Liz Sherman (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
walking_napalm) wrote2012-03-04 06:46 am
walking_napalm) wrote2012-03-04 06:46 am
(no subject)
Ramon Mendoza is having a bad day.
If pressed to pinpoint, he would have to say that the exact moment where it all went wrong was when something loomed out of the darkness and hit Agent Sherman so hard that she disappeared. In retrospect, he realizes that she didn't disappear, she just got sent flying as the light she'd been providing with her hand went out, but in the split second that it happened, it was pretty fucking confusing.
Then it was just him, Park, and Gerrish with crap-ass flashlights in the dark.
"Sherm--" Gerrish began, Mendoza starting to point his flashlight on where he'd thought Sherman would be now and the other two turning on where she had been standing -- and then Gerrish screamed and there was a thud and a cracking sound that Mendoza really wished he didn't recognize.
(He did recognize it; it was breaking bone.)
Everything after that happened really fast. Shots fired, Gerrish still screaming, Mendoza and Park yelling for a light from Sherman, something big swooping in and out of flashlight beams and hurling Park into a cave wall, Mendoza snapping around in every possible direction as he tried to get a bead on where the hell it was coming from next--
But it was gone, and so, they discovered after Mendoza hauled Park up and they checked on Gerrish, was Agent Sherman.
Which is how Ramon wound up at this exact moment in his life, shoving a big Korean guy's dislocated shoulder back into its socket.
That's a pretty bad noise, too.
Park yells something that sounds a whole lot like, "SHITFUCKDAMNSHITTINGFUCKDAMN" and then falls silent, breathing raggedly, hand clutching his shoulder.
"I just don't get it," Mendoza says, sitting back on his heels and giving Parkie a minute to pull his shit together. "She was right there; I saw her."
"Not there anymore," says Gerrish. He's got several broken fingers and what they're all pretty sure is a broken knee cap, and what are probably the beginnings of shock. They threw a space blanket over him, after splinting him up as good as they could and giving him the good drugs, and now he's huddled against the cave wall providing totally useless drugged-out information. "Poof."
"She's not anywhere," Park says, a little thready but present. Ramon has never been so glad that Park is ex-Marine Corps and an Afghanistan vet. "You saw the GPS; her signal's nowhere within a hundred-mile radius."
Gerrish laughs woozily. "Red's gonna kill us."
"I'm gonna kill us." Park shakes his head, standing up. "How the hell do you lose a team member like that?" Mendoza picks his flashlight up off the rock floor and hands it to him. Park grimaces but takes it in his good hand and passes it into his bad, and then draws his gun again.
Mendoza shrugs helplessly. She's got to be okay, he thinks; Sherman is one of the most competent agents he's gone into the field with, and she's got the whole going-nuclear thing going for her. She's got to be.
"The beacon thing's not good," Park grunts, pulling him away from Gerrish. "We've got a serious problem here."
"No kidding," says Mendoza, his voice lowered, too.
Park rolls his eyes, but doesn't reprimand him. That's the nice part about the Bureau's informal hierarchy: no insubordination charges, even from ex-military like Park. You get the traditional beat out of you pretty quick at the Bureau. Park says, "We should get him out of here ASAP, but Liz--"
Mendoza has never been so glad not to be the team leader. That's Park's call, or maybe Sherman if she was here. Definitely not his.
"And fucked if I even know what that was." Park's holding his flashlight stiffly, arm tucked in closer to his body. "It felt like a train hit me. Gerrish, are you sure you didn't see anything?"
"Yep," Gerrish calls cheerfully. "Too dark. It was big and it felt like rocks and it picked me up and broke me."
"Great," mutters Park. "Listen, come on; let's get the EMF and infrared and motion sensors going, see what we can get here," and then there's a terrible grinding of stone from outside the circle of light provided by their flashlights.
Mendoza is forced to admit that it's toying with them.
"It's toying with us," he says, muffled as he probes the bloody now-open space between two teeth with his tongue; "damn."
"Hrnrnlnl," says Gerrish, from where he has tipped over on his side.
"Like a cat with a ball of yarn," Park groans in agreement, picking himself up off the floor. Mendoza turns his flashlight on him, just for a second, before going back to sweeping it across the empty tunnel. Park's face is bleeding. "It could have wasted us a dozen times by now, easy."
"It's got to be the rock demon," Mendoza says. "Christ, it's fast."
"You'd think something that big would be slower. It got my flashlight."
"Mierda," says Mendoza.
The final time that it comes, it's in the pitch black.
It hit Mendoza last time. Park hadn't been kidding about the train thing. It felt like a building crashed into his chest. Mendoza thought they'd been caught in a cave-in for a half a wild second, frantically trying to draw air into lungs that felt crushed; half aware of yelling and gunshots.
