"So he's in there there?" Kyra asked uncertainly, staring at the door that led to the Specimen Storage.
That name did not inspire confidence.
"According to the sensors, yes. He's in there. In a room at the very far end of the area," Powell replied unhappily. "And as far as I can tell, it's legit. He should be there. Alive and kicking. My guess is he somehow got himself into a jam and had to lock himself up."
"God knows what's between him and us," Collins muttered.
"Everyone get ready, sooner we do this, the better, we don't know if he might be in danger or not, what kind of a burning fuse he might be facing," Kyra said as she pulled out her plasma rifle. This time, she was going to be blasting demons hard to the core.
She was fucking done with this place.
Everyone prepared themselves, and Powell got up next to the control panel beside the door. Which, suspiciously, wasn't locked. Just shut. His hand hovered over the button, waiting on Kyra's command. She gave it and he hit the button, then moved to rejoin them. The five of them stood lined up, guns in hand, fingers on the triggers, just like they had barely half an hour ago. The door slid open, and like before, a chorus of shrieking and roaring and growling met their ears. Kyra prepared to unleash a blue-white fury of plasma onto the shambling hordes, but stayed her hand as she realized the truth of the situation.
There was no horde to fight.
Instead, there was a horde on display.
The Specimen Storage bay was a massive, warehouse-sized room, long, high, and rectangular. It was about a football field's length and maybe a third that across, with a ceiling three stories overhead. Stacked in a grid of titanium and glass to either side of them, stretching down the entire length of the room, were cages. Hundreds upon hundreds of cages. Kyra saw that about half of them were broken or otherwise empty, but half of them weren't.
Slowly, they walked into the room, breaking the threshold and stopping a few feet in.
Kyra saw damn near everything in those cages.
Zombies, fiends, fly skulls, pumpkins, maggots, pinkies, and skull spiders. No skeletons, thankfully. Or chaingunners. Maybe they were unique to Earth, and they hadn't had a chance to make any down here since the invasion began. She estimated that, altogether, there were probably between a hundred and a hundred and fifty of the things, all locked up.
"I don't suppose you have any idea if there exists a master control switch?" she made herself ask after several moments.
"Knowing the UAC, of course there does and it's in Command Control," Falcheck growled.
"We're really doing this, aren't we?" Weldon muttered.
"We're really doing this," Kyra confirmed. She roused herself. "Stay sharp. Keep ready. We might luck out. We're making a beeline for Carpenter. Powell, get ready to get that door open as fast as you can. Everyone else, be ready to fight like hell."
They all gave tired but sharp replies.
And then they set off.
The main floor of the lab was a huge, empty, open space, broken only by corpses, bloodslicks, and rolling gurneys with broken restrains on most of them. Some still held corpses, or even living things, in place. Several held zombies, a few held fiends. Some of the fiends were still alive and thrashing madly against the restraining straps.
Kyra shot each of them in the head in passing. The fewer enemies, the better.
As they passed the twenty meter mark of the room, making steady progress to the great slab of a door at the far end, she realized there were other rooms off the sides of the primary area. They were placed roughly every twenty meters, opposite each other to the left and right, doors set into the walls among open spaces in the cages. The first one she saw that was actually open gave her an idea of precisely what they were getting up to down here: it led into a bloodstained, stainless steel surgical bay. Precision cutting tools and implements lay scattered across the no-slip tiled floor in great pools of blood, mixed in with body parts.
What a wonderful place they'd come to.
They made it almost exactly halfway down the room, listening to the cacophony of sounds as the demons raged inside their cages, before, abruptly, a still silence fell across the room. It was so sudden that everyone immediately froze as still as statues, looking around, weapons raised. Kyra's heart hammered in her chest and she could feel sweat pouring down her body inside the suit, climate control or no.
The zombies, the fiends, all the demons were staring at them now with malicious glee.
And that was when all the cages opened at the same time.
The universe seemed to hold its breath for precisely two seconds as the full weight of how fantastically fucked they were fell onto the group of battered, hell-stricken survivors. And then, with a thunderous wave of sound, the demonic horde fled their cages and made a slavering, screaming, psychotic beeline straight for the group.
