Jack felt about as good as he had ever since learning that he'd arrived just in time to see the end of the world. All in all, there were a dozen Marines in Anderson's unit. They all looked battle-hardened and grizzled, and like they'd all seen heavy combat. Which he was sure they had. Probably nine out of every ten living human had seen heavy combat over the last few days. But it felt good to be back in the company of competent Marines once again. Although he didn't let it soothe his frayed nerves that much. He'd been in similar company more than once before now, and so far he and Jennifer were the only survivors.
Well, now Kyra, too.
They left the apartment complex after checking to see that the way was clear and gathering up everything they could manage. He was loaded down with guns and ammo now, most of it for Raptors or shotguns, and he'd donned a backpack stuffed full of radio gear and spare parts. As they began making their way down a street, he found himself walking next to another Marine, a large, dark-skinned man who had a grim grin on his face. The nameplate embedded in his armor read S. SGT. Hollenshead, S. His eyes spoke of years of combat experience, and the grim guile and dark humor some Marines developed by then.
If he had to guess, he'd say that Staff Sergeant Hollenshead was a man who took a bleak sort of pleasure in what was happening.
In a way, Jack understood the feeling.
He saw that the man was carrying a…
"Holy shit, is that a Sig-Cow?" he asked.
Hollenshead glanced over at him, then looked down briefly at his weapon and grinned. "Yep. Sure as shit is," he replied. "We've been arming almost literally anyone who can hold a gun at this point, and we ran out of guns. They had to pull them out of storage. How long you been around? You remember them?"
"Yep. The M Two Eleven Semiautomatic Gas-Operated Infantry Combat Weapon. Single shot, fifty round mag, ten millimeter rounds," Jack replied.
"Holy shit, how goddamn long you been around? You can't be that old."
"Twelve years," Jack replied. "Did one tour with the Sig-Cows and the AB-10s before they retired them and replaced them with the DX arsenal."
"Shit yeah, when we sold out to the goddamned UAC...I overhead some of what you told the el-tee. Look where that got us. UAC fuckin' sold us out to the demons," he muttered.
"I don't think that's what happened. I think they were just so fucking stupid and greedy and arrogant that they opened the door a crack and the demons saw their opportunity and kicked that son of a bitch wide open," Jack replied.
Hollenshead just grunted. "You know, I was actually tossing around the idea of retiring this year? Been doing this shit twenty six years. Signed up when I was just a twenty year old punk with a heart full of napalm and veins full of battery acid. Goddamn, I was staring down the barrel of death and daring that bastard to pull the trigger. I was fucking nuts man."
"I knew a few guys like you," Jack replied. "How'd you survive this long?"
Hollenshead laughed heartily. "Luck, mostly. And mostly I was just too fucking angry to die. Now I'm thinking maybe I stuck around for a reason. I felt like something was on the horizon, like a tidal wave or an asteroid blotting out the sun, you know? I figured I could offer some help, or at least do some damage when Armageddon came knocking."
"Given everything I've seen so far...you are going to more than have an opportunity to kick ass, take names, and stack bodies like firewood. There's an absolute fucking metric fuckton of demons out there that need their daily recommended dosage of lead."
Something up ahead roared. Hollenshead grinned savagely. "Speaking of which..."
"Contacts!" Anderson called.
They were on approach to a big intersection that was, like apparently everywhere in Hayden, choked with burned out, broken vehicles. As Jack began going for cover and trying to figure out exactly who it was they were fighting, a hail of gunfire began to pepper his position. Okay, so, former humans. Because as far as he knew, zombies were the only ones who used guns. Sure enough, as he dropped to one knee behind a wrecked vehicle and shouldered his SMG, he spied a squad of mostly Marines standing among the wreckage in the middle of the intersection. As he opened fire on targets of opportunity, Jack felt a chill shiver down his spinal column. It was genuinely frightening to see how far they had come.
He remembered fighting his first zombie back on Phobos. For awhile there, they'd been pretty incompetent. Then they'd started using tools. Then there was Z-Sec. They were organizing, and fast. It had been less than a week since first contact. Good lord. He popped a face like a grinning skull with a concentrated burst of fire from his SMG, then shifted aim and put a shot into another ex-Marine's head that turned its right eye into a bloody crater. All around him, his fellow Marines opened fire, hosing the enemies down.
