Necropolis 3 (6 page)

“
Hey, uh, how much longer?” he asked.

“
Just a few more minutes. I'm downloading all this data here into my infoclip,” Reed replied.

“
You mean infopad?”

“
No. Infoclip. One of these.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a slim piece of black metal. “They're like infopads, only they hold raw data, they don't display anything. They hook into terminals or infopads to display the data. I'm going to give everyone two of these, each holding a copy of the data here. There's a lot in here, but I've found something that is specifically relating to you, Greg.”

That caught his attention. “What?”

He stepped closer. Reed shifted. “It says here that you were instrumental in the making of the Cure, somehow.”

“
I...it's complicated.”

“
Apparently. However, what they talk about here is that the Cure doesn't work, at least not the way they intended.”

“
What was going wrong?”

“
It causes total memory loss.”

Greg blinked in shock. It made such perfect, simple sense. This was why they were so desperately hunting him. This was why he was so important. He remembered thinking that the Cure might not work, but to know that it had such a deep flaw...he wondered if it was something to do with the fact that it obviously hadn't been made with humans in mind. He thought about the Cyr for the first time in a long while.

“That's crazy,” he said finally.

“
Yes. Quite a flaw.” Reed agreed.

He copied the data to more of the infoclips. When two of them were filled, he slipped them into his inner pocket. When two more were filled, he passed them off to Greg, who mimicked the action.

“Hey guys, anything?” He called.

Everyone reported back negative and began to drift back to the central area. Reed continued filling and passing out infoclips.

“So, what were they actually doing here?” Campbell asked.

“
It looked like they were purposefully infecting the miners and then running all sorts of tests on them. I think they were trying to find a new cure, as well as a method of control, over their rapid evolution and on a more basic level,” Reed replied.

“
Sick shit,” Kyra muttered.

Thompson accepted his infoclips and walked cautiously over to a nearby cage holding a Berserker. He reached out and tapped on the glass.

Inside, the Berserker raged.

“
Man, these things are ugly, huh?” he asked.

“
Done,” Reed said. “Now we can go get that part.”

“
Thompson,” Carter called. “Get away from that.”

Thompson turned around to face them. He laughed nervously. “These cages are like indestructible, right? I mean, they'd have to be actually opened for the thing to get out, right? We're safe.”

“No reason to go taunting the damned thing,” Carter muttered.

A horrible, wretched, godforsaken sound came to Greg's ears then, all of their ears in fact.

It was the sound of a cage door opening.

Then it was followed by two more sounds, signifying the exact same thing.

Thompson turned around, looked up and made a small, terrified sound.

Chapter 05

–
Run n' Gun
–

Chaos and death was given form as the Berserker brought its hands up, made two fists, and smashed Thompson's skull in between them. Greg let out a small sound of terror as fresh, warm blood sprayed his face and uniform.

“Run!” Carter screamed as he suddenly bolted forward, hand in his pocket.

Greg couldn't believe how fast everything had gone to hell. There were two Berserkers to his right, stepping out of their cages, with Carter racing up to the one directly in front of them that had just murdered Thompson.

Kyra, Campbell, and Reed beat a hasty retreat deeper into the lab, away from the beasts. Greg moved with them, uncomprehending of what Carter might do. The security officer pulled something from his inner pocket, reached the Berserker and leaped into the air. The titanic Undead was in the midst of roaring, its mouth a gaping maw. Carter shoved what Greg finally realized was a grenade into its mouth, landed, turned, and sprinted away.

“
I said move!” Carter screamed.

Greg moved. He joined Carter in fleeing the alcove created by the racked cages and just barely managed to clear it when the grenade went off. Greg stopped and peered back around the corner, seeing the huge beast slump to the ground, now headless, its thick neck little more than a smoking crater. He laughed and kept moving.

“Nice one.”

“
Yeah, but we've still got two more to deal with, and that was my only grenade,” Carter replied as they raced on.

They caught up with the others deeper in the lab as the Berserkers gained their senses and tore through the cages and equipment to get at them.

“I've never really fought one of these things before,” Carter said. “How in the hell do you kill them?”

“
Shoot them in the head, a lot, with big guns. Though I've usually had luck with dispatching them via the environment. Although it doesn't look like there's much in the way of that in this lab,” Greg replied.

The first Berserker rounded the corner, caught sight of them, and roared. It charged for them. The group opened fire, blasting away chunks of flesh and spraying midnight blood across the area. The second one appeared as the first slowed from taking so much gunfire. As everyone emptied their weapons and reloaded, the thing was still stood.