He dropped their last flashlight in the chaos. He's pretty sure the thing stepped on it.
Mendoza has been listening to three sets of quick breathing for -- he doesn't know how long it's been now. It's hard to say, this deep underground, in the dark and the damp. He has a hand on Park's good shoulder, so that he knows he's still there, and Park says his foot is pressed up against Gerrish's leg. They stopped talking a little while ago. There's not a lot left to say; Mendoza is scared out of his fucking mind, and he knows Park and Gerrish are, too. For all the scary-ass shit he's seen in the last year, this -- waiting here, in the silence, in the dark, not knowing what's out there or when it's coming, every breath hurting his lungs and his ribs, is the scariest.
There's a soft noise, like a pebble bouncing across stone. Mendoza raises his gun barrel back up in a split second. From the swoosh of air next to him and the way that Park tenses hard, he can tell that he does the same.
They wait. Mendoza's heart hammers in his chest. He's a pretty hardened field agent by now, or so he likes to think, but he dimly wonders if Park would think less of him if he leaned over to his other side and puked right now, 'cause that might be a thing that's happening.
Stone grits against stone, ever so slowly, somewhere in the tunnel.
Mendoza squeezes Park's shoulder tight enough that it's got to hurt.
"Steady," Park says, low, and then -- BAM, the whole tunnel shakes; THUD WHIFF, Park is ripped away from him; Gerrish hollers and Mendoza fires, and is rewarded by another grinding noise, this one somehow feeling angrier. Something displaces air right in front of his face, and he blindly lashes out. It feels like punching a stone wall. He staggers back, swearing, and trips on something warm. From the sound of it, it's Gerrish.
Mendoza stands in front of Gerrish, Glock held in a sure two-handed grip, pointed directly at the direction he thinks he came from, elbows locked. He takes one, two, three burning breaths.
Light flares into being. He's staring at what he first thinks is a pile of rocks. Then it draws itself up with that familiar grinding sound, and the top rock slowly turns toward him, and he realizes: it's vaguely person-shaped and it has eyes.
"Move," says an echoing voice, and Mendoza finds himself grabbed by the suit jacket collar and yanked, hard, so that he staggers backward. Agent Sherman stalks past him, both hands now on fire. Her hair is damp and straggling around her dirty face. Her vest, shirt sleeves, and pants are streaked with -- hell, Mendoza doesn't even know what most of that is; some of it looks almost like dried blood or dirt, but most of it is weird colors and textures and all kinds of wrong-looking. Her vest is torn in a couple places and one of her boots is most of the way shredded. There's a cut above her eyebrow and another one on her lip. But mostly, she looks pissed.
As she gets all the way past him, her hands clench into fists at her sides and she lights all the way on fire with a dull whump.
"Back up," she says.
"Hey," Park says, grabbing Gerrish under the arms and lifting (his face goes gray immediately but he doesn't drop him; Mendoza takes two quick steps over and grabs Gerrish's other shoulder, leaving Park to be able to use only his good arm to hold him up); "Liz, watch the explosions. Cave-ins."
She says something that's pretty shockingly filthy, even by Bureau standards, and then lifts her hands, and everything goes so white-bright that Mendoza has to look away as they drag Gerrish back. Even at this distance, the sudden blast of heat is searing. The grinding of rock sounds like a howl.
Park and Mendoza haul Gerrish behind a big-ass rock and tuck in there. There's a BOOM, BOOM that might be huge steps, then the whole tunnel shudders, pebbles and rock dust raining down from the ceiling.
Mendoza asks, "Should we--?" and Park immediately shakes his head.
"Nope," he says. "She'll say if she needs us."
Fire whooshes, hotter this time, and even though he knows it's a bad idea, Mendoza peers up over the top of their makeshift shelter. He gets a quick look at a cyclone of red-orange-yellow flames before his eyes burn, spots flashing, and he ducks back down. THOOOOM. The tunnel shakes again, this time with a tremendous crash, and then there's silence.
Long silence.
There's a rattle, then footsteps crunching toward them. Park rises up, and Mendoza follows him.
Sherman is picking her way toward them, a pile of ash and charred rocks still smoldering behind her. One hand is raised and burning from elbow to fingertips; her face looks exhausted and pinched under a layer of fine gray rock dust. She stops a few feet away. The three of them look at each other in the flickering light.
"Where the hell have you been?" says Park.
There's a longer pause.
"One minute it was hitting me, the next I was in a lake," says Sherman, finally, shoving her hair back with one hand. "I can't -- don't ask me to explain it."
