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Tie the Noose Chapter 36
"Move, move, move!" Chris shouted as he, Albert, and Barry pounded down the dank, black hallway, the humidity and the slickness of the concrete squelching under their boots as they heard the clicking, stomping, and hissing of the strange, monstrous creatures stumbling after them. Chris kept his Galil up and angled back over his shoulder, firing short, controlled bursts whenever the light crossed over one of their grotesque forms. Each burst hit with a dull, wet slap that should've dropped a man, but the creatures kept coming, limbs jerking like poorly hung marionettes in a never-ending march of the dead.
Albert pivoted on a dime, raised his rifle, and with a roar, fired several rounds downrange. The brief flashes illuminated the dark as the glaring creatures, their barbed tentacle tongues, their black ribcage-mouths, and the glowing orange eyes flared in the pitch. He didn't spray. He placed his shots, tracking those eyes and punching rounds into them with a steadiness that almost seemed easy compared to Chris's wild bursts. When one of the monsters lurched too close, Albert stepped back into a braced stance and drove two rounds into its core, then shifted the muzzle a fraction and did the same to the next.
The creatures were never down for long, or far from them. A tentacle snapped past Chris's ear and slapped the wall, leaving a gouge in the stone that could've gone into his face if he were any less lucky. He ducked instinctively, felt the sting of air as it missed him by inches, then returned fire with a spray that took it in the legs, sending it tumbling. Barry kept pace, light sweeping in tight arcs, the beam catching slick, mottled bodies that crowded the corridor like a tide, his groupings tight and centered, for all the good it did him, the walking nightmares eating the damage to seemingly no effect.
"There's too many of them!" Barry shouted as he finally lifted the grenade launcher. He didn't slow, but he did plant his feet for half a second, bringing the tube up and sighting down it while Chris and Albert kept firing to buy him that moment. They were barely far enough back to be out of the blast when they heard him shout, "Fire in the hole!"
With that, there was a sharp thump and in an instant, napalm washed over a dozen bodies, the liquid fire clinging tightly to their mottled flesh, but it didn't seem to slow them. The smell was a hundred times worse than anything any of the men had experienced before, like a combination of burning tar and flaming dumpster, but the creatures themselves seemed almost immune to the flames. The bright, sticky orange was engulfed, the slime of their bodies swallowing it down, choking it, and consuming the heat.
The heat and the blast should have taken them down, broken their momentum. Instead, the burning abominations shoved through each other, the slick on their bodies hissing as it smothered the fire in ugly, stuttering patches. One of them stumbled forward anyway, ribs yawning open like a mouth. Chris raised his rifle on reflex and put two shots into its eye at arm's length. It snapped back hard, slammed into the wall, and dropped to its knees, but the ones behind it climbed over, their weight grinding it underfoot.
Chris had never seen napalm act like that, and it barely slowed the monsters down, and in the back, behind the hoard, he could still hear that strange detached torso clattering across the ground, finding new bodies to raise up and send after them. The sound kept pace with them, a steady, ugly scrape that made it clear the thing was tracking them, trying to corral them and overrun them. It was a terrifying show of tactical intelligence.
Worse yet, the three had no idea what happened to the girls after they were separated. None of them, not even the usually cool Wesker, had managed to keep the trepidation out of his voice as he shouted instructions back and forth, calling out targets, and trying to thin the herd. But no matter what they tried, nothing seemed to work. Chris's mind kept snagging on the last glimpse he'd had of Jill, then forcing itself back to the corridor in front of him because if he lost focus for even a second, he wasn't going to get another.
If they could get a line on those strange fluorescent hearts, that seemed to put the creatures down for a time. But then they would be quickly trampled by their mutated brethren, and Chris had no idea if those ones that had hit the ground stayed down.
A creature surged in from the side cut, tentacle tongue lashing. Chris saw the tongue coil toward Barry's knees and fired without thinking, rounds chewing into the slick limb until it snapped away and recoiled. Barry, for his part, just nodded at Chris as he drew his big Samurai Edge custom, the weapon roaring as it sent his attacker flying back into the tunnel.
"We have to get out of here before that big one comes back," Wesker snapped, and Chris couldn't agree more. Albert was already moving again, backpedaling in short steps, his rifle at the ready as he took snapshots in a staccato rhythm. The big one, as the Captain had so eloquently put it, had lumbered out of the dark like a two-legged elephant not long after things had gone completely to shit, charging through the crowd of shambling nightmares, almost on a beeline towards them.
They'd only seen flashes of it, slamming through the mass, chasing after anyone it seemed to get its eyes on, but once it got stuck going after the girls and they dropped a napalm grenade right between its shoulders, it seemed to fuck off. For now, at least. But given the resilience of these things, Chris didn't expect it to stay that way. He could still feel the shock of its mass on the floor when it hit, each thundering step heavy enough to create a physical shockwave when it landed.
Barry swept the wall of monsters with his light while he and the Captain tried to pick off the closest of the creatures. They were all bullet sponges, each and every one of them, seemingly able to absorb anything not immediately lethal and quick enough to make drawing a bead, especially this close up, and more than once they'd had to rely on their hand to hand skills to keep from getting pulled in. At that distance and with these numbers, getting tangled up would be a death sentence.
