The Hell Keep loomed ahead of them, a black monolithic sentinel that lorded over this region of Hell. The closer they got to it, the worse it looked. Those were definitely bloodfalls and that was definitely a blood moat, although as they drew within a hundred meters of the place, he saw that there was at least a natural land bridge across it. Although he wasn't happy to see the bulbous, floating shapes of some Cacodemons hovering lazily across the landscape of a courtyard in front of the Keep. And there were several Imps standing guard as well.

What were they guarding?

As they covered the final stretch of distance, feeling horribly exposed, he found himself wondering what they were supposed to be doing. What was their goal? The monsters he'd come across all seemed so...disorganized. It was too easy to get them to fight each other, and they never seemed to be doing anything beyond killing and torturing people. Most of them seemed more like animals than creatures. Well, the Demons at least. The Imps seemed like they could grasp basic combat tactics, and there was a cruel, if simple, kind of intelligence in their gaze. The Cacodemons and Lost Souls? Who could say? The zombies were, well…

Zombies.

Except for the Barons of Hell, they all seemed like, at best, grunts. Where was the General? Where was the monster behind the invasion? Provided there even was one. But Jack was reluctant to dismiss this as a random occurrence. It was there, hidden in the horror, somewhere. But now wasn't the time to think about that, because they were coming up on the land bridge. Unfortunately, there was nowhere to hide, so they just straight up crossed the bridge, walking into the maw of bloody violence. Jack had his pistol out.

It was time to rock and roll.

Jack got things started off with a good, clean shot that punched right through the left eye of one of the nearest Imps, turning it into a bloody crater and dropping the thing in a second. The others all let out shrieks of rage and fury and began to thrown fireballs at them. The Cacodemons joined in, raining down death from above.

"Spread out!" Green called.

Jack strafed away, to the right, making sure he didn't get in anyone's line of fire. He aimed and squeezed the trigger three times in rapid succession, missing twice but putting a bullet straight into the mouth of another Imp and blowing out the back of its head like a ripe melon. He hissed in pain as a fireball seared past him, far too close for comfort, burning his cheek. No armor here. Had to be careful. The combat armor had made him careless. Jack turned, aimed, and fired, popping another head and dropping another Imp.

Suddenly, the Imp he was aiming at stumbled forward and he held fire, realizing what had happened: a Cacodemon had accidentally shot the Imp. The reaction was great. The spiny red thing spun around, hissed and threw a fireball at the Cacodemon, which promptly returned fire. "Hold fire!" Jack screamed as other Imps joined in the sudden new battle, and the other two Cacodemons joined their brother.

The others stopped firing, as the creatures had become entirely engrossed in their new battle. They fell back and watched the whole display continue until, in the end, there was exactly one Cacodemon left, and it wasn't in good condition. Three barrages of bullets converged on it and popped the bleeding thing, and then all fell silent.

"Damn," Green said. "Always weird to see that."

"But very pleasant," Stratton said.

"Yep. Let's get inside," Jack replied, jogging across the courtyard towards the structure itself. The 'courtyard' that sat in front of the immense stone and metal structure was mostly barren, though Jack spied a collection of what seemed to be low stone buildings off to the right. Might be a good idea to check those, and it became even more prudent when they reached the front door and found it locked down tight.

"What the hell?" Jennifer muttered, staring at the door.

It was metal, stamped with the UAC logo, trimmed in a strange red design. "This is so weird," Jack said. "It looks so...out of place."

"And it's locked," Green said. She sighed. "Well, let's hope there's a red keycard somewhere around here. Let's search those structures."

They moved across the desolate courtyard, stepping over corpses and through pools of blood and gore, and came to the three low structures. They reminded Jack of storage sheds, and when he stepped in through one of the open-faced doors, he saw that apparently, they'd reminded the UAC of them as well. Or at least that's what they were using them for. They searched each of the small structures, finding little more than bland silver crates that were mostly packed with spare parts for all kinds of scientific equipment.

In the third one, they found a severed hand clutching...something red.

"Is that...what is that?" Jack asked, crouching. He peeled the pale, stiff fingers one by one, revealing what appeared to be a red keycard done up in the style of a skull. "Did we make this? Or was this already here?"

"No idea," Green replied. "Doesn't really matter."

"I guess not," Jack murmured, passing her the card.

They returned to the door and she slotted the card. There was a sharp buzz and then the door slid open, disappearing into its niche. Jack slowly moved into the large room beyond, covering a portion of it with his pistol, sweeping left and right.

"Whoa," he whispered.

