An instant later the rest of the scrap avalanched down the shaft with a drawn out screeching and crashing fit to wake the dead. Donna got up and ran from the spot before anything turned up to find out what all the noise was about.
Perhaps a hundred metres away, Mad Donna ducked down beside the rusting carcass of another turbine mounting and caught her breath. She was in a broad court studded with the things, and wide archways in all directions gave way onto similar chambers. It had once been an orderly place with the machines set out in precise rows like soldiers on parade. The ranks were now all but obliterated by chunks of masonry that had fallen from the ceiling and the floor was scattered with unidentifiable machine-guts. Stray slivers of light illuminated chambers far into the distance, indicating to her just how deep the giant cracks in the surface of Cliff Wall truly went.
Donna set her back to the direction the tunnel had taken into the shaft below. She hoped that would at least take her vaguely in the direction she needed to go. She started to pick her way through the rows of machines, noting that she had picked up another pair of rats for company. Or was it the same ones from before? It was hard to be sure. She kept her ears sharp for the flutter of carrion bats or ripper jacks as she moved, but all was quiet. Perhaps the noise had frightened them off for the time being.
Hours later it had become apparent to Donna that the biggest threats in the turbine chambers were hunger and thirst. She had come down several dead end rows and had to backtrack so many times that she was afraid of getting hopelessly lost. But when she used a thermal view to check her own trail it confirmed she was moving ever deeper in. Apart from the rats she had seen nothing living in all that time and the chambers seemed to stretch for miles.
A few hours more and Donna was starting to get seriously worried. Even if she could find a way out of there, at this rate she would arrive in Dust Falls to find the bounty hunters already waiting for her. No, she told herself as she strove to quell her frustration, that was just paranoia. Plodding through the endless ranks was getting to her. There had to be some better way to find a clear path, some clue she had missed before now. She gazed intently around her, willing a solution to appear.
Looking down, she saw a telltale gleam of reflected moisture beneath some scrap. She bent closer. Grey-black sludge was seeping out of a crack in the floor. She followed the crack back several rows until it disappeared under a machine and from there she could see a glistening rivulet of the stuff wending its way between rubble piles. Donna followed it and after only a couple hundred metres came out from between two crushed rows of machines into a relatively open space where the floor sloped up at an abrupt angle.
Mad Donna breathed out a gusty sigh of relief and almost choked when she breathed in again. A bitter, noxious stench was wafting down the slope and warring with her nose and throat, threatening to make her cough or puke, or both. She quickly looped a scarf around her face and trusted its carbon-impregnated weave (well, soot-smeared anyway) to filter out the worst of it. It helped a lot and she scrambled up the slope on her hands and knees without any trouble, scuttling crabwise to avoid several cracks dribbling thick sludge on the way.
The top of the slope opened out onto the wide, ugly vista of the sludge pits. Narrow rockrete piers stretched out in a grid pattern delineating dozens of steep sided cisterns. Some of the cisterns were cracked and dry, others were full to the bubbling brim and slopping obscenely over the sides. Patches of slime, algae and fungus dabbed spots of lurid colour here and there, casting sickly, dim phosphorescence over the scene.
Many of the piers were shattered or at least slick, treacherous and crumbling, and by now Donna expected nothing less. One slip could mean either a bone-breaking fall into a dry cistern, or a slow drowning in a full one. Depending on how corrosive the sludge was, the latter could be infinitely more agonising. Donna looked back down the slope; rat-eyes glittered up at her from between the rusting machines at the bottom. Donna cursed at them dispassionately. She was tired and could use some rest before tackling the pits. But staying up here would mean slowly choking to death, and going down among the machines would mean no rest at all.
With a weary sigh she wandered along the edge to find a row of intact-looking piers she might traverse. Rumour had it that the far end of the sludge pits led to the bottom of the Lesser Trunk and thence to Dust Falls. She turned and stepped out onto the piers. Having come this far she had to believe that rumour was true.
