For a little while, she didn't think.
Kyra simply sat there in the conductor's chamber at the front of the tram, staring out of the windows into the glass-and-steel tunnel ahead of her as she slowly trundled along the tracks. Something brought her back to reality bit by bit, something repetitive and familiar. Metal tinking on metal. Something being jostled ever so slightly by the simple motions of the tram cart. She realized that she had seen something on the way in, something important, something that demanded her attention. With a soft sigh, Kyra came back to herself.
She couldn't keep indulging in these shell-shocked moments.
And that brought her back to the reality that she was still holding her hand over her arm. As soon as she realized it, the pain spiked and she growled in frustration. Fucking stupid. She hadn't been paying attention. After this many years of being a Marine, after this much combat, she would've thought that paying attention would be ingrained into her by now. But apparently not. Apparently facing alien demonic horrors was throwing off her game. Who knew? She pulled her hand away and looked at the shredded remains of her environmental suit sleeve. She was going to have to fix that. And the gashes in her skin.
Well, she had some time.
Sighing quietly, Kyra tracked down an emergency medical kit that came with the tram and cracked it open. The most she could do was a patch-job. She bit back a scream as she dumped a combo of antiseptics and numbing agents into the wound, then let out a long sigh as the numbing agents went to work. She slapped a bandage over the wound that sealed it tightly and would do for now. Then, after a moment's consideration, she grabbed a universal antibiotic/antiviral dose and injected herself. Fuck knew what kind of bacteria that thing had been carrying. Was it an alien? She didn't want to think about that, not yet.
Kyra then hunted down a suit repair kit and took a moment to slap a second patch over her bicep, sealing the wound in her suit. She was going to have to get some real armor soon. She was holding out hope that there would be some in the Military HQ. Now that her arm and suit were taken care of, Kyra stood up and moved back into the main cabin. She had to see what was bugging her. She'd seen something on the way in.
And that something was at the back of the tram, almost tucked away into a corner.
Kyra moved across the tram slowly, partially out of a newfound abundance of caution, but also out of worry that she might roll this corpse over and see a familiar face. They were facing away from her, wearing an environmental suit like her. As she crouched down, she saw a lot of blood. Pistol in hand, she grabbed body's shoulder and rolled it over.
"Aw shit," she whispered. "Erikson."
He was a PFC onboard her ship, a rifleman. He'd gotten rotated in at the same time she had, and was anxious because this was his first spacebound assignment. She remembered looking over his service record. He'd seen a few firefights, and, from what she'd gathered from the psych notes, he was out here because he'd basically lost his nerve in the last one. He'd been protecting a city under siege by rebels over in Greece, since they were currently allied with the US and Norway, which was where he was originally from, and the US was trying to keep Greece from falling after its economy had tanked for the tenth time this century.
Staring at his pale face, as white as a corpse left in the snow for three days, she felt a powerful sense of empathy and regret. They'd stuffed him out here because they figured he wouldn't see any combat.
Hell, someone probably thought they were doing him a kindness.
And they probably would've been...if this hadn't happened.
Judging from the ugly wound in his stomach, which had basically been ripped out, one of those red-brown bastards had gutted him. The poor kid had died, alone and in pain, on some distant fucking moon.
"I'm sorry," she whispered.
Then she saw that he was laying on something, something that glinted, and finished rolling him over. Well...at least the situation wasn't a total waste. Kyra grabbed the shotgun he'd died with and bled all over, then reached into one of her pockets and pulled out an antiseptic wipe. She slowly went about wiping the gun off, her movements methodical, and she temporarily lost herself in the motions. She wouldn't be able to get all the blood off, but by the time she was finished, it was close enough for rock and roll.
She checked it out, found it empty.
Well, great.
She patted Erikson down, checking all his pockets, and managed to scrape together enough shotgun shells to at least bring it back up to full. After sliding the shells in one by one, Kyra stood back up. She lingered for a moment, looking down at Erikson. How many more were dead? Was she alone here? She remembered seeing the distant firefight. It was around the building she was going to...or she thought so. That seemed like a long time ago now. Well, if they were here, she would find them. There was bound to be a LifeScan in the Military HQ, and hopefully that could give her a reading on just how alone she was here.
The tram was finishing its trek.
