by S. A. Lusher
She tried to get it up but there wasn't enough space. Abandoning the rifle, she groped for her pistol. She could just barely reach it, but in order to fully do so, she had to raise up her head. If she raised it even another inch or so the thing would get a solid chunk out of her face. Jennifer held her breath as an idea came to her. She shoved up with her legs as hard as she could. It didn't throw the beast off of her, but it raised it up enough so that she could get at her pistol. She grabbed it, pulled it from its holster, aimed and fired.
She emptied half the fucking magazine into the thing, spraying its dark gore over the environment. Now that it wasn't pushing against her, she used the last of her strength in her legs to slump it to the side off of her. Jennifer gasped as a dark figure appeared over her and she shifted her pistol, but she eased that crucial final centimeter off the trigger when she realized it was Drake. He offered her a hand but she waved him off.
“Need a minute,” she said. “My legs.”
“Okay,” he said. “You all right?”
“Yeah, fine,” Jennifer replied.
She gave herself three minutes, then she stood up, groaning. Her thighs were burning. She was glad for the daily regimen of exercise she'd put herself through. She and Drake resumed their journey yet again, crossing the specimen storage room and exiting it. They hurried down and across the corridor beyond and finally located the backup mainframe room. The pair of them stepped inside, cleared it with a sweep of their rifles and approached the main workstation. This room seemed to be in significantly better condition than the last one.
“Cover me,” Drake said as he stood before the workstation and hooked into it. “I'll need just a minute to copy all this.”
“Take your time,” Jennifer replied as she began moving across the room, double-checking to make sure they were really alone.
It had seemed empty but there were a lot of free-standing data stacks. She began moving through them, checking out the shadows and niches. She thought she could sense someone or something in there with them now...
Jennifer spun as something shifted behind her and an explosion of pain erupted across her face as something heavy and solid hit her, sending her sprawling. She yelled in pain, pulling the trigger, spending bullets here and there. Landing on her back, she found herself staring up at a hulking figure she immediately recognized as Frost. He was aiming away from her, to the left, in between a pair of data stacks, towards Drake. Whatever he was holding, it sparked bright blue-white when he squeezed the trigger.
At almost the same moment she heard Drake shout in pain and a heavy thud. Great, she was likely on her own now. Aiming through the haze of tears the pain had brought on, she raised her rifle. As she squeezed the trigger, Frost suddenly lashed out with one immense booted foot, causing the shot to go wide and tearing her rifle from her grip. He aimed his own rifle at her. Jennifer lashed out with her boot, hitting his shin with her heel and causing the man to scream in agony. She did it again, then pulled out her pistol, aimed and fired.
The shot was a good hit, punching through his left shoulder and releasing a spray of blood. Frost screamed again and then recovered. He tried to raise his rifle but his left arm wouldn't respond. He squeezed the trigger and a round punched Jennifer in the stomach, hitting her bulletproof vest but not going through. Still knocked the wind out of her though. Jennifer moved to hit him with her heel again but he stepped aside and tried to line up another shot. Jennifer rolled away from him and managed to scramble in between the mainframes.
Drake was still on the floor. Not good. She scrambled to her feet and barely avoided getting hit with another shot. Spinning, she raised her pistol and tried to draw a bead on Frost, but he was already in the process of throwing his bulk towards her. She sidestepped again but Frost clipped her and sent her sprawling.
“Time's up,” he said. It would have sounded ridiculous in any other situation, coming out of anyone else's mouth, but Frost made it sound serious and intimidating. Especially as he raised his rifle once more, his left arm hanging uselessly at his side, blood spilling down it. Jennifer's pistol had been thrown from her hand.
She stared up into the black maw of cold death.
At that moment, Drake's arm shot up, pistol in hand and he emptied the whole magazine into Frost, sending the man stumbling back the length of the room. The moment of pure horror passed as Frost's gun fell away.
“Goddamn,” Drake said thickly, slowly getting up. “Never thought I'd have to deal with one of those fucking shock guns again.”
Jennifer couldn't think of anything to say. They both got to their feet. “Um...you okay?” she asked, finally, realizing that she was more shaken than she was used to. Maybe she'd stared down death one too many times today.
“Fine,” Drake grunted as he turned back to the workstation. He worked the controls for a moment, then made a small sound of grim joy. “Good, we've got the files, the research. Fucking finally. I need to update the others.”
Jennifer nodded and crossed the length of the room, following the bloody trail Frost had left. He was lying on his back now, a hole in his neck, another in his forehead, a peppering of crushed shells in his bulletproof vest, the bloody socket she'd created in his shoulder. He was lying on his back in a widening pool of blood, broken in death, silent and still. He'd come to kill them. Why did it have to come to this so often?
She heard Drake wrapping up a conversation. “Good news,” he said. “The doctor we're looking for, he's apparently trying to flee. He's underground, moving our way. We need to get down there, capture him. You game?” he asked.
“Always,” Jennifer replied, feeling her control reassert itself.
“Good, let's go.”
