PART FIVE
–HEART OF DARKNESS–
It could definitely be worse, but it could also certainly be a hell of a lot better.
Kyra scowled at the teleporter pad she'd finally managed to locate and decided to put it off just a little bit longer by searching her armor one more time. Just to make sure that she did indeed truly have full stock of her supplies.
It didn't take very long.
All of her pockets were empty. Every last one of them. She hadn't overlooked anything. No spare bullet, no overlooked grenade, nothing.
She looked over her weapons.
A damaged pump-action shotgun with a single full load of eight shells.
And one plasma rifle, decent condition, with one third of a power cell left.
Kyra let the rifle hang and gripped the shotgun, reminding herself that it had been worse before. There had been a time, not all that long ago, when she'd woken up in Hell, completely naked and defenseless. She still had her uniform and armor, and a few weapons. Just no sidearm, no spare ammo, not even a fucking combat knife.
She looked behind her, down the short stonework corridor. That initial huge room she'd had to fight half a CyberDemon in had given her a false impression that she'd have a lot to investigate. But she hadn't. There were three ways out of that room, and two of them had been caved-in completely. This little corridor with a teleporter at the end of it was all she had to go off of. And it was going to be a hell of a gamble.
Kyra had already tried her radio more than once while searching the place over, but either it didn't work or no one was there.
"Okay," she muttered, staring at the odd silver square sporting a pentagram, "I gotta do this. There's no other way."
Stepping up to the edge, she frowned intensely as she stared down at it. "Shit," she whispered, shaking her head.
She really didn't want to do this.
Finally, Kyra reached for that steel resolve she'd strengthened and sharpened over the past few decades, squared her shoulders, gripped the shotgun, and prepared herself for the worst. Then she stepped onto the teleport pad.
In a flash of light, she was suddenly somewhere else.
Kyra swiveled around, stepping off the pad as she did, and scanned the area for hostiles. She was in an enclosed space, not very large, and no roof.
And the walls were…
"What the shit?" she muttered, staring. The walls resembled the exterior of an apartment building. Tan brick, too many windows covered with blinds. Something about it, besides the obvious, set her on edge. There was no clear exit, beyond a pair of teleporter pads. The walls were maybe fifteen feet across each, and all of them were covered with those windows. It almost looked like someone who had seen an apartment building, but had absolutely no concept of why it existed, and was trying, poorly, to recreate it.
But why?
Why the fuck would this be happening?
It almost reminded her of some kind of procedural-generation software going haywire. Taking things it already had templates for, like walls and windows, and just creating them at random.
And then she turned around in another direction and froze.
"Okay, what the shit?" she whispered, her voice harsh.
She shared this space with someone else. Someone else who was dead. Whoever they might once have been in life, now they were strung up, hanging from the ceiling with both wrists bound above their head. They hung almost like a side of beef, and their legs and part of their torso was flayed of flesh. They were so mutilated that she couldn't get any real kind of sense of what they had looked like originally.
She just hoped they had died after the mutilation began, but she doubted it.
And to keep a promise that she'd made herself, she stepped off the square stone platform she had been standing on into the strange blue inch-deep liquid that flooded the rest of the room. Walking over, she checked the body, to make damn sure they were dead. And they were. Turning away from the dead body, the grim task complete, she moved over to the nearest window and tried interacting with it. But a quick examination revealed that the windows were basically painted on. There was nothing behind them. The blinds didn't even work.
Kyra finished checking the room over and finished by looking up at the big square hole cut into the ceiling. She was definitely in Hell, all right. As if it hadn't already been confirmed. She saw a glowing red sky and enormous, high-reaching, pointy mountains of some white-green rock, far off in the distance.
She looked at the teleports, wondering which one she should take.
One might lead to certain doom and unspeakable danger.
And the other might lead to unspeakable doom and certain danger.
Or something. At this point, one of them could lead to the inside of a sun and the other might lead to a birthday party.
"Whatever," she muttered and stepped aboard the one to the right.
In a flash, she was in...a slightly less enclosed space. To either side and behind her was an angled wall of dark green plating. It also had no ceiling, and the opening ahead of her opened up into a path of gray cobblestone that went left and right. There was a similar wall of plating maybe six feet ahead of the opening, giving the space a corridor-like feel. She waited and listened, and heard the unmistakable sound of a zombie groaning.
No, several zombies groaning.
And something breathing heavily nearby.
Great.
Shouldering the shotgun, she stepped up to the opening. Something shifted nearby, something heavy. Kyra tensed as she heard meaty footfalls coming closer to her current position with an increasing speed. She took a step back into the safety of the somewhat sheltered area and waited. A few seconds later, a bulky, wavery figure stepped into view. Sort of. One of the invisible bastards. She aimed and fired, twice, pumping two shells into it and dropping it, blood spraying on the air from seemingly nowhere.