A route avoiding the most cracked piers perforce took her beside or between the fuller cisterns. As she made her way further out she found very few of the cisterns were actually empty except along the edge. Most had at least three metres of foul smelling glop in the bottom, usually bubbling flatulently or swirling in slow, rancid eddies. She steered well away from anywhere the sludge was seeping over and crossed no crack that was bigger than a long step. While looking back to see how far she had come, Donna caught sight of low, lean shapes slinking along the piers after her. At least the rats still had their hopes up.
Donna slogged on through the dizzying stench and concentrated on keeping her feet from straying. Her knees were starting to feel uncomfortably weak when she reached yet another intersection between the piers with four especially full and eye-wateringly foul pits. Donna looked around at her choices and glanced back to check on her rodent companions, noting interestedly that they were nowhere to be seen.
That was her first warning.
She heard a soft plop behind her like a particularly large bubble rising to the surface of the sludge.
That was her second warning.
Something gelatinous writhed around her ankle. She whipped her foot away in revulsion and whirled about. A nest of translucent, questing tendrils was reaching blindly out of the sludge at her. She almost backed right off the pier, her arms flailing and heels skittering on nothing at its edge. Another plop announced the emergence of a similar horror behind her. Crouching to regain her balance, Donna whipped out Seventy-one and slashed around her desperately, shuddering every time the spinning teeth tore through soft, yielding flesh. A severed tendril flopped against her arm, and its very contact raised welts on the skin and instantly made the limb go numb. Donna threw caution to the wind and ran along the pier to escape, and in doing so she missed seeing the third attacker until it was too late.
Tendrils lashed at her face, catching in her hair as she ducked away. She was brutally dragged down to the pier and almost over the edge, her face numbing as tendrils brushed against it. She couldn’t see, her sword arm felt like a solid lump of ceramite, and the grip on her long dreadlocks tenaciously dragged her towards the viscid sludge. In desperation she ripped out her plasma pistol, pointed it over the edge and pulled the trigger. There was a heart-stopping fraction of a second delay, and then a tiny part of the sun touched the sludge pits. Raw sludge flashed into geysers of superheated steam where it struck and flames raced away over the surface. In seconds the flames had reached the limits of the cistern and lapped hungrily at its edges. Whatever had a hold of Donna let go and she crawled away along the pier with her sight dimming from the potent toxins in her face and arm.
She could sense light and heat from the burning cistern. She could also feel it becoming more intense as the fire spread. Thick, choking smoke billowed around her, filling her lungs until it felt like they were coated with black soot. She crawled on, dragging her paralysed arm with Seventy-One dangling uselessly from it. For a terrifying eternity her world shrank to encompass only the rough surface of the pier and her inching painfully along it. About a couple of millennia later she felt herself tumbling over an incline. By that time all Donna could do was flail feebly as she rolled over. She hit bottom and blacked out.
The rats, their patience rewarded at last, trotted down to the supine form at the bottom of the slope. Jaws twitched and drooled at the prospect of sinking fangs into firm white flesh. Donna lay paralysed and could do nothing as the pack closed in around her. They were led by a scorched and blackened skeletal
horror with bony horns on its head. With malicious deliberation, they started gnawing on her arm and face.
Rats! Donna’s first conscious thought brought her sharply awake. She started up violently and fell back down coughing and retching. A burning sensation like pins and needles times a million coursed through her arm and face. She cursed and slapped at them to get the circulation going while she glared around for her tormentors. Outside of her fever-dream there were no rats to be seen, just a bare incline behind her that led up to the sludge pits. She must have crawled to the edge and rolled down before losing consciousness.
Donna had no way to know how long she had been out but the air was acrid with smoke and she could make out wavering patches of orange illumination smearing the clouds at the top of the slope. That indicated some of the pits were still burning, presumably not too much time had passed. She picked herself up more cautiously this time and bent slowly to scoop up Seventy-one and her plasma pistol from where they had fallen. The Pig was down to a quarter charge; she must have pulled back on the trigger way too hard back there. She was lucky it hadn’t overheated and taken her hand off.
