Whoever it was, they didn't seem to realize she was there.

Which seemed impossible, given how goddamned loud her boots were. Kyra waited and listened, trying to confirm what she thought she was hearing. Yeah...they were actually shuffling away from her. Why? Was it a trap? Could be. Could be someone else waiting just beyond the door to ambush her, distraction tactics. So what to do? Kyra remained still, hoping that whoever it was would come to the door, but the unknown person stayed out of sight. They groaned and shuffled a few more feet, then became still.

Kyra suppressed the urge to sigh. She couldn't just keep standing there. Well, the only wrong decision was no decision. She began moving slowly down the stairs. There was a grunt as she did so and she again came to a halt, waiting to see if whoever it was would come over. More shuffling footsteps, then nothing. Tightening her grip on the pistol, she finished moving down the stairs and crept up to the door.

Moment of truth.

Kyra moved quickly in front of the door, pistol aimed, ready to open fire if necessary, but hesitated as she caught sight of the figure in the corridor beyond. They were wearing a familiar yellow jumpsuit, the kind she always saw their pilots wearing. Some of the troops had taken to calling them canaries. Like a flash, an old phrase came to her: Canary in a coal mine. That made her shudder viciously as a tremor of real fear ripped through her again.

She realized that, even from behind, she recognized the figure before her.

Before she could think better of it, she opened her mouth and said: "Meyers."

Another warning grunt, and she immediately regretted her decision. Something was very wrong, something that had her instincts screaming at her. It wasn't just the fact that Meyers's suit was ripped in a few places, or that he had clearly bled a lot from a wound on his right shoulder. Nor was it the sounds he was making. It was more the slow way in which he was moving, the way he'd been shuffling around back and forth aimlessly for the past few moments.

And then she knew for certain that something was absolutely wrong with the man as he fully turned around and locked eyes with her.

The eyes currently embedded in Meyers's skull were no longer the eyes of a human being. They were glassy and milky with some strange white substance. And they had a faint glow to them. His face looked like it had cracked in a few places, almost like it was a porcelain mask. His veins were clearly visible, and stranger still, there was something almost leathery about his skin now. He let out another groan and began stumbling towards her, reaching for her with thoughtless, groping hands. His fingers were covered in blood.

"Meyers, stay back," she warned, hard steel coming into her voice.

She was being threatened, and she never reacted well to that. She aimed the pistol deliberately at him now.

Meyers gave absolutely no indication of having heard.

"Meyers, I said stay back. Stop moving. Now."

Still nothing. If anything, he sped up.

Something was obviously completely fucked here. Was it some kind of virus? A disease or infection? It was the only thing she could come up with in that moment as her brain shrieked at her not to let him touch her, to get near her at all.

"Meyers, I will shoot your ass!" she roared as he hit the doorway and stuck one arm through the crack down the middle, groaning louder now, muttering incoherently as he reached for her. There was something mindless about what he was doing. He seemed less like a human being that might be sick and more like some kind of animal, or even a machine. Like he had been replaced with a robot that had broken badly.

"Meyers! I mean it!"

It was obvious he wasn't listening, and he was beginning to get through the door. She adjusted her aim, deciding to take the non-lethal approach first, hoping to, if at all possible, incapacitate the man. She didn't want to murder him.

Kyra shot him in the foot.

It didn't seem to phase him in the slightest. And the blood that began to ooze out...something was wrong with it, too. It was too thick, too syrupy. It was like the blood of a corpse that had died a few days ago.

It was coagulated.

What did that mean!?

She adjusted her aim again and shot him in the thigh. More blood, no reaction. It was like he was impervious to pain. Meyers then made it through the door, and came right at her. Kyra reacted instinctively to the obvious threat: she raised her pistol up higher and put a shot right into his pale forehead.

That did it. He dropped like a rock and ceased all movements.