Chris had tossed his shotgun to Jill to give her a fighting chance after her own rifle was yanked away, but that just left him with the Galil and his pistol. The M3 had been ideal at these close ranges, but he would make do. He worked the Galil hard, burning through the last of his magazine in measured bursts, aiming for the cores when he could and knees when he couldn't. When one of the creatures lunged, Chris cut its leg out from under it with a burst and watched it hit the floor with a wet smack, still reaching for him, the persistent bastard.
Albert had been hot-swapping between his weapons, moving with the same eerie calm that Chris had come to expect of him, though this level of skill was beyond even what he thought the Captain was capable of. The man seemed to have an almost laser focus as he managed to drop one after another, by far the most successful of the three of them in this little game of theirs. He swapped to his shotgun mid-stride, fired once to clear a clump that was about to hit him, then snapped back to the rifle without missing a step.
"We need to get out of this tunnel!" Chris shouted over the racket, "We're gonna get split up and picked off at this rate!"
"Damnit." Wesker growled, before turning to look at Barry. "Burton! Find us an exit, I don't care what! we're getting overrun!"
"On it!" Barry shouted as he fell back behind them, light scouring the walls nearby. Wesker closed with Chris, the two of them providing as much of a wall for the burly STARS armorer as they could, their guns a nonstop barrage of 7.62 as the two were slowly pushed back. Of his nine mags, only a couple were left, and those were going fast, and for all his skill and accuracy, Chris knew the Captain couldn't have been much better.
"Barry, how are we doing on that exit?" Chris called out. He didn't turn his head, because he couldn't afford to, snapping another round down at the shambling mass of rotting meat. "Because things are starting to get expensive over here!"
"Working on it! I found a hatch!" Barry shouted back. "The damn handle's rusted over! Give me a minute!" Barry moved to the side, planted his shoulder into the wall for leverage, and started wrenching at the wheel with both hands while he gripped a flashlight between his teeth, the beam bouncing wildly with every tug.
"We don't have a minute!" Albert snapped back. He stepped in front of Barry for half a heartbeat, rifle up, and fired straight down the corridor as the pack surged closer. The muzzle flash showed that the crowd had seemingly tripled in the scant few minutes since it all went to hell.
Chris grimaced. He was running out of ammo, and that was going quick. His pack was laden down with more ammo, but that wasn't going to do him any good now. He slapped the empty mag free, rammed the last one home, and forced himself to keep the trigger disciplined. It was a losing proposition though, with the buzzing worry forming in his gut.
"On my last one!" Chris called out, counting down the shots left in the pipe. Twelve, eleven, ten... he was burning through it too fast.
"We just need a little bit more time," the Captain said, as he swapped to his shotgun one more time to blast the torso out of one of the mutants as it stumbled in from the side, tentacle tongue lashing. He racked the gun and fired again. Blowing the remains back into the dark. With a smooth, singular motion he reached down and yanked one of his last mags free. "Redfield! Make them count!"
Chris caught the spare with a grateful nod as he slotted it, and none too soon as one of the creatures closed in on him tightly enough that its fetid breath fogged his mask. He kicked it away with a vicious thrust, before firing into its maw.
"Almost got it!" Barry shouted, and they could all hear the creak as the rust finally gave way. "Open, open, open!" The wheel jumped under his hands, and the hatch edge lifted a fraction, metal shrieking as it broke free.
In an instant, Chris was moving, Albert right beside him. "Fall back! Fall back!" The Captain shouted as Chris drove a final burst into the nearest pair of creatures to stagger them, then grabbed the hatch lip with one hand and hauled himself through. Albert slid in after him, rifle already angled back through the opening.
Barry slipped in last, nearly catching a tongue as it snapped for his boot. Chris caught the movement and fired once, the shot grazing the thick muscle and spraying black fluid all over the floor. Barry didn't slow as he yanked himself through and slammed the bulkhead shut, spinning the wheel until it locked sharply.
Moments later a heavy pounding came, like rain on a tin roof, rattling across the thick door. God only knew how many of those things were hammering on the steel, the solid frame holding up despite their efforts. Each hit echoed through the tunnel, wet and weighty, but the door held strong, the tight seal more than enough to keep out the monsters. Fortunately, they seemed too stupid to work the wheel, but that was only the smallest mercy. The three of them stood there, listening, letting their lungs steal a few filtered breaths through the heavy masks, the feeling claustrophobic.
"Jesus fucking Christ," was all Barry could say as he put his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. His shoulders rose and fell hard, worn from the effort as his adrenaline crashed back to normal. The man was getting too old for this shit.
Chris, for his part, took the momentary lull to drop his pack and crack it open, reaching in and scooping out a handful of rifle rounds. His fingers felt clumsy even though he'd done it a thousand times, the fine motor work harder with his hands half-cramped from clutching his rifle so hard. He'd lost several of his magazines, but fortunately there were more in the pack, and he went about refilling his pouches as Wesker kneeled nearby to do the same.
"Status," the Captain said, half-distracted as Barry watched the corridor. Wesker's voice stayed even, but his posture didn't. It seemed even the implacable Albert Wesker needed to cool down sometimes, but Chris was smart enough not to say anything about it. The Captain could be very prickly about being needled, and not just because he was a stickler for rank. He was just as pointed out of uniform.
"I burned through a hell of a lot of ammo back there," Chris grunted, "but I'm fine. Just a couple of scratches and bruises." He checked his hands as he spoke, noting the shaking, and clutched his fingers to his palms, forcing it to stop. The bruises were already making themselves known in the tight way his shoulders moved, though. He wasn't looking forward to how he'd feel in the morning. If he made it that far.
