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Oct-04-09, 08:56 PM (EDT)
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"FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire"
 
   Monday, November 2, 2409
Fairfield, Faliszek III
Booth sector, United Federation of Planets

Master Sergeant William B. Overbeck, WDF Tactical Corps (ret.), had seen a lot of seriously crazy shit go down in his day. He'd been with the 14th Armored Cav when they hit the dirt - except there wasn't any dirt - on Cybertron in 2026, MPed for Tactical Detachment Command when they turned a transport-load of Marines and Salusian swabbies loose on Kooken's Pleasure Pit for R&R during the 12th Kilrathi, and even helped recover relics of some ancient pre-Salusian civilization or another on a planet that turned out to be completely artificial, damned if he could remember the name of it now.

It was the kind of thing he'd lived for since, hell, since before First Contact. Where other kids had gotten drafted and bitched the whole time they were there, Bill Overbeck had volunteered to go to 'Nam because somebody had to, and it might as well be someone who was interested in getting the hell out of Pittsburgh for a while. And if he'd retired after the WDF went bust in 2288, well, a man was entitled to take it easy for a while, wasn't he? Besides, he'd be back in action again someday. The virus would see to that.

When selecting Faliszek III as his place of refuge, Bill would never have figured that it would end up being the site of the weirdest goddamn thing that he had ever witnessed, bar none. But it was. The other virus had seen to that.

Well, he assumed it was a virus. What the hell else could it be? He and Francis had had this argument three or four times while the four of them fought their way across Fairfield, trying to reach the evac point they'd heard of, crosstown at Mercy Hospital. Francis thought it might be magic.

"That's the biggest bunch'a horseshit I ever heard," Bill growled, taking a drag on his cigarette. "I've seen magic zombies before, on Karelvi. Raised by goddamn Lughebu worshipers. This is completely different. These people ain't dead."

"They are when we get through with them," Zoey said, giggling just a little hysterically.

Bill put a hand on her shoulder. "Steady, girl," he said. "You done great so far. Don't come apart on us now."

"I'm okay," Zoey replied. "Really. I am. Let's just get the hell out of the city."

"Good plan," Louis agreed. He checked the charge status of his blaster carbine, then looked around the room at his companions. "I'm ready to go if y'all are."

Francis laughed harshly and clapped Louis on the shoulder, nearly knocking him over. "Let's get it done!"

"Stay frosty, people," Bill cautioned. "We're not outta this yet." He hefted his BR55 and kicked away the pipe wedging shut the exit, then swung the door open and slipped out, checking left. After all they'd been through, he knew without looking that Zoey was already at his back, covering them to the right - but the alley was empty.

"Huh," said Louis. "Where is everybody?"

"How do I know?" Francis replied. "Maybe it's league night at Zombie Bowl. Am I some kind of motherfuckin' zombologist now?"

"Shut up, Francis," Bill grumbled.

"Yes, sir, Sgt. Overbeck, sir," Francis replied, sketching a mock salute.

"Son, if you'd spent any time in uniform, you'd know that not even the most clueless scumdog recruit calls a master sergeant 'sir'. Now secure the jaw and keep that shotgun ready. Let's move, people."

Weapons at the ready, the four moved cautiously toward the end of the alley. Louis poked his head out, looked up and down the street, and then edged onto the sidewalk.

"Nobody out here either," he said. Then, pointing, he added, "There's the hospital!"

The others joined him in the street and looked. Sure enough, there was Mercy Hospital, the huge white letters near the roof still glowing despite the rest of the city having lost power around it.

Bill sized up the distance they had left to go. "Maybe half a mile," he said. "Then we gotta get to the roof. That might be the hardest part. I heard the outbreak started there. God only knows what's inside that place."

"Well, we ain't gonna find out standin' around in the street," said Francis. "Let's go!"

"For once, you got a good idea there," said Bill with a half-smile. He lit a cigarette and started leading the way up the street.

The eerie silence grated on all their nerves. They knew from hard-won experience that Fairfield never stayed this quiet for this long. They kept glancing nervously at each other, checking their weapons, waiting for the other shoe to drop, as they covered each empty alley and doorway. One block. Two blocks. Three. Stick to the shadows. A few streetlights still on in this area, probably fed by the hospital's own fusion plant. There was an orange glow in the sky near the hospital; something over there was on fire, the fire's light reflecting from the overcast that made the night even darker. Silence.

Wait...

Zoey heard it first, freezing suddenly, holstering one of her pistols so she could hold up a hand. "Shh! Listen."

The survivors halted, straining their ears. Francis was just about to say "I don't hear anything" when he heard it. A low rumbling, like the sound of a distant river going over rocks.

"Must be the fire," said Louis, his voice hushed.

Bill shook his head. "No... it's getting louder."

