Purgatory, 5: Promised Land
06 Jan 2024Meowers
Warning: descriptions of human suffering.
"Out of all creatures I've ever seen, humans have the most striking contrast, ranging from sinisterly vile to ever-innocent. If that's the gift of self-conscience, I don't even know what to say about it."
T + 8h 07 min. Spotted blood, gunshot impact marks and footprints in the mud ahead. Thermals show nothing. Seems like another attempt of escape, suppressed by the mercenaries, but no dead bodies around the spot. Damn it's getting dark real fast. This place is close to the equator and the day length is something like twenty hours.
T + 8h 16 min. Garraway has become delusional, and his damn arm is so swollen it doesn't fit into the suit anymore. Both other wounded are getting worse rapidly too. Medics are pessimistic, if necrosis starts with the body being thoroughly infected... Surviving the night could be impossible. Our conventional antibiotics have almost no effect. Shit.
T + 8h 32min. Encountered a group of civilians wandering down the same road. One is armed with a rifle. Stopped to ask what's happening, they said almost twenty of them attempted to escape but half ended up shot and they dragged the bodies away. Surprisingly, the mercs didn't leave the truck at all, it kept going. That woman in front managed to snatch the rifle, but only with one mag that was loaded already, so no way she could've covered them properly. And yeah, they want to see what's ahead. Picked them up, told not to stick their heads too far out of the truck.
T + 8h 44min. Our medics inspected the civilians, found the same symptoms developing in two of them, one with a light gunshot wound, one with a grass cut. Seemingly, local grass or the fluids inside it cause the infection immediately once they contact with human blood, so the standard antiseptic treatment can't stop it. At least a clue. Those mercenaries were okay even if some of them wore bandages under the armour, they might have an antidote of sorts, but not on them personally. So, the antidote has a permanent or a long-term effect. That's a chance for our folks, stepping on the gas, meds may be stored in that A-15 place. Shit it's totally dark, Foster's gadgets are my eyes, can't use the headlights.
T + 9h 21min. Buildings up ahead. Fences with barbed wire on top, lights skimming the perimeter, lit central area, guarding towers. No drones. Logically, their intercommunication could give the place away. Other trucks parked on the territory. Totally a prison. Why a prison? Whose prison? Moved back, hid the vehicle behind the road curve, proceeding on foot through the jungle, civilians following us twenty metres behind. Can't send them back in the night, can't leave them in the truck. Damn.
T + 9h 54min. Approached the complex, it seems like they didn't notice us. Good. There's a twenty to thirty metres wide killzone around it, no trees or tall grass, everything is removed. Metal spikes planted into the ground. Several dead bodies in torn rags, different stages of decay, most of them are picked apart by local animals. Insects and maggots all over them. Damn that offal smells. Gunshot wound signs on every one. Escape attempts didn't go well. Several buildings on the inner territory, that two-storey concrete one looks like it's central. Also, a power generator, a kind of warehouse presumably, and multiple large crude wooden blocks. High windows with fences on them. Much likely made of local trees for prisoners. Will try to get inside the central, we really need that antidote. Took all three marksmen, first, second and HQ, second rifle team, engineers and Witulska as medic. Others are waiting for orders.
T + 10h 22min. Oofff. Observing and waiting for several mercs to look in the opposite direction took a heck lot of time. Marksmen smoked the guards on the towers at once. Tested the fence, it's non-electrical. Running back and forth, making a safe line in the spikes and cutting a hole in the fence in the moments when the searchlights are away. Godsdamned videogame.
T + 10h 54min. We're in. Behind the warehouse. Approaching the central.
Shit some of them are moving to us, get into that barn
Three mercs. Five of us in the building.
Damn that machete is good, cut his head almost clean. Fucking blood is everywhere. Other two got their necks snapped, didn't make a sound. Good. Shit, there's a lot of people inside... Godsdammit. It's... Worse than a prison.
Light from the surrounding buildings and towers softly streamed in through the high windows, and through faults and cracks in the decrepit crude wooden walls, and I could make out the silhouettes of dozens upon dozens of figures stood in eerie stillness silently looking up at us from the floor. Or, at least, where the floor should have been. Instead it had been dug out into a shallow pit.
The soft light glinted off of the eyes of the shadowed figures, like ghosts, and, as our eyes adjusted properly to the darkness, we realised the true extent of the horror we were seeing. The people stood before us were barely living. Filthy, clad in nothing but rags, and skeletally thin through malnourishment, with sunken eye sockets, missing teeth, and a frailty to them which could clearly be seen by the way that they stood, and leaned upon each other for support. They bore bruises, scars and cuts, courtesy of the many beatings that they had received from the guards, with many of the wounds severely infected and weeping and bleeding as a result.
