Doomsday Hunter

by Eric Vall

  Thanks a lot, fate…

  I hated heights. Like, really hated heights.

  I could do creepy crawly bugs and vermin… I could do tight spaces… but heights?

  Not a chance.

  “Uh… I don’t think we have anything to secure ourselves to,” I argued, “so we’re kinda screwed if our ropes snap off when we’re halfway down the structure.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Hunter,” Natalie chuckled. “We’ll tie it to one of those large concrete beams on the side. Those things aren’t going anywhere any time soon.”

  Well, crap. Maybe there wasn’t any way out of this.

  We needed to get to the operator’s room, and it was right next to the reactor. Not to mention, we had no idea just how many Rubberfaces were inside of the building. For all we knew, there could be hundreds of the mutants waiting for us when we walked through those doors.

  Going straight into the reactor would be the quickest way from point A to point B, and it would also probably be the least messy.

  But, then again… The heights.

  Your heart rate is increasing again, Hunter, Karla’s voice broke me out of my trance. Is everything alright?

  “It’s fine,” I reassured the woman. “Natalie just suggested we rappel down into the reactor so we aren’t seen by the Rubberfaces. Is that even, like… safe?”

  That’s a brilliant idea! the voice in my head gasped. Why didn’t I think of that?

  “So… it is safe?” I tried to lead Karla on, but she wasn’t picking up on my hints. “There’s nothing that could go wrong if we do it that way? Nothing at all?”

  Of course there are things that could go wrong, Karla scoffed. Your ropes could snap or the reactor could be turned on while you’re descending or the mutants could be waiting for you inside of the reactor structure itself. But you’re a Wayfarer, Hunter. You can’t be dissuaded by a little bit of risk.

  I’d hardly call this a “little bit of risk,” but she was right.

  If that was going to be the safest option for getting us through this mission in one piece, then that’s what we needed to do.

  “She loves the idea,” I announced to Natalie. “Lead the way.”

  Natalie couldn’t contain her excitement as she jumped up and down and grinned. Then she recomposed herself, readied her AK-47, and crouched down so she wasn’t as easily visible. She motioned for me to follow her, and we began to head around the building using the tree line as our cover.

  Finally, we came to a point in the forest where we were straight across from the rungs that crawled up the side of the reactor, and Natalie took a deep breath as she looked around cautiously.

  “There’s absolutely nothing out there in terms of cover,” the Scavenger warned. “If one of those ugly fuckers comes around the corner and sees us, the only option we have is to keep running and hope they aren’t a good shot. Are you ready?”

  My heart was in my throat, but we didn’t really have much of a choice at this point. So, I gulped loudly, nodded, and then slung my shotgun back over my shoulder.

  Natalie threw her AK-47 onto her back, held up three fingers, and then started to count down from three.

  Three… Two… One.

  We both took off in a full sprint toward the side of the building, and the entire time I ran, I swore I saw something moving out of the corner of my eye.

  But we couldn’t stop.

  Even if that was a whole horde of Rubberfaces armed to the gills with rifles and shotguns and rocket launchers, we couldn’t stop.

  If we stopped, we’d be dead.

  Our footfalls echoed loudly across the dirt and gravel of the ground, but we finally made it to the edge of the reactor building.

  Without breaking stride, Natalie leapt up, grabbed onto the rungs that jutted from the side of the building, and began to climb.

  I was right behind her, though I was much less graceful. I stopped at the bottom of the ladder, grabbed the rungs in front of me, hoisted my feet up onto the lowest ones, and then began my ascent.

  The rungs of the ladder were old and crusty, and specks of dirty rust flaked off onto my hands with each move I made. I swore I heard the metal creak underneath me as I shifted my weight onto them, but I didn’t have any time to worry. There was still a long way to the top, and I was running on pure adrenaline.

  I just had to keep reminding myself not to look down.

  Dear god, Hunter, don’t look down.