"Same here," Barry grunted, as he watched the hall, the darkness swallowing his sight and his light. "Just sore, no injuries." The words sounded relaxed, but the way he said them carried something else, a disbelief that they were still upright and kicking, especially after that shitshow.
"All right. Did any of you see what happened to Rebecca and Jill?" Wesker asked. After the two had been separated things had gone mad with the ever-increasing wall of rotting flesh. Chris dredged his memory, trying to pick something, anything out of those fleeting memories as Barry tensely shrugged. Then it hit him.
"I saw them get cut off. Rebecca was getting cornered. Jill went to intercede, but I lost sight of them in the crowd. I know that thing, the one made out of all those bodies, went after them, but it got stuck in the door." He said, sounding more sure than he felt. "Barry, remember when you hit it with a burner? It went nuts after that. I'm pretty sure they got away." Barry's eyes lit up when Chris mentioned it, nodding.
"Yeah, I remember that. I didn't see who it was going after, but it was a juicy target." He sighed, "Glad it helped. If they managed to avoid the worst of it, like we did, then they should be okay." The words were cold comfort, almost more about reassuring them than any vote of confidence, but Barry still tried. "Jill is tough as hell, and Rebecca is solid, even for a rookie. They'll be fine."
"Good. That means we can link up with them later." None of them seemed to want to explore the other possibility, or even say it out loud, so when Wesker put an end to that line of thought, they let him. "Burton, get loaded up. Once we're topped up, we're going mobile. Whatever is happening here, we're in the middle of it. Whatever those things are-"
"Headless." Barry interrupted, None of those things had a working head. Just a mouth made of ribs. Those things were all headless." The name got a look from the other two, but the big man just shrugged. "Better than calling them monsters all the time. Given what we've seen there's a whole menagerie down here." He said as he kneeled next to the pack, and began reloading his own magazines. Wesker stood almost in tandem, taking the watch position.
"A fair point, Burton. What of the other two? The big one and the torso." Albert asked, grabbing onto the topic, letting them distract themselves with something other than their situation, or the fate of the girls.
"Abomination, for the big one?" Chris offered, but Wesker shook his head.
"No, too long. Perhaps something... more... well, it appeared to be made of a large number of bodies stuck together. The Grafted, perhaps?" Both Barry and Chris were a bit surprised that the ever-stoic Albert Wesker would get in on it, but both of them nodded along.
"Grafted is good. I like it." Barry said, and then offered, "And for the spider, call it a Necro?"
"Necro?" Chris asked, before it dawned on him. "Oh, like Necromancer. I get it. Claire dragged me to a tabletop game night once about dungeons and adventurers and stuff. Those are the ones that raise the dead, right?"
"Got it in one." Barry said, as he slotted another full mag into his vest. He glanced down at the MGL after a moment, "I don't know what it is, but those things seemed weirdly resilient to napalm. All that slime kept dousing it. I've never seen anything like it. I'm gonna swap over to flashes. See if those giant eyes of theirs aren't sensitive enough to the light. But otherwise..." Barry let the words drift off. He stared at the new round for a second longer than he needed to, then shoved it home with a hard, final motion.
"Do what you can with what you have," Wesker said. "See if we can focus on taking them down one at a time. If not, aim for limbs. While their bodies seem particularly resilient, taking off a limb tends to slow them down, at least for a time." He didn't look at either of them when he gave the order. He stared out into the dark, the barest lines creasing his face, a sign of hidden stress that Chris had never seen on the man before, but Chris couldn't blame him.
"Yes, sir," Chris said, before being echoed by Barry. Chris tightened the strap on his pack and felt how heavy it was, noting the change from before, barely there, but still notable. Barry clicked the launcher closed and checked it twice, before letting it hang off his back. It was then that something occurred to him.
"Are you able to reach anyone on the radios?" Chris asked, a glimmer of hope in his voice. Albert reached up to tap his. He almost wanted to kick himself for not thinking to try it sooner, Chris didn't like how much he needed that answer all of a sudden, how badly he wanted a voice to cut through the static and give him just that small peace.
"STARS Three, STARS Four. This is STARS One. Do you copy?" Only static came back. The hiss filled the space with empty noise and dead air, and for a second, just a second, Chris thought he heard a glimmer of something, but then it was gone.
"I say again, Jill, Rebecca, this is Albert. Do you copy?" Still nothing. Wesker held the mic down for a beat longer than necessary, as if he could force the air itself to respond. "Damn." He eventually grunted. The word came out tight, clipped, and Chris caught the small shift in his shoulders, the hint of anger that had nowhere to go.
"It was worth a shot," Barry said. "But that just leaves us with the last question of where exactly we are, then." Barry rumbled. He looked down the tunnel ahead, then back at the bulkhead, like he couldn't decide which direction was worse. The pounding behind them had started to feel like a clock, counting out how long they had before the steel stopped being enough, despite all sense to the contrary.
"Did you see a sign when you were trying to pry the door open?" Chris asked, but Barry shook his head while he swept the beam in short cuts across the tight walls and uneven floor. The bulkhead behind them rang now and then with dull impacts that had softened, but hadn't stopped in the time they'd been recovering, as much as they could. There was a pall in the air, a familiar sense of tension coming back to them now that they were back on the clock. "No such luck. It was too dark and I wasn't exactly looking."
