Situation Normal All F***ed Up. (A Battletech SI)

[MarkWarrior]

Situation Normal, All F***ed Up. (A BT Si)

Introduction

The first thing I noticed when I woke up was that it was cold. The second thing I noticed was that I was stuck. As in, instead of the nice, warm bed I usually slept in, with the blanket and my wife next to me, I was trapped in some sort of box that had iced-over glass for the door. The third thing I noticed. I was naked as the day I was born. Which explained part of why I was so cold.

Had someone tried to kill me? I tried to scream for help, but instead, what felt like mucus began to crawl up my throat, forcing me to cough viciously and hard, spitting out a sickly yellow-green substance that tasted acidic on the way up.

Leaning forward and resting my head against the cool, comforting glass as I coughed up what must have been half of my stomach and lung capacity in this gross and awful-tasting crud, I noticed that the 'door' or whatever the glass was, had begun to slide open.

What started as a slow creak open pushed all the way up as whatever leftover battery or hydraulics kicked in and spilled me out onto the floor.

"Ow," I groaned into the hard concrete. I had tried to catch myself, but my arms didn't seem to be working; everything felt weak. Like I'd spent a few weeks in bed being sick. My bones ached, and my throat was scratched and raw from the vomit.

"Can anyone help?" I rasped, my voice sounding like I'd chain-smoked a carton of cigarettes. But no one responded. The only sounds I could hear were what I thought was the wind beating on the outside of whatever building I was in.

I lay there trying to force my muscles into obedience for what felt like an eternity. The time crawled by while the wind continued its song. My only measure of time was the sound of my heartbeat.

Finally, though, my arms began to respond. Pushing them underneath me, I tried to do a push-up and get back onto my feet the same way I'd been doing since high school, only for the now weak and noodly arms to fail me. Muscles that had atrophied collapsed and left me on my knees.

But I could finally see, and craning my head around, I observed my surroundings.

Behind me, where I'd first fallen, was what looked like a bunch of knock-off cryo tubes from Halo, only square. All of them, except for the one I'd just fallen out of, were cracked, opened, or damaged in some way.

The concrete room around me was covered in debris, skeletons, and destruction. There were scorch marks on the walls, old, spent shell casings on the floor, and burnt-out equipment everywhere.

I had no idea how I'd even gotten here. The last thing I remembered was working on a chapter for one of my Battletech fics while my wife and I watched a show in the background. Eventually, she'd rolled over and gone to sleep while I'd stayed up another few minutes to work on something. Then I'd set my head on the pillow and been out like a light.

Shaking my head slowly, I ripped myself out of what had happened yesterday. Looking down, I noticed that my hands and arms looked small and frail compared to what they'd been the night before. Not as if I'd gotten older or younger, but as if I'd been a coma patient for a long time.

Still, even if my muscles were weak, I couldn't just sit around here on my knees. I needed to do something. First, I needed to be able to move, to take stock, and see what I was missing because of the rubble I couldn't see over.

Spotting the leg of a metal table nearby, I slowly crawled on my hands and knees over to it. One edge was jagged and rough, but the other was perfectly fine. So, I put the jagged end against the floor and tried to push up.

"MMM, fuck," I grunted as a jolt of pain from little-used muscles shot through my arms and legs. But I was standing, and even if it hurt, being able to stand was movement in the right direction.

Now leaning on my makeshift cane, I carefully moved through debris on the floor. Now that I was standing, I remembered I wasn't wearing any clothes, and that included shoes. Maybe there were some clothes next to the icebox. Now that I was paying attention, it did look like there were some shelves or lockers beside the rows of the dead and damned.

Hobbling to the locker, I looked at the one beside the box I'd crawled out of and noted that it did indeed have my name on it. "H. Mark A." Was set into a nameplate, and it looked like there weren't any locks on it. So, I grabbed the handle and twisted, smiling as it began to open. Then the red emergency lights turned off, leaving me in the dark.

My heart jumped; a part of me wanted to hide because of whatever might be coming after me in the darkness. The other part of me was telling me that I was still naked, and that If I was going to die, I might as well do it warm and without being shriveled up.

So, I reached into the now-open locker and felt a burst of happiness and satisfaction at what felt like clothes.

Pulling each item out, I began to slowly identify what they were in the pitch-black. That was a shirt; this one was a pair of shorts. Finally, I found what felt like a pair of boxers, and leaning against the still-cold icebox, I began to pull them on.

Backwards, I put them on backwards. That was uncomfortable, so I quickly stripped them back off before pulling them on the right way. Certain important parts of me at least somewhat protected, I gradually found items and got myself dressed. Pants, shirt, a pair of shorts, and what felt like slippers.