  We moved up the ladder as quickly as our bodies would take us. As we got closer to the top of the structure, the wind became stronger and frigid as it threatened to knock us both off the decrepit rungs. However, I forced myself to do nothing but look straight ahead.

  Not down at the ground far below or up, where I’d see nothing but sky.

  Just straight ahead, at the pocked, dull gray concrete before me.

  My leg and arm muscles screamed from the stress of the long climb, but my adrenaline kept them from turning to complete mush. I had to keep going. Finally, just when my whole body started to ache, I felt my right hand hit a flat surface.

  The rooftop.

  Holy crap, we’d made it.

  Almost.

  The crumbling concrete gave out from beneath Natalie’s footing, and the Scavenger let out a gasp as she began to fall backwards off the building.

  I threw out my hands swiftly, caught the falling woman by the wrist, and then let out a grunt of frustration as I willed every muscle in my body to hold on for dear life.

  Natalie’s body slammed into the side of the concrete silo, and gravity threatened to pull her out of my grip.

  I wasn’t going to let that happen.

  I gritted my teeth as I gave a hearty tug, and soon I felt the weight lift from my hands.

  Natalie was now back up to safety, and she looked like she had just seen a ghost.

  “Thank you,” she whispered as she stood to her feet.

  “H-Holy shit,” I panted. “That was inten-”

  Before I could finish, Natalie put her hand over my mouth and gave me a sharp “shhh.”

  “Don’t move,” she warned as quietly as she could. “And definitely don’t talk.”

  Soon, I found out why. From all the way down at the ground, there was a loud clang.

  We both froze in place as we waited for the angry calls of the Rubberface guard. A tense moment went by where neither of us moved, spoke, or even breathed.

  Then, when I finally found my courage once more, I slowly crawled over to the side of the rooftop and peered over.

  Sure enough, the Rubberface guard was down below inspecting the fallen rung.

  Not good.

  My heartbeat jumped to the levels of an Olympic sprinter as I watched him look around for whoever threw the metal piece. Then he looked upward, and I only had seconds to pull away before he saw me.

  “He’s down there,” I whispered to Natalie. “And he just looked up.”

  “Did he see you?” she hissed and pulled her AK-47 over her shoulder.

  “I don’t know… ” I admitted. “I wasn’t going to stick around and find out.”

  Natalie’s eyes were nearly crazed as she slowly slunk over to the edge of the rooftop. The blonde woman cautiously looked out over the side, and I prepared to hear gunshots.

  However, they never came.

  Instead, Natalie let out a sigh of relief and crawled back over to my position.

  “He’s gone,” she announced. “Or, at least, he didn’t think the fallen rubble was worth investigating.”

  “Whew.” I rubbed the sweat from my brow. “I’m really sorry about that, Natalie.”

  “You have nothing to be sorry about, Hunter.” She shrugged and put her AK-47 back over her shoulder. “I’m the one who wasn’t paying attention to my footing. It was just a freak accident. I’m just glad you were there to catch me, or that guard would have found a lot more than a pile of rubble at the bottom of the ladder. Now, could you hand me that spool of rope that you brought along?”<
br />
  I pulled the bag off my back, sat it down on the concrete, and then opened it up. The spool of rope was still at the top, so I pulled it out and handed it over to Natalie.

  “Are you sure that’s enough?” I questioned.

  Natalie walked over to the hole at the center of the roof, looked down into the structure, and then shrugged.

  “Obviously, we don’t have enough to get us all the way down to the floor,” she noted, “but we don’t need that much. There’s a large, circular catwalk about fifty feet below us, and it appears to have ladders that will take us down to the next layer and then so on and so forth until we’re at the bottom.”

  “Uh… those spools say ‘one-hundred feet’ each,” I explained. “Now, I’m not a mathematician, but by my calculations that’s not going to be enough to get us down there.”

  “Oh, it won’t be,” Natalie admitted. “We also have to take into account the ten feet I’ll need to get it from the hole to the tie off. We’ll probably both only have about… thirty-five feet to work with when all’s said and done.”

