For once, Kyra didn't appear in the middle of something awful.
In fact, as she snapped back into reality and looked around, she was so surprised by the change in pace of her luck that she nearly forgot to step off the pad. She did, with two seconds to spare, and Carpenter appeared behind her.
"Wow," he muttered, "talk about luck."
"Yeah, what's the catch?" she replied as she looked around.
The teleport led to a place that looked so normal, so human, that she for a second wondered if they had actually teleported back into their own reality. The room had a security checkpoint built around the teleport pad, and beyond that rounded wall of lexan glass (that was now bullet-riddled and blood-splattered), she saw workstations and lockers ringing the exterior wall, and a few doors that had been torn open, leading to other rooms.
"I'm sure there's shark-toothed demons lurking somewhere nearby, hungry for guts and gore," Carpenter said, hefting his weapon.
"Let's introduce ourselves."
They checked out the area room by room, moving carefully. As they investigated, it became clear that this was a bit more permanent of an outpost, though it had held up no better. One of the rooms led to a barracks, another to a small mess hall, another to a control op/security area that had been thoroughly ransacked, and finally…
"Oh shit, this may actually help us a lot," Kyra said as they came into a motorpool and found a mostly intact ATV.
"If it runs," Carpenter said.
"Yeah, and if there aren't any other teleports around that'll bring us closer."
There were a lot of corpses around, but nothing alive. Despite the ripped-up state of the outpost, they did managed to find a small surplus of weapons. She finally found more cells for her plasma rifle, and they each got shotguns with lots of shells.
Carpenter laughed as he loaded his up.
"What's funny?" Kyra asked.
"It's just...shotguns as we know them have been around since the eighteen hundreds. Over three centuries. We have literal lasers now, but at the end of the day, these things are still pretty much the same, and they're widespread. You can find shotguns everywhere. I'm sure we've already put down hundreds of thousands of the demonic fuckers with shotguns alone, as a species. We have all this crazy tech, and a lot of us still come back to this thing," he replied.
"It's a solid gun. What I wouldn't give for one of those double-barrels," she said.
He grunted. "Yep."
They kept up their search. When they found a workstation in ops, Carpenter set to bringing it back online. While he did that and once she was sure they were secure, or as secure as they were going to get, (one door led deeper into the structure and she had closed and locked it after taking a peek out and seeing candles and blood, and the other doors in the motorpool let out onto a vast landscape of black sand beneath a bloody sky), she set to work checking over the ATV. It was a good model, United Marine Corps standard.
It could hold four fully armored Marines with some room to spare, had a chaingun mounted on the roof, and had some decent cargo space in the rear. It was obvious that someone had been working on it, though, and recently. How recently, she couldn't be sure, but the hood was popped and some repairs had been made to the engine. Even more, she realized as she slipped into the driver's seat and checked the dash-mounted onboard navigational database, someone had replaced the battery and run a diagnostic on the whole vehicle, and apparently had gotten through most of the necessary repairs. So the question was…
"Where are you?" Kyra muttered, getting back out of the vehicle.
She rejoined Carpenter, who was studying the workstation's screen intently.
"Got some kinda good news," he said. "And maybe bad news."
"What's the bad news?" Kyra asked, joining him.
"There's no other teleports in this place that aren't local. So we aren't progressing that way. The kinda good news is that I've managed to find us on the bigger map. We're at the Bloodfalls...great name." Kyra looked at the screen he was studying, recognizing the regional overlay. That teleport had brought them quite a good distance closer to the UAC Command HQ. "Map of this structure shows there's a few caches around, supplies that might have weapons or parts for that ATV. What kind of condition is it in?"
"Decent, actually. Someone was making repairs. I think they're still around," she replied.
"We should find them."
"Yeah, if they're still alive. Also…" She hesitated for a moment.
"What?"
"Just thinking, what if they come back while we're out looking for them?"
"We could leave them a note on the steering wheel."
"Can we trust them to not drive off without us regardless? What if they think it's a demon trick? Or they just don't give a fuck? We need that ATV...I'll go pull the control chip. Can't start without it, and there probably isn't another one laying around," she said.
"I'll go to the exit and wait for you," Carpenter replied.
She nodded and headed back to the garage. A few moments later, she had the chip in a hardened pouch on her suit and she was standing with Carpenter at the exit to the outpost. And the entrance to the Bloodfalls.
