Necropolis 3 (10 page)

“
What?” Greg asked, taking his helmet off. He liked the suit, but the helmet was annoying. He put it back in the locker.

“
Downstairs, back in the tunnels, is where the filtration system for the oxygen is. They recycle the oxygen we breathe. They were damaged as well. We need to replace them, but it should be a pretty easy process,” Linda explained.

Greg sighed. If it wasn't one thing, it was another.

“How were
they
damaged? They're all the way underground,” he said as they found a maintenance hatch and began crawling back down.

“
Sabotage by the Augmented, obviously. So be ready,” Linda replied.

They came to another small storage room and moved out into the main tunnel beyond. Further down the way, Greg could see Burne and his men, protecting the backup generators. At least
they
were secure.

They had to go the other direction, though.

“Be careful in this area,” Linda said as she led them towards the oxygen filtration systems.

“
What? More careful than we have been?” Campbell replied.

Linda rolled her eyes. “Yes. This area isn't exactly stable. The ground, I mean.”

Great
, Greg thought miserably,
another thing to worry about.
They kept going, pressing deeper into the tunnel. Greg strained his ears against the silence, listening for signs of bad guys, but could hear nothing. Visions of Speed Demons and Rippers filled his mind's eye, but he looked ahead of and behind the group and saw nothing.

They reached the room that held the oxygen filtration system, what Linda referred to as the 'scrubbers'. They cleared it, found it suspiciously empty, and then guarded Linda while she went to work. Greg hung out by the doorway, in between the room and the tunnel, and wondered about how they were going to do get around all this.

How could they be expected to make any real progress when the Augmented, Dark Ops and the Undead kept fucking with everything?

Greg frowned as he thought he saw something further down the way. He blinked, stared, but it was gone. He frowned and kept focusing, trying to sense any movement along his peripheral vision, keeping his eyes perfectly still.

A sound, a soft creepy noise, echoed down to him.

He left the doorway and walked a few meters down the tunnel, listening, trying to figure out what the hell he was seeing and hearing.

“Greg, where are you going?” Kyra asked.

He glanced back. She stood in the doorway, looking apprehensive.

“Just thought I heard-”

The ground abruptly gave way beneath him. Before he could do anything, he was sliding down into a pitch-black hole.

He screamed, heard Kyra yell his name, then his head slammed against something hard and unyielding and he was out, again.

Chapter 09

–
The Dark
–

Greg gasped awake.

Sensations, half-formed memories and emotions flooded his mind in a sensory overload.

Terror. Wet. Dark. Decayed flesh. Black blood. Steel. Gunfire.

He coughed raggedly. Nothing. He could see nothing. Could smell nothing. For a long moment, Greg was struck by the powerful conviction that he was dead, and that this was purgatory. Or was it hell?

Then another thought wormed it way into his head. He had no memories, how did he remember hell, or purgatory for that matter? It was strange the things he remembered. Scenes from movies, common cultural themes. Sounds, smells, sensations. Yet, he couldn't recall whether or not his parents were still alive. What they looked like. Where he'd grown up. Even something as simple and fundamental as his own name would have escaped him if he hadn't had his nametag still barely attached in that ruined troop transport.

Another sensation worked its way in, and this one seemed to root him a little more firmly to reality.

He was cold.

“Am I dead?”

His voice echoed, sad, lonely, and isolated. Greg had the notion that he was in a cave of some sort. He didn't know how long he laid there in the absolute pitch-black darkness, cold and wet. It might have been a minute, it might have been four hours.

Slowly, his thoughts reassembled themselves.

His memories were swept up off his mental floors and sorted back into their proper places. What was once a confusing jumble of sensations, messily telegraphed from a pained body to a dazed mind, slowly became something more organized.

Greg lay in the dark, half-submerged in a pool of icy water. He wore a suit of some kind, a mining pressure suit, he remembered, but it had obviously broken in some places, because the water was leaking in.

The darkness, he realized, was not as absolute as he had once feared. A dim, dull gray light called his attention as his eyes adjusted. He coughed and listened to the noise echo. He was in some kind of large cave.

The last thing he remembered was Kyra...seeing something strange...and then falling.

Then nothing.

It seemed to take another age, but Greg tried to move his limbs. His leg hurt a great deal, and so did his chest and head. Everything else had taken on a dull kind of throbbing. Water sloshed gently as he gathered himself up.

“
Hello?” he asked the darkness, if only because the silence was getting to him.

All he had for company was the lonely call of his own voice. Greg sighed and sat up. The water sloshed and a bolt of white-hot agony shot through his leg, crackled around in his chest and finally terminated in his skull.

