Like they had over a dozen times before, they rolled into their next destination.
Command Control over on Deimos looked in even worse condition than it had back on Phobos. Jack, Jennifer, and Jenkins stepped silently out of the tram after it had settled into its nest and put down a half dozen Imps and zombies hanging around on the platform. It started out weird almost right away, as Jack led the way deeper into the structure. He stepped into what was supposed to be the main entrance lobby.
It didn't look anything like what'd he'd seen so far.
Rotted, pale wood surrounded them. There was a wall dead ahead, maybe twenty feet, that had a window about ten feet up. He could see Demons stomping around beyond the blood-smeared window. What was supposed to be the lobby split to the left and right. He could hear Imps and zombies around somewhere nearby.
"Let's get to work," he muttered.
They went to work and spent the next ten minutes blasting their way through the immediate area. Jack, Jennifer, and Jenkins put holes in a dozen zombies and a quartet of Imps. They made their way deeper into the maze of strange pale woodwork. Sometimes, through holes in it, he could see steel and bare circuitry, proof that the original installation still existed somewhere under there. Jack burned through three magazines for his pistol and as he reloaded the very last magazine, a shot whizzed by his head and he turned around.
They'd made it past the lobby area and had come into a storage bay. The walls had shifted from odd pale wood to a strange slate gray marble. Z-Sec assholes were pouring into the room from three different entrances.
"Open fire!" Jack called as he dove towards the corpse of a Space Marine behind a trio of crates. He quickly patted the corpse down and almost let out a shout of joy when he found a pair of magazines for his SMG. He holstered his pistol, then quickly reloaded the SMG and pocketed the remaining magazine. He could hear Jennifer and Jenkins blasting away at the small army of Z-Sec. As soon as he was ready to rock n' roll, Jack popped up, feeling full of piss and vinegar, and sprayed a quartet of dark-armored assholes down with red hot lead. He splattered their coagulated blood across a stack of crates and they fell to the deckplates.
He grunted as a pair of bullets pinged off his armor, both hitting him in the chestplate, and he turned and finished out the magazine, shattering the visors of two roaring, pistol-wielding Z-Secs. Another round winged his armor and he spun, let the SMG drop and whipped his pistol back out. He aimed and fired, putting four rounds through the chest of another Z-Sec, then fired two rounds into the head of a regular zombie that had wandered into the fray. Only this one was wielding a shotgun and had fired off some shells.
The two rounds tore away a good portion of its skull and brain.
He finished out the magazine putting down the rest of them and hastily reloaded, but no more shots were fired. An uncomfortable silence fell across the area.
"Clear?" he called.
"Clear," Jennifer confirmed as she and Jenkins came out.
"Secure the area," he said.
They headed out, moving through the storage bay. The first thing Jack did was to claim that shotgun he'd seen. He grabbed it and found it empty. Cursing briefly, he slung it over his shoulder and kept searching. In the end, he managed to snag another pair of magazines for his SMG and nothing else. Not even a spare mag for his pistol.
Well, it was better than nothing, he supposed.
They left the storage bay by way of a large door made of that same pale wood. It slid up into the wall just like the regular doors did and as he watched it disappear into its niche, a powerful sense of unreality and dislocation settled over him. Jack tried to shake it off, no time to be in a daze. It was weird how the littlest things got to him. Zombies, fire-throwing monsters, corridors made of flesh, crimson skies, oh yeah, he could apparently handle that. But a door made of wood acting like a door made of metal?
No way, that's where he drew the line.
The thought almost made him giggle hysterically, but he bit down on his tongue, making himself cling grimly to professionalism and rigid military discipline. He'd seen guys lose it before on the battlefield. At one point, when he was fighting a nasty turf war over in Estonia, one of his squadmates had just started laughing, right in the middle of a firefight. Jack saw that he was laughing at a small white rabbit that was hopping through the blood-soaked, body-strewn nameless field they were fighting in. Just hopping, like nothing was wrong.
The guy had gone right on laughing until suddenly his head was blown clean off.
Jack himself had almost started laughing, but that spray of hot blood nailed him back to reality in a very powerful way. And it had saved his life that day. So here and now, he made himself get nailed back to reality, or else he was going to become a corpse. The storage bay led out into a large, circular corridor similar to the one back at Deimos Labs. They walked along it for a bit and finally found a way into the dark heart of the structure.
Unfortunately, they couldn't actually get inside.