Kyra opened the door again and they looked out into the room beyond.
"From the bottom of my heart: fuck this place," Carpenter muttered. "What even is this?"
"Bloodfalls," Kyra muttered as she stepped out.
The room itself wasn't all that wild or out there, compared to some of the stuff she'd seen. The floor and ceiling were made of relatively smooth gray rock, the walls made of similar substance, though cracks ran through the walls with a strange uniformity. What really made the room strange was the fact that a T of tiny canals had been cut across the floor, with the head of the T laid not far from the entrance to the outpost, and through the canals ran a steady stream of blood. And, to make it stranger, there were black, lit candles spread around the area.
There were no other doors. The only way out seemed to be where the canals met the walls. Though the one to the right came out of a tiny opening only a few inches high at the bottom of the wall, the one to the left and the one at the opposite end of the room both let out into larger openings that a person could drop down through.
They both walked to the opening to their left. "We gotta go down there, huh?" Carpenter muttered miserably.
It was a good fifteen foot drop into what appeared to be a pool of blood.
"Yep," Kyra replied. She began to say something else, but stopped as she heard the distant sound of pulsing plasma fire. "Shit, someone's in trouble." She activated her radio. "This is Morgan, can anyone hear me!?"
"Staff Sergeant!? Holy shit! This is Powell, I need help!"
"I hear you Powell, we're coming!" Kyra stepped up to the opening. "Let's go!"
She dropped down.
The drop was just fifteen feet but for a terribly long second it felt like fifteen hundred. And then she slammed into knee-deep blood, splashing the stuff everywhere. Her suit absorbed the worst of the impact but it still sent lances of pain up her legs, her knees complaining. She saw a few corpses floating in the blood, zombies and an Imp, and then started kicking her way through it towards a broad stairwell dead ahead.
"Bombs away!" Carpenter called and a second later splashed down. He actually did fall over and came up cursing, his suit of combat armor completely covered in blood. "Fuck, definitely too old for this shit!" he growled as he joined her.
"Come on!" Kyra replied, hearing the gunfire intensifying.
They raced up the stairs, finding more dead Imps, peppered with bullets. As she reached the top of the stairs, she found herself looking through an open door on a figure in cobbled-together armor, facing off against a half dozen pumpkins.
"Friendlies on your six!" she called, racing forward, her own plasma rifle out. She and Carpenter ran up to stand on either side of him and opened fire on the grinning demons. They popped them one by one, sending their pulped remains splashing down into a massive blood pool, until there were none left. As the gunfire cut off, Kyra really took in the scope of the room and got a better idea of why this place was called Bloodfalls.
They were standing on a platform that jutted out over a huge pool of blood some twenty feet down, and the ceiling was another twenty feet up. Big staircases curved around to either side of them, away from the platform, leading down into the blood. Waterfalls of the red stuff fell from high up on the walls, down into the pool below.
She finally turned her attention back to Powell. "Wow...what happened to you?" she asked.
He sighed heavily as he reloaded. "When I popped into existence over here, half my fucking armor was missing. Literally. Bits and chunks of it were just gone, my whole right arm, half of my helmet, as if it had been put through a buzzsaw, it was totally random. Most of my guns were missing components too, like they just been snapped out of existence. And of course I dropped into some fucking field of dead trees and weird glowing rocks with a bunch of zombies around. I had to fight my ass off and put together a new set of armor out of whatever I could find. Wandered around for a long time until I found a building, cleared it out, found a teleport. Rinse and repeat until I finally found this place and an ATV back there...what about you?"
"Kind of the same. You catch any radio conversations?" Kyra asked.
"No, my radio's gone."
"The good news is that I have the data on the big bad demon still, I managed to get in touch with Linaweaver and Falcheck. Weldon's KIA, though. And we also got in touch with some super badass survivors who are going to help us. Plan is to meet at a UAC Command Post, gear up, and assassinate whatever big-ass demon is running this show."
"I'm down," Powell replied. He pointed to a trio of descending platforms dead ahead of them that led to an open room across the way. "For whatever fucking reason, they put a storage bay in there. I'm guessing there used to be bridges or a fucking floor or whatever. But I gotta get there. Can I assume you know my plan?"
