Kyra's whole world became swirling white-gray chaos as she fell out the back of the ship.
Her chute, which had hooked wirelessly into her suit, deployed automatically when it reached the appropriate altitude. That was to say: almost immediately, given how low they were to the ground. Grunting as she was violently yanked upwards, she fought against panic. She'd been through worse than this. Much worse. The biggest problem was that she was in enemy territory, in demon territory, and visibility was shit.
That was kicking her battle anxiety up to eleven.
But as she had over and over, especially recently, she called on skills and abilities honed by years of training, combat, and war.
She calmed down.
Good thing, too, because she hit the ground a moment later and almost immediately landed on a damned fiend. The spiky bastard let out a shriek and began whirling up to hurl a fireball her way as her chute automatically disengaged and popped from of her suit of security armor. Kyra tried to shoot it with her rifle, but in that instant realized that it had been ripped from her grasp sometime during the leap out the back.
"Fuck you!" she screamed, focusing all her rage at that particular development on the fiend before her as she whipped her shotgun into play.
That had survived the fall.
She stuck the barrel in its sneering face and squeezed the trigger before it had time to launch the fireball it was generating. The fireball disappeared in a puff of smoke and its head disappeared in a plume of dark red gore. The body took a few jerky, stumbling steps in the snow, blood spraying violently from the stump of what had once been a neck, and then collapsed in a tangled heap of ivory spike-studded limbs.
With the boom of the shotgun going off, Kyra immediately heard warning cries from elsewhere in the storm. Her suit was working overtime to cut down on the audio white noise of the winds and trying to amp up the visibility, but the storm was a bad one. She took a quick look around, turning in a circle. There were no hostiles in the immediate vicinity, but she could just barely make out the edge of what appeared to be a fence in one direction. It seemed like the only viable way to go, so she started walking.
There was no way in hell she'd find her rifle in all this mess.
The shotgun and pistol would just have to do for now.
Fuck, she'd made due with far less, literally in Hell.
Kyra didn't do particularly well in storms. The constant movement all around her triggered all sorts of internal alarms that she had to learn how to adjust. She'd been through sandstorms like this all over the Middle East, and she had enough snowstorms under her belt that this wasn't new territory. It was just hated territory.
She activated her radio. "This is Staff Sergeant Morgan to anyone, do you copy? Over."
She listened as she kicked through the ankle-deep snow. Nothing but static. Great. Kyra hit the fence and looked around. Nothing but more fence to the left and right. It was less of a fence and more of a solid barrier. Knowing her luck, she was on the outside of it and would have to find a way in. She tried a few more times to get in touch as she went left and began moving along the perimeter wall. Of course they'd build a ten-foot perimeter wall in fucking Antarctica. It was probably some kind of violation of some international law, given how touchy Antarctica was, even after that mess with the fall of the treaty, but clearly the UAC didn't give two fucks about the laws. They'd made it clear by now they wiped their asses with the law.
She'd never been more enraged, more livid in her entire life than at the Union Aerospace Corporation. They'd drilled straight to Hell just to make a fucking profit. And now billions were dead. Probably billions more would die.
This might actually be the end of the whole human race.
Shit, the end of basically all life on this planet. People had been spouting off about how a lot of people mistook the apocalypse. They liked to say 'no, it's not the end of the world, it's the end of humans, the world will continue without us'. But that wasn't fucking true now, was it? She very much doubted the demons and whatever they intended to do to the planet would discriminate in who or what they murdered by the billions. Some stuff would evolve and adapt, maybe, but surely most of the species of Earth would go extinct.
Kyra paused as the perimeter wall ran out and made a right-hand turn. Shit, so she was on the outside. She sighed softly, then rounded the corner. As she began really worrying about her abilities in getting into this place without having to somehow scale the wall, she suddenly caught a break. Something had smashed right through the wall. She hesitated as she looked up at the large break in the perimeter wall.
What had been big enough to smash through it like this?
Nothing she wanted to face. Whatever it was, maybe it had fucked off into the vast antarctic wastelands. Kyra passed through the hole in the perimeter wall and caught sight of a structure up ahead. If she had her bearings correct, which admittedly she might not, then that should be the Support Station where the personnel lived.
As she approached it, she tried the radio again. But again the static mocked her. Something had to be screwing with comms. Feeding one more shell into the shotgun to replace the one she'd expended so far, Kyra got up to the first entrance she could find in the building. It was large, square, and mostly covered in snow and ice. Which couldn't be a good sign, given that these buildings were supposed to have de-icing systems. That had to mean power was down. Though, as she approached, she realized that the door was open.
It stood as an ominous invitation, beckoning to her.
Getting up to it, she activated the flashlight mounted on the end of the shotgun and aimed it inside. A small room with another open door awaited her. Well, it wasn't like she was going to find any answers outside.
Kyra walked into the building.