They began to make quick work of them. Despite their improvements, once you got past the horror factor of fighting literal zombies, they didn't have squat on real Marines. Jack put down two more of the ugly bastards before a fireball punched him right in the back. His armor absorbed most of the impact, but he could definitely feel the heat. About that time, someone shouted that contacts were flanking them, and he spun around and saw a clutch of Imps spilling out of alleyways on either side of the road they'd just traversed.
Cursing, he aimed and fired, emptying his Raptor and murdering a pair of Imps. He ducked another fireball, ejected the spent mag, and slapped a fresh one in. Jennifer stepped up next to him and together they opened fire, hosing down a quartet of Imps as they began leaping over cars, coming for them, hissing and shrieking and hurling balls of fire. Jack punched three rounds into the chest of one of the spiny brown bastards and nailed whatever served it as a heart, because it dropped dead to the street. He fired again, sending a slew of bullets into the open, screaming mouth of another Imp and popping the back of its cranium like a zit.
It wasn't like before, with the last shootout they'd gotten into.
This time they had backup, a shitload of it, and they made mince meat of the zombies and the Imps, and the pair of bulldog-faced Demons that came stomping from the right side of the intersection. They perforated their bodies and turned them into so much chewed-up meat. They didn't even resemble their former selves by the time they slumped to the pavement. As the last of them fell, a general cheer went up from the squad.
"Let's move out, Marines!" Anderson called.
As they fell silent and began to hoof it through the streets again, Jack could hear heavy gunfire in the distance. Including several chainguns. Shit. It was coming from the direction of their extraction point. They began making their way through the vehicles, occasionally jumping or climbing over them, picking up the pace. Jack felt a sense of urgency beginning to rise in him, a sense of desperation, like all of this was just a preamble to the monster that was to come. No doubt humanity was evacuating Earth, which was one of the most insane things he'd ever heard, but what choice did they have? The problem was, there wasn't enough room out in space.
How many could live out there? A million? Two?
He'd be surprised if they could manage even that many. Sure, there were a fair amount of space stations and colonies out there now, but they were already populated. Maybe they could re-purpose them. Surely they could start pumping out space stations optimized for packing as many humans as possible onboard, but even if they started right now, there'd be a good month or two delay before even the first wave of new stations came out. Jack wasn't sure he saw a way out of this that didn't involve billions upon billions of brutal deaths.
No, had to stay focused on the here and now.
It was how he had gotten across Phobos and Deimos, how he had gone through Hell and back, twice. How he'd gotten back to Earth. All of those seemed impossible at one point or another, and yet, here he was.
They pressed on, making their way down street after street, popping any of the creatures that showed their ugly faces. Jack kept his eyes peeled for anything new. After running into the freak show on Phobos, Deimos, and Hell, being surprised again and again each time he ran into something completely fucking different, he'd come to expect the show to continue. So far, he'd only seen zombies, (with their latest variety), Imps, Demons, Lost Souls, and Cacodemons. Although as he passed one alleyway he did see the downed, thankfully bullet-riddled and unmoving corpse of a goddamned Baron of Hell.
No Cyderdemons or Spider Masterminds yet, thank God.
He'd wanted to believe that the only Cyberdemon was at the Tower of Babel, but he knew that wasn't true now. So now he was wondering if there were more Masterminds somewhere around? And what about beyond that? When they had murdered that big spider bastard, Jack had honestly thought that was the General behind the army of demons. Clearly it had been...not really controlling the legions, per say, but coordinating them at least.
Obviously, though, that was not true.
Because clearly these bastards were more coordinated than ever.
So what was out there that was bigger and badder than the Spider Mastermind? There had to be something, unless he was missing something. Whatever it was, he didn't want to meet it, because facing the Mastermind had been…
Terrifying.
It was a miracle that he and Jennifer had walked away from that.
Jack focused up as the shooting drew closer and closer. They pressed on down several more streets and after awhile, finally, they came to the battle that had yet to abate. There was the park. He could see a half-dozen troop transports in sleek camouflage green lined up, surrounded by a ring of Marines behind sandbags, crates, trees, fountains, anything they could take cover behind, duking it out with the forces of Hell. Surrounding the park, advancing on them, was a wave of zombies, Imps, and Chaingunners, with a few Cacodemons floating overhead just for good measure. Fuck. This was going to be a bitch.
As Anderson raised one hand, preparing to give the signal to strike while they had the advantage of surprise, a rocket suddenly shrieked out from a street off to the right, where a big, brick apartment building hid the view. It struck one of the Cacodemons and burst it. Another pair of rockets flew out, nailing the cluster of floating pumpkin bastards and destroying them utterly. Then a hail of gunfire opened up on the zombies and Imps nearest to that street.
