Play 2 Wage: Linked

Eight. I counted eight people I had slain or downed in the gunfight. Two of which I could see with my own eyes from the hallway, laying where they had fallen in contorted positions with small yet slowly growing puddles of blood seeping out from under them. I averted my eyes from the grim aftermath and confirmed another four in the room to the right of the main hallway after I pushed the mangled door open. I stepped through and was startled when one of them coughed and made some feeble movement while they lay there curled up on the ground.

Looking over the bodies a little closer, it surprised me that they were all dressed in matching military, or maybe hunting camouflage outfits. I stepped closer to the one that had coughed, debating with myself on if I should finish them off or not, when I noticed that under their cap they had a distinctive and expensive blonde dye-job that I recognized.

Bree lay there, curled up and facing away from me as she bled out on the ground, and didn’t seem to realize that I was approaching. My anger surged. This chick had not hesitated to try to kill me and pretty much everyone I cared about, and she had just tried to kill me again. I stepped towards her and was working up the nerve to pull the trigger to finish her off, when a metallic ping noise sounded off, and a little metal clip bounced across the concrete floor from where she lay.

The edges of my vision all flashed a bright red, and Max practically screamed in my ears. “Grenade! Move back!”

I blinked and hesitated for a split second, before spinning around and running back into the hall. “Keep going! Get behind the blast door and close it if you can, explosives are way more dangerous when they’re contained!”, Max shrieked as I continued back the way I had come.

I nearly made it back to the door when the grenade went off and threw me the rest of the way out of the bunker. I was instantly thrown down onto my face next to the pool of blood that had seeped out of the doorman, like I had caught my toe in something at a dead sprint. I landed on my borrowed rifle and felt like I had maybe cracked or sprained my wrist by the awkward way I landed on top of it.

I groaned and rolled over, blinking at the dust and smoke that filled their air, and a stray almost homesick longing for the dwarven underhome’s ventilation drifted through my mind. I hurried back to my feet and looked into the hallway, noticing that all of the doors had been blown open. The entrance to the room Bree had been in was now mangled even further, the hollow steel door drunkenly swinging in the swirling dust and barely hanging on by half of a bent hinge.

Shaking my head, and even more determined to get something other than vengeance out of the bunker, I crossed the threshold again and pushed down to the door on the left, which was now blasted open by the pressure from the grenade. I edged up and peeked around the corner, making sure to keep one eye on the door at the end of the hall where I could still see the feet of one of the first guys I had shot.

Behind the newly opened door was another shorter hallway, with two people laying on the floor both in the same uniform as the others. One of them lay broken and unmoving, while the other was laying down next to them and quietly sobbing as they ran their hand over the cooling cheek of the first. It was difficult to make out any details through the dust, but I recognized the bright red hair of the dead man.

I stepped a few feet towards the two, but was wary after Bree’s stunt with the grenade, I did not get too far from the doorway in case I had to retreat again.

“Let me see your hands, if you want to live through this.” I ordered the person with their back turned to me.

Their only response at first was a choked sob, followed by a mumbled, pitiful, and distinctly feminine complaining noise I couldn’t understand beyond the pain and fear filled tone.

“One of you already tried to get me with a suicide grenade, let me see your hands or I just shoot you and keep going.” I elaborated, despite my caution and anger that told me to just shoot them and keep moving.

The dust was starting to clear from the air, and I saw the hand lift from Andy’s cheek and raise into the air as the injured person spoke with a hesitant voice. “I- I don’t have any grenades.”

I knew that voice. I crossed the hallway and loomed over Kaylee, using my foot and roughly kicking her over onto her back so I could see her face.

“You! Fucking traitor.” I pointed Tevin’s rifle right at her, but managed to hold myself back from killing her right then and there.

She let out another sob, followed by a cough, and scrunched her eyes up. She brought her bloody hand up to shield her face from the rifle. “Please! It wasn't supposed to be like this! You were supposed to get a choice. A choice you could walk away from!”

