We Dove into the husk of a collapsed parking structure as the hum of repulsor engines echoed through the air.
"Buzzard," Rorke muttered, pressing his back to the pitted concrete.
above us, the alien craft drifted low and slow as if it were looking for us.
"Movement equals death," Vecht hissed into the comms. "Nobody breathes unless needed."
We all stayed frozen, not uttering a single word. The gunship loomed, its searchlights cutting through the shadows like knives.
Jex crouched beside me, eyes locked upwards, voice shaking. "Y-You think it saw the mess up there?"
Don't matter," I whispered back. "It's looking for us now."
A sudden loud crack, it had a sharp sound of stupid. Marik leaned against a wall and his elbow knocked a chunk of ferrocrete down the ramp.
Everyone was tense.
The Upyr gunship pivoted towards the noise, letting out a sonic boom through its speakers, something between sonar and alarms. The searchlights swung our way.
"Scatter!" Vecht Barked.
Like a collective hive mind, we all bolted deeper into the ruin as energy rounds scorched the ground behind us.
Ventral stopped only to fire a single warhead from the thermobaric launcher. The shell struck the gunship's undercarriage, making it lurch sideways in the air with a roar, but it wasn't down, it was now just pissed off.
"We can't kill the fucker," Rorke barked. "Just fucking run!"
We tore through the building like a pack of rats. The alien gunship screamed overhead, its repulsors flaring as it swung wide. For now, we'd lost its line of sight.
We barreled through a collapsed storefront, boots crunching over the broken display screens that once flowed lively neon colors. Everything in there reeked of scorched plastic.
"Vecht, how far to the fallback point?" I asked in between gasps for air.
"2 Klicks west. Assuming we live long enough to reach there."
I nodded grimly. "So… No pressure?"
We moved fast but sloppily and out of formation, hearts thundering from that dance with death. And that was our undoing.
Vendral was first to notice, he skidded to a halt, rasing a fist. "Hold. Something's off."
Rorke slowed, scanning. "No shell casings. No debris. Just… clean."
Too clean.
That's when we heard the distinct sound of a discharge from a shattergun.
Jex screamed, his shoulder jerking back in a spray of blood as he crumpled behind a slab of wall.
"Sniper! Up left!" I shouted, dropping behind cover.
Another round whistled past my head, then another, then all of a sudden, shots began raining out from another direction. A second Upyr squad was waiting to jump our asses.
"Ambush!" Vecht barked. "Multiple bugs. This was a trap!"
Vendral fired blindly towards the sniper nest as Marik pulled Jex into cover. The medic was breathing, but his breathing was ragged and slowing. His armor hissed as the built in biofoam systems deployed to seal the wound.
"They waited for us to flee from the gunship," Rorke hissed with rage, peeking over a counter. "Drove us right into their net."
Another volley came in, pulsefire this time, stitching the walls around us with charred surfaces where the
beams connected.
Marik cackled in a fit of hysteria.
"Stop fucking laughing and waste these bugs!" vecht snapped, tossing a grenade over the wall.
The grenade that vecht launched over the counter went off with a flat whump, the kind that compressed your chest more than your ears. Then the settled dust and splinters that caked the counters rained down like ash.
"Run!" Vecht barked, and we started moving.
Ventral hoisted the unconscious Jex over his shoulder without a word and hightailed it out of there. Marik dashed ahead, popping one of the standard issue stimulant pills and then kicking through a crumbled service door, laughing like a maniac all the way.
Rorke and I laid down covering fire, ours rounds lighting up the dug in position that the ambush squad holed up in.
Once every one of the squad had escaped, me and Rorke got up and sprinted towards the exit to regroup with the others.
A hiss behind us, then a blur. My heart stopped.
"Crawler!" I yelled, spinning to aim.
It was one of those lab grown abominations, Lithe, bony, and teeth like surgical knives, limbs bent wrong and too many of them, like a centipede, mechadendrite like arms on its back. Rorke put 3 rounds to its torso, but not before it screeched loud enough to call more.
"Fuck." Rorke spat, "we gotta go."
Rorke took off out of the shot up shopping mall and into the atrium of the shopping center with me in tow, we regrouped with the others.
"We cut through the maintenance sublevels and head towards the extraction point." Vecht says through the helmet comms system.
Ventral slung his launcher and adjusted his grip on Jex. The medic groaned, eyes flickering open just long enough to whisper something indecipherable. Blood still seeped between the armor seams despite the biofoam seal.
"This a good idea? Could be another trap." Ventral asked, "maybe. Rorke muttered. "But I say we set one first."
He forced the mangled metal door open and with a shriek the door gave way. The hallway beyond was black and narrow, pipes and cables dangling like vines in a jungle.
"Lights out," Vecht ordered. "No comms unless it's life or death."
We slipped in one by one, silence pressing around us like pressure at the bottom of a bottomless sea.
Our boots splashed on the half flooded flooring of the maintenance tunnels. The walls smelled of mold and rust. The pipes above hissed like they were trying to whisper warnings. No comms, no lights. Just movement and breathing.
Ventral moved slowly now, burdened. Jex hung over his shoulder like a bag of meat, armor dragging along the side of the corridor with a scraping whine.
Then… he coughed.
It was wet. Final. A rattle.
Ventral froze mid step. "Jex?"
He gave no answer.
Just a slow exhale, soft, long, continuous, like air leaking from a tire.
Vendral eased him down, fingers fumbling "hey, hey, stay with me."
Half through, his voice broke, cracked right in the middle of stay. He blinked hard and shook his head like that might push the moment away.
"Come one," he whispered. "Not like this. Not now."
Vendral took off his helmet, a single tear running down his scarred face.
Jex gave no response, his chest didn't rise. The faint hiss of the biofoam had gone silent, as if his soul has left his body.
Ventral pressed two fingers to the side of the now deceased medic's neck. Waited. Moved them. Waited again.
Nothing.
Ventral's shoulders slumped. His hands curled into fists that beat into the cold ferrosteel floor.
One tear rolled down his cheek. Then another. Then another. And then he broke.
Not a quiet tear nor a silent grief tucked away for later.
Vendral sobbed a deep gut wrenching sob that shook his bulky frame. Like a mother who'd lost her child. No war cry or macho fury. Just sorrow, naked and unfiltered.
Marik didn't make a sound. Not even a nervous twitch. He himself was likely holding back tears, but he made not a single peep.
Vecht was the first to move. "We can't carry him."
Vendral paid no heed.
"Vendral," Vecht said, firmer now. "You hear me?"
A long beat passed. Then Vendral nodded once, mechanical. He pulled the Jex's tags, tucked them into his pack. Reached down and pressed jex's eyes shut.
Another sob. Then silence. He wiped his face with a shaking hand, and rose like a man twice his age.
He did not say farewell, nor a single word.
He just turned his back and followed the rest of us into the dark.
(Authors note: I had finals thats why no new chapters)