"Whatever," Gerrish says, from the ground; "let's go find some fucking sunlight already."
If pressed to pinpoint, he would have to say that the exact moment where it all went wrong was when something loomed out of the darkness and hit Agent Sherman so hard that she disappeared. In retrospect, he realizes that she didn't disappear, she just got sent flying as the light she'd been providing with her hand went out, but in the split second that it happened, it was pretty fucking confusing.
Then it was just him, Park, and Gerrish with crap-ass flashlights in the dark.
"Sherm--" Gerrish began, Mendoza starting to point his flashlight on where he'd thought Sherman would be now and the other two turning on where she had been standing -- and then Gerrish screamed and there was a thud and a cracking sound that Mendoza really wished he didn't recognize.
(He did recognize it; it was breaking bone.)
Everything after that happened really fast. Shots fired, Gerrish still screaming, Mendoza and Park yelling for a light from Sherman, something big swooping in and out of flashlight beams and hurling Park into a cave wall, Mendoza snapping around in every possible direction as he tried to get a bead on where the hell it was coming from next--
But it was gone, and so, they discovered after Mendoza hauled Park up and they checked on Gerrish, was Agent Sherman.
Which is how Ramon wound up at this exact moment in his life, shoving a big Korean guy's dislocated shoulder back into its socket.
That's a pretty bad noise, too.
Park yells something that sounds a whole lot like, "SHITFUCKDAMNSHITTINGFUCKDAMN" and then falls silent, breathing raggedly, hand clutching his shoulder.
"I just don't get it," Mendoza says, sitting back on his heels and giving Parkie a minute to pull his shit together. "She was right there; I saw her."
"Not there anymore," says Gerrish. He's got several broken fingers and what they're all pretty sure is a broken knee cap, and what are probably the beginnings of shock. They threw a space blanket over him, after splinting him up as good as they could and giving him the good drugs, and now he's huddled against the cave wall providing totally useless drugged-out information. "Poof."
"She's not anywhere," Park says, a little thready but present. Ramon has never been so glad that Park is ex-Marine Corps and an Afghanistan vet. "You saw the GPS; her signal's nowhere within a hundred-mile radius."
Gerrish laughs woozily. "Red's gonna kill us."
"I'm gonna kill us." Park shakes his head, standing up. "How the hell do you lose a team member like that?" Mendoza picks his flashlight up off the rock floor and hands it to him. Park grimaces but takes it in his good hand and passes it into his bad, and then draws his gun again.
Mendoza shrugs helplessly. She's got to be okay, he thinks; Sherman is one of the most competent agents he's gone into the field with, and she's got the whole going-nuclear thing going for her. She's got to be.
"The beacon thing's not good," Park grunts, pulling him away from Gerrish. "We've got a serious problem here."
"No kidding," says Mendoza, his voice lowered, too.
Park rolls his eyes, but doesn't reprimand him. That's the nice part about the Bureau's informal hierarchy: no insubordination charges, even from ex-military like Park. You get the traditional beat out of you pretty quick at the Bureau. Park says, "We should get him out of here ASAP, but Liz--"
Mendoza has never been so glad not to be the team leader. That's Park's call, or maybe Sherman if she was here. Definitely not his.
"And fucked if I even know what that was." Park's holding his flashlight stiffly, arm tucked in closer to his body. "It felt like a train hit me. Gerrish, are you sure you didn't see anything?"
"Yep," Gerrish calls cheerfully. "Too dark. It was big and it felt like rocks and it picked me up and broke me."
"Great," mutters Park. "Listen, come on; let's get the EMF and infrared and motion sensors going, see what we can get here," and then there's a terrible grinding of stone from outside the circle of light provided by their flashlights.
Mendoza is forced to admit that it's toying with them.
"It's toying with us," he says, muffled as he probes the bloody now-open space between two teeth with his tongue; "damn."
"Hrnrnlnl," says Gerrish, from where he has tipped over on his side.
"Like a cat with a ball of yarn," Park groans in agreement, picking himself up off the floor. Mendoza turns his flashlight on him, just for a second, before going back to sweeping it across the empty tunnel. Park's face is bleeding. "It could have wasted us a dozen times by now, easy."
"It's got to be the rock demon," Mendoza says. "Christ, it's fast."
"You'd think something that big would be slower. It got my flashlight."
"Mierda," says Mendoza.
The final time that it comes, it's in the pitch black.
It hit Mendoza last time. Park hadn't been kidding about the train thing. It felt like a building crashed into his chest. Mendoza thought they'd been caught in a cave-in for a half a wild second, frantically trying to draw air into lungs that felt crushed; half aware of yelling and gunshots.