Kyra slipped back into the driver's seat and went through the annoyingly slow process of bringing the tram through the airlock. She scoped out the loading platform as the tram finished locking into place. No zombies, no...whatever they were. She needed a name for them. Even as she was thinking it, a word came to her from somewhere in the abyssal depths of her brain: fiend. They looked like fiendish little bastards. Well, big bastards, given they were taller than she was. And they all looked alike. Well, roughly alike, she hadn't exactly had time for examining the finer details. What did that mean? Were they demons?
Kyra had never really bought into any of the religious stuff that still held a strange kind of sway over the world, but she was at least familiar with it. Something about these creatures made her think of demonic entities. They couldn't be. Hell wasn't a real place. Were they aliens? If they were aliens, then first contact was officially blown. Well, she had been tired of fighting her fellow human for all these years…
She had to admit that fighting zombies and aliens was a big step up.
There was often moral ambiguity to war. There didn't seem to be much ambiguity to gunning down freaking zombies and demonic aliens. Unless she was missing something huge. With how absolutely insane this situation was, she thought that it wasn't impossible that she was actively hallucinating or in a coma right now. But, there was also a good chance that this was real, so she should keep going on as such.
She stepped out onto the platform and checked it over. No zombies, no fiends. Good start. She searched the area, pointing her flashlight into all the shadowy niches, finding nothing but a few corpses with no ammo in their pockets, the bastards. She left the platform and came to a small checkpoint that had obviously seen some heavy fighting. The opposite door was broken and half-open, which was good for her, given that she wouldn't have another way to get it open if it was locked. She ducked through it, shotgun at ready.
Kyra came into a bloodied, flickering antechamber.
"Oh shit," she muttered.
Here was a roadblock...probably. Dead ahead of her and to her right were two large doors that were not only closed, but ringed by red lights: a lockdown. The antechamber was clear at least. Kyra scoped the area out as she moved towards the main door. The way she wanted, needed, to go: Command Control. The answers would be there.
Once she got to the keypad, Kyra extracted the cracked, bloodied PDA that had once belonged to Staff Sergeant Burns. She swiped it, waited...and heaved a sigh when the pad buzzed angrily at her. She tried it again out of frustration, but received the same result. Annoyance settling in, Kyra turned and marched over to a security center that was tucked away into one corner. At least it wasn't locked down. Kyra performed a quick search of the center, but it was pretty damned ransacked. No armor, no ammo, nothing of use.
"Give me something to work with," she muttered as she settled in at the main console and got to work. It was, at least, intact.
Burns's PDA clearance got her into the system and the power or the servers or whatever must be better over here, because there was a bit more to access and the load times were shorter. She didn't go hunting for intel, not yet. She doubted anything relevant was kept anywhere but Command Control. Instead, she checked into the lockdown and studied a map of the Military Headquarters. And resisted the urge to shout a curse.
It was definitely a full-blown lockdown.
This was going to require more than a bit of hacking or tracking down a PDA to get past. Kyra studied the situation a bit longer and managed to piece together what exactly it was she was going to have to do, which was basically track down three keycards. The first one was in the Barracks, which was the only way that wasn't locked down. That card would let her into the actual headquarters part of Military HQ, which was where she would be able to find the next card that would grant her access to the final portion of the base, which held the other keycard that would finally fucking get her into Command Control itself.
What a great fucking day.
Kyra left the security center and moved over to the barracks entryway. She hit the access button and prepared herself for whatever might lay beyond. Another, smaller antechamber with three doors leading away from it, two of them open. Even as she was peering through the one dead ahead of her, she saw two, now unfortunately familiar maddened red eyes staring out at her from a nearly pitch black interior.
She aimed and fired, lighting up the barracks beyond and blowing the head clean off of the fiend that was waiting for her. All around her, a cacophonous roar went up.
"Shit," she muttered, backing up.
They sounded like mostly zombies, so Kyra backed up, out of the door she'd come in through, and switched to her pistol. No sense in wasting shells on zombies. As she kept backing up, a gunshot sounded and she jerked in surprise. The first zombie, a man in ripped fatigues, stumbled out, wielding a pistol.
And pointed it at her.
"Fuck me," she muttered, aiming and firing, putting a round scorching through his right eye and turning it into a geyser of dark red gore.
She'd forgotten they could do that.
