When the computer had informed her that the tramway tunnel, the glass tube that connected the buildings, snaking its way across the surface of the moon, was 'compromised', she'd assumed that it had sustained some damage. Kyra had no idea that it was such a fucking wreck. Huge pieces of the glass had been smashed in by what looked like explosions and there were bodies all over the place, littering the dozens of meters of tunnel ahead of her. A lot of them were fiend corpses, and there were a lot of zombies, too, and pinkies. She saw a few of the deflated corpses of the pumpkins, too. Man, this must have been one hell of a battle.

She stood there staring down the length of the tunnel for longer than she should have, and finally made herself hop down off the platform. Landing with a soft grunt, she began making her way along the passageway, moving cautiously among the dead. She paused every now and then when she found an intact human corpse to search it, but after a few times it became obvious that someone, or something, had been by this battlefield already and picked it clean. No spare rounds, no intact weapons, no magazines of ammo to collect.

She was so focused on any potential lingering threat on the inside of the tunnel that she missed the fact that there was a threat outside of it. The first notion she had that something was wrong was her instincts spiking a warning as she heard the bare faintest noise, and then a hiss sounded behind her, followed by several more.

"Fuck!" she screamed, turning around and raising the rifle.

A half dozen pumpkins had floated in behind her through the holes in the tunnel. The flotilla began their bombardment, launching a half dozen balls of blue electricity her way. She began backing up, shifting to the right, preparing to open fire, wondering how she was going to get out of this one, when she nearly tripped over something that clanked against her boot. Sparing a bare half-second glance down, she saw it for what it was: an air canister. A plan flew together in her mind and she knelt, scooped it up, and hurled it as hard as she could towards the bastards. She tracked it with her rifle, preparing to blast it, but she didn't even get the chance.

One of them did it for her.

A collective roar of pain and fury went up as the concussive blast of the ruptured tank slammed into them. Kyra turned and sprinted away, running towards the far airlock. It looked like it was miles away. That blast bought her a few seconds, disorienting the floating uglies, but it wasn't long before she came under fire again. She ignored them as best she could, just running and jumping over corpses, trying not to get tripped up.

She made it thirty feet, fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty…

Finally, after what felt like ages, her muscles burning even with the help of the suit of armor, she all but slammed into that silver airlock door. She hit the open button and turned around. They were closer. They'd almost kept pace with her. As it opened up, she returned fire, throwing a few three-round bursts their way, and hitting two of them. Then the door was open and she slipped through. Smashing her fist on the cycle button, she watched the door close, the pumpkins disappearing from view. For a moment, she just leaned against the wall, getting her breath back.

That had been close. Way too close.

This place was really starting to wear her down. And why not? She'd literally been through hell at this point. All too quickly, the airlock finished its cycle and the inner door opened. She came out on the bottom floor of the corresponding tram station, where they stored all the extra crap and technical bits. Flicking on the flashlight mounted at the end of the barrel, she moved slowly around that area to clear it out, chasing away the shadows and making sure nothing lurked in that darkness. She found only a single zombie, one that looked like it hadn't received whatever upgrades the others had been apparently getting recently, as it hardly reacted to her.

She put a shot in its forehead and then climbed up to the next level. After clearing it out with a similar proficiency and finding nothing waiting for her, Kyra headed for the exit. But before she could get there, a voice came to her.

"Identify yourself."

It was a man's voice, obviously coming from some kind of radio.

"Who's there?" she replied, trying to track the source.

"My name is Doctor Jensen. Identify yourself."

There. A terminal tucked away in the corner. She moved over to it and studied it. "My name is Staff Sergeant Morgan."

"Where did you come from, Staff Sergeant?"

"It's a long story, but the short version is I crashed landed at Typhon Station and took a quick jaunt across hell to get here."

"Then you know a lot."

"Not enough. I take it you're one of the assholes responsible for this shit show?"

He sighed. "Yes, I'm afraid so."

"Fan-fucking-tastic. Look, I need some way to either call for help or get to somewhere closer to civilization. I need to report this fucking mess."

"I see. I'm afraid conventional means are out. Our hangar was destroyed in an explosion during the initial invasion. I've personally picked the place over. We have no more vessels. Not that it really mattered anyway, considering we had no ships with engines powerful enough to get us to Earth or even Mars. And our communications are completely shot. But I have a deal to make you."

"What's that?" she asked cautiously.

"I'm sure you've seen corruption taking over the station, the unnatural fusion of our own existence and hell's?"

She thought back to the creeping wood, the rows of burning red pots, the other weird shit she'd seen so far during her short stay here. "Yeah."

