Blah blah, this is late, blah blah.

You'll also notice as you go down that the Mercs segment is shorter than usual in terms of goings-on. I did this pretty much entirely because their story is actually moving ahead a lot faster than I'd really planned it to. So yeah, it's uneventful, but come the next update, doors will be kicked and bullets will start flying and shit will get marginally more real.

Story time.

The Pelanoi Accounts

Chapter Eleven: Pursuers

The Survivors

The snapping jaws loomed in front of her like a great, drooling void had simply opened up in front of her. In sheer, primitive terror her legs ceased to function and Tiffany felt herself collapse to the smooth, cold floor.

The fall saved her.

The yawning maw sailed straight over her head. Tiffany could smell rotting meat on its breath and the stench made her gag. The others behind her avoided the lunging maw, albeit with more grace, but were knocked aside like skittles as the body of the grossly oversized snake charged through them.

Tiffany tried to pick herself up but suddenly stopped as her arms simply gave up. They had been running on fumes for the entire night and now – and Tiffany had known it would come sooner or later – was the crash. Craning her aching neck, she saw the others were in similar states, unable to rise from sheer exhaustion.

This is it. She thought to herself. This is how we're going to die: on our backs, panting for breath, waiting for a giant snake to wolf us all down one by one.

The sheer absurdity of it almost made her laugh, but she didn't have the energy for that either. So instead she settled for little, pathetic wheezing noises.

The snake came back; its reflective, scaly hide a constant shimmer in the dull, dank grey of the server room. It seemed to be observing the prone figures below, confused as to why its prey did not flee as it had before. A soft hiss escaped its scaled, shimmering lips as it drew closer to the groaning men and women, who tried fruitlessly to crawl away from the drawing monster.

Helpless, indignant frustration overtook her. This was it. They had all come so far and they wouldn't even get to rail against the cruel fate that had decided it was done playing favourites. Her, Kit, Leah, Ethan, Rolf, Sema, Ellen, Cassidy and Sydney, and Nick and little Mary too–

Wait.

Where was Mary?

Something impacted against the creature, an empty soda can. The shimmer paused and shifted.

Little Mary Jane stood in front of the beast; her young, aristocratic features trembling in barely restrained terror; a small throwing knife clenched in a tiny, slender fist; her light blue eyes locked on the shimmering mass before her.

'D-d-don't…' she started, but her voice trailed off as her fear overtook her and she took a step back.

'Mary, don't!' Nick said, breathlessly, trying to reach out for her. 'Just run!'

Mary's eyes flickered to Nick, and the sight appeared to momentarily bolster her courage as her eyes took on a more defiant glint.

'Don't touch them you filthy creature!' She shouted at the bio-engineered monstrosity.

The snake obliged.

It coiled like a spring and leapt at the young girl, jaws opened; intent on swallowing her whole. Mary squeaked and crouched low. The snake shot over her, its fangs digging into a machine behind her. It struggled for a moment before it yanked its head back, extricating itself from the server. One of its teeth was left inside the crumpled metal, and there was a small stream of blood running from the great snake's jaw.

Mary yelped and dove aside again. Unlike before however the snake pulled back before it overextended itself and buried its teeth into another machine. It whipped around and struck again at the young teenager, who only just managed to avoid its snapping jaws. Mary retreated through the exit to the server room. The snake followed her out of sight.

'No!' Nick bellowed, and began to push himself to his feet before he collapsed again. He roared in impotent fury and tried to get up again, only to meet with failure once more as his body gave in.

'Nick!' Tiffany shouted hoarsely at him. The burly man ignored her, struggling once more to rise to his feet.

'Nick stop it you'll burn yourself out!'

After collapsing again for the fourth time, barely covering a third of a metre, Nick finally gave up, sobbing in frustration.

'I failed again,' he said in between mangled gulping noises.

'What?' Someone asked, it sounded like Sema.

Nick didn't answer her, and began to pound his fist weakly against the cold, uncaring floor like a toddler in the middle of a tantrum.

'Well, look at it this way,' Ethan spoke up in between pants. 'She just bought us all–'

'Shut the fuck up!' Nick raged, his face contorted into a mask of unrestrained fury. Had he not been rendered nearly immobile by exhaustion, no one had any doubt that Nick would have attacked him. Alarmingly enough, he clawed at the younger man anyway before conceding to fatigue.

They lay in a heap for what could only have been a few minutes at most but felt like an unbearable amount of time. The commotion beyond the server room (presumably the BOW chasing Mary) began to fade, much to Nick's growing anxiety. It was clear that he took his recent role as her guardian incredibly seriously, and Tiffany made a mental note to ask him about that later once they made it out of the Ranger Station.