The next two after him also wore torn, bloodied military uniforms, but weren't armed, and they went down without a problem. Then something let out an awful hiss-shriek and a ball of fire flew out at her. Kyra ducked it and backed up a few more steps, preparing. A fiend came out of the opening, shrieked at her and threw another fireball. This one came dangerously close to hitting her and she could feel the heat of its passing even through her suit. She fired, putting three rounds into its big, gaping mouth.
The back of its head opened up like ripe fruit dumped from three stories up.
Even as it dropped, two more zombies appeared. Kyra put them down, her shoulders squared, her aim steady.
In the end, she ended up emptying her magazine, slapping in a fresh one and popping off two more shots before the tide of monstrous bastards ceased. She waited, then began moving forward again. When nothing leaped out at her, she kept going. Checking out her options, Kyra chose to ignore the almost totally dark barracks for now, given that she had another, actually lit barracks and a bathroom to investigate.
She moved slowly, carefully. At this point, she really didn't think the zombies were capable of much more than coming right at her, maybe wielding a gun, which was surely dangerous, but nothing she couldn't handle. The fiends on the other hand...she had no idea how intelligent they might be. They could do something like lie in wait, set a trap, or something else. Were they animals or intelligent beings? She thought the answer was somewhere in the middle. As she began picking through the wrecked remains of the first barracks, Kyra felt her hope slip a notch. At first, she couldn't really put her finger on why.
But as she looked across bloodied and ripped mattresses, bullet-riddled corpses in pools of their own blood, and the general state of the place, which looked as though a tornado had been through, she slowly realized what was bothering her. How many times had she seen a room like this? Barracks were pretty much universally mil-spec now, apparently even out here in outer space on a UAC base. If you had been in one, you'd been in them all. Even with all the blood and death around, she could catch a faint whiff of the antiseptic spray they mopped and buffed the floors with. It was like...home. This place was powerfully nostalgic and provided a sense of warmth and comfort, like an eye in the middle of the painful, never-ending hurricane that was life.
And to see it in such a state of disarray, filled with the dead, with her own kind…
It was powerfully disillusioning.
Kyra pushed through that mounting despair. She had to. It was easy to give in to despair and misery and hopelessness. Sometimes she thought dying was easy, it was living that was hard. And right now, she needed to live, even if only to see what in the fuck had happened here. But there might be survivors, people she could help, and she would help them if she could. Kyra finished her search of the first barracks, finding just a few more shotgun shells and another magazine for her pistol, then commenced the search of the bathroom.
It was just as void of the keycard as the barracks.
Fighting fear, which quickly replaced the despair, Kyra found herself soon standing in front of the entrance to the dark room. She holstered her pistol and grabbed the shotgun, bringing it back into play and snapping on the barrel-mounted flashlight. A shaft of titanium white light cut into the abyssal gloom, revealing more racked rows of ruined bedding. She played the light across the interior, checking to see if anything was alive within. She couldn't see anything. That didn't necessarily mean the area was clear.
Then her light stopped suddenly as something blue glinted.
"There you are, you little bastard," she whispered.
The blue keycard was at the back of the room, in between two rows of beds, in a pool of blood. Well, now or never. Kyra moved forward through the barracks, keeping a wary eye out to either side of her. Just get in, grab the thing, and get out.
She got to the blue keycard and knelt to grab it.
Something growled. Kyra cursed and took a step back. The growl had come from above. She brought her shotgun up and pounded out a shot at the same time she saw a fiend coming down at her from a hole in the ceiling tiles.
The blast took it in the gut and eviscerated a good chunk of it in a spray of pulpy gore. It shrieked and landed atop her. They both went crashing to the floor and she let out a shout of pain. It was still alive, she realized as it grabbed her helmet, shrieking in her face. The thing had to weigh several hundred pounds. It was pretty much raw muscle. Knowing she had to get it off of her, and right now, Kyra put all of her strength into one powerful shove and rolled over to the right, dumping the half-dead thing over onto the floor.
She rolled away from it, trying to put some distance between the two of them, but it was already scrabbling towards her, shrieking madly. Kyra yanked her pistol from its holster, rolled back over to face it, shoved the business end into its big mouth and squeezed the trigger twice. That stopped the ugly bastard from moving.