"Go! Go!" Anderson screamed, and began rushing forward, opening up with his weapon.
Jack, Jennifer, and the others surged forward, doing the same, and sent a wall of gunfire screaming ahead of them and crashing into the bulk of the forces nearest them. Jack emptied his Raptor into the back of a Chaingunner, punching bloody holes in the broad bastard's back and then blowing out its face as he fired a slew of shots into the back of its head, and then using the rest to hose down a pair of Imps not far away. As they became aware of the rapidly evolving combat situation, half of the demonic forces spun heel and immediately returned fire.
Jack ducked down behind a burned out wreck with Jennifer and another Marine from Anderson's team, a tan-skinned, stern-faced man that moved with a stiff competence. His nameplate read SGT. ABRASH, J. He was holding a scoped assault rifle and blasting away with it in careful bursts. Jack wished he could trade in his Raptor for one, and intended to as soon as he could. But he made do with what he had in the moment. Aiming through the broken out windows, Jack popped a zombie skull, then shot an Imp in the neck. The fireball it was gearing up to throw went wide and smacked right into the back of a Chaingunner. Jack laughed as he saw the big bastard spin around and open fire in a furious rage on another pair of nearby Imps.
They were mowed down, and then a grenade landed at the feet of the Chaingunner and blew it into so many free-floating gory chunks.
Its chaingun, little more than blackened, twisted metal, flew through the air and crashed into a zombie's head hard enough to straight up decapitate it.
Jack slapped a fresh magazine in and burned through it as fast as he could. In those first few moments of combat, there were so many enemies between them and the extraction point that he hardly had to aim. The car he was ducked down behind shook and shuddered under the barrage of incoming fireballs and bullets.
Minutes passed that felt like hours.
Between Anderson's squad, the Marines entrenched in the park, and the second squad that had launched the rear assault, they managed to whittle down the forces and punch a hole in their ranks. Abruptly, Anderson shot to his feet.
"Go! Go! Evac now!" he yelled.
And then he was off and running. Jack and the others took off after him. He wasn't sure what had changed. Maybe one of the Marines at the ships had signaled him through their radio network, or maybe he just saw an opportunity. As Jack jumped over the car after slapping another magazine into the Raptor, one of his last, he saw the other squad making their own run. He took potshots at more zombies and Imps that were closing in, roaring and screeching as they pelted their position. Jack burned through every bullet in that magazine by the time he reached the park's edge. He reloaded with his second to last magazine and kept firing.
More zombies, Imps, Chaingunners, and Cacodemons were coming, he saw.
They were everywhere.
He kept running, firing off a few more shots and then just putting his head down and running his goddamned ass off. Chaos boiled around him. Insane, malignant demons closed in on all sides as he and the others booked it. He could see the nearest of the troop transports, its back ramp open, waiting to swallow him and twenty nine others up to whisk them off to…
Where?
Safety?
Was anywhere safe anymore? Anywhere on Earth?
Didn't matter, he needed on that transport. The Marines nearest to it were firing away with scoped assault rifles, no doubt making precision shot after precision shot. How many demons were there? A billion? Ten billion?
More?
More than he could kill in a lifetime, or three.
Jack finally hit the back ramp and pounded up it. The second he was at the top, he spun around and helped with covering fire, calling for the others to move their asses. Kyra was up first, and she took the exact same position he had on the opposite side. Anderson skidded to a halt at the base of the ramp and did the same, Jennifer with him. The others began bolting up the ramp, and as soon as they were up, Anderson sent up the nearest Marines, and once they were up, Anderson and Jennifer hustled up the back ramp.
Jack and Kyra covered a handful of remaining Marines who finished filling it up, then the back ramp quickly began to close and they started to take off.
Jack staggered over to the nearest seat and dropped into it, hastily strapping himself in. He realized he'd sat next to Anderson, who looked a little fried. They were silent for the first minute or so as the ship rose rapidly into the air, pelted with fireballs and bullets.
Finally, Jack leaned over. "Where are we going?"
"Last secure location in the area: Fort Minor."
Jack just nodded and leaned back. On his other side was Jennifer. He looked over at her, and she looked back.
She looked as grimly determined as he'd ever seen her.
It was time to figure out where they fit in this new world disorder.