"So now what?" Nelson asked uncertainly as the lift slowly made its way up.
"There's a utilities sector we need to pass through next," Jack replied. He was studying his holographic map. "This lift will let us out at the edge of a power distribution grid. From there we need to cut across a water control zone, and finally we need to get through a climate control center. That will let us cut through a corridor and a little repair area, which will let out onto a landing zone. Cutting across that will put us in spitting distance of the security node. Where, ideally, we might find some local forces."
"How do you know all this?"
"I have a map of Haydenfield."
"All of it? Holy shit."
"Yep, it's pretty useful." Jack dropped out of the map and regarded his arsenal glumly. His Sig-Cow was dead and he was now down to three magazines, two of which were loaded into his pair of pistols. Not a great place to be. The elevator began to slow. "Okay, get ready."
The elevator settled into its metal nest and a second passed, a second of peaceful silence, and then the doors slid open.
"Oh fuck me," Nelson whispered.
Though the short corridor ahead of them was clear of hostiles, it had obviously been subjected to some kind of brutal slaughter. Blood splashed the walls in liberal sprays, and there was a lot of it on the floor, and even the ceiling. It dripped steadily in some places.
"Steady," Jack said, and took point. His boots squelched loudly in the blood as he progressed slowly down the corridor. He listened for telltales of enemies around, and thought he could hear at least the groans of zombies somewhere nearby. Reaching the door at the end, he rolled his shoulders, preparing himself for a fight if need be, and then reached out and hit the button. He pulled his hand back quickly as the door slid up. "Oh fuck!"
The room beyond was packed with zombies and Imps.
There were over a dozen of both types and a general roar of awareness went up among them, passing over the crowd like fire in dry kindling. Jack immediately opened fire, and Nelson did so as well. Both men pulled their triggers as they fell back a few paces. They didn't have a lot of hallway to work with. Thoughts flying frantically through his mind, Jack aimed and popped off shots as fast as he could manage. An Imp was nearest and he put it down with a shot to its big, weird-shaped head. Its deep ruby blood sprayed across the others and sent them into an even worse frenzy. He popped a shot into the pale dome of a former technician, dropping him and throwing some coagulated blood into the mix, then shifted slightly to the left and repeated the action.
The sheer closeness of the monsters and former humans worked against them, and it only ignited the natural hatred that seemed to be their fuel, as those at the back began tearing into each other. As he put down another Imp, he saw a zombie begin shooting an Imp in the back, and another Imp hurl a fireball with an enraged shriek into a zombie's face. He emptied his pistol putting down half a dozen of the bastards and hastily reloaded his last spare. Slipping it in, he put a restrictive hand on Nelson's arm as the man also reloaded.
"Fall back," he said, doing exactly that and pulling the man with him.
They fell back. A zombie came in after them, as did an Imp, but the remainder of the hostiles were tearing each other apart now. They each took one of the enemies down with a well-placed headshot, then waited. Roars and screams and shrieks were all that entered the corridor for the next minute, as well as some blood, as they watched the display of destruction. In the end, a single, bullet-riddled Imp was left standing, barely, and Jack rewarded it with a blast to the face. It collapsed and they waited to see if anything else had survived.
Nothing in the immediate area seemed to have, so Jack cautiously crept out. He studied the room beyond. It looked like an antechamber that led to a few other areas. A little cargo lift was tucked away in the far right corner, and four other doors led away from the main room, two to either side. "Check the corpses for ammo, I'm going to see what I can see in these rooms," Jack said, setting off towards the nearest one to the right.
"Got it," Nelson replied, and set to work.
Jack walked over and hit the button. As the door slid up, he found himself staring down the barrel of a shotgun.
"Whoa! Fuck!" he snapped, snatching the shotgun in automatic reflex and thrusting up. The sneering zombie on the other end of it roared and squeezed the trigger. The shotgun boomed and jerked violently in his grasp, and temporarily blinded him from the muzzle flare. Reacting instinctively, he jammed the pistol in the thing's face and pulled the trigger twice. The shotgun was nearly torn from his grasp as the zombie died and fell, but he held onto it, ripping it from the dead man's hands and taking a step back.
