Dark Signal
It wasn't just the Auburn District that had been hit by that massive, nuclear (or it damn looked like nuclear anyway, though radiation had not massively increased) explosion.
Hell, they'd be lucky if the entire city was the only damage. Fairport was a fucking mess. In fact, "Fucking Mess" had become it's new name in the man's mind. And you know, the explosion - right as his team were about to reach a data storage facility to support their fellow Delta Force members - wouldn't have been so bad. Really, it was FUBAR and stuff but not actually that terrible from a "we can deal with this" kind of perspective. But as for… whatever it was that happened after…
He didn't know or want to know how to describe it. Ghostly visions, flashes of… something following them. Things. They had seen one survivor so far, but before they could reach him he was dragged into the floor by a shadow, and rather messily too, his remains splattering across the ground. They had been careful to avoid shadows after that.
Eventually, after a couple of hours of trying to drive around, maybe find some other Delta's, they had heard that an Extraction Point was being set up at a hospital for their fellow Delta Force soldiers, so they decided to take a ride there. Not that it was so easy as it sounded.
For some reason, members of his team - including himself - had been having headaches, and seeing visions of… something. A little girl? A swing? They had all been having headaches, but the fact that whenever they could catch any sleep their dreams were the same. Grass. Trees. Her.
The man's name was Michael Becket, and the team he was a member was a Delta Force team codenamed Dark Signal. He - together with his teammates "Top" Griffin, Keira Stokes, Harold Keegan, Redd Jankowski, James Fox and their self appointed driver (and occasional morale officer) Manuel Morales - had been despatched to support fellow SFOD-D troopers in the area, and been caught up in what Becket could only describe as "unnatural fuckery". They were fortunate that nothing was apparently able to get into the APC or they'd really be in the shit.
They were currently driving down a ruined street, attempting to locate any survivors. There weren't any that they had seen since the unfortunate person who had met a messy demise in the streets. Suddenly, Manny stopped the APC, and everybody jerked in their seats.
"Manny, what's up?" Top asked.
The driver turned around in his seat, and turned to face Top.
"You wanna look outside and see for yourself, Top," he said, very seriously. Just as Top was about to ask why, Manny added "seriously, man."
Top frowned, then motioned to Becket and Stokes to follow him.
Ok, this was just scary. It was an air force jet plane - a big one too, not a combat fighter - crashed right over a subway entrance. Nearby was the entrance to a warehouse area, and rather conspicuously, a lot of blood.
"This shit just ain't right," Top muttered. Becket nodded silently in agreement, while Stokes wandered over to the entrance to the subway.
"Looks like something blew out these lights, Top," she said, pointing down into the darkness. Becket and Top walked over to her. Behind them, from out of the APC, came Fox, Keegan and Jankowski. Redd had been quieter than his usual self since the explosion - even calling Becket "Becket" rather than his degrading, and (in his mind anyway) witty pseudonym, "Bucket," which by the cocksure young man's standards was pretty much unheard of.
"You ok Redd?" Keegan asked.
"Yeah, just got a feeling of… something," Jankowski replied. He looked around, as if searching for someone, and then his eyes alighted on a small alleyway - and the distant but very familiar figure stumbling down it. "Spen?" Almost immediately, he took off after the shambling form of his brother.
"Redd!" Keegan yelled. Top looked up to see the young soldier rounding the alleyway.
"Shit!" he swore. "Keegan, Fox, go after him!"
The two men nodded and sprinted after their comrade. Becket meanwhile was shining a light down into the subway entrance when it alighted upon someone - a girl, about eight, with a red dress on. She looked up at the light and laughed, before rushing further in.
"Top," Becket called, "unaccompanied minor. Girl, eight, red dress."
"Get after her!" Top yelled, too preoccupied by Jankowski wandering off to think too clearly. Becket looked at Stokes, briefly considering asking her to come with him, but then took off alone. He was a Delta Force operative, elite of the elite. He did not need help finding one little girl.
Redd Jankowski was not afraid, although he knew he should be, somehow. The figure of his brother kept eluding him, vanishing before he could find him. He had to find him.
Spen and Redd were not as close as they could have been. Redd was a rowdy youth and Spen a responsible older brother. Spen had been hoping to play basketball professionally, but had instead helped Redd pass his exams and achieve his dream of joining the army. Spen had followed him to look after him but they had taken separate paths. Spen to F.E.A.R, Redd to Delta Force. Quite why Spen would be out here was unclear to Redd, but he was. Redd had to help him.
"Spen?" he asked, moving forward. "Are you here?"
"Is someone there?" the voice of his brother floated around a corner, and Redd raced ahead.
"Spen! You here?" he called. Then he saw him.
Grey, dead skin, eyes reduced to gaping sockets, dust and ash falling from him.
"Redd?" this apparition said, and Redd gasped in shock. How could his brother still be alive? "Redd, you have to run. She is near here…"
And with that, he dissolved into ashes, revealing that he had been standing over a pool of blood. Redd looked down at it, then crouched, picking up a blood soaked dog tag that had the name "Douglas Holiday" on it. Holiday? He'd been a Master Sergeant assigned to the Armacham HQ mission, and he'd also been the one who'd helped set up the hospital extraction point. Redd cursed softly at another dead Delta, and looked at the bloody pool which stretched up to a window. There was apparently nothing left of Holiday except - and here Redd felt vaguely sick - an arm. A motherfucking arm.