"I guess we'll find out, sooner or later." Chris hummed as he cinched his pack's strap tight, and checked his gear, making sure it was cinched. It wouldn't do to have something come loose or snag, but he was satisfied that it was good to go. The corridor didn’t give them room to walk without risking stumbling over each other, and barely enough room to shoot around the person in front of them. This close, each shot would be orders of magnitude louder too, so Chris made sure his earpro was in tight.
"The only way to go is forward," the Captain said tersely. "So heads up, eyes on a swivel. I don't like these narrow corridors, and watch out for alcoves or offshoots. They'll be hidden in this dark, and we don't want one of those things getting too close." As he spoke, Wesker centered up behind Chris with his rifle in a loose ready and his posture compact. Barry held the rear and lifted his own rifle, before settling in to watch their backs, the heavy grenade launcher looking small as it hung from his back.
"Especially you, Redfield. I know you've been rather desperate lately, but still, I don't think you'd like a kiss from one of these all that much." Wesker shot Chris a wry grin, the rare joke from the Alpha leader ringing almost unexpectedly off the walls. Not that Chris wasn't quick to take up the gauntlet.
"Oh, don't you worry, Cap. I like to think I've got higher standards than that." Chris barked out a laugh, unexpectedly.
"Since when?" Barry chimed in from the back, and all three shared a chuckle before the suffocating atmosphere rushed back in, and the sound got swallowed quickly by the long and empty corridor.
They moved forward at a snail's pace. Chris led with his rifle shouldered and his light kept low, sweeping the walls quickly between trailblazing the floor. The corridor didn’t give them room to spread out, so their spacing stayed tight enough that a stumble could turn into a pileup. Barry kept his flashlight disciplined, and he traced where the floor met the walls before he lifted the beam to skim cables and broken fixtures that lined the path. Wesker stayed in the center, ready to support either man if an attack came from one direction or the other, a compromise that would at least give them two guns pointed towards any oncoming attack.
The hallway stayed disconcertingly silent. The walls pressed close, damp with grime and streaked with old runoff that had collected in shallow grooves carved into the stone. Naked cables were pinned to the walls and fed electric lamps, many of whom the housings were shattered. The wiring had been ripped open in places, and insulation had torn back to leave copper exposed and dulled with corrosion. Some glass still clung to the metal, and it broke into sharp edges that caught their light.
The ground crunched with broken glass as they moved, announcing their presence, and Chris shifted his steps to the side where he could. It didn’t help much, because fragments littered the whole corridor, and the crunch carried in the narrow space. Chris suspected that some kind of power surge had caused the lights to blow up. He’d seen it happen before once, in his high school science class, under much more controlled conditions. This was far beyond that, though, and he couldn't begin to guess the kind of surge that caused it.
They passed a section where the wall had been scraped down to raw stone, gouged at knee height in uneven lines, and Chris slowed just long enough to make sure the rough-hewn ground below didn't hold any hidden surprises. The path dipped and shifted randomly, and tangling cables sometimes dipped down into tangled triplines. Every so often they'd come across broken pipes, sheared metal and the occasional blockage, but nothing that was able to slow them for long, fortunately. But beyond the few environmental issues, the corridor remained deceptively bare.
"Captain," Chris said, grabbing Wesker's attention. "We might be coming to the end."
"What makes you say that, Redfield?" Albert asked, turning his mask to face the STARS pointman. Chris shrugged and pointed to the ground.
"We're on an incline, and the walls are widening out. The shift is subtle, but you can feel it if you're looking for it." Chris replied, and after a moment, Wesker nodded.
"Then look sharp," Wesker hummed as he lifted his rifle to his shoulder as he patted Chris on his, signaling him to go. "Be ready for anything."
Chris tightened his grip and adjusted his stance to match the incline. It wasn't long before the three found themselves at the end of a seemingly infinite hall. They couldn't have been walking for more than half an hour, but it felt like days trapped in the dark and the wet as the narrow path stretched on for what felt like forever. They were at the end, though, at long last, and what they found made them almost wish they hadn't.
In front of all of them stood another heavy bulkhead door, and all three men already knew that they weren't going to like what they found. Because sitting above the door, covered in black, slimy mold, the words CENTRAL DISPATCH glowed fluorescently under their lamps.
The mold had spread across the sign in thick, uneven sheets, and seemed to consume the door itself. The black film pooled in the seams and around the handle, glistening with an oily sheen. Worse, there was a strange, almost twitching cilia that rose from the door to sway in an unseen wind, like it reaching out to them, spreading a thin layer of black particles into the air that swirled in spirals around them as they stepped close.
"Check your filters, gentlemen. I suspect we're not going to like what we find," Albert said, and the two STARS with him couldn't help but agree as Barry made his way forward, wrapping his gloved hands around the wheel, and began turning.
000
“Cover me.” Jill said, snapping Rebecca back into reality as the lithe specialist slid out of cover, making her way over to the mauled bodies lying dead on the ground. There wasn’t any question that they were, either, the three torn to pieces, two from those strange explosive rounds that neither woman had ever seen nor heard of before, and the third beheaded in a very violent, very personal way.
Rebecca reacted on instinct, sliding out and raising her rifle, her eyes scanning the upper levels as Jill made her run. Nothing was moving, not that Rebecca could see, but she wasn’t going to trust that, given the giant could come back at any time, and she didn’t suspect it would care very much about the fact that neither of them were with the strange black ops soldiers that it was hunting.