"Nelson, cover!" he said, crouching.
Two rounds scorched overhead as he fought to get his vision back. It finally returned, the afterimage clearing, and he saw two more dead zombies inside. They didn't have weapons, at least, but it was good to know Nelson had quick reflexes.
"You okay?" he asked.
"Fine," Jack replied, slowly standing. "Goddamn...got a shotgun, at least!"
"Lucky."
"Yep. Here, take this." Jack offered the man his Sig-Cow. He wasn't sure how Nelson would take it, since Jack was finding that he honestly didn't like the weapon all that much, but Nelson seemed happy to lay his hands on something besides a pistol.
"Thanks," he said, checking it over.
"It's spent for now, gotta find more ammo for it," Jack said.
"I'll keep an eye out."
Nelson got back to work searching the corpses and Jack performed a quick search of the ones in the storage room. Lo and behold, the shotgun was damn near full, and the dead man who'd been holding it, another man in yellow armor, had spare shells! Oh glorious fucking day! Jack topped off the shotgun and managed to find enough shells for a full reload. He pocketed them, as well as the three magazines of ammo he managed to find among the dead for his pistol. The room they had been hiding in was empty, but the next one, which was empty of hostiles, explained what this area was for: storage. It held a bunch of silver metal crates.
After searching it and the next two rooms, finding nothing worthwhile, he rejoined Nelson. "Anything useful?" he asked.
"Just some magazines for the pistol," he replied. "You want some?"
"I'm good," Jack replied. "Come on."
They moved over to the lift and Jack got atop it and rode it up first, as it seemed to be the only other way out of the room. Opening up the door at the top, he found a corridor that wrapped around the storage room awaiting him. He sent the lift back down after seeing that it was clear and Nelson rode it up and joined him.
Despite their initial reception, the rest of this area, the power distribution grid, didn't seem to be particularly infested with the demonic presence. Jack talked with Nelson as they searched the handful of rooms in the area for useful supplies or enemies to put down.
"How'd you end up here?" he asked. "At Haydenfield, working this job, I mean."
"Oh...it's embarrassing," Nelson replied after a moment.
"You don't have to tell me if you don't want, but it's not like I'm going to make fun of you or anything," Jack said.
"I..." He hesitated for a few seconds. They came into a bathroom and put down a pair of Imps chowing down on a corpse. "My dad was a Marine. It was his life. And he very obviously wanted me to be one, too. I mean, I'm probably alive right now because of him, because he instilled a lot of survival instincts into me, pushed me to work out, learn how to shoot a gun, shit like that. But...fuck, man, the stories I heard on the news, all the just insane shit you hear from guys fighting over in...well, everywhere, I mean, I just couldn't do it. I ended up taking this job to try and get him off my back about it...probably sounds really stupid to you."
"I mean no, not really. Like, I get it. It's fucking awful fighting in wars. I survived mainly due to luck. It was stomach-churning over there. I saw a lot of people die and it was always ugly. I've been shot and stabbed and hit with shrapnel and lit on fire once and that was before the demons. I fucking hated it, I just...didn't have any other choice, really. It was the closest thing I ever had to doing something worthwhile with my life, you know? But it was all bullshit. Fighting wars for goddamned corporations and their corporate interests and lining some rich old fucker's pockets. I hated it. And I can't blame you for being scared. It's fucking scary. You probably made the smart move staying here. Although now it all feels like a moot point, you know?"
"Yeah..." he muttered, though he looked relieved.
They finished clearing out the power distribution grid, only putting down a handful of zombies and Imps hanging around, not finding much in the way of useful materials. The hallway finally terminated in a simple door that led to a divider room, serving as an access point between this sector and the next one: the water control zone.
According to the map, it had a bit of a weird layout. The area they were going to come out onto was a platform overlooking a trench that had a similar platform on the opposite side of it, and down in the trench itself was some kind of command room for water control. They'd have to cross the trench to get to the next part.