The small room beyond was meant to be a transitional antechamber, the walls covered in lockers meant to hold cold weather gear. Most of them were broken open and empty. One entire section of lockers to her right was sprayed with a gratuitous amount of blood that was now frozen solid. Great. Obviously shit was fucked at Strata Station. She slid through the next door, on high alert, and found herself in a corridor that had obviously been subjected to some fighting. Bullet holes in the walls, blood and shell casings on the floor, par for the course at this point. A handful of corpses, men and women in UAC jumpsuits, techs by the look of them, lay scattered in random positions down the length of the passageway, broken in death.
Time to start her search. The corridor had a pair of doors in either side and one large, double-door set into the end, some fifty or so feet away. She moved to the nearest door in the right wall, almost all of them were open, and peered inside. There was more light in here, as the windows let in the gray antarctic light.
Kyra beheld a slaughterhouse.
She'd definitely come to the Support Station, as this was the mess hall. And it was a complete, bloody wreck. She began hunting through the brutal slaughter for signs of life, trying to pick out clues among the dead and debris. It was such a mess that she almost missed the bootprints printed in blood. Someone had been through here, and someone had killed a fiend. The blood hadn't had a chance to completely freeze over yet.
Readjusting her grip on the shotgun, making sure she was still riding that razor's edge between being keyed up enough to react in a heartbeat and blow off an enemy's head if it tried to surprise her, but not so keyed up she would accidentally shoot a friendly, Kyra set off. She followed the bootprints across the mess hall, back into the kitchen, then into a storeroom. There was a door at the back. She moved over to it and peered through into another corridor. The bootprints continued faintly across it, to the left, and through another door.
There were a trio of dead zombies around. Kyra stepped out into the corridor and followed the trail, listening carefully for signs of life, but there was only the wind and the occasional, distant thump of something moving around or the telltale groan of a zombie elsewhere in the facility. Where were the others? It was entirely possible that she alone had survived. Unlikely...but not as unlikely as she would have liked, given how dangerous the world had suddenly become. Pressing on, she passed through the next door and found herself in a rec room.
It was the bloodiest place yet.
There were a dozen and a half corpses spread out across the room. Most were human, or had once been human, a few were fiends. In the corner slumped the shredded, pulped remains of a pinky. Someone must have taken a chaingun to the thing, or a bunch of someones had unloaded with some rifles and SMGs. There was frozen blood fucking everywhere, even on the ceiling. And there was a torso, not-so-cleanly severed from its lower half, tossed haphazardly onto a pool table in the center of the room. How that happened, Kyra had no idea, nor any interest in knowing. She performed a sweep of the room and checked the small closet she found in the back, found no survivors, though signs of someone else's passage, and moved on.
Fighting the urge to hurry up and make something happen, Kyra pressed on to the end of the corridor and then hesitated as she went to open the set of doors. They were closed. All the other doors had been open. That implied a conscious decision, likely on the part of whoever it was. It was almost certainly another member of the team, but it could be a local survivor, and as much as she wanted to believe 'all humans good' given the sheer magnitude of manic evil the demons exuded, that wasn't necessarily true. Though more practically speaking, they'd likely be as keyed up as she was, and she didn't want to get her head blown off.
There was also the fact that the zombies seemed to be getting smarter.
Gearing up for a fight, Kyra hit the button and took aim while exposing as little of herself as possible. The doors parted in the middle and slid open with almost no sound at all. A crossroads room awaited her with three other similar doors, one in each wall. From what she could see, there was more blood, more death, but no immediate signs of survival. Despite that, she hesitated. Something was pinging her awareness...
Slowly, very slowly, she edged past the threshold.
Something, some tiny sound, made her snap to the left and she came terrifyingly close to squeezing the trigger and blowing North's head off her shoulders. Judging from the expression the pale woman wore behind her faceplate, Kyra figured something similar had happened on her end as well. Kyra let out her breath slowly as she lowered the shotgun.
"Are you injured?" she asked.
"No," North managed after a few seconds. Kyra noted the woman took longer than she should have to lower the pistol she was holding. "Lost my guns though."
"Have you seen anyone else? Heard anything?"
She shook her head and looked around in a furtive gesture. "Thought I heard you on the radio, otherwise no."
"You check any of these other doors?"
Again she shook her head. "No, no time. Got into this room and heard what must've been you back in the entrance I came through, hid here to lay an ambush, thought it was a hostile."
"Okay." Kyra considered it for a moment. North looked shaken, and was giving some of the warning signs of what she was now coming to think of as hell-shocked, which was really nothing new, though she wondered if the reaction of terror, panic, or rage, or some combination of the three, was worse now that they were facing something not just inhuman, but fucking demonic. Finally, she made a decision. "On my six, nice and easy. We'll clear this building, then get a move on, try to link up with the rest of the team and complete our mission."
Kyra tried to convey as much authority but also reassurance as she could in her tone and words, and they seemed to have the desired effect on North. The woman calmed a little and nodded tightly. She seemed to get a tighter grip on herself, shifting her stance, readjusting her hold on her pistol, and looking around in a way that was less paranoid and more tactical.
