THE ALPHA RECKONING
"The air tasted of burnt copper and hellfire."
Lt. Robert Akers is a Tier-1 professional trapped in a body screaming for the mercy of a blackout he cannot afford. His mission was simple: extract the asset known as Eleven. The reality is a suicide mandate delivered by murderers in air-conditioned offices.
Blood-soaked, broken-ribbed, and fueled by military-grade stimulants, Akers chooses to hold the line. This is the anatomy of a final stand where the only thing more dangerous than the monsters is a soldier with nothing left to lose and a target who refuses to let him die.
"The worlds are in flames, and here I stand, pissing right into the heart of the fire."
â Lieutenant Robert Akers
The air tasted of burnt copper and hellfire. It was a thick, sulfur-laced miasma that clawed at Lieutenant Robert Akers' lungs with every ragged, shallow breath he forced down. Each inhalation was a violent, suffocating reminder that Earthâthe real Earth, with its blue skies and breathable atmosphereâwas a forgotten memory. They were standing in the nexus of a nightmare.
High above the twisted, skeletal silhouette of the Hawkins National Laboratory, the Red Storm raged with primal, apocalyptic fury. It wasn't just weather; it was a malevolent atmospheric event. Crimson lightning fractured the sky in silent, strobe-light bursts, casting a hellish, flickering illumination across a landscape that defied every law of biology and physics. The light didn't reveal terrain; it revealed an infection.
Akers stood in a grotesque replica of the central chamber of the Upside Down Lab. The air here was colder, heavier, vibrating with a low-frequency hum that made his molars quiver in their sockets. He adjusted his grip on the M16. His knuckles, stripped of tactical gloves, showed a ghostly, skeletal white against the frost-dusted handguard. He didn't just hold the weapon; he clung to it like a drowning man to a jagged rock.
The fever was a low, steady burnâa rhythmic fire turning his tactical gear into a pressurized tomb. His T-shirt had long since failed; now it was nothing more than a sodden, salt-crusted shroud, plastered to his torso like a second skin that refused to breathe. Every micro-movement made the fabric tug at his bruised flesh, a constant, abrasive reminder of the Humvee's cold steel impact.
His black beanie was a heavy, saturated weight. Drenched in cold, clinging sweat, the damp fabric felt like a lead bar pressing relentlessly against his temples, aggravating the hammering pulse there.
Then there was the noiseâa dull, rhythmic hammering inside his cranium. Three times in twenty-four hours he'd been put down. Three times the world had flickered into blackness, and three times he had clawed his way back to a consciousness that now felt like a predatory curse. His vision was shot through with jagged, electric static; the stimulants had forced his eyelids open, but they couldn't stop the mounting pressure behind his sockets. It was a sick, pressurized ache that turned every flicker of light into a needle driven straight into his optic nerve.
He drew a breath, and the air felt like inhaling liquid lead. His ribs weren't brokenânot yetâbut the massive hematoma blooming across his chest made that distinction feel like a lie. There was no sharp edge to the pain, only a dense, suffocating compression that fought his lungs for every cubic inch of oxygen. The military-grade painkillers were surging through his veins, but they were useless against a wreck of this magnitude. They didn't numb the agony; they simply detached his mind from his nerves, leaving him a ghost haunting his own suffering. He was wide awake, hyper-aware, and trapped in a body screaming for the mercy of a blackout he couldn't afford.
He forced his gaze away from the rifle, his eyes drawn back to the center of the room by a grim, mechanical necessity. For the sake of the mission.
Eleven.
General Kay's orders had been explicit, delivered with the cold detachment of a man moving pieces on a board:Â Infiltrate the breach. Locate the asset known as Eleven. Neutralize any resistance. Secure the target and extract immediately.
"Target." "Asset."
Akers stared through the reinforced glass of the improvised tank, and the words felt like ash in his mouth. He didn't see a target. He saw a weapon being forged in real-time, a human being being torn apart from the inside out by forces beyond comprehension.
