"Harper, you remember that woman I showed up with, Taylor?" Jack asked. They'd backtracked and doubled around the courtyard. It was, as Jack had suspected, not part of the original architecture, and he didn't like how it was already becoming a little more difficult to navigate Haydenfield. How long before he had to piss away an hour trying to find an alternate route or some way through a new hellscape region?
"Yeah," Harper replied. The kid had been quiet so far. He seemed shaken but ultimately still all there, not dazed out like some guys after they ran into their first real combat. He didn't think it was his first battle, but fighting demons might as well be.
"You seen her? Heard from her since we dropped into Haydenfield?"
"No...sorry," he replied. "Are you, uh, with her?"
"Yeah," Jack muttered. That was still bugging him but there was nothing he could do about it right now, and he still had to focus on his job. Now that he had Harper, he wanted to get this fucking booster turned on. Then maybe he could contact Jennifer. But there was something else that was bugging him that he could deal with.
They were moving through a derelict power distribution room, the walls full of dials and monitors and other tech equipment that Jack couldn't readily identify. It was empty, looking relatively untouched by the horror that had swept Haydenfield, and as they approached the door that would take them to the next area where they could access the node from, Jack stopped.
"What is it?" Harper replied immediately, looking around.
"We need to talk," Jack said.
"Uh...what about?" Harper replied, staring at him anxiously.
He frowned, considering how to approach this without coming off like a total asshole or arrogant prick. Finally, he just decided to approach it like how he approached everything in his life: full frontal assault and bluntly.
"I'm getting the impression that you think I'm fucking amazing at killing demons, would you say that's right?" he asked.
"I mean, yeah, obviously," Harper replied uncertainly, like he thought he was being quizzed with a trick question. "...why?"
"I don't want you to rely on me. What I mean by that is, obviously I'm going to watch your back. Right now, it's my job, but I'm not omnipotent. We've started coming across demons hiding in wall panels that just pop up out of nowhere, and it always surprises me, even though I try to be ready for it. My point is this: don't let your guard down by relying too much on me." He paused. "I'm not trying to be a dick or anything, I'm just trying to head off any problems I see. I'm good, probably great, don't get me wrong, but I wasn't good enough to keep Bidwell alive."
"Oh God, Bidwell's dead?"
"Yes. That's why I had to come get you. Bidwell turned on the booster, and then a wall panel opened up behind him, one of those big bulldog things stepped out and bit his head off. There was nothing I could do. So...you know, keep alert," Jack said.
"I, uh, yeah...okay, yeah," he replied, looking around nervously.
Jack suppressed the urge to sigh. That was probably about as much as he could do. He turned back to the doorway. "You ready?"
"Yeah, I'm ready," Harper replied, and Jack was glad to hear some more steel in his voice. He was a Marine, after all.
They approached the door. Jack waited, listened, but heard nothing. He hit the button. The door slid up, revealing...an empty octagonal room. Slowly, they walked inside. Overhead, a square had been cut out of the ceiling, letting the red light of the Firewall leak into the room. There were silver metal walls and an oddly blue carpeting and nothing else in the room.
"So...now what?" Harper whispered.
Jack sighed heavily as he saw that one of the doors had not just a blue trim, but a blue-red trim. Something occurred to him. "Maybe I can cut down on our workload," he replied, pulling out the blue keycard from the last area.
He tried it. The door buzzed angrily.
"Fuck you," he muttered, throwing the keycard against the door in frustration. He glanced at Harper. "You know an easy way through one of these locks?"
"No," he replied. "They make them pretty tough."
"Great. Okay, now what happens is we search the area for keycards." He looked around. They had six other doors to choose from. This was set up a little like the Node, though it clearly wasn't one. Maybe they just liked octagons in Haydenfield. Jack spent a moment checking what the rooms around them should be. There were a few storage bays, a corridor that led off to another section, a maintenance room, and a room that wasn't clearly labeled. "Well, let's search the storage bays first. Someone might've crawled back there to die."
