Alone again.

He and Cortez had backtracked until they'd found a crossroads section that would take them to where they needed to be. And right now that meant hunting down a probably terrified and possibly dead young PFC named Harper. Jack had been trying to raise him over the radio, but so far there was still no joy in that department.

At present, Jack was as alone as he could be, stalking down a blood-painted passageway just below the surface of Haydenfield. He'd managed to find a shortcut that would chop away the need to pass through a maze-like network of maintenance tunnels up above. Once he surfaced at the other end of this tunnel, he would, theoretically at least, be within pissing distance of the section that Harper was supposedly at.

There was too much theory in his life lately.

And too much blood.

It was obvious that some kind of slaughter had happened in this hallway, which was broad, though short. Despite the fact that he didn't have to hunch to walk down it, Jack felt claustrophobic. The ceiling was barely a foot above his head. There were bodies along the walls to his left and right. It seemed as if some of the local security forces had been in a brutal battle with a metric fuckton of Imps at some point. Given how many had died, he wasn't sure who had won. Maybe no one had won. He stopped to scrounge for ammo whenever he saw an intact yellow-armored body, but none of them were packing anything.

Maybe someone had been through already. He reached the end of the corridor and found a trio of doors waiting for him. The one to his right was already open and showed a stark, white-tiled bathroom painted in blood, guts, and gore. For a few seconds, Jack simply stared. Someone was hung by their own intestines, swaying gently from a light fixture, dripping blood into a huge pool. He saw a human brain tossed carelessly into a urinal. Piles of pulped and shredded meat, skin and musculature, filled three sinks.

"Fuck," Jack whispered, and turned from the desecrated bathroom.

The demons were definitely getting worse.

He knew that the door ahead would take him to the little service lift that would get him back to the surface, but the map just showed a simple square room beyond the left door. He opened it up. Jack stood in the doorway and looked around, blinking, trying to determine if he was losing his mind or maybe just hallucinating from hope alone.

The room beyond was a storage bay of some kind, the walls covered in shelves that had crates of generic technical supplies. That was expected. What wasn't expected was the pile of guns and ammo in the center of the room.

After a moment, he determined it was real.

He also determined it was too good to be true. It had to be a trap of some kind. Had to be. He wasted two whole minutes staring at the room, trying to determine where things might be hiding. But he couldn't see anything at all. Finally, knowing that time was burning away second by second, he took a step into the room.

Nothing happened. Jack took another step.

Nothing continued to happen.

He ended up at the piles of weapons and ammo and still he remained intact, no monsters screaming out of popped-open wall panels or concealed compartments. Jack crouched and, after a second's hesitation, began scooping up ammo. In the end, he ended up with a dozen magazines for his pistol, a dozen for his rifle, and filling his pockets with shotgun shells. He walked out of that room without running into a single monster. It was the best thing that had happened to him ever since he'd hit dirt back on planet Earth.

Jack thought back to Kyra.

Okay, well, second best thing.

He wondered how she was doing, or where she even was. But that just led to him thinking about Jennifer. He still hadn't heard from her yet. He turned on the radio and began calling out to her, but as he entered the next room, cleared it, and rode the lift back up to the surface, he didn't get a reply. Jack tried to push the worry aside, but could only succeed in pushing it down, and not very far. He had spent a long time not really giving a shit about much of anything after his life had shattered into pieces the day the ducks died. Joining the Corps had at least given him an outlet to vent and a direction to aim, but until Jennifer had come along, he hadn't seriously cared about anyone in anything more than a basic empathic capacity.

He had empathy, and it was enough to get by for nearly a decade, but Jennifer actually touched something deep in his core.

He hadn't told a woman that he'd loved her since before he'd signed up with the Marines.

And for all he knew, she could be dead right now. Or a zombie. Of course he'd fall in love just before the absolute fucking end of the human race.

The lift deposited him into another storage area and Jack made himself focus. It became easier when he got that queasy, negative sensation approaching the only way out of the room. The same sensation he'd gotten just before finding the crusher and that weird hellscape. And sure enough as he opened the door, Jack found himself looking out onto a red-lit courtyard. He prepared himself for something weird, terrifying, or both. However, as he actually looked out there, peering through a two meter long, narrow corridor of smooth gray rock, he didn't see anything all that strange. Slowly, wary of traps, he moved down the alcove and came to the threshold. Beyond was indeed a courtyard, a simple square of space fifty feet by fifty feet.