Several zombies and more of the damned invisible ones. What had Jack and Jennifer called them? She couldn't remember but she knew she called them Ghosts. Kyra braced as another came around the corner, followed by a handful of zombies. She began working the shotgun, emptying the shells into first the Ghost and then the zombies. When the shotgun ran dry, there were still two left. With a scream, Kyra ran forward and brought the butt of her shotgun down onto the nearest zombie's head as hard as she could.
The zombie staggered and when she did it again, both the shotgun and the thing's head broke. The final zombie was wielding a pistol and lining up for a shot. She didn't give a chance, grasping its wrist and tearing the gun out of the thing's cold, dead grip. She turned the pistol around, stuck the business end in its mouth, and squeezed the trigger.
Nothing happened.
"Oh you fucking jackass!" she screamed, dropping the pistol and headbutting the zombie hard enough that it stumbled, tripped over a corpse, and fell flat on its ass. Kyra ran forward, brought her boot up, and then smashed it down onto the thing's ugly face. Once, twice, three times. Going until its head was pulverized into bloody paste.
"Fucker," she whispered, taking a quick look around. She seemed to be alone again. Fine by her. Kyra spent a few moments searching the recently deceased undead and managed to come up with two magazines of ammo for that pistol and, of all things, a goddamned AB-10 Machine Pistol. And ammo for it. It was a nice little weapon, basically a compact submachine gun. She'd prefer a Raptor, but this thing spat out forty two twelve millimeter rounds per magazine and was pretty accurate. It was an older model, phased out early on in her career. She seemed to recall someone saying something about breaking out older models for this new war.
"Fine by me," she muttered as she checked the weapon out, loaded it, and then pocketed the remaining four magazines the zombie had had on it. She'd also managed to find a dirty yellow skull-key keycard and pocketed it for safekeeping. "Now, where to next?"
She began exploring and as she walked along the passageway between the strange walls, she started to worry that she was in some kind of maze. But it didn't take long to explore the entire thing, and it couldn't be properly called a maze. She didn't find any doors or windows, and the walls were probably too tall to climb out of, but…
There was another teleport. Of course there was. Well, no time like the present. Making sure the AB-10 was ready, Kyra stepped aboard the teleporter and disappeared in a flash of light yet again. This time, however, she reappeared somewhere else with the barrel of a gun pointing into her face and for a second the thought 'so this is how I die' blasted across her brain. And then the gun was lowered and she was looking at a familiar face.
"Sergeant Weldon," Kyra managed after a few seconds.
"Sorry, Staff Sergeant...you startled me," Weldon replied.
Kyra stepped off the teleport and looked around. "I can see why. It looks like you've been busy."
This time she had come to a room that was mostly brown brick and tan rock. The tan cobblestone floors were covered with corpses. Zombies, Imps, Pinkies. She even saw a Baron of Hell in there. "Goddamn, Weldon. How'd you do all this?"
"I had a plasma rifle," she replied, "depleted and overheated the damn thing taking everything out. I've been wandering this place for about an hour now. Killing everything I've come across. Got lucky early on and found a little stash of UAC weapons, but they're mostly used up now...you didn't happen to find a yellow keycard around, did you?"
"I did, actually," Kyra replied, feeling a wave of relief. This was shaping up a lot better than she'd initially feared.
Weldon nodded. "Excellent. There's one door I couldn't get through and it's an actual door with the UAC logo on it and everything."
"Hmm...given how much of our universe we've found in here, and the fact that the keycard I found was a skull-key, I'm not sure if it's actually UAC presence," Kyra replied.
"I found more evidence that the UAC have been here. A few smashed consoles, a few cleared out stashes of supplies, some cameras and broken auto-turrets. It's also the only non-dead end I've found after checking out everything else."
"So we might as well check it out." Weldon nodded. "Okay, lead the way."
She turned and walked over to a platform that was almost, but not quite, too tall for them to grab onto and haul themselves up. Kyra covered her while she went up, and then Weldon covered her while Kyra got up. She looked around the rest of the bizarre room they were in. They were on a wooden platform, broad, made of actual wooden planks, and leading away from it was an equally broad descending stairwell where another teleporter pad waited. There were more corpses, a lot of Imps and Pinkies around.
As they passed one of the dead spiky demons, she thought that she did like the name Imp more than Fiend, it just fit better.
The stairs dead-ended in another pair of silver teleporters. Weldon made for the one on the left. "Where does the other lead? Or do you know?" Kyra asked.
