Holiday gulped in shallow breaths, his nostrils having glued shut in protest. The crypt smelled like the locker room back at HQ after a garbage truck had plowed into it. Angry rats skittered away from the glare of his headlamp, illuminating a damp hallway through which the point man lumbered. He and Jin followed, their boots crunching against fallen bricks and evangelical pamphlets.

Man, he'd kill to have the big guy's mask. It wasn't like the killing machine needed it.

"This is a brilliant opportunity," Jin said, a smile thinly playing upon her smooth lips. "We've never had a Class Z-Gamma-43 incident before."

Holiday raised an eyebrow at the lingo. "You've fought ghosts before?"

"Sub-lethal telesthetic signatures only. Mostly harmless."

"Hang on," he said, patting the woman's slender shoulder and swiveling her around to face him. "Define 'mostly', 'cause the ghost we're up against sure ain't Casper's sister."

"The last phantasmic manifestation we encountered was an old teacher." She delicately pried his hand away. "She'd left a residual imprint on her classroom that caused the narcolepsy rate at that school to triple. Colonel Betters brought us in after his daughter fell asleep in class."

Holiday bit back an obligatory remark. "So what, you just barged in there with proton packs and blasted away?"

She giggled softly and shook her head. "No, we just got Jankowski in as a janitor and wiped up all the ectoplasm."

"So you killed this ghost with a mop?" said Holiday, his eyes focused on the broken marble tomb that the trio was now walking past. A plaque lay on its side, depicting a portly man without his head along with the text: Here lies STEVE CARPENTER, wine connoisseur tragically taken from us by his love of wine.

"Technically it was a Heavy-Duty Electro-Magnetic Residue Obliterator, but we lost the specimen." She sighed, greenish eyes set upon the Point Man's large frame as he broke down a wooden door. "They never let me do the field work…"

Darkness suddenly plunged as Holiday's headlamp died, and he instinctively clenched the Point Man's back for support. Invisible figures, swift and itchy, rustled past his face. He coughed in vain, trying to clear his mouth of dust that had flown in. Distorted screams echoed across the broken masonry, accompanied by bright flashes and the ricochets of bullets.

His lamp turned back on to reveal a pale, slender woman. "Jesus Christ!" he whispered, almost ventilating Jin's face then and there.

"Did you swallow?" she said, eyes narrowed in concern.

"No," he coughed. "My mouth naturally tastes like a foot-rag." They rounded the corner, finding a doorway illuminated by an unhealthily weak torch.

"That was a paranormal manifestation. Ingesting such particles gives nasty side-effects – lung irritation, nausea, bowel loosening-"

"That's more than I needed to know," Holiday said. The Point Man halted, and suddenly crouched against the door's right side. Jin immediately slunk behind a niche, while Holiday brought his rifle to bear and pinned himself opposite to the combat operative.

Silence passed for a moment. It continued for a longer moment. The Delta signaled for the FEAR operator to move in, only to receive the same impassive stare through crimson goggles. Sighing to break the tension, Holiday leaned around and nearly tripped over a pair of dead Replicas.

"Well shit," he said. "Seems like these guys wanted to save us the trouble of killing 'em." One clone lay against a vat of pinkish wine, a broken bottle clenched in his hands and his mask drenched in liquid.

Jin bent down, sniffing the damp yellow patch on a clone's balaclava-clad face. "They appear to have choked on their own vomit."

"They swallowed." Holiday said. "I don't get it. Aren't the ghosts on the clones' side?"

"Do the dead like the living?"

"That a trick question?" he muttered, turning his back on the woman. "I ain't got time to decipher cryptic nonsense." He walked ahead, not trusting the mute creep to give him and Jin adequate warning of another ambush.

A maze of hexagonal shelves held countless bottles. Gigantic barrels lay to their left and right, dripping ever-so-small droplets of alcohol from their rusted taps. Fat rats lay drooling on the floor, too inebriated to care when a boot inadvertently crushed their tails. Holiday ducked beneath a cobweb, which made the spider very happy, and paused at the stairwell leading upwards.

"Hold up." Tip-toeing upstairs, he peeked through the keyhole. A cheap, garishly-painted store room lay ahead, bereft of enemies. He tried the doorknob. It clicked, but refused to move.

"Fuck it." He turned around to find the grimly masked Point Man only inches away from his face. "FUCK!"

"Maybe you should let him open the door," Jin said, her smile wider than ever.

"Sure. Charlie Chaplin, do your business." Holiday bowed away, and nearly fell over as the FEAR operator swooped into the air and jump-kicked the metal door off its hinges. Jin's soft clapping filled the musty air.

His face burning, Holiday scrabbled to his feet and began peering through the next door. An entire hallway full of lurid paintings, creepily-detailed statues of crucified men and upside-down crosses lay before them. A Pair of rooms was visible to the sides, containing furniture lovingly draped over with moth-eaten curtains.

There were also ten clones in there, silently stomping around and toting weapons as big as Jin's torso.

Holiday straightened up and looked at his compatriots. "Here's the battle plan: I'll provide suppressive fire while Jin takes cover and Gordon Freeman soaks up the-" he blinked and then the Point Man was already out there, filling the building with a choir of screams. Jin smirked and closed her eyes.

"It's like Beethoven," she said, "Only a little more graphic."

Growling, the Delta rushed out and stumbled right into a warzone. A head rolled down to him, trailing a crimson path leading to its mutilated owner. One clone had been smashed head-first through the plaster wall, leaving only his legs to stick out. Another pair of hapless soldiers lay in pools of their own blood, caressing each other tenderly. Spent rounds carpeted the floor and a smiley-face was stenciled over a picture of a red-clad Mary.