"We ready?" Jack asked as they came to stand on either side of the broad door at the other end of the antechamber.
"Check," Nelson replied.
Jack opened the door. He had his shotgun in hand and leaned out with it. What he saw on the other side made him hesitate long enough that it damn near got him killed. The platform was occupied by not only a clutch of Imps, all wandering around, hissing at each other, but also a pair of Chaingunners. And he could see more hostiles across the trench, a good fifty feet away, directly across from them. More Imps, at the very least. What really shocked him was that this area was open-air, as in: no ceiling. Or, more accurately, it had a ceiling, but it had been caved in and now blood-red light filtered in and he was given an awe-inspiring view of the Firewall that enshrouded the whole of Haydenfield. It seethed and burned hundreds of feet overhead.
One of the Chaingunners happened to be facing him and the big red-armored bastard let out a roar and immediately opened fire. A bullet pinged off his helmet, damn near ending his life, and that knocked Jack right out of his shocked stupor. He pumped out a shell and punched a hole right in the huge demonic thing's head, effectively decapitating it and spraying the others around it with gore. That got the party going with a bang.
The Imps all shrieked and began turning to face him. Nelson opened up with his pistol, punching rounds into their leathery hides, and the other Chaingunner began spooling up its chaingun and Jack fell back, knowing he didn't have time to line up a shot. An Imp apparently wandered in front of the Chaingunner and was turned into chewed-up meat by the barrage of bullets. Nelson pulled back after putting two shots into another Imp and they waited. Several Imps began shrieking and the Chaingunner let out some kind of weird grunting.
"They're fighting again!" Nelson cried, overjoyed by the development.
"Yep," Jack agreed, and took a peek.
It was better than he'd hoped. The Imps and a handful of zombies across the way had caught sight of him as well and had opened fire, and now they were fighting among each other. Jack laughed and pumped a shell into the back of the nearest Imp's head, blowing it open like a ripe fruit. Then he pumped the shotgun and repeated the action on the Chaingunner. The shell took it in the neck and put it down. Its chaingun stuttered and slammed into the floor as it kept firing for a few seconds, putting some rounds into an Imp's legs and sending it sprawling. Jack laughed and blasted away, punching a fist-sized hole into its chest and killing it.
He pumped the gun again and put down another Imp, then ducked as they slapped a few more fireballs his way. He switched to his pistol as the survivors on his side of the trench were put down by the idiots on the other side. Scoping out the situation, Jack saw a quartet of Imps still alive over there, and they seemed content to hang out on that side and hurl fireballs his way. He performed a quick check to the left and right beyond the doorway, (the fireballs didn't move all that fast and were easy to dodge from such a distance), and then he stepped out with Nelson and they got to work mopping up the local resistance.
They put down three of them, and as Jack was preparing to kill the last one, a door to the right suddenly opened up and a shotgun blast blew its head clean off. Jack waited, wondering if a zombie might come out, but he relaxed as he saw a lone figure in bloody green armor. The movements were too fluid to be a zombie…
He hoped.
Jack waved. The man waved back. "Who goes there?!" he called.
His voice sounded vaguely familiar, touched by an accent. "Sergeant Ward!"
"Ward? Aw shit, I know you! You're the loco son of a bitch who volunteered to take just a pistol into this place!" the man replied.
"Let's meet in the middle!" Jack called back.
"You got it!"
They took a moment to try the two doors on their side of the trench, but they were both locked down firmly and wouldn't open. He reloaded his shotgun as he and Nelson walked down a flight of stairs and back into more liquid. This stuff, at least, was water. There was a few inches of it in the trench and Jack imagined that this was the result of another leak. He made sure nothing was lurking on this side of the trench, then entered the control room at the bottom. The other Marine entered from the opposite side, and as Jack saw his face and nameplate, he remembered the man.
PFC Cortez. He'd fought with them through Hayden to get to the extraction point, part of Anderson's crew. His tanned face had an easy smile behind his faceplate, not something Jack expected to see in a place like this, but it was more than welcome.
