by S. A. Lusher
All they had to do was crawl a bit-
Drake froze as a loud, drawn-out metallic groan suddenly sounded. The vent beneath him shifted slightly.
“Oh fuck, back up, back-”
The vent broke open all at once and the three of them came crashing down into a large, open area. Drake cried out as he slammed into the floor, banging his injured shoulder, but quickly recovered, scrambling to his feet. Taking a quick survey of his surroundings, he surmised that they'd been dumped into the training area. Free weights, training mats and benches surrounded him. Although they were alone for the moment, he knew that it wouldn't stay that way for long. Someone was screaming in the distance.
And it was getting closer.
“Come on!” he snapped to the others, taking off for a door at the far end of the room. He glanced over his shoulder and saw that they'd both regained their feet and were running after him. They had to get the hell out of here.
Drake burst through the open doorway and skidded to a halt in the corridor beyond, tossing quick glances left and right. Still nothing, but the shouting was closer now and accompanied by pounding, frantic footfalls.
“Which way?” he asked, uncertain.
“Left, all the way to the end,” Eric replied.
Drake turned left and started running. He had his rifle out now. Eric had said something that he should have thought of himself, something that made him feel like an idiot, not a twenty year merc vet: incapacitate them. It was obvious that something was driving them, that headless corpse he'd seen was proof enough of that. Some kind of force...or power...some strange energy was at work on Ash. And although he couldn't incapacitate them, he could clip their wings, so to speak. An armless immortal enemy was a hell of a lot less threatening than a wholly intact one. They could still kick and bite and barrel into you, but the biting wouldn't get through the suit and the kicking would probably just be an inconvenience.
Plus, the armor-piercers they were packing should be enough to, with three or four shots, blast their damn arms off.
The only problem was that those were precision shots, a lot of them, and that wasn't really easy when you had a dozen assholes running and screaming at you at all at once. As he hit the end of the corridor, which terminated in a T-junction, he spun around, hearing the shrieks of the damned. Sure enough, at the other far end of the corridor, behind Parker and Eric, he spied a half-dozen of the bastards racing for them, with more showing up every second.
Drake raised his rifle, switched to three-round burst, took aim and fired. His first barrage was lucky: the right arm of the lead psychotic blew off at the shoulder in a spray of gore. He adjusted him aim slightly and fired, once and then twice, since the first assault missed. The leader's left arm blew off then as well.
It didn't stop him from running forward, though.
“Come on!” Eric cried, leading Parker down another hallway.
Feeling satisfied that he had at least some kind of workable solution, something he could fall back on if he absolutely had to, Drake followed after them, picking up the pace. The answer, at least for right now, was still to get the fuck out of the base and to the research site. Ahead him, Eric hooked a right into an open door and Drake and Parker followed. They sprinted through a security center, burst out the opposite door and emerged in another corridor. Running its length led them back to the door they'd originally come through.
There were more crazies around.
One of them lurched out of an open doorway and snagged Drake in passing, grabbing him by the neck and beginning to lift him off the floor. Drake gagged, beating helplessly on the thing's wrist as hard as he could. On the third strike, he heard something snap and the psycho's hand sagged slightly, now at an awkward angle. He was trying to get his rifle up into position when, suddenly, there was a spray of gunfire and the guy's shoulder turned into an eruption of bloody gore. The arm detached and the fingers were still in a death grip around Drake's throat. He shouldered the crazy in one hard jolt, sending him stumbling back into the office he'd originated from, then tore the disembodied arm away and raised it to throw it in after him.
The arm twitched and made another grab for him.
It was still functional.
Screaming in surprise and revulsion, Drake threw it and ran after the others.
“Did you fucking see that!?” he snapped.
“I saw it,” Parker replied grimly.
“What?! What happened?!” Eric cried, ahead of them, getting the door open.
“Their body parts work even if they're fucking detached from them!” Drake replied.