He dropped their last flashlight in the chaos. He's pretty sure the thing stepped on it.
Mendoza has been listening to three sets of quick breathing for -- he doesn't know how long it's been now. It's hard to say, this deep underground, in the dark and the damp. He has a hand on Park's good shoulder, so that he knows he's still there, and Park says his foot is pressed up against Gerrish's leg. They stopped talking a little while ago. There's not a lot left to say; Mendoza is scared out of his fucking mind, and he knows Park and Gerrish are, too. For all the scary-ass shit he's seen in the last year, this -- waiting here, in the silence, in the dark, not knowing what's out there or when it's coming, every breath hurting his lungs and his ribs, is the scariest.
There's a soft noise, like a pebble bouncing across stone. Mendoza raises his gun barrel back up in a split second. From the swoosh of air next to him and the way that Park tenses hard, he can tell that he does the same.
They wait. Mendoza's heart hammers in his chest. He's a pretty hardened field agent by now, or so he likes to think, but he dimly wonders if Park would think less of him if he leaned over to his other side and puked right now, 'cause that might be a thing that's happening.
Stone grits against stone, ever so slowly, somewhere in the tunnel.
Mendoza squeezes Park's shoulder tight enough that it's got to hurt.
"Steady," Park says, low, and then -- BAM, the whole tunnel shakes; THUD WHIFF, Park is ripped away from him; Gerrish hollers and Mendoza fires, and is rewarded by another grinding noise, this one somehow feeling angrier. Something displaces air right in front of his face, and he blindly lashes out. It feels like punching a stone wall. He staggers back, swearing, and trips on something warm. From the sound of it, it's Gerrish.
Mendoza stands in front of Gerrish, Glock held in a sure two-handed grip, pointed directly at the direction he thinks he came from, elbows locked. He takes one, two, three burning breaths.
Light flares into being. He's staring at what he first thinks is a pile of rocks. Then it draws itself up with that familiar grinding sound, and the top rock slowly turns toward him, and he realizes: it's vaguely person-shaped and it has eyes.
"Move," says an echoing voice, and Mendoza finds himself grabbed by the suit jacket collar and yanked, hard, so that he staggers backward. Agent Sherman stalks past him, both hands now on fire. Her hair is damp and straggling around her dirty face. Her vest, shirt sleeves, and pants are streaked with -- hell, Mendoza doesn't even know what most of that is; some of it looks almost like dried blood or dirt, but most of it is weird colors and textures and all kinds of wrong-looking. Her vest is torn in a couple places and one of her boots is most of the way shredded. There's a cut above her eyebrow and another one on her lip. But mostly, she looks pissed.
As she gets all the way past him, her hands clench into fists at her sides and she lights all the way on fire with a dull whump.
"Back up," she says.
"Hey," Park says, grabbing Gerrish under the arms and lifting (his face goes gray immediately but he doesn't drop him; Mendoza takes two quick steps over and grabs Gerrish's other shoulder, leaving Park to be able to use only his good arm to hold him up); "Liz, watch the explosions. Cave-ins."
She says something that's pretty shockingly filthy, even by Bureau standards, and then lifts her hands, and everything goes so white-bright that Mendoza has to look away as they drag Gerrish back. Even at this distance, the sudden blast of heat is searing. The grinding of rock sounds like a howl.
Park and Mendoza haul Gerrish behind a big-ass rock and tuck in there. There's a BOOM, BOOM that might be huge steps, then the whole tunnel shudders, pebbles and rock dust raining down from the ceiling.
Mendoza asks, "Should we--?" and Park immediately shakes his head.
"Nope," he says. "She'll say if she needs us."
Fire whooshes, hotter this time, and even though he knows it's a bad idea, Mendoza peers up over the top of their makeshift shelter. He gets a quick look at a cyclone of red-orange-yellow flames before his eyes burn, spots flashing, and he ducks back down. THOOOOM. The tunnel shakes again, this time with a tremendous crash, and then there's silence.
Long silence.
There's a rattle, then footsteps crunching toward them. Park rises up, and Mendoza follows him.
Sherman is picking her way toward them, a pile of ash and charred rocks still smoldering behind her. One hand is raised and burning from elbow to fingertips; her face looks exhausted and pinched under a layer of fine gray rock dust. She stops a few feet away. The three of them look at each other in the flickering light.
"Where the hell have you been?" says Park.
There's a longer pause.
"One minute it was hitting me, the next I was in a lake," says Sherman, finally, shoving her hair back with one hand. "I can't -- don't ask me to explain it."
"Whatever," Gerrish says, from the ground; "let's go find some fucking sunlight already."