Shell

Chapter 21: Nightstalkers

Over the course of the next few days not much happened, the occasional banter between Arthur and his friends at the mess hall but otherwise silent days. Cryptid was on standby and I was bored out of my mind so I'd go down the range to keep me busy. I was aiming down the scope of an MK.11 rifle when a messenger came up to me.

"Hey you're Artemis right?" He asked me.

Taking my shot before answering. "Who's asking?" I replied back.

"Commander Hicks needs you, the rest of your team is already in his office." He said before leaving me alone on the range.

I sighed and flicked the safety on before returning the rifle to quartermaster and headed to the Commander's office. I opened the door to see Marcus, Ray, and Katty in the room along with Hicks behind his desk.

"Well now that everyone's here lets get started." Hicks started. "Some of the prisoners finally decided to spill the beans on where their base is on the condition that we burn it to the ground. Now they wouldn't say why but I can guess that something is in there thats not entirely right, which is why I'm sending you guys in for an intel gathering mission before we do bomb it."

"Alright, so do we get any back up or is it just us?" Ray asked.

"We'll have Apaches and Blackhawks on standby for you but otherwise you'll be on your own, you can handle that right?" Hicks grinned.

"Heh, yeah we can just thought I'd get the run down."

"Well get to it, the base is indoors so prepare accordingly."

We headed out to our rooms and got geared out. Seeing as I didn't have a CQC weapon aside from my knives and pistol I went up to the quartermaster to see what he had.

"Well with our limited supplies the best thing I got for you is this." He said offering me a AKS-74U. "Got tons of ammo but were running out of guns haha" He chortled.

I took the small rifle from the table and got a feel for it. It certainly wasn't the platform I was used to but I felt I could get the hang of it with time. I thanked him after he told me not to lose it then handing me a few magazines for it before I left for the blackhawk that was waiting for us with Ray and Marcus already boarded I hopped on and we took off. After an hour or so the pilot told us to ready up and I had just finished jury rigging a high intensity flashlight to the barrel of my rifle with a roll of electric tape.

"Where in the hell did you find that relic?" Marcus asked me over the radio.

"It's all they had." I shot back.

"Nice haha!" Ray laughed while Marcus just shook his head in amusement.

We landed and exited the helo on the grassy plains, in the distance the hills that hid our base could be seen and the sun was sinking into the horizon. Just ahead of us was a complex that looked like it had lost power, though I thought there would be more to it as none of the sections were above a story tall. We entered the streets looking for an entrance when Marcus stopped us.

"Is it just me or some of these shadows moving?" He asked.

"I'm trying not to think about it, we've had enough weird shit happen to us already." Ray complained.

I looked around in the shadows as we made our way through and sure enough every now and then out of the corner of my eyes I'd see shadows dart from place to place. Thats when I felt a chill run down my spine, we were being watched whatever was watching us looked at us like we were dinner. We found a sliding door partially open and had to force it open to get through as the door control was shot to pieces, literally, we entered the pitch black hallways and flipped on our flashlights.