"Son of a bitch," she whispered as she picked herself slowly up off the floor. She groaned, feeling various aches and pains assaulting her now, and took a moment to pop her neck. Then she holstered her pistol, snagged her shotgun, and grabbed the blue keycard.
So, the bastards could set traps.
Either that, or it was luck of the draw for the fiend.
She wasn't sure what to believe as she pocketed the blue keycard and then hurried out. She came back into the main antechamber and marched quickly over to the next door on her list: the one that would take her into the headquarters portion of the military base. Kyra took a deep breath, let it out slowly as she came to stand before the large, red-ringed door. Staring up, she couldn't help but think red ring of death.
She shook her head and raised the lockdown, swiping the blue keycard.
The red lights flashed, then were replaced by a green light, then they went out. Kyra pocketed the card. She hit the access button and leveled the shotgun at the opening aperture. A long, stainless steel hallway, smeared with blood, awaited her. Before she could take a step into that corridor, she heard a deep snort, like a pig…
Except not a pig, bigger than a pig.
Her mind's eye filled with the vision of a huge boar with enormous, gore-streaked tusks. She shivered and focused. Boars always creeped her out for some reason. Kyra waited, then took a step into the corridor. Something snapped wetly, then she heard an awful sound: eating. Something was chowing down. Something big.
Not a zombie, she couldn't imagine a human being making that noise, even zombified. And the fiends...no, they didn't make noises like that. Or at least she didn't think so. She could be making assumptions, which was dangerous, but her gut told her she was hearing something altogether new. What was it? Did she want to know? The awful feeding sounds only intensified. They were coming from an open doorway to her left. She could hear deep, wet breathing, then another snap. She realized it was a bone snapping.
Kyra swallowed and got right up against the wall. She waited, hyping herself up, then stepped around and into the doorway.
And saw something completely new.
"What in the fuck?" she whispered in open horror.
What looked like a shaved, pink gorilla with bright, golden, glowing eyes and a mouth stuffed with huge teeth and smeared with blood awaited her. It was in the middle of a bathroom, in front of a row of stalls, presiding over a pile of body parts. The big thing looked at her with a feverish intensity, and something about its gaze made her think of an animal more than anything else. Whatever this thing was, it wasn't particularly bright.
That made it no less dangerous.
The thing issued a low grunt and suddenly began coming towards her. Its feet stomped through the bodies, splashing blood and snapping bones, and she screamed and squeezed the trigger. The shotgun shell hit it right in the head and ripped away a chunk of its skull. The thing let out a full-blown roar this time and came at her faster, charging now, too stupid to realize it should be dead. Kyra threw herself out of the way, diving to the left and landing hard on her side. She rolled over, aimed the shotgun again and then pounded out another slug shell as soon as the big bastard came into view. The shell took it in the chest.
The big pink thing turned to face her, readjusting its trajectory.
Kyra's eyes widened and she pumped the shotgun, then blasted out another shell.
That one went into its huge, gaping maw. And that slowed it down. She fired again, and this time the back of its head burst in a spray of dark red gore. That dropped it. Breathing shakily, Kyra got back to her feet and studied the hulking beast she'd killed. It had to be a good six feet and a solid five hundred pounds. It looked like it was made of pure muscle. Only unlike the fiend, which looked like he was a nut about working out, this bastard looked like he was a steroid freak and pumped iron twenty four seven.
"What are you?" she whispered, studying it.
What did this have to do with zombies and fiends?
What was going on here?
The light had faded from its eyes. Kyra studied the creature with an analytical eye. It was clearly strong, and it had a good reach and looked like it could bench press a car. Its big, giant head was hunched forward and had a massive mouth with huge teeth, so that was an obvious threat. It had white horns sprouting from its head on either side, like a bull. They weren't too long, but it was possible that it could gore her on one of those if the circumstances were right. It didn't seem capable of producing any kind of projectiles, like the fiend, so basically she just had to keep these bastards at a good distance and put them down fast.
Okay, fair enough.
But what to call them?
She'd named the fiends, and zombies were obvious, and naming it might help her cope with it, because this was starting to freak her out.
It was pink.
Well, not bright pink, more like burnt pink, like scar tissue, but definitely pink.
"Pinky," she muttered. "You're a pinky. Big ugly bastard."
