They drove up to the apartment in a normal-looking army jeep, covered in canvas and not particularly obtrusive. Pegasus got out first, checking to see that the street was empty. Having determined that much, he called out everyone else. Five people in metal and ceramic suits climbed out of the back of the truck, plasma rifles in the readied position. Epsilon-2 never went anywhere without full body armor and the best weapons if he could help it, and today was no exception.
MTFL Pegasus and MTFTs Sally, Yosemite, Gerudo, Light, Basket, and Statue rushed straight out of the vehicle and through the unlocked front door, as quick and coordinated as a SWAT team, and looked into an empty lobby. The place was clear of furniture, ornaments, or carpeting, or anything to indicate that there was anyone home. The lights were out, so Pegasus switched on his headlamp to get a better look at the floor. The dust was thick on the floor, but Pegasus could make out clear footprints, leading around lobby and up the stairs next to the elevators on the left.
Pegasus slung his rifle over his shoulder and dug out a little receiver from his belt. After pushing a few buttons, he could see a little light blinking on his helmet display, just out of the corner of his eye. “Command? Can you read me?”
“Loud and clear, Epsilon two,” said a voice into MacLean’s ear. “You’ve got great reception. We’re just starting to get your video feed.”
“Roger that,” said Pegasus. “Alright, team, sound off.”
Once everyone had been officially accounted for, Pegasus started following the footprints up the stairs. The team followed behind him silently in single file. At each floor, the prints lead down the hallway, into each open room, and then back out up the stairs. After the first three floors of this, Pegasus made a command decision and decided to simply follow the prints up to the floor where they didn’t round back to the stairs and start searching there.
At the fifth floor, the team noticed a distinct lack of climbing prints, and fanned out into the hallway beyond the stairwell. Agent Bates’ footsteps went into a doorway, currently closed, almost directly across from the stairway exit. Pegasus moved to one side of the door, while Sally took the other side. Light and Basket covered the hall while Gerudo walked up and gently turned on the knob. He gestured to Pegasus to indicate that the door was unlocked. Pegasus nodded, and the remaining team members took up places against the wall the door was set into. Sally gently reached across for the knob, twisted it, and pushed inwards.
Pegasus dashed in the door, weapon pointed ahead, and scuttled sideways as soon as he was through to make room for the rest of the team, who moved in one after the other and fanned out to push into every room of the apartment. Tense seconds passed, but Pegasus didn’t hear the sounds of screaming or gunfire, so he let out a breath and tried to suppress his adrenaline surge.
“Epsilon two, report!” he barked into his helmet microphone. The voices of his comrades echoed in his eats almost at once.
“Oh-two, nothing in the bathroom.”
“Oh-three, kitchen’s clear.”
“Oh-four, hallway is still empty.”
“Oh-five, no one’s on the stairs.”
“Oh-six, I found Bates. He’s in the bedroom closet. Well, there’s no bed, but I think this is the bedroom…”
“Oh-one, foyer is clear,” said Pegasus, rounding out the group.
It was redundant information for most of them, but redundant extra layers of redundant protection provided much comfort to me, especially when they turned out not to be redundant.
“Six, stay where you are, I’ll join you. Two, three, get in the foyer,” continued Pegasus, walking into the back room which might have been a bedroom at one point. He found Statue kneeling over the body of a man who matched the description of Agent Bates. His wrists were slashed, and he looked like he’d been bleeding out of his ears and his nose. There was a bloody knife lying in a pool of yet more blood on the carpeted floor of the closet. Pegasus guessed that Bates had bled out his last in this room.
Pegasus swore under his breath, prompting 06 to look up from his inspection. “Sir, do you know what these injuries mean?”
“I know they mean trouble, but you probably guessed that,” said Pegasus, sourly. “Get back in the hall.”
Once everyone had regrouped, the team wandered down the hall, barging into each room in turn as they had the first room. Soon enough, they had cleared the entire floor and found absolutely nothing. MacLean sighed and spoke into his mic again. “Command, we’ve found Bates dead and no trace of what killed him. Possible suicide. Please advise.”
“Roger that, Epsilon Two. The anomalous object should still be in the building; our surveillance doesn’t show any indication that anything left it. Continue searching.”
Once, just once, I would have loved to hear my superior’s say “Screw it, just leave. We’ll carpet-bomb the area and call it a day.”
Pegasus sighed and ordered the team to regroup while he thought about what to do next. They had no clear idea of what to look for, no clear idea of where to look, or any clear idea of what kind of traces their target might leave. That left them with sole option of wandering around in random directions until they tripped over something supernatural.