Whatever it was came into view a moment later, cresting a small rise in the street perhaps 300 yards away. At first it was just an indistinct wavering shadow, a strip of darkness deeper than that of the surrounding night, stretching across the street, and for a second Francis thought, improbably, that it was a river, some kind of approaching flash-flood. That was absurd - the sky had so far only threatened, not actually rained, and anyway, this was downtown Fairfield, not the New Los Angeles flood control canal system.

Then, with a sinking feeling of horror, he saw. They all saw. As the leading edge of the wave passed under one of the still-functioning streelights, it became apparent to the survivors that the dark shape was a flood of sorts, but it wasn't made of water. It was a crowd, an absolute horde, of Infected, all of them maddened into the kind of frenzy that usually required a loud noise in a confined space, all of them running as fast as they could possibly run. They stretched from sidewalk to sidewalk, pouring down the full width of the street, gibbering and snarling, trampling the slower members of their own mass underfoot without the slightest hesitation. There had to be hundreds, maybe even thousands of them.

"Holy shit!" Louis yelled. Reacting instinctively, he planted himself, swung his E-11 into position, and opened up, firing full-auto from the hip. The E-11 was a notoriously inaccurate weapon when used in such a mode, but it wasn't as if he could possibly miss. Scarlet blasterfire raked the oncoming wave, but he might as well have been shooting at an avalanche. Those few Infected he hit stumbled, fell, were subsumed by the mass, but the mass kept coming.

"We gotta get outta this street!" Bill yelled, grabbing Louis by the upper arm.

"Where?" said Francis.

Zoey looked around, then pointed. "There!"

Bill turned to see that she was pointing to a fire escape on the front of a building on the nearest cross street. If they could get to it, climb up, and pull the ladder up after them, the wave might pass by beneath. From the looks of them, they might not even stop - Bill couldn't say for sure that the charging Infected horde was even aware that he and the others were in its way.

"Go! Go!" he yelled.

Louis tried to shake off his target fixation - now was not the time to get locked into a full-powerpack rock-'n-roll - but he was still looking down the street as he started to sidle after the others, and that meant he was the only one who saw, toward the back of the onrushing mob (now close enough that he could recognize individual Infected in the front rows), bodies flying into the air and plummeting back into the crowd. He knew well what that meant. It was the worst possible thing that could happen right now, the thing that could and probably would ruin Zoey's escape plan and spell the end of them all, this close to their ultimate goal.

Freezing again, he pointed and yelled in a tone of abject terror, "TAAAAAANKwait. What the hell is that?!"

He sounded so puzzled at the end that the other three all halted their headlong dash for safety, turned, and looked. Something was charging up from the back of the zombie mob, all right, its impact flinging unlucky Infected out of its path... but it wasn't one of the hugely mutated Tanks with their hideously overdeveloped arms and little stunted legs, loping gorilla-like along and smashing everything in its way.

It was a giant vehicle of some kind, like a double-decker bus or a locomotive, complete with huge floodlights that they could now see shining through the frontmost ranks of the packed Infected. It had a curving wraparound windshield up on the "top deck", above the lights and a giant chrome T-in-a-ring logo, and the rest of it was either chromed or painted some dark color that looked black in the dim streetlights.

With a deafening blare of pneumatic horns, this monstrous vehicle plowed out of the Infected wave like a surfacing submarine, pulled away from them as it raced toward the survivors, and then went into a gigantic power slide, clouds of smoke billowing from the twelve huge whitewall tires on its three rear axles. For one horrified moment, Bill thought it was either going to topple over on its side or clip Louis with its skidding tail, but it did neither of those things, instead coming to rest perfectly square in the center of the street, its air brakes letting out a satisifed honk as the bus/train/thing came to rest.

At which point a large door on its side accordioned open, a set of stairs dropped down, and two glowing blue eyes looked out from the shadows within before their owner leaned out into the glow of the streetlight.

"Come with me if you want to live," said Atomic Robo.

The survivors blinked, looked at each other, looked at the still-charging Infected horde, and then ran like hell for the bus. They had just reached it when the Infected arrived, their en-masse impact actually shaking the huge vehicle on its suspension as they crashed against its prow and flowed down the sides. Louis, Francis, and Bill got aboard safely; Zoey was right behind them, holstering her other pistol and grabbing the handrails on either side of the bus stairs with both hands, when the tentacle-like tongue of a Smoker whipped out of the crowd, encircled her waist, and yanked her bodily off the steps.

"Zoey!" yelled Francis, but Atomic Robo put up a hand to forestall him and jumped out after her himself.

