No Stop Button
A roar rolled in from far away — unmistakably not a human throat. The men who had been hurrying along stopped almost as one.
"Hey. That just now…?"
"Yeah. A Gorilla."
"Shit. There was one in this sector too?"
"Those bastards can be anywhere. Anyone who hasn't run into one yet just got lucky."
Gorilla. Among the veteran inmates who had walked Special Duty more than once and come back alive, the name needed no introduction. They were called that for a reason: massive frames sheathed in dense, corded muscle, and a viciousness that was a dead ringer for the real animal.
"So what now? We turn back?"
"Are you out of your mind? We go back empty-handed this time, we take a penalty. That amount comes straight out of Prison Banking. You gonna eat that?"
"That's…"
They were barely into the expedition, and already a teammate had escape on his lips. The man at the front cut him off, sharp as a blade.
"In here, whether you eat or you starve, you go. There's no such thing as a stop."
"I've been through this sector a few times. The cave zone itself doesn't have any special structures worth stripping, but once you push past it, useful supplies are piled up like a mountain."
"You mean the mining zone, the indoor cultivation zone, and the researcher residential zone you mentioned last time?"
"That's right. The mining zone means going deeper, so the risk is too high. But the indoor cultivation zone and the researcher residential zone? Those are guaranteed, stable returns."
His companions nodded, still a little skeptical. Of the four of them, he had the most time in. Out in the world that might not have counted for much, but down here the veteran's word came first. A long record of experience meant only one thing: you had walked through a slaughterhouse of threats and come out the other side anyway.
"But if a Gorilla is going this berserk, doesn't that mean someone already pissed it off?"
"Exactly. Which makes this the perfect window, doesn't it? Once a Gorilla actually lands a hunt after a rampage like that, it doesn't give a damn about anything else. It just sits down and eats to put back the calories it burned."
"And if the hunt fails?"
"Almost no chance of that. But if it does, whatever it goes after next is completely fucked."
His companions swallowed dryly. They didn't have their leader's hours in Special Duty, but they weren't complete rookies either. They knew what this place was.
Down here, you took off your gas mask and you died. You missed a step and you died. You lost the path in the dark and you died. You failed to deal with hunger and thirst in time and you died. This was a place where a human life was treated even more cheaply than in a prison where violence and murder already came far too easily.
"Move. We can't turn back now anyway. We fill our packs in that researcher residential zone, or we don't get out."
The leader started walking, and his companions forced their feet to follow. The sturdy alloy short-spears, machetes, and hammers in their hands were a thin, meager kind of comfort.
People like to say violence doesn't solve much of anything. I see it a little differently. It isn't that violence failed to solve the problem. It's that you didn't use a bigger one.
That said, I don't have endgame gear in my hands, I haven't given my body any tasty upgrades, and I sure as hell don't have a squad of LAN buddies I've been in sync with for five-plus years.
So this is the best I can do right now.
With every preparation in place, I watched the Growler try to wedge itself through the emergency-stair entrance to the basement and come charging in. On a normal day the thing drifted around like the amiable uncle next door, ambling after an easy meal. Once it lost its mind, though, it would not stop until the hunt was finished. Even if I managed to shake it, it would tear through the surrounding area in a blind rage, kicking up noise and vibration the whole time.
I was not about to let that thing ruin my first Darkzone expedition.
A hollow clunk. I cracked the last fuel drum from the basement generator room and flung it into the middle of the corridor. Several more were already stacked there waiting for it.
What a waste. A real waste. Every drop of that stuff could have been blood and meat to me.
A heavy thud, then the wet crunch of something giving way. The Growler that had followed me in was almost through the narrow door. It looked downright delighted by the thought that all it had to do now was eat up a few dozen meters of long corridor and it could pulp me.
Hoping to buy even a second or two against that charge, I had already dragged every object in the basement out into the hall. A steel ladder. A janitor's cabinet. Spare construction materials. A pair of cabinets so old they were falling apart.
Any moment now, they ought to take the bait.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
That was when a nauseating series of impacts exploded from the opposite end of the corridor, not the side I was watching. The one that had gone after the wheelchair on the first floor had heard the noise boiling up from below and come down the other emergency stairwell.
That did it. I was perfectly flanked.
Knowing this isn't a game only makes it worse.
The stale air inside the gas mask, the cold sweat sliding down my skin — all of it was unmistakably real. So was the Growler that looked ready to come at me like a truck, and the roar that shook the air when it opened its throat.
Hesitate, and you die.
A crash, then another wet crunch. With a spitefulness that felt almost personal, the late arrival and the one that had already been smashing the door burst into the basement corridor at nearly the same instant.