She kicked it in frustration and moved into the bathroom, then began searching it. Every time a fresh puzzle piece fell into her lap, it seemed to change the fundamental shape of the puzzle, so that she no longer had any idea what she was looking at. As she finished up her search of the bathroom and found nothing, Kyra suddenly began looking around for a vent grate. Suddenly, the idea of crawling through the vents didn't seem so bad.
Unfortunately, the vents of that first building seemed like a fluke. She couldn't get in, the grate was way too small. Trying to put aside her frustration, Kyra left the bathroom and moved back out into the main corridor. She moved slowly, listening for any further threats, as she approached the next door. Opening it up, she saw that it led to a training area. The place was a wreck. Well, time to get to work. Kyra began searching the area.
The next half hour seemed to pass with a torturous lethargy.
She search the training room, a gym, an armory (that one was particularly painful, as obviously the local forces had cleared the place out), and a main security center. And all she managed to find for her troubles were a handful of zombies and fiends, about enough ammo for her pistol and shotgun to replace what she used killing the inhuman beasts, and another keycard. At the end of it all, she ended up standing before the final locked door feeling like she'd played a zero sum game. Well...at least she had the card.
Using her yellow keycard, Kyra opened the next door blocking her path to answers. It opened up to reveal another corridor. This one ended in a pair of door-doubles that led to an elevator. Her ticket into Command Control. And it was locked, too. Just one more keycard, and it rested somewhere in the immediate area. Well, it had better, because she didn't know where else it might be. Of course, it was possible that it may lay beyond the locked door...then she was fucked. As she began hunting through more derelict, wrecked rooms, her minded wandered.
What had happened here?
Zombies, she could make some kind of sense of. And the fiends...there were fewer ways to make sense of that, but it still could go together. Some kind of alien invasion and they turned humans into zombies either on purpose or maybe as a side effect of...wherever they were from. But the pinkies? What in the hell were they doing here? She had no idea how they fit into the equation. Then again, she was just assuming that there were more than one. What if it was just a one-time thing? An experiment gone wrong?
A freak of nature?
But even as she thought this, she came into an office and found another pinky corpse slumped on the floor in a huge pool of blood, most of its skull blown off, its brain exposed. What brain it had, anyway.
She cleared out the offices, a bathroom, and finally located the final keycard she was looking for at the back of a storage room, clipped to the belt of a dead Marine. Key in hand, she finished securing the area, then finally came to stand before the elevator doors. Time for some answers. Hopefully. And maybe an upgraded arsenal, although she was beginning to lose any real hope for that. This whole base seemed like it had been cleared right out. The elevator came down into its metal nest and the doors opened up, revealing a sparking, bloodied interior. Well, it was otherwise empty, at least. Kyra stepped aboard and rode it up.
The elevator clicked into place and the doors slid open.
Kyra stood there for a few moments, staring out at Command Control.
Something about seeing this high-tech, million-credit control room shredded and destroyed, smeared with blood and littered with spent shell casings, presiding over a base filled with death, seemed to resound deep within her. Something about it made this situation real in a way it hadn't been to her since she'd first woke up in that escape pod. The elevator dinged and the doors began closing. Kyra snapped back and stepped out, blocking them. She looked around, taking in the smashed consoles, the cracked screens, the dead bodies.
There were a good dozen or so Marines and technicians scattered across the circular room. There were windows along the periphery of the room, just above the ring of workstations and terminals and consoles along the walls. It gave her a view out onto the immense desolation that surrounded her. She ignored it and instead began taking the opportunity to pat down the bodies. She managed to snag a few more magazines for her pistol and another shell, and nothing else. Frustration mounting yet again, she settled in at the most intact terminal and got to work, trying to hunt down some kind of information or clues as to what had happened.
Twenty more minutes passed, each one pissing her off more than the last.
At the end of it, she came very close to smashing her fist through the screen. Instead, she just took a deep breath, let it out, stood, and marched back to the elevator. The internal database was shot. There were so many holes in the network that she couldn't find even basic reports. The LifeScan was broken beyond repair. The communications were broken beyond repair. So basically, this whole building had been a complete waste of time.
She rode the lift down and then moved towards the tram station on the other side of the Military HQ. She had two buildings left to check out: Research and Utilities. Since she doubted that the utilities building held anything worthwhile, she planned to head onto the research structure.
Hopefully it would have at least some kind of answers for her.
But her hope was beginning to wear thin.