Whatever horror was in the sludge had either burned on the surface or had been driven to the bottom.
Donna would wager good credit on the fact it couldn’t come after her or she would already be dead. She limped slowly away from the pits, her arm and face burning, every part of her body feeling scraped and bruised. She wanted nothing more than to lie down and rest, but instead she kept going and made a mental note to shoot the next rat she saw for all the trouble the little frikkers were causing.
There had been no revenge killings on her part by the time she reached the back wall. The air was a little cleaner here, but not much as the fires were still burning. Blinking through the smoky haze, Donna felt a moment of heart-crushing defeat as she saw the wall was unbroken along its entire length. There was no way through. The stories were wrong and she was as good as dead. She shook her head to get a grip on the gibbering panic that was rising inside her and looked again, paying more attention to the smoke. It was definitely swirling away from the wall in some places. The fires were drawing air into the pits from an adjacent space, and if air could move there was presumably a way through.
She found an old service crawlway after a dozen steps but it was mostly blocked off by debris so she kept looking. She found an identical crawl space ten steps further along and hauled herself into it. It was a tight squeeze, making her wonder just how big maintenance workers had been back then. Donna didn’t really care as the cleaner air was sweet and, most important of all, a way out of the thrice-damned sludge pits.
Donna dropped out of the crawlway and into the generatoria dome. Her legs were shaking with exhaustion but she was so far from being in a safe place to rest it wasn’t even funny. After the pits, the generatoria dome seemed majestic and cathedral-like. Building-sized reactor stacks reached upward before splitting into branched conduits like so many giant candelabra, their sweeping ironwork arches lit by beams of sodium-yellow light as they ran off out of sight hundreds of metres above. Dark specks floated through the saffron shafts like so many dust motes, probably flocks of carrion bats out looking for a meal. At least some of the generators were still working; Donna could feel vibration through the floor and see the occasional jewel-like blinking among the branches. It was frustrating to be in the presence of so much coursing energy and be unable to use it, but Donna stuck to the dome wall for good reason.
In ages past there had been a time of crisis above as desperate power shortages plagued the ever-growing Hive City. Desperate decisions had been made and some heroic team of engineers had descended to the old generatoria dome to reactivate as many generators as possible. It was a Herculean effort marred by frequent accidents and Underhiver scav-raids making off with equipment, tools and materials at any opportunity. At the end of it all, the techs had left an enduring gesture to their hosts by rigging the casings of the reactors (and just about anything else nearby) so that they ran with live power. Donna could see that each stack was surrounded by its own drift of burned scraps and blackened bones left by over-ambitious power tappers, incautious vermin and ignorant green hivers.
She tried to stay off any areas of metal, whether it be grill-like floor plates, protruding supports or even just where cracked rockrete exposed its reinforcing internal mesh of rods. When there was metal unavoidably in her path she threw bits of scrap at it to see if they raised a spark. She was paying such close attention to her feet that she didn’t even notice the little holestead in the dome wall until she was almost parallel with it.
A narrow door had been crammed into a crack in the wall; a crude thing of scavenged plates welded together. The rubble floor in front of it was beaten flat and devoid of cover for several metres, and there were a couple of slime-trenches close to the entry. She was cautious, despite her bone-weariness, since holesteaders were an ornery bunch. They had to be to try and make a living beyond the comparative safety of the settlements. As such they were as likely to shoot at strangers as welcome them, which was not surprising given most gangers viewed any holestead as a potential source of income in exchange for their dubious brand of “protection”.
Donna warily approached the door. She drew her laspistol but held it loosely at her side—it was good manners and good sense to show that you were armed and prepared to shoot in the Underhive, if only to show that at least you weren’t a liability. Close up she could see the door was hanging slightly ajar and dark handprints marked the jamb. Not a good sign. She raised her pistol and drew Seventy-one with her other hand (still tingling, dammit!), hooking the door fully open with it.