"Understood, Staff Sergeant," she replied, her tone tight and clipped.
Kyra looked around. Two of the doors led to dorms, one wing for medical staff, one wing for technical staff. She imagined the grunts lived in a barracks in the military complex and the scientists lived close to their labs. The UAC didn't seem to like people mixing too much, especially when it came to their eggheads. The last door led to the medical wing. She decided to get the dorms out of the way first and walked over to the tech wing. Hitting the access button, she shouldered her shotgun as the doors slid open.
A zombie was waiting for her on the other side. He had once been a tan-skinned man with a shaved head and somewhat gaunt frame. Now, he was no more than the walking dead, his eyes burning with the malignant evil energy of the demons, mouth smeared with blood, framing broken teeth. An orange jumpsuit, torn and bloodied in several places, hung on his frame. Kyra vaporized his skull and pumped the shotgun.
The Support Station immediately came awake all around them with the screams of the damned and demons.
"Aw shit," Kyra muttered. She heard running and stumbling footfalls coming at them, both from ahead and somewhere behind. "Fall back. Bottleneck in the original corridor."
North reacted immediately, about-facing and rushing back through the door they had both originally come through. Kyra backpedaled, keeping an eye on the door she'd just opened, but as she got back to the first doorway, the other two suddenly opened up and two clutches of fiends began pouring into the crossroads chamber. She could see zombies and more fiends behind them. Kyra cursed, paused in the doorway, and doled out two slug shells. Two fiend skulls popped like balloons in pulpy sprays of gore.
She finished falling back, joining North in the mess hall access corridor. She spared a brief glance over her shoulder, seeing nothing sneaking up on them from the flank at least, and then there was no time to do anything but fight. North immediately fired off two quick shots from her pistol and dropped the first fiend through the door, blowing its eyes out and spraying the others with its deep ruby blood. Kyra fired off another shell and shot another one of the leathery, spiky sons of bitches in the neck, decapitating it successfully.
The two women continued firing as the wave of demonic and undead forces scrabbled over and around each other to try and get at the fresh meat just beyond the threshold. It was a good bottleneck, as far as those went, and probably the thing that helped keep the two of them alive and intact the most. Kyra timed her shots so that she emptied her shotgun at the same moment North finished reloading her pistol. She hastily fed another eight shells into the barrel and got back to work. The dead were piling up as gunsmoke filled the corridor.
Fiends shrieked and zombies roared as they largely fought each other. After she'd finished emptying her shotgun a second time, she called for a ceasefire and had North back up half a dozen steps with her.
"What?" North asked uncertainly, pistol still aimed at the doorway.
"Just watch," Kyra replied as she put the last of her shells into the shotgun.
She'd noticed some more serious infighting among the survivors and sure enough, as they stopped shooting, the zombies and fiends that were still alive were ripping and tearing into each other. Blood spilled, flesh was torn, and at one point she even saw a particularly enraged fiend rip a zombie's arm clean out of its socket. The screaming, bloody melee continued for about sixty seconds before only a pair of injured fiends remained.
Kyra pulled out her pistol and she and North each rewarded a victor with a bullet to the head. They waited to see if anything else would show up, but nothing did. From there, it was standard operating procedure for Kyra by now. North kept watch while she performed searches of the zombies. She was hoping to find at least some more shells, maybe an SMG or even assault rifle among the dead undead, but the former humans were ill-equipped it seemed. All she managed to scrape together were a handful of pistol magazines, which she passed to North.
She decided to stay with her pistol as they started their search of the tech dorm. With her shotgun running low, she was feeling paranoid. Never knew when you might very suddenly need a whole lot of stopping power all at once. A chaingun would make her feel a lot better, but a shotgun was good enough for the moment. Probably. The next fifteen minutes that followed were about as close to routine as Kyra got nowadays. Among the two dorm wings and the infirmary area, they found a whole lot of corpses, only a handful of which were still upright and walking around, a couple of magazines for the pistol, and a lot of damage.
No survivors, no keycards, no PDAs, nothing of much actual use.
At the end of it, she decided to try her radio again as she and North began heading back to the original entrance. She should theoretically be able to find her way to the next building she wanted to get to, which was Security HQ, using only her compass and memory of the map now that she knew where the Support Station was.
As she activated her radio, a voice suddenly came to her before she could begin talking. It was hazy and laced with static, but surprisingly clear. "This is Linaweaver to anyone, I need backup ASAP! Over!"
"I hear you, Linaweaver," Kyra replied, picking up the pace. "What's your location?"
"Security HQ! Lots of those bulldog motherfuckers around!" She could hear him firing off a shotgun over and over. "I need backup now!"
"On the way! Fall back if you can!"
He said something, but it was lost to a sudden rising wave of static. Kyra cursed and rushed out through the door, setting off into the storm once again, North on her six.