Quota 0/391 — Only 3 days left
Victor's fall echoed through the bunker's empty corridors. It wasn't because of a cry of pain, he'd carefully kept himself from shouting, but because of the missile that had fallen with him.
'At least it didn't explode,' he thought, taking a moment to inspect it.
There was a dent here and there, but nothing too serious. Or so Victor believed, given his utterly nonexistent military expertise.
'If a drop of barely one meter could put this kind of military hardware at risk, the Soviet researchers must have had a few mishaps.'
They hadn't, however, taken care to surround their creation with foam or any other insulating material.
The deafening crash had rung through the room and made the reinforced concrete walls vibrate. The sound must have traveled to the deepest part of the bunker, and Victor worried that the creatures lurking in the shadows might have heard it.
"Are you okay, Victor? What happened?"
It was Olivia. She'd come back with a bag far too big for the four meager items it contained. Her gaze swept the rest of the room for the slightest danger, her eyes lingering only twice—on the missile lying in the middle of the room.
With a semi-automatic rifle in her right hand and a shovel in her left, she wasn't expecting Victor's answer.
"I just dropped the missile on the floor by accident," he explained sheepishly.
As for how he'd managed to bring it from the munitions room to the bunker entrance, he'd already thought of everything.
'I haven't the faintest idea.'
He couldn't claim he'd rolled it or carried it on his back from one end of the bunker to the other—that made no sense. The missile had to weigh more than a ton, and Victor knew Olivia knew he couldn't move such a load by himself.
"You must have used one of their hand trucks, but we're going to have a hard time getting it back to the surface even with one. The crawlway we came through on the way in is way too narrow to let us even crouch; we'll never get a hand truck through it. We might have to force the passage a bit, but I'm afraid all of that will be pointless without a ramp…"
Olivia seemed momentarily lost in thought. Victor didn't know what a hand truck was. What he did know, however, was that he had until the end of the day to find a cart, qualifier or whatever would do the job.
As for the logistics required to bring the missile back to their camp, he'd let the experts handle it.
'I feel like a truffle pig. My only role in this whole mission is to check the quality of the merchandise,' he thought, plunging headfirst into the bag Olivia had brought back.
'Oink. Only two of the four items have any value.'
Rubik's Cube: x1 — value 12
Bronze bell: x1 — value 48
The bell alone was worth more than his huge missile.
"Where's the fairness in that?" he muttered under his breath.
He felt like meeting the person at the Company who had set up the points system, so he could calmly explain his point of view.
No physical violence, just insults and verbal threats.
With the Company's conversion system, he didn't even know whether it was more profitable to sell them the missile or let Shirley sell it to some of her contacts.
In any case, it wasn't his place to ask questions. He was just the truffle pig in all this.
"Only the bell and the Rubik's Cube have value—the other two are worthless in the Company's eyes."
Olivia simply nodded.
"Were there other valuable items in your storage room?" she asked.
It seemed she had already searched the kitchen top to bottom.
"Two missiles, each worth a little, and then ammunition and rations," he answered after racking his memory for a few seconds.
Ammunition fell into the category of items with intrinsic value, whatever the Company might think.
"How much is each missile worth?" she asked after a brief pause.
"— 44, 22, and 18."
That didn't seem high enough to interest her.
"That sounds like too much potential trouble for what it would bring us. I think it's better we spend more time in the undergrounds rather than make a second round trip for crates of ammo. We can always experiment and try coming back after the three days to see if we can still access the bunker. There doesn't seem to be any reason we couldn't, but you never know."
Victor agreed with her on that last point.
They just needed to find a bottle of perfume or any item with a value of 50 or more to make up for the value of the ammo boxes.
The French conversation was cut short by Nathaniel's arrival.
Like Olivia, he had a barely filled shoulder bag, but also a small bag he held pressed against his chest. His expression was one of pure caution, as if he expected a monster to jump out at him at every turn.
"**I found our way in.**" he announced after handing the few items he'd found to Victor.
Rubber duck: x1 — value 18
'What's that doing in an abandoned Soviet bunker?' Victor wondered, tossing aside a worthless razor and survival knife.
He set the rubber duck with Olivia's two other valuable items and left the bag at the entrance. The group had decided to burden themselves as little as possible before entering the underground passages so they'd need to make fewer trips.