They discussed it as a group, and at Pegasus’ insistence they decided not to split up to cover more ground. There were only a few more floors that they had not investigated yet, and so they resolved to look through these before declaring that there was nothing to be found and leaving.
Epsilon-2 moved into the stairwell, and Pegasus was walking toward the stairs leading down the stairs when he heard Gerudo muttering something into his ear. “Three? If you’ve got something to say, speak up!”
“Uh, sorry chief. I just thought I noticed a light up a couple floors.”
“A light?” Pegasus looked upwards. The stairs were blocking his view, but as he sidestepped to get a better look he noticed that there seemed to be a little more ambient light higher up than on the floor they were on.
“This place doesn’t have power, right? So why’s there…”
“We get the picture, Three. Everyone, we’re moving to the eighth floor. Rifles ready, people, this could be a sign of life.”
It was no illusion; the eighth floor of the apartment building had its lights on, somehow, and the glow from the hall spilled out into the stairwell. In contrast to the filth on every other floor, the eighth was swept clean, adding to Pegasus’ feelings of unease.
The difference between being a trooper in the Taskforces and a leader in the Taskforces is that a trooper only has to worry about following orders when crazy stuff starts happening and the path ahead is unclear, while an MTFL is responsible for actually figuring out what needs to get done. Knowing that, I have a lot of sympathy for commanders I’ve had that tried to guess what to do, guessed wrong, and got killed.
“Epsilon Two, form up. We’re going to cover this floor like we did the other ones. Call if you notice anything, and I do mean anything.”
The hall was quiet, signs of life notwithstanding, and nothing eventful happened as the team checked into the first few rooms. The third suite, #808, had what looked like a large, chrome-colored, gas-powered generator, which had no cables extending from it and thus wasn’t hooked up to anything, even though it was clearly turned on. Pegasus opted not to touch it.
“Command, we’ve found an anomaly. Dunno if it’s related to what we’re looking for, but this machine… you’re still getting audiovisual, right?”
“Roger that, Epsilon Two. We see it, and we’ll send along a truck to pick it up. Make sure the area is clear.”
“Understood, Command.”
“Chief, I see movement!”
“What?… Eyes wide, Two. Team, regroup at Two’s position.”
Less than a minute later, everyone was huddled in the hallway once again, looking down in the direction of suite #816. “The door opened, and something’s head popped out,” said Sally, pointing at the door in question. “It looked straight at me and then shut the door.”
“Human?”
“Negative. Head was way too big. Face had funny dimensions too.”
“…Shit. Team, we’re going in. Two, you take point.”
The door was locked, so Sally kicked it down while the rest of the team covered her, and dashed into the suite with Pegasus right behind her. The suite foyer looked like all its original furnishings were still inside; a big couch was set in front of a large LCD television, and a plush purple carpet covered the floor.
A humanoid figure wearing ratty jeans and a blue anorak sat on the couch. It had a shrunken-looking body in contrast to an enormous head with a face that looked like it had been smashed and poorly reconstructed several times. The strange creature looked straight at Pegasus.
Sally abruptly spun in place, rifle to her shoulder. Pegasus dropped to his knees before she got her first shot off, leaving her free to blast Yosemite as he came in the door behind them. His armored chestplate glowed red for an instant before he screamed and dropped to the carpet, stumbling and nearly falling on Pegasus.
…Wait, what? That can’t be right….
Without thinking, Pegasus raised his rifle and blasted through the back of Sally’s head from point-blank range. Her state-of-the-art helmet was made to stop bullets and resist explosions, but it was nigh-useless against ionized-
No, that’s wrong. I did not shoot first. I didn’t.
Pegasus heard the sound of a shot and a scream behind him and whirled around to see Statue standing over Basket’s body, firing another blast at Yosemite. The others were nowhere to be seen, somehow. Pegasus pointed his gun at Statue, but dropped it when he felt a searing pain in his right arm shoulder. He screamed, and the noise of it buzzed through his mic and drowned out all other sounds. The plasma rifle dropped to the floor and-
That can’t be it. I lived. What am I remembering if I
“MacLean? Is something the matter?”
I don’t know, does it matter?
Gerudo lost it. He was firing his rifle at nothing somewhere down the hall, full-auto, indiscriminate, his shouting filling the com channels and mirroring Pegasus’ own. Yosemite came up behind him and smacked him with the butt of his rifle, knocking him to the ground, and then shot him.