An angry and hateful part of me really wanted to shoot her, that was most of the reason I came down into this hellhole. She was the one I blamed most for this other than Andy, who had actually pulled the trigger on Tevin, but he looked to have already gotten what was coming to him with a swift death in the midst of combat. That felt a little too easy for me, but it was done and I had my main culprit in my sights.

“You’re a liar. You’d say anything, wouldn’t you?” I spat back, hiking my rifle up and squaring my aim.

“No, no, no.” She sobbed, shaking her head and speaking in a desperate rush. “I promise, we were supposed to entice you, to show you what the council are really doing, and how much suffering and death your actions are aiding!” She coughed again, and cracked her eyes open to look up at me as she continued. “You’re not indoctrinated like the rest, you’re a worker. We hoped we could turn you to our cause if you only knew what was happening, but…” she looked over at Andy again, and her pain filled looked worsened. She closed her eyes and looked away, shaking her head before continuing.

“It turns out, we were all liars, other than poor Raschel. Our plan leaked out to a different group, and they got to Bree… she was always so angry.”

She drifted off for a moment, wincing in pain and panting softly as she clutched at her previously injured collarbone with her good hand.

I grit my teeth and watched her, really not wanting to take her word for it but unsure what to do. I planned to just shoot her, to shoot them all and walk away. Yet, I was struggling to bring myself to actually do it, even if I knew that simply listening to a snake like her was a dangerously slippery idea.

“This is what you get, not listening to me and letting me do a deepdive on these yahoos before it was too late.”

“Shut up.” I growled, mostly at Max, but I said it loud enough for Kaylee to hear and flinch away from. Tears streamed down her face, and the uniform she had changed into was splattered with blood and fresh injuries from the indirect fire from before. I wondered at that, having seen what the massive bullets from Tevin’s gun had done to the others.

“Where are you injured? Show me.” I asked, jabbing my rifle down at her.

She winced and rolled over a little onto her side, using her good hand to pull up her jacket and show me the ragged hole in her lower abdomen. It looked like a bullet entered a few inches above the outside of her hip and had torn a hole through her side.

I became a little queasy at the sight, not having really seen much real life gore before. I had done that, and while I felt justified, some part of me really didn’t like looking at the intentional destruction I’d caused to another human being.

She let her jacket fall back in place and flopped back down, wincing again and breathing hard. “Are you going to let me live, Nick?”, she breathed out. “I can understand, I hurt you. I… Tev…” She choked off, her tears welling up again. “I helped take someone important away from you. I’m so sorry, Nick. I swear I didn’t mean for any of this to happen like it did.”

“You should really just shoot her and keep moving, man. She’s gonna have you wrapped around her finger if you let her tap into that pity I can see building up in you. See how she started talking about Tevin, and then changed the subject? She used your name, trying to play on your soft side, to get you to focus on the good times. She knows you’re weak, not a fighter, not a killer.”

“Shut, up!” I nearly yelled, causing Kaylee to flinch away and raise her hand up to shield herself again.

Max’s eternal whispering, losing my home, my closest friend hanging onto life by a thread, all of my hard years of hard work gambled on an insane plan that I was threatened and coerced to follow, and now Kaylee’s fear filled face as I stood over her and debated shooting her in cold blood. All of it was enough to drive a guy crazy. I couldn’t let myself think about it, so I shut the door in my mind and tried to toss emotion out. I needed to be as cold as I could be, and not let either anger or compassion guide my thinking.

What I knew was that despite everything, I couldn’t seem to bring myself to just shoot her. Still, I knew I couldn’t keep listening to her either. She was gut-shot, and unless she got medical attention there was only a slim chance she would live for very much longer unless I did something to help her, which was also out of the question. I needed to make sure she couldn’t work against me anymore, and then keep moving.

