Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 4979096" data-attributes="member: 143">Session 7 (May 26, 2008)Chapter 20Vasily kicked Catalina hard, knocking her out of the open doorway.  The attacker’s knife narrowly missed her, nearly coming out of the man’s hand as it glanced hard off the threshold of the door.  The Russian slammed the butt of his rifle into the man’s face, knocking him roughly back.  The man fell back against a table a short distance into the room, and nearly fell.  The rest of the room appeared to be another lab, but it was difficult to make it out clearly, for an unpleasant fog of green smoke hung thick in the air, obscuring their view.  But it wasn’t enough to hide a second man who shambled forward.  Like the first, he was in terrible shape; gory wounds covered his body, and a chunk of flesh the size of a deck of cards hung from a terrible gash along his jaw.  He carried a metal wrench the size of a club, which he lifted as he approached.  “What the hell are they!” Catalina yelled, as Jane helped her to her feet. “Humans?” James asked. “Move!” Vasily yelled, thrusting them back behind them, away from the two men and the gas that was starting to swirl out through the open door.  “MOVE!”  The first man had recovered, and started forward again, his knife still ready in his hand.  Vasily lifted his rifle, and fired a burst into his chest.  The bullets drove him back, and again he nearly fell, propped up tentatively against the desk.  But he did not go down. The second man reached the doorway, and now Vasily wasn’t the only one firing.  A dozen bullets and streams of coherent light from the laser pistols that Jane and Buzz carried smashed into him, turning his face into a gory mess of crimson.  Even as he crumpled, the one Vasily had shot started forward again, stepping clumsily over his fallen companion, the knife twitching in his hand.  Vasily grunted and slammed a fresh clip into his rifle, but before he could shoot again, Catalina stepped forward and leveled her pistol squarely at the center of the man’s head.  The gun barked, and the back of his head shot out over the wall next to the door.  That finally seemed to be enough for him, and he collapsed in a messy heap. “That… that was freaking creepy,” Buzz said, while James bent to examine the bodies. “Careful, doctor,” Jane said.  Vasily grunted as he kicked the wreckage of the dead man in the doorway out of the way, then pushed the door shut again.  It sealed with a click.  “Hope we don’t need to get in there again,” Jane said.  “I did not see other door,” Vasily said.  He touched his finger to his earpiece, trying to raise the Skyranger above.  “Static,” he said.  “No contact.”“We’re pretty far down,” Jane said.    “Are we safe here?” Buzz asked.  “I mean if those guys… whatever did that to them, what if it gets us?”“Hopefully our suits and masks are protecting us,” James said, as he straightened from examining the nearer of the two bodies.  “And if not, we’ve already been exposed.”Giving the body of the man she’d shot a wide berth, Catalina listened at the steel door that was the only unexplored route left to them.  She put a finger to her lips.  “Someone’s there, I think,” she said after a moment. They set up a perimeter around the door.  Once they were ready, Vasily nodded to Catalina, who operated the door mechanism and pulled it open.  The response was immediate, as a half-dozen shambling forms, men in just as bad shape as the ones they’d put down earlier, staggered through the open door.  They were clad in varied outfits, two in workman’s coveralls, to a pair dressed in lab coats, and finally another soldier, his rifle dangling uselessly from a long strap.  All of them bore obvious wounds, and one of the workmen had his head bent at a nasty angle, as if his neck had been broken.  They charged into the barrage of fire from Alpha Team, crumpling from hits that would have killed most men immediately, only to struggle to get back up.  “Go for the heads!” Catalina yelled, as she fell back to reload. Buzz paused to adjust the settings on the laser pistol.  He didn’t even see the soldier who broke free of the pack and stepped toward him, ignoring the bullets that slammed into his torso, or the bright streak of energy from Jane’s pistol that tore a long black gouge along the side of his skull.  “Buzz!  Move!” Vasily shouted.Buzz looked up just in time to take a solid smack across the face.  He fell, his gun clattering from his hand, but tethered to him via the pistol’s power cable.  The soldier nearly fell onto him, but James drove him back with a blow from his rifle, and both he and Vasily pumped rounds into his head until he stopped moving.  The others were tangled up around the doorway, blasted into almost unrecognizable mounds of flesh. “What is wrong with you!” James yelled, helping Buzz to his feet.  The hacker’s mask had been knocked ajar by the force of the blow, and a purplish bruise was already forming on the side of his head.  “Anything moving that slow, just move back while the rest of us fire away.”After carefully scanning the area beyond the door, Vasily stepped over the dead men into the room beyond.  They found themselves in another laboratory, this one with medical diagrams affixed to the walls, showing details of human anatomy.  There were more papers on the desks and scattered across the floor.  Catalina picked up few sheets, and started scanning them.  James used his xPhone to take pictures.  Catalina paused with an open folio that she pulled open.  “Project Lazarus,” she said, drawing the attention of the others. “Laz-a-rus,” Vasily said.“Name mentioned a few times in these documents,” she said.  “I’m not religious, but didn’t he get up and walk after dying?” “That’s...” James began, but he trailed off, leaving it unsaid.  “Definitely a bad moniker with walking dead guys about,” Buzz said.  He’d found a laptop computer in one of the desks, and was trying to get it working.   “X-COM been studying aliens for medical research,” Vasily said.  “Maybe we not only ones.”“I wonder if these guys got hold of some of the alien medical stuff and made a bollocks of it?” Cat asked. “Huh,” Buzz said, looking at the computer.  “Hey, gang!” he said.  “It appears that there is something going on here.”“Biggest understatement of the year,” Jane said. “You want to be more specific?” James said.  “Don’t tell me, some major medical project?” Catalina said. “They were definitely working on aliens here,” Buzz said.  “It looks like they brought in three sectoids, held them for research…  Anyway, there’s a log file here… it seems that the seals on the containment unit were opened recently from a remote location.”“So the aliens escaped because someone from the outside took over the computer?” James asked. “Bit odd, don’t you think?” Buzz replied.“We need more answers,” Vasily said, his voice grim.</blockquote>

Verification