Crysis: Legion Read Online Free PDF

nail in it. My surroundings sink in for the first time: some kind of dockside warehouse. I’m in an aisle formed by two rows of big green shipping containers, stacked to each side, unmarked except for the red cross decaled across the door of each. No weapons. The floor’s littered with spent casings, so there could be fresh ammo nearby at least. The aisle dead-ends against a wall about ten meters in front of me. There’s a little fire flickering down there, a pile of smashed wooden shipping flats that’s just about burned itself out. Filtered sunlight spills over the top of the cargo pods to my left. It looks like there’s a way out down at the other end of the aisle, a gap between the pods and a stack of big wire cages that look like giant mutant shopping carts stuffed with rags. There’s a bad transformer or breaker box down there, too, judging by the buzzing.
    I start moving. The thing on the roof starts moving, too.
    I think it’s tracking me. I think—
    I think those aren’t rags.
    I don’t think that’s a bad transformer.
    Fuck.
    There are feet sticking out of those cages. Arms. Some look almost normal, some are wormy with rootlets and tumors. Something glistens from the shadows in all that clothing; before I’m close enough to make it out I already know it’s looking at me. And it is. There’s a nice clean bullet hole in the forehead rightabove it. Flies crawl and buzz and do little joyous loop-the-loops around the windfall.
    I look down at casings scattered around the floor like leaves in fucking autumn. Standard military issue.
    Not one of these people is in uniform. At least two are wearing surgical scrubs.
    I’m running so short of headspace to process all the nightmares—hostile aliens, savior suicide, the Thing On The Roof, and now a massacre of goddamn
civilians
?—that I almost don’t notice the bright new icon blinking upper-left. All that registers at first is a sense of minor irritation, some vague tugging at the back of my mind. I stand there like a moron for a good five seconds before I notice the damn thing flashing at the corner of my eye. But the moment I focus, it jumps front-and-center and starts talking:
    “Find Gould. Nathan Gould. It’s all I can do now,
you’re
all I can do. I’m sorry, man. I’m so fucking sorry. It’s all on you now.”
    Text crawls across my eyeball—
    Gould, Nathan.
89 South St #17, New York, NY
     
    —and my first reaction is
Are you fucking KIDDING? Who GIVES a shit?
    But Prophet has charged me with a sacred quest, and maybe I
can
just turn around and walk away from that. But then again, maybe I can’t. The only reason I’m alive now is because of the man lying dead at my back; and my life came with a price tag attached. Besides. I’m cut off from my chain of command, my squad’s been exterminated, and I have no fucking clue why any of this is happening. Nathan Gould is a place to start, at least. He’s bound to have some answers. Let’s go talk to nice Mr. Gould.
    What else am I going to do? Count the dead?
    Except it turns out I’m locked in. The windows are barred and out of reach, way up near the ceiling. Every door’s been welded shut and backed up with weighted cargo containers. Some of the blockage is pure battlefield entropy but most of it’s been deliberately barricaded against whatever’s got the high ground outside. I climb over sandbags and body bags, I kick open shipping crates and rummage through lockers. I find two bodies in hazmat suits, I find overturned tables, I find microscopes and thermocyclers and those spinning things, what do you call them,
centrifuges
smashed and scattered across the fractured cement. I even find a couple of usable ammo clips, but wherever I go those scary metal footsteps seem to follow me around up there. Although they’re not
exactly
footsteps. It sinks in after a while; the rhythm’s all wrong.
    But there has to be some kind of way out of here because after all, Prophet brought me
in
, right?