Just then, Top, Fox and Keegan rounded the corner Spen's… ghost? Had come around, and Redd turned to face them.
"Where's your brother?" Top said, sounding pissed.
"You won't believe me," Redd said.
"And what the fuck is that?" Fox asked, pointing at the bloody pool. Reds tossed him the dog-tag, and Fox showed it to Top, who swore.
"I knew him. Good man," he said. "Alright, if we're finished sight seeing…"
The men walked off, not noticing the small figure of a little girl in floral dress looking down at them from above, her yellow eyes shining in the darkness.
Becket hated dark spaces, especially dark spaces like this with shit loads of dead shit in it. Whoever had come in here butchering both Replica's and these black body suited men was a cold-as-stone killer, no doubt, and Becket seriously didn't want to meet them. He walked further forward, and then stopped, as a strange sight came into view.
A perfectly normal woman - forty, but wearing it well, with spectacles and a gleaming intellect in her eye, walked out of a door. She looked around the bodies with a slight frown, tsked, then looked up at Becket. She frowned slightly at him, not irritated, but fascinated, walked a couple of steps towards him, then seemed to see something more interesting behind another door and walked through that. Becket ran after her - not only was she a civilian to be rescued (and apparently an unshockable one judging from her reaction to the bodies) but she might have seen the girl. Becket opened the door - but the woman was nowhere to be seen. There was a small control panel, and a few ashes dissolving over it, but no sign of the woman. Becket turned around, annoyed.
The woman was staring right at him, scrutinising him carefully behind the glasses she wore. She narrowed her eyes - yellow eyes - at him, before backing off. She nodded at him, carefully, as if deeming him acceptable, and then… she dissolved into ash. Becket swore and aimed his gun, but there was nothing there.
"What the fuck," he said more than asked. He quickly ran out of the subway, meeting up with the still waiting Stokes.
"Find the kid?" she asked. He shook his head, shocked and half-terrified by what he had witnessed. Just then, Redd turned a corner, Top, Fox and Keegan following.
"I'm telling you man," Redd was saying, "my brother turned to ashes right in front of me."
"And I'm telling you that ain't possible," Top replied.
"Redd, maybe you need a rest," Fox said reasonably. "I'm sure your brother's fine."
"What are you staring at, Bucket?" Redd snapped at Becket, who had been staring at him. Becket looked back at the subway, and then back at Redd.
"Did you just say, 'dissolved into ashes'?" he asked.
"Yeah, and?" Redd asked.
"Well," Becket said, "you won't believe what I just saw…"
They all deserved to die. The people in the streets. All the men with guns. Even her living son, who had shot at her. Betrayal. Betrayal everywhere. Hatred and betrayal and hatred and…
In the astral plane she inhabited, which took the form of grass, and trees, and one tree in particular with a swing, something changed. She looked up, to see the other parts - the weaker parts - of herself staring at her. The one who was what she could have been, and the one who was what she once had been. Innocent child and normal, logical woman. Nearby, hiding behind the tree from - well, everything, was the other little girl. The scared one with the battered face and the tattered dress. On the swing itself, the other girl - rabid motherly instinct gone mad - swung, ignoring the anger until it threatened one of their children. Oh, so many parts were children, because that was what she had been for so long: a scared child. BUT NO LONGER! She was strong! Hate, incarnate!
The various fractured parts were sundered by the mental tortures that Alma had endured - for so long she had held it together, reaching out with her will in the only form she knew she had, the little girls form, but as soon as she had been released she had shattered into pieces, rage alone driving her onward. She had tried to embrace her firstborn, but he had shot her and run from her. He was no better than the rest. He was no better. He was scum like them! He deserved to die. They all deserved to die! All of them! He had eluded her again - but not forever. Oh, she would find him and melt him, and scour his essence and torture it like she did Daddies Favourite Girl and Daddy himself and the one who had taken her child and…
"Don't hurt him," one part of her whispered, and the little red-dress wearing girl, the form she had seen her second son in, which had now taken on her violent protective instincts, looked at her, having materialised away from the swing. She had sensed her other self's anger from her position and moved to counter it. The Anger hissed and snarled. She would do as she pleased. It was her anger that had kept her/them alive, where a normal person might have just died and let their revenge go into nothingness. It was her anger that would choose their path now.
The red-dress wearing girl vanished - she had to find her first born. The floral dress girl - younger still than the one in red and the very epitome of innocence (hence why she was small and young, because Alma's innocence hadn't lasted long at all) looked up at the older woman (so normal. Sickening that it even existed in Alma, this person, this part of her, when she was RAGE INCARNATE ITSELF). The woman looked down at the girl, and made a face that suggested that she had no clues as to how to proceed, before she too vanished. Finally, the little girl vanished too, leaving the anger alone with itself.
It didn't care. It didn't need anyone else. It had the rage that had kept them going for so long, and that was enough.