Jill, for her part, wanted one thing and one thing only from the bodies, and let out a small hissing “Yes!” as she lifted up one of their weapons, still intact despite being inches away from a low-yield detonation. To her surprise, finding it to be a P90 of all things was interesting, in that detached, clinical way that one might note the color of the car barreling at them, but combined with that, she managed to sweep up half a dozen magazines and another thirty rounds of 9mm from their sidearms. The guns themselves were generic Glocks, but she grabbed two, just as backups for her and Rebecca.
The beheaded man didn’t seem to have anything interesting on him, apparently an officer, or leader, who lacked the same load of tactical gear the other two had been kitted out in. No wallet or ID, either, though that didn’t surprise her. Only an idiot carried something like that on them when they were doing… whatever fuckery was going on here. Same for the other two, lacking any kind of identification, but she did find something odd. On each of their shoulders was a black and grey umbrella, a unit patch marking them as USS Viperstrike, whatever that meant.
It made her think of the red and white pharmacorp logo, but she doubted there was any connection there. Still, it was odd enough that she ripped it off the uniform and pocketed it. It was something she could investigate later. For now she managed to rack up what she’d wanted to get, and she made her way back to Rebecca, handing over her spoils. She also held out the patch to Rebecca, on the off chance she might know something.
“Any thoughts?” She asked, as the two ducked back into the alcove. Rebecca took it and ran her fingers over the symbol, humming as she did so.
“I’ve seen this symbol before, for Umbrella.” She said, finally, just as confused as Jill had been. The woman in question nodded, as she was handed the patch back.
“I know, right? Do you think it means anything?” She asked, but Rebecca shrugged back, just as lost.
“No, I don’t think so. Umbrella doesn’t do mining operations, to start. They make medical equipment and supplies. Plus… I mean, it would be weird for them to have soldiers, wouldn’t it?” She hummed as the two shared a look. Neither had been eager to go wandering out in case the seemingly invincible killer came back, but it seemed to be clear for the moment.
“Yeah. It would be.” Jill agreed after a moment. “Think he’s gone?”
“I don’t hear anything, which is weird, when you think about it. Shouldn’t we be hearing shots or something?” Rebecca asked, and Jill nodded. Gunshots weren’t quiet, yet they weren’t hearing anything, even distantly. That meant that the walls here were particularly thick, or that the place was much larger than either of them thought.
“We should, and I don’t like it. Much as I hate to say it, we’re going to need to get moving if we ever want to get out of here.” The older woman sighed, shouldering the compact submachine gun up, checking it. “Unless you wanna try going down there again.” She snorted. Rebecca, for her part, shook her head no very quickly.
“Let's go.” It was with that that the two stood, sliding across the walls and trying to avoid leaving themselves too open to the catwalks above. There was nobody there, not that they could see, but that didn’t mean much of anything. At least with the power on emergency settings, or so they thought, they wouldn’t need to worry about being spotted on cameras or something equally annoying. It was a small, cold comfort. At least there didn’t seem to be any of the monsters up here.
Reaching the double door, they pushed it open slowly, weapons raised. They expected it to be bad, but when they stepped in, what greeted them was a charnel house. Between the two of them, they counted almost eighteen bodies. It was almost, because most of the dead were in pieces, as if someone had blasted them apart, then blasted them again to make sure. Mulched was the word that came to mind for Rebecca, shredded, disconnected limbs, bits of bone, gristle, and strings of intestine splattered across every visible surface. She made to step back, but her boot squelched wetly under her foot. Jill’s hand shot out to catch her before she fell, but as she looked under her she realized she’d stepped in a chunk of brain.
In an instant she yanked her mask off and let out a stream of vomit, her lungs screaming as she emptied what little remained in her stomach. Jill said nothing, preferring to keep her thoughts to herself as she rubbed the younger woman’s back, as Rebecca fought to get herself back under control, again, for what felt like the tenth time today.
“Fuck! Fuck…” The medic groaned, before messily wiping at her lips. A splash of water from her canteen cleaned the taste from her mouth, but the burn of the bile sat in the back of her throat. Her mask found itself back on her face not long after, if only to block out the smell of freshly spilled guts, the stench of blood still thick despite the filtration.
“It’s pretty bad, yeah.” Jill said dispassionately, seemingly unaffected, but Rebecca could see the tightness in her eyes through the glass of her mask. Pretty bad was an understatement, to be sure, but this… this was a massacre. It wasn’t hard to imagine that this was what those exploding shells did to a person, with this much proof sitting in front of her. It was clear that the person behind it had been that armored man, but here it looked like he just kept firing until there wasn’t anything but meat paste and human giblets left. The soldiers had put up a valiant effort to slow him down, too. There were what had to be thousands of cases all along the ground, everything from pistol caliber all the way up to 5.56, and none of it had done anything to even slow the man down.
That was horrifying enough on its own, but as they made their way down the hall, picking their steps carefully, they found more bodies. People not dressed in armor, or carrying weapons, but wearing lab coats instead. None of them had been spared, and it was clear that it had been systematic. Some tried to hide, some tried to fight, some tried to run. It didn’t matter. The cold halls had been transformed into a crimson rorschach drawing, blood and guts congealing in the chilled air under the glaring emergency lights. Some of the doors had been barricaded, or the attempt had been made to do so, anyway. It didn’t matter. They had been blown clean off their hinges. In fact, most of the doors had been on this level. Picking up one of the spent shells off the ground, Rebecca looked at it curiously.