"As best I've been able to determine, it is being caused by three unique energy sources. I've seen them through the cameras, and I can track them with the internal sensors. They appear as beating human hearts on iron pedestals. Destroy them, and I will reactivate the portal at Site Echo."

"And where will that get me?"

"The Moon."

"You have a fucking base on the Moon, with a teleporter?!" she snapped.

"Yes. And other bases throughout the solar system, though I'm not privy to most of them. Unfortunately, the portal will not take you directly to our lunar base. The best I can do is put you on the path to a portal that will lead there. I'm afraid you'll have to go back into the other dimension," he explained.

She sighed heavily. "Of fucking course I will. Anything else?"

"Yes. Once you're finished, come see me at Command Control. I have some information I'll need to pass off to you."

"You know, another doctor told me the same thing back in Typhon Station. And his PDA didn't survive the trip to Hell because every fucking thing I brought with me got disappeared in the transition," Kyra replied.

"Which doctor?"

"Henderson. He died."

"Hmm. Unfortunate. I likely have a copy of his research. But I should be able to compensate for that. For now, focus on destroying the hearts."

She sighed softly, considering it. What choice did she have, really? If they had a portal linking to the Moon, then that's where she needed to be. God, the thought of these goddamned things being that close to Earth…

"Jensen...did the UAC have teleportation devices on Earth?" she asked slowly.

He paused for a long time. "I don't know," he admitted.

"Oh that's fucking great. Fine. Give me a map and the locations."

"Transmitting now. Plug your suit's radio into the internal comms network so that we can communicate. You should also be able to download a map of the area so that it will overlay your head's up display and identify the locations of the hellbound hearts."

She hesitated. "Is there some...reason you're calling them that?"

Now he paused. "Just a reference to an old horror novella." He cleared his throat uncomfortably and she resisted the urge to laugh. It was the first time he'd done anything that broke through his flat, scientist-y demeanor. "One of them is in the Military Headquarters, one is in the Arboretum, and one is in the Machine Shops. Although I have lost my cameras in those regions, the last time I saw them, they all appeared to be heavily guarded."

"Great."

"Indeed. I suggest you hurry."

"Fine. But when I'm done with this, I want some more answers about all this."

"I'll tell you what I can."

"Uh-huh. Bye."

She downloaded the map and figured out how to make it display, then disappear, so it didn't distract her while she was fighting, then hooked her radio into the internal comms network of Obsidian Station. With those two things out of the way, she studied the map for a moment and worked out the best route to take. Thankfully, the first location, the Arboretum, was basically within spitting distance, but she didn't like the idea of 'heavily guarded'.

Kyra reloaded the assault rifle and set off.

As she moved through the security checkpoint and into the lobby area beyond, then struck off towards the Arboretum, she really began to focus on what she was actually doing. She was going to destroy a fucking human heart sitting on a pedestal that was apparently responsible for slowly warping reality itself into some sort of hellish nightmare. Never in her life did she envision that she'd be doing something even a quarter this strange.

A howl from somewhere else in the facility derailed her train of thought and set her instincts on edge. This was a new sound, and yet...not new. In fact, it was very familiar, which was why it was so weird to hear it here.

It sounded like a dog howling, like a hunting dog that had spotted its prey.

Were there dogs here? Had the monsters corrupted them, as they had the humans? Or was she just imagining things? Well, Kyra supposed she'd find out sooner rather than later. She moved down a broad, low corridor that offered an uncomfortable view out onto the surface of the moon. She picked out several corpses out there from the fighting that had engulfed the area before she'd arrived. So much wasted life.

She sure could use some of those fighters right now to help her out.

The corridor terminated up ahead, the door into the Arboretum was split down the middle, partially open, spitting sparks. It had a lot of dried blood on it. As if seeping out from beneath it, she spied more of that ugly, mottled wood, but that didn't prepare her for just how weird the place was, how much it had changed. As she peered cautiously in through the partially open door, she hesitated, not sure if what she was seeing was real.

The far right wall no longer even remotely resembled the UAC facility. It looked like a fucking castle, like the kind you'd see in old horror vids from way back when, with mad scientists and groaning creations and a million different levers. It even had old, rusted iron bars over the windows and for some crazy reason, about two dozen skulls were stuck across its surface seemingly at random. The floor of the Arboretum was almost totally replaced with the hideous brown wood from the hellscape she'd endured earlier, and it was broken in places, revealing the guts of the facility itself. Another wall looked like it was covered in blue-and-red glowing veins, pulsing randomly, like she was seeing the exterior of some giant alien brain.