'Especially when you can only carry four items at a time,' he grumbled, watching Nathaniel head off again.
Olivia and he had to wait for Shirley to return to take inventory of what she'd found, while Nathaniel was in charge of opening the next door. Victor didn't know how long it would take, or whether the dozen keycards he held to his chest would help.
'We'll see in about ten minutes when Shirley gets back.'
That was when they heard a cry—a woman's cry. It didn't sound like pain or suffering, but rather surprise.
'What on earth did she run into?' Victor wondered, running after Olivia with a bag full of weapons in hand.
The farther they went, the more muffled the cry became—not as if it were turning into a death rattle, but as if something were dampening her voice.
"Get this thing off my head!"
They had reached the engine room, the huge gray steel engines having stood idle for nearly fifty years. There was a whole row of holes in one corner of the room, through which several pipes about fifty centimeters wide ran. The fluorescent tubes and bulbs on the ceiling were all off, giving the place a near-claustrophobia heightened by the darkness and the oversized machinery.
"Help!"
The silence was broken only by Shirley's muffled cry. Olivia and Victor kept running through the narrow aisles formed by the rows of generators. Only after crossing the room to the far end did they finally find her.
'What the hell is that thing…'
Some kind of grotesque larva was wrapped around Shirley's head while she was on all fours, patting blindly at the floor as if searching for something to defend herself with. The larva's body completely blocked her view, but she had still heard their hurried arrival.
"Get this thing off my head! I can feel my suit about to give!" she shouted, turning blindly toward them.
Olivia and Victor didn't wait a second longer before pulling a shovel from their respective bags. Olivia was quickest, striking the creature; the larva let out a high-pitched yelp of pain before dropping to the floor from the blow. Victor, meanwhile, watched in horror as his shovel struck Shirley's visor a beat too late, worsening the cracks already there.
"Sorry…" he murmured sheepishly, feeling Shirley's stare.
He had tried to help, but ended up dealing friendly fire instead.
'But why were there already cracks in her helmet? Is that little alien a boa constrictor or what? It's always the little critters that hide to ambush the big one,' he thought, turning to Olivia, who was busy pummeling what remained of the alien.
The little human seemed to have triumphed over the little larva.
"**Are you okay, Shirley**?" she asked after kicking the creature's curled-up corpse away.
Shirley nodded and let out a relieved sigh.
"**I'm fine. Luckily you got here in time, and Nathaniel got us these suits, because otherwise I don't know what would have happened. The larva must have been hiding on the ceiling behind a fluorescent tube and it jumped onto my face when I passed right underneath it.**"
Snare fleas added to the host bestiary ! Danger level: 27% (drastically reduced in the context of solo expeditions)
Victor would have thought the risk would be higher if he were alone and no one could come to help, but the system seemed to disagree.
'In any case, we just have to keep an eye on the ceiling so nothing can happen to us,' he thought, using his flashlight to light up the menacing-looking tubes.
Behind him, Olivia had helped Shirley to her feet, the young woman swaying only slightly. She had no visible injuries, but they took a break to give her time to catch her breath. The shock from the shovel blow seemed to have disoriented her, and the stress of coming so close to death had knocked the wind out of her once the adrenaline wore off.
She took only a few seconds to pull herself together, and the group set off again.
Olivia and Shirley took care of lighting the surroundings and the way ahead, while Victor kept his beam fixed on the ceiling.
Once they were back in the entry hall, Victor took a moment to glance at the items Shirley had picked up.
No value
No value
No value
No value
Now, that was underwhelming.
All that remained was to venture into the underground passages to find the rest of what they'd come for. The trio crossed the rest of the bunker to reach an armored door even more massive than the one at the entrance. This one was already ajar—opened with a badge, not explosives. Inside the room, Nathaniel was kneeling before a door like the one in New York. The plating was a pure white that stood out against the surrounding gray, and the opening mechanism was a propeller-style wheel like on a bank vault.
'Why do I have the feeling this door is neither Russian nor from the '80s?'
Nathaniel finished picking and opening the heavy door. The concrete walls had turned into gray sheet-metal panels, and the silence had been filled by the hum of an electric fan.
It wasn't the familiarity of the manor, but the chill of an industrial facility.