EPISODE THREE
–HELL ON EARTH–

PART ONE
–WELCOME TO ARMAGEDDON–

So this was the apocalypse.

This was the end of the world.

Despite that famous poem, it sure seemed to be ending with a bang. Private Jack Ward, Space Marine, warrior, survivor of Phobos, Deimos, and Mars, who had been to the shores of Hell and back again, sat on the bridge of a Marine Recon vessel that he had never actually learned the name of and watched Armageddon unfold beneath him on a massive display screen designed to resemble a window. Its visuals were piped in from a series of cameras mounted at the front of the ship, and right now, it was showing the Earth, growing rapidly.

Even as he watched, a fresh mushroom cloud plumed somewhere in Europe.

He looked over at Jennifer Taylor, the only other survivor, as far as they knew, of the incident that had consumed Mars and her two moons, and thousands of souls. She looked back at him, her face white with terror. He looked to his other side at their latest addition: Staff Sergeant Kyra Morgan. The redheaded Marine veteran was staring at the screen with a fierce scowl that told him everything he needed to know about her and how she felt about the situation at present. Being the highest ranking one around, she had assumed command and given the most obvious order after they had extracted her from the moon.

Make for Earth, full speed ahead.

Already, the ship was beginning to rumble with reentry as it began breaking through the outer atmosphere. Jack dug his armored fingers into the armrests of the chair he was buckled into. Pierce, the man in charge of the ship, stood at his station among the rest of the skeleton crew manning the bridge. Jack's mind worked furiously, churning to and fro as his eyes were dragged relentlessly back to that screen.

He wanted to ask how this could have happened, but he already knew the answer. Not the specifics, he wasn't sure if he'd ever really understand what the fuck was going on here, but he knew enough to piece it together. The Union Aerospace Corporation had ripped a hole straight through reality, into Hell itself, and had let all the demons out. And apparently they'd been stupid enough to port this technology to Earth.

"Do we have any comms?!" Kyra demanded.

A pause. "Nothing! They're completely dead!" one of the bridge crew reported back.

Another minute went by, the stuttering of the vessel steadily growing in power as more resistance came from the turbulent atmosphere the deeper they got into it. Jack realized that he was clenching his teeth so bad his jaw was aching and he knew if he didn't relax it, he'd crack a tooth. But could he be blamed? He was looking at the goddamned end of the world. Although apocalypse scenarios were more popular than ever during his generation, given how close they seemed to a real-life collapse of society and humanity as a whole, and he had grown up under the weight of a century and a half of science-denying politicians, sparking endless wars and fucking over the Earth's atmosphere and ecology and animal life…

He had never really, truly believed that he would live to see it.

Then again, he'd also never, in his heart, believed that goddamned motherfucking demons would pour in through technology-fueled portals by the millions.

The thought almost made him laugh, but he kept a lid on it, because he knew if he started laughing right now, he might never stop.

Jack felt a pressure on the back of his hand and looked over. Jennifer had gripped his hand. She looked over at him with a frightened but determined smile. She leaned over. "Jack...I wanted you to know that whatever happens, whatever we have to go through down there, even if we don't make it to the surface, that I'm so glad I met you. You're the best man I've ever met. And whatever happens, I'm yours."

She kissed him.

He kissed her back immediately, gripping her hand and squeezing tightly. When they finished kissing, he said, "Jennifer-"

The ship bucked abruptly and violently.

"What the fuck was that?!" Kyra snapped.

"We have a problem!" the pilot reported.

"Yeah?" Pierce asked.

"Remember that maintenance we were supposed to get? Well, it's taking its toll. Engine Three just blew out, and we need all remaining engines to safely make this landing. If we lose one more, we're fucked," the pilot explained flatly.

"Great," Pierce growled. "All right, if-" The ship jerked again, far more violently this time, throwing him from his seat.

"Aaaaaaaaaand there goes Engine One," the pilot reported as he got back into his own seat.

