Luke. Underlake.

When people are put under stress, some of them break. If the stress is bad enough, most of them will break in some way. We saw this with combat veterans in the wars before corporations and the Antithesis incursions made war mostly obsolete. We see it in military contractors and personnel who act to contain Antithesis incursions, like all of you did. We even see it with private citizens confronted with violence they didn’t anticipate.

But a few of those people don’t break, even under terrible stress. Human brains are strange. They’re all wired a little differently. Sometimes, when the madness hits us, it tempers us. We take the madness in, and we use it as fuel to grow stronger.

You are all here because you’ve seen that madness and survived. You’re veterans of at least five active incursions, and all of you have participated in a Model Seven cleansing operation. We have checked you all for signs of post traumatic stress disorder and we are convinced all of your symptoms are manageable.

We brought you here to act as the tip of the spear. We brought you here to make sure the Company does its job and fulfills its contracts. We brought you here to get the VIP home, to enforce corporate policy against all opposition, and to be the steel hiding behind the shadows. We brought you here to win.

Welcome to the Nintendo of America Quick Response Force, you tough sons and daughters of bitches. A division of Interpacific Entertainment, a limited liability corporation.

* Sergeant Luca “Gumba” Biro to new recruits undergoing advanced Nintendo of America special forces training.

Luke didn’t know what the hell was going on, but there was a choice to make. Either he hoped that his inner airlock door, built of 12 gauge steel and not meant to do anything more but form an airtight seal on a budget, would hold against three determined attackers, or to strike first.

“Oh, fuck me. I guess this is happening.” Luke thought to himself. He glanced through the yellowing acrylic window of the inner airlock door to see who he was dealing with. Luke was shocked by what he saw.

The outer airlock door had been knocked off of its hinges by what looked like repeated strikes. Moving inwards were three shapes, all wearing the tough rubber coveralls favored by Pit salvage crews. They moved in from the murky light of the outside and under the LED strip he kept in the middle of the airlock for just this reason, illuminating their faces.

He knew these people. They were the other members of Zim’s shift crew. The leader of the four-man outfit was a middle-aged woman who went by Junk. She’d always been a hardass, but was a friend. No one knew her real name, her original name, but she was well-built, kept herself in shape, and spent her off time arm wrestling male toughs down at the Swillhouse, the moonshine distillery most of the local pit crews went to in order to get fucked up. In her left arm was the sledgehammer which had breached the outer door of his airlock, while secured in its holster on her right hip was Junk's prized Colt m1911, a genuine antique .45 caliber pistol she kept as both her pride and joy and her first line of defense.

With her were two newbies he didn’t know - both younger. One, a thin woman who looked to be in her mid twenties, was missing an arm and gripped a bat awkwardly in her other. The other was an overweight but well-muscled man with just a hint of grey in a mustache which would have looked impressive if it hadn’t been caked in what looked like vomit. His axe dragged idly on the floor as he walked towards the inner airlock door. All three people were wearing SCB's, but they had been violently jammed to the side, as if they'd panicked at the feeling of the mouthpiece restricting their airflow but had forgotten entirely how to remove the straps which kept them secured.

Luke didn’t know what the hell to do. Sure, he could slag the two newbies without much of a how-do-you-do, punch some holes in them, apologize to the leader of Zim’s gang, and dump their bodies in a Pit for compost. No one would really care. Maybe he’d need to give out a free tuneup or two if they had friends. But Junk? He knew her. Junk and him had known each other for several years, which was a long damn time in the Underlake. She wasn’t the type to fuck around, because she didn’t want to find out.

"Junk! What the fuck are you doing? Answer me!"

Junk didn’t look at him. Not a hint of recognition dawned in her eyes, one milky with a cataract, the other normally sharp but now oddly unfocused. She did not respond. Or, well, she did respond, but it wasn’t in any way what he expected. Opening her mouth, Junk emitted a sound halfway between a bellow and a moan as she swung her hammer towards the inner airlock door, seemingly without grace or thought. But that wasn’t what caught Luke’s attention.

