18. Nastya
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Nastya


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If the jackboots set you running and you've got no place to turn,
And you find yourself in trenches strange, it's logical to yearn
For that pleasant little hidey-hole away from your new hosts;
In long-abandoned dug-outs dwell their own unhappy ghosts.

The destruction of the Site was a step in the right direction.

Not that it wouldn't generate more headaches later, of course, but in the short term it made her job much easier. Indoor combat was a study in routes: where were you, where did you need to be, how many paths could take you from A to B, what benefits and difficulties did each present, what was the resource and opportunity cost for taking one over the other, et cetera et cetera. When the bombs went off and took out the entire second skin access corridor in front of her, simultaneously breaking down the bricked-up door to her left… well. With only one direction to go, she didn't need to waste any of her go-juice making a decision. She loped over the collapsed barricade and entered Site-43's very own empty quarter.

Ibanez had been very clear. "If they're gonna get past us, you run. I want you ahead of them. You'll know what to do." She did know what to do. She couldn't do it head-on; all her mags were spent, and her favoured tool was wasted on a frontal assault. If she'd turned around, she'd already be mincemeat — and anyway, it was only water back there now.

She didn't waste time wondering at her Chief's fate. She'd fought alongside the woman with Magical Mystery Tour during the Impasse, knew Ibanez was a survivor. She needed all her attention on the task at hand.

There was a knife in her hand. A very special knife. That knife was the task, and (not to put too fine a point on it) its execution at the same time.

The space beyond the barricade wasn't particularly dusty or airless. The ventilation systems were rated to run for decades without maintenance, though unlike AAF-D this Section hadn't been given an extra special long haul makeover. It also hadn't been occupied in over thirty years.

Well. Not by its original occupants, anyway.

The hallways were dark and narrow, and oddly difficult to focus on. Overhead lights came on as she walked, though one in every three failed immediately after activation. Her first stop would be the junction box, to put an end to that—

Her blood had never been curdled before, and it didn't curdle now, but that scream was definitely the sort people described as blood-curdling. Uninhibited horror and rage. It was coming from deeper in the bowels of Procurement and Liquidation, the only sector of Site-43 to have been permanently taken out of circulation.

The space she'd hoped to make her turnabout battlefield.

Nobody had ever fully explained what went wrong in here. Some sort of psychosis related to the objects being stored, most of which were still in storage. P&L was cradled on all sides by the dorms, the hospital, Admin and the firing range, and sat on an impenetrable bedrock table which Rydderech's abyss neatly bypassed. Nothing was getting out without their knowing, and as nothing within was deemed high value or high yield, it had all been left in situ during the evacuation.

The voice howled again, and there was a sound of breaking glass, then a desperate, mournful whimper. "Shut up!" the voice screamed, and it echoed through the claustrophobic corridors.

The first Insurgent was too busy noticing all that to watch his flank as he pushed through the hall. She couldn't blame him, but she could plant her knife in his jugular. She turned him away before taking it out, keeping the blood spray off her. That wasn't the sort of slippery she wanted to be right now.

She stashed the still-bleeding corpse in the maintenance closet which was right where she'd hoped it would be, and cut the power to the lights. In the dark it was easier to see what was wrong with the air: horizontal bands, thin and thick, scrolled through space and occluded her view. A trick of the dust? Oddly geometric —

The dust parted abruptly in the next hall over, and something leathery flapped over her head. It hadn't been aiming to overshoot; she'd simply dropped to a crouch on instinct. "WE SLEEP LONG TIME," the leathery something bellowed as it passed.

She resisted the urge to respond.

Shouts and gunfire back near the entrance told her the thing had met her pursuers. That gave her a little more time to explore. Pushing ahead through the utilitarian accessways of P&L revealed dozens of storage rooms, all for small items — the larger ones were located in other Sections with subway access — and quite a few missing their doors. It was good that she'd come here; probably nobody knew this ancient containment had been breached, a crisis of a kind (if not in scale) with what was no doubt breaking out in the attic.

There was only one office in P&L, and it was located at the head of a large workroom full of cubicles. The screaming had definitely come from here, though whatever had produced the sound was no longer in evidence. That gave her plenty of time to pull the plug on the empty water cooler, cut it with her knife, and find the precise right spot to strangle the second Insurgent from. This one she stabbed maybe a dozen times, between the vertebrae. His fault for wearing a helmet.

She had just set him up in one of the office chairs — one of the few that weren't overturned, or slashed to pieces — when the screaming came again, much closer this time.

As in, right behind her.

"It sees you!" screamed Allan McInnis — had he ever been so young? — as he raised the detached paper cutter blade above his head.

Nastya.png

Udo

Indivisible

Nimkii

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