Premptive author’s notes - This chapter is a little more hard boiled than the others - in keeping with marine personality there’s swearing and stuff. Just a friendly heads up.
The interior of the bunker was eminently practical in its design: a flattened egg of steel and concrete meant to shelter ground forces, increasing their expected lives by a truly astonishing number of minutes. Like all bunkers it was purpose built to house four active troops and their supplies, which meant that with only a marine and an SCV huddled inside, there was very nearly almost enough room in this one to coexist without killing one another.
The SCV operator peered through a gun port of the bunker, shuffling his way past the grumbling marine.
“It still out there?” The marine said, then spat.
“Did you just spit inside your helmet?”
“...no. And shut up. Is it still out there?”
There wasn’t much of a panorama offered by the narrow slit and what landscape there was to see wasn’t worth the effort.
“Nope...nope...Oh wait. Yep. She’s still over there.” The SCV sighed. They’d been hiding down here for some time and with nothing to do but sit, wait and drive each other a little more insane, time stretched out maddeningly before them.
“It’s an ‘it,’ not a ‘she,’ moron.”
“But she’s definitely a she. I mean look at... her. She’s pink. Come on man, like, super pink. That’s definitely a girl... something.”
The opaque mask of the marine shifted to an angle which inferred that the face beneath it was giving him a very disgusted look. “You are gonna drop this conversation right here, before I beat you senseless. I don’t care what it was, ‘cause what it is now is infested.”
The SCV peered again. She hadn’t been all that threatening, mostly she’d variously tried enticing or pleading, shouting invitations to them from the distance. When she poked her head out a few shots went her way, but she was so quick...
She was being very friendly, in an airheaded kind of way. Secretly, the SCV wished he could have her in here, and the marine out there.
“How can you be so sure she’s infested?”
The marine, and it was important to note that anyone who managed to get themselves made a marine wasn’t the brightest to begin with, stood silent for a few flabbergasted seconds as his brain struggled to go down a few more gears.
“See the way she’s all bubbly and excitable and friendly? Total give away.”
“Really?”
“No damnit, it's the tentacles, and whatever that twitchy green blobby thing is! Seriously, you are too fucking dumb to live, you know that?”
The SCV stifled a sniffle. “That was uncalled for,” he said sadly as he moped in the corner.
The marine managed to stifle his trigger finger, just barely. The decision was based not on any sense of nobility, patience, or even the vague and laughable threat of some kind of court martial. Oh no, he had something else entirely in mind.
It’d be a close call to outrun an infested...whatever the hell this was, but he wouldn’t need to. He just needed to outrun the SCV. Small children hope they get presents or candies. The marine hoped, with much the same delight, that he’d get to see over his shoulder if that special moment came.
“This sucks.”
“Shut up.”
“This really sucks.”
“Shut up.”
“I’m tired of being stuck here.”
“Are you not hearing me tell you to shut the fuck up?”
“You don’t have to be so mean about it. Couldn’t we just let her in? She seems nice enough. I bet she’s better company than you.”
“You. Are. So stupid I don’t even believe it! I would send you to scout an enemy base except you’d be too much of a dumbass to even find the damn thing if you were walking in the middle of it! You know what happened to the last bunker that let an infested in? A GODDAMN DINNER PARTY!”
“Did somebody say PARTY?!”
“SHITFUCK!” the marine screamed, spraying U-238 gauss rounds every which way out the gun port at the bubbly voice that had been right there. When there was only the click click click of the empty magazine he remembered to breathe.
He shoved the trembling SCV operator aside and glanced out the northside port. Nothing. East, West, South. Nothing, just the rolling plumes of dust and the endless rocky expanse.
Then, in the silence and terror, there came a sound. With even more terror, they realized that it was a song, with speakers and bass and everything, impossibly.
Party Pony on the bunk tonight!
Everybody’s gonna have a good time!
Pinkie makes you lose your mind!
I just wanna see ya!
Shake th-
The explosion was so loud it wasn’t really sound at all - it’d be as futile as trying to convey the heart of a sun in terms of mere temperature. There was, however, a sort of theme to the sound. Anyone who might’ve heard it from a distance would be put in mind of a billion balloons bursting.
As the marine and the SCV witnessed a special showing of a little big bang of their own, each could’ve sworn they saw against the backdrop of stone and metal a trail of brightly coloured streamers in the air.
The last echoes died away and the two found themselves standing under the open sky. They hadn’t moved at all. Rubble rained down around them, and the largest piece was almost big enough to brain the SCV with. Most was too small to pick up with anything other than a dustpan.
Otherwise they were entirely unscathed, and stood utterly dumbfounded. A pink thing landed lightly on top of the marine and sat on his shoulders. There was some vague sense of panic, but his mind was too full of fuck to do anything. The bit of brain that picks up strange details when the rest of the consciousness is having a good gibbering cry in the corner noticed that there was entirely no tentacles, twitchy green blobby things, or slathering monsters there of trying to pry itself into his brain.
Pinkie, after a moment’s consideration atop the stunned marine clapped her hooves together and beamed a wide grin.
“So you can explode twice! I totally have to tell Spike!” With a bounding leap and a sprint into the distance, she was gone.
The SCV operator spoke quietly, as if afraid breaking the silence would get him in trouble. “I will never complain about bunkers again.”
“I am never touching another drop of stim again. From now on, I’m sticking to the good old illegal shit.”
“...you got any on ya?” The SCV asked nervously.
The marine, much to his own surprise, popped open his special little compartment and took out some of his stuff, because sometimes you hate somebody for being thicker than a brick, but when you go through the forge so much that you’ve had enough of the kiln, you just want to get baked.
“That was all just a bad trip. It never happened.”
“Of course not. That’d be crazy...”