Some kind of cosmic joke, I thought — and my body was already moving. They ignored the vicious stink of fuel oil entirely and charged straight down the center of the hall toward each other, locked onto the noise I was making. Straight toward the pile of junk I had stacked there, crowned with every fuel drum I could find.
"I'm gonna honey-farm this and get out!"
I put everything I had into it, ran up the piled objects, and caught the ladder I had left standing at a precarious angle, hanging from the ceiling vent. The old grate was caked in dust, the wiring behind it laid bare, and there was just enough space for one person to squeeze through.
Then it happened.
A rolling crash, and a detonation like a bomb going off. The objects packed into the middle of the corridor folded like cardboard boxes, and the two Growlers, granted their dramatic reunion at dead center, planted a deep, sloppy kiss on each other. The impact was ugly enough that both of them howled and flailed their limbs in a way that would have been genuinely funny — except that if this failed, there was nothing behind me at all. I clenched my teeth and hauled myself up into the vent.
The emergency generator was still feeding power through the building. I grabbed a cable that had been severed a long time ago and was still spitting fat, ugly sparks, sliced the fastener off with my knife, and flung it down through the grate.
Thanks to the two of them cheerfully tearing the place apart, the basement corridor was swimming in dust — and in the fuel I had spread, carefully and thoroughly, down the center of the floor.
A roaring whoosh. In a single breath the corridor filled with a blaze of orange light, heat rolling out in every direction.
By then I was already gone, scrambling through the vent like a cockroach with its nest on fire. The heat on my back was not some brat's little prank with matches. It was a real, building-eating fire.
In EFD, environmental changes a player kicks off — fires, gas leaks, that kind of thing — stay temporary. There's no guarantee reality works the same way.
I half talked myself into believing something was still coming after me and crawled hard for the shaft that led back to the first floor. Fortunately, the place took its quarantine procedures seriously enough that the air-circulation system was solid. Getting out into the first-floor corridor was not difficult.
"Hah—!"
After being trapped in that narrow space with heat and soot for company, bursting free was a relief I had no words for. I offered the Growlers — who by now were presumably becoming a live barbecue down below — a brief moment of silence, then pushed my aching body upright.
Any later and that would have gotten ugly.
If the filter-change window had come due while I was still in there… I didn't even want to picture it.
No emergency alarm. No sprinklers. The internal systems are completely fried.
Or, more likely, the power the emergency generator was putting out had been concentrated on a specific space inside this building from the start.
Part of me wanted a sample of Growler tissue off the leftovers so badly I could taste it, but I would rather roll the dice somewhere else than go back down there.
With the pests gone, there's only one place left worth hitting.
Darkzones came in every environment imaginable, but a few rules held across all of them. If there was a building, the heaviest item spawns sat in the basement you could barely climb out of and on the top floor. Grind yourself raw through a middling first floor or the building's midsection and you were just scratching the surface.
I didn't hesitate. I took the central stairs and ran for Floor F.
"Yeah. This is it."
The top floor, Floor F, was sealed behind a barrier that made the reinforced glass doors on the first floor look like a joke. The entire level had been tiled in a special grade of bulletproof glass, probably to keep internal security and quarantine protocols airtight.
Beyond that frosted wall, research equipment, samples, and documents lay scattered in a beautiful mess. Narrow my eyes and try to look closer, and whole stretches of it blacked out on the spot. Which meant this was the real mother lode. The Eldorado of the Darkzone.
The Growlers couldn't get anything off this floor either. They bounced off the wall a few times and went back down.
Scratches and impact marks ran across the glass in every direction. The entrance in particular still carried the scars of someone trying to force it — and those were not Growler marks. A human being had been here.
I felt a clean, uncomplicated admiration that someone besides me had actually made it this far, and I pulled the plain white keycard I had been hiding against my chest.
In EFD, the laboratory-themed buildings attributed to that unidentified research group were all set up the same way: classified zones opened on a dedicated keycard. What I had picked up at the construction site outside was the lowest-grade disposable security card. It would work anywhere except a Black-level priority zone, but once you used it, it died. The only cards you could swipe more than once were the colored ones. The ones I knew of were yellow, green, blue, red, purple, and black.
A sharp beep.
Fortunately, every watt still running through the building seemed to exist to keep this floor's systems alive. The security key took.
A long, depressurizing hiss. The door opened, and the airlock system sucked the interior atmosphere out in a rush. The special-issue gas mask kept me from smelling the soot still hanging in the air, but somehow, I could smell money. Thick as oil.