"Shit," Jennifer muttered as she studied the lockout that had been placed on the door. "What is it with this place and lockdowns? This is ridiculous."
"What do we have to do?" Jenkins groaned.
"We gotta find a handprint, a PDA, and a red keycard," she replied.
"Holy God..." Jack moaned miserably. "Do we have any idea where any of those are?"
"Well...I can at least find the keycard. It's off to the left a ways, in a mess hall. As for the PDA...ugh, I'm going to need to get to a security center and then override the PDA tracking system and see if it's even still intact. As for the hand...hell, Staff Sergeant Hall could've ended up anywhere. I'll have to think about that one," she replied.
"Great," Jack muttered. "Well, let's at least get the keycard. Then figure the rest of this crap out," he added.
Jennifer took the lead.
The jaunt to the mess hall wasn't too particularly difficult. They put down a handful of zombies and a few inattentive Imps. When they actually got to the mess hall, though, they got into a brief but brutal firefight with some more Z-Secs. Jack wondered what they were doing hanging around this place. They hadn't seen many of the dark-armored jerks until just recently. Jack managed to retrieve about as much ammo as he expended.
Nothing new there.
They found the red keycard discarded back in the kitchen area, tossed inside of an empty cast-iron pot in a lonely, forgotten corner. After pocketing the thing and making progress towards the nearest security station, he found himself wondering just how in the hell it had ended up there. When disaster struck and chaos reigned, stuff wound up in the weirdest locations. He'd seen it happen before and the mind couldn't help but try and come up with some kind of scenario to explain the situation. The brain was a funny mechanism.
They hunted down a derelict security center five minutes later and he watched Jennifer work. As she stared into the screen and her fingers worked the keyboard, he felt an unexpected wave of...well, lust wasn't really the right word. Lust was some of it, he was horny for her in that strange way that combat brought forth all the baser emotions, but he also admired her. She was smart, she was brave, she was dedicated.
He realized, at that point, that there really wasn't any question. If and when they got out of there, he intended to be with her in every way possible for as long as possible. That was, of course, provided she still found him a tolerable partner.
"Got it," Jennifer said suddenly. "Okay, the good news is that we can do this. The bad news is that it's going to be a bit of a pain. I found the PDA, it's in the command staff's living quarters. I also discovered that the scientists here had put into effect a sort of DNA tracking system. It's experimental, but it should work. Basically, it plugs in through the LifeScan network. We can access it through the medical complex on the other side of the building."
"Hooray, let's trek around this place some more," Jack muttered.
"Hey, we aren't getting paid by the hour," Jenkins replied.
"I wish we were getting hazard pay for this shit," Jennifer said as she grabbed her shotgun and headed out of the infirmary.
Jack and Jenkins followed her, echoing the sentiment. They plunged back into the main circular corridor that ran around the core of Command Control. Jack felt like a clockwork man, trudging along, running mostly on autopilot. He was beyond exhaustion at this point, almost like when you were so cold that eventually, you no longer felt the cold because you no longer felt anything. You were numb. He felt numb to a lot of stuff happening around him. As an Imp leaped out of an open doorway and he blew its head off, he idly wondered if he was losing his mind. It didn't seem like it, but then, wasn't that how it often was?
One of the whole points of losing your mind was that you thought you were fine, while everyone else realized that you'd gone off your damned rocker. Well, he had two other fine examples of Marines here to keep him in check...although they might be just as crazy as he was. Phobos and Deimos had been a nonstop horror show almost from the first moment he'd set foot on the surface of Phobos. Again he was struck by the idea that this might just be an extended hallucination. He blew away another half dozen Imps and three zombies with the others' help, and they killed their way to the command staff dormitories section.
It didn't take too long to track down the PDA. Thankfully, it was only a little bloody, the screen only a little cracked, and it fired up on the first try. It even had most of its power bar full. Jack tucked it away in a reinforced pocket of his suit of combat armor and they moved on to the third and final leg of their journey. Well, this small journey anyway. Not even the last journey in this structure, let alone this moon.
As they made their way towards the medical complex, Jack's mind kept wanting to drift towards 'after'. What would happen after this? After they got into the core of Command Control? After they moved onto the next building? After they got to the Hangar? After, God willing, they got off of this moon and away from...from wherever the hell they currently were? But he kept forcing the questions back down now because there was nothing but speculation. When the world was as uncertain and terrifying as this, you really were only able to have one larger, broader goal, and then you had to deal with everything else as it came to you.
Right now that goal was: Get to the Hangar.