Her mouth wriggled. White shapes waved around as spittle flew with the effort of her screams. The inner airlock door slowly moved towards giving way, the thin steel denting inwards, the hammer peeking through a rent in the metal, and the hinge screws starting to strip through their holes and back out. In Luke's shop, the environmental contamination alarm blared its klaxon. The hammer punched right through the door again, and again. Zim kept twitching on the table. He was getting worse. Luke’s eyes went to the instrument tray, where he’d dropped the forceps at the first sign of intrusion, and flashed to the small shape which he’d pulled out of his friend.

It matched the shapes in Junk’s mouth.

Oh, fuck.

Luke knew what was happening.

There wasn’t much to do in the Underlake between jobs, and Luke couldn’t just tinker all day. His hands would cramp up after six hours or so of work. So, he spent time on the Mesh paying attention to the outside world. He, and every man, woman, and child over the age of six, knew generally about the Antithesis, but most people intentionally pretended they didn’t exist so that they could watch more AI-generated crap on the ‘net and pretend the world wasn’t going to shit. Luke preferred reality.

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He knew that Bothell had been hit by an incursion a couple months ago, and local footage had made its way past the state censors to the dark web. Streams from that many security cameras were just impossible to suppress. With the typical corporate corruption and bullshit of the Free State government, he knew that a jurisdictional spat between two PMC’s on who would take primary command and control had delayed the military response, and that the infestation just outside the Underlake had been contained only with difficulty.

So, he'd brushed up on what the swarms were like. In those bootleg feeds, he remembered seeing groups of people looking just like this stumbling and even running down the street towards both civilians and PMC's without an ounce of fear in their vacant eyes.

Model Sevens. It’s the only explanation.

Model Sevens were the physically weakest form of the semi-sentient, plant-based alien invaders which plagued the planet Earth. But they were the most horrifying of all models he had seen. Oh, sure, a Model Three could tear you apart with its jaws, or a Model Five could crush an adult with its fists or impale them on its high-velocity quills, but Sevens?

Sevens were parasites. Nasty little shits the size of large earthworms, they burrowed into any living animal flesh they found and took control of the animal nervous systems. If there was enough functional critical mass in the flesh they inhabited, the dead body even started moving, like a horde of zombies, either towards a Nest, for God-knows what reason, or towards their former allies.

Luke was dead. There were antithesis in the Underlake. Luke was dead. His friend Zim was going to be dead, if he wasn’t just a hive for the little worm fucks by this point. Junk was definitely dead. He might arm wrestle her once more, but she wasn’t going to ever flirt good naturedly with anyone in the Swillhouse, and the wrestling he would be doing would be for his life.

And the worst thing about it all is that he knew the city wouldn’t give a shit. Oh, they’d eventually come down here to clean up the mess, sanitize everything. But everyone in the whole fucking Underlake would be dead by that point. Then the bastards in P&L would find a new round of people they could make into Null-Citizens and toss down to die among the pits, the sewage reclamation plants, the recycling plants, before they figured out how to survive.

Stumbling back from the door in stunned horror, Luke saw the ghastly face of his friend’s corpse as it slammed the hammer into the door again. This time, the airlock door burst inward, and Zim’s former friends stumbled in, faces contorted in a horrifying mockery of rage and confusion as unfocused eyes stared towards the only mobile person in the room - Luke.

Time seemed to slow. The ringing in his ears, ever present after the explosion on the night of the Strike, intensified until it seemed to overwhelm all sound. Sensation vanished from his arms and legs, and he moved without conscious thought or control, stumbling backwards towards the pile of spare parts in the back of his shop.