A few bodies lay in the mud at the feet of the prisoners. Some might have been dead for days, some maybe for hours. With the state of them it was hard to tell, and we had no way to know how often the guards collected and removed the corpses.
The conditions were beyond cruel. Rusted old buckets in one corner provided the closest thing to toilets in the place. Similarly looking buckets in the opposite corner contained the poor semblance of food that was given to these people. The prisoners slept around the edges of the pit, laying on cardboard and non-descript fragments of fabric. Old and rotting. But with so few of these makeshift beds available that the prisoners had to take turns in sleeping. The centre of the pit was worn deeper, and rainwater leaking in from holes in the roof had pooled there, making the ground into soft mud, in which the prisoners spent their waking hours sat or stood. And apparently used this water for drinking, one of the buckets stood right under the biggest breach. The constant damp and unsanitary conditions allowed sores and fungal infections to ravage the bodies of these poor souls.
People in that state, in those conditions, survive through determination alone, desperately clinging to the last flicker of hope that one day they will be rescued. And so they looked at us in shock, realising that day may just have arrived. But they remained silent, knowing that any noise from them might give away our presence and end that hope to which they had so tightly held onto.
Those mercs are insane, whoever the bloody hecks they are. Had no time to talk with the prisoners, promised them to return tomorrow.
T + 11h 01min. Entered the central, took the comms room first, spread out the group to check the other rooms. Many of these mercs were sleeping... Forever, from now on. Going to the upper floor.
Fuck they are waiting, returning fire
They're watching the stairs, look out dammit
Richardson hit badly. Damn Irena get her out of here!
Take that you fucker
Clear? Go go don't stop get to the window and give 'em hell
Upper floor is ours, a bunch of them outside... Come get some you shits
How do you like that you fucking amateurs
First, first, do you copy? Shit that low-power mode sucks... Smith, get your folks here with both machineguns and delete everyone outside, now! That warehouse is full of damn buggers!
Dammit... Finish them off, every one of them. Machetes. Spare your ammo. Leave none alive.
T + 11h 15min. Shit, that was a bit rough. Richardson is badly wounded, Broekman and Barton got new holes in their armour too, but those don't look that nasty. And there's no godsdamned infected grass in the complex.
Friggin scumbags, not the best mercs in the world, but they know how to shoot, we were lucky... Again. To find so many of them sleeping, and others, those blocked on the upper floor, frantically trying to build a defence. Gathering everyone in the building, sent Foster to find that group of civilians and lead them inside, looks like that A-15 thing is ours at the moment and will be our camp for the night. Marines found some codes with timestamps in the comms room, presumably that's their way to ping the facilities, someone should listen and respond. Sent unoccupied medics to sift through the rooms, if there's a place to store the antidote then it should be here somewhere, not the shabby rusty barracks'n'warehouse. Damn those first three are bad, Garraway is losing consciousness, Smith leads the first rifles now.
Should go and help with piling those arseholes somewhere. What this bloody forsaken place is anyway, a concentration camp?
T + 11h 27 min. Medics have found a container with injectors in it, none less than fifty, in what looks like a first-aid room. No markings and there's no equipment to examine them, it's not a damn lab. We have to play chances. Yet by all means of logic it shouldn't be anything else, I should ask those three.
Damn they're so bad they can barely understand what I'm saying. Therrien just nodded. Told the medics to give them these shots, otherwise a couple more hours and they're dead. At least this place has some bunk beds, everyone's tired. Arranged watch shifts. Civilians are on the ground floor, getting to sleep too. Going to check the rooms for any other stuff then close my eyes for a little while.
T + 11h 39min. There's a little mess hall for the mercs and the kitchen. Some merc rations, more or less okay, but hells, that foul chow for the prisoners... Bluish synth watery goop in mouldy buckets, diluted as heck, with floating lumps, and... Is this sawdust? That's mad. At least it has some pieces of meat in it, like, looks like real meat. Hm. In that shitsoup? We may take the meat as a trophy. A couple of big fridges in the corner...
Fuck. Human arms, legs and guts. Ah, okay, I got it, that's the meat. No, not taking that.
T + 11h 52min. Checked every other room, nothing interesting. This place is built around the kitchen, merc beds and comms box. I think I saw enough for today, going to sleep.
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Next part: #6: Dawn of a New Day
Next part: #6: Dawn of a New Day