One of the odd things about the contagion was that those afflicted by it seemed to be able to sense those who were immune. They wouldn't even bother trying to bite someone who was. They would, however, do their damnedest to punch, claw, kick, and/or stomp such an individual to death, and being torn limb from limb had no more appeal for Zoey than becoming a zombie. She couldn't get to her weapons, so she tried her best to protect her face with her half-pinned arms while digging in her heels in a futile effort to keep the Smoker from dragging her too far from the bus.

Atomic Robo appeared at her side, elbowing his way through the mob of common Infected, then grabbed the tongue a few feet from where it wrapped around her with the hand that wasn't clutching a heavy autopistol, took a turn of it around his hand, and gave it a solid yank, dragging the Smoker clean out of the cover of the crowd. It blinked in a sort of rudimentary shock, its eyes barely visible amid the mass of tumors that covered its face, and Atomic Robo emptied his weapon into its body, blazing away until it exploded.

The giant cloud of green smoke that always burst out at that point blinded and choked Zoey, setting her to coughing and her eyes to tearing; she felt herself being hustled in the other direction, Atomic Robo's hand on her back, and then the stairs beneath her feet. When her eyes cleared, she saw her robotic savior standing in the doorway, punching Infected out of the way while the stairs retracted, the bus already starting to pull away. Just before the doors closed, he unwound the severed Smoker tongue from his hand and tossed it out the window, then eyed his hand with an air of marked distaste.

"... Gross," he said, wiping his hand on his battle-dress pants. "You okay?"

Zoey coughed once more, wiping at her eyes, and managed to nod. "Fine."

"Good. 'Scuse me." Robo shuffled past her on the narrow staircase, hung a right, and headed forward. Zoey climbed after him, shaking the last of the cobwebs from her head.

The little hallway led to another short staircase. This led up to a space reminiscent of a starliner's flight deck as decorated by a 1930s diner manufacturer, all chrome and black Bakelite with quilted stainless steel wall panels and red-piped black leather seats. The driver sat dead-center behind that big wraparound windshield they'd seen from outside, surrounded by banks of controls and instruments that also would've looked less out of place in a starliner. Behind his station were two rows of four seats, each divided into pairs by a central aisle. On the curving bulkhead just above the brow of the windshield there was a gleaming aluminum panel bearing the legend,

The figure behind the Teslaliner's giant steering wheel, handling it with the same cool aplomb all the survivors had seen him show in everything from supercars to asteroid racers on TV, wore a white fireproof racing suit and black-visored white helmet. He said nothing, didn't even turn to acknowledge his passengers, as Robo gestured to the seats and told the survivors,

"You guys better strap in."

Then, body language countering the slight swaying of the Teslaliner as the Infected outside thumped and pounded and clawed at its exterior panels, Robo went up and braced a hand on the back of the driver's seat.

"We all set, Stig?" he asked.

The Stig nodded.

"Then let's get the hell outta here," said Robo, dropping himself into the seat just behind and to the driver's right.

The Stig's only response was to tug his seat harness slightly tighter before downshifting and putting the Teslaliner's accelerator to the floor. The enormous vehicle lunged forward, rear tires barking against the tarmac as they hurled down its engine's vast power, and the liner began gathering speed with the smooth inevitability of an asteroid. Within a block or two, they'd left the entire horde behind.

It didn't escape the survivors, however, that what they were accelerating toward was a blank concrete wall at the far end of what had been Fairfield's Main Street. It was part of the retaining-wall structure that had once isolated the business district from the noise of the Crosstown Expressway, and it was adorned with an enormous yellow sign advising oncoming vehicles that they really, really needed to turn right. Immediately.

Zoey glanced from the back of the Stig's seat to a monitor showing the rear view. The Infected were pursuing, though hopelessly outpaced by the Teslaliner. From the front of their teeming, thrashing ranks, she saw a Tank bound out and take up the chase in its weird but startlingly fast arms-and-toes lope. Her eyes flicked back to the windshield, where the wall with its huge sign was approaching awfully fast now.

"Oh, man, I knew this was gonna go wrong," Francis muttered, hurriedly buckling his seat harness. "I hate buses!"

The Stig ignored him. In fact, the driver's only response to the fact that they were barrelling straight toward certain death was to reach down and flick a single toggle switch on the right side of his impossibly complex instrument panel. Something inside the panel made a cheery electronic chirping noise...

... and a beam of brilliant white light shot from somewhere just below the windshield to splash against the wall in a curiously un-light-like manner. The bright spot spread, shimmering, as the Teslaliner hurtled toward the wall. The survivors flinched - and the wall was gone, replaced by something that looked for all the world like a purple version of hyperspace. Zoey looked at the rearview scanner again; it showed nothing behind them but more of the same.

Atomic Robo sagged slightly in his seat, letting out a synthetic sigh of relief.

"Glad that's over with," he said. "Nice job, Stig."

The Stig nodded.