"Fix the ATV, get the fuck outta here?" Kyra replied.
He nodded. "Yep. Most of the way there, it'll be a lot easier now that you two are here. Also...I'm glad you made it, Carpenter. I don't really trust anyone, but you seem like one of the good guys."
"Well...thanks," Carpenter replied, a little awkwardly.
"What about me?" Kyra asked.
"Oh, I trust you as much as I can trust anyone anymore," he replied easily.
"Why? You hardly know me."
"Yeah but I already know what I need to know about you. You'd sacrifice me in a heartbeat for the mission, the real mission, but you'd never sacrifice me to save your own ass. There's a galaxy of difference between those two things, and that's what truly makes a Marine. You've got that shit in spades. I'd trust you with my life."
"Well, uh...thanks," Kyra replied, feeling a little awkward now, too. He was right, though. She would absolutely sacrifice him if it was him or killing the lead demon. But she'd also go through Hell and back to make sure he didn't get left behind, and she'd give her own life up for his if that's what it came to.
"Yeah. Hopefully it won't come to that," he said. "Now, uh, watch my six while I hop over there and see if I can grab anything?"
"You got it," she replied.
She and Carpenter took up overwatch while he made the hop across the 'islands' over to the room on the other side. He opened up the door as soon as he was there and disappeared inside in a standard room-clear motion. A few tense moments passed. Finally, he reappeared. "You might as well come over!" he called. "Teleport in here and I haven't found any other way back up!"
"Coming!" Kyra called back.
She had been wondering about that. She and Carpenter took their time hoping over, covering each other, and ended up in a shockingly standard-looking storage bay. Save for the rock walls and a few candles scattered about, there were crates, there were tables, there were workbenches and shelves. The place was ripped up, just like everywhere else Kyra had been to over the last few days, but it looked pretty human and normal.
"Let me see what I can find," Powell said as he started hunting.
"How much do you actually need?" Kyra asked.
"Not much. Some standard parts and tools, and one pain-in-the-ass part that might be a little hard to find, but the engine won't go without it."
"Understood. We'll watch your back."
"Thanks."
She and Carpenter hung around while Powell moved through the area, checking everywhere and gathering whatever he could find in a pile on one of the upright tables. Five minutes passed, then ten, then twenty. They spent almost half an hour in that room. And at the end of it all, Powell muttered a sharp curse.
"Missing something?" Carpenter asked.
"Yep. Got everything but that fucking chip I need." He heaved a sigh. "Good news is that there's another storage bay in the immediate area. The bad news is that we have to go there."
"At least there's three of us now," Kyra replied as they walked up to the teleport. "Are we sure this will take us anywhere we want to go?"
"Yeah. I looked over what schematics and records they had left before making my repairs on the vehicle. This should take us back up to the room with the black candles," Powell replied.
"That'll help at least."
"Yep. Gimme a ten count," he said, and stepped aboard.
Kyra counted to ten and then stepped on as well. Sure enough, they ended up back in the room with the black candles and blood canals. Once Carpenter appeared, they moved over to the only other way out and looked down it.
"Nothing ventured," Powell muttered, and leaped down.
Kyra joined him as soon as she could and Carpenter hopped down right after her. The three of them came to stand at the head of a long tunnel, the floor of which was covered in ankle-deep blood. Up ahead, maybe thirty or so feet away, she saw that it let out onto an open area with what might be sky. Great, she'd sure missed that wonderful sky. With a sigh, she began leading them, plasma rifle in hand, ready for the worst.
Or so she'd thought.
Admittedly, after the half-a-CyberDemon, she hadn't run into a whole lot, and it was making her wonder if they were in a relatively depopulated portion of Hell.
"What...the hell is that?" Carpenter muttered as they came to the end of the hallway.
"Bloodfall?" Powell replied.
The room beyond the hallway was basically a giant cube, the walls made of green marble for about twenty feet, then, atop that, iron caging. The floor was more of that cracked gray rock, and the room was largely featureless save for two things. The first was that one section of the wall was a different color than the rest, the other was that in the dead center of the area, maybe ten feet away, was a huge pillar of flowing blood, almost like some hellish caricature of a chocolate fountain at a fancy party. It had to be a good ten or twelve feet tall.
"Where we going?" Kyra asked.
"There," Powell replied, pointing up and to the right.