* * * * *
They'd made good time cutting through a couple of back maintenance corridors that had been installed to let techs get around fast in an emergency. Now, Greg was stepping out into a larger corridor as the maintenance passageway they were using terminated in a room with a couple of workbenches and lockers. Beyond, there was a war going on. They'd come out just a few corridors over from the command center.
And Enzo.
Greg was nervous. Enzo was good, really good, at combat and staying alive. He wasn't sure if he, Drake or Eve would be capable of bringing the man down. He'd spent thirty years surviving in pain, been through Spec Ops training and all sorts of other kinds of trails by fire. Greg roused himself as he peered out into the corridor. A squad of men and women in dark armor were combating a pack of zombies and Rippers with a few Lancers mixed in. The squad seemed to be holding their own. Greg motioned for Eve to hang back for a second, then, exposing as little of himself as possible, leaned out, took aim and put a round through one of the men's faces.
That got things going.
The squad, previously tight and concentrated, suddenly found themselves a man down and facing a new threat. That gave a few of the Rippers a chance to get past their defenses and move in close among them, tearing into them in vicious sprays of blood and loud shrieks and screams. Greg stepped out of the way, calling for Eve's help, and they both shifted into the corridor and began putting down hostiles. Immediately, the remainder of the Rippers, a trio of the nasty things, and a pack of zombies broke away from the conflict.
They began coming right for them.
Greg and Eve quickly downed the Rippers with sure, proficient shots, then took out of the zombies with a series of headshots. As the last zombie fell, they returned their attention to the Rogue Ops squad, only to see that they'd been taken out by the Lancers and zombies. The pair quickly took down the remaining survivors.
“Not bad,” Greg said, then immediately regretted it as he heard running footsteps. He dropped to one knee and aimed down the corridor, waiting. A few seconds later, another Rogue Ops trooper rounded the corner. He was promptly put down with two shots through the neck, and so was the next one who rushed into view by Eve, who shattered his faceplate with a well-placed shot. There was a pause and Greg tensed waiting for more
troops to barrel into view. That wasn't what happened next. Instead, someone tossed a grenade.
Then another.
“Oh fuck, back!” Greg shouted.
They both beat a hasty retreat to the maintenance corridor, barely managing to get inside in time before the twin blasts shook the area and sprayed a deadly hail of metal fragments every which way. Greg leaned out and prepared to return fire and nearly had his head taken off by a shot that glanced off the door frame next to him.
“Greg, we need to go,” Eve said suddenly. “They know it's us, they're converging on our location. There's a lot of them.”
“Fuck!” Greg snapped.
He pulled out a pair of grenades all his own, pulled the pins and tossed them quickly. There were a series of shouts but he was already running after Eve. They'd made it down the maintenance corridor and into a side room by the time the second twin eruptions went off. He followed Eve into a maintenance bay, shut and locked the door behind him, then hurried to catch up as Eve opened up a hatch and jumped back down into the underground. As soon as she was out of the way, he jumped down as well, landing with a grunt.
“Fuck, now what?” he muttered.
“I've got an idea...wait, hold on...”
Greg checked the area while Eve listened in on Rogue Ops' comm chatter. They'd come down into another nondescript tunnel of bland chrome metal. Greg had to admit he was getting really sick of seeing stuff like this. How many miles of corridor had he stalked through in his life? His life being about eight months long now. He hadn't had to put up with it much over the past half-year but apparently that just wasn't enough time. He'd been here hardly two hours and already he was getting bugged by it.
“Found Matheson,” Eve said suddenly.
“Where?”
“Not near us, near the others, let me fill them in.”
She began leading him as she contacted Drake and gave him the pertinent data on Matheson, which was fine by him, he didn't want to deal with the guy anyway. That man gave Greg the creeps. Thinking about Matheson made him angry, anyway. Tracking the man should have been absurdly easy, given that he had a fucking tracking device implanted on him, but the government had been unwilling to lend them the technology used to track the implant. They said they were afraid of it falling into the wrong hands but in their eyes any hands but their own were the wrong hands, even though Anomalous Ops was technically part of the government.
Greg got the idea that no one trusted Hawkins and his crew.
“Where are we going?” Greg asked.
“Last time I glanced at the map I saw a security workstation down here. Enzo's boys and girls upstairs have the situation around the command center largely under control. We need to fix that if we're going to deal with Enzo,” Eve replied, turning another corner.
“And how do we do that?”
“Repeat performance. Open all the doors, kill the power.”
“You'd think they would have put safeguards in place to prevent that, since we've already done it once,” Greg said.
“And by now, I'd have thought that you'd have figured out what a genius I am...ah, here we are, watch my back.”
“Gladly.”
“Back, not ass,” Eve said, rolling her eyes.
They came into it security center. It was abandoned but functional. Eve stood before it, set her gun aside and went to work. Greg watched her. There was something intimidating about his girlfriend, a kind of tenacity, a grim determination that could be deterred, apparently, by nothing. It was a fantastic quality to have in this line of work where nothing was as it seemed and the situation was constantly evolving, and he had it himself. But it was intimidating. And very attractive. He'd come to realize that it might even be the foundation, the real foundation, of their relationship. She was intense, rarely backed down, happy to fight if the situation called for it.
