The walls were all flat, blank concrete, and we walked down what looked like an emergency exit tunnel. Each of the Hobbs clicked on a flashlight as we moved into the dark, splashing everything in harsh white light. My helmet automatically clicked off my low-light vision mode to prevent the beams from dazzling me.

At the far end of a long, broad tunnel, the walls opened into a circular concrete room that was depressed into a drain in the center. Faded dusty paint on the wall indicated where the rescue kits should hang, and what should be in them. Civilian clothing, general first aid kit, a loaded sidearm, holster, and spare magazine. Mr. Sada had built his mansion at the end of the army’s bugout tunnel.

I was at the front, with Tollya. We had our shotguns at the ready, watching ahead. My helmet had a motion detector built into the minimap, and I shouted a warning when several red dots suddenly entered it. Rayna acted immediately.

She barked an order and the Hobbs scattered while she clicked the toggle on a grenade. The sound echoed in the dark and she tossed the device onto the central drain in the room behind us.

It beeped once, the sound echoing off the walls, and then the grenade flashed, erupting into foaming mud. A ball of murky foam bubbled up and then constricted hard, settling into a quick-drying mud-crete cap over the drain.

Before I could marvel at the item much, Rayna pointed at me with the flat of her hand and then behind me to the corner near the entrance. Red dots swarmed closer as I took position on one side of the entryway and Tollya slammed into place on the other. I caught a look at her face through the slits in her helmet. She was grinning.

Rayna herself stepped up to the empty doorway, and hefted the flamethrower, flicking its pilot light on. I gripped my shotgun in one hand, and my Sleem Stick in the other.

I didn’t end up using either.

A burbling swarm of Sleem poured around the corner ahead, emitting their noises of excitement as they rushed toward us. I felt the heat from the flamethrower as Rayna opened up next to me. Liquid fire rushed out and coated the hallway. She swung it in an arc, letting off the trigger as the hallway lit up. Sleem screamed, farted, crisped, and died.

Rayna let them have another blast, and the few red dots on my map that hadn’t retreated burned and died.

Tollya laughed, and the rest of the Hobbs joined in. Rayna shook her head and grunted for quiet, which was immediately obeyed. We gathered up and headed down the angled concrete hallway toward a junction point.

Everything was stripped from this place, down to the clocks on the walls and lighting fixtures on the ceilings. In their places were the original paint the construction crew had idiot-proofed the base with, and long faded cable tracks. Bright dayglo orange instructions taught us how to build an underground army base, everywhere, on empty stretches of concrete.

As we approached dead Sleem, we had to stop and wait for BuyMort pods to arrive and sell the bodies. It was pocket change, the napalm damaged them beyond badly.

Most of them were little more than greasy burn stains by the time BuyMort got to them, but the important part was to remove their acidic remains from our path. Even dead, they could cause serious damage or kill. I thought of that poor squirrel from the first day and shook my head.

A slow pace was good, Rayna insisted. Going through a Sleem nest fast was an excellent way to end up dead. She had the experience, and I fell in line. Wherever she pointed, I responded. As we approached the intersection ahead, a particularly small Sleem ooze dripped from the ceiling in an attempt to land on Tollya.

I lifted the Shockwave and blasted it out of the air with a taser slug. The little ball of slime splashed to the floor in a sparking, twitching heap, and Rayna roasted it with a quick burst of napalm.

Tollya grunted at me and struck her own chest, lifting her chin.

I nodded back and slipped another taser round into the shotgun, before racking its slide. My helmet had warned me of the little Sleem on the ceiling and pathed a trajectory for me to successfully shoot it.

I was starting to feel like a smart shopper.

Rayna called a halt at the cross shaped intersection and grunted at each of us, putting us in position around the small room. Old dayglo orange paint indicated where a water cooler and snack machine were meant to go, as well as a trash receptacle.

I was teamed up with a male hobb whose name I hadn’t learned yet. He carried an Ak-47 with a wire frame stock clearly made from scrap.

He also had a really big Leno chin, which endeared him to me immediately, when coupled with his Vietnam era marine combat helmet.

His hands were steady as he held the rifle on the hallway, and the little flashlight hung in the webbing of his helmet bobbed as he looked down the dark concrete hole. It really stuck out to me how barren it was down here, I had expected something to look at. Army stuff. It was all just dusty old concrete, cobwebs, and faded dayglo orange paint.

