The Will To Live✔️

Chapter 38: The Deep

"I think I can work with this, gimme a moment," she murmured.

Greg left her to it, looking back out the window. He wondered about the facility, about how it had come to be. It had been over a week since the outbreak began...right? Somewhere between one and two weeks, he still wasn't entirely clear on the timeline. Hell, at this point he didn't even know how long he had been on Wintermute. But he knew that a group of highly-trained, well-funded people could create miracles and move mountains if they were properly motivated to. He'd seen it happen before. So it wasn't impossible that they'd just seen an opportunity and jumped on it. Whoever they were. Gibson had sure hopped on it quickly enough.

But maybe someone with more pull and power had been of a similar mind as Gibson. Probably this place was known to some high ranking members of the military. Maybe they thought it would be a secure or at least isolated enough place to do research.

"Got a map," Izzy said, breaking his thoughts.

Greg moved back over and looked at the screen. He saw a rough topographical overlay of the facility and quickly oriented himself. The place was basically a giant square, and they were in the bottom left corner. To their right was the dorms wing that ultimately terminated into a large storage warehouse. Up from their current position was security, the medical ward, and ultimately the control room at the end. Between the control room at the top left corner and the utilities section, which made up the top right corner, were the labs where they kept and experimented on the specimens. Ideally, all they'd have to do was walk up to the control room.

Ideally.

Greg downloaded the map to his suit, then uploaded it to the team's wireless cloud and pushed it through to everyone's database.

"All right, map incoming. It looks relatively simple, all we have to do is-"

He fell silent as they heard distant gunfire: the rattling of a battle rifle. He hurried over to the place it was coming from: the right, the way to dorms and storage. He joined Rydell and Coretti at that door, staring down a long length of bloodied metal corridor. He couldn't tell for sure, but he thought the gunfire might be coming from the far end, near or in the warehouse.

"Flood, maybe?" Coretti murmured.

"What, shooting each other?" Rydell replied.

"Maybe."

"No, it's too controlled. They fire really sporadically," Greg murmured. He activated his radio. "This is Sergeant Walker of Task Force Reaper to anyone, respond. Over." He waited. The gunfire didn't let up. He cursed. "Either they're too busy or they've got a busted radio. Rydell, with me. Everyone else, get to the control room and get that data. I'll go grab whoever it is and meet you there," he said. "Izzy's in charge."

"Let's move," Izzy said.

Everyone gathered around her and they hustled out of the room.

Greg looked at Corporal Rydell, who looked back at him with resolute lethargy. "Let's get this done," he said, and they set off.

Their pace was brisk, as whoever it was was still firing away, but they had to keep an eye out to both sides as there were a lot of doors surrounding them and any of them could hold Flood. Even as he thought it, Greg heard a growl come from the third open door they'd passed on his side. He skidded to a halt, turned, and raised the shotgun. A Combat Form, a woman wearing the tattered remains of a white labcoat over the bulging malformation her body had become thanks to an Infection Form, began coming for him from out of a wrecked dorm room. He squeezed the trigger. The shotgun bucked in his grasp as the shell blew out the Combat Form's chest, sending it flying backwards into the dorm room and crashing into something.