"Okay Eric, what's the shortest route possible through Sector Two?" Greg asked, his voice tight. Tension sang through him as they stepped back into the junction area. They'd successfully repaired the reactor and navigated their way back out without running into any more hostiles. For which he was very grateful. Unfortunately, it just felt like there was going to be a fresh horror waiting around every corner, and every corner they turned, every door they stepped through where there wasn't anything just ratcheted up the tension another notch.
And Greg knew it was only going to get worse.
To make the situation even more strenuous, Drake was looking shittier now. He wasn't saying anything anymore and he'd puked twice, dry-heaving the second time since there was nothing left in his stomach to come up.
"Hold on," Eric murmured as he quickly crossed to the terminal, fired it up and located a map of the area beyond. He muttered to himself for a moment, then called them over. "Here, look," he said, pointing to the topographical overlay of the living quarters. "We can head immediately into this mess hall, cut through a storage area at the back of the kitchen section, then across this rec room and through these two infirmaries. That'll put us at the next junction, which should grant us access to the control room," he explained.
Greg looked it over, scrutinizing the route, both to double-check it and to ensure there wasn't a shorter way through, but he couldn't see one. He nodded tightly. "Okay, let's get going. Sooner we're out of this shitstorm, the better."
Drake just grunted quietly in agreement. He was leaning heavily against a nearby wall. As Greg and Eric prepared to move out, Drake tried to straighten up, but groaned. "Shit, Eric, gonna need some help here," he said, his voice slurring slightly.
Greg felt a fresh wave of cold fear roll through him as Eric helped him up. Drake was tough, simply put. He didn't ask for help unless he absolutely needed it. This was a good thing, because it meant he wasn't an idiot too obsessed with pride, but it also meant that he was nearing the end of his rope, physically speaking.
He couldn't go on for much longer.
Once Drake was up, Greg moved over to the large door that separated the junction from the rest of the station and opened it up. An entrance lobby awaited him, a place of destruction and death. Wrecked furniture, corpses strewn about, blood on the walls. Greg did a quick search of the area, knowing that they didn't have time for it but also knowing that he needed more ammunition if they were going to make it through this alive.
There was nothing in the lobby, but he managed to track down a box of shells in the security station attached to the lobby. Nothing else, though. He reloaded his shotgun and pocketed the rest. Feeling the immense press of time, Greg led the way out of the lobby, into a corridor and through the first door on the left, into the first part of their journey: the mess hall. It definitely lived up to its name. It looked like when whatever it was had happened, whatever horror had swept the station, it had been in the middle of a meal.
There were plates and bowls and cups everywhere, silverware glinted under the remaining lights, mixed in with pools of blood. Half-chewed corpses were strewn at total random in between rows of tables and benches. Sticking to the right side of the room, Greg led the pair through it. There didn't seem to be anything lurking. They managed to hit the back of the room, get behind the serving tray line and pass through a doorway at the back. They came into a kitchen and moved through a second door that led to the storage bay.
So far, so good.
The storage bay was packed and unruly. Obviously some kind of explosion or maybe a hull rupture nearby had sent everything off the shelves, scattering the supplies across the floor. And, mixed in with those supplies...Greg hesitated. Bones. Pure, clean, bleached bones, thrown into a chaotic pile. Shadows had been here.
"Shadows might be nearby," he murmured as they pressed on. Although...he frowned as he studied the scene further. The clothing that some of the bones were half-in/half-out of was tattered and torn and stained with blood, and they reeked like that of a Mutant...did that mean they were fighting each other? Oh man, wouldn't that be fucking great.
They pressed on through to the other door, opened it up and stepped out into a passageway beyond. Greg looked left and right, saw nothing but lonely stretches of corridor, and then passed through the doorway directly across from them. They were making good time, Greg thought, but then came up short as he stepped into the recreational area beyond. A pair of Mutants were wandering purposefully around among a maze created by couches, knocked over arcade cabinets, and chairs. They seemed distracted and not at all interested in the three people who had stepped into their territory. Greg raised his shotgun, then hesitated.