"To a room and some corridors with a lot of dead demons and nothing else worth mentioning," Weldon replied. "Be ready for this next area. It's basically a big acid pit and no guardrails. I think I killed everything in the area, but I'm not sure."
"All right. I'll give you a ten-second count to get clear of the pad, then come through," Kyra said.
"Ten seconds. Check."
Weldon took a short breath and let it out in a huff, raised her weapon, then stepped onto the pad and disappeared in a flash of light. Kyra waited, counting off ten seconds in her head, and then did the same thing. She appeared in a very strange place that immediately set her on edge. It was a broad, long room of odd angles and disjointed spaces. The walls, the most normal aspect of the room, were uneven white rock speckled with vertical strata of darker rock. The floor was indeed just a bubbling pit of green acid, with a melange of islands made of bland tan rock scattered about. The ceiling...was really creeping her out.
It looked like blood. It looked like someone had filled a glass-bottomed pool with blood and she was looking up at it.
The place was a warzone, or more specifically the aftermath of a warzone. Dead demons and spent shell casings lay everywhere, scattered across the islands or bubbling away in the acid below. "You did good. I'm impressed," Kyra said as she walked up to Weldon, who stood at the edge of the platform they were on.
"Had to," she replied.
"I know the feeling."
Weldon pointed across the room, to a door with a yellow trim. "That's the last door I could find."
"How do we get there?"
"Hop scotch from hell." She took a few steps back, then sprinted forward and leaped the gap between this platform and the nearest island.
"Great," Kyra muttered, and prepared to do the same.
As they navigated the miserable room, she did indeed see signs of the UAC. And not the randomly generated stuff, but signs of things actual, real humans would do if they were trying to convert a small portion of Hell into something even remotely livable. It was clear that there had, at one point, been impromptu bridges made between the islands. But all that remained of them was some shredded, charred metal and wood attached to a few of them. The demons had been busy. They jumped across the islands, aided by their suits of armor's strength enhancing capabilities, and finally managed to make it to the other side.
"Okay," Kyra said, pulling out the skull-key, "get ready."
Weldon nodded tightly, her shotgun pointed at the door. Kyra slid the key into the slot beside the plain chrome door. It had no window, just the damned UAC logo stamped onto it. Something chimed softly and the door slid open. A groan sounded and Weldon pounded a few shells into what Kyra assumed had to be a zombie. Sure enough, a zombie corpse fell out of door and into view, its face sheered off and smoking.
The pair of them moved inside carefully, finding a medium-sized room of that same striated rock, and a scene of destruction. It was obvious this place had once served as a UAC outpost. Two corners were taken up by large, high-tech consoles, now smashed into uselessness, screens dark and dead, no longer even spitting sparks. What remained of the UAC personnel who had been here when the attack had come were smeared across the floor, the walls, the ceiling. One bits remained, most of them turned into food or zombies by now. Broken open crates lay scattered around as well. There were two ways out, so they split up and each took a door.
The one that Kyra chose led to a pitiful barracks. Another similar room, this one packed along one side with triple-stacked bunks, the other side holding quick-install showers and chemical toilets, as well as a row of ripped-open lockers.
From the gory remains in some of the bunks, Kyra wondered how many times those poor bastards had lain awake, thinking of this exact scenario, or had nightmares of it. Only for it to happen, for some godawful demon things to come screaming into the room and kill them right in their beds. She checked under the bunks and in the chemical toilet stalls to make sure that there weren't any survivors, on either side of the line, lurking about, then returned to the main room and headed through the door into what turned out to be the last area in this little outpost.
She found a lot more smashed equipment, another teleport pad, and Weldon standing at a surprisingly intact console.
"Anything?" she asked, approaching.
"Maybe something," she muttered. "Their database is pretty scrambled but...it looks like this teleportation pad will bring us to another area, near another outpost. What is labeled as a communications outpost."
"That seems significant," Kyra replied, looking at the teleport. "Maybe we'll be able to get in touch with someone else. We have to report this data."
"I'm with you, Staff Sergeant," Weldon said. "Whatever it takes."
Kyra nodded. "Whatever it takes."
They waited a few more minutes for Weldon to sort through what remained of the outpost's database, but there was nothing of significance remaining in the scrambled data. Finally, the pair prepped for the jump.
"Who goes first?" Weldon asked.
"Rock, paper, scissors?" Kyra suggested.
She laughed. "Sure, why the hell not?"
Both Marines raised their hands and Kyra counted off. She chose rock, Weldon chose scissors. "Well, that settles that then." She stepped up to the pad. "See you on the other side."
She stepped aboard and vanished in a flash of light.
Kyra waited, doing her ten-second count and looking around the room, glad to be free of this place but anxious about going to wherever this pad led to.
Once the ten count was up, she stepped aboard.