"What a pleasant thought," Harper murmured.
"Yep." Jack walked over to the first door and opened it up. "Watch the door," he said as nothing immediately leaped out at him with bloody claws and a scream. Harper took up watch while Jack moved into the storage bay beyond. It was a simple rectangular room and it didn't look like anything special. Just a bunch of silver crates. At least they didn't have the fucking UAC logo. He'd had enough of that logo to last him an entire lifetime. He pissed away five minutes hunting through all the little nooks and crannies and finding exactly nothing. No ammo, no keycard, no spare guns. Nothing. With a sigh, he moved back.
"Come on, next room," he said.
He and Harper shifted to the next storage bay door. He opened it up and froze, feeling that distinct gut-punch of fear he always felt now whenever he opened a door and saw something demonic. No actual demons this time around, just clear evidence that they had twisted and warped this particular little slice of his reality.
The walls were made of water-stained, heavily chipped material that vaguely resembled large, heavy bricks of sandstone. The floor was made of similar material, though the bricks were much smaller, closer to normal size. The only thing in the room, which was a big rectangle with an unusually high ceiling and ended some ten or fifteen meters away, were two pillars that were covered in some sort of rotating motif that Jack already didn't feel comfortable looking at. The only other thing of note in the room were square holes cut into the walls to the left and right. Each of them glowed with a hellish red light and made him deeply uncomfortable.
"Okay, something's wrong here," he muttered. He squinted and stared, then sighed. "Goddamnit, I see the red keycard there, between the pillars. Fuck."
"Is this a trap?" Harper asked uncertainly.
"Gotta be, but we need that card. Just be ready. Stay here, watch your back and mine," Jack replied as he studied the room.
"Uh...yeah, okay," Harper replied.
Jack took a deep breath, let it out, then began making his way into the room.
He made it probably five feet before the trap was sprung. A great hissing sound went up. It seemed to be coming from all around them. Simultaneously, from all of the square holes, Cacodemons began to float out.
"Fuck!" Jack screamed as he took aim. With a sweep of his gaze, he counted ten of them. The big red beach balls with the huge grinning mouths and giant cyclops eyes all began to come for them both, grinning madly and belching blue-yellow fireballs. "Fall back!" he snapped as he pumped out a shell. Glancing back over his shoulder, he fully expected to see the door having slammed shut behind them, but it was still open.
"Go!" he screamed, turning and running before it changed its mind.
Harper followed and they ended up back in the octagonal room. Jack felt a thrill of adrenaline as he turned back to face the oncoming Cacodemons again. This time, he had a bottleneck. The only problem was not having a fucking Chaingun. But his shotgun would do. He shouldered it and went to work. The shotgun boomed while Harper's assault rifle chattered out three-round bursts. The two men sidestepped several times to avoid incoming fireballs. He emptied his shotgun blowing holes in Cacodemon faces, (they were all face), spurting geysers of blood through the air, popping eyeballs, and blasting away at the flying fuckers.
He reloaded and kept it up as they came forward, growling and roaring under the hail of fire, returning their own volley of actual fire. One of the Cacodemons popped, splattering the area with its guts. A few seconds later, two more popped almost at the same time.
"Keep going!" Jack screamed over the gunfire as he hastily shoved more shells into his shotgun. He was running out of them fast, but at this rate they should kill off the Cacodemons. Seconds blasted by as he strafed, fired, pumped the shotgun, fired again, tried not to get in Harper's way. The demonic pumpkins encroached on them further, one making it through the door before getting blown away. Finally, nearly two minutes after stepping into the room, the last Cacodemon exploded in a gory spray of pulped meat, and all fell silent.
The last fireball crashed into the door behind Jack, leaving a smoldering, ashy mark, and then he heard nothing.
"Holy...man, that was a lot," Harper said, panting. He looked at Jack. "Is that normal? That's like the third time that's happened so far."