Kyra heard herself screaming something as she took aim at one particular patch of monsters, thick with fiends and pinkies, and then the plasma leaped from the long, boxy barrel of the strange rifle. Blue-white balls of energy sailed out and began smacking into the monstrous legion, blackening and crisping flesh on contact, and sending a dozen of them first stumbling, then crashing to the bloody floor as the life was burned out of them. She managed to drop fifteen of the bastards before forcing herself to stop using the plasma rifle.
Much as she desperately wanted to just fry the lot of them, she knew there were almost certainly worse things waiting for her deeper in the facility.
She had to save it.
Switching to her SMG, she opened fire. The bullets exploded out of the muzzle and shrieked across the distance in no time flat, stitching a line of blood eruptions up the leathery, ivory-spike-laden chest of a shrieking fiend gearing up to toss a fireball her way. The line of perforations continued up until they hit its neck and then its slightly bulbous head, splitting its skull in half and pulping its brains in an instant. Demonic gray matter sprayed the others around it, sending them into an even worse state of frenzied fury.
She twitched the gun to the right and sent a slew of bullets into the open mouth of a bellowing zombie, what had once been a security guard for the UAC, and burst the back of his cranium out in a gush of shredded gore. Another twitch, another fiend took a barrage of hot lead to its face, one of its eyes morphing into a volcano of deep ruby viscera. She emptied the SMG putting down another zombie, then shifted through a reload as fast as her reflexes would allow. As soon as that fresh magazine was slapped in, she resumed fire.
Kyra's mind submerged, slapping the autopilot and allowing her body and combat instincts to take over. If anything was going to get her out of this particular nightmare scenario, it was going to be the act of automatic reaction, not thinking. Behind and around her, she could hear the others firing away with a cold desperation, and trusted them to cover her ass. She had to focus on doing the same for them. There were so many of them incoming, she briefly faltered, wondering if she was going to be able to actually get through this.
Either I can or I can't, doesn't change what I need to do, she thought grimly.
The SMG rattled empty again and as she went for another reload, a pistol bullet pinged off her chestplate at the same time a fireball smacked into her shoulder. The magazine dropped from her grasp and she made a quarter-second calculation, knowing she didn't have enough time to grab another and successfully reload. Instead, she dropped the SMG and pulled out her shotgun. Bringing the barrel up, she fired off a shot and pumped it, absolutely demolishing a fiend's head. A bucket of blood exploded back and away from its stumbling, decapitated corpse. She repeated the action three more times, dropping another pair of fiends and a zombie.
Then a pinky was stomping up to her and reaching for her with those shaved-gorilla arms, preparing to grip her and bite her head off, or maybe pull an arm off and snack on it like some human jerky. She began pounding shells into its vast open maw. It staggered, roared, took a step back as another shell took it in the gullet, and then it finally died as a tremendous spray of blood burst from its mouth. It collapsed into a heap, tripping up another two behind it. Fuck! She smashed a fiend's face in with the shotgun as it got too close, turned and swung the butt of the weapon into the skull of a zombie and heard something crack.
It dropped and she fed six more shells into the shotgun. Working it fast, she alternated fire between the two encroaching burned-pink-skinned fuckheads, ignoring the incoming fire as best she could as it smacked painfully into her armor, which was already sending more warning signs flaring across her HUD. It worked, but at a cost: a part of her armor blew off from incoming fire. As her shotgun ran dry, both pinkies dropped in a growing pool of blood, and a zombie grabbed her and began to grapple with her. She grunted, pulling back, trying to break free of the thing's pallid grip, but it was stronger than she'd anticipated. It had a hand on her wrist, another on her shotgun.
She let the shotgun go, momentarily sending it stumbling back, and with her free hand pulled out the pistol, stuck the business end in the thing's gore-smeared mouth, and pulled the trigger twice. It went down in a spray of blood, brains, and bone fragments, and nearly took her with it. Pure luck it jerked her down so that she just barely avoided a fiend's fireball as it instead sailed just barely over her head. Ripping her hand free, she raised the pistol and started firing as the horde of fiends and zombies crowded in.
