Here we go, Chapter 4. Working on another story based in the Bioshock universe, so I'll be dividing my attention between that and this for at least a few days.
"Private, repeat last," Bass waited for a reply. A transmission tagged with Wallace's name returned, but was nothing but white noise. Bass cursed. The last thing he needed right now was to lose contact with the other half of his squad. They were paused in one of the better-lit corridors, but aside from a few bloodstains on the metal floors, they'd not run into anyone living or dead.
"Gunny, I don't like this," Kaczynski spoke up, "Not like fear, but this place is just…wrong."
"No shit," Sherman snorted, a hint of nervousness tainting his cocksure remark, "No one to be seen, not even bodies. 'Course shit's wrong here."
"Not like that," Kaczynski shook his head, "This place just feels wrong."
"Thank God," Chen breathed a sigh of relief, "You feel that, too?"
"I'm not seeing it," Sherman shrugged, "Can you be any less vague?"
"There's this buzzing, like static," Chen looked over his shoulder, as if afraid someone other than the squad was listening, "It's there until I try and listen to it, then…nothing."
"You gonna be alright, Chen?" Bass abandoned the radio efforts, tilting his chin to the medic, "I need us all sharp for this. We're in deeper shit than we even knew existed."
"I'll be fine, Gunny," Chen sighed, cradling his rifle, taking comfort in the potential power it had, "Just…just need a second."
"Take two," Bass smiled, then looked to Dean, "How about you, kid?"
Dean had never liked the nickname bestowed on him as the least experienced of the Omegas, but now it was oddly comforting. There was a paternal undertone in Bass' voice that reminded him of his father, long since deceased back on Earth.
"Just fine, sir," he nodded. Bass slapped him on the shoulder.
"Good man. Kat? You doing alright?" Kaczynski was staring aimlessly at a spot on a wall, unfocused, but shook himself back at his name.
"No problem, Gunny. Ready when you are," he adjusted the auto-stabilizer hooked up to the Grinder that took the majority of the weapon's sizable bulk. Sherman seemed fine as it was, and Chen had straightened up and turned to Bass for further orders.
"Alright. We keep moving, primary goal is to find a functioning lifeboat. Once that's secured, we get it back to the Valor, pick up Jones and his crew, and hightail it back to friendly space," Bass stated, double checking his weapon and smiling inwardly as his squad did the same, "If we find anyone on our way, we find out whatever we can about these things. Don't use your suit's independent air supply, but keep the filters on. Whatever made these ugly SOBs could be viral."
The men glanced at one another nervously. They'd not stopped to try and guess what had made the creature onboard the Valor, but its semblance to a human was enough to assume what it once had been.
A high-pitched whine of discharging energy turned all their attention down the corridor. Blue light glowed around the corner, and a howl followed with a second blue discharge. A heavy, dark form thudded to the ground just within their line of sight. Bass' helmet automatically adjusted for the darkness, and was able to make out what it was.
Like the creature aboard the Valor, it had arms ending in long spines, and bore a terrifying semblance to a human, even if its inhuman nature was obvious. Its body was gone from the waist-down, but it lifted its head with terrifying vitality and screamed at whatever had reduced it to that condition. It was bathed in blue light for a moment before a bright beam of energy tore off its head and burned away most of its chest. Only then did it slump, finally dead.
"EDF Marine Corp!" Bass barked, amplifying his shout through his helmet speakers, "Show yourself!" The squad kept their weapons trained down the corridor. A scant ten meters separated them from the curve, and whoever (or whatever) was around it. Each man moved to whatever cover the alcoves of the hall offered.
"The Corp?" a distinctly male (and more importantly, human) voice shouted back, unconvinced, "You shittin' me?"
"Come out and see. We're standing down, just come out slow," Bass raised a hand signal as he did: stay ready. Shoot to kill if hostile.
"Alright, hang on," a metallic scraping followed, and a figure limped into view. He was wearing a crewman's RIG, albeit one in terrible shape, and the scraping came from the metal exo-brace on his left leg. A bloody bandage was wrapped around his thigh, but the motor at the knee of the brace was letting off the occasional spark and was locked in place.
Beside the injury, he was a giant of a man, easily as bulky as any of the Marines in their armor, though his worn face and gray buzz-cut suggested he was on the wrong side of middle age. Most interesting was his right arm: missing from below the elbow, but replaced with an obvious prosthetic. On Earth, higher-tier limb replacements could resemble the original limp with a coating of synthskin, or a porcelain-clean replica. This one was darkened metal, built for hardiness, not elegance, and the pistons that operated his fingers twitched like a spider's legs when he raised a hand to them.