"You made it! Man, I can't believe you made it! Although shit, I guess if you're gonna go and survive goddamned ground zero this ain't much to you," he said, laughing.
"I got lucky," Jack replied. "Found some help, too. Nelson, this is PFC Cortez. He's part of the squad I got sent in with."
"Good to see another friendly face," Nelson replied.
"Hell yeah. Not enough of those to go around lately. Have you seen anyone else?" he asked, looking to Jack.
"No, not yet. Haven't heard from anyone either."
"Ah!" he griped, shaking his head. "Whatever's going on is playing hell with the radio. I haven't seen anyone either. I can assume you're heading for that security node up ahead?"
"Yep. You good to go?" Jack replied.
"Hell yes! Lead the way, Sergeant," Cortez replied.
Jack nodded and they took a moment to search the control room. Cortez looked to be in good fighting form, and clearly he'd been doing a lot of fighting. His armor was smeared with blood and ashes, and scratched in a few places, as well as dinged from bullets, indicating he'd had several close calls with at least Imps and zombies. The man provided an immediate boost to Jack's morale. Having another Marine, especially one who could more than pull his own weight, would help. There was only so much he could do by himself, or even with Nelson.
The control room had been pretty much cleared out, so the trio left it, ascending the stairway that Cortez had initially taken.
"What's back the way you came?" Jack asked, glancing at that door.
"Maintenance area and a whole lot of tunnels," Cortez replied. "Nothing useful."
Jack nodded and took one last look up at the Firewall, glimpsing the unsettling visage through the ruined ceiling. A few Cacodemons drifted lazily overhead, prompting him to move on. He moved to the door at the end of the platform, hitting the access button as soon as the other two were in place. Last stop was the climate control center. It didn't look all that big on the map, and with luck, they'd be able to push through it with relative ease. The door opened and let onto a bloodstained chromed corridor that was home to a few badly chewed corpses. Something about that set Jack on edge, but there was nowhere for anything to hide in the corridor.
"Nice and easy," he said as he shifted down it, shotgun at ready.
Nelson got his six and Cortez brought up the rear. They were silent as they traversed the passageway. They reached the other end without a problem. The problem occurred when they opened the door and came out onto another platform. Another trench awaited them, with yet another platform on the opposite side, about forty feet away. Only this trench was bathed in gloom, the floor wreathed in almost total darkness twenty feet down. There was supposed to be a bridge across this one for simple foot traffic, but it had evidently collapsed, probably during the same attack or event that had caved in the ceiling in the previous area.
Jack flicked on his flashlight and scanned the area down below. He saw a room studded with more of those technological nodes, no doubt the digitized brains behind the climate control for this section of Haydenfield.
"Something's down there," he muttered unhappily.
"Are you sure?" Nelson replied.
"I don't see anything," Cortez murmured.
"I don't see or hear anything, but if there was one thing I learned on Phobos and Deimos, and in the other dimension, it's that they lay traps. They make plans. They're smarter than you think," he replied.
"Which ones?" Nelson asked uneasily.
"All of them."
"Are you fucking with us right now?" Cortez asked uncertainly. "Because hey, I'm all for jokes, but..."
"No," Jack said flatly. "It would be a terrible time to fuck with you right now, and I am absolutely not fucking with you right now. Not to freak you out, but the whole time I was there, I got this impression like...there was some kind of intelligence or presence behind the monsters, the invasion. Some controlling force. I thought it was the big spider demon I killed, but obviously that wasn't the case. But don't underestimate them. I think...individually, most of them are stupid. The Demons, uh, the bulldog-ape things, they're like animals. The zombies are, well, zombies, though they definitely got smarter. I think the Imps have some intelligence, and surely the Barons of Hell do, but even that is probably limited-"
"Barons of Hell?" Nelson asked anxiously.
