They made sure to each grab StimPacks on their way out. Jack would've liked to grab a full Medikit, but it was too big to attach to his belt, so he had to settle for the smaller StimPack that contained the bare basics of an emergency medical kit.
"Where should we start?" Jennifer asked, studying the large antechamber.
Jack looked around, then pointed at the offices. "There's as good a place as any, I guess," he replied.
They struck off towards it, crossing the desolate metalwork area. Somewhere, he heard the groan of a zombie, and that strange clicking-gurgle sound that he'd come to associate with Imps. No signs of fighting, though. No shouts, no running footfalls, no gunshots. Did anyone else make it? Surely they weren't the only two left?
They hit the office complex and found themselves among a field of cubicles. Jack could see zombies lurking, their heads sticking up over the tops of the cubicle walls. The place was a wretched mess, just like everywhere else.
"Let's get to it," Jack said, raising his pistol.
They cleared out the offices. He felt good, better than he had for awhile, since hitting Phobos at least, as he hunted down the zombies. No Z-Secs here, thankfully. Though that meant much less chance of finding any ammo. The food, the shower, and the sex had revitalized him. He made his way between bloody cubicles, scattered with office supplies like a particularly bad storm had blown through, and put holes in zombie skulls.
They were fairly easy targets and he managed a one shot, one kill policy the whole way through. Only took up one whole magazine to do so, though, unfortunately, they couldn't find any more ammunition. He reloaded his last magazine and they proceeded to search the office a bit more thoroughly, but there was nothing worth taking. Suppressing a heavy sigh, some of his, well...good cheer wasn't the right phrase, but his zeal, seeped out of him.
"Where to now?" he murmured as they left the complex.
Jennifer began to respond, but it was decided for them when they heard gunshots. Jack felt his pulse spike. Another survivor. The shots were coming from the power station. The two of them took off running, boots banging hollowly on the metal deckplates. They were pistol shots. Jack realized, as they hurried in through the big metal collar that ringed the entrance, that it could just be a pissed off zombie shooting at an Imp or Demon that had bumped it, but he didn't think so. His instincts told him otherwise, for whatever reason.
It was the gunshots themselves, he realized as they passed into a bloody, sparking antechamber and broke left, plunging into a dim tunnel, lit mainly by broken power junctions sporadically spitting blue-white sparks. The shots were too measured, too deliberate. The zombies all just popped off, pray and spray, even the Z-Secs.
They pounded down the doorway and hit a T-junction. The gunshots had stopped. He skidded to a halt, looking left and then right indecisively.
"Hello?" he called out in frustration. "Is anyone there?!"
"Jack?!" came the reply.
It was Jenkins. The voice came from the left.
"We're coming to you!" Jack called, running off. Jennifer followed after him. They passed several offshoot alcoves, glancing down each, looking for hostiles. He didn't see any, but most of the alcoves were pitch-dark.
They found Jenkins, half-naked and bloody, in a control room with smashed consoles, walled by smashed equipment, amid a small collection of dead zombies and Imps. He had on a torn, bloody pair of pants and blood-spattered boots, a pistol in hand.
"Christ it's good to see you," he whispered, then he looked disappointed.
"What?" Jack asked as they walked into the room. "You look disappointed."
"Well, I was hoping I'd get to see Taylor before she found her clothes," he replied.
They both stared at him for several seconds, then began to laugh. It was a stupid thing to say, he thought, but for some reason it was hilarious. Maybe they all just needed a laugh. "Okay," he said, "have you seen anyone else?"
Jenkins shook his head morosely, his humor gone. "No, no one. Just these assholes. You?"
"No, just us. Although I guess the only one left would be Thompson. He's big and badass, I'm sure he's running around here, butt-ass naked, smashing zombie skulls into the wall and tearing Imp arms off and beating them to death with them," Jack replied.
Jennifer and Jenkins laughed again, though not as loudly as before.
"Where'd you get those uniforms?" Jenkins asked.
"Supply room. Come on, let's search the area, then we'll get you to an infirmary nearby. You can shower and change and get something to eat," Jack replied.
They searched the area and only managed to find a single magazine of ammo, which Jenkins took because he'd expended his. They only had one scare on the way back through the derelict power station. As Jack passed one of the darkened alcoves, he barely noticed a flickering yellow light in time. Spinning instinctively, he raised his pistol and popped off four shots, turning the rogue Lost Soul into a rain of bleached bone.