She was like a shot of adrenaline.
Abruptly, the power died, replaced once more by crimson emergency lights. Greg's visor cleaned his vision up, giving him a better view of the area. Overhead, there were confused shouts, then, suddenly, a staccato barrage of gunfire.
“Let's go,” Eve said.
* * * * *
How could this be happening?
How could it all be falling apart so fast?
“Where's Frost?” Enzo asked.
“No response,” one of the techs replied.
“Keep trying,” Enzo growled. His mind was racing. It was really looking like he was going to have to evacuate. He didn't want to, it was the last fucking thing in the world he wanted to do, but he still had Natalia, a ship, the research and Matheson.
Matheson...
Where was doctor?
“Matheson!?” he called out, scanning the command center. “Where the fuck is Matheson!?” No one seemed to know where he was. “Goddamnit, get a team out of and find him...” But where to look? He thought for a moment, then an idea struck him.
Reaching up to massage his shoulder again, which was flaring up, Enzo activated his communications unit and began walking towards the infirmary. There was too much going on. The pain was making the situation untenable.
“Natalia,” he said as he stepped inside his private infirmary and sealed the door. “Natalia, where are you?”
“I'm not too far from the hangar. I'm alone now...the creatures took out the guards I brought with me,” she replied.
Enzo sighed. “Shit. All right, look. Keep an eye out for the good doctor. Matheson is missing and I imagine he's trying to escape. We need him. You find him, you capture him. Knock him out or something, tie him up.”
“Got it...are you coming? What's happening?”
“It's bad...” Enzo replied. A fresh wave of pain flared up from his shoulder. He bit back a cry of agony, feeling tears welling in his eyes. When he opened them, he found that he was staring at the device.
He wanted, very badly, to use it.
To find out.
“Are you coming?” Natalia repeated, an edge of worry to her voice.
“Y-yes,” Enzo replied. “I'll be along soon.”
“Okay, hurry.”
Enzo continued staring at the device. “I'll be there soon.”
CHAPTER 15
–Downfall–
“So how are we supposed to find this guy?” Jennifer asked. “And who is he, anyway?”
They were back underground again after recovering the data and getting their wind back. Now more than ever Jennifer was lamenting not having a suit of power armor. She'd never worn one before, only regular body armor.
“His name is Matheson. He's a scientist. A genius, apparently. Since you're either going to die or join us, I'll fill you in, I guess. The guys we're fighting, they used to work for the Galactic Alliance. They were like...well, like a bigger version of what I do now. They dealt with unique, weird situations. Well, exploited them, actually. But then they went rogue and became Rogue Operations. I and a handful of others were...culled, I guess, to put them down.”
“A handful of people put down an entire branch of the government?”
“We had a lot of help. They mostly destroyed themselves, too. And we got lucky pretty often. But yeah. Anyway, this guy, Matheson, turned on them, offered to give us information, though I think he was just looking out for himself. He saw which way the winds were blowing and figured why not get back on the winning side? We rescued him from a bad situation and turned him over to the authorities. Apparently he didn't like how they were treating him, so when Enzo came calling, he decided to switch back over again.”
“And now...we're supposed to capture him?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Well, presumably so they can try to milk more of his genius out of him from a prison cell, I imagine.”
“Maybe we should just kill the guy. Someone with that much potentially dangerous knowledge and that lacking in morals seems absurdly dangerous.”
“I was having similar thoughts...”
&n
bsp; They both fell silent as they heard gunshots. Pistol reports and someone cursing, followed by a loud moan. The pair rushed down the corridor they were standing in and came to a heat exchange room, the walls made of piping and workstations, everything bathed in a crimson glow. Power had died again in some areas and was functioning only somewhat decently in others. More gunshots came from the left, down a narrow alcove.
“Come on,” Drake said. “I think that might be him.”
“How can you tell?” Jennifer asked as he rushed into the alcove.
“I remember his voice.”
For a moment, she felt the press of the narrow alcove around her. All she could see ahead was Drake's bulky power armored back, and the gunshots were getting louder, closer. Then, suddenly, the walls fell away and they were in a much larger room. A bald man wrapped in a bloodied white jumpsuit stood in the middle of a half-dozen advancing zombies. Drake raised his rifle and began picking the things off, so Jennifer helped. They each took down half. When all was still and silent, Drake shifted his rifle to the bald man.
“Doctor Matheson,” he said.
“Oh dear, I seem to recognize you,” the man replied. “From the frozen planet with the cyborgs,” he murmured.
“Yeah. I'm here to place you under arrest. The government would like a word with you.”
“And if I refuse?” Matheson asked.
Drake shifted his aim slightly and fired. The bullet just barely missed his right ear and buried itself in the wall behind him.
“Ah...I see,” Matheson murmured. “Very well then, I suppose I-” He froze and stopped speaking as heavy footfalls sound.
“Aw fuck!” Drake groaned.
Jennifer turned to spy a Titan pushing its way into the room.