“Jill, have you ever heard of a Frag-12 shotgun shell?” She asked, and Jill stopped, turning to look at her. After a moment, she held out her hand, and Rebecca handed the casing over to her. The ex-Delta peered at it curiously, twisting it left and right, before handing it back.
“Only in theory.” She said finally, sounding a bit disturbed. “They were playing around with all kinds of stuff when I was in the service. I know someone had wanted a shotgun-firable explosive round for breaching and clearing, but it was still in the idea stage when I left. Think this is what Mr. Axe was using to do all this?”
“It fits. You left Delta a few years ago, so that… do you think that means he’s Delta Force?” Rebecca asked, but Jill snorted almost derisively. It was a strange reaction from the older woman, and Rebecca tilted her head and asked, “What?”
“If he is, then standards haven’t just slipped, they went right into the toilet. No, if he was Delta, aside from the fact that there would be at least a dozen others with him, along with the full weight of the US Military burning this place to the ground, Tier One doesn’t operate like this. This is all anger, all emotions, if you look at it. He’s hunting these people, going out of his way to kill everyone here, and making sure they’re dead.” Jill said, with a grim sneer in her tone. “You don’t become Delta, or any other specialist outfit without having enough discipline to do the job you need to and get out.”
“And not go out of your way to cut some guy’s head off when a bullet was just as good?” Rebecca finished, and Jill nodded.
“Got it in one. There’s a fine but definitive line between what Delta does and… this. Which means we need to be extra careful, even more than we were before. If this is somehow personal, then that’s bad enough, but whoever is behind that mask could be a psychopathic thrill-killer let off the leash.” The words sent a cold shiver down Rebecca’s spine. Her thoughts drifted invariably to Danny again, this time having to face down whoever this lunatic was.
So far none of the faces she’d seen matched his, but that didn’t mean anything with the number of pulped people she and Jill had come across. Had she walked right past his body somewhere? She didn’t know, and it was killing her. This place was massive, she was beginning to realize, and the man she loved could be anywhere, could have been one of the headless flailing bodies that had tried to rip them apart down below, or been one of the mushed up corpses on the big one, or maybe he was just a severed torso skittering around, infecting more and more bodies with whatever mutagen had created those monsters. He could have died, screaming, in horror, alone, investigating this place on his increasingly less insane crusade against some grand conspiracy that she was really starting to believe in.
Christ, she wished she’d listened to him better. That she’d believed him. That she had tried harder to understand. Because she couldn’t help but think that the reason he came up here was to find the proof he needed to convince her, Jill and all their friends. To finally be able to explain what he couldn’t before. And now he was gone and she was trapped up here, and the chances of finding him alive were vanishingly small.
Those were the thoughts that haunted her as she and Jill crept through the halls. The bodies had thinned out, for a time, as they looped the bottom floor. Nothing was left alive, and thanks to the explosive shells, not much had survived the encounters either. Jill had picked up some more ammo, and she’d managed to grab some more herbs and whatnot, but it still felt ghoulish to take from the dead soldiers.
Jill had just shrugged and told her that it was necessary to take what they could. Between the monsters below and the psycho who might well be stalking the building still they needed to be as prepared as they could be. It still bothered her a bit, even if the reasoning was sound. She chose not to press the issue though, they had bigger problems, and while she wasn’t religious, she would send a prayer for the dead when she had a chance. It felt like too little, but it was the best she had.
Of course, all that changed when she found… it. At first, what had caught her eye was the change in the bodies. Before, they had been blown apart, by and large, but when she glanced down the path as they crossed, she spotted two largely intact corpses. It was unusual enough that she stopped Jill to investigate. Needless to say, it was odd, and as they approached, it was increasingly clear that the two soldiers hadn’t died particularly well, or peacefully. One had been killed with a close-range shot to the head, an execution if Rebecca had to guess, and the other had their throat ripped open with a series of gruesome, savage cuts.
Blood was smeared along the door, on the walls, and on the bodies, only revealing itself under the dim light as they approached, and it made her curious about why.
“It looks like they were guarding something.” Jill said, “Based on their positioning, at least. Then something hit them by surprise, maybe from the room they were watching.” The older woman hummed, but Rebecca latched onto that immediately.
“Like a prisoner?” She asked, trying to keep the hope out of her voice, and Jill chose her next words very carefully as soon as she realized what it could imply.
“Maybe, or maybe it was just another one of those freaks-” She started to say reaching out to stop her, to hold her back, but Rebecca had already forced the door open, and the two came face to face with a wave of stink that hit them like a physical blow to the gut. Blood, sweat, feces, urine, and worse hit them all at once, thick and sour, and it clung to the walls and the floor like a slimy patina. It didn't stop the young woman but for a moment, as she gathered herself. The doorway stuck for half a second under her push, then it gave, and the room opened up in a cramped, filthy little pocket off the hall.
What they found was just one more horror to the thousand they'd both faced down already, but this one was more personal, more... human. Because there wasn't any doubt as to what they were looking at. Jill knew it from her days in the military, from her work in some of the most primitive and savage places on the planet, hunting people who were the worst evils imaginable. It was personal for her, an understanding that lived in her darkest memories, where men, women and children were hung like cattle for slaughter and left to rot in the jungle heat just to make a point.