A short entryway led straight into the living area. The holesteaders had widened this part of the crack and dug out sleeping niches but it was still barely more than a corridor. Plastic sheeting hung down separating the living area from another half-dug chamber at the back. There was blood everywhere. There were drag-stains on the floor, handprints on the wall, and arterial spray patterns looped chaotically about the room. Furniture and belongings had been scattered around in some kind of struggle: broken plates, a shattered pict, a child’s rag doll that made Donna shudder internally for its owner. Judging by the sleeping niches at least four people had lived here, but there was no sign of any of them.
Some horrible tragedy had occurred at this holestead, and it was all the more mysterious as the door could only be opened from the inside and hadn’t been forced as Donna had first assumed. On the bright side their fuel rod was still burning; the wan yellow lights glimmered as she moved through the hole, and there was a humming power outlet near the door. Without hesitation she snapped out the Pig’s power pack and slotted it into the outlet. Grisly as the place was, it was the closest to safety Donna had seen in a while. She closed the door and locked it before selecting a sleeping niche and dropping into fitful slumber, her pistol at the ready and internal alarms set on a hair trigger.
Donna was hours from the holestead and almost out of the generatoria dome when she noticed she was being followed. She was watching yet another flock of carrion bats circling over one of the stacks, indicating that they were waiting for something to die. She suddenly sensed movement on the ground. A small group—three of four figures—moved together and slowly followed the route she had taken. Even at this distance she could tell they were not gang fighters; they shuffled along too hesitantly and bunched up all the time.
The exit from the generatoria dome was up a series of switchback ramps of compacted rubble. The group trailing her would have her in a tight spot on the ramps. There was no cover and nowhere to go except up or down. Donna decided to hide and get a look at whoever they were from closer up, and then she would decide whether to just let them pass or deal with them.
She hunched behind a tumble of fallen rockrete and waited… And waited. An interminable time later she heard feet scrunching through the dirt, drawing gradually closer. Donna’s patience was already shot, and impulsively she
decided to confront them and have done with it. She bounded out behind them, sword and pistol at the ready, and hissed, “Freeze or you’re dead.”
The words had barely left her lips before she realised she had made a mistake. They were already dead.
Two men, a woman, and a little girl stood raggedly before her. Donna immediately reckoned that they were the missing holesteaders. Horrible wounds marked all of them: torn throats, hanging intestines, flapping skin, glistening bone, missing eyes. They were plague zombies.
Even in the Spire Donna had heard stories of the fearful neuron plague that periodically swept the hives of Necromunda with a liberal dose of anarchy and chaos. It destroyed the victim’s higher mental functions while leaving intact, or even intensifying, activity in the hindbrain. The result was a creature always hungry for flesh and incapable of feeling pain.
Every time the afflicted pulled down another victim they infected it and added a new member to their ranks. At their peak the zombie plagues touched even the Spire, choking the promenades and boulevards with heaving crowds of restless, ravening dead. Once in the Underhive, Donna had learned that the plague had never really gone away at all, it just lay dormant in the darkness below and contented itself with taking odd victims here and there until it rose again in full force.
Donna felt sick with fear. She had slept in the plague-struck holestead so she might be infected already. Failing that, the zombies could inflict it with so much as a scratch of their ragged, filth-encrusted claws. She caught sight of the little girl’s face, miraculously intact but with slack, drooling lips and cloudy eyes. Something snapped inside Donna’s mind, an old familiar break that came when some part of her own hindbrain said “no more”. She saw red and the fight that followed became a stop-motion flick book of carnage from her perspective.
Two shots as she charged, one body down with limbs flailing. A backhand cut from Seventy-one sliced through the top of a skull like a knife through an egg. Another cut lopped off a reaching claw. A point-blank las-shot fired into an empty eye socket. A zombie tripped on its own entrails. A decapitation. Hacking, hacking, hacking at the dead little girl until she finally stopped writhing.
Necromunda - Survival Instinct Page 4