If we make it out. She thought with a grimace.

Finally strength began to return to their aching limbs, and nothing attacked them. In fact, there was almost no sound of any sort of activity, which greatly distressed Nick.

'We have to find her,' he said, still panting. His eyes were bloodshot, his expression haggard, almost frenzied. Everyone else wore similar faces and Tiffany doubted she looked much better herself.

'Not really,' Ethan muttered under his breath. Sema and Leah both fixed him with a dirty look before casting worried glances at Nick, relaxing a fraction when it appeared that he hadn't heard Ethan's snide remark.

Tiffany took a few calm breaths before easing back into control. On the one hand she wanted to leave, not least because hunting for the girl also most assuredly meant hunting for the great, invisible snake. On the other, she'd never left anyone behind in her, admittedly, short, career as a Marine Captain and she didn't want to start that so far, non-existent list with a young girl.

She squeezed her eyes shut and made a decision.

'We'll look.'

All eyes turned to her.

'Bullshit,' Ethan spat. 'Chances are that thing's eaten her already. We go looking; chances are we'll run into that thing again, not to mention those assholes in black.'

'What about that one back at the town?' Sydney piped up, her eyes suddenly brighter than anyone had seen in a long time. 'The one who let us go… I mean, if he'd wanted us dead he could have done there couldn't he?'

Ethan rounded on her in an instant.

'What, you reallytrust that spook in the black get-up? Chances are he knew he couldn't get all of us and let us go so he could tell his buddies where we went and get the drop on us later.'

Tiffany held a hand to her chin. Ethan had raised a reasonable point, but the soldier they had encountered had sounded genuine. She felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to see Kit, who seemed to be trying his best to appear comforting, though the way he shifted awkwardly on both feet from time to time told her that he wasn't entirely sure how to go about it. Regardless, she appreciated the gesture.

'Don't worry about them…' he began, before suddenly stopping. He furrowed his brow, and then tilted his head ever so slightly to the side, listening.

'Do you hear that?' He turned to the rest of the group, who looked at him quizzically.

'Listen for a moment, I swear I can hear…' he trailed off. The noise was faint, distant, but it was one they had become familiar with over the course of the last two days.

Gunfire.

'I fucking told you,' Ethan scowled.

'Oh shut up Ethan!' Sema snapped; her accumulated fatigue and stress born from fear giving the usually quiet nurse more bite. 'Maybe it's just another group like us?' she said, more calmly this time.

'Out here? I don't know…' Randolf said doubtfully, 'if it's tourists or other people who don't know the lay of the land then maybe, but anyone who lives here would know there's not much out at this part of the island.'

Tiffany suddenly raised her hand up sharply, signalling for silence. A hushed calm fell as the young woman strained herself to pick up on the rising staccatos of gunfire. She suppressed a curse, biting her lip and looked at the assorted faces staring at her for answers.

'No doubt about it,' she said with a long, heavy sigh, 'that's military-grade hardware going off out there.'

'So it's Mr Black and all his wonderful friends then?' Ethan said, sounding not a little smug at having been seemingly proven correct.

'I didn't say that, did I?' Tiffany snapped, giving him a withering look. The stress was making Ethan more of a handful and if it continued like this…

'What?' Ethan muttered to himself. 'Am I–? Are you–? What? No. Damnit, Marcus you know it's a shitty idea.'

Leah raised an eyebrow at Ethan's behaviour, while Nick stared at him as if he'd grown a second head.

Leah drew a taser from her pocket, her pistol practically spent in the siege at the manse. 'Okay, while Mr Sensitive over there wrestles with what tatters remain of his conscience, I say: if we're looking for this girl, let's go find her. If not, let's go.'

'Will that thing really work on any of those creatures?' Cassidy asked, looking dubiously at Leah's taser.

'Worth a shot, right?' Leah replied, though she felt less brave than she had sounded. It was a good question, and Leah silently resolved to hunt for another weapon when she had the time.

'All right then people, let's go find Mary. She has to be in here somewhere. We'll move in three groups of three–'

'There's ten of us.' Randolf interjected.

'Two groups of three and one four then. Kit, Sema, you're with me. Rest of you buddy up as you please and start sweeping. Shout if you run into that snake, or just start shooting. Either way, we'll come running. We'll meet outside the vehicle lot, now let's hustle people.'

Nick approached her as she made to leave the server room with Kit and Sema.

'Thank you…' he said, his voice heavy with fatigue, and not a little gratitude. Tiffany felt her heart soften at the sight.