The next three seconds were spent emptying the magazine, doling out a round of headshots for anyone who cared for one. The zombies went down from a single shot apiece, five in all, but the fiends had thicker skulls. Only a pair dropped, the others just suffered head wounds, and then she was out of ammo for the pistol. She could hear the others shouting and cursing and firing frantically. No one was coming to help her.
Kyra smashed a fiend's shrieking face in with the pistol, whipping it three times in rapid succession and breaking something with her armor-boosted strength. It went stumbling into the others, and then she did the same with a zombie that was getting too close, beating it so hard that the pistol broke in her grasp as its skull caved in. Cursing, she ripped her combat knife out and drove it into the skull of another fiend trying to give her the kiss of the death. It died screaming, spraying her visor with demon blood, and she tore the knife from its brain. Stabbed another one in the throat and kicked it in the chest, throwing it onto its back.
She successfully stabbed another two of the bastards in the skull and killed them before she repeated it a third time, killed the fiend before it could get its claws on her, but then it was down and the knife stuck in its thick cranium. The blade was torn from her grasp and suddenly she had nothing left but armored fists.
Kyra put them to use. She'd killed at least fourth fifths of the monsters in her own little corner of hell, but that left a half dozen more and God knew how many elsewhere in the room. Her body was shaking from the raw adrenaline and rage, but she could feel exhaustion coming on. How much longer could she keep this up for?
Didn't matter, either she fought or she died.
Simple enough.
Kyra made a fist and drove it as hard as she could into a fiend's face, breaking several bones. It screamed and came back for more, but she punched it again and this time something important cracked open and it dropped. It was still alive, shrieking weakly, but it was out of the game for now. Something grabbed her left arm and she turned, saw another fiend, and drove two fingers into its eyes. The metal gauntlet she wore made it no contest. Her fingers sunk into its eyes, turning them to jelly and destroying them, and it let go of her in an instant. Horrid yellow-red goo oozed from its ruined eye sockets as it roared madly.
She shoved it away, ducked a swipe from another fiend, sidestepped a grab by a zombie, grabbed the zombie's arm and brought her elbow down on it hard. There was an awful crack and she drove the exposed bone up into its head as hard as she could, piercing its brain and killing it in a split second. She grabbed the corpse before it could fall, swung it around, and hurled it into the fiend that was trying to murder her. Something pawed her ankle and she looked down. One of the injured fiends was reaching for her, trying to finish the job.
Kyra raised her boot and brought it down swiftly on the thing's head, cracking its skull open and spraying its brains outwards for a three foot radius.
It stopped trying to grab her.
Taking the opportunity, she knelt, grabbed her shotgun, and stood. As she prepared to reload it, she saw a bright glow coming her way from the high left. Reacting reflexively, she tossed the shotgun into the air, caught it by the barrel, then swung it like a baseball bat into the flying skull as it came within arm's length of her. It let out a howl as brisk contact was made and the thing burst into a cloud of bleached bone. She turned the gun back around, hastily reloaded it, and rapidly finished off any survivors that were over on her side.
As she fed more shells into the shotgun, she turned around, ready to offer assistance and assess the casualty situation. But to her utter delighted surprise, she saw that everyone was still standing tall, blasting demons with a brutal efficiency. They were covered in blood and ash and shredded bits of flesh, their armor obviously having taken damage, but everyone was still in the game. She fired off a few shotgun shells and helped them clean up the stragglers, and as the final demon (a skull spider) was put down, the only sound that remained was the metallic rattling and clacking of several different weapons being reloaded.
For several seconds after, only silence followed.
Somewhere, a fire crackled.
Somewhere else, blood dripped steadily.
Something shot sparks periodically.
And beyond that, nothing. No groans or howls or shrieks or roars. Nothing stumbled or shambled or dragged itself towards them.
They had killed the demons.