The Arboretum itself, which had been made up to resemble a garden, was trashed. Almost all of the plants were dead, and those that weren't didn't look natural. An ugly quagmire of thick brown-green knotty tendrils with spikes growing out of them, each dripping a grotesque black substance, seemed to be taking over the area. And there, at the center of it all, was the pedestal that the good doctor had warned her about.

It looked...well, just about like what she'd pictured in her head. A cylindrical iron pillar maybe three feet tall and half a foot thick supporting a flat platform that was shaped a bit like a diamond sitting on its point, but it'd had the top third of it or so chopped off. And on this platform rested a human heart, an ugly lump of still-beating muscle.

God, she could even hear it.

Kyra stared at the heart, then looked around the room. There were a lot of shadows, a lot of blind spots. How to do this? After another moment or so, she thought: Why risk it? Bringing the rifle up and staring down the scope, she switched to three-round burst and zeroed the sights on the pumping heart. Holding her breath, she steadied her aim, waited just a few seconds, and then squeezed the trigger. The lead crossed the distance in less than half a second. It was a perfect shot, nailing the heart dead center and splattering it all over the place.

The world seemed to be holding its breath.

And then a scream went up. Not one, by a symphony of them, and the entire Arboretum seemed to come alive with movement. Cold black terror shot through her body like a malignant energy as she rapidly began backing away as she saw familiar shapes come stomping out at her. Pinkies. Only they weren't alone.

Dogs. They were dogs.

Only they weren't.

They were big dogs, skinless, slinking horrors that slunk out of the darkness with glowing bloody eyes and mouths stuffed full of razor teeth and huge claws that clacked on the wooden floor. And the horns. Awful horns jutting up through their meat. There were a good half-dozen of them and they all growled deep in their throats. Something about that touched a nodal point deep in her brain, a throwback to the days when humans huddled in caves, staring out at the rainy darkness and the beasts that lurked within it.

A time of teeth and blood.

She backed up, aiming the rifle, as the dogs came for her and the pinkies stomped towards her, the floor trembling in their wake. As the first of the skinless dogs came through the door, gunning for her, a name for it slammed into her skull.

Hellhound.

If there was anything that ever needed that name, it was this fucking thing. She aimed and fired, plowing what passed for its brains right out of the back of its skull in a spray of dark gore as she nailed it dead on. As it dropped, two more slipped through to take its place, and the first pinky showed up, then promptly began forcing the door open wider so it could get through. She kept going, backing up slowly, forcing down her terror, letting the cold, detached control she'd mastered after years of combat take its place.

The next hellhound went down, its head splitting open with another well-placed burst from her rifle. Then the second one smashed to the floor, taking three more bullets into its open mouth. The pinky finished coming through and stomped over the remains of the dogs, awful squishing and snapping sounds filling the corridor. Kyra ignored it, pouring the remainder of the ammo in her magazine into the thing, trying to score as many potential killshots as possible because these big pink bastards were hard to put down sometimes.

She got it with the last three rounds, nailing it in one of its golden eyes and sending it smashing to the plate metal floor. She slapped a fresh magazine in and got back to work. The bottleneck and the long corridor really helped her out and by the end of it, the closest any one of them managed to get was within maybe six feet. Too close for comfort, but none of them had actually gotten close enough to attack her. What a goddamned relief it was to fight things that couldn't shoot back or return fire in any way!

She'd emptied her rifle in the process and now held her shotgun, ready for any stragglers. But it was dead silent again. Kyra crept forward, moving among the blood slicks and the piles of corpses, and came back to the Arboretum. It was indeed dead. The lights seemed to have come on a bit brighter, chasing away a lot of the shadows, and she saw nothing hiding along the periphery of the Arboretum. The thorny roots had stopped twitching and writhing. They seemed dead now. This whole area did, in fact.

"Well that was easy," she muttered, then wondered if that was stupid. It felt like tossing up a challenge to the whole base.

Well...next stop was the Machine Shops.

She set off.

The closer she got to the Machine Shops, the more Kyra regretted her assessment of the previous situation, because it really did feel like Obsidian Station was saying, Oh yeah? Wait 'til you see what I got next, bitch.

It sounded like a whole crew of technicians was in the shops, running all the machinery to its maximum capacity. As she drew closer to this wing of the structure, having to pass through another pair of vacant corridors and a security center, she heard whirling, banging, drilling, hammering, nailing, welding, and other sounds she couldn't readily identify. She prayed that the whole thing was just automated and someone had left it on accidentally, but she didn't really believe that. All she could think of was that the demonic things were putting their newfound human tech toys to good use, making themselves harder to kill.