The girl was submerged in water that looked disturbingly thick, like amniotic fluid clouded with engine oil. She was convulsing, her small frame jerking against the buoyancy of the tank as she waged a war none of them could see. Akers watched her, seeing the flickers of a mental struggle so violent it seemed to vibrate the very air in the room. This was the "asset" they wanted him to bag and tag. But looking at her now, watching her drown in the psychic filth of the Upside Down to hold back the rot of Vecnaâthe hive-mind demon of tendrils and decayâthe word "monster" felt like a sick joke.
Then his gaze shifted to Hopper.
The man was sitting on a crate beside the tank, his posture shattered, his eyes fixed on the girl with a raw, desperate protection. Hopper's hand was pressed against the glass, a futile anchor for a child fighting a demon.
Akers felt the familiar, heavy weight of his M16. His training told him this was a textbook extraction. It would be effortless. Two rounds for the man, a quick breach of the tank, and the girl would be his. The mission was right there, laid out in cold, simple strokes. His finger hovered over the trigger guard, ready to execute the sequence he had practiced a thousand times.
But he didn't move.
Through the haze of his fever and the rhythmic thumping in his skull, Akers realized the truth. He wasn't looking at a threat to be neutralized. He was looking at the only thing standing between humanity and the strange things. He stood there, sweat stinging his eyes and his bruised chest heaving, watching a child burn herself out to save a world that would never even know she existed.
"Hold fire!" Akers hissed, the order barely reaching the three men crouched in the shadows behind him, like a dry rasp.
The three operators nearby didn't move, their rifles still trained on their targets, but they held on. Another wave of fever swept through Akers, his salt-crusted shirt pulling at the huge bruise on his chest, but he forced his voice to remain expressionless and professional.
"Change of plan," he whispered, his gaze never leaving the girl in the tank. "We're not touching her."
His men didn't ask. They were professionals, conditioned to adapt to the changing battlefield without hesitation.
Before he could elaborate, the radio crackled with a sharp, stabbing panic attack. It was Kim, the technician.
"Sir, we have a problem," Kim's voice trembled over the comm. "Surface radar. I've detected multiple contactsâdozensâmoving at high speed through the perimeter. They're headed straight for the lab's main entrance. An army, sir. And they're almost overhead."
Akers' grip on the M16 tightened until his knuckles ached. The mission had not only changedâit had become a siege.
The words hung in the heavy, terrifying silence of the chamber. In that fraction of a second, the fragmented.
General Kay hadn't sent the elite Alpha Unit here for a tactical snatch-and-grab mission. He hadn't sent them to succeed. The "capture" order was a lie, a carrot to get them through the gate. Kay knew exactly what was waiting for them on this side. He had chosen them not for their skill, but for their expendability. They were biological canaries dropped into a coal mine full of monsters, meant to draw fire, to bleed, to hold the door for just a few precious minutes while Eleven and Vecna ââannihilated each other. The military would just sweep up whatever was left. The words hung in the heavy, terrifying silence of the chamber. In that fraction of a second, the fragmented, dissonant pieces of the mission finally slammed together in Akers' mind with the brutal clarity of a gunshot.
Akers felt a cold, hard knot of fury tighten in his gut, hotter than the sulfur burning his throat. He was done following orders from murderers in air-conditioned offices.
"Alpha Unit, listen up!" Akers' voice cut through the oppressive atmosphere like tempered steel, betraying none of the adrenaline dumped into his system.
"Change of plans. Forget the extraction protocols. We aren't here to apprehend the subject," Akers commanded, his voice low and lethal. He gestured towards the main blast doors leading out into the red nightmare. "We're building a wall in front of this lab. We hold the line. We buy her time to finish this."
Martinez, his second-in-command, stepped forward, her brow furrowed. "But sir, General Kay's orders were specific. Secure and extractâ".
Akers silenced her with a single, icy stare that tolerated no debate. "The orders were written by a man who expects us to die here,
Martinez. He sold us out before we even geared up," he growled. He looked back at the girl in the tank one last time. "We're soldiers. We don't execute children. We hold the corridor until she finishes that thing out there. Move out!"
They breached the heavy blast doors and stepped outside, instantly submerged in the bleeding red light of the storm. The wind roared here, a physical force that battered their bodies.
Akers took a step forward, and the ground beneath his heavy combat boots squelched. It didn't feel like soil or concrete. It was soft, yielding, and disturbingly warm. He looked down. The landscape wasn't rock; it was alive. The ground pulsed beneath his feet, threaded with thick, obsidian veins that throbbed rhythmically, looking exactly like blackened, necrotic muscle tissue. They were walking on the skin of a dead god.
"Contact front!" Not a tactical call-out. A scream of pure, unfiltered terror tore into the void.
The silence of the Upside Down vanished, shattered not by military commands, but by a chorus of inhuman, guttural shrieks that echoed from everywhere at once. They didn't come as scouts. They didn't come one by one. They came as a tidal wave. A pack.
Shapes detached themselves from the shadows of the twisted, skeletal trees. They were Demodogs, but these were monstrosities compared to the specimens referenced in the panicked briefings. They were larger, faster, their bodies sleek with armored muscle. As they charged, their faces peeled backâpetal-like jaws unhinging naturally to reveal circular rows of needle-sharp teeth and maws coated in thick, glistening black slime.
"Open fire! Engage! Engage!" Akers roared.
He brought his M16 up and fired burst after controlled burst. The muzzle flashes were brief sparks in the pervasive red gloom. His movements were automatic, precise, born of thousands of hours of drilling. He saw his rounds impact the leading creatures, punching holes in their leathery hides, black blood spraying into the air.
But they didn't stop. They didn't even slow down.
Akers watched in slow-motion horror as the finest unit the military had to offer was overwhelmed by the sheer, brute ferocity of the pack. The creatures moved with impossibly fast, jerky motions, phasing in and out of the deep shadows.
He heard Kim scream firstâa wet, choked sound that was abruptly cut off as a Demodog latched onto his throat and tore it away in a spray of crimson. Martinez was next. She was firing her sidearm point-blank into a creature's chest when another one flanked her. Bone-like spines punched through her reinforced ceramic chest plate like it was cardboard, lifting her off her feet before slamming her into the pulsating ground.
The air was filled with the deafening cacophony of gunfire, snarling beasts, and the dying screams of his people. One by one, the elite soldiers of Alpha Unit fell, their advanced training absolutely meaningless in the face of apex predators native to this hellish dimension. They were meat. Just meat in a grinder.
The slaughter was absolute. The creatures were adapting, evolving their tactics right in front of his eyes, circling the survivors, cutting off escape routes. Within minutes, the firing stopped.
Akers was the last man standing at the threshold of the lab. He stood amidst the carnage of his unit, weapon raised, waiting for the end.
It came from the flank.
A massive shape, darker than the surrounding nightmare, erupted from the treeline. It was an Alpha Demodog, a titan among its kind, easily twice the size of the pack-mates that were feasting on his squad. It didn't leap; it charged like a runaway freight train, a juggernaut of muscle and teeth.
There was no time to react. No time to brace.
The creature slammed into Akers with unimaginable force. It was an impact that would have crumpled a light vehicleâeasily exceeding 15 Gs of raw kinetic energy. The breath was instantly, violently blasted from Akers' lungs. He heard the sickening, wet crunch of his own ribs cracking like dry kindling beneath his tactical vest.
Simultaneously, a white-hot agony seared through his midsection. A jagged claw, sharp as a flensing knife, punched through the layers of Kevlar and ballistic nylon, puncturing his abdomen just below the ribcage and tearing deep into his flesh.
The world spun violently. Up became down, red became black. He hit the ground hard, his helmetless head slamming against the pulsing necrotic earth, skipping once before coming to rest. His vision swam in a thick, viscous crimson haze. He couldn't breathe. Every attempt to draw air into his shattered chest resulted in a hitching, agonizing gasp that tasted of blood.
A shadow fell over him. The massive Alpha Demodog loomed over his broken body, blotting out the stormy sky. Its grotesque head tilted, inspecting its kill. Slowly, terrifyingly, the fleshy petals of its face peeled back, unhinging in a grotesque mockery of a smile. Thick ropes of dark, viscous drool dripped from its maw onto Akers' face. It smelled of old blood, ancient rot, and the grave.
This was it. The end of the line for Lieutenant Robert Akers. Betrayed by his own command, used as bait, and left to rot in a crimson hell dimension.
The creature lunged down, jaws opening wide to consume his head.
And something inside Akers snapped.
It wasn't hope. It wasn't bravery. It was pure, undiluted, nihilistic rage. A hatred so profound it eclipsed the pain of his shattered ribs and gutted abdomen. He refused to be just another piece of meat.
Fueled by primal instinct and spite, Akers didn't try to bring his rifle to bear. He didn't reach for his sidearm. He roaredâa guttural, blood-choked sound of defianceâand thrust his bare left forearm upward. He drove it straight past the snapping outer teeth, punching deep into the monster's wet, slime-coated gullet.
He felt the inner rows of needle-teeth shred the skin and muscle of his arm, flaying him alive, but the agony felt distant, irrelevant. His fingers clawed blindly inside the creature's throat until they closed around something soft, hot, and frantically pulsing. The creature's vitals.
"Die... you... son of a bitch!" Akers choked out, blood bubbling past his lips.
With a roar that tore his own throat raw, summoning every ounce of remaining strength in his broken body, Akers pulled. He twisted his hand violently inside the beast, his fingers acting like grappling hooks, tearing at the soft tissue. The Demodog shriekedâa high, keening sound of confusion and painâand tried to pull back, but Akers held on.
With one final, brutal, impossible yank, he ripped the creature's throat out from the inside.
A fountain of black blood erupted, drenching him. The massive Demodog convulsed once and then collapsed on top of him, a suffocating mountain of dead, twitching weight.
Akers lay trapped beneath the beast, drowning in its blood and his own pain. He shoved weakly at the corpse, his breath coming in short, agonizing gasps as excruciating pain radiated from the gaping wound in his abdomen. He could feel the warm wetness of his own blood seeping rapidly through his torn uniform, pooling beneath him on the alien ground. The metallic tang filled his senses, overpowering even the sulfur.
He managed to push the carcass just enough to clear his chest. He lay there, staring up at the violent red sky, surrounded by the butchered corpses of the men, he had led to their deaths. The Red Storm continued its violent dance above, indifferent to the carnage.
He had survived the impossible. He had killed a monster with his bare hands. But the cost was total. He was broken, bleeding out, and utterly alone in hell.
Consciousness was beginning to fray at the edges. The blackness was creeping in, narrowing his vision to a tunnel.
Akers's consciousness began to slip through his fingers like dry sand. Time had ceased to be linear; he could no longer tell if he had been lying there in the dark for minutes or if he had collapsed only a second ago. He balanced on the razor's edge between an eternity and a heartbeat, a place where seconds swelled into hours and minutes evaporated into nothing.
Somewhere in the distanceâor perhaps right beside himâEleven was still waging her invisible war. Akers could feel the static tension vibrating in the air, the rhythmic aftershocks of her psychic struggle, but it felt like the fading signal of a distant radio broadcast. The world outsideâthe frantic scratching of the creatures, the staccato crackle of gunfire from the perimeter, Hopper's ragged breathingâreceded into meaningless background noise.
The darkness didn't strike all at once; it besieged his vision methodically, tightening the tunnel of light that still anchored him to reality. Each heartbeat was a heavy, thinning toll of a bell echoing inside his skull.
He closed his eyes. In that instant, the painâthe searing, crushed agony in his ribs that had kept him tethered to the livingâsuddenly went quiet. It gave way to a weightless, inviting void. There was no more duty, no more mission, and no more unbearable fever. Only the silence remained, promising both a fleeting moment of peace and the infinite dark.
He was ready to let go.
Footsteps.
They weren't the heavy, rhythmic, crunching tread of military combat boots. They were lighter, quicker, moving with a different kind of urgency over the fleshy ground.
Akers forced his eyes open, struggling to lift his head through the haze of pain. A figure emerged from the swirling red shadows and ash. It wasn't another soldier. It was a civilian woman. Small frame, dark hair, holding a sawed-off shotgun with a lethal competence that seemed entirely out of place.
He recognized her from the mission briefing dossiers. Target profile:Â Nancy Wheeler. One of the primary "insurgents" obstructing military operations in Hawkins. One of the people he had been ordered to hunt down, detain, and hand over to Kay's interrogators.
She saw him. She didn't hesitate. She didn't raise her weapon in fear.
She rushed to his side, dropping to a crouch beside his broken body, her movements economical and precise. Her bare, gentle hand found his neck, pressing against the carotid artery. Her skin felt startlingly, shockingly warm and human against his own cold, clammy, feverish flesh. The sensation was so alien it almost made him flinch.
Akers tried to respond, to offer a sitrep, to tell her to run. But only a wet, metallic cough escaped his lips, spraying a fine mist of blood onto his chin.
Nancy didn't wait for a response. She moved with a singular focus. Her hands quickly worked the quick-release buckles of his destroyed tactical vest, pulling the heavy, blood-soaked Kevlar aside. She gasped softly as she revealed the ruin beneath: the deep, jagged, weeping laceration that carved across his abdomen.
Her jaw tightened, a muscle feathering in her cheek. Her bare fingers lightly touched the mutilated skin near the wound's edge, assessing the catastrophic damage with a clinical detachment that surprised him.
"Deep laceration. Arterial nick maybe. You're bleeding out fast," she murmured, speaking more to herself than to him.
Nancy didn't waste a single second. She didn't panic. Her bloodied fingers moved with frantic precision, clawing through the remaining pouches of Akers' tactical vest, searching, discarding items until she found exactly what she was looking for: a sealed package containing a military-grade compression bandage and a stack of sterile gauze.
She held the package up. Instead of fumbling with her slippery, blood-slicked hands or wasting precious seconds searching for a knife to cut the tough plastic, Nancy brought the package to her face and ripped it open with her teeth.
It was a raw, primal, almost feral move. The sound of the plastic tearing was sharp and loud. It sent a strange, unexpected surge of electric tension through the air between them, a spark of life in the shadow of so much death.
She spat out the piece of plastic and immediately went to work. She took the wads of gauze and jammed them deep into the weeping cavity of his wound, packing it tight. Akers' back arched off the ground, a choked cry trapped in his throat.
Then, she took the compression bandage and began to wrap it tightly around his powerful torso. She didn't be gentle. She pulled with all her strength, cinching the bandage down hard enough to crush his already broken ribs, desperate to stem the tidal wave of blood pouring out of him.
Akers gritted his teeth so hard he thought they might shatter. A low, guttural, animalistic growl of pure agony escaped through his locked jaw as his body fought the white-hot pain of the intervention. His vision went completely white for a second, then snapped back to red.
He looked up at her. At Nancy Wheeler. The "enemy." The target. She was kneeling in the mud and gore, sweating, her hands covered in his blood, fighting harder to keep him alive than his own commanding officer ever had.
The realization hit him harder than the Demodog.
A slow, incredulous, ironic, and bloody smile began to spread across Akers' pale face.
General Kay had sent him and his unit here to die. They were just meat to clog the gears.
And yet, here he was. Being savedâactively, desperately savedâby the very person the military had ordered him to hunt down and slap in irons. He had just ripped the throat out of a nightmare monster to buy time for Eleven, the girl he was supposed to capture. And now Eleven's friend was patching him up.
The absurdity of it was overwhelming. The irony was so perfect, so devastatingly, darky funny, that he almost started to laugh right there on the edge of death.
Nancy tied off the bandage with a savage tug. She noticed the strange look on his face, his bloody smile. Her brow furrowed in confusion and concern.
"What? What's so funny?" she demanded, her voice tight. "You're losing blood fast. Stay with me."
Akers tried to speak, to explain the cosmic joke, but only a choked, rattling, wheezing laugh escaped his lips, bubbling up through the blood in his throat.
He reached out with his own blood-stained, mangled hand. He grabbed Nancy's shoulder. His grip was surprisingly strong, shocking her with its intensity. He pulled her slightly closer, staring into her eyes with a gaze that was rapidly losing its focus.
"You have no idea," he rasped, his voice just a ghost of a sound over the wind. "Wheeler... you have no idea... how funny this all is."
The darkness rushed in from the periphery, finally claiming his vision. Nancy's concerned, dirt-streaked face, framed by the red lightning, was the last thing he saw.
The ultimate irony of fate had saved him when the ultimate betrayal was meant to end him.
And as the world finally went black, Lieutenant Akers was still smiling.