"Godfuck!" Pierce roared as he shot to his feet.

"We are going down," the pilot said in a maddeningly calm tone.

"No shit!" Pierce snapped as he stumbled to a nearby workstation. "Everyone, get to the pods! I'm programming them to land within a mile of each other below us. I've got no fucking clue where we are beyond...somewhere over the American Midwest. Go!"

The ship had begun to rattle much harder, bucking in the turbulence now that it didn't have enough thrust to maintain its course. The ground was approaching much more rapidly. Jack, Jennifer, and Kyra unbuckled and shot to their feet.

"Where are the pods?!" Kyra demanded.

"All the way down the main corridor there, near the engines! Left side, just before the engine room!" Pierce replied.

"Let's go!" Jack said.

"Be along in a minute, gotta finish programming this, everyone else, get the fuck outta here!" Pierce snapped.

Jack didn't need to be told twice. He took the lead with Jennifer and Kyra on his six, the rest of the bridge crew following after them. He was still wearing the green combat armor he'd donned for the spacewalk to the lunar base they'd picked up Kyra from, and he had his pistol on his belt and some ammo, but nothing else. All around him, the ship shook and shuddered as it began to come apart from its uncontrolled descent through the Earth's atmosphere. This was not how he had hoped to return to Earth when he'd been exiled from it.

The way ahead seemed somehow longer than he remembered from his time spent aboard this vessel over the past two days. Of course, none of the times he'd walked this passageway previously had ever been under such dire circumstances. Now it seemed a wildly flashing chromed tunnel that stretched away from him. He almost laughed as he hustled down it, towards the pod bay at the rear of the ship. All the things that could have done this, all the demonic shit he'd faced down over the past several days, and they were crash-landing because the Marines who'd saved his and Jennifer's and Kyra's asses hadn't had time for maintenance and had been forced to push the ship to its limit in order to try and get home and warn everyone.

Turns out, they needn't have bothered.

Everyone already knew that demons were real, Hell was a real place, and they were at risk of global meltdown.

As he reached the halfway mark, the ship suddenly lurched much more violently. He was thrown off his feet, landing painfully on the deckplates, and ahead of him a bright yellow-orange light burst into being as a wall panel exploded. Behind him, he heard someone scream as a similar explosion occurred. Twisting around as he staggered to his feet, he saw that two of the bridge crew were down. Kyra was checking one's pulse.

"Dead!" she snapped, and turned to the other, who was groggily moving around, her head bleeding badly from where she'd hit it. Kyra scooped her up. "Go!" she screamed as she got to her feet, holding the injured woman.

Jack and Jennifer ran on, the others following in a loose congregation spread out along the length of the hallway. The shaking grew worse and worse the farther along they got, almost as though the ship were trying desperately to break into pieces before they could safely get away, as if it wanted to take them all down to a fiery grave. Jack pushed himself harder, ran faster. No fucking chance of that happening.

Finally, he found the door he was looking for and slapped the open button. The door slid into its niche, revealing a shiny metal bay of pods, a dozen to either side, lined up and ready to go. They were single-person escape pods, which gave him pause. They weren't exactly the safest way to go. But he forced himself on, hurrying to the nearest one and opening it up. He turned to face Jennifer, who was right behind him.

"Get in," he said.

"No, you go first," she replied.

"Jennifer."

She sighed. "Fine, but you'd better be right fucking behind me."

"I will. I'll see you on the surface," he replied. He wished they could kiss, but they'd both since pulled their helmets on. She slipped into the pod and he made sure that she was strapped in securely, then he stepped back and sealed the door. A few seconds later, as she stared out at him through the shatter-proof glass port in the front, she disappeared in a rush of atmosphere as she engaged her pod and launched it towards the surface.