“Shit. Carter, Mike, Kyra, Reed, get out of here. If we all hang around we're just going to get in each others way.”

The
quartet must have agreed with Greg, because they beat a hasty retreat. He and Campbell backed away in the opposite direction, opening fire again and leading the creatures deeper into the lab. Greg began to really worry.

“
What the fuck are we gonna do man?” Campbell asked.

“
Dunno-duck!”

The wounded Berserker charged them and swung. Greg ducked and Campbell dove out of the way, narrowly avoiding the titan's swing. They were recovering when the second beast charged for them. Greg barely tossed himself out of the way and the thing crashed into a tower of equipment, sending it sprawling everywhere.

“Do you hear that?” Campbell asked suddenly.

Recovering, Greg listened, and after a second, he did. It was the odd, almost wave-like sound of raw electricity.

“What is that?” he asked.

“
Who cares? Maybe we can use it,” Campbell replied.

They kept backing up, keeping out of reach of the recovering Berserkers, and found another towering wall of stacked crates. Quickly, the pair moved around it and put it between them and the rampaging Undead.

Greg saw what was making the electrical arcing sound. A whole section of the far wall had been exposed and the inner workings of what he realized must be a generator was visible. Raw electricity arced across the exposed guts of the machinery.

“
Now
that
is what I'm talking about!” Greg cried. “Lead the wounded one away, keep shooting him in the head. I'll deal with the other one.”

“
You got it,” Campbell replied.

They both rounded the corner. Campbell screamed at them and opened fire, focusing his attention on the beast that had already taken a lot of damage. It let out a furious roar and made for him. Greg caught the attention of the healthier one with a couple of shotgun blasts to its broad chest. The creature snarled and charged him, building up speed, closing the short distance between the two of them.

At the last second, Greg dove, tucked and rolled, letting his momentum carry him as far as possible. There was a tremendous crash, followed by a jerking, staccato roar of absolute pain and rage. He spun around and stared at the creature, now ensnared in the electrical field, blue-white arcs engulfing its body.

Suddenly, the whole thing overloaded and everything went pitch black for a second before the lights hesitantly flickered back to life as a back-up generator kicked in. The Berserker fell away from the generator, now little more than a huge, burnt-out, crispy mass of blackened flesh. Deeper in the lab, Greg could hear gunfire.

“Little help here!” Campbell shouted.

Greg hurried after him, coming around the stacked-cage wall, and saw the creature advancing slowly on Campbell, who was backed into a corner, reloading. Greg rushed over to it, put the shotgun to the back of its head and fired off a pair of slug shells. The top of the thing's skull blew away in a chunky spray of visceral gore.

The creature toppled over, nearly crushing Campbell in the process.

“
Thanks,” he muttered as he finished reloading. “Can we get the fuck out of this place now?”

“
Let's go regroup with the others and figure out our next move,” Greg replied.

Greg made sure to go back to Thompson's corpse and scavenge his extra ammo and the two copies of the data he had, then they left the labs, tracing the escape route Kyra and the others had taken. They found them securing a long corridor just outside the labs.

“What the hell happened in there?” Carter asked.

“
Lots of fun,” Greg replied. “Now we get to figure out what to do next.”

He took a moment to take in the environment. The mining headquarters were nearly as bad as the
Anubis
had been during his very last trip to the ship. The walls, floor, and ceiling were battered, burnt, blood-splattered, and dented. Several bodies occupied the floor, which gave Greg a slight relief, as it meant Erebus and his Augmented had yet to reach this area and begin their eerie 'harvest'. The lights were low and dim, they flickered occasionally.

Greg activated his radio. “Lynch, we've got copies of the data. Lots of nasty research files and plenty of dirt on Dark Ops for when we get the hell out of this place.”

“Good. Now you need to go get that device for the bomb. You remember where it is?”
Lynch replied. Greg could hear gunfire in the background.

“
Yeah, I remember the way.”

“
Good. Get to it.”

Lynch cut the line. As Greg and the others set off down the corridor, a tremendous, marrow-freezing roar suddenly loosed across the base. It was so loud and powerful that it froze everyone in their tracks and cracked several nearby windows.

“What the fucking hell was that?” Carter whispered, the terror obvious in his voice.

“
I heard something like that...back on Dis. Only it wasn't
that
powerful...I'd always thought it was a Berserker, but maybe it's something more powerful.” Greg murmured.