Greg groaned and simply sat there for another long, dark interval of time. He wasn't dead, he decided. He was in too much pain to be dead. Death would be a kind release from this misery. Finally, the nagging notion that he had to get his ass moving forced Greg to pull his legs up under him and, groping blindly in the darkness to rise to his feet.

It took him two tries. He fell back into the fetid water that, he realized, stank of disuse and time. His head swam and he swayed on his feet, but Greg finally stood. He remained where he was, waiting until the world stopped swaying and pulsing. He looked around, studied the area he was in. The only light seemed to be coming from far away.

A cave. He was definitely in some kind of cave. As his eyes fully adjusted, he caught hints of uneven ground and rock walls. He glanced down. A pool of water lay at his feet, slowly losing the gentle waves he'd created while rising.

Greg glanced up. He couldn't see it, but he knew there was a hole in the ceiling. Again, urgency surged through him, like a countdown clock letting out a small but insistent warning as it drew even closer to its end.

Splashing carefully across the water, as he didn't know how deep it might be, Greg made his way to the opening across the way where the light came through. He wanted to be back with people, back in the light, at the very
least
, warm again. His suit was ruptured and the uniform he wore was soggy now.

Something let out a high-pitched moan from somewhere. Greg froze and suddenly the need for a weapon seized upon him. He patted down his armor. His weapons were gone, likely lost in the pool or maybe thrown around the cave, but also very likely broken in the fall.

His hand fell upon the butt of his pistol. Heart thumping in fear and hope, Greg undid the latch and extracted the pistol. He felt along it, but as his hands touched the tip of the barrel, his hopes went up in flame. The barrel was pinched. There was no way this pistol was going to be put to use anytime soon.

Not without reluctance, he abandoned it, setting it on the ground, unwilling to toss it for fear of the sound it would make. He was alone, wounded, and defenseless.

“I'm fucked,” he whispered.

Another sound, this one lower, more of a howl that ended in a series of odd clicks, sent ripples of raw terror up his spine. Moving, he needed to get moving. Greg made his way across the cavern he was in to the opening in the far wall.

Beyond it, the light was better. It was still thin, gray, and dim, but it was better. He took a small amount of relief from this fact alone. Greg peered cautiously into the area beyond. He was at the end of a rocky tunnel. There was a single work-light placed a dozen meters away, pointed in the opposite direction.

His light.

Cautiously, he worked his way towards it. His leg hurt worse now, forcing him to limp. A thought came to him out of the blue: his radio. He reached up and felt around in his right ear. Hope shot through him like a jolt of electricity. It was still there. Carefully, he pulled it out and studied it.

The hope was gone in an instant: the exterior casing was cracked and the little light was dead. It was broken. He wanted to toss it aside, but instead pocketed it, thinking it might still be salvageable to someone more technically-minded.

Greg reached the work-light and passed it, his shadow hobbling along on the wall with him as he kept going. The tunnel went on for quite a ways, and he had an idea that it was part of an abandoned project by the miners, a new tunnel hunting for fresh deposits of precious minerals. Eventually, the tunnel came to a sort of junction that looked more civilized. There were light-strips attached to the ceiling and a few crates were stacked in one corner.

There was only one way to go, another tunnel, this one much smaller and more comfortable, so Greg went. Thoughts haunted his aching head. He wondered about the others, about the nature of memory, about what might be down here in these tunnels with him. There were no more sounds, for the time being.

He finally came to another break in the tunnel, this one even more civilized. It resembled a remote outpost, a place for mining teams punching ever deeper into the rock to stop and take a break from time to time without having to go all the way back.

Greg felt like it was a God-given blessing.

He moved slowly through the area. The three-room sanctuary stood against the chilled darkness of the tunnels and caverns. Greg moved slowly, deliberately. He detected no hint of Undead or Augmented. As a matter of fact, the place felt completely empty. For a second, he felt like he was investigating the long-abandoned ruins of an ancient civilization, buried deep beneath the dead surface of a long-forgotten moon.

His head throbbed in dull, thick pulses. Greg confirmed that he was alone in the three-room break area and then locked down the pair of entrances. A sense of palpable relief washed through him. He wasn't out of this yet, not by a long shot, but he was safe, for now. The light, the relative warmth, the simple, animal comfort of four walls and a roof was enough to help him feel less like giving in to the panic that was gnawing at him.