'We still need to find her yet. When we do, you keep her safe.'

'I didn't plan on anything different,' he replied, and then he left with Cassidy, Sydney and Ellen.

Leah, silently bemoaning her luck at having been buddied up with Ethan and Rolf, called out to the former of the two, who was still locked in an argument with himself.

'Hey! Ethan, come on! We're finding the kid.'

Ethan snapped his head back to her so fast it almost made her blink in surprise.

'What? Are you crazy?' he asked, exasperated.

'Says the guy talking to himself in front of everyone,' Rolf murmured, having appeared at her side – probably after leering at the disappearing asses of every woman in the group. Despite herself, Leah chuckled.

'You know, if you really want to go, you can. But last I looked, GI Jane had the keys to the vehicle lot and it's still a bit of a distance to go.' She let the implications hang for a moment. Ethan fixed her with a glare before shaking his head and releasing a defeated noise that sounded halfway between a grunt and a sigh.

'Fine, I see how it is. Let's go find the little dumbass then.' He held his fire axe in one hand and stalked after the two of them. The two shared a look before shrugging and exiting the server room.

'Yeah, fuck you Marcus.' He muttered darkly, as he pushed through the door after them.

The Mercenaries

Burke and Jäger didn't appear to suffer any symptoms of infection, but he had Tech and Alaina watch them both anyway. Elias had heard far too many stories in his line of work about sudden mutations in virus samples. Part of him wondered at times why so many corporations would go to such expensive and extreme lengths to create a monstrosity that would be just as likely to chomp on its creators as its intended targets. In the end however money was money, and work was work.

It was at times like those where he remembered a line from a book he'd once read: "Retirement is wasted on the old." It was a statement meant in jest, a line on one of those supposedly humorous bumper stickers but Elias had entirely agreed with it. Once this job was over he'd have a tidy amount of two hundred and eighty million dollars to his name, spread across multiple bank accounts. He'd had more than double that at one point but the economic crisis of 2008 (what had, amusingly, been referred to as the 'Credit Crunch') had put a sizeable dent in his retirement savings and he had taken job after job ever since to regain it.

Now though, with this mission to this island Pelanoi, he had a sudden thought. He could quite conceivably live in comfort with what he had at the moment. It wasn't as if he wanted to live in a mansion or anything gaudy like that. Such buildings were a security nightmare more often than people were really aware of and he knew well that costs to keep the things secure were almost extortionate.

To put things even more into perspective, the number of bio-crimes was rising. Much as the recently re-organised BSAA was trying to clamp down on them, they could only do so much and their rapidly expanding charter was meeting resistance from many nations outside of Europe and America. Elias didn't have particularly strong feelings for the situation as a whole; if someone wanted him to run a blockade he'd run a blockade and equally if someone wanted him to punch a hole in an extremist group smuggling samples of this T-Virus he'd do that quite happily too if the pay was right.

Regardless of his feelings however, the situation pointed to something large brewing in the (entirely) illegal bio-weapons development community and if it was anything like on the scale of Pelanoi then the smart thing to do would be to buy an island somewhere and stock it with enough firepower and supplies to survive whatever holocaust was being cooked up. Perhaps after this was done with he'd get started on–

'Hold! I see something.' Natalia's voice hissed through the comms. Everyone got down on one knee, weapons up. Listening. Watching.

'Brooks?' Elias asked.

The Recon specialist waited almost ten seconds before answering. 'Looks like a building Grey Lead. What I can tell from these tracks there's a group of people that definitely ran in there.'

'Local files tell me that's the Pelanoi Ranger Station for the Wildlife Preserve.' Tech piped up, no doubt downloading and reading through various maps and other files he pulled from that piece of techno-sorcery he wore on his head.

Natalia's voice came squelching through the comms again moments after the young mercenary finished speaking. 'Looks like they were followed too. Same sort of freak show that jumped us back there.'

'Numbers?' Elias demanded.

'On the civvies I'm guessing ten adults and a child, or a really short person with tiny feet. On the BOWs: just the one.'

Well that would make things easier. Far from ideal but infinitely better than the SNAFU in the middle of the field of tall grass.

'That sounds like our group. Okay Grey Team I want you to stack up on that entrance and on my signal we boot those doors in and start hunting. If you see anything moving, if something so much as twitches wrong, you put it down and you do it fast. I want this done right this time.' He stared at Jäger, letting him shuffle uncomfortably (or angrily) under his gaze for a few moments before signalling with his fingers for them to move up on the Ranger Station.

-X-

As always, Read'n'Reviews are appreciated. C&C doubly so.

Hope you enjoyed.