"Maker's blood, I didn't think anyone was coming," he chuckled grimly, "You lot got evac?"
"Not yet," Bass waved down his squad's weapons and approached the man, "One of these…things," he gestured to the corpse, "Got aboard our ship. Took out the bridge and docked us as smoothly as a clockwork assfuck."
"Shit," the man muttered, "So we're stuck here?"
"That depends," Bass replied, "We boarded to try and find a way off from here. Is anything intact?"
"Fucked if I know," the man shrugged, propping himself against a wall to take weight off his leg, "We lost escape pods before all this shit went down, and the hangar's a long way off. Not even sure if anything's working there."
"Won't know until we try," Bass extended a hand, "Gunnery Sergeant Bass, by the way."
"No shit," the man laughed, shaking the outstrentched hand heartily as his prosthetic clacked with the motion, "From the Charlie Foxtrot back on Tanith, right?" Bass only grunted a reply, but it was enough of an affirmative.
"Don't mean to bring up old wounds," he added, "Hell, I was with Tanith's PDF when all that went to hell. Where I lost my arm," he raised the mechanical limb, "And all I got for all of that was a 'new' arm and a few legal threats." He snorted, glancing down at the corpse of the creature.
"Some cushy retirement this turned out. Didn't think anything could be as fucked up as they were back then. Never thought it'd be worse than Uskar was."
"That's close to the first good response I've gotten to my name in years," Bass smiled behind his helmet, "Didn't catch your name, though."
"Shit, sorry. Name's Viktor Hark, but Hark's enough." His leg brace twitched spasmodically, throwing him off balance and almost toppling him over.
"Goddamnit," he grabbed hold of the joint, trying to work it back to the locked position manually, "Got clipped by one of these SOBs, and this thing's not much of a help for anything but keeping me standing still. Not even very good at that, really."
"Gunny?" Sherman gestured toward the brace. Bass nodded, and Sherman crouched alongside Hark.
"Lemme take a look at it," Sherman slung his rifle and drew an omnitool from his belt, "You'd think these things were built to short-circuit, but if you know what to cut and what to cross, it'll outlive your kids. Voids the warranty, of course," he smirked, "But somehow I don't think that matters all that much."
"What've you got there?" Kaczynski spoke up, looking at the large weapon Hark had hanging in his remaining hand, "Nice piece of ordinance." Hark glanced down at it fondly.
"Yeah. Got it from a techie a little ways back. Contact beam the miners used for smashing rocks. Turns out it works on these things better than the pistol I found in security." Sherman gave the leg brace a final slap, then turned his attention to the contact beam when Hark nodded permission. The internal motor whined as Hark shifted his leg, visibly pleased at the quick-fix.
"Hot-damn," Sherman whistled, "Whoever played with this was a crazy sonuvabitch, but a crazy sonuvabitch who knew what he was doing. Bypassed the safety limiters, IFF sensors, and even hotwired it to an extra power supply. This thing's a tank-buster."
"Damn straight," Hark grinned, hefting the weapon, "Even blasted open a locked door or two before I started to worry I might breach the hull. It's done right by me." Bass stared wordlessly at the weapon. For a moment, he was back on Tanith, watching one of his APCs erupt in flames from a blast from a similarly modified weapon.
"You alright, Gunny?" Dean broke him from his reflection, and brought him back to reality. That was then, this was now.
"Fine, private," he nodded, turning back to Hark, "You can move well enough?"
"Thanks to your boy, I'm all set," Hark flexed his mechanically-supported leg.
"Good. We'll have Chen look at your leg once we're out of the open. Until then, we keep moving." The rest of the squad were grimly reminded of the monstrous corpse lying in their midst. There were more lurking about, and their hallway had too many angles of entry for any of their liking.
"Which one's Chen?" Hark looked over the team, "Didn't get any names but yours, Gunny."
"Looks like we're both slipping on formalities," Bass allowed himself a smile, pointing out each man in turn, "That's Lance Corporal Kaczynski, but we call him Kat, then PFCs Sherman, Dean, and Ch…"
He trailed off, pointing to a man who wasn't there. The squad glanced around them. One, two, three, four…
…but no fifth. Chen was nowhere to be seen.
McNeal's Jackhammer boomed, tearing the shoulder and talon-arm from the creature's body. Though it screamed in pain and fury, it was barely slowed by the magnum shells. Another shot blasted through its torso, audibly snapping its spine. It crashed to the ground, but its remaining arms continued to pull it toward McNeal.