And of course, Sleem. More of them were out there, present at the edge of my mini-map. They seemed hesitant but were growing in number. I hissed for Rayna and pointed. “At the end of this hall, and that hall,” I said, indicating with a bladed hand. “Sleem are massing. They’ll attack soon, I think.”

“How many?” Rayna grunted.

I performed a quick count on the map, but the dots were moving around and bouncing off one another. “A few dozen maybe? I can’t get a good count.”

Rayna nodded at me and then fell back into the center of the room. “Hold positions. Alternate fire. Call out reloads.” She looked at the Hobb behind us guarding the empty hallway. “Watch our backs. Help only if called. Callsign ‘rear-guard.’” With that, she grunted and hefted the flamethrower again, getting ready.

The red dot swarms started surging. They would press directly up the edge of our flashlights, and then retreat. Each time they did this, they came closer, there were more of them, and the sounds they were making grew in intensity.

Suddenly, a large red dot entered my mini-map at the end of the hallway I was guarding, and the smaller Sleem all charged. “Incoming!” I shouted.

My companion Hobb opened fire as Rayna painted Tollya’s hallway with napalm. The Hobb at my side selected targets and fired in sparing bursts, only putting two rounds in each Sleem. The bullets streaked through the air incandescently and hissed upon contact with the Sleem’s gelatinous bodies.

The Hobbs were using tracers.

The little Sleem especially seemed badly wounded by two tracer rounds in them and slowed to the point that they were rolled over by their brethren behind them in the crowd. My friends casually slowed their charge by tripping up the lead Sleem.

I watched closely, looking for a weakness to shore up with a taser slug, but he managed the entire charge by himself.

Within a few seconds, Rayna was at our sides and we both fell back to avoid the spray of napalm that lit up our hallway and filled it with the screaming farts of dying Sleem.

The Hobb across from me nodded and popped his magazine out. He reached around his side and opened a small bag on his mesh chest sling. Fishing out a handful of rounds, he began reloading the magazine in his other hand. Casually, unhurried, mechanically, and efficiently.

“Hey. What’s your name?” I hissed across to him.

He lifted his eyes to me and smiled.

“Ordo.”

With a smooth, mechanical motion, he finished loading the magazine and slipped it back into his rifle. As he lowered the rifle to clack the magazine into place against his thigh, he reached his other hand out to me. Tollya lit up the hallway behind us with shotgun blasts and the sound of her shotgun’s slide being racked.

Ordo and I shook briefly, before both returning to a ready position. Rayna nodded and stepped back, moving to return to Tollya’s hallway. I had counted eight shells fired and could now hear the rhythmic sound of new rounds being slid into a shotgun’s magazine.

I stayed focused on my hallway but watched theirs on the mini-map. Sleem surged forward once Tollya ran out of ammunition, but their front line fell apart when that flamethrower got back in action. They were wiped out, and those at the rear slowed their advance significantly. I saw the larger dot at the rear back away, and the remaining Sleem gathered around it scattered.

“Clear!” I shouted.

Rayna raised an eyebrow at me and shined the light in my helmet. She nodded, but everyone stayed on their hallways as those who needed to, reloaded. Rayna had a spare tank for the flame thrower but refrained from reloading yet. She had been doing a good job of using the fuel sparingly.

Now we had a problem though.

We couldn’t leave a hallway like this behind us, or risk getting cut off by the Sleem. Rayna told me that was exactly how they operated. Entrap and ensnare, overwhelm, and consume. I got the distinct impression that hobbs engaged with Sleem regularly. There was also a weakness with the room we were in. A large vent in the ceiling.

Rayna and Tollya shook their heads when I asked how to address that issue, and Tollya grabbed a grenade.

“Fun game time,” she quipped, nodding her head and tossing the grenade in the air a few times. She clicked the toggle and waited, before tossing it at the vent. “We all try. Come.”

Her grenade went off with a wet splatter, and we all dodged the droplets. It had popped too late, and a thick puddle hardening in the shape of a cow patty on the floor was the end result. The grenades blew out like a bubble of foam when they went off, and some of it got stuck in the vent over-head, so I realized that even with enough failure, we would get what we wanted anyway.

Rayna shook her head and palmed a grenade. “Not reliable. Sleem still get through sometimes. We need to keep watch.”