For Rebecca, it was different. She was innocent, and she knew it, but there was a cold, clinical part of her mind that catalogued the things she saw and what they were for, how they were arranged, and why. Like the hook hanging from the ceiling, and the drain in the floor beneath it, her eyes following the mix of fresh and old, stained tracks that ran toward it in uneven streaks. The tray came into focus after that, half scattered across the floor, covered in knives, clamps, surgical tools and needles. Broken vials were scattered across the ground, some shattered, but others intact, and their labels listed chemicals like phenocyclocine, a potent drug that could cause hypersensitivity and hallucinations in high doses, and dexadram, which was a trauma-level coagulant meant for closing up heavily bleeding injuries.
Her eyes locked onto the body next, a thin man with gangly features and his throat ripped clean out in a ragged, brutal tear. She had no idea what could have caused that injury, only that the ragged, uneven rending wasn't made by any tool there. He had been savaged, gagging and choking on his own blood, his uniform jacket soaked through but tacky, the body cooling but not in rigor mortis. The kill was too recent, for as animalistic as it was. She couldn't imagine what would drive a person to do that, and it had been a person. She knew it was.
“Rebecca-” Jill tried to say, as Rebecca stood there taking it all in with a muted, horrified silence. She moved unevenly, as if to pick something up off the gurney, and her boot brushed against the body. The shift was barely perceptible, until they heard something clatter on the concrete. Rebecca’s head snapped down as she spotted the compact grey device, tracking it as it settled onto the ground. Reaching down, she picked it up and recognized it as a tape recorder. She wiped her thumb across the casing to clear the blood off, and fingered the buttons, as if she were afraid to see what lay on the device. Jill tried to stop her, tried to do something, but the younger woman pulled it away sharply.
"Wait, you might not-" Jill said, gently, but that was all it took to push Rebecca. She pressed the play button, and the tiny speaker crackled as it fought through some kind of damage. “...ecording session nine, eight-forty three AM, Tuesday March twenty-fourth. Subject is retaining some semblance of coherency despite fifty-one hours of enhanced sensory techniques, blood pressure is…” The list of vitals were rambled off for what seemed like forever, an uncaring string of notes that made both women pale as it painted the picture of a person barely alive as it was, made worse when it was joined by another person.
“...How’s he daein’, Pip? We dinnae want our belle o’ the ball tae be in onything but perfect condition, ken? I’ve got something special in store for him t'dae.” The sounds of something electrical crackling filled the room, sharp and irregular, and then the other man continued, “I want tae see if we can get ye charged up, lad.”
Rebecca froze as a scream echoed through the tiny speaker, one that seemed to go on for hours as the electrical sounds increased in their severity. “See!? Bet ye like that, don’t ye, boy! Let’s gie him another!” The sounds of electricity roared through the speaker again, followed by another agonized scream. It went on like that, over and over until Jill yanked the little recorder out of her hands and stopped it.
“Oh… oh god…” Rebecca’s voice was haunted. She knew that voice. How could she not? She had heard it on and off for months, lying in bed next to her when the terrors hit, and the nightmares got to be too much. It rang in her ears, in her soul, like a shrieking, hateful whistle that consumed her thoughts. All at once, the guilt, the self-loathing, the constant agonizing despair that she had been forcing down for months at this point came back and wrapped around her throat like a noose.
Jill’s hands shot out, grabbing Rebecca by the straps of her pack, pulling her out of the room and slamming the door shut before the younger woman could collapse into the filth, but it didn’t stop her from sinking to her knees in the hall. She let out a keening wail as she ripped off her mask, and Jill froze as her friend curled up into a ball of hyperventilating sobs that tore through the empty hall. She felt a moment of panic as the woman seemed to fold tighter, whatever semblance of control she had left vanishing under the nightmare of listening to Daniel get tortured, of hearing him scream while she was too far away to do anything to stop it, to not even know that it had been going on, that he’d needed her, and she had been too far away to do anything to stop it, unable to-
SMACK!
She hadn’t seen it coming, until there was a sharp, all encompassing pain radiating from her cheek. She stared blankly at Jill, who had dropped to her knees in front of her, had grabbed her by the shoulders, and had slapped her hard enough that she was almost seeing stars.
“That’s enough of that, soldier.” The words were delivered with a flat, cold tone that the younger woman had never heard from Jill before. She opened her mouth to say something, to respond, but the words died in her mouth when she was lifted straight off the floor and onto her feet, with her mask shoved unceremoniously back onto her face. “I know what you’re feeling, but I need you to un-feel that right fucking now. You need to break down, have a cry? Do that on your own time. Right now we are in the shit, and I need you here. Do you understand me?”
Rebecca tried to speak, but the words were strangled in her throat as she stared into Jill’s unforgiving stare, a sharp thing that stole her breath away. Instead, she settled for nodding, stunned, shocked even, the pain in her face keeping her centered as the rifle was shoved into her hands.
“Look around. Danny isn’t here. He got away, but he is out there somewhere, and between those freaks and the guy who just cut some asshole’s head off, he’s in danger. He’s possibly delirious, he’s definitely hurt, and he. Needs. You. So get your shit together and let's move.” Jill snapped, and Rebecca nodded again, dumbly, as her wits started to come back to her. The raging fire of her guilt, her pain, the weight of her mistakes, all of it died out, replaced with a chilly calm as her senior’s words made it through the haze. She was right. Rebecca knew she was right. She could sit there and scream and cry later, once Danny was safe. Right now, she did not have the time for this.