"Come on!" Jack called, opening the next one. He got the first of the other survivors into the pod, made sure they were secure, then sealed the door. He felt a little bad, because he'd only really had time to learn even Pierce's name, and then just his last name. He'd been far, far too fried to interact with anyone but Jennifer during their brief stay aboard the ship. A few seconds later, he got the second survivor in and launched.

Kyra came into the bay, carrying the injured Marine. "Where's the others?!" Jack snapped as he got another pod open.

"Explosion! Dislodged panel pretty much took their head off," Kyra replied grimly as she hurried over. They got the injured woman inside, strapped in, and programmed the pod to launch for her in fifteen seconds, given she seemed too out of it to do it herself.

"Okay, go," Kyra said, opening up another one.

"Where's Pierce?" Jack replied.

"Still on the bridge, I imagine. I'll make sure he gets on, go," Kyra answered curtly.

"No, I'll do it," Jack said.

"I'm pulling rank! Get on the fucking pod! That's an order!" Kyra yelled.

Jack stared at her, wanting to argue, then growled, turned, and stepped into the pod. She silently made sure he was strapped in, then closed the door. Jack hit the launch button as soon as he got the go-ahead from the computer.

And then he was gone.

The world unfolded beneath him.

The atmosphere burned just past the glass ahead of him.

Jack looked around the pod as best he could, but it was practically an upright coffin, made all the more claustrophobic by the fact that he was wearing his green security armor. The pod rattled violently all around him and he found all of his thoughts honing down, focusing on a singular thing: praying he survived the landing. The single-person pods were notorious for killing their occupants more often than not. He thought that they'd been phased out at this point, but there were always those ships that had yet to be decommissioned or upgraded. Brass always bitching about budget cuts. They were living in an era where the most money ever, in the history of mankind, was being spent on the military and they still couldn't figure out how to properly allocate it.

Of course, there were more wars than ever before.

There was probably a correlation there.

But now all that was over. Now, at the very least, everyone on Earth could appreciate a threat as straightforward and terrifying as millions of demons rolling over the cities, killing and killing and killing without discrimination. He wanted to believe that he was overreacting, maybe it wasn't as bad as he thought, maybe the demons weren't here in total force. Except...those nukes. They wouldn't be making mushroom clouds if there wasn't a full-scale invasion. Of course...what if it was worse than that? What if the nukes were because World War Three had finally happened, and they were just nuking each other?

God, either way it was a fucking nightmare.

Jack tried working the controls built into the pod near his hand, and barely managed to twist his head around to look at the display screen set into the hull to the right of the only window in the pod. A very simple display showed him an extremely rough idea of the terrain below. It was flat, pretty much all flat. Shit, it was probably fucking Kansas. It could be one of the Dakotas or Nebraska or even Utah, but knowing his luck, it was goddamned Kansas. It was said that there was nowhere more boring in all the solar system than Kansas.

Having been through there more than once, Jack found it hard to disagree.

He saw other pods on the screen, well, signals representing the other pods that were linked via a simple wireless signal meant to keep them all connected and on track to land not too far from each other. Theoretically. He counted half a dozen pods besides his own, and felt at least some relief. That likely meant Jennifer's, the three he'd launched, Kyra's, and Pierce's, hopefully. He didn't think anyone else had been alive besides himself, Kyra, and Pierce at the end. The crew of the ship was extremely minimal.

Finally, there was the altimeter, showing him how fast he was approaching the ground. And that number was rapidly diminishing, faster than he would have liked. At least this part would be over sooner rather than later. Worse than dying was waiting to die. Or, well, he assumed, given he'd never actually died yet. Jack kept an eye on the altimeter as it steadily dropped and tried to open up a channel with Jennifer.

"Jen, can you hear me? Jennifer?"

A pause, then, through a haze of static, "Yes! Jack, I hear you. What's happening?"

"I helped some people get out, then Kyra made me jump and went for Pierce. I think they made it out," he replied.

"You said you were right behind me," she said.

