Logan Harrison's Arc

Chapter 7 of 9

At first light they went down. The eyebot's map lit Logan's screen. He led with the power meter in one hand and Warrant Officer Danials at his shoulder. Danials wore crisp fatigues and a black beret, a Rangers muscle Logan trusted to shoot straight. Zelda and Sinclair came behind. The stairwell opened onto the level two corridor, gray and cold. The dark control room waited at the far end. "Corridor first," Logan said. "We hold it, then I read the panel." Ghouls broke from a doorway on the left. Three of them, then more, dragging fast on the concrete. "Left!" Danials shouted. She fired, and Sinclair fired beside her. Zelda pressed to the wall and drew her sidearm. Logan pocketed the meter and got his pistol up. Rounds cracked the corridor loud. The lead ghoul dropped a stride from Danials. The team worked them down, muzzle flash lighting the walls, until the last one folded and slid still. Then the right wall groaned. Something huge stepped from the shadow. It had the shape of a deer, but wrong — antlers wet and cracked, ribs showing through torn hide, eyes burning a sick green. The glow bled from splits in its flesh. It swung its head toward Danials and charged. "Down!" Logan yanked a red incendiary grenade off his belt. He pulled the pin and threw it under the thing's chest. It burst white-hot. Fire climbed the mutant's ribs and it screamed, thrashing, antlers gouging the ceiling. The heat drove Logan back a step. The creature buckled, legs folding, and burned down to a smoking heap on the floor. Quiet came back. Logan's ears rang. He turned and saw Danials on one knee, holding her side. Blood ran between her fingers where the ghoul's claws had raked her before it dropped. Zelda was already there. She opened her medical bag and cut the fatigue away from the wound. "Deep, but clean." She pressed a vial to Danials's arm. "RadX. That thing was hot. So were the ghouls." She worked fast, flat and calm. "You'll keep the leg. Won't keep the shift." Danials gritted her teeth. "I can hold the corridor." "You can't," Zelda said. "Not bleeding. Not dosed." Logan looked down the empty corridor to the control room. The panel he needed was ten steps away, intact, waiting. He had cleared the floor. He had reached it. But his one gunhand was down, and the room past the panel led deeper, into dark he had not mapped. Sinclair crouched by the burned mutant, studying the glow still leaking from the ash. "Never saw radiation walk on four legs," he said. "That came from below. Deeper than your ghouls." He looked up at Logan. "Whatever's down past that control room made this thing. You power the panel, you open the door to it." Logan holstered his pistol. The corridor was his. The cost had a name now, and a wound. "We get Danials up top," he said. "Then I read that panel. Alone if I have to."