“R-right.” She hated the stutter in her voice, and forced out, “You’re right. Sorry.” She said, quietly, but firmly.
“Good. Now let's get moving. It’s clear that he managed to get out and went down this hall, so keep your head on and follow my lead. Got it?” Jill snapped, as she lifted her own submachine gun and started stalking forward. Rebecca shifted her mask, setting it right before scurrying after her, her own rifle tight to her shoulder.
000
Daniel ducked hard against the wall as rifle rounds pinged off the concrete next to his head, the Saiga held low as he swapped out the empty magazine for another rack of grenade shells, the eight such magazines of nearly twenty that John had left him as his parting gift. He didn’t know why the man had done so, graduation gift or not, but the fact was that it didn’t matter. Daniel was making short work of the seemingly endless bevy of mercenaries that infested the Power Plant. He wouldn’t be able to get it up and running again so long as any of the Umbrella scum remained, and he wasn’t going to suffer them to live. Not after the last week he had, not after the pain, the drugs, the torture… No, everyone died. The soldiers, the scientists that remained behind, and that shitfuck Gideon if he made the mistake of staying there where he could get to him, pet Tyrants or no.
He had plenty of grenades to go around, and if that wasn’t enough, he’d taken the time to go collect that weird three barreled rifle that one USS soldier had tried to mince him with, along with two more of its big, blocky magazines. Admittedly, the thing was in rough shape, but if worse came to worse, well, a wall of bullets couldn’t hurt. Plus… he had to admit, despite all the shit that had happened to him, there was still some part of him that just… wanted it. Call it a trophy, and a backup, for the idiot mistake of not bringing his P90 with him.
Racking the shotgun, he stood, and in an instant he felt the pinging of rounds crashing into his armor, and could see the dents they left, but he didn’t care. Their rifle rounds were nothing compared to the thick slabs of carbon-titanium that engulfed his body as he drew a line on the men hiding behind a flipped over soda machine, as if the barricade would help them. Their profiles were etched in green wireframes as his motion trackers marked them. He marched forward, uncaring of the panicking, the screaming, the begging, and pulled the trigger. The saiga roared, one, two, three times as the rounds exploded behind the soldiers, the airburst just so that it caught them out of their cover. He watched impassively as two were torn to pieces, the blasts so close that it peeled them open like cans of sardines. The other three were far enough away to just suffer some mild maiming, a few lost fingers, or in one case, a foot.
Daniel snorted, reaching to his side and drawing the massive, heavy Mateba from its holster, before pointing it at the first man that was desperately crawling away. He raised the magnum and there was a crack that would have been deafening in such a small space, even through his muffs if they were any less advanced. The round caught the USS soldier square in the face, and his head detonated like a melon, coming apart in a bloody fountain as his helmet went flying. The next one scuttled back, covered in the blood of the now-dead man.
“Wait! Wait wait wait I didn’t have-” The next round took the begging man in the throat, decapitating him as his stump sprayed blood across the hall. Daniel lifted the Mateba, examining it. It was a fine weapon, the other gift from HUNK for living through all this shit. He might have hated the man, and was going to kill him, next time they met, but damn if he didn’t have an eye for quality.
The third man had made a decent attempt at getting away in the interim, for someone missing a foot. Daniel could appreciate the drive, the will to live. He really could. As he strode up to the man, and flipped him, the soldier shoved his handgun into Daniel’s chestplate and fired everything in it into him, point blank. It was enough that Daniel even felt it, the force enough to make him take a step back, but then…
BOOM.
It wasn’t enough. None of it was enough. Not now, not for him. His suit systems tracked a man making a run for it, and he put a round into their back with an almost dismissive ease. The man wore a labcoat, another of the scientists, and all he felt was the surprisingly light recoil from the heavy rounds. He cracked it open, extracted the spent rounds, and topped it up once more. He had .454 for days, a whole pouch of it, that he didn’t feel a need to ration it. Not yet.
No, this was about sending a message. He had found and killed that pigfucker MacKinnon, cut his head off and crushed his skull, just for the satisfaction, and then started clearing house. He’d thought he’d be safe behind a wall of USS operatives, that they could drop him with enough fire, but no. No, his armor more than held, ignoring the worst he had to throw at Daniel while he emptied magazine after magazine of grenades into the fleeing, cowering Meat…
No. No, Daniel needed to keep those thoughts to a minimum. Even with the suppressor in his system, he had noticed that he was getting more violent, more sadistic. Crueler, almost revelatory when he killed, and pulling the trigger had been easier than ever. Which was a little disconcerting. A lot disconcerting, actually. More than enough to have him trying to stay aware of what was going through his head as he tore through the mercenaries.
The worst thing was he didn’t know if it was the Dhampir or just his own worst impulses taking over. Because he did hate these people. He hated all of them. Wanted to see them dead, for what they did to the people here, for what they did to him, for what they were planning to do to Rebecca… no, he wouldn’t feel pity, or remorse for removing those stains off the census. They didn’t deserve to live, not a single one of them, but he shouldn’t delight in making them beg, making them scream and cry and burn and DiE iN AgOnY-
“Fuck.” He said, roughly, as the shotgun barked again, sending another of the explosive rounds right into the guts of a man as he tried to slow Daniel down. It was a pointless, worthless effort. None of their