"I was! I am! I had to help," he replied.

She sighed. "Whatever, just as long as you're okay. Oh shit, I think-"

An earth-shattering crash sounded over the radio and it went dead. "Jennifer, you still there? ...Jennifer?!"

He looked out the window. The ground was rushing up to meet him now. He checked the altimeter. Under a thousand feet. Shit, this was it, the landing. At least it was going to be over with relatively quickly and then he'd get to find out whether or not he died. Well, if he died, he already had a nice casket at least-

The pod smashed into the ground.

Jack didn't pass out, not quite, but he was in a brief sort of daze where, for a few seconds, he wasn't sure where he was, what was happening, or what he was supposed to be doing. He knew it was important though, and he thought he heard Jennifer's voice briefly over the radio, and that helped him shake off the shock. He was encased in the escape pod, he realized. The window ahead of him was cracked and outside he saw husks of corn. Great. He reached out and hit the emergency eject button. The pod's door popped off in a hiss of hydraulics and his harness released its death grip on him. Staggering to his feet, Jack loosed his pistol from its holster.

He regretted that he didn't have more on him. In all the chaos, he'd only managed to leave the ship with...he checked his pockets...a sidearm and fifty bullets. Great. He made sure those four spare magazines were accessible but secure, then looked around, scanning the skies. He was in a field of cornstalks taller than he was, which would make this whole thing harder. Why did it have to be fucking corn? He didn't have anything against it, but damn if this wasn't a terrible place to be. There! He saw a pall of smoke rising into the sky. As he took a step towards it, Jack froze. He realized that he was going off half-cocked.

Not great, given everything he'd endured recently.

He took a moment to turn back to the pod and thoroughly search it over. His quick but diligent search yielded results: a single StimPack. He secured it to his belt, cursing himself briefly for almost having abandoned it, and then he began working the pod's basic controls. If he remembered, the pod should have two key features, beyond getting your ass to the ground. Communications and LifeScan. Not a great LifeScan, per say, but better than nothing. He activated his radio as he booted up the LifeScan and had it run.

"This is Private Ward to anyone, do you read? Over." He waited, heard nothing, and repeated the message twice more. But either his radio was dead...or everyone else's was. He supposed it was also possible that they were looking at a Phobos situation. If the demons were indeed here in force, it was possible they had a way to block comms on a mass scale. God, there was a nasty thought. Jack cursed as the pod indicated that the LifeScan wasn't working. He didn't have time to dick with it, so he abandoned the effort.

Pistol in hand, he began shoving his way through the cornstalks, towards the smoke. He left his radio on as he pushed forward, and he was careful. Theoretically, there could be civilians around. He fully intended not to shoot some poor farmer in the face if he ran into someone like that out here. Unless he was a zombie. Jack shuddered at the thought. Images kept trying to rise up and overtake him. Oceans of blood, mountains of skulls, whole cities razed, skyscrapers burning like funeral pyres for the whole human race, people being tortured by the millions, kids getting ripped to pieces by Imps, or chewed up by Demons…

God, this was truly nightmare stuff. The list of godforsaken, nightmarish things that could be happening right now seemed to have no end. His mind was spinning, his body aching from the crash, and a thousand thoughts seemed to want to press in on him at once. Jack fought for control, for clarity, for certainty. Sometimes it was like this, it felt like the whole world around you had gone completely bugfuck insane and you had no idea how to handle it, but he knew. He had learned the hard way. You focused on what was in front of you.

Right now, finding his fellow survivors was in front of him.

Finding a better arsenal, a working radio, and tactical intel was in front of him.

At last, the eternal cornstalks finally gave way to another clearing that had been created by the escape pod that had landed there. Jack saw that it was unopened, and when he looked in through the window, he saw that the person inside was dead. Their neck had snapped and they weren't breathing. Blood leaked steadily out of their mouth and nostrils. It was one of the bridge crew, and Jack snapped out a curse and punched the front of the pod.