She clicked her grenade and waited, before tossing it up with a nod. Hers did better. Much better. It went off mostly in the vent, so the mud-crete that fell to the ground was less than the mud-crete that stuck to the vent and helped cover it.

From what I could see, there was none of the grate left open, and when I informed them of that, they tossed another up to be safe.

This time it was Ordo who threw a grenade, and he waited until the last possible instant. The entire bubble of foam was still traveling upward when it went off, and it splashed against the ceiling and vent, coating the metal entirely. The rest of the Hobbs cheered him, and it was generally agreed upon that Ordo was the best at throwing mud-crete grenades at the ceiling. I was tempted to try but focused my efforts into what we needed to do next now that we had secured a safe-ish area.

It was decided that I should scout, being the one with the mapping system. I convinced them to hunker down in the hallway and hold out while I explored each main hallway to the edge of my current map. That would give us some information to go on, I argued.

Rayna relented quickly and held the intersection for us to use as a hub to explore from. The intent was that I would go out and come back, and then we would decide what to do from that point.

A hobb would extend out with me, as nobody could go anywhere alone. Rayna was firm about that, because, as she explained, that was how you got swallowed.

Tollya was my escort again, and we headed down the first hallway, the only one we had not been attacked from. As soon as we got out of sight, a Hobb from Rayna’s group broke away and followed us down the hall. We created a relay system of Hobbs that way, and none of us were ever out of sight of the others.

At the end of the first hallway, my mini-map told me there was a large building-like structure to explore. We entered the first floor of what appeared to have been a science office building and residential compound. Rooms were laid out below for administrative, record keeping, residential dormitories, and the vaguely-titled experimentation ward.

I know because the signs painted on the walls in the lobby remained.

The building itself sprawled at least three stories, which is as far as my mini-map extended down. I was not about to go delving either. The map said the only way to go was down, and the only ways down were two black holes in the floor that had concrete stairwells vanishing into their gaping maws. Plus one at the back that was clearly a former cargo elevator. It just disappeared into inky blackness when I peeked in. Extra creepy.

Back at the intersection, we took the next hallway. It led to a hospital wing filled with ancient tile and multiple drains. This wing spread out over a large area, from what my map told me. It was all one floor, with rooms jutting from hallways like leaves from branches. Tollya and I cautiously entered a circular room that was the center of a spiral of wings branching out. Two large, dark doorways lead in opposite directions to either side of the hallways.

I called us back at that point, the area was far too risky to explore unless we moved in force. There were so many drains everywhere, and I felt like Sleem were hiding behind each and every one of them.

It was significantly shorter to return to Rayna in this direction, which ultimately weighed heavily in our choice to confront that area first. A shorter hallway to retreat in, if and when retreat became necessary.

The third hallway was a bust before it even began.

The map expanded to show a deep hangar at the end of the hallway as we neared. It truncated in a metal staircase that was dripping with acidic slime. In the few minutes I spent staring out into the abyssal expanse of the underground hangar before me, it occurred to me that we may not complete our task down here in a single night.

I wondered how the Sleem would respond to our intrusion as we retreated to Rayna for a huddle. We needed to decide what to do next.

Rayna, it turned out, was the veteran of several Sleem hunts, and she made the decision to begin systematically clearing the drains in the hospital wing. There were so many that it created a constant hazard. The Sleem would use the pipes to move around and set up ambushes, and it was necessary to take that away from them.

We left two Hobbs at the intersection with strict orders to report any activity via MortMobile and returned to the hospital wing. After we were sure they were secure behind us, we began the slow and terrifying process of sealing any and all vents, grating, and drains.

Rayna directed us, and we set several mud-crete grenades. Once a room was secure, she would mark it with a florescent colored marker, and we would move on.

I made sure to keep close watch of our surroundings on the map, and even found a feature that allowed me to mark rooms we had cleared.

We traveled in small arcs, around the main room, staying close to our escape vector at all times, while branching a little further out with each pass.

No Sleem showed themselves, on the mini-map, or in person. There was residue everywhere, so thick that Rayna had to burn it off before we could progress at times, but no Sleem themselves. I got more nervous the further we went from the main hallway, until a sudden deep groan in the earth stopped us all. Rayna held up a fist and her eyes went wide. The corners of my map began to close in on us in red. There were no dots, just a flood of color.