No…. No…. No…. No…. No…. No….No…. No…. No….No…. No…. No….No…. No…. No….No…. No…. No…
It was a different suite. Basket was shouting something incoherent and pulling a pistol off his belt. Light lobbed a grenade at him, and Basket actually made a flying leap out of the eighth story window behind him to escape the blast. Pegasus just kicked Light on top of the bomb and fled into the hallway before it blew.
“MacLean, are you alright? You seem… agitated.”
OH, REALLY!? NO SHIT! I NEVER WOULD HAVE FIGURED THAT OUT WITHOUT YOUR HELP!
Pegasus was standing over the generator firing blast after blast into what he thought was the fuel tank. Light came into the room behind him and charged at him with a bowie knife. At precisely that moment the tank exploded, and the concussive force of the fuel cooking off sent Pegasus careening backwards into his attacker.
This was where it started and ended. No, just ended. Something else started. What was it? I… can’t… think…
Somehow, Basket had ripped Sally’s helmet off, and had her pinned to the floor, smashing her head into the floorboards over and over with an armor fist until blood splattered everywhere-
“MacLean?…. Oh, Christ. SECURITY!”
Yosemite was rolling down the stairs, clutching something in his arms. When he finally crashed into the seventh-floor landing, that something started to glow a strange color and there was a blinding flash-
….I don’t remember how it started. But I know how it ended. That part was pretty standard; all alone, no one to help me… Somehow still alive, God only knows why…
Pegasus was in the apartment room, staring at the purple carpet. His helmet was gone and he had a splitting headache. Something was ringing in his ears and he thought he tasted blood. Three or four or perhaps five armored bodies were lying on the ground all around him. The little guy with the big head was nowhere to be seen. He had a pistol in his hand, and for some reason it was stuck inside his mouth. He pulled it out and looked at it, wondering what it was doing there. He rubbed his eyes with his other hand, feeling too tired to think.
He heard a clicking noise behind him, and turned to see the door behind him had been shut. He frowned, and gingerly stepped over the bodies as he made for the door and turned the handle. It opened easily, leading into a nicely-swept hallway. He looked to his left and saw a figure turn into what he dimly recalled was a stairwell.
Awareness began to return to him. He started off down the hall, first at a walk, then a jog, and then a sprint. He heard footsteps thumping down the stairs as he turned to face down into the darkness. He stuck a hand into his belt and pulled out a small flashlight, clicking it on as he started down the stairs himself.
He lost track of the noise his quarry made under the noise of his own armored boots clomping on the concrete steps and paused to listen, moving his light around the stairwell and looking over the railing onto flights of stairs below. He saw nothing and heard nothing, and was just about to start walking further down when he turned his light into the corner not five steps away from him and saw it.
As soon he looked at it, its ugly faced filled his vision, and he heard a roaring noise. The sensation stopped as soon as it had started, leaving him feeling nauseous. The room was spinning, and his headache was worse than ever, but he could still see it. It was trying to move past him down the stairs, but it was dragging one leg. Had it been injured?
He was blinded by the thing’s face again, only it was worse this time; everything looked all red. Pegasus groaned and swayed and almost fell over backwards, but he had enough presence of mind to raise his pistol. His aim was everywhere; the target was moving, the room was moving, Pegasus was moving, and it seemed like no two things stayed in the same place relative to each other for more than a few seconds. Pegasus fired anyway, listening to the sounds the bullets made as they ricocheted in the dark stairwell. He dropped the flashlight and lost sight of the creature, but continued shooting where he thought it might be.
Eventually his sidearm started clicking instead of banging, and Pegasus let it fall from his hands. It was supposed to hold twenty rounds. Pegasus had no idea how many he’d actually fired, but had seemed like a lot more than that. The gun made a surprisingly loud clattering noise when it hit the floor. He tried to take a step forward, slipped, and fell flat on the stairs, armor clanging and rattling as he slid down the steps. Pain and fatigue finally won out over adrenaline, and he blacked out.
The Foundation’s recovery team found him there, still unconscious, some hours later. The body of the malignant telepath he’d killed lay a few floors below, with blood loss from multiple gunshot wounds to the torso being its apparent cause of death. The rest of what had been team Epsilon-2 was in a suite on the eighth floor, all apparently dead from plasma cooking.
The mysterious generator was in pieces and apparently irreparable, but the researchers gathered up all the largest bits they could find for study anyway. The helmet video logs of every team member had been shut off shortly after they’d reported the existence of the generator, so the inquest into who had shot whom was never conclusively completed. It was tacitly decided that the telepath would be blamed for anything, and that the one surviving person with a plasma weapon should not be held responsible for things he might or might not have done while under external influences. MTFL Pegasus was assigned some vacation time to recover and released after being debriefed. He ran away and never came back.