Something growled to his right.

Jack froze, eyes wide, heart leaping into his throat. How many times had he heard that sound? That exact sound? Dozens? Hundreds? Too many. He knew exactly what that was, and hearing it confirmed all of his most terrifying suspicions. Something shifting and he twisted to face it, aiming his pistol in one, smooth motion, waiting for it to come to him.

He didn't have to wait long.

The stalks shifted and swayed. The zombie drew closer. Jack's breath caught in his throat as he flashed back to the first time he saw one on Phobos, in the Hangar, Stanmore at his back. Before he'd gone and gotten the poor bastard killed. He'd gotten almost all of them killed. Finally, the thing stepped into view and he was granted sight of the horror. If he had to guess, he'd say it was a farmer, or maybe one of the techs who helped run the farm's equipment. It wore a short-sleeve yellow jumpsuit that was ripped and bloodied in several places. Blood was smeared around its mouth and across its hands, and its eyes had that vacant, malignant glow.

Jack squeezed the trigger as the zombie fucker stumbled for him and watched a bloody hole open up in its tanned forehead. The zombie let out a final grunt as it flopped back onto the dirt, disturbing more cornstalks as its coagulated blood and decaying brains splattered across them. For a few seconds, he stood there, staring at it. All that time he'd been fighting up there on Phobos and Deimos, across Hell and even Mars City, he'd been hoping, praying, and somehow believing somewhere deep in his soul that this hadn't happened on Earth. It felt too big, too impossible, too horrible to be real. And yet, here it was.

A zombie, on Earth. It had happened.

For a few seconds, he felt so utterly dwarfed by this fact that Jack wasn't sure he could possibly go on. He wasn't sure he could take another step. How many were dead? How many were suffering? Was this truly the end of the human race? The end of everything he had ever known in his entire life? He felt like an amoeba before a tidal wave.

And then he heard gunfire, coming from behind him, and a familiar voice shouting.

Jennifer.

That broke through his paralysis. He spun around and began hurrying through the cornstalks towards the sound of gunfire.

"Jennifer! I'm coming!" he shouted.

He ran as fast as he could manage, the armor making it easier to get through the stalks. A few bullets whizzed his way.

"Friendly fire!" he shouted.

"Fuck, Jack!?" she cried.

"Yes!"

"Sorry!" She grunted with effort suddenly and he heard two more gunshots, then an Imp shrieking, another gunshot and the shrieking cut off abruptly. At last, he stumbled into another opening in the cornfield and there she was. The most amazing woman he'd ever met stood among a small collection of dead zombies, and an Imp corpse, her green armor spattered with blood, a pistol in her hand. They locked eyes.

"You made it," she said, the relief as obvious in her voice as it was on her face.

"So did you," Jack replied, knowing exactly how she felt.

Somewhere not too far away, another Imp shrieked. "Damn," Jack muttered, looking around. He activated his shortwave radio. "This is Ward to anyone, does anyone hear me?" He waited, licked his lips nervously, then prepared to repeat the message. As he did that, Jennifer turned back to her pod and quickly began searching it for supplies.

"This is Kyra, I hear you, Ward. I need some help. My pod door's stuck and there's hostiles hanging around."

"Copy that, Staff Sergeant. What's your location?" he asked.

"At the edge of a cornfield. Hold on...goddamnit, my pod's navigation is fried. What about yours?" she replied.

"Mine was fucked. I'm with Taylor now." He looked at her. "Any luck?"

"Yes," Jennifer replied, studying the screen inside the pod. She came onto the link. "What's your pod number, Staff Sergeant?"

"Ten."

"Okay. I have you, and the other pods," Jennifer said. She waved Jack over and quickly downloaded a very rough map of the area to both their suits, with each of the pods indicated with beacons.

There were six total.

Only six had made it off the ship.

"We're on the way," Jack said, and they set off.