Despite how reviled she was by the corpse before her, Kyra felt drawn to it. She needed information. Intel was survival here. Keeping the body covered with her pistol as she advanced on it, because she didn't trust anything in this situation, Kyra got to Meyers and then flipped him over. She hadn't known the man all that well. He was the co-pilot under Whitley...had she made it out? Kyra felt her stomach twist uncertainly as she stared at the corpse she'd made. Anger and terror and confusion roiled violently in her mind.

Before any one thing could take root, she heard a roar.

Not a grunt, not a growl, a roar.

It came from somewhere out in the base. Kyra jerked to her feet and moved forward, not wanting to be trapped here in this control tower. She shoved herself through the opening and looked down the length of the immense corridor.

The base came to awful, dark life all around her.

The growls became a broken chorus of living horror. Suddenly, she saw shapes emerging from several of the doors. Half a dozen. A dozen.

Two dozen.

They were the base personnel, she realized with a growing, yammering terror that was swelling in her mind, overwhelming her. She squeezed the trigger and punched a hole in the head of the nearest former human. That was when all of the now over thirty horrors let out screams and roars of fury and began coming for her, arms out and reaching. At least one of them had a weapon, and a bullet seared past her.

"Oh fuck this," she whispered as something snapped inside of her.

Unsure of what she was doing, Kyra turned and sprinted through the nearest open door, shooting another one of the shambling things in its open mouth. She came into a garage and slammed her fist on the close button behind her.

But the door didn't close.

She cried out in blind panic and punched the button again, and again. The door remained open. The horde of monstrous things were coming for her, getting closer, a cacophony of horror. Kyra felt her heart slamming painfully in her chest, which felt horribly tight, her breath coming short and fast. Looking around, she saw a collection of crates stacked in the corner. Without thinking about it, the second she saw that they led to a vent grate, she rushed over to the stack, holstered her pistol, and scrambled up the crates.

And then she was through the grate and into the vent and crawling.

The next segment of time came to her in a series of flashes.

Most of the time she was crawling through vents.

Sometimes she remembered looking out of a vent grate, and regretted it. At one point she saw a pair of men in shredded, bloodied uniforms crouched over a corpse in an office, chowing down, their faces smeared with blood. Another time she saw a beheaded Marine in hallway. And she saw more of the former base personnel. They seemed to be everywhere. Their groans haunted her as she crawled furiously through the vents.

When she fully came back to herself, Kyra was sitting on top of a sturdy pile of crates in a small room with barely enough space for her to sit, her head almost touching the ceiling. As she felt control fully reasserting itself, Kyra took a deep breath and slowly let it out. It had been a long time since she'd lost control, and she wasn't sure she'd ever snapped like this before. She hadn't realized just how much this whole thing was freaking her out, how stressed out she was. And she dealt with stress on a daily basis at this point.

That's what made the whole thing that much worse. Kyra had fought on battlefields for years now. She'd been in bad firefights, ambushes that she was lucky to walk away from. She'd been shot and stabbed and even set on fire once. She'd been in crashing ships at least half a dozen times. (One more time now.)

Even through the worst of it, she'd never fully lost control of her own mind.

As she sat there, Kyra zeroed in on the problem immediately. Although she'd been through a hundred different kinds of hell, she had never, not once, faced a…

She had to admit it to herself.

A zombie. Let alone a fucking army of them.

She was in outer space, after going through a crash landing, and now she was stranded in a facility that was overrun by goddamned, motherfucking zombies.

Zombies.

Never in a million years did Kyra think she would actually be facing down the living dead. But even as she thought this, she felt control reassert itself like a steel vault door locking into place. She could deal with zombies. They were slow, they were loud, they telegraphed their presence from a mile away. And they could apparently use weapons, if she was actually remembering that right, that one of them had taken a potshot at her, but she imagined they were shit shots. And she knew for a fact she could kill them.

She just needed to get headshots. And she was good at that.

"Okay...okay..." she whispered, slowly crawling to the edge of the crate pile she resided on, "I can do this. Just gotta get to a security center. Get a map, some more firepower, find other survivors," she said quietly.