Eric apparently had nothing to say to that. He got the door open and hurried back outside into the wretched dark light of Ash. Parker went out after him and Drake got out last, slamming his fist on the close button, then locking it. Ahead, beyond the landing pads and the storage shacks was the beautiful sight of their vehicle.
They ran for it. Over the cracked, blasted landing pads, across the ashy surface of the planet and in between the shacks. Behind them, the base screamed, writhing with impossible, immortal, tortured life. It sounded like the whole population was coming for them, coming to claim and convert them, to turn them mad with unending pain too.
Drake followed them out through the gate and threw himself into the driver's seat, fired the vehicle up and, the second he was sure the others were in the jeep and they weren't going to fall out, he stomped on the gas pedal.
* * * * *
Eric felt like his mind was tearing him in about a thousand different directions. He'd been sitting in silence for a few minutes now as they drove across the wastelands of Ash, just getting his breath back. All at once, he felt the urge to speak, to get out of his own head, to distract himself somehow. “I don't suppose anyone has any interesting theories on just what the fuck is happening?” he asked, looking first at Drake, then at Parker.
Drake shook his head. “I've got no fucking clue.”
“I've been wondering...” Parker began, then hesitated.
“What?” Eric pressed.
“I've been thinking that we might be in a pocket dimension.”
“What?” Drake asked.
“It's like...” She sighed. “How to explain this? It's essentially a sub space, a realm within a realm. It's only been theorized. I could be wrong, but it's the sun that made me think of it.”
At that, Eric glanced up at the sun. It didn't seem particularly bright and it was horribly awkward to stare at that black orb with its deep, deep crimson corona.
“Obviously the sun doesn't look like that from outside the planet. It would also explain the absolute lack of scanning ability or the communications blackout we've encountered. Like I said, I could be wrong but it makes about as much sense as anything else so far.”
“Interesting...in more practical and immediate theories, I wanted to discuss tactics to take these assholes down, to somehow incapacitate them or at least de-fang them. Back in the base, I managed to blow the arms off of one of them with a three-round burst for each arm. Obviously it doesn't put them down but it takes a lot of their killing power away.”
“I was thinking about something similar,” Parker replied. “That man we came across, the first one, he was bolted to the wall. If we could find some industrial strength bolt or rivet guns, we could pin them to hard surfaces.”
“Whoa...what the hell is that?” Drake asked. Eric had been looking inbound, at the others, but now he snapped his gaze forward.
At first, he couldn't tell what the hell it was. Then, as he activated the zoom function on his visor, he saw it was the bony remains of some kind of huge creature. It was difficult to tell but from the rough shape of the bleached bones it seemed like a ground-based creature...did Ash have any native life? No, he remembered from the briefing, no it didn't. Not at all. So what the fuck was this thing and why was it so creepy?
“There's not supposed to be any native lifeforms on Ash,” Parker said quietly.
“I-” Drake began to
respond, but then shut up as the pile of bones shifted.
“Oh fuck,” Eric moaned.
It was getting up. The bone pile moved, reformed and surged forth from the ashy ground as the jeep drew within twenty meters of it. Before Eric could even get the shape of it in his mind or Drake could swerve to avoid it, the thing charged straight at them. Drake slammed on the brakes, which probably saved them from serious injury or even death as the beast charged them. The front of the jeep crumpled instantly as the two objects met. Eric screamed as he was thrown through the front window and up over this mysterious new entity.
He sailed through the air and then slammed into the ground, rolling several times, his whole body wracked with pain. He heard shouting over the radio, and gunfire, as he finally rolled to a stop and lurched to his feet, trying to stop his head from spinning. Eric grabbed for his rifle, thanking luck that it hadn't been dislodged from his body in the crash. Spinning back around, he saw Drake a couple meters away, already up and firing at the thing. And Parker...he couldn't find Parker for a second. But then he heard more gunfire, closer to the creature.