“
More
powerful than a Berserker?” Campbell cried.

“
Yes...let's get the fuck out of here and hope we never have to find out.”

They set off again. Greg made sure to memorize the route through the headquarters and the actual layout of the place to the best of his ability, though he'd snagged an infopad with a map of the base just in case. The squad was silent as they traversed the ruined, derelict corridors of the building, listening to the haunting sounds of its new tenants. Greg tried not to think of whatever might be big enough to roar like that, but the notion wouldn't leave his mind and ideas of its size, shape, and lethality kept forming.

He tried to focus on the mission instead. The part they were looking for was in a storage bay in the first floor of the mining headquarters. The corridors would take them most of the way there, just a few twists and turns, but they had to pass through another warehouse to get to the room they wanted to be in, then they'd have to perform the now familiar process of hunting down a single piece of equipment amidst a field of crates.

Greg studied the others as they kept going. Kyra and Campbell looked solid, though tense, but the others looked shaken up. Even after all they had been through, Greg wasn't sure how much actual combat experience with the Undead Carter or Reed had seen. Thompson's death must be weighing heavily on them.

He understood. Death was pretty terrifying when it was so immediately obvious. It seemed way too easy to die in the situation they were in. One minute, Thompson had been alive, aware and fully functional. The next, he was dead. Just like that. And there was no coming back, no hope of saving him. He was wholly, absolutely gone.

And it could happen to any of them just like that.

Greg was still wrestling with this notion himself. He'd just had a lot more time and practice at keeping it off his mind.

As they navigated the corridors and came to the end of their journey, a new sound came to Greg. It was a curious, wet clicking, almost like some kind of overgrown insect. Greg shuddered at the noise.

“What
is
that?” Kyra whispered.

“
I have no idea, I've never heard anything like it,” Greg replied softly.

“
Great,
another
new one? Is that it?” Campbell asked.

“
Possibly. Everyone be ready. God alone knows what the fuck we might be facing this time around,” Greg replied.

They came to the end of the corridor they were in and halted before a large pair of doors that stood between them and the warehouses they needed to be in. Reed knelt by a battered, bloodied control panel and worked at getting the doors opened. Greg felt tense apprehension doing a slow creep up his body.

He studied the corridor they stood in, but it was vacant save for the others and the lonely solitude of corpses.

“
Got it,” Reed murmured.

The doors opened. Greg kept his shotgun tucked up tight against his shoulder, finger inside the trigger guard, ready for anything, as he stepped into the storage bay beyond. The room was a titanic area where every sound echoed and towering stacks of huge, rectangular, gunmetal gray crates hung over them.

There didn't seem to be anything unusual about the bay, and yet...that familiar sense of subtle wrongness of things hiding just of out of sight, lying in wait. The lights weren't that good, little more than distant bulbs high overhead. The dim luminosity created deep nests of shadows around the edges of the room, where anything might lurk.

“
Okay,” Greg murmured. “Come on, let's go. Nice and easy.”

They entered the bay. It felt like stepping into a slaughter house. Slowly, easing their way into the bay, they began navigating the alcoves created by the stacks of crates. The clicking sound came to them once more, much closer this time. Greg swallowed, his muscles tightening in anticipation of some unforeseen attack.

What could
possibly
be making those noises?

They came out of the alcoves about halfway across the bay, into a makeshift courtyard that housed a few mobile platforms obviously meant for use by the base personnel in reaching the higher-up crates if they needed something. There was a great deal of blood on the floor, though only a handful of body parts.

“Something's wrong...” Campbell murmured.

“
This feels like an ambush,” Greg looked around for just such an event.

Abruptly, the wet clicking noises, which had become a background murmur by then, cut off dramatically. It became eerily silent.

“Get ready,” Greg whispered.

Something moved in the shadows of an unlit alcove in between a pair of crate stacks. Greg trained his shotgun on it and began to let out a warning when it launched itself from its hiding place, directly at him.

It was new, he realized as he squeezed the trigger and lit the place up in a flashing freeze-frame of muzzle flare. Greg caught a glimpse of it before its head vanished in a thin, black vapor of blood and brains.

It had once been a man, but the Undead infection had taken that man and worked him over into something downright wretched. The torso had become hunched over and the arms and legs were longer than was natural. The skin was pallid, almost a perfect titanium white, and the veins stood out more than ever, like a wicked,
all-too-detailed road map to hell. What was different, and most terrifying of all, was its hands.