"Big goat-faced bodybuilders that throw green plasma. You don't want to see them. But I think that something is controlling them. Maybe all at once, or maybe just giving orders in a 'set it in motion and let it go' kind of way, and sometimes it reaches out and takes control directly...but I don't know anything for sure, obviously. Just, you know, something to consider. Now, we've gotta get down there and cross to a ladder on the other side. I've got the shotgun, so I'm putting you two on flashlight duty, understood?"
"Understood," they both replied.
Jack located a ladder and descended. He stepped off and swung the shotgun into play. Damn this thing for not having a flashlight. Some models did, some didn't, frustratingly. Nothing came to him as he probed the gloom around him, the only light coming from a few very dim bulbs high overhead and Cortez's light shining down from above as Nelson descended. The darkness seemed oddly thick, the light not pushing it back very much. He still couldn't see or hear anything, but he felt more certain than ever that something lurked.
They waited for Cortez to join them. Once he was down, he had both men flank him on either side, flashlights out.
"Again, nice and easy," Jack said softly.
The most direct path lay dead ahead, between a pair of tech nodes. He stalked forward, straining his ears against the silence, his eyes against the darkness and the glare of the flashlights. A smell came to him through his suit vents, a rank scent of carrion and blood. He tensed, waited, and Cortez and Nelson froze behind him. He waited, the seconds ticking by in tense foreboding. Still nothing made a sound, no presence made itself manifest. Reluctantly, Jack set off again. He took a step, another, a third, and moved past the tech nodes.
There was the ladder. It glinted silver in the flashlights' beams, welcoming. Almost tantalizing, in fact. Jack hesitated again, very briefly.
A growl sounded to his left as he took another step forward. I knew it! He though in a grim sort of triumph.
"What is it? I don't see anything!" Nelson snapped.
Jack stared in the harsh light, aiming his shotgun as he hunted for the hostile. It was close, getting closer, he should be able to see it. The treading was huge and meaty, driving columns of dust from the debris-strewn metal plating.
His hell-shocked mind finally snapped the answer into focus as he saw a bulky, wavering effect in the light.
"Shit! Spectre!" he snapped, then aimed and fired.
A spray of blood gushed out, coating a portion of its body. Nelson and Cortez immediately opened up with their pistols and put it down.
"Holy shit, they can be invisible!?" Nelson cried.
"Yes, now-" More heavy footfalls sounded. Several more. "Fuck! Move! Now!"
They sprinted for the ladder.
"Get up there!" Jack shouted, shoving Nelson towards it. The security officer began clambering up the ladder. Jack and Cortez whirled around opened fire as two more Spectres came into sight. Inasmuch as the ghostly bastards did so. He pumped out another pair of shells right into the center of the nearest bulky Spectre, and the thing roared and collapsed to the ground. Cortez did the same thing, pumping his pump action as he sprayed demon blood across the instrumentation behind it. The third Spectre went down.
"Go!" Jack snapped as he fed the last of spare shells into the shotgun.
Cortez didn't argue, scrambling up the ladder. More were coming. How many had gotten down here!? With the light poorer than ever as both men hurried up the ladder, Jack could hardly see. He didn't bother firing again, instead hopping onto the ladder as soon as there was room. They were getting closer, their footfalls accelerating, their growls getting louder. Jack climbed for all he was worth and-
"Fuck!" he snapped as a hot, crushing pain suddenly ensnared his ankle.
Drawing his pistol as he looked down, he saw one of them had his foot in its mouth. He was going to loose it if he didn't act fast. Aiming down, just barely able to make out the uncertain, wavering effect of the Spectre, he emptied half the magazine into its face. It roared as the bullets punched into it and spilled its blood, and thus freed his foot. Wincing in pain and hoping nothing had been stressed too badly, (Jack felt like he'd know if something had been broken), he hurried up the ladder. A moment later, he stood atop it with the others, breathing heavily.
"You okay?" Nelson asked.
"Fine," Jack replied after testing his weight. His foot ached, but the armor had done its job, it was nothing he couldn't handle. "Come on, we have to hurry, we're almost there."
They set off, hoping to make it to the security node sooner rather than later.