It had no roof and was open to the Firewall, which gave it its hellish red glare. The ground was just dirt. The walls were made of that same slate gray rock, chipped and scarred by some kind of battle. There were a handful of dead security personnel and Marines around in yellow and green armor respectively, as well as a few Imps and a Demon corpse all chewed up by bullets. In the exact center of the courtyard was what looked like a stainless steel shed, a solid looking thing on a raised platform, maybe two feet off the ground.

There didn't appear to be anything else in the area. No other way out, no other points of interest, nothing alive, just the corpses and this shed.

"What the fuck is this?" Jack whispered, slowly walking into the courtyard.

He got his answer about three seconds later.

With a sharp grinding sound, a stone door sealed in place behind him, effectively locking him in. Jack's pulse tripled in about a second as, at the same time, most of the walls on the other three sides of the courtyard opened up to reveal rooms that were apparently packed with Imps and zombies. A cacophonous, collective roar went up as they all began spilling into the courtyard, coming after him. Jack looked down at the assault rifle in his hands, then back up at the horde of probably over fifty hostiles.

He had time to admire that, at the very least, what he had to do in order to have any chance of getting through this one alive was simple.

Dead fucking simple.

Kill or be killed.

Jack shouldered the rifle, flipped to full auto, and squeezed the trigger. At first, he didn't even need to aim. Screaming at the top of his lungs, he rattled through an entire magazine and put down eight or nine of the fuckers, mostly zombies. That gave him a little bit more space, but he was already rapidly losing ground and his back was practically up against the wall as it was. The gun ran dry and he hastily ejected the magazine and slammed in a fresh one, then started being a little more discerning. He needed to step up the kills and the only way he was going to do that was to score some headshots. As he took aim and popped an Imp's skull like a zit with a three-round burst, he jumped to the side, avoiding some incoming fireballs.

The only thing presently keeping him alive was the fact that there were so many of them and they were getting in each other's ways. He could already see an Imp ripping into a zombie and two zombies opening fire on an Imp. If that kept up, and if he kept a sharp eye out, he might be able to get out of this one alive and intact. Jack rattled through a whole second magazine of three-round bursts and dropped a dozen hostiles. As he reloaded, they kept pressing in on him, but he made some very quick and rough calculations. If they kept infighting and Jack continued making headshots at this rate, then he could have this room cleared in the next few minutes without them getting to him. Although it would be a real walk across the razor's edge.

If even one thing went wrong–

He heard a sound behind him: the grinding noise he'd heard when the door had closed, sealing him in. As he glanced back over his shoulder, he heard a worse sound: a deep growl. His eyes widened as he saw that the hall he'd come through was packed with a row of Demons now. Panic, real, icy, raw-edged, screaming panic came at him like a freight train. Jack finished reloading, turned around as he sidestepped a fireball, and flipped back to full auto. He might be fucked. Taking aim at the Demons as they stomped towards him, he squeezed the trigger and unloaded the whole magazine. It dropped two of the Demons as they came out through the door, but there were a good half dozen of the fuckers still coming.

Jack let his rifle hang by its sling. He didn't have time to reload it as he felt several bullets ping off his back. A fireball smacked him in the back of his thigh. Whipping out his shotgun, he spun back around while moving away from the Demons, and unfortunately towards the ever-encroaching horde of somewhat-less-threatening hostiles. He aimed and fired. The shotgun was like a cannon in his gauntleted hands.

He blew an Imp's head clean off and showered the area with blood. Shift aim while racking the gun, squeeze the trigger again and BOOM! There was a zombie's skull turned into so much free-flying blood, brain matter, and bone fragments. And then Jack's conscious thought left him as his body snapped on the autopilot, his reflexes hitting executive override and trying desperately to get him out of this one alive. He slid to the side, blew off an Imp's head, shot another zombie through the chest, and emptied the shotgun putting down another few Imps. Jack shoved some shells into the gun, racked it, put two slug shells into a Demon coming up on him. It dropped with a snarl, its thick blood spraying the other Demons behind it.

Bullets pinged off his armor, leaving welts on his battered body.

Fireballs winged him as he emptied the shotgun again, then used it to bash an Imp's face in, took a step back and felt something slam into his back. Jack screamed. A fireball slammed against the right side of his helmet. Several bullets punched into his armor. An Imp roared and swung at him, the claws digging furrows into his armor plating.

Something happened.

His scream lengthened, becoming one of white-hot fury, and then his vision began to go red and he really stopped thinking. After that, he had an impression of a series of flashes.

Here, he was driving his armored fist into a zombie's face, crushing its bones.

Here, he shoved his shotgun's barrel into the mouth of a Demon and blew out of the back of its head in a hefty spray of puled gore.

Here, he used his assault rifle as a baseball bat and hit an Imp's head so hard that it literally detached in a ripping of flesh and meat and flew off.