The Sevens were faster. They started narrowing the gap. It wasn’t like his shop was massive - only two and a half meters by ten - but it was like Luke was watching the scene from the first person perspective of another person’s experience. He was screaming at himself to react, to move, to raise his gun and defend himself. But he couldn’t.

Then, Luke tripped. A power conduit ran across the floor, taped down properly (safety is always important), but Luke was shuffling his feet as if he was already infested by the Sevens. His boot snagged on the cable, and he went down. His head cracked against the floor.

A white flash shot across his vision, and he came out of his state of shock. None too soon, it turned out. Roaring through a worm-laden mouth loud enough that even his shock-reinforced tinnitus was overcome, what was left of Junk swung her hammer with both hands in an overhand blow and hit the side of Luke’s knee, bending the entire leg in the wrong direction with a sharp crack just above the joint. It hurt, badly, but at this point, so much adrenaline was running through his system that it just didn’t matter in the moment.

Finally snapping out of the remnants of his stupor, Luke’s right hand shot up, still gripping his SMG. He pulled the chunky steel trigger and the gun barked a line of fire up Junk’s body, starting at her navel and moving up her chest until the last round of his five-round burst impacted her right between the eyes. She dropped like a sack of potatoes, nerves dead as brain matter interspersed with wriggling white decorated the wall of his shop.

Out of the corner of Luke’s eye, he saw motion. Quick motion. The man dragging his axe was swinging it in an awkward overhand chop towards Luke. Screaming in pain, anger, and terror, Luke was able to just twist himself out of the way onto his side, and felt the impact as the axe embedded itself in the plastic floor of his shop.

Grunting in determination, Luke aimed down the length of his body as the man stupidly tried to tug backwards on the handle of his axe. Luke squeezed the trigger, and his gun barked again, firing three rounds into a stiffened leg, luckily hitting the knee. He went down, but he wasn’t out of it just yet. The man collapsed sideways, his left leg suddenly unable to support an adult's weight, impacting the exam table with a meaty thud as he fell towards the floor.

Remembering there was a third attacker in the room, Luke frantically looked left and right, only to see a descending metal bat, heading towards his stomach. He didn’t have time to react.

Oof.

The bat crunched into him, driving all the air from his lungs as he fought the need to vomit with everything he had. He was wearing a Scub. If he vomited, he was dead. He’d aspirate the vomit and by the time he could breathe again, he would be just biomass for the Nest. Even if he spat out the regulator and vomited into his mask, he wouldn’t be able to see, and he’d be just as dead.

Through determination and will, he forced down the rising gorge from his stomach and raised his gun towards the slim body of the younger woman who was attacking him. Honestly, he was thankful that he’d focused on the man. The beefier man was built almost like a lumberjack. If he’d been hit by the axe, Luke wouldn’t have survived a second. As it was, he felt like he was almost certainly going to die from this, but maybe, just maybe, he could kill off his two remaining attackers and the gunshots would draw someone who could save Zim. Cut out the worms before they spread too far.

Luke’s right arm raised jerkily. He barely had control of it at this point. Something was seriously wrong inside him. His breaths were ragged and painful, shallow, as if they were stabbing him, and red was intruding into the sides of his vision. But his arm rose towards the woman’s animate corpse, and his finger pulled the trigger spasmically. His gun barked and bucked. It was a good thing he’d gone for the full 32 round magazine and preloaded it, because he couldn’t even let go of the trigger. Wildly spraying in her direction while held in an arm only barely under his control, it was sheer luck that one of the rounds impacted the woman in the center of her neck and punched through the back of her spine, severing her brain's nerves from her body. She collapsed onto the floor right by Junk’s body as the gun clicked empty.

It was then that Luke realized that he had only one functional leg, at least one punctured lung, and that he was stuck on the floor of his shop with a very determined opponent, who didn’t feel pain, didn’t feel fear, and was going to do his level best to kill Luke.

“Fuck me.” Luke coughed, as he tasted blood, and saw a man jerkily crawl towards his broken leg.