Ground Zero Lab Raid: They Were Warned Not To, but They Did It Anyway

WEST OF ROSEWOOD. Nobody on this server had ever been seventeen floors underground until Monday night, when a crew went all the way to the bottom of the compound west of Rosewood just to see if they could. On Tuesday six of them went back down, found a door with DON'T OPEN painted on it, and opened it. Warnings, it turns out, are for other people.

Four of the six were dead inside a minute. The aviators filmed the whole thing, we've seen the tapes, and we've watched them more times than is healthy.

The middle of nowhere

The compound is a couple of kilometres of forest west of Rosewood, which is a couple of kilometres further than anyone sensible goes. There's no road on any map. There's one dirt track, a fence, a car park and a helipad on the roof, and that's your lot. It looks like somebody dropped a building in the woods and hoped nobody would come poking around. Somebody came poking around.

Bundu bashing

They didn't take the dirt track, obviously. The goggles walked out front on foot like he was leading a patrol in a war film, and behind him a blue SUV and a van painted like a bad acid trip went straight through the trees, both towing trailers under blue tarps, one of them full of guns. Every window had somebody hanging out of it. Nobody looked at the map once.

They'd brought a soundtrack too, because of course they had: a boombox and twenty-eight cassettes. The goggles carried that boombox the whole way down, and the logs have it playing 63 times on the barracks floor alone. The first thing the dead of floor thirteen ever heard was AC/DC, which is honestly a better send-off than most of us will get. The full tracklist is on the next page.

Seventeen floors down

Before Monday, the deepest anyone on the server had been was somebody's basement. Behind the fence there's a stairwell that goes down twelve floors before it reaches anything worth stealing, then keeps going for another five. The crew went all the way to the bottom. Nobody had done it before, and judging by what happened next, nobody should have.

They went down the way you get into a cold pool: all at once, swearing. One of them had already died three times on the way there (see Dispatches). It didn't slow anyone down.

Guns and naked men

Floor sixteen was a gun room, and not a small one. Lockers full of rifles and shotguns, ghillie suits, and an experimental Desert Eagle that nobody had any business finding. The goggles walked out with the Desert Eagle in his bag. Nobody saw him take it, and he hasn't mentioned it since, which is how you know.

Below the labs the concrete gives up and turns into a cave, and the dead down there had been stripped of everything: clothes, boots, dignity. The crew's own naked man, in leopard-print briefs and a gas-mask hood, fitted in far better than anyone was comfortable with.

Lights out

Halfway through the night the building did something nobody asked it to. The lights flickered five times, and then 217 of its 259 bulbs blew at once. Eight minutes later the pyro died in the stairwell, one floor down, in the pitch dark. She was back the next night with a new face and a lighter, which went about as well as you'd expect.

The crew killed at least 1,185 of the dead that night. The server made 1,290 new bodies. The other hundred or so are somebody else's problem.

The door

The survivor camp at the far end of the cave had been barricaded shut for a reason, and every note in the place said so. On Tuesday the barricade was gone. At eleven on the game clock the door went up, and behind it were roughly 665 of the county's worst, who'd been waiting a long time and weren't in a chatty mood.

Then the Molotovs came in. Both of them ours. The pyro threw first and it landed right at the front of the line, and seventeen seconds later the deputy threw another one, presumably in case the first one got lonely. The pyro's character was less than two hours old at this point. Nobody that young should be handed a lighter.

The fallen

Nobody reanimated, mostly because there wasn't enough left of anyone to get back up. The four of them are already back on their feet with new faces and fresh boots, starting from nothing, which is its own kind of punishment.

Burned up. Buried under a horde.

The coroner's report, in full

The last man out

Two of the six got out: the goggles, who was last up the stairs and out the door, and the aviators, who had a camera running the entire time. That's where the tapes come from, and it's also why he's alive. The cameraman never dies. Everyone knows this.

The goggles came to at the bottom of the shaft in the dark with a boombox, a borrowed Desert Eagle and a cameraman for company. The car park was seventeen floors up.

Up top the weather had turned into a proper storm, the kind you can hear through seventeen floors of concrete. Then the building pulled its trick again and the lights died. Two minutes later it did it again, in case he'd missed it the first time.

They made it to the car park just before midnight, the goggles last out of the door with the camera still on him. They climbed into the van, shut the doors, and sat there in silence, in the rain, staring through the foggy windshield at the dark lab in front of them.

Nobody said a word. Nobody started the engine. Seventeen floors under their feet, whatever came out of that door was still down there, wandering around in the dark with the door wide open behind it. And both of them knew exactly what that meant.

They were going to have to go back down there and finish what they started.

Sources: the server logs, two tapes and a cameraman who refuses to die.