He realized, all at once, that she was on top of it.
She must have flown right onto the thing when she'd been dislodged from the jeep. Now she was on its broad spinal column, firing right down into its skull. As Eric sighted the thing, he finally got a good look at it. It was about the size of an elephant, maybe a bit bigger, and it had a head that reminded him of how some people drew dragons, only it came with tusks. It was a big, bulky four-legged thing and even sported a long, spiky tail. The creature was an impossible beast, a collection of bones that, without any supporting musculature or meat, shouldn't have been able to stay together at all, let alone attack them.
But that didn't change the fact that it was happening.
“Parker!” Drake called. “Get off of there!”
Parker began to say something, but then the creature turned fully to face them and jerked, trying to dislodge her. Taking the hint, she let go, dropped down between its huge rib cage and hit the ground running, ducking and narrowly avoiding its big, spiked swinging tail.
“Grenades!” Drake roared.
Eric had already opened fire on the thing, chipping bone from its skull with armor-piercing rounds, but he responded to Drake's order immediately. Pulling out one of his fragmentation grenades, he primed and hurled it. Three grenades from three different locations landed perfectly, rolling beneath the huge bony monstrosity.
A second passed.
The resulting triple explosion blew the thing to bits. A wave of tiny, bleached-white bone fragments rained down, a great deal of them burying themselves in the flaky dirt, a lot of them plinking off of the warrior's suits of power armor. When the dust finally settled and the quiet returned, Eric's gaze was drawn to the jeep.
It was a smoking ruin of twisted metal.
“I guess we're walking,” Drake muttered.
“What the fuck was that thing?” Eric asked as they regrouped.
“I doubt we're going to find out,” Parker replied.
“All right, we need to get going,” Drake said, orienting himself towards the base using his suit's navigational system. “Greg's team is definitely going to beat us there and we're all going to need all the help we can get.”
As they set off, making for the research site, a drop of blood landed on Eric's visor. He frowned, blinked, looked around.
“What the hell?” he muttered.
“What-” Drake began, then, “what the fuck?”
More drops of blood landed on his visor now, and not just on his visor, but...all around him. He looked up to confirm this latest maddening development.
“It's raining blood,” Parker said quietly, staring up as well.
“We need to hurry,” Eric replied.
They set off.
CHAPTER 11
–The Labyrinth–
“Shoot them in the legs,” Greg said suddenly.
“W-what?” Jennifer asked, looking over at him. “What'd you say?”
“I've been sitting here, thinking about how to deal with these things...shoot them in the legs. No legs, no running. I don't know why the hell I didn't think about it sooner,” he replied.
“Oh...that makes sense,” Jennifer murmured.
“A sound tactic,” Keron said quietly from where he sat in the back.
They'd been driving for a little while now in silence, away from the devastated colony and the writhing, shrieking madness that now passed for a local population. Greg was still trying to digest all of the information that had been forced on him over the past hour. He felt like he was no longer playing with a full deck. It was difficult to hold onto his train of thought and, what was worse, thoughts of Campbell kept creeping back in. No matter what he was thinking of, eventually, he'd find his mind turning to his guilt.
How many had he killed?
How many had he gotten killed?
As they drove through the ashy desert, Greg glanced over at Jennifer. “Hey...I have a question,” he said, getting her attention.
She'd been staring out over the wastelands again, clearly lost in thought about something, but now she looked at him. She seemed pale, behind the glass pane of her visor. “What?” she asked.
“I've been having some, uh, troubles, with guilt recently,” he said, deciding not to try and mince words. “Killing people, getting people killed, survivor's guilt, I guess. And plain old murderer's guilt,” he added.
“Oh...you want to know how I deal with it?” Jennifer replied.
“Yeah. I mean, if you don't want to talk about this, it's fine.”