Here, he pumped a slug shell into a zombie's chest, opening it like a package of raw meat.

Zombies, Imps, and Demons fell before him and throughout it all he felt the fury singing through his veins. Pain ebbed through his body, a network of suffering that only served to fuel the righteous rage even further. His body became an engine of torment, a thing that took in pain and put it back out tenfold, a maelstrom of maddened red fury replacing the blood in his veins.

And then, suddenly, it was over.

The red seeped from his vision and Jack looked around, gasping for breath, trying to figure out what the fuck had just happened.

Everything hurt. His whole body ached from all the wounds he'd just sustained, though most of them were fairly superficial. Then again, his armor could only take so much. It had done a good job, but he was sure if he had someone checking it over, they'd find a number of problems. He stood there looking among a sea of corpses for maybe two or three minutes, then finally focused his attention on that stainless steel shed. What in the fuck was so important that they had to have fifty goddamned motherfucking bullshitting monsters lay in wait around it?! As he stared at it, Jack realized that it was probably empty.

He was likely overthinking it, giving too much credit to the demons.

Well, there was a button on it, and regardless, he didn't intend to leave this courtyard without seeing what was in that shed. Still breathing heavily, he groaned, his body aching as he walked over. Marching up the steps, he got to the top of the little platform and hit the button. And found himself staring down the barrel of an assault rifle.

The rifle was trembling slightly, and it lowered. He was glad he'd resisted the urge to shoot whoever was on the other end of it, because it turned out to be a very much alive Marine. "Oh my God...was that you screaming out there?" the man asked, his voice strained.

"Yeah," Jack groaned, then coughed. His throat was raw. "You Harper?"

"Y-yeah...are you okay?"

"Need to sit down for a minute," Jack replied, and took a seat on the steps, relief flooding him. "Thank fucking God I found you. Need you. Anderson sent me."

"I'm glad he sent you," Harper murmured in amazement as he stepped out and looked around. "Holy shit man, you really did this by yourself?"

"Yep," Jack croaked. "You got a canteen?"

"Uh, yeah, yeah," Harper replied.

Jack studied the man he'd killed over four dozen demons to get to. He was a skinny, pale kid inside his armor. He had the kind of face you'd expect to find behind a computer screen or buried in a tablet most of the day. Well, he was still alive at least.

"What were you doing in there?" Jack asked as he accepted a canteen from Harper and drank deeply from it, then passed it back.

"I got chased in here by some of those big bulldog things, and as I was fighting them off, the walls opened up and all these assholes started coming out. I...panicked. That was when Anderson was in touch with me. I ran into this little shack thing here and got myself locked inside," Harper explained, looking embarrassed.

"Well, it kept you alive," Jack replied. "Will you do me a favor? I need to get my breath back. Can you search the zombies for ammo?"

"Yeah, sure," Harper replied, getting to it right away.

Jack watched him move among the field of corpses for a little bit. Then he pulled out a bottle of painkillers from his pocket and threw down a few. Just enough to dull the pain without making him hazy. He didn't like that he'd lost it again, really lost it. He didn't even remember killing half these fuckers. He just remembered…

Red.

Seeing red. A whole lot of red.

But it had kept him alive. He supposed that was what mattered. For now.

After a bit, he took stock of his arsenal, because he honestly couldn't remember how much he'd used up during the fight. He was unhappy to see that his assault rifle was fucked. He'd used it as a club, he at least remember that, and it was busted to shit now. He checked the ammo count on the weapon, found that he'd at least used it up before ruining it, then tossed the useless thing aside. His shotgun and pistol were still in good condition, at least, though he had just two full loads for the shotgun. He reloaded it, then let it hang.

His pistol was down to half a dozen magazines.

"You find any shotgun shells?" Jack asked as Harper returned.

"Some yeah, enough for a full reload. You should have 'em, I don't have a shotgun," he said, offering them.

Jack took and pocketed the shells. "How are you for ammo on your rifle?"

"Almost spent," Harper replied.

"Here." Jack gave him the leftover ammo he had for it. Then he stood and stretched. Groaning, he popped his neck, back, and shoulders. "Fuck," he muttered. He still ached, but it was more distant now and his breath was back. "Okay, here's the plan: we need to get to a comms booster and turn it on. Think you can do that?"

"Uh...probably," he replied. Then nodded. "Yeah, I can do it. Just get me to it."

"Perfect. We aren't too far from where it's supposed to be. Once we get it online, we'll be one step closer to regaining control of this place."

"Good, 'cause..." He looked up at the Firewall. "We need it."

They walked out of the courtyard.