She saw the barest hint of a blue fringe through the iron gating up above. "You got a blue keycard?" she asked.
"Yeah, found it while I was raiding the outpost, we're good," Powell replied.
"Then let's figure out how to get up there."
They began walking forward. The instant they did, a skeleton appeared in a flash of green light atop the bloodfall, screamed at them, and launched a pair of rockets. All three of them shouted in response and opened fire while sprinting away, desperately trying to dodge the incoming rockets. They split, one going after Kyra, the other after Carpenter.
She managed to pour a decent amount of plasma into the skeletal demon before being forced to give up and deal with the rocket. She could sense it honing in on her, getting closer, speeding up. She was going to have to time this just right…
Running directly towards the wall, she turned at the last second and threw herself away. The rocket smashed into the wall and burst in a plume of fire, washing over her and kicking her in the back, sending her flying to the ground and rolling painfully a few times. As she heard a second explosion she staggered back to her feet and saw that Carpenter was okay. She aimed for the skeleton again, but as she did, Powell finished it off, bursting its head in a spray of bleached bone and smoke. It collapsed into a bony heap, falling down the bloodfall and splashing into the pool at the bottom.
"Well...I think something knows we're here," Kyra muttered as she rejoined them.
"Yeah, keep a sharper eye out," Powell agreed.
They moved over to the differently-colored section of wall and spent a few tense moments trying to figure out how to open or activate it while waiting for something else to teleport in, and would've kept on waiting until Kyra kicked it in frustration.
The section of wall lowered, revealing itself to be a rudimentary lift.
"Like...seriously?" Powell asked.
"I hate this place," Kyra muttered as they stepped on. Almost as soon as they did it shot back up to its original position.
They checked out the pathway along the top, finding little more than cigarette butts, a corpse, and some spent shells. Kyra could imagine some poor bastards being forced to patrol this area. How many Marines had the UAC sent into this place to die? Hundreds? Thousands? More? It didn't seem all that unlikely. Though it didn't really matter now, given that most of the UAC was probably corpses. And if they weren't, well…
She'd need something to do after killing all the demons.
They got to the blue door, unlocked and opened it after making sure they were clear. It led to a similarly sized room, though this one had more stuff in it. All of it was made of that gray-green stonework. Half a dozen hexagonal pillars surrounded a central platform that had…
"Okay, genuinely, genuinely, what the fuck is that for?" Kyra asked. "I've seen some weird shit in this place, but...I mean why?"
"I don't know, but the storage room should be over here," Powell replied.
Kyra heaved a sigh and, with one last look at the blue cube that was hovering motionless over the platform in the center of the area, followed after him. She kept expecting something to happen, something brutal or shocking or terrifying, but they cleared the room, found the second storage bay, and searched it over without running into any trouble.
"Found it!" Powell said after another fifteen minutes of hunting through crates and shelves and spare parts. "Shit, finally," he muttered, securing it. "Let's get the hell out of this place."
They took another teleport back to the original room and headed back to the ATV. Powell was as good as ever and managed to finish the repairs in under five minutes. And noticed the missing control chip. When Kyra explained her reasoning, he shrugged, accepted the chip, and admitted that he'd have done the same.
"Done," he said, slamming the hood. "Now I've done my part. I'm assuming that you're in charge of this, uh...operation? If that's what it is."
"Yeah," Kyra replied. She got into the driver's seat and booted up the dash-nav again. "Powell, man the chaingun. Carpenter, if you could open the garage door and then ride shotgun, I'd appreciate it."
"Yep," he replied, heading for the garage door.
By the time he had it open and both of them were in place, Kyra had got the navigational array working and figured out their next destination.
As she pulled out of the garage and began driving across the black desert, she felt almost good. Like she was a real Marine again, and not just some fucking rent-a-cop shilling for bullshit corporate overlords. She'd felt like a real Marine ever since she'd landed in enemy territory back on Europa, but if it weren't for the weird color of the sand and the sky, then right now she could almost feel like she was back on Earth, driving through one of a dozen deserts she'd taken similarly designed ATVs through. Almost.
It didn't matter all that much but for some reason, it gave her a strange sense of hope that if she managed to get through this alive and if they somehow managed to win this thing, she had some semblance of hope for a normal life again back home.
Maybe.