The clothes were all baggy on my now-frail and skinny frame barring the elastic of the underwear. But they were still clothes. Still, there might be other things in the locker, so I began combing through it in the dark. There were a few items that I couldn't identify, but there was one that felt intimately familiar.

Grabbing onto the pistol, I slowly pulled it out and began running my fingers over it. It didn't feel like any of the models I was familiar with. The grip was textured in an odd way, but it was comfortable in the hands, and it was something.

Hopefully, whoever had used this locker set up their handgun the same way I liked to. Pushing the lever on the device under the barrel of the sidearm, I blinked and covered my eyes as a flashlight burned my retinas even though it was facing away from me.

Leaving it on and blinking spots away out of my eyes, I waited until my vision wasn't impaired to begin inspecting the rest of the locker bearing my name. There was a carbine of some description sitting beside a pair of socks and boots. I wasn't going to be able to hold the other weapon with the state I was in. So, I set the handgun and flashlight combo down in a place where it illuminated around me, pulled the socks and loose boots onto my feet, and used my table leg to stand up.

"Three minutes without oxygen, three days without water, three weeks without food," I reminded myself. I had air, I had shelter. What I needed was water and food…

---

The room I'd woken up in was the deepest part of wherever this was, and however damaged the room I'd started out in, the rest of the facility was worse.

Exiting out of the crumpled metal door, I noted that the rooms were marked above the doorways. The room I'd just left had a bright yellow "Cryo" painted above it.

In the hallway, illuminated by the light on the end of my pistol, were two rooms. Each of them had the room name written out above them. One read Storage, the other Generator.

Thankfully, the doors seemed to be able to be manually turned and opened with the same sort of seals you'd normally see on a Navy ship. Even if I was a bit concerned with my ability to open those kinds of doors at the moment, I needed to get inside the generator room to see if I could get the lights back on. Then I could check storage for water and food.

But first, I needed to catch my breath. Maybe I'd been in that icebox for so long that I'd gotten weak, but I didn't know why my heart and lungs were causing so many issues.

I collapsed against the wall next to the generator room and just breathed for a moment. Why had I ended up here? How had I ended up here? What was the reason for all of this?

They were questions that needed answers. Answers that would have to wait until I'd gotten the survival priorities fixed.

"Maybe I was living in the Matrix," I muttered, standing up and leaning against the door before grabbing the wheel and putting all my weight into spinning it open.

To my surprise, it spun easily, or easily compared to what I'd expected and after a few seconds, I had access to the generator room.

The generator room had lights. Or at least some form of them. They were red, and they didn't glow like the ones that had been in the cryo room. No, they kinda looked like glow sticks at a second glance.

"We're not here to marvel at glow sticks, Mark," I said out loud, taking control of my scattered brain and looking around the room.

It was in better shape than the cryo room. No rubble or anything, just dust and lack of maintenance, and the generator wasn't anything I was familiar with.

Still, I needed to try something, and there was a small panel on the generator with an analog dial on it. Moving closer, I could make out that whatever this thing used for fuel, it'd finally run out of whatever was in the tank.

The problem was that I didn't see anything that would be used to power a generator. All of the shelves around me were filled with full water jugs. There were no fuel cans, no propane tanks, nothing that made sense.

"Maybe there's something in the storage room," I sighed, resting my head against the dusty generator for a second before groaning and easing myself off of the machinery.

Wait, I closed my eyes and opened them again, now realizing that there were some labeling instructions on the screwcap for the generator's fuel tank.

It was in small font, but with the help of my pistol light, I made out some instructions.

"Primary source, distilled water. Use other sources only in the event of an emergency."

"Huh," I guess someone had found a way to get the water engine working, after all. And, I was surrounded by water jugs.

Resting on my cane, I flowy made my way over to one of the jugs that was only partially filled and tried to lift it, only for me to drop it onto the floor where it then rolled back towards the generator.

"Well, that worked," I laughed, turning around and heading back over. It took a bunch of breaks and tries, but I eventually managed to empty it out into the fuel tank. It didn't move the needle a lot, if at all. But it did do it a small bit, and the instructions on reactivating the generator were spelled out and idiot proof. I guessed I'd ended up in a military installation of some kind.

Grabbing onto the handle of something that looked like it'd come out of the Metro series, I turned it and flipped a switch. One second, passed, then a second as I counted to ten before releasing both and smiling.

There was a gentle whirring sound that filled the air as the generator started back up. The red lights remained, but now clear white ones began to come on where they weren't broken or dead.

"Well shit," I swore and sat down as I looked at something I recognized was painted on the wall. A blue shark on a red rectangle… I just hoped I wasn't on Von Strang's world…