  “That’s still a fifteen-foot drop,” I gulped.

  “And that’s a drop that’s survivable without injury.” Natalie shrugged, and then she walked over to the thick concrete pillars that jutted up off the edges of the roof.

  “Karla?” I whispered to the voice in my head. “Can humans really survive a fifteen-foot drop without hurting themselves?”

  It depends, Karla retorted. In theory, you could fuck up your leg by falling from a foot or two. It’s all in how you land, honestly.

  “Okay… ” I grumbled. “Let me rephrase the question. How can I fall from fifteen feet without hurting myself?”

  Over at the other side of the rooftop, Natalie was hard at work tying off our rappelling ropes. I was sure that, being a Scavenger, she knew how to tie a strong knot.

  I just worried about the state of the building, especially after my little near miss a minute ago.

  That’s easy, the voice in my head explained, you just have to tuck and roll. A few seconds before you reach the ground, just curl up into a ball, use your momentum to roll forward, and then pop up onto your feet. Do that, and you’ll be fine.

  “That easy, huh?” I asked sarcastically. “I’m not a parkour runner, you know.”

  Trust me, I know, Karla chuckled. But that’s really the only thing I can suggest in this situation. I’m assuming that means you are on the rooftop, and you’re short on rope?

  “Are you sure you’re not seeing everything through my eyes, like with a secret camera or something?” I teased. “Because you’re getting really good at guessing the exact situations I’m finding myself in.”

  We’re both good guessers, she mused. My father is a hyper-advanced artificial intelligence, after all.

  I couldn’t argue with that logic.

  Soon, Natalie had everything strapped up to the support beams, and she came back over with the two rope ends in her hand.

  “Now, we just need to tie ourselves in,” she announced. “This is gonna be the thing that makes or breaks this whole endeavor.”

  “Then you’d better do it right.” I winked.

  Natalie rolled her eyes. “I thought you were the one who knew all about survivalist stuff?”

  “I dabble.” I shrugged. “I will admit, I think I skipped over the episode where they taught you how to tie your own climbing harness.”

  “It’s actually not as hard as it looks,” she admitted. “At least, not when you’re making them for easy escape. You didn’t happen to grab any carabiners, did you?”

  I just shook my head. “I didn’t think we’d need them.”

  “No worries,” Natalie noted, “that just means my knot-tying skills are going to be all the more important.”

  The blonde woman took the end of the rope and wrapped it around my waist as tightly as she could. Then she looped it under one of my thighs, looped it underneath the part around my waist, and repeated the action on my other side.

  “You think that’s tight enough?” I joked. “I’m not sure I’ll be able to have children if you go any tighter.”

  “Squat down,” Natalie demanded, and I obeyed.

  Once I was in position, she tightened the ropes even more, brought it back up around my waist, and then tied it off with a knot I couldn’t even recognize.

  Then the woman gave my ass a quick smack.

  “All good,” she giggled, so I stood back up.

  Natalie proceeded to repeat the makeshift harness on herself, and all I could do was watch in awe as she worked her magic. Finally, she finished up her knots, gave a hard yank on the rope behind her, and turned back to me.

  “Is that it?” I gulped as my hands grew clammy. “Are we ready to go?”

  “As good as we’ll ever be,” Natalie mused as she walked over to the hole. “Now, watch what I’m doing carefully… If you don’t have tension on your rope from the start, you’re pretty much dead.”

  “Noted,” I muttered as I walked over beside her.

  The Scavenger pulled the slack in the rope up to her chest in bunches, so I followed her lead. Then, once the rope was nice and taut, she shimmied backward, placed her feet squarely on the edge of the hole, and took a deep breath.

  “From here, we just slowly lower ourselves down,” she explained. “Don’t let too much tension out of the rope at one time, or you’ll risk breaking the knots or even the rope itself.”

  “I definitely will not do that,” I chuckled, but I was currently scared out of my mind.

  Natalie gave me a little salute, and then she began to let her rope slip through her fingers a little bit at a time. In just a few seconds, she was hanging down below me.