"I'M EXPOSED!" a lone Replica screamed, rushing out from beneath a curtain to club Holiday. The man unloaded his rifle at close range.

"So are your guts." He said to the corpse. The soldier didn't laugh on account of his lungs having been pulverized.

They found the Point Man a few minutes later, playing basketball with a severed head.

"Good god!" Holiday bent away, biting back the urge to puke. He turned around to see Jin batting her eyelashes at the Point Man, her eyes wide and her lips parted. Then he vomited.

"What's the matter, Lieutenant?" Jin leered. "You've never seen FEAR in action?"

"I've never worked with psychos before."

"You never saw Jankowski on a bad day…" she replied, tilting her head to glance sideways at him.

"Last time I worked with you guys, I had to pull his ass outta the fire."

"Guess who provided you cover?" Jin crossed her arms, conspicuously flexing her red index fingers. "There was a reason why no one heard a couple of grown men clomping through the dead of night."

"You're a sniper?" he visualized the petite woman holding a gun taller than her, and chuckled. "Shit, I thought FEAR only hired you to fill the ethnic quota."

"I was. Then they kicked me down to examining bodies other people killed."

A sharp rapping cut in and Holiday saw the Point Man trembling like a closed pot, his feet beating a tattoo on the floor. "What," he asked the tongueless man. "You can't hold it in?"

"I think we should keep going." Jin said, pulling open the double-doors and revealing yet another nave. This one contained a baptismal font upon the altar, which looked over the rows of pews like a disapproving schoolmarm. After taking a moment to assure that there were no clones they were interrupting, the trio went forward.

"I'm not the best Catholic," Holiday said, pointing at the stained glass window to their right "But I don't think Jesus got shot in the head."

"High-level psychics can manipulate particles in our world," Jin said. "Seems like Fettel's gained a little messiah complex."

"I died," burbled the red water inside the baptismal. Holiday braced himself, instinctively shielding Jin and cowering behind the Point Man. "And behold I am alive forevermore." Before their eyes, a pair of pasty arms tore out from the bowl and a naked Fettel stumbled out. As he lifted a thin leg, the bowl tipped over and he flopped out like a broken fish.

"My cup runneth over…" he mumbled, levitating above the dumbstruck mortals. It was then that Holiday noticed the gaping hole in his crotch. "So, brother, my dearest Judas, why have you brought the simpering female and the Moorish brute along?"

"Don't even go there, Beetlejuice" Holiday snarled, aiming his gun upon the translucent figure. The man laughed wheezily and with a loud pop his commander uniform rematerialized upon him.

"Douglas," Jin was awfully quiet. "He's dead. Save your bullets."

"Now you may wonder: to what end will this affair achieve?" Fettel crossed his legs and rested his carnivorous face upon his spidery fingers. "And to that the answer has slipped my mind. No thanks to YOU!"

The Point Man nodded, calmly reloading his weapon. Holiday glanced worryingly at the throbbing hole in the ghost's head.

"Suppose this city is a stage," the ghost continued, not noticing that the trio was now stomping towards the exit. "Ms. Kwon may play the lovely Desdemona, and I the conniving Iago. The moor can play Othello, and my brother's skin shall carpet the floor."

"Shut him up," Holiday told the Point Man, and the mute obliged by shooting off his brother's tongue. Gurgling in incoherent fury, the disfigured ghost screamed out "MOMM!" and popped out of sight with a sound unlike a backwards cough.

"That confirms my suspicions about Fettel being lobotomized." Jin rubbed her chin, eyes cast down in thought. Holiday gazed around, wondering if a squadron would burst out from behind the windows.

"Wouldn't that make him easier?"

"It'll make him more unpredictable. Just because we've got a hunk on our side doesn't guarantee our survival."

"You're real optimistic."

Jin rested a hand on her hip and gave an ambiguous glance at the Delta. "I wouldn't mind dying – it'd confirm a few of my theories."

They were interrupted, once more, by the sound of forty heavy-caliber bullets being unloaded into a wooden pew. As desperate clicking filled the air, the two turned around to see the Point Man shakily waving his gun at the spectral figure of a little child. She turned, eyes as black as a bee's, and whimpered.

"Please – I hurt me. Me don't want hurt me. I want kill you but I don't."

The two back rows of pews suddenly lit on fire, and the chandelier exploded. Plunged into hazy darkness, Holiday stumbled back to the altar and saw a naked woman casually walking through the flames. Charred and bloated, she looked for the entire world like a zombie who'd never cut her hair. Her rotten lips curled up in a smile that'd frighten any dentist, and with a single gesture the rest of the pews flew to the ceiling and fed the choking flames that were descending from the ceiling.

"I kill you," the little girl lifted a finger, and the trio suddenly fell into darkness. Her tiny voice echoed in their minds. "But I don't kill you."

A blue light, brighter than any sun, enveloped their vision and spewed out a sea of absurd monstrosities. Holiday tried to back away, ignoring the futility of not having a physical body to move, and failed to prevent a star-struck Jin from stepping into the light and dissolving out of sight.

"You no fun," the child hissed. "You go with son. Bad boy. Very bad."

Then his stomach dropped.

Holiday opened his eyes, feeling like he'd just swallowed an ocean of tequila. The cold, unforgiving red goggles of the Point Man stared back at him, illuminated by an ashen sky. The church lay to his right, burning brighter than hell itself.

"This better be just purgatory," Holiday muttered before falling back into oblivion.

Jin rubbed her eyes, shaking off the effects of rematerialization. When she glanced up, there were twenty shotguns pinned against her head, chest, butt, knees or toes. Twenty confused clones stared at her for a moment, before twenty radio messages crackled in her ears.

"Command, we've apprehended the woman."

Jin smiled as they tied her up. She'd never examined the Replicas so close before.