What ungodly horror, what wretched terror culled from the deepest blackest abyssal pits of Hell itself awaited her this time around?

She was really thinking about maybe taking a break, because she still felt like shit, and now she was amped up on terror and adrenaline to boot. A bad combination. But no, she had to do this. She was here, now. She could take a break when the hearts were dead, when the threat was eliminated. Of course, she could also take a break if she died. The sounds only grew louder as she drew closer, and Kyra was forced to turn down her suit's auditory sensors. At last, she turned a corner and came to a lengthy corridor.

The walls were broken up by smashed-open doors every dozen or so meters. She counted six doors in total, three on each side. And...shit. Lo and behold, there was the heart, at the very end of the hallway maybe fifty or sixty meters away. She could just make it out, resting on a pedestal. She could take it out from here with the rifle, as she'd managed to find a single spare magazine and reload on the way to the Machine Shops, but…

She really wanted to see just what, precisely, was happening in those shops. She reasoned, as she stared at the nearest open door, that it would be a tactical advantage to know, but as she began walking slowly forward, she had to admit to herself that it was curiosity that won out. Creeping up to the edge of the door frame, she peered carefully around into it. Looking into the large room beyond, that extended away from her for a few dozen meters, Kyra saw it. She saw it all. She saw precisely what the demonic bastards were up to.

They were upgrading themselves.

A group of glowing-eyed, bloody former humans, all of them techs as far as she could tell, were working the machinery. This immediately jumped out at her, as this was clearly a new level of intelligence, but this was wiped away when one of the things being worked on somehow became aware of her presence and turned to face her.

It was a pinky, only a lot different.

This thing was much more like a dog than the big shaved apes she'd been seeing so far. It was built like a bulldog on steroids, with a massive, bulky torso and enormous front legs that ended in fat paws studded with thick claws. It had a huge, eyeless skull that was almost all mouth, and of course it was stuffed full of razor teeth.

The skin was paler pink, and coming out of the back was…

"What in the fuck are you monsters doing?" she whispered in horror.

Sprouting from the back of the creature was an assemblage of machine parts, what almost looked like a spine with two wheels growing out the back, replacing its hind legs. The thing opened its mouth and loosed a furious roar, and immediately several others took up the sound, freeing their own and creating a symphony of horror.

"Oh fucking hell," Kyra groaned.

She almost began to pull back, but something caught her eye. Well, it had worked before...Kyra took aim at a trio of airtanks not far from the new pinky's locations and fired off a three-round burst. The tanks popped right as she began retreating, knowing that if she didn't get another bottleneck, these things were going to overrun her and fast. Already there were more of them pouring out of the labs, a monstrous horde of nightmarish flesh and machine combinations. Before she finished getting back around the corner, she counted four of them, and there were probably more coming. More than four of these half-machine bastards!

She was going to have to be precise and fast as fuck.

There was just one mag left in her rifle, almost full, so that's where she started. Taking aim, giving herself room to retreat if she needed to, Kyra saw the first of the horrors come slamming around the corner. It roared as it...smelled her? Sensed her? It had no eyes, how did it know she was there? What difference did it make? Kyra aimed and fired, throwing as many small volleys of three-round bursts into the thing's mouth as she could, since that was its biggest, most obvious vulnerability. The monster came right at her, swallowing the lead in sprays of dark blood, and with just six bullets left in the gun, it snarled and went down.

By now, two more had appeared at the end of the hallway and she didn't like the way this was going. She fired off the rest of her rounds in the assault rifle and then let it hang by its shoulder strap. Immediately snatching up her shotgun, she aimed and pounded out a slug shell right into the gaping maw of another one of those big half-machine fuckers. That at least stopped it for a few seconds, which held up the other, as the hallway wasn't quite big enough for two of the big, burly things to walk shoulder-to-shoulder.

She hit it twice more, pumping the shotgun fast and hard, and that put it down as its head came apart in another spray of dark gore. But now the third one was free, and another was already coming around behind it. Kyra began backing up as she emptied the shotgun, blowing off a leg of the third monster and ripping away part of its big ugly skull in the process. Her back hit the wall as she finished shoving what remained of her shells in: just enough for a half-load, then she was down to her pistol and the goddamned ax.

Kyra hit the access button behind her to get the door open. It was time to create a better bottleneck. But there was an angry chime. Real, blind panic blasted into her and she smashed the button again, and again.

But the door had locked behind her.

