Sometimes its just like this:
I was walking through the empty, dark, and silent church sanctuary. I had a pistols in hand. When I would see a small multi-legged creature (think facehugger/headcrab), I would waste a few bullets on it. Some other guy, my friend, you could say, was there doing the same thing. We had it under control.
When we had finished making the rounds, we gathered up the buggers and tossed them in a trash can. Just then a lady wandered in. "What were you doing here?"
I responded, matter of factly, "Shooting face huggers."
She sat down on a pew, smiled, and nodded, "Ooh, yes. I hate those things."
I picked one more up and threw it into the trash can.
My friend spoke up, "Don't you think we despose of them... you know, as hazardous materials?"
I tossed a "meh" back at him, "These shouldn't cause anyone any real problems now. They're dead."
We both left the building, and headed towards a building where the group of church-goers were gathered instead. I presumed that this was their spot due to the condition of the sanctuary. I blended right into the crowd, meeting up with another friend of mine. "Guess what I was just doing?"
He chuckled, "Huh?"
"Shooting headcrabs in the sanctuary," I said blandly and matter-of-factly.
He similarly uninterestedly responded, "Cool."
My sister had been out of town, but this was her first Sunday back in a while. She gave a talk to the crowd. She talked about how she appreciated the church and the church people. She particularly mentioned how she hoped for the best "even through these hard times." I assume she was talking about the nation-wide facehugger infestation. It had hit right at home too.
I left during the middle of the service. Had to get back to work. I was on assignment to go with a tech team to clear out a government, chemical research facility, of headcrabs.
We had to enter through an underground pipe/sewer system. The building had been automatically locked down from the inside.
On our way in, while walking by a dark intersection, a headcrab jumped out and hit one of my team members square in the face. We managed to wrestle it off and slice it up, but the victim didn't look good. She was passed out. I told another one of my team members to stay with her. We had radios, we could stay in touch.
Before we left, we scraped some of the viscous material the headcrab had been attempting to inject into its unfortunate victim, into a plastic baggie.
Eventually after traversing more dark corridors, we reached a more open area in the warehouse.
They were everywhere. In all senses of the word, the place was crawling with these things. Gunfire ensued. Those buggers can move fast when they're hungry, when they can smell you, smell your fear. My team fanned out. We started hearing gunfire that was not our own. I instructed my members to keep spreading out and cleaning up. I lost contact with a lot of my team, but I knew they could hold their own.
With the sounds of gunshots still hammering like rain on a corrugated tin roof, I made my way to a more secluded area of the warehouse. It was there I found a tech. She was cowering in a corner behind some crates. As soon as she saw me, she called out, and I quickly ran over to her.
I asked her if she could make any use of the sample I had collected earlier. I produced the plastic bag. Her eyes lit up. "I need cover. If we can get to the electrophotometer, we can analyze this sample. Maybe we can understand why these things are so effective at infecting us."
I provided her cover, and kept her hidden until we finally found the machine. She carefully placed some of the sample on a membrane and put it into the apparatus. We went over to to the computer interface and flipped the switch on. It wasn't in the most secluded of areas, so we had to stay low.
The computer loaded up, but it got to a log-in screen, asking for a password. There was a special four by four keypad with mixed numbers and letters mixed. We both cursed.
On the table top, there was a men's magazine among other papers. I picked it up, chuckling, and turned it over. On the back was a laundry list of codes. It looked like someone else had been trying to brute-force it, and had been recording their attemps. I quickly scanned down the list, committing as many as I could to short-term memory. There was another slip of paper with line after line of similar codes all the way down its length. The problem is, that one may have actually contained the code. Only the specific scientist who worked this machine would know.
"Fuck it," I said, "Let's start trying codes. There's a chance we get it right." As light-hearted as this was, I could still hear the guns blazing, and a sense of urgency with the probable masses of viral creatures about.
-click, click, click, click-
I put in four characters and slammed enter.
The screen went dead.
"Fuck."
After a second, the screen lit up, and displayed a "loading..." message.
"Well shit," i said, "if it takes this long for every try, we'll never get in."
The rest of this dream shall be written after I get some sleep.