I knelt down and wordlessly began to search them. I recovered the pistol Andy had shot Tevin with, a couple of mismatched mags from his pockets as well as a pair of grenades that looked like they were 50 years old. I picked up a folding knife that lay nearby on the floor, and an expensive and shut-down mobile comm from Kaylee. It turned out she was telling the truth about not being armed herself, as that's all that I could find on her with a quick frisk while she lay there and continued to sob as I roughly patted her down.

Fearing for her life, she followed my command that had been meant mostly for Max. She shut up and did not try to convince me further as I disarmed them both. When I stood back up, my pockets weighted heavily by all of the looted gear, I wondered if I should restrain her or anything. If I tied her up with her injuries, it would be the same as killing her.

There was a slim chance she could crawl far enough to find the supplies to treat her wound, and possibly walk out of this if I left her unrestrained. Was I okay with that? I couldn’t bring myself to shoot her after she surrendered, and after giving myself a second to think about it, I decided I wasn't okay with leaving her tied up and gut-shot to die either.

Leaving her on a razor's edge with only a slim chance to wiggle through and save her own ass was exactly what she had done to me. That thought secured my choice, and after a second sweep to make sure she had no other weapons, I went over the hallway they were in as well. I took a moment to check the other rooms in the short hall for weapons as well, which turned out to be a series of small bunk bed filled rooms that must have acted as a barracks.

With the area cleared and her still quietly crying in the hall, I stopped before continuing to the rest of the bunker.

“Tevin’s not dead, his armor closed and stabilized him.” I said as I stood in the doorway to the hall, unsure why I was even wasting my time to tell her. She obviously didn’t care about Tevin, and had only used him to get closer to Katie and myself.

She turned her face to look at me and I saw a mix of pain, fear, anger… helplessness. I turned away before that damned soft heart of mine could be drawn in. I was sick of being manipulated, and could actually do something about it in this case simply by not looking and walking away.

Her answer surprised me. “Good. I… I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I wanted it to stop,” She grimaced, overcome with pain for a moment before she could continue. “-to stop the killing. That’s all I wanted.”

I hesitated in the doorway. I wanted to believe her, to know this was a mistake and that her intentions were better than the reality she had wrought. In a better world, maybe it would have worked and I would have chosen to side with them.

I had seen first hand why they fought, why they were willing to die and kill to make a change. I even somewhat agreed with them after having dipped my toe into the life that ‘the elite’ lived. A life filled with luxurious pampering by servants without a real choice, of kissing-ass and sucking up to anyone higher up the ladder than yourself in the hope that they don’t choose to kick you back down to the bottom. I’d only gotten as far as I had because I got results, and I constantly felt the looming threat of being sent back to my life of menial labor before I had even the imperfect shelter of a contract with Rosso.

Sometimes I wanted to go back to that version of my life. Grinding away at the mountain for Rosso was hard work, but it was straightforward and fulfilling in a way. That would be better than the chaos I’d lived for the last few weeks, and vastly preferable to any of the easily accessible routes to death on the streets as an exile, or even the work of the labor camps.

I was operating under the assumption that Max had put me into an all or nothing situation. Either everything would somehow work out, or I’d be dead, with a non-zero possibility of my death being a long drawn out affair confined to a life of intensely invasive science experiments while whatever group that managed to capture me tried to figure out what the meddling AI had made of me.

None of these assholes knew just how far beyond any of their plans, beyond even the option of going back, I already was. Max had uprooted my life and made things vastly more complicated, but with all of his meddling and ‘assistance’ I stood a better chance at changing everything than anyone could know. They couldn’t see that I had already joined their cause, to fix this busted-ass system and bring some fun and fairness to this world of gray toil, but I could not join their side. I was already committed.

Maybe it was the slow drip of chemicals and alterations Max fed me, or maybe it was the power and control he gave me. When I really drilled down and thought about it, despite all of Max’s problems and bullshit, I was on his side.

I walked away from the weeping, dying, misguided traitor and shouldered my rifle. There were still more of them deeper down and I had a ride I couldn’t afford to miss.