"Fuck," he whispered, looking around for any more enemies. "That was close." There was nothing else around, and they managed to get to the infirmary without further incident. While Jenkins stripped and showered, Jack left Jennifer to guard the area while he jogged over to the storage area and retrieved a spare uniform, boots, and an MRE. He made it back to the infirmary and left the clothes on the counter in the shower area, then joined Jennifer in the main room. They both sat in companionable silence until Jenkins emerged, freshly dressed.
"That's so much better," he muttered as he sat down and tore into the MRE. While he ate, he had questions. "So, any idea where we are?"
"No," Jack replied.
"I think we might be on Deimos," Jennifer said. They glanced at her. "It stands to reason that this is the Deimos Anomaly. Where else would the Phobos Anomaly gateway lead that looks like this?" she asked.
She had a point. "So where's the gateway?" Jenkins asked.
"Through that big silver door out there," Jack murmured. "Who wants to bet that it's locked the hell down and needs eighteen keycards?"
"Just our luck," Jenkins muttered.
He finished his food and downed two cans of Mountain Dew, then most of a canteen.
"Well...now what?" he asked, looking at the two of them.
"We should go back through the gateway," Jack said. Now they both looked at him. "Well, it makes sense, right? I mean, we go back through, keep going with the plan. Find a way to destroy the gateway, then call for a pickup. I mean, we've killed a lot of assholes over there, so it'll be less dangerous on Phobos than Deimos."
"Who says we can even turn the gateway on?" Jennifer replied. "Or that we can link them? This is either very high tech or alien tech..."
Jack sighed. She had another point. "Let's just...get there first," he said. She nodded. "In the meantime, I say we hit those storage areas first and see if we can find more supplies. We've got no idea what's between here and home, and we'd be idiots not to take advantage of this eye in the storm, you know?"
"Yeah," Jennifer replied. "Good idea."
Jenkins was nodding. It looked like he was back in charge again, apparently. He missed Blackmore. He didn't like being in charge, he just wanted to get shit done. Then again, having other people to help and listen to you typically meant it got done faster. Whatever, they needed to keep going. It wasn't over yet, though he still clung grimly to the hope that the end was close. Centering himself, Jack led the pair of Marines out of the infirmary. There were things he needed: a rucksack, armor, more guns and ammo, but he didn't exactly have much hope of finding any of it around. His luck hadn't been all that great just lately.
Then again, he was still alive and intact.
They started off in the storage wing he'd woken up in and wasted twenty minutes poking through the various rooms. There was nothing that could be useful for their hard journey ahead. They moved on to the second wing, the one he'd found Jennifer in, and repeated the process. There were just a few lingering zombies in some of the rooms that went down easily enough, and this search was a bit more fruitful. They managed to find rucksacks. He missed this big, huge backpack model from when he'd lost it coming through the gate and was glad to have another one. Now that they had the packs, they stored several canteens and MREs for future use.
Unfortunately, they didn't find anything else. No armor, no more guns, no ammo, no radios or cool pieces of tech that might help them endure and survive. Ultimately, the three of them came back to the main room and gathered before the huge silver door. Jack wasn't sure how to take it when he discovered that no, the door wasn't locked down and, in fact, all that it took to open it up was the push of a button.
"Good omen or bad?" Jenkins murmured.
"No idea, be ready," Jack replied.
Pistols drawn, the three of them moved into a large antechamber beyond. It seemed like a huge airlock.
"Okay, that is a bad goddamned omen," Jennifer said as they finished coming into the room.
Jack had to agree with her. They all saw it right away when they came into the room. It was in the wall right next to the entrance, initially hidden from sight until you came into the room. It was a visage of true horror.
Thompson was dead.
Apparently, when they had been tossed through time and space by the gateway, Thompson had been teleported into the wall. About half of his head, most of one arm, some of his chest, one knee and one foot were sticking out of the wall. All the exposed parts had leaked blood. He had a kind of grim grin on his face, so at least he'd gone out smiling, but Christ, what a nasty way to go, especially for a Marine.
"Damn," Jack whispered.
It was just the three of them now.
With nothing else to do, the three of them silently moved on, heading over to the other side of the room, where the door was partially open. It was a split down the middle kind of door and one half had slid partially into its niche. It sparked periodically, sending wisps of black smoke into the air. Jack led the way through the opening.