Everything else was just a string of haphazard objectives.
They killed another batch of Demons and Imps, who ended up getting pissed at each other halfway through and turned on each other. Jennifer had rewarded the lone survivor, a swaying, one-armed Imp, with a shotgun blast to the face. They kept moving through the ruined, bloodied chromium environment until they came to the medical complex. As they made their way through the reception area and came into one of the larger emergency rooms, Jack froze. So did the others. The first thing that hit him was the stench.
It was beyond awful.
It was so bad that, without really thinking about it, he closed his vents and turned on the internal oxygen supply.
There were about a dozen examination tables in the room, along the walls, but something like fifteen or so more mobile tables had been brought in. All of them were occupied by bodies. They were naked, and they had all been cut into in one form or another. Several of them were limbless, a few, (the lucky ones, he thought), were headless. Several had been cut open from crotch to chin, skin neatly flayed open and, as if in contrast to the surgical precision, the flaps of skin had been bolted crudely to the top of the table.
Some of them were still moving.
"God," Jack whispered.
"We have to...end it, for them," Jennifer murmured softly.
Jack felt his stomach turn over, ice fill his veins, but he knew she was right. There was no way to save them from this. No way but a bullet.
"Do it," he said grimly.
They moved out, among the dead and the dying.
Feeling like a reaper, Jack found the first of those still alive, a man who'd had his eyes cut out and most of the skin along his right arm flayed off. He placed the gun against the man's head and squeezed the trigger. As he moved on, he heard the others doing the same thing. He came across a woman who'd had her intestines pulled out through a cut in her stomach. They were hung from hooks overhead. She was moaning continually and it seemed as if she'd bitten through her lips in several places. Her eyes were vacant and cloudy.
He shot her in the head.
In the end, there were eight still alive, and somehow, not one of them was screaming. They didn't even seem to recognize that the end was being delivered. They seemed insane, beyond pain, beyond recognizing anything around them. It was, Jack thought, a mercy. But he couldn't help but think of the torture, the agony, they'd had to endure in order to break them in such a way. With an effort, Jack forced the thoughts from his mind as they finished crossing the hellish horror of the infirmary. They moved down a short corridor and came at last to the main control room. It was considerably less bloody and horrifying.
"Give me a minute," Jennifer said quietly as she settled in to work at the main workstation. Jack looked around the room. It seemed like a glorified office, the walls to either side of him stuffed with technology, the main workstation itself at the back. He and Jenkins stood guard by the door, as it was the only way in.
Jack hesitated as he saw something unfamiliar on his HUD. He studied it and realized, with a start, that it was a countdown timer for his oxygen supply. It was still high, almost full, but he hadn't even realized he'd turned it on. Not that he really blamed himself. He quietly opened his vents and shut it off. After another minute or so, Jennifer stood up.
"Okay, I found him. Staff Sergeant Hall isn't too far from here. He ended up in an auxiliary generator room," she said.
"Wait, can you use the scanners to determine if anyone else is alive?" Jack asked.
She shook her head. "No, I don't have access to that, but we should be able to from the control room," she replied.
He nodded. All the more reason to get the job done fast. The three of them trekked on, pressing back through the slaughterhouse. Jack did his best not to look at any of them, not to focus on the fact that these were all people, all human beings, who had once had dreams and hopes and loves, and now they were just so many objects in a cold, bloodied infirmary on Deimos. As he stepped back out into the main hallway, his focus shifted forcefully as a fireball smacked him in the chest. Swept with a sudden inexplicable but powerful, potent rage, Jack spun, raised his shotgun and aimed at the Imp that had attacked him.
Only no, it wasn't inexplicable, it was perfect explicable.
He was furious at these inhuman monsters, these demons, for what they had done. For the horrors they had visited upon him, upon his friends and allies, upon good men and women. He couldn't squeeze the trigger, he just couldn't.
Because he wanted to kill this fucker with his bare hands.
Letting out a scream of white hot fury, he dropped his shotgun and raced forward, covering the distance in a bare few seconds. The Imp seemed confused by the sudden change in tactics. It had been winding up to throw another fireball but he crashed into it like he was tackling another player at football practice. The two of them went tumbling to the rusty, blood-stained deckplates and the Imp issued a hissing shriek.
It was the last sound the thing ever made.