The place looked like a slaughterhouse, but not just humans this time. There were a good two dozen Imps, Demons, and zombies butchered.

"Think they tore each other up?" Stratton asked.

Green shook her head. "No, look, too many headshots. This was one of ours."

"God, I hope whoever they are, they're still alive," Jack said. "We could sure as hell use the backup."

"Yep," Green said. She looked around the room. It was home to, besides the bodies, a few workstations that had been shredded by gunfire and fireballs. "Okay, this is how we're going to do this. Sweep and clear through the whole facility. It looks like it's three levels. Keep an eye out for armor, weapons, radios, anything useful. Once you clear your section of the first floor, we meet back here. Questions?"

There were none.

She nodded sharply. "Then let's get to it."

She and Stratton broke left, he and Jennifer took the right. They moved through another doorway, coming to a broad but low corridor. They were quiet at first, checking out the side rooms one by one. They were mostly empty, mainly bunk rooms. There were several corpses that had been mutilated beyond the point of use, either for zombification or anything else that demons did with dead bodies. Jack didn't want to think about it.

"God, can you imagine sleeping here?" Jennifer muttered.

Jack shook his head. "Honestly not, and I've slept in some pretty shitty places."

They swept the bunk rooms, finding nothing of use. The place had been picked over thoroughly. Beyond the corridor lay another room constructed, apparently at random, of metal and stone plates. There were more bodies, and lying among the corpses and blood was something absolutely beautiful. "That's mine," Jennifer said, moving past him.

He sighed, but before he could even respond, she grabbed the shotgun and turned to look at him. "You got it last time," she said.

"Fine, fair enough. But that means you get point," he replied.

"Fair enough," she agreed.

There were three ways out of the room. Two were dead ends, home to just a few zombies milling around that went down easily enough. Jack managed to snag another magazine for his pistol, to replace the one he'd spent outside, taking down the Imps and Cacodemons. One room was a makeshift galley and another was a storage room. They would have looked generic, except for the fact that some of the walls were covered in that awful creeping ivy and, in the galley, there were several torsos hanging from chains, still dripping blood, ragged shreds of flesh hanging with ropy lengths of intestines. They left the galley quickly.

The only way left to go led to an uncomfortably narrow corridor that had several other alcoves leading off of it.

"Great," Jennifer muttered. "This'll be fun."

True to her word, she took point, shotgun at ready. She only had eight shells. He hoped it was going to be enough. As they began making their way through the tight and narrow maze, Jack realized that whoever had been living here hadn't liked it either: there was basically nothing in here. He wondered if this had been punishment duty: piss off the CO, go patrol the maze. It would be good incentive to not act up.

Progress was slow and painful, like a migraine.

Every time Jack turned a corner, he expected something to be waiting for him, some new horror, or even an old one. But the minutes bled by and there was nothing. Just blank wall after blank wall, dead end corridors, low ceilings. And then, suddenly, they reached a dead end. And there was nothing for them to see.

Just a blank wall.

"What...why is this even here?!" Jennifer growled.

"No idea, but at least we cleared it out," Jack replied. He turned around and as he began walking back the way they'd come, at least decently sure that he could remember the way back, he heard a sound: a door opening. From somewhere up ahead. On the heels of that noise was another, more ominous one: the meaty tread of a Demon, marching towards them.

"Oh shit," he whispered.

"Down! Now!" Jennifer snapped, and he got down just as a big, pink monstrosity walked around the corner. It issued a roar and began stomping towards them, and Jennifer responded in kind, putting a shotgun shell right into its big, gaping mouth. Blood and gore sprayed the area and the thing dropped with a heavy thud.

"You've gotta be shitting me," Jack groaned.

"Get behind me, let's get the hell outta here," Jennifer replied.

He got behind her, suddenly terrified. They had no armor, no way to call for backup, and pistols were worth about jack spit against these awful things. The two of them kept going, and they heard another door open up, and then another, and more. Followed by roars and the steady thumping of Demons coming for them.

God...fuck, this was a bad situation!

Jennifer disappeared around the corner and he heard a shotgun blast, saw the muzzle flare on the strange, gritty metal walls, heard her fire again, and again, and again. He glanced behind them, well, at least there were no doors opening up back there. For now. Jack moved around the corner and joined her, finding her a few feet deeper down the low passageway. He was counting off the shells as she fired them.

She didn't have many left.

And there were more Demons, stomping over their dead brethren, heedless of them. Then, suddenly, she was out of ammo, the shotgun spent.