Fighting for control, Kyra moved forward quickly as she aimed and fired, desperately trying to bring the fourth creature down as it came for her, snapping its jaws and roaring furiously, wheels spinning and spitting sparks behind it as they grinded against the metal flooring. She needed to recreate some of her fallback room, because fighting with your back against the wall was no way to fight, but she suddenly wasn't too confident about her chances of survival now. She flashed back to that room she'd gotten trapped in back in Hell.

She managed to put down the fourth ugly mechanized thing as her shotgun went dead, and she abandoned it as well, drawing her pistol. Had to be fast, had to be accurate. Aiming as best she could, trembling with adrenaline and terror, she emptied the magazine into the head and mouth of the fifth creature. It was definitely getting too close for comfort. Hastily reloading, she pumped more hot lead into the demonic entity, squeezing the trigger as fast as she could, her heart hammering painfully in her chest as it drew closer and closer.

Finally, as she emptied her second magazine, it went down.

As she reloaded, what seemed to be the final creature shoved past its dead brethren and came for her. Kyra screamed as it snapped its jaws at her, now within reaching distance. She backed up, finished reloading a second time, and began emptying rounds into the thing's face. It roared and pressed its attack, coming at her with a mindless, animalistic determination. Two shots went into its mouth. Another glanced off its big, bulky head.

Three shots into its mouth, four, five…

One went wild.

She put the rest of the rounds into its gaping maw, and then the gun clicked empty, her back hit the wall, and the thing was upon her. Pure, mindless reflex: she dropped the pistol and ripped the hatchet from her belt right as the thing clamped down its huge jaws on her armored leg. The pressure and pain hit her like a hammer as at least two of its teeth broke straight through the armor. She screamed again in rage and fury and agony and drove the blade down into its skull as hard as she possibly could. The thing roared and then bit down again as the blade bit deep into its cranium. But it wasn't enough. Knowing she had to do this now, she had to kill it before it killed her, Kyra ripped the ax out and chopped into the thing's head again.

And again. And again.

Blood flew. The beast roared. She screamed like a Valkyrie.

By the time she delivered the killing blow and finally chopped into whatever served it as a brain, her throat was raw and sore from screaming and she was losing blood from her wound. Gritting her teeth, grunting with effort, she freed herself from the dead mecha-pinky or whatever the fuck it was and then sat down in the corner, gasping for breath, shaking badly, gritting her teeth. She kept the ax raised, but she was alone now.

She stayed like that for she wasn't sure how long, huddled in the corner, eyes wide and staring, ax raised and dripping demon blood. It was the pain that finally pulled her out of her near trance-like state. A comforting blanket of what might have been shock settled over her, and her terror and anger drained away and she got to work. It took several minutes, but the work was calming. She removed the section of armor over her lower right leg, where it had gotten her, and cracked open the Medikit. Working slowly and methodically, she cleaned the wound, grimacing as the pain spiked from the antiseptics. Then she sealed up the wounds, gave herself the strongest antiviral injection she could find, and replaced the armor.

From there, she applied some suit repair kits, closed the Medikit back up, and got slowly to her feet. Replacing the kit in her pack, she recovered her ax and her pistol. She reloaded it and checked her ammo supply. It was very low. All she had left to her name were a pair of magazines for her sidearm. Sighing, she recovered the rifle and the shotgun, then she gripped the pistol and then set off. If she ran into anymore of those bastards, she'd probably be in a lot of trouble, but she had to complete a search of the area for more ammo and finish the job she'd come here to do.

Coming back into the main hallway, she heard some of the machines still running, and abruptly remembered that there had been zombies running this place. Shit. Why hadn't they joined the fray? More alert and cautious now, she moved closer to one of the openings and peered in. A few of the zombies were still manning the machines, but most of them were just wandering around. None of them seemed to be armed. Good and bad. Good, because she could likely afford to save on ammunition. Bad for the obvious lack of ammunition.

She holstered her pistol, loosed her hatchet, and set to work.

It was bloody, but easy, work. In the end, Kyra killed close to thirty of the zombie techs, and almost none of them fought back. She had no idea why. Maybe there was only enough room in their dead heads for one set of commands. So some were commanded to kill. Some were commanded to work machinery. Although the notion that they were still smart enough to work complex machinery was pretty fucking terrifying, so she killed them gladly. She did manage to find a few more magazines for her pistol, and was very grateful that her next stop was the Military HQ. There should, hopefully, be some stockpile leftover there.

Emphasis on hopefully.

She shot the heart and waited for the worst, but it seemed that the worst had already come to pass. At least in this instance. With that gruesome task out of the way, she left the Machine Shops and began making her way to the Military HQ.

Two down, one to go.