"Linaweaver, Collins, Falcheck, grab ammo. Weldon, stand guard, watch our backs. Powell, with me," Kyra said, glad that her voice sounded only a little tired, and not shaky at all. She led Powell across the blood-slicked plating of the Specimen Storage floor, their footsteps echoing as they crossed the last half of the distance. She kept expecting something to leap out at her, to descend on her from above or grab her somehow through the floor, keyed-up and jumpy from the insane battle she had just been through, but they reached the far door without incident. Kyra considered the situation as she looked at the huge slab of a door.
She walked over to the control panel and found an intercom that linked with the interior. Keying it, she spoke up. "This is Staff Sergeant Morgan with the United Nations Marine Corps, you in there Carpenter?"
There was a pause, though not as long as she thought there might be. "Yes. Riddle me this, Staff Sergeant: Why should I believe you?" came a weathered, tired yet resolute voice.
Kyra considered this for a few seconds. Finally, she said, "Taggart sent me."
"...ah hell."
The door began to open.
"Be ready, we don't know if he also might be in league with them," she muttered. But then, technically speaking, she didn't know if she could trust Falcheck or Powell, either. She doubted all of them were in league with the demons, but it was technically possible one more of them could be. It all depended on how subtle a form that manipulation could take. She'd suspected something was off about Blair from the beginning, but she imagined people had been suspicious of Blair for the past several decades, because that's just how the guy was.
The door opened, and she got her first real look at Carpenter. He had a crown of wispy gray hair and a gray mustache. His face was pale, long, and grim. He was tall and pretty built for an old guy, but then again he'd been in the Marines for some long length of time. He was wearing a white and gray camo cold weather uniform beneath pieces of green armor that looked salvaged. He was holding an assault rifle, a shotgun slung across his back, a pistol on his hip. Steel gray eyes regarded them with a stern calm.
"Taggart sent you, huh?"
"Yeah. He said you got ahold of some crucial, war-winning intelligence. That true?"
"I believe so," Carpenter replied. "If it isn't war-winning intelligence, it's at least crucial."
"What is it, exactly?"
"Just before everything went to hell, we managed to determine the location of what we believe to be the one in charge of this whole thing."
"Well shit," Kyra muttered.
"Hey, asshole, I want to know something," Powell said, stepping closer to Carpenter. He didn't actually point his weapon at Powell, but he did tense.
"What's that?" Carpenter replied.
"What the fuck is going on and how much did you know? Because obviously this is bigger than just what's going on here," he said, glancing at Kyra, who suddenly felt guilty. Obviously he'd pieced together that she'd left the whole apocalypse thing out of the equation.
Carpenter sighed. "A lot, although I suspect I don't know everything. I wonder if anyone in this miserable company does." He glanced behind them into the room beyond. "I suppose you should bring your friends in here if I'm going to tell you this. Then we really need to get to Command Control, if you are legitimate."
"We are," Kyra said. "You can get us into Command Control?"
"Should be able to," he replied.
"Care to tell us how?" Powell asked.
"No, I'd rather not. Don't know who's listening."
"Fair enough."
They waited until the others had finished scraping together whatever ammo they could, then called them over, into the room at the end of the area. Carpenter seemed to have locked himself up in a large office of some type.
She wondered if it was Blair's.
He seemed like the kind of guy who would want to walk through the entire length of this wretched place just to get to his lab, where he lorded over this section of the facility.
Carpenter continued as the others came in and closed the door behind them. "Here's what I know: the UAC has known about the other dimension for at least a year now. Took them awhile to learn that it was inhabited. Once they learned about that, they started doing research on the creatures. Any they could capture, dead or alive. Obviously the priority eventually became on capturing them alive, as they possess some rather...unique abilities. The notion that something like this may occur someday was not lost on them, so they began running a number of experiments to try and come up with technology and weapons to counteract the demons and their dimension. A lot of it never made it to fruition and a lot of it just led nowhere, but one of the things they did manage to piece together was tracking some manner of energy the demons emit, that was what got them all hot about them in the first place. They thought they could be used as sources of power."
"Wow...demon batteries, of course," Powell muttered.
"Exactly," Carpenter said. "Now can we go to Command Control? Whatever we do, we need to shut down the gateway and stop Blair."
"Let's go," Kyra replied.