  Now, it was my turn.

  I took a deep breath, sat back in my harness, and released a small bit of my rope. My body felt like it was falling for a moment, but then it was suddenly caught by the tension of the cord. Now, I was hanging completely down inside of the reactor, with nothing keeping me from the ground but a strip of rope and some hand-tied knots.

  Down below, the room was lit by only a few flickering fluorescent lights. I could see what Natalie had been referring to, a donut-shaped strip of metal that surrounded the perimeter of the structure and had a ladder that led down to other donut-shaped floors.

  At least we didn’t have to do this the whole way down.

  I continued to release the rope, inch by inch, until finally it went taut. I couldn’t go any lower.

  Even more concerning was the fact that we were dangling over the giant pit at the center of the room, rather than the safety of the metal floor.

  “Okay,” I called out to Natalie, who was also in the same predicament. “Now what?”

  “We swing.” She pointed to the nearest strip of floor. “We get our momentum going, and then we cut ourselves loose when we think we have enough force to carry us to safety.”

  “Wait… ” I gasped. “Whoa, whoa, whoa… This wasn’t part of the original plan.”

  “I didn’t know the full extent of the situation,” Natalie said nonchalantly. “It’s changed now. All I know is that, if we want our feet safely on the ground, we’re going to need to do this.”

  My entire body felt like it was on pins and needles as I hung there helplessly, like a marionette doll without its puppeteer.

  Okay, Hunter…. You can do this. It wasn’t that hard. All I had to do was pretend I was back on the elementary school playground, on the swings that Tommy Jackson and I used to play on.

  I reached back into my open backpack, pulled out the E-Tool, and unfolded it in my hands. I really, really hoped this was gonna be sharp enough to cut through this nylon.

  “I see fear in your eyes, Hunter,” Natalie chuckled. “That’s the kind of thing I always see when I’m helping Marcus train the newbies. Now you’re getting the full Scavenger experience!”

  I was sooo flattered.

  Natalie and I both began to rock back and forth in the air. Eventually, we
were able to build up momentum, until we reached the speed we needed to be.

  Suddenly, Natalie flipped open her large folding knife, held it at the ready, and waited patiently. She swung forward… then back… and then, on the second forward swing, she swung her blade as hard as she could. Natalie struck the chord at one of its tautest points, and it snapped like a dry twig.

  The woman’s body was released from the nylon rope’s grip, and she flew forward as if she’d been thrown from a moving vehicle. Natalie tucked and rolled as she hit the ground, and I watched her tumble a few feet before she popped back up to her feet.

  “Alright, now it’s your turn,” she called back up to me as she put her blade away.

  Even though I was still swinging like crazy, I wasn’t quite ready to make the cut. My heart felt like it was down in my feet, and the dizziness was just beginning to set in.

  However, I didn’t have much more time to hesitate.

  I heard a crack from above, and then my body rapidly dropped about two feet.

  “Shit!” I gasped.

  “The anchor!” Natalie gasped. “It’s coming loose! You need to get over here, right now!”

  I started to rock back and forth so I could regain my momentum. Soon, I was moving even quicker than before.

  I only had one shot at this, so I had to make it count.

  I swung forward, then backward, and then I took a deep breath.

  As I came forward, I lashed out at the rope above me with my E-Tool. There was an elastic snapping sound as the spade cut clean through the rope, and then I felt gravity completely take over.

  My body shot forward like a bat out of hell, and I knew I had miscalculated the release.

  All I could do was toss my E-Tool off to the side and then attempt to tuck and roll.

  Unfortunately, my “tuck and roll” was more of just a “roll.”

  I slammed into the metal with a loud thud as my body went prone and tumbled across its rough surface. My momentum came to a halt when I slammed into the concrete wall, and a wave of sharp pain shot through my entire left side.

  There was a bit of blood trickling from my nose, and I felt like I’d just been hit by a freight train.

  However, I was still alive.