Jack raised his pistol. He saw two more. "Duck!" he screamed.

Jennifer dropped smoothly into a crouch, abandoning the shotgun and pulling the pistol from its holster in one tight motion, and then they were both firing. The sound was awful in the close quarters, but no time to worry about that. He squeezed the trigger, his body as stock still as he could manage, his aim dead on, given that it was hard to miss these assholes. He popped off the rounds as quickly and accurately as he could, aiming for the big mouth, since it was the easiest target. Seven rounds from him and six from Jennifer put down the first Demon. He began to get desperate as the other waded through the corpses, coming straight at them.

As both of them exhausted their current magazines, it finally dropped dead, barely three feet in front of Jennifer.

"Shit," she whispered, breathing heavily. "Let's get the fuck out of here."

"Seconded," Jack replied, shaking so badly he nearly dropped his magazine as he ejected the spent one and slapped a fresh one in.

They hurried over the bodies and, thankfully, ran into no other enemies. In just a few minutes, they'd made it back to the start point. Distantly, they could hear gunfire, though it didn't sound desperate, it sounded measured and controlled. He hoped that Green and Stratton were handling themselves and resisted the urge to run off after them. Green had been clear: stay there once they got back to the lobby.

"That was too close," Jennifer said, and he saw her looking down at the gore stains on her uniform. He knew how she felt.

"Yeah...but hey, we made it," he replied, trying for a light tone and failing spectacularly.

"I didn't expect that at all. I mean...at all. Everything has been pretty straightforward so far, but those assholes were hiding from us, or were hidden. This is getting worse. I'm...worried," she said, looking at him.

"I've been worried since my boots touched dirt on Mars," Jack replied.

She shook her head. "No, I mean, really worried. How long can we keep going like this? This situation just keeps getting more and more dangerous, and-"

"Jennifer," he said, cutting her off. Her gaze had begun to drift, but now she snapped it back to him. He looked her in the eyes. "Keep it simple," he said. "We sweep and clear wherever we go, we find more ammo, bigger guns, kick ass, and keep pushing."

"And that's it? It's that easy?" she asked.

He laughed. "That sounds easy?" he replied.

She laughed too, suddenly, loudly, the tension broken. He knew how she felt, and he knew that hopelessness was lurking in all of their brains, and that the strongest power of hopelessness was logic, reason, and fact.

Because there was a very good chance that they were all going to die, and die horribly, in here. The odds against them were astronomical. The deck was stacked so heavily against them that the game was rigged. But…

But that didn't mean they should just lay down and die.

And all it took, sometimes, was for someone to remind you of that. Jack was sure he was going to need reminding pretty soon, because he felt close to a breakdown.

"I guess not, but we'll get it done, won't we?" she asked.

He nodded. "We'll get it done," he agreed.

Green and Stratton came back at that point. They hadn't had much luck on their end, either, but they'd at least killed a bunch of Imps and had found the way up...and had some bad news to deliver. Bad news seemed to be the only thing not in short supply.

"We found the motorpool, but it's locked down. We need a blue keycard," Green explained as she led them deeper into the structure.

"Of course," Jack muttered.

"We'll find it. It's gotta be somewhere upstairs," she said, and he hoped she was right. They'd been lucky so far.

The four of them hurried through the dead corridors, found the stairs, and went up. Jennifer warned them about the new tactics on the way. As they came up into the central antechamber for the second story, they found a reception party waiting for them. A dozen or so zombies were milling about, few of them armed, but more significantly, there were a trio of Lost Souls drifting about overhead. Prioritizing them, the group opened fire, taking up defensive positions as much as they could in the open area. Jack put three rounds into one of them and popped it, sprinkling down bits of bleached, singed bone onto the zombies' heads.

He dropped his aim as the others took out the remaining Lost Souls and got to work on the zombies. He punched holes in skulls, blew two eyes out, and put a round through a roaring mouth before his pistol ran dry. As he reloaded, down to his last magazine now, he heard the familiar shrieking of Imps.

"Crap," he whispered, head-shotting another zombie and then twisting to the right, where the shrieks were coming from. A pair of Imps tore into the room and immediately began throwing fireballs at the squad. He kept his shots sparse, pulling the trigger only when he was sure he was going to connect, and for the most part he did good. He fired off twice, and got a lucky shot, hitting one of the Imps and tearing away a portion of its skull in a plume of dark red gore. The next shot went wide, and he cursed furiously, then made himself focus harder.