From the right, in a corner of the room that was bathed mostly in darkness, one of the shadows detached from that darkness and bounded up over a broken, tipped-over arcade cabinet. One of the Mutants turned to face it and took a swing at it as the Shadow leaped onto it. Watching all of the skin, the muscle, the meat, the organs, the blood...all of it pop out of existence was an utterly surreal thing. In fact, Greg wasn't even sure he'd actually seen it, like his brain was having difficulty admitting that it had just taken place.
The bones and the Mutant's yellow uniform dropped like a puppet with its strings cut.
Without hesitation, the Shadow leaped onto the next Mutant and again, the second contact was made, the same thing happened. When those twin, glowing blue eyes turned on him, Greg was jolted into action. He aimed and fired, pounding out a round that went wide as the Shadow began coming for him. Cursing, he adjusted his aim and fired again, this time connecting and blowing the thing to hell. Breathing heavily, he looked around the room, but saw nothing more.
"Holy shit," Eric whispered. "Those things are pure horror."
"Yeah," Greg muttered distractedly. He'd never actually seen one of the things in action before. Now that he had...he shuddered, then made himself move on. The only solace he took was that they were attacking his enemies as well.
They hurried through the rec room, exited it, moved down a short corridor and came at last to the medical section. The trio moved quickly through a waiting room and slipped into the first of two infirmaries. As he stepped inside, Greg spied a Shadow lurking near the edge of the room. He raised his shotgun and pounded out a slug shell immediately, taking the thing in the head and disintegrating it into nothingness.
As they began pressing on, Drake suddenly let out a groan and Eric grunted in surprise. Greg spun around and saw that the man had passed out.
"Fuck," Greg snapped, moving back to help Eric as he eased him to the floor.
"He's out," Eric said, checking him over. He looked up, "I can carry him but-" He froze and they both looked up and around as a low whispering began to build. Greg swallowed and straightened back up, icy fear slithering through him freely. He snapped his shotgun up and looked around as Eric stood up and did the same with his pistol.
"We've got company," Eric murmured.
"Back to back, watch over Drake," Greg replied.
The first Shadow came in through a broken out vent grate overhead. Greg aimed and fired. It was a good shot, but even as it hit and the Shadow died and dissipated into the air, another one was coming out of the grate. As Greg fired again, he heard Eric suddenly shooting up a storm at his back. Both of them kept up a steady stream of fire as more and more Shadows came in through vents and doorways, intending to murder the three of them for their unknown and perhaps unknowable reasons. Greg went through every last shell in his shotgun, then dropped to a crouch and snatched up Drake's abandoned pistol.
He raised it and kept up a steady rate of fire. He put down five, then eight, then eleven of them. As the twelfth died and the pistol clicked empty, all fell still and silent. Breathing heavily, sweating profusely, he kept his gaze darting between entry points in the infirmary, but there were no more Shadows. Greg took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
"Fuck," he whispered, straightening up. He liberated a pair of magazines from Drake's pocket, as well as the holster, since the unconscious man wasn't going to be using the pistol anytime soon, then reloaded, pocketed the second magazine and reattached the holster to his own belt, then holstered the pistol. Snatching up his shotgun, he reloaded it, too. "Grab some medical gear," he said quietly, "when we get somewhere safe, maybe you can help him."
Eric nodded, his own eyes wide, his face slicked with sweat. Greg kept watch until Eric had collected up whatever medical gear he could find and easily transport in his pockets, which wasn't exactly a lot.
When they were clear, Eric picked Drake up and began carrying him, following Greg. They progressed through the infirmary and then quickly through the next one, coming at last to the junction that would lead them onward.
"Okay, okay," Greg whispered, "Sectors Three and Four..." From the angry red lights on the beefed up security control panel for the door leading to Sector Four, it was obvious that it was locked down. Sector Three, on the other hand, wasn't.