"Get used to it, that's the new normal," Jack replied as he fed a few shells into his shotgun. He was down to less than a full load. After that he was back to his pistol. Damn did he need a new gun. Slowly, he approached the door again, wary of some other attack. He reached the threshold and waited, standing in a puddle of Cacodemon guts.
Finally, he growled irritably. "Stay here," he said, and set off once more into the room.
This time he managed to make it deeper in without anything happening. Besides the two very strange things in the room, it looked surprisingly uninteresting. Although clearly this was not part of the original design, with the sandstone brickwork, he would've thought the hellish architecture would be more outlandish. Although he had to admit, the two abnormalities made up for that. The first, the fiery square holes in the walls, were definitely odd-looking. But the two pillars at the far end, between which the red keycard lay, was something else entirely.
They ran from floor to ceiling, square pillars maybe two feet thick. Their surfaces were constantly rotating, like one of those holographic ads malls loved to use so much that constantly rotated with new slogans and logos, an eternal circle of bleak capitalism. Only the surface of this particular item was advertising nightmares. The surface being rotated had the vaguely burned-pink look of scarred flesh, in varying shades, and its surface was plastered with what looked like bones, ribs, and elongated, screaming faces.
It was beyond horrifying and it churned his guts just looking at it.
Jack carefully moved along the side of one, keeping as far from the pillar and the wall behind him as he could, as he trusted neither. Fuck, he didn't trust the floor at this point but it wasn't like he had a lot of options there. He peeked behind the pillars, but there was nothing there, just three feet or so of empty space.
He needed that keycard.
Returning to the front of the pillars, he glanced back briefly at Harper, who was no doubt watching him with concern.
"Just keep watch for hostiles," he said.
"Will do," Harper replied.
Jack sighed and returned his attention to the keycard. All he had to do was snag the thing and book it back to Harper, and then they were halfway (ideally) to getting this damned thing turned on. Finally, he took a few deep breaths, let them out slowly, and made his way up to the pillars. They rotated in perfect silence. He would've been more comfortable with a grinding sound or a buzzing or something, it was creepy, the way there was no noise. He took the last few steps, swiped the card, then backed away rapidly
Nothing happened.
Jack hurried back across the area, stomping through Cacodemon pulp, and rejoined Harper. Still nothing happened.
"Damn," he whispered as he pocketed the keycard. "Well, one down, one to go. Come on, let's get this shit done."
After that, they decided to check the maintenance room. Jack prepared himself for another horrifying nightmare, but it was apparently unchanged. There were a few corpses spread across the room, tools scattered across pools of blood and oil, but no monsters and no keycard. It was largely the same story in the third and final storage bay they checked. This one was mostly cleared out, just some silver crates and a few shelves with random crap scattered across it. Jack decided to tackle the weirder of the two left: a corridor that, upon closer inspection of the map, seemed to lead to nowhere. He opened up the door and found himself staring down a length of passageway.
The walls and ceiling were rough beige rock of some kind, and the floor was made of slate-gray stonework, bricks fit together in a bizarre pattern. The corridor extended about fifteen meters and dead-ended abruptly.
There was nothing in the corridor, except for something at the very end, up against the wall.
"What is that?" Harper whispered.
"No way," Jack muttered as he stared at the device. He couldn't be seeing what he was seeing, and yet it was right there.
It was one of those fucking plasma guns, like the one he'd seen back up in space, that the UAC had designed. Could it be the same design? How was it on Earth? In fucking Haydenfield? Well, he suppose it was technically possible that it could've somehow made it here, considering there was a link between the two places: Hell. Technically someone, or a demon, could've snatched some prototypes from Phobos or Deimos, carried it through Hell, brought it here. Or maybe the UAC had sent out a batch to some investors or something.
Or could it be a trap of some kind?
It had to be, it was too tantalizing, but he couldn't just leave it there. Not when all he had to his name was a pistol and a shotgun.