Kyra reached the edge and looked down. She'd come to a small storage room. Bigger goals came to her as she first visually secured the area, then got down onto the metal plate floor. She had to get to Command Control. She knew each of these installations had a Command Control, where the answers she was seeking would more than likely be. That meant finding a bigger and better arsenal and getting out of this building.

Her first goal was leaving this room. Kyra took a moment to check over the crates and shelves, seeing if maybe there was anything of any real use, but it was all a bunch of tech parts that she had no need for. Moving over to the door, she waited and listened. Nothing but the hiss of oxygen and the hum of power, but that didn't necessarily mean much. A lot of the time these walls were built too sturdily to hear anything on the other side. But as she reached for the open button, an idea came to her: why risk moving through the hallways?

She'd already proven that she could move through the vents.

Kyra looked down at the pistol on her hip. She didn't have a lot in the way of spare ammo. She should conserve it if at all possible. Yes, if she was going to get out of this alive, she had to think tactically. Moving back across the room, she climbed to the top of the crate pile again, located the grate she'd used to come into this room, and slipped back through. As she began crawling through the vents almost blindly, hunting fervently for an armory or security center of some kind, Kyra's mind began to go into overtime.

Zombies?

How in the unholy hell could there be zombies at a UAC station on Europa? But even as she asked this question, it somehow didn't seem too unlikely. It was just one of those things that felt like a pair of puzzle pieces fitting neatly together. Because everyone knew that the UAC was shady. Everyone knew that the UAC got up to all sorts of unknown shit out there in the dead space. What were they doing, locked away in their hermetically sealed chromed vaults? Only they knew, and some people who had a lot of money and power back on Earth as well.

How often had she found her mind wandering, theorizing on all the various things that the UAC scientists could be getting up to? Zombies...weren't actually impossible. Well, obviously. Then again, there was the question of whether or not they were actually zombies. What was a zombie, anyway? There seemed to be different varieties. The supernatural kind, the virus kind, the coming back from the dead for no real reason kind, that was somehow almost, but not completely, different from the supernatural kind.

Virus seemed to be the winner. Hadn't she smelled something, been smelling something ever since she stepped foot in this awful place? Could be the infection she was smelling. So what was the deal with these things? Was it bloodborne? Airborne? Was she already fucked? If so, what were the symptoms? Or did she need to get bitten or scratched in order to be turned? Well, there were more things on her list of shit to do now.

Find information about what in the hell was going on, and discover the truth behind these zombies, and if she was infected. If so, how to fix it. If not, how to avoid it. Until then, she just had to kill or avoid the undead, and, of course, lay her hands on some heavier firepower. Or even some more bullets for this sidearm would be a godsend.

The trip through the vents seemed to take forever.

She passed several bloody hallways, several more zombies, a few more storage rooms, a break room, some offices…

"Oh fucking finally," Kyra whispered as she looked through the latest vent. Her knees were aching like hell by now.

She saw the familiar telltale bank of monitors and at least one gun locker that signified a security center. It wasn't much, but it would be a step up. She cleared it as best she could visually from behind the grate, then opened it up and slipped down. Breathing a sigh of relief, she quickly confirmed that she had the little security office to herself and then moved over to the only door and locked it down. That sure, certain red the little keypad began to glow was strangely comforting. Kyra first moved over to the trio of gun lockers that occupied the back wall. Two of them hung open and empty. She managed to get the third open.

Then cursed.

It was basically empty. All that she could find were another pair of magazines for the pistol. Not even a damned shotgun or an SMG that the security forces were so fond of. Well, better than nothing she figured as she pocketed the spare magazines. From there, she moved over to the bank of monitors, though her trip there was brief. It was obvious that they were screwed. It looked like someone had emptied an assault rifle into them and the few that were left intact showed nothing but static. Sighing, she moved at last to the single workstation in the room.

It, at least, was still functional.

Although she quickly surmised that she wasn't going to get much out of here, either. As she sat there, frustrated and navigating painfully slow menus, she couldn't help but ask again: "What happened here?"