They opened the door and stepped inside.
Another lobby, this one mercifully clear for the moment. What wasn't merciful, however, was the fact that the door that led to the Command Center, (which was at least clearly labeled), was locked down tight. After Eric looked through the control panel and then a nearby terminal for any kind of hacking openings or override commands or anything he could work with, he sighed disgustedly and turned away from the terminal.
"We need to get into the Military Headquarters," he said, pointing to a door at the far left of the entrance lobby. "From there, I should be able to raise this lockout."
"Great," Greg muttered. If it wasn't fucking one thing, it was another. Eric picked Drake back up and Greg led him onward. He at least didn't have to bother worrying about whether or not the Military HQ was locked down: the door had been bashed wide open. They moved down a corridor that was sandwiched in between a pair of extensive security checkpoints. Bulletproof glass made up most of the walls to either side and judging from the cracked and damaged state of most of it, it looked like someone had really put the glass to the test.
They proceeded down the length of the glass and steel tunnel, came to its end and found themselves in a transitional room that granted access to the larger portions of the Military HQ. Barracks and mess to the right, training, armory, and other assorted necessities to the left and, dead ahead, the control room.
"Thank fuck," Greg whispered as the door actually opened when they tried it. He found a pair of Mutants inside the room feasting on a trio of corpses that had been gathered into a pile and quickly put them both down with pistol shots to the chest. Once they were dead and the room was deemed secure, he closed the door behind them and looked around. The room was pretty basic: a square ringed with terminals, workstations, and consoles, and a raised dais in the center so that the military commander could lord over all those working under them.
Eric made straight for the dais, settled in and fired it up after setting Drake down carefully in a clean spot. Greg crouched by him, studying him. The guy looked like hell. He reached out and checked his pulse. Well, still going, though it seemed a little slow and maybe weak. Bad sign. He looked back over his shoulder as Eric snapped a curse.
"What is it?" he asked, standing and moving to join him.
"We're going to have to jump through more hoops to get into the Command Center. We need a pair of keycards and a security code. The good news is that, judging by the security systems in place, I can at least tell that both security cards are inside of the Military HQ. Unfortunately, I can't refine that any further. Uh...listen," Eric said, glancing over at Drake. "This is a secure place and I'll need time to find those codes...could you go get the cards?" he asked.
Greg nodded. "Yeah, I'll track them down. Make sure he stays safe," he replied, making sure his weapons were loaded up.
"I will...good luck."
"Thanks, I'm going to need it," Greg replied.
As soon as he left the control room, he closed the door behind him. The first thing he was going to do, he decided as he set off, was visit that fucking armory. After ensuring the lobby was clear, he hustled over to the door he needed and opened it up.
"Oh fuck!" he cried as it opened to reveal something completely new.
He couldn't help but study it as he raised his shotgun. It was maybe five and a half feet tall, humanoid, dark in color, its skin strangely reflective. It had two arms, two legs, and a torso, but...no head. And that wasn't even the strangest feature: it had no chest, either. There was a hole where its chest should be, and in this hole were large hairs, evenly spaced along the periphery of the hole, all of them pointed inwards, meeting in the center.
Greg fired but, because of his instincts to shoot either the head or the chest, put a round scorching straight through its chest hole. It blasted off the strange hairs, but otherwise did no damage. Crying out, backing up as the creature began rushing towards him in an awful silence, he adjusted his aim and fired again, this time to its left shoulder.
That did it.
The shell blew its arm off and punched a hole clean through the ring of flesh and musculature there. An awful black gore sprayed on the air as the creature was spun around and tossed to the deckplates.
"What happened?!"
Greg cried out and about-faced, seeing Eric poking his head out of the command center door, a worried look etched into his features.
"New monster," he said. "It was, uh...shit, Drake would recognize them," he murmured, thinking furiously as he fed another few shells into the shotgun, wanting to keep it topped off. "Fiends," he said, finally. "They've got holes in their chests and no heads."