"It's a plasma gun," Jack said finally. "Very powerful. UAC made it. I'm going to go get it, we could really use it. Stay right here, and cover my six. Got it?"
"Uh...yeah," Harper replied. He looked pale. "Are you sure this is a good idea?"
"No, it's a terrible idea, but I'm gambling that I can get out of whatever bullshit trap they can spring on me. Just watch my back."
"Okay."
Jack began making his way down the corridor. His footsteps echoed loud and lonely as he walked down it. He kept his eyes on his surroundings, but kept glancing back at that plasma gun. Already, he could imagine the blue-white pulse, the shrieks of the dying monsters, the blackening of their flesh as it crisped and melted and curled under the furious barrage of the plasma energy. They had sure earned such a treatment.
He managed to get almost all the way there, practically within pissing distance of the damned gun. That was when it happened.
The wall against which the plasma gun rested snapped up. It fell forward, right between the hooves of a motherfucking Baron of Hell.
Jack stared up in trembling horror at the eight foot beast, which sneered down at him. The thing loosed a trumpeting roar as it took a step closer to him and reared back, preparing to take his head clean off with one of its green energy balls. Jack's body snapped into automatic and before he even realized what he was doing, he dove forward. The Baron took a swipe at him but missed, screaming now in rage. Jack narrowly tossed himself between one huge, well-muscled goat-leg and the wall, through a space barely wide enough to accommodate him and his armored bulk. He could even feel and hear his shoulder scrape against the rock.
But there was room, and he got through. He scrambled as he got behind the goat-faced fucker, snatched the plasma gun up, rolled onto his back and took aim.
He squeezed the trigger.
The gun responded. A stream of blue-white pulses, little balls of energy that were shaped almost like the elliptical orbit of planets, poured into the thing's broad back. The immense titan roared, now in enraged fury, as it staggered forward. Jack didn't let up. He held the trigger down, spraying the thing with concentrated plasma fire. Turning around, the beast roared again, then took some plasma directly to the face. It staggered backwards in response, swiping its huge arms, ripping furrows of raw rock out of the walls with its claws.
Finally, it toppled over, its face a burned, ruined mess. Jack laid on the floor for nearly a minute, staring at the corpse, trembling so bad he nearly dropped the gun several times. Harper shouted questions at him, and finally worked up the nerve to come into the corridor.
"Ward, are you okay?!" he demanded as he came closer.
"Okay!" Jack called finally.
"Oh thank fucking God," he muttered, slowing as he reached the dead behemoth. "What the fuck is this thing!?"
"Baron of Hell," Jack replied, and finally managed to get to his feet. That had been close. Way too close. Way, way too fucking close.
"Okay, you know, I mean, I was on the fence about like the Imps or the bulldog things or the freaking zombies, but this!? This looks like a fucking demon! I mean, fuck! It's even got the hooves and the goat face and the horns! It throws green hellfire!"
"I know," Jack said. He kicked the big bastard. "But it can't be a demon."
"Why?" Harper asked, still staring at the behemoth thing.
"Because I just fucking killed it, that's why," Jack replied. "Isn't there some shit in religion like...what was it, Earthly weapons can't harm them or something? Or am I making that up? Shit, even if I am, it's one of two things. One: it's not a demon, it just looks like a demon. Why? Who knows? Two: It is a demon, but so what? We can apparently kick its ass. Not exactly a win-win, but they aren't invincible, right? What if it is an inter-dimensional horror, but somehow they interfered with our dimension thousands of years ago, making us think they're demons? Have you considered that? Fuck, if I went back in time a few thousand years with a shotgun and a chainsaw, I could literally convince a nation that I was a god."
"Shit...that makes sense," Harper muttered.
"They aren't invincible. They aren't all-powerful. They're an enemy, like any other you've faced. We can fight them, we can kill them, we can end them. We just need to get coordinated enough and have enough endurance to get the job done. Now come on," Jack said.
They began heading back to the octagonal room again.