Outside Arkham, New England
North America, Terra
Three days of Hell.
There was no other way of describing it. Even that didn't seem good enough. Three days ago, Terra went mad. Rioting, uprisings... Chaos. Killings in the streets, mass suicide, every city on the planet thrown into anarchic self destruction, even the world's protectors weren't immune.
Sergeant Nichols had considered the day he was accepted into Stone's Lament to be one of the proudest moments of his life. Three days ago he watched it all burn down. It was... it was like a flash of something... Sergeant Nichols couldn't put it into words, he didn't want to put it into words. He'd been running his troopers through drills and he'd just dropped like a stone while... something... flashed through his mind. When he recovered, he knew his men had experienced it too. Somehow he knew that everyone in the world had experienced it.
Then the killing started.
He'd been part of a mixed battalion posted to the North American continent. That battalion didn't exist anymore. At least half of them took their own lives within a few hours. Most of the rest began killing each other, ranting and screaming madness. Sergeant Nichols would never admit it to anybody else but... he didn't know if he had been one of them. One of the ones doing the killing. He knew he'd been fighting, but everything was a jumble, an incomprehensible mess. His clear memories only extended back to less than a day ago, when he found himself somewhere west of Salem, trapped in a suit completely depleted of power and buried in snow.
That's where they found him. A mixed bag of armored infantry and a couple of mechs, most of them Stone's Defenders from a base further south, plus a handful of Lament troops who'd apparently made it out of the base. They'd almost killed him on the spot before he was able to convince them he wasn't a threat, but they let him recharge his suit and tag along on their way to Arkham, where apparently some Lament troops were seen gathering. Along the way, they filled him in on what little they knew; some sort of nuclear blast in the pacific, widespread rioting and infighting, crippled military response, no communications. Knight Errant Saban, their de-facto commander, believed it was some sort of airborn psychotropic chemical attack, and kept them buttoned up in their suits and mechs indefinitely until they could get to a "clean location." A couple of the other troopers Nichols had talked to insisted it was some sort of mass hysteria, and at some point it would just stop on its own. Nichols didn't comment on it, but he knew, with painful certainty he knew they were lying to themselves, desperately trying to push away what they knew in the depths of their minds...
But Nichols desperately didn't want to think about that right now. Or at all, ever. But right now he had a job to do.
They'd stopped short of simply marching into Arkham. It was too risky, the Knight Errant insisted, without knowing whether or not the residents and any troops there had been "infected". Nichols didn't buy the chemical weapon notion, but he knew Saban was right to worry.
Thus it fell to him and an ad-hoc squad of their stealthiest armor to scout the way. He took point, his Angerona had the best stealth capabilities anyway. A Purifier and Infiltrator followed a fair distance back, while a Hauberk brought up the rear. Normally he'd hate the lumbering suit slowing him down, but in a mission like this, over this rugged, frozen terrain, it didn't make much of a difference.
They were approaching from the northwest, sticking to the trees and skirting the wetlands along the Miskatonic river. In addition to the heavy overgrowth and light snowfall, they had to contend with the decayed remnants of most of a town. Arkham had not weathered the centuries well, and much of the population of its past had moved away centuries ago and left the city to rot away. There were only a couple hundred people still living here. Probably out of stubbornness or some antiquarian quirkiness.
As they made their way around the back of an ancient ruin that used to be an asylum, Nichols caught sight of something that stopped him in his tracks. With a quick hand signal he sent his squad back behind the wall.
"Yep, that was a Poseidon," he stated. The massive three legged machine had been unmistakable, so imposingly huge next to the backdrop of the sleepy little town they would have seen it seventeen kilometers back, if not for all these damn trees. "'Bout two klicks distance. Lament colors, looked like it's standing guard over something."
"About where the old university was," Kyle, his squadmate in the Purifier, offered.
"Radio it in. You guys stay here and pretend to be walls while I get a closer look."
He took it slow, giving his suit's camo system plenty of time to keep up with his movements. He had about a klick of rapidly thinning woods until he got to the parts of the town that were still inhabited, and though he hadn't seen any scouts yet, he wasn't going to get careless about it. It was an ugly thought, sneaking up on your friends just in case they want to kill you.
As he made his way around a ruined house, he found the first group of remains.
"Oh god," he said, feeling a wave of nausea and dizziness that caused him to lurch into a ruined wall. The long decayed brick crumbled under the weight of his armor as he went straight through, landing on his side as rubble from the collapsing wall came down on him. And suddenly he wasn't there anymore. Flashes through his mind showed his base, his fellow soldiers, him... slaughtering them...
And just as quickly, he was back, feeling something knocking on his faceplate. As his vision returned, he saw Kyle's Purifier standing over him.
"You still in there?"
Nichols brought his suit back to his feet. His throat was absolutely raw. "How long?"
"Long scream, then you were out for maybe a minute." Kyle gestured over to the half buried carnage nearby. "I've got a guess why."
"Not the first corpses I've seen," Nichols protested. It was weak.
"Sarge, I mute my microphone before I go to sleep, we all do." Kyle walked over to the first of the remains. "We all see the same thing, we just don't talk about it where Saban might hear. For all we know, it could have been any of us who'd done this." He looked back. "Last guy who had a breakdown in front of him? Saban killed him, called him infected. Sorry, should have told you sooner."
Nichols felt like he should be horrified, but somehow that didn't even rate anymore. He approached the remains and crouched down. "This wasn't us," he said, first just to reassure himself, then more confidently. "No, not us. These people were run over, smashed up. Maybe a tank or something, or a Mech's foot." He brushed some of the snow away. "This is a grave pit. They just threw all the parts here."
He straightened back up. "Come on, we gotta see what's going on in there."