The primary room was a break area, complete with some couches, tables, chairs, and a small kitchen area. The second room was a small storage area that resembled a large closet. Shelves held small crates of basic supplies: mining equipment, spare parts, spare light-strips, tools. He left it alone and moved on to the third and final room, which turned out to be a white-tiled, well-lit bathroom.

Sinks and mirrors to the right, stalls and urinals to the left. Greg immediately walked over to the nearest urinal, freed himself and took a lengthy piss. He hadn't even known he'd needed to until he saw the bathroom.

Sometime later, he finished up, washed his hands, and moved along the stalls. As he moved down the row, he smelled something. It wasn't the rotted decay of Undead flesh, but rather something a little more basic, a little more cloying, and somehow, less repugnant. Greg abandoned his notion of complete isolation when he reached the last stall and slowly pushed it open, fearing what he might find.

A miner had committed suicide in the back of an isolated, abandoned bathroom, deep beneath the surface of a dead, airless moon on the edge of known space.

Greg stared for a long time at the corpse. He found himself wondering about this man. Who was he? Why had he been driven to kill himself? Did he have friends? Family left? What was his favorite color?

It was hard to believe that something as small and simple as a corpse could have once held so much knowledge, so many memories, so much life.

And that it could be snapped away in an instant.

The man had killed himself with some kind of tool. It was still gripped firmly in his pallid hand. Greg knelt and gently pried it from the death-grip. After a moment of inspection, he realized it was a bolt-gun.

A slow, painful, grim grin spread across his face. In the absence of any real kind of arsenal, this thing would do nicely.

Greg spent the next five minutes stripping the man of his gray miner's uniform. The method of suicide had, somehow, left the uniform largely undamaged and without any stains. Greg felt a momentary pang of guilt as he stripped the jumpsuit, but gave himself a little bit of comfort in the knowledge that this man would no longer need it. Once he had the jumpsuit stripped, he folded it up into a bundle and headed back out into the break room.

Greg slowly came back online. His thoughts were clearer, but so was the pain in his body. Shock and a mute numbness granted to him by the almost frozen water in the cave both wore off.

He’d need painkillers, and to make sure nothing was broken. Greg hunted through the break room for a while, setting aside the bolt gun and the miner's uniform, and turned up a medical kit. It was larger than the smaller, emergency kits that were bolted to walls in corridors, service tunnels, and bathrooms. This was meant more as a field kit, as this was likely very far away from anything that might be called civilization.

Greg sat down on one of the couches and opened up the kit. Inside, he found was he was looking for: a handheld scanning unit. Firing it up, he ran it over his body in wide, sweeping arcs, focusing on his head, his chest, and his leg. After a few moments, the device seemed satisfied it had gathered enough data.

By some small miracle, the device reported that nothing was broken, cracked, or even sprained. All the pain he felt was on the surface. He supposed Linda was right. These suits could take quite a bit of damage. It was too bad he hadn't kept his helmet on, if he had, he might not be in such a painful and shitty situation right now.

The device also showed no signs of infection, of any kind. He took that as a good sign. Satisfied that he was okay, medically at least, Greg stood up and took off the suit, which was ruined now. He also stripped off the uniform he had beneath it. Next, he dug around in the kit and came up with the proper supplies to treat the small collection of cuts, scrapes, burns, and bruises he'd gathered.

When he was finished, he dosed himself with an anti-viral/antibiotic injection, then a hit of painkillers, and for good measure, a half an injection of stimulant, to wake him back up and really get his blood pumping again.

For a while, he just sat there in his boxers and let the painkillers work. When he felt good enough, he pulled the dead miner's uniform and his battered suit of armor back on and then hobbled over to the kitchen area. Hungry. He was hungry. Ravenous, actually. And thirsty. He pried open the fridge and found a couple of cans of Vex.

Without hardly a though
t, he popped the top and downed the whole thing in one go. Greg crushed the can and tossed it over his shoulder, belched loudly, then hunted some more. He found a pair of freeze-dried meals. One of them was a hamburger with fries and another was a beef-and-cheese enchilada with hot sauce and rice.

He nuked them both in the little microwave and tore into them, eating right down to the black plastic case. Greg felt better as the painkillers really took effect and the food settled comfortably into his stomach.

He grabbed the bolt gun and fiddled with it. After a moment, he saw that it operated basically like a gun. It came with a magazine, which held ten bolts of metal about three inches long and were about as thick as his pinky.

They were blunt, not pointed like bullets, but they'd do the job.

Resisting the urge to fire a test shot, Greg instead opted to hunt the nearby storage room for spare magazines. He located two spare magazines and pocketed them.