"Oh fuck," Eric muttered. "He told me about those."
"Yeah, they suck. Don't worry, I've got it under control."
"All right."
After lingering for another few seconds, Eric disappeared back into the control room and closed the door. Greg returned his attention to the corridor beyond the doorway. He passed into it, coming to the head of an L shaped passageway.
"Oh thank fucking shit," he whispered as the very first door he laid eyes on turned out to be the door that led to the armory.
It was stuck open, attempting to close slowly over and over again on someone's leg that was sticking out. Greg moved forward and peered inside. His hopes fell and dwindled. The place looked cleaned out. Sighing, he stepped carefully inside, setting the door to stay open in case he needed to make a quick exit, and looked around.
Yeah, definitely pretty barren. Shelves, containers, gun lockers, almost every surface and niche he saw was empty. What else was new? With a sigh, he began sorting through the remains, his mind wandering. In the moment of relative quiet, he again found himself wondering and worrying about where his other friends were. That was going to be another priority: run a BioScan as soon as they got to the control room of this station and figure out if anyone else was alive and kicking. He'd been apart from Eric and Drake for like five minutes and already the cold horror of isolation was settling in. He would have thought that spending who knew how many hours and days by himself, fighting against screaming horrors from beyond the stars, would have inoculated him against the fear of isolation, but it didn't. He was still scared.
So he did the only thing he could do: he shoved that fear down and did whatever it took to get past it and get on with the mission.
Because there really wasn't any other option.
In the end, he managed to track down a brand new weapon and a store of ammo for it. Greg took a moment to admire the sleek, black and silver submachine gun under the brilliant lights of the armory. It was a fine piece of hardware, though not as fine as the assault rifles he'd gotten used to using. No silencer feature, no three-round burst, just single-shot and full auto, no zoom, no armor-piercing rounds. Just a thirty round magazine of 9mm bullets.
Back to basics, he supposed.
Letting the shotgun hang across his back, Greg checked the weapon out, found it to be in adequate working order, (although he was going to have to perform the only actual test that mattered when he found a target), and finished his search of the armory. His diligence proved worthwhile: he found a pair of fragmentation grenades.
As Greg made his way to the exit, feeling a bit better about his current situation, he got the opportunity to test the SMG out faster than he'd thought, or hoped. He heard a soft whispering sound about half a second before he passed through the doorway and immediately stopped his forward motion. It was a good thing, too, because a Shadow leaped out into the doorway. He would've been dead if he'd kept going.
As a startled shout escaped him, Greg snapped the SMG up and squeezed the trigger. He poured half a magazine into the thing. It burst into a diffusion pattern, dissipating into the air. "Fuck," Greg whispered, trembling with adrenaline. He waited a few seconds more, then moved slowly out into the corridor beyond. Nothing there now. He glanced at the spray of bullet holes in the wall across from the opening. He'd fired off about eight more rounds than he'd needed to. Had to be more careful with ammo as scarce as it was.
Even moving as quickly as he could, it seemed to take Greg ages to make any real progress. His next stop was a gym. He put down a pair of Harvesters that were feeding on the dead and performed unhappy searches of the nine corpses that were strewn about the room, including a small office area at the back and any other likely hiding locations, but all he managed to get for his troubles was another magazine for his pistol.
From there, he moved on to a shooting gallery. It would've been nice if there'd been some ammo around, and nicer still if there had been a keycard tucked away somewhere, but he found neither of those things. A break room and a pair of bathrooms were also empty of everything except for a few more Mutants wandering around. Greg was beginning to get worried as he stepped into the last area in this side of the Military HQ: an office complex. Three hallways snaked away from him, lined with doors and windows.
Great, he loved searching offices.
Especially when there were awful sounds coming from somewhere deeper within. With a sigh, Greg tightened up his grip on his SMG and set off. He moved down the first corridor to the left, poking through all the offices he found, searching drawers and bodies and coming up empty each time. Eventually, he reached the end of this corridor, retraced his steps and began moving down the central one. However, before he'd made it beyond the first pair of offices, he saw something at the end of the hallway.