Jack felt like his vision was going red, like his brain was on fire and something inside of him was screaming. He grabbed the thing's huge, misshapen head and began pulling. His natural strength, amplified greatly by the suit of combat armor, was enough to decapitate the thing, though messily. It bucked and jerked beneath him, but he kept going, hearing a horrible ripping sound, followed by a wet snap that had to be its spine, and suddenly he fell backwards, the thing's head in his grasp. He looked up and saw another two coming towards him.
Screaming again, he threw the head at one of them. Blood splattered the pair of Imps as the head struck one squarely in the chest. Before he could go at these with his bare hands, they went down under a pair of well-placed shots. Jack jerked around, ready to keep fighting, but there was only Jennifer and Jenkins, who were staring at him with a concerned, fearful horror.
"Jack…what the hell was that?!" Jennifer cried.
He tried to say something, but his throat had locked up. He closed his eyes and fell to his knees, trying to get control of himself. He reached up, groping blindly at his helmet, and managed to get it off just in time before he puked. He narrowly avoided someone's boots, he wasn't sure who had gotten to him first, all he could see was the floor and a stream of dark, murky liquids escaping his mouth. The stomach acid burned up his throat and into his nostrils and as he finished throwing up, he coughed raggedly, groaning.
He hated puking.
After dry-heaving for a bit longer and spitting several times, he finally crawled over to the nearest wall and sat with his back against it. Through some small miracle, nothing else had shown up while he was having his miserable little breakdown.
"Shit," he whispered, taking off his pack and rummaging around in it until he came up with one of the canteens. He drained most of it, then replaced it.
"Are you okay?" Jennifer asked quietly. She stood in front of him now. Jenkins stood a little further down the corridor, facing away from them. Now that his brain wasn't on fire anymore, Jack felt a slow horror creeping over him.
"I..." He wasn't sure what to say. How do you explain that? How do you explain that you just ripped something's head off and try to claim that you aren't losing it? "I don't know," he said finally, not looking at her, staring at a spot between his feet. There were several drops of blood there, across the chromium deckplates.
"Are you going to be okay?" she asked. She sounded worried. He didn't like that. He was worried enough for the both of them.
"I think so," he said. He cleared his throat, turned, hawked and spat a few times. Damn, he hated the taste of stomach acid. "Yeah, I'll be okay," he said, finding some certainty. "I'm sorry," he added, grabbing his helmet and pulling it back on. As he got up, he went to retrieve his shotgun, and tried to articulate himself.
"All those people," he said, now looking at her. "I just...I flipped out. I was seeing red. I hated that Imp, it was like...it had done it, all that stuff in there, all the stuff we've been through, all these dead people. Someone needed to pay," he explained quietly.
"I understand," Jennifer said finally.
"If it helps, that makes sense to me," Jenkins said. He was facing them now. He looked pale and vaguely embarrassed.
"I guess it does," Jack replied awkwardly. He reloaded his shotgun. "Let's, uh...let's keep going. I've wasted enough time as it is."
Jennifer gave him an appraising stare, probably trying to judge whether or not he really was back in control. Finally, she gave him the barest of nods, seemingly satisfied, and set off. He followed after her, trying to stop from trembling. He didn't know if the shakes came from adrenaline or fear. He'd worked very hard to form a rigidly stratified self control over the past several years, and he thought he'd done a good job.
He noticed, unhappily, that neither of the other two had freaked out like this. Maybe they had better control than he did. Or maybe there was something else. A million things went into the psychological makeup of a human being, it could be anything. So, in the end, Jack just resolved not to flip out yet again, though it felt like a shaky resolve. They managed to get to the generator room without further incident.
At first, they were utterly stymied.
There were no bodies in the generator room, which wasn't all that big. There was blood, though. After hunting through the room, behind the machinery, in every place they could think of, Jennifer finally suggested looking under the room. They found an access hatch and went back down into the darkness once more, but yet again they were stymied. There was nothing and nobody under there. Finally, as he was staring at nothing in particular, trying to figure the situation out, turning it over in his mind, he glanced up.
"Oh!" he said, feeling like an idiot.
"What?" Jennifer asked, startled.
"Above us. He's got to be above us," Jack replied, walking over to a table and standing up on it. It groaned but held his weight. The ceiling was made of panels that could be lifted up. He pushed one up and looked around inside. Sure enough, he spied a corpse over in a far corner. It took a few minutes, but they managed to get the poor bastard down.
"So...how do we get his hand off?" Jenkins asked.