He put three rounds into the other Imp's chest. Not dead, but injured at least, and Jennifer finished it off with one to its neck and another to its dome. After that, he ended up using every last round in his pistol killing off the rest of the zombies and another Imp that arrived. As the last corpse fell, Jack immediately began hunting for the scattered pistols that he'd seen the zombies holding. Once he was sure it was safe, he hurried over to the nearest one, grabbed it and ejected the magazine. He and the others scavenged for ammo.

In the end, he managed to piece together one, whole single magazine.

Wow, what a fucking haul.

But it was better than his fist, at least. They took the first door they could, dead ahead, and finally caught a lucky break. Well, considering the way things had been going lately, it was a lucky break. The door led into the security center that the holographic projector had promised. The place was big, and impressive, or it would have been if it wasn't shredded to shit. Two of the walls were covered entirely in monitors and the other two were mostly taken up by high-tech workstations. Most of the monitors were broken, and those that weren't were dead.

The four of them spread out, searching the place over. They managed to find three good things: the first was more ammo, both for their pistols and the lone shotgun they had among them. Jack managed to get another two magazines in his pockets. Also among the debris, hidden away in a location that almost seemed intentional, were another two skull-keys: red and yellow. Jack wondered where the yellow one went, but thought he had a good idea. The third and final thing they found was a surprisingly intact PDA.

Jack checked it over and found a single file on it, a video recording.

"Hey guys...come here," he said as he checked it out. "It says this was recorded after the event happened."

They crowded around and watched as he fired up the file. The screen booted up, then cleared to show the haggard, pale face of a man. A Marine. His eyes were wide and bloodshot, his hair sticking up in several different directions, and there was a nasty cut down one cheek. He looked off screen for a moment, then returned his attention to it.

They could hear others, talking in the background, and Jack realized that this had been shot in this very room.

"This is Corporal Adam Watts, Hades Squad. If you're watching this...then you probably know a whole hell of a lot more than I do. I'll give you the basics: shit is fucked, my Sergeant and half the squad is dead, and there are monsters everywhere. But we've got a plan of action. Hacked this place's intel, learned quite a bit. In case you're trapped here, don't worry. Well, okay, worry, but there's a way out. At least, there's supposed to be. Find a map of this region, you're going to want to get to the Slough of Despair, from there you can teleport between the structures until you hit the Tower of Babel, from there, you can teleport back to Mars City. That's what me and the survivors are doing right now, we're gearing up.

"We found an armory and a motorpool, left a few toys up in the armory, and we're gonna leave a vehicle in the pool. Gonna have to fix both of them, but we could use the break, honestly. As of right now, my squad consists of Corporal Fletcher, Lance Corporals Bryant and Wong, and Private Davis. We can't wait for you, but it's gonna be slow going, so maybe you can catch up with us...fuck, who's gonna see this anyway?"

The vid log cut off abruptly.

"Well...shit," Jack said.

"How long ago was this?" Green asked.

"If this PDA's chronometer is accurate...almost a day," Jack replied.

"Shit. Well, come on, now we've got even more incentive to haul ass. Let's pick it up, people!" Green said, turning on her heel and marching out of the room. The others quickly followed her. From there, it was a simple matter to finish checking out the area. They picked off a handful of zombies and Imps hanging out on the second and third floors. Getting into the armory with the yellow key, Jack discovered what they'd left behind.

"What the hell is this?" he asked as he pulled the weird, bulky, long-barreled black and gold weapon from its glass case. "I mean...seriously, what is this?"

"I've heard of this," Green said, studying it. "It's a plasma rifle. If I recall correctly, its official name is the UAC Zero One Plasma Rifle."

"You want it?" he asked.

"You keep it. You can...field test it," she replied, grinning.

He laughed. "I'll get right on it." He looked around for more ammo for it, but he didn't see anything, so he just slung it. They ended up finding another shotgun, which Green took, and a pair of SMGs, that he and Stratton took, and a decent amount of ammo for them. From there, they retraced their route back down to the motorpool, unlocked it and discovered that there was indeed an armored ATV waiting for them.

It even had a minigun.

"I'll drive," Green said as she opened up the driver's side door.

"And I call minigun duty," Jennifer said, staring at the huge, mounted silver gun. Jack and Stratton followed her in, Stratton sitting up front, next to Green, Jack taking the back seat to himself while Jennifer got up into the domed top housing the minigun. The ATV fired up as soon as Green tried it, then she opened up the garage door and a hellish red light spilled into the motorpool. Wordlessly, they drove out, back into the fires.

Towards the Slough of Despair, this time.