A Guardian.
It stood there, staring at him with malignant eyes, as if daring him to come forward. Greg leveled his SMG at the fucker and blew it away, punching a gory hole in its chest. He did the exact same thing to the second Guardian that came up to take its place, then slapped a fresh magazine in and waited to see if anything else would show up. When nothing did, he moved down the length of the corridor and came into the room at the end, what looked like a meeting room. He found what he expected to see: a Hive, attached to the far back wall.
What he didn't expect to see was something silver sticking out of the Hive. Cautiously, he approached the pulsating mass of flesh and muscle and organs. When he got close enough that he had to hold his breath, he confirmed that, yes, it was a security keycard. Resisting the urge to sigh, he reached out and grabbed hold of it. As soon as he yanked it out, however, a Slug abruptly popped out of the Hive practically in front of his face. Barely managing not to open his mouth in a scream, he snagged the card and jerked himself back just in time, as the Slug launched itself from the Hive. It fell wetly onto the floor.
Greg turned and saw it slithering towards him with an awful speed and dexterity. He brought his boot up and slammed it down. His stomach turned over as a sickening, squelching pop sounded and its dark guts sprayed all over the floor. He took a moment to wipe off the keycard on a corpse's relatively clean uniform, then resumed his search. It took another fifteen minutes, but he managed to discern that the second card was not in the office complex. Which was just fucking great. Frustrated, he ran off to the other portion of the Military HQ.
In the end, after killing off another clutch of Mutants in a mess hall and taking out some more Harvesters in a barracks, he finally managed to find the second card, which was being clutched in a severed hand in a bathroom next to the mess.
Frustrated, disgusted, and worried, he ran back to the control room and let himself in.
"Two cards," he said, holding them both up.
"Just in time," Eric replied from his position on the raised dais. "I've managed to locate the codes we need."
"Then let's get going," Greg said.
* * *
Greg let out his breath as he eliminated the final Shadow in the Command Center. They had made the quick jaunt over to it from the Military HQ and unlocked it without managing to run into anything else. Unfortunately, half a dozen Shadows had been hanging out, doing...whatever the hell it was they did when nothing was around to kill. The Command Center was built like a horseshoe inside of a larger horseshoe, the smaller central one being another level higher. Greg moved deeper into the room, up a ramp to the left and into the second story of the area. When he spied no more enemies, he called Eric up to join him.
Once he'd set Drake down on the floor, leaning him against a terminal, he found the most important looking workstation, sat at it and booted it up. A few minutes went by while he searched over the relevant data. Greg listened to him muttering to himself as he checked over Drake again. Still unconscious, and was his pulse slower now? He couldn't remember what his last count had been and cursed himself for not remembering.
Too much going on at once, too many variables.
"It's still a fucking mess in here," Eric muttered. "But I've at least got some good news. There's an antidote to what they poisoned Drake with and it's in Sector Four, the research wing. And I can unlock that wing from here."
"And the bad news is that I have to go back out there by myself and track it down," Greg said, standing back up.
Eric nodded. "Yeah. I'm sorry, but I can't leave him here alone and I'm probably the only one among us who can sort through this mess of a database and try to pull some answers together. I can at least give you some help," he said, reaching down and opening a drawer in the workstation. He rooted around in it for a moment before coming up with two items: an infopad and an earpiece radio. He handed Greg the radio while he hooked the infopad into the computer. A moment later, he handed it over, too.
"There's a map of the whole station in there now," he said. "And the radio connects directly back to me. I might be able to provide some kind of help while you're in there."
"Thanks," Greg replied.
"Good luck out there, and...please hurry," Eric said, tossing a worried glance at Drake.
"I will."
He made sure that his weapons were topped off with ammo and in working order, then he left the Command Center.
Eric locked the door behind him.