It was a question spoken to an empty room, but even as she felt this sentiment, Kyra couldn't shake the feeling that someone was watching her. She turned around, away from the workstation, fervently searching the room. But there was nothing. She remained alone. Kyra turned back to the screen and froze. For a split second, just a bare fraction of time, the screen had turned a vicious red. But it flashed by so fast that she couldn't be sure if she'd actually seen it, or if it had been some kind of strange optical illusion or…

Maybe just a product of an overly taxed mind.

Kyra let out a huff of annoyance and kept working the controls until finally she had an actual map of the building. Not of the whole installation, just this building. It was a start at least. It wasn't all that complex of a building, most of it taken up by the hangars and garages. And there was just one other security area on the map. Probably worth checking out. But...what was this red thing here? Kyra tapped on it and the map zeroed in.

"Shit," she growled as new data became available to her.

The way out, which was an exit lobby to a tram that would take her deeper into the area, was on a lockdown. Of course it was. She tried to raise it from there, but discovered that the lockdown was tied to someone's PDA, someone with high enough clearance. And...well, luck would have it, she could actually track that PDA. After using a few 'shortcuts' she wasn't supposed to know about. And it was apparently located in Vehicle Maintenance & Repair. Great. Kyra looked back up at the ventilation grate she'd come through.

"I don't want to go back in the vents," she muttered, then quickly reminded herself that she was a fucking Marine and to get the fuck over it. It was either that or throw away ammo she might need later shooting her ways through the hallways, and risk exposing herself to a potential unknown contaminant. So, vents it was.

She crawled back inside.

The second security center turned out to be a bust, being totally cleared out by the sorry bastards that had been stationed here when the shit went down. It took her about ten minutes to finally reach the repair bay. Looking out, she spied a few shuffling figures, but as far as she could tell from her vantage point, the place looked secure, all the exits closed off. So, it was time to go to work. Kyra hit the access button and slipped out, landing with a soft grunt on the floor. The nearest zombie, a man she didn't recognize in a technician's jumpsuit, turned towards her with a warning grunt. As soon as he, (it?), saw her, it began coming right for her.

Kyra raised the pistol, took aim, zeroing her sights right on one of its cloudy eyes, and squeezed the trigger. The sound was too loud for comfort, and it alerted every other zombie in the maintenance bay. It also turned the initial zombie's eye into a gory socket and dropped it like a rock. She shifted aim and punched a hole in the dark forehead of another technician. Switch aim, fire again. She did this three more times.

Then, as she shifted her aim one more time, she hesitated, though only for a second. She recognized the face. It was another one of personnel from her ship, a medic, a petite, pale blonde named Peters. Most of her right arm was missing and she was limping badly. Her mouth was smeared with old blood.

Kyra put her down, then waited a few seconds. Once nothing more came for her, she took a moment to pat down the bodies, rifling through pockets, but none of them had anything worthwhile. She sighed and lingered for a few seconds after finishing her search of Peters. She hadn't known the woman too well, but Peters always struck her as polite and competent. She'd had the notion that she'd been sleeping with Mora, one of the PFCs under Kyra's command. He'd also been a medic and they seemed to spend a lot of time together outside the med bay.

It didn't matter now, she supposed.

It took another five minutes to locate the PDA, which had a cracked screen and a bit of blood on it. Fearing it wouldn't work, she resisted the urge to cross her fingers or hold her breath as she tried to activate it. The screen flickered to life.

She dug in. "Well, Staff Sergeant Burns," she murmured as she sorted through the data, "looks like you were garbage at keeping records..."

There was hardly anything on the PDA. Just a few reports from over the past month, none of them within the last week, and she didn't have the time to go digging right now. But his security clearance looked like it would indeed get her through that lockdown. She pocketed the PDA and then crawled back into the vents. After another five minutes, she was at the locked down door and through it without a problem.

As she moved through the tomb-like lobby and located one of the trams still in its station, Kyra finally felt like she was making some real progress. There were a lot of things on the other side of this, and she hoped that at least some of them were good. After clearing the simple, boxy tram, she settled into the controller's seat, fired it up, and sent herself into the airlock, and then back out onto the dead, frozen surface of Europa.

And onward into the unknown.