A third shell burst its head. Finally, its seemingly unlimited capacity for damage gave, and it lay still.
But with every passing second, the screams of the creatures grew more numerous, the clattering in the vents more constant, and McNeal's panic only rose with it. Each additional shot needed to put down even one of them meant that three more had a few precious seconds to tear their way further into the room.
His last shell casing ejected from the weapon, and McNeal's back bumped the bulkhead as he fumbled for another drum magazine. He hadn't even realized how far he'd been backing up.
While McNeal was speeding closer to a breakdown, Wallace had felt almost relieved to finally face a problem that he could solve. His vision was lined with red, and his HUD's targeting system burned a constant gold in the target-rich environment. Armor-piercing rounds tore apart metal and flesh alike. Wallace spoke not a word through his gritted teeth, but the Grinder howled his war cry as it lived up to its name in full, reducing any of the creatures he turned it against to mulch.
An echoing boom added itself to the cacophony of death, and the adjacent bulkhead door crumpled near the center as if struck from outside by a massive fish. Two more booms followed before chitin-coated fingers punched through, grabbing hold of the hole they had made and ripping outward. McNeal whimpered a curse as a monster that dwarfed all before it tore the door apart, forcing its way through when it was close to large enough.
It let out a bellow that shook the deck, hunched over like a massive, carapace-coated insect that knuckle-walked in a manner that more closely resembled a gorilla. McNeal's legs grew weak, but Wallace delighted in another monster to slay. The brute charged, shaking the ground with each stride, smashing aside the displaced mess hall tables and even crushing two of its smaller brethren who weren't quick enough to evade its indiscriminate charge.
The beast's hide was all but immune to small arms fire, but the Grinder's scream was not so easily ignored. Shards of chitin snapped and crumbled, and the high-caliber barrage was enough to slow even the monster's charge. It roared as several rounds in the hail managed to penetrate, splattering black ichor on the deck.
With a final surge, it lunged, one burly arm reaching out to crush the insect that had harmed it so. Even as the three-fingered hand clawed toward Wallace, the Marine grinned with malevolent satisfaction as the already weakened organic plating buckled and failed, exploding the hand in a spray of black blood and tearing further up its arm.
The hulk ground to a halt not two meters from Wallace. The Marine fired until his HUD flashed a warning of critical heat buildup in his weapon, and he overrode the automatic shutdown. By the time his fingers finally released from the firing studs, the Grinder had eaten its way through the beast's thick armor and eroded its flesh, leaving nothing of its head and burning into its chest cavity. The upper half was left nearly hollow by the time he let up long enough for the liquefied remains to dribble out.
McNeal was the first to react after what could have been anything from a few seconds of silence to a few hours. Janick was in no shape to even speak, and Wallace would have held his ground even if God Himself were to try and push him off. McNeal hastily slung his shotgun, grabbing Janick by the shoulders and pulling him along the floor as quickly as the Marine's wounds would allow him to.
"Come on, man," he panted, making for the blast door the brute had torn asunder, "We gotta move, and we got a place to move to now." Wallace wordlessly deactivated the magnetic grip that braced the Grinder against the deck, letting the weight fall on the support harness.
"Give me a hand, at least," McNeal gestured to Janick. Wallace glanced down at the delirious trooper.
"He's not going to make it," Wallace stated flatly.
"Shut it," McNeal grunted, "He's gonna be fine. We're all gonna be fine."
"You know that's not true," Wallace cocked his head, "He needs serious treatment, and we don't have a medic anymore."
"Shut. Up." McNeal pronounced as clearly as he could, continuing to Janick toward the door, "Chen is with Bass. When they get back-"
"If they get back."
"When they get back," McNeal snapped, "You just killed a Frankenstein's goddamn gorilla, and you're telling me we won't make it through this?"
Wallace shrugged, then stepped through the broken door.
"Alright, then. Bring him if you want, but he's your burden." McNeal was still riding on adrenaline, but was still shocked by Wallace's callousness. He was fairly detached to begin with, but this was something else. He had a point, as much as McNeal hated to admit it: Janick would die without proper attention, but while Wallace was growing more introverted, McNeal couldn't help but further latch onto his squadmates, and the bond grew more dependent as there were fewer men to imprint on.
And for some reason, McNeal felt almost as if Janick were the only other man left. Wallace was already dead. His body just hadn't caught up with him yet.
Read and review, anonymous welcome, as per norm. Hark is most likely the last new character to be introduced, for anyone worried about the rather sizable cast of OPs.