Robo unbuckled and got up from his seat. "Okay, you guys. Let's go down and get you checked out in the medical bay. We'll be in New Avalon in about half an hour, and then the Chief is gonna want to talk to you."

"Hold on, wait a second, I ain't goin' anywhere until I get some answers," Francis protested. "Like what the hell happened back there, for a start. One minute I'm workin' on my bike, next thing I know the whole goddamn planet is all Night of the Living What the Fuck."

"Yeah, we'd all like to know what happened," said Louis.

"And why we were immune," Zoey put in. "I mean, I can guess why Bill is, but what about the rest of us?"

Robo held up a hand. "Take it easy. You'll get everything we know soon enough. Right now I just want to make sure you're not walking around with some internal injury you've been too keyed up to notice yet." He led them down the short staircase from the control room and down a narrow hallway to a tiny but well-equipped sickbay, complete with droid doctor.

"We don't know much yet," Robo admitted as the doctor set about examining the survivors. "We've only had agents on the ground back there for about 12 hours, and not all of them have reported in yet. The only thing we know for sure is that it was no accident."

Zoey looked up from watching the doctor bandage her arm, horrified. "You mean it was some kind of weapon?"

Robo nodded. "And it was deliberately deployed on Faliszek III. What we don't know yet is who by or why. But we'll find out, and when we do, we'll track down the people responsible and stop them."

Bill checked his BR-55, slung it on his back, and took out another cigarette, but sighed and didn't light it after the droid doctor raised a warning finger.

"And I'm gonna help you do it," Bill said to Robo.

Louis nodded. "So am I."

"Yeah, me too!" Francis yelled. "I hate bioterrorists."

Robo tilted his head at Zoey, who gave him a tired smile. "It's not like any of us has got anything else left. If they're in, I'm in."

There was a pause while Atomic Robo looked slowly from one survivor to the next. No one spoke; no one moved apart from the droid doctor, who carried on his work with complete indifference to the conversation.

Then Robo nodded again, extended his hand to Bill, and said, "Fair enough. Welcome to Tesladyne."

"Guns 4 Hire" - a Future Imperfect mini-story by Benjamin D. Hutchins
(based on
Left 4 Dead by Valve Corporation)
special to the Eyrie Productions Discussion Forum
© 2009 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited


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FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire [View All] Gryphonadmin Oct-04-09 TOP
   G4H side note Gryphonadmin Oct-04-09 1
      RE: G4H side note mdg1 Oct-04-09 2
      RE: G4H side note CdrMike Oct-05-09 4
      RE: G4H side note MoonEyes Feb-23-14 39
          RE: G4H side note Gryphonadmin Feb-23-14 40
              RE: G4H side note Mercutio Feb-23-14 41
                  RE: G4H side note Gryphonadmin Feb-23-14 42
   RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire BZArchermoderator Oct-04-09 3
   RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire Senji Oct-05-09 5
   RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire Prince Charon Oct-05-09 6
   RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire Meagen Oct-05-09 7
      RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire Gryphonadmin Oct-05-09 8
          RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire Rickdominated Oct-05-09 9
              RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire Gryphonadmin Oct-05-09 10
   RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire StClair Oct-06-09 11
      RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire Vehrec Oct-07-09 12
          RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire Gryphonadmin Oct-07-09 13
              RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire BeardedFerret Oct-08-09 14
                  RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire trigger Oct-08-09 15
                      RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire Wedge Oct-08-09 16
                          RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire Gryphonadmin Oct-08-09 17
                              HALO SPOILER - RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire Wedge Oct-08-09 18
              RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire Vehrec Oct-12-09 20
                  RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire Offsides Oct-13-09 21
                  RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire Gryphonadmin Oct-13-09 22
                      RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire BeardedFerret Oct-14-09 23
                          RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire Gryphonadmin Oct-14-09 24
                              RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire BeardedFerret Oct-15-09 25
                                  RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire Matrix Dragon Oct-15-09 26
                                      RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire BeardedFerret Oct-15-09 27
                                  RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire Gryphonadmin Oct-15-09 28
                                      RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire Wedge Oct-15-09 29
                                          RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire Gryphonadmin Oct-15-09 30
                                              RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire BeardedFerret Oct-16-09 31
                                          RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire Gulping Again Oct-16-09 32
                                              RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire BeardedFerret Oct-17-09 34
   warning: dumb joke ahead Norgarth Oct-10-09 19
   RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire CGWolfgang Oct-16-09 33
      RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire CdrMike Oct-17-09 35
          RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire CGWolfgang Oct-17-09 37
              RE: FI Mini: Guns 4 Hire CdrMike Oct-18-09 38
   It may be because I've never played L4D... mdg1 Oct-17-09 36


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