“No, I guess I don't mind talking shop. What else is there to talk about in a place like this?” She heaved a world weary sigh. “Before I met you and got this job, I didn't have to deal very much with murder. I had killed before and I spent a few years getting over it, dealing with it. I think how people handle murder is kind of like rolling dice. Either you can't handle it or you can, there's nothing you can do to augment that reality. As much as you prepare yourself before or rationalize it after, the stark reality is just that: you can handle it or you can't. And I discovered that I could handle it. I don't like it, at all, ever, but I can do it if it needs to be done.
“But, like I said, before I met Enzo and his fucking merry band, I'd only had to kill maybe half a dozen people. Working corporate security is generally boring, but sometimes it's dangerous. So I can handle having to kill people if they're trying to kill me. But getting people killed...” She hesitated again. “For the most part, I've done my job well. People have been injured under my watch, twice someone has died under my watch, but it wasn't really my fault. There was no way to prevent it. But...there was this guy, Mark, he was with me, back on the Cimmerian. I mentioned in my report that Enzo killed him when we were captured but...”
She stopped speaking once more, looking down at the dashboard, then, after a long moment, she looked over at Greg. “What I didn't mention was that I got him killed. I started pushing Enzo, I was...I was trying to test him, or to piss him off so much that he just left the room, or maybe get information out of him. Whatever, the point was that I played dice with our lives and, much to everyone's surprised, I think even Enzo himself, maybe especially him, Enzo killed Mark. Just like that. Just blew his fucking brains out because I pushed him. And I...I don't entirely know to handle that. Other than to just keep going.”
“That's all you can do,” Keron said, startling them both. “Just keep going.”
“I guess you're right,” Greg agreed reluctantly. But still, that worry and guilt was gnawing at him, slowly grinding him down.
Without warning, something abruptly burst up out of the ground in a spray of ashy dirt. Something big and solid. Greg screamed and swerved to avoid it but all that ended up doing was tipping the car over. It went rolling. The interior turned into painful chaos as the vehicle rolled rapidly. He heard the others screaming, the crunch of metal, the banging of the jeep hitti
ng the earth over and over again. Then, suddenly, it came to a stop.
Greg grunted as he was jolted violently to a halt. He was hanging upside down, still locked into his seat by the seatbelt.
“Jennifer? Keron?” he asked.
No reply, but somewhere, he thought he could hear screaming. It sounded like Keron. The sound turned his blood to ice. Quickly, fumbling, seeing blood on the inside of his visor and knowing that he'd been hurt somehow, he groped for the seatbelt release. As he did, he began to hear heavy, plodding footfalls.
They were getting closer.
Frantically, he continued trying to get unstuck, but the damned thing had been damaged, he realized. Groping for his combat knife, he planned to cut himself out. Only it didn't work out that way. What ended up happening was a hand with long, skeletal fingers, covered in what appeared to be melted wax, shot in through the shattered side window, wrapped around his torso and forcibly ripped him up and out of the vehicle.
Greg screamed as he was lifted off the ground, hanging upside down, and was brought to face height by the thing that had caused them to crash.
“WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS!?” he heard himself shriek as terror rushed into him.
He found himself staring into empty black sockets. Whatever it was, it had a skeleton's face, but a skeleton that had melted dark pink wax for skin, covered in ashy dirt. It opened its mouth, revealing a gaping maw with rings of spinning bony teeth, like a garbage disposal from hell, and loosed a shriek directly into his face.
Greg shrieked back.
Suddenly, he heard the distinct sound of a three-round burst and he was dropped. Grunting hard, he landed on his back and immediately began scrabbling away, his body reacting on autopilot, just wanting to get the fuck away from this horrific nightmare culled from the deepest pits of hell. As he was scrambling, he came across a hard shape in the dirt: a rifle. Whether or not it was his or someone else's, he didn't care. Snatching it up, he lurched to his feet. He took in the scene before him at a glance: the jeep was a crumpled wreck, the creature was standing next to it and Jennifer stood about five meters away, shooting it.