"We don't have a knife..." Jack murmured. He sighed. "Step back," he said, raising his shotgun. He aimed and fired, severing the man's hand, wrist, and about half his forearm with a point-blank blast. Blood sprayed and some of it beaded on his visor. Without a word, he leaned down and grabbed the severed limb.
"Can we go now?" he asked.
Jennifer nodded, again giving him that appraising look, and they set off. Ten minutes later, they'd gotten back to the main door. Jack slapped the hand across the print reader, then they scanned the PDA, then he swiped the card through.
"Open Goddamned Sesame," Jack muttered as the door finally opened up.
"Let's see if all that was worth it," Jennifer replied, leading the way.
They moved into the core of Command Control, finding a winding stairwell that curved in on itself several times as it led upwards. More of those strange green vines grew along walls that were now stonework. As they finally came into the top level of the structure, they found it wanting. Jack looked over the ruined, circular room that lorded over Deimos. It reminded him of the Labs. Only this was different, worse.
The place had been warped by whatever strange reality they now found themselves in. More vines grew over the workstations, and at seemingly random intervals there were tall, brass candle-holders, only they didn't hold candles, they held flickering green flames. There was a lot of blood, and a few severed limbs, but no bodies. Poor bastards had probably all been turned into zombies, or maybe fresh meat for the Demons.
Jennifer found a functional workstation and got to it. While she worked, Jenkins stood guard by the door and Jack moved over to the windows again. He didn't want to look out, but figured it'd be stupid not to. Lost Souls and Cacodemons roamed over the surface, no change there. Though now he could see groups of Imps and Demons, and lots of zombies, stomping across the gray-reddish surface of the moon now as well.
"Oh shit," Jennifer said. It sounded like a good 'oh shit'.
Jack hurried over to her. "What?" he asked.
"There's...other people alive," she said. "Not a lot. Three. Two of them are in good shape according to the sensors, and they're in the next building! The Nuclear Plant. The final one is...not in such good shape, and in the Hangar. The first two are mobile, the third is stationary. Also, there's a big armory not far from here, back downstairs."
"Perfect," Jack said. "What about comms?"
She sighed. "The comms here work, but I can't do anything with them."
"That same signal as on Phobos?" Jenkins asked.
She shook her head. "No. There's just nothing to connect to. No other signals, no frequencies, no nothing. It's like the rest of the freaking universe doesn't exist anymore..." She trailed off and they all must have been wondering if maybe that might not be true. Jennifer cleared her throat. "I can't get in touch with any of the survivors, either. We should get out of here, go to the Nuke Plant and link up with them. They might know more than us."
Jack nodded. "Yes, definitely."
He was beginning to feel better, almost good. The three of them quickly left the control room, made their way speedily back down the spiral staircase, and tracked down the armory. It was, like all the other armories around here, raided and a mess. But it wasn't stripped clean or depleted. There were magazines for their pistols and SMGs, and shotgun shells, scattered across the deckplates. The three of them quickly began gathering it all up. They placed everything they found on a table in the center of the room.
After thoroughly scouring the area, Jack made a fantastic discovery.
"Whoa, holy shit!" Jenkins said, seeing what he'd found. "Nice!"
"Nice indeed," Jennifer agreed.
It was a DX-88 'Eliminator' Rocket Launcher. Military issue. A compact gray tube that fired a single, small rocket that packed a hell of a punch.
"I don't think it's fair that you should have a rocket launcher and a chaingun," Jenkins said, eyeing the chaingun hanging across his back.
Jack figured he had a point. "Fair enough," he said, taking it off and setting it on the table. They'd found a pair of big boxes of ammo for it. "You guys wanna arm-wrestle for it?" he asked, wondering who should get it.
"I'll be fine without it," Jennifer said. "I've always been better with speed over strength. It's hard to be fast with a bigass gun like that hanging around your neck."
"Fine by me," Jenkins said, grinning broadly as he took the big gun. Jack was glad to be rid of it, in a way. It was heavy. The rocket launcher was about half its weight. He even managed to find three rockets for it. He loaded it up, pocketed the two spares, and hung it over his shoulder, keeping it for something big. Maybe one of those big horned bastards. The three of them spent a bit dividing up the ammo. In the end, Jack wound up with six magazines for his pistol, four for his SMG, and enough shells to load up his shotgun three times over.
He was definitely feeling better. After checking over all his weapons, making sure they were loaded up, safety off, (except for the rocket launcher, no coming back from a misfire there), and selecting his SMG as his main weapon, he made for the door. The others followed him. It was time to get some backup.