"Damn," he muttered as he came into the huge room beyond.
It was a large arena style room with concentric rings lowering into the ground ahead of them. All of it was centered around the gateway. Or what had once been the gateway. All that was left in the dead center of the room was twisted metal.
"Well, there goes that plan," Jennifer said.
Jack sighed and walked slowly into the room, taking in the devastation. There were workstations and consoles and terminals everywhere, all along the lowering rings of metal, and they were all smashed and gutted. Bits of bodies, spent shell casings, and more blood was mixed in. God, he'd waded through an ocean of blood by now.
Suddenly, from somewhere overhead, Jack heard a hissing sound. It sounded distinctly organic. Jerking in terror, he stared up and saw something so totally different that he had no idea what to do. It was a floating, beach ball horror. It was red. That was the most immediately obvious thing. It was a deep, deep red that made him think of the lowest pits of hell. It was round and it hovered down at him from the ceiling.
A single huge eye of iridescent green stared at him with a black slit of a pupil. An enormous grinning mouth, filled with huge canine teeth, seemed to smile with an insane kind of malignancy, a cruel humor. Its spherical form was ringed by dull gray spikes, most of them coming out of its top and its bottom.
"What the fuck is that?!" Jenkins shrieked.
That seemed to snap Jack back to reality. Just in time, too. The thing opened its mouth wider and abruptly, a ball of blue-yellow flame emerged from it, coming straight for him. Jack dove out of the way, felt the heat of the fireball as it scotched past him. Not another one that shot things! He rolled onto his back, aimed up with the pistol and hammered out every last round in the sidearm. At the same time, Jenkins and Jennifer opened up as well. Holes opened up on the creature and dark red gore spilled out as it spun and fired on the other two, spitting balls of fire at them. By the time his last shot was fired, the thing was looking bad.
Suddenly, it let out a bellow of furious pain and then seemed to deflate slightly. It began to fall right towards him. Jack rolled out of the way just in time. The new horror hit the floor with a wet smack. Jennifer and Jenkins jogged over to him, running down the steps to the second level where he had ended up.
"What is that?" Jennifer whispered as they joined him.
Jack finished getting to his feet. "Hideous," he muttered in reply. He looked morosely at his pistol. It was dead empty now.
"We should name it," Jenkins said quietly. "We named the others."
"You seem good at it," Jack said to Jennifer.
"Well..." She seemed to consider it. "Cacodemon," she said suddenly.
"Cacodemon?" Jenkins asked uncertainly.
"Yes, Cacodemon. It fits."
Jack nodded. It did fit, strangely. "Okay then. But, what do we do now?" he asked. He felt lost and afraid, standing there with no ammo in the ruined Deimos Anomaly, staring again at the shredded remains of their first Cacodemon.
"We keep going," Jennifer said. "Same plan as before. Find a radio or a working ship. The Anomaly was what was putting out the interference signal, and this Anomaly is destroyed. So now we can complete our mission and call for help."
Jack felt a seed of hope, warm and cautiously comforting, somewhere deep inside him. She was right, he realized. All they had to do was keep pushing, get to a radio or a ship, and get the hell off of this miserable rock.
"Okay," he said. "Split up, search this place. We need more ammo if we're going to do this. Keep an eye out for armor, a radio, anything useful."
They got to work. Twenty minutes passed in miserable silence. As he worked, hunting through the ruins, Jack found his mind wandering into dark places. The Cacodemon disturbed him, and not just because of how freaking creepy it looked, or because of the fact that it could shoot freaking fireballs out of its mouth.
It was its utterly bizarre appearance.
The other things he'd encountered so far, they'd been weird and out there, but, in their own way, they made a certain kind of sense. The zombies, the Imps, the Demons, he could get those...sort of. The Lost Souls had certainly been weird, and so had the Spectres. But this thing was just...insane. What the hell else could come out of this nightmare? What other kind of monsters waited for them? He shook the thoughts off with difficulty.
In the end, they managed to secure five more magazines of ammo for the pistol and a fully loaded shotgun. Jack accepted one magazine and reloaded his pistol, and took the shotgun. It felt good to have, but it also meant he'd just accepted point duty again. Shotgun in hand, Jack motioned for the others to join him at the entrance of the Anomaly.
"Let's get this over with," he said.