The Moon, chapter 42: Déjà

The vacant, sterile steel halls echoed emptily with the sound of footsteps as Susie walked through the door, and made haste to enter the next directly in front of her. She knew what sort of creatures lurked here, and knew it was best not to tarry for long. The door opened to a large rectangular room, about as featureless as the hallway behind her, save for a large lift that spanned the width of the room in front of her. The lift was made out of a different sort of darker steel than the rest of this place, and heavily resembled the bunker elevator from back at Hometown. Though, considering how many Hometowns there could be here, she didn't find this very surprising.

Susie stepped into the lift, and hesitantly pressed the down arrow on the panel. A pair of rusted chain link doors scraped the floor as they closed her in. A most horrendous metal squealing erupted from above her as the elevator slowly began its descent, as if the entire mechanism was a creature itself, just barely clinging onto life. Susie decided she was to swear off elevators entirely once all of this was sorted. This thought, however, would bring her to the conclusion that things will never be “sorted”. There's no way she could go back to normal life after she destroyed the core. Not after all she experienced and knew. Even if this was some elaborate fever dream, she'd be permanently affected by the events that took  place here. She's lost friends, new and old. She's currently going through hell and back to save any last shred of life that she can from constant torture. Going through everything here would leave a mark on more than just her body.

Susie's thoughts were interrupted when even more screeching metal noises came from below her, as well as the entire lift tilting slightly to its side, knocking her off balance a little. Hoping something terrible hadn't happened to increase her growing fear of elevators even more, Susie walked cautiously to the elevator's entrance and looked down to the best of her abilities. There was a gap of about two or three feet between the elevator and the shaft's walls, and between this she could spot the issue. Everything from girders to support beams to thick metal wires clogged up the entire bottom half of the shaft. The destruction didn't look natural either, it was as if something filled this shaft with miscellaneous metal parts with the intent to stop the elevator. She wouldn't give up this easily, however.
Susie walked backwards and readied herself, then rushed the doors. Their rusted frame broke surprisingly easily as the doors burst open. As open as they could, anyway. As they hit the wall of the elevator shaft rather quickly. There was enough space there for her to climb up the door and onto the roof of the elevator. With a quick inspection of the rubble below, she was able to plan out a way to crawl in between some of the rubble in order to get below. She was able to see the bottom of the shaft through the rubble. Though it was tough to gauge how far down exactly it was, she was sure it was a height she could fall down and live without much injury.

Before thinking to do that though, she had something to take care of. Susie dropped the backpack off of her shoulders and unzipped it, snatching the radio from inside.

“Hey. You there?”

Only static replied. As she expected. Even disregarding whatever supernatural interference it could be, it was a low chance that the distance would let them speak. Quickly zipping the bag back up and wearing it on her back, she jumped down to the steel behind the elevator. The hole was between two support beams and a large girder that stuck out of the wall awkwardly. It was hard to tell whether it was made by someone, or whether it was simply a useful coincidence. In either case, it beat having to jump out the window of the floor above, so she took what she could get. The hole was just big enough for Susie's body to get through along with the backpack, and she slowly lowered herself down feet first. Jagged metal and rebar poked out at her from many directions, and it was when she felt a sharp stinging in her lower back that she realized she wasn't taking this as seriously as she had to. She looked behind her as best as she could and found a piece of rebar sticking out at her, a bit of fresh blood on its tip. She hoped that wouldn't leave a mark or get infected, but she reasoned she had more intensive worries than a simple infection.

A bit of awkward maneuvering had to be done to keep both herself and her backpack from getting stuck or stabbed, but eventually she found her legs dangling over empty air. Susie did her best to look downward towards the bottom of the elevator shaft. She was more easily able to guess the distance between her and the floor, and she decided it was probably a dozen or so feet down. Knowing she could easily make that jump without much trouble, she lowered herself slowly until her entire body was below the blockage, and let go. The drop to the floor didn't last long, and the small pain she felt from the impact was negligible. Whatever the puppet had done to her had certainly worked its magic, but she was wondering how long this boost of strength would last. That was a problem for the future, however. Right now, she was at the bottom of an elevator shaft filled with rubble, with an elevator and hundreds of pounds of steel above her ready to drop. Susie got to her feet and climbed out of the bottom of the shaft, finding herself in a rectangular room, just like the one above, with a similar steel door at the end. Susie opened her bag, equipping her knife and flashlight, and continued through the door.

She exited to find ash beneath her feet, realizing she was finally at the bottom of the gigantic room she saw before. Looking upward, she could see the platform that jutted out from the wall above her, which held what she would refer to as the observation room. To her it didn't feel like she had traveled miles down to get here considering how slow the elevator was going, but time and space in this place seemed to more or less do whatever it pleased anyway. Before her was a desert of ash and discarded metal pieces, very little of anything resembling houses or buildings. The only thing of major consequence was the dark pit in the center of the room that she saw from the observatory. It seemed to be the only way forward from this point, so she began her trek to the pit, walking through the uneven and shifting ash she'd gotten so used to over the past while.

The walking didn't last long, however. She was stopped in her tracks when she noticed something strange. Shoe prints in the ash. Ones that matched the boots she was currently wearing. Susie stumbled forward over a dune of ash and stopped at the top, looking down. Between her and the pit was a body, face down in the ash. A body with a purple complexion and dark clothing. A body with dark brown hair. A backpack laid beside it. A gas mask strapped to its face. Strange, flesh like boots on its feet.

A knife plunged deep into her back, after having been stabbed into it multiple times before, leaving gaping infected wounds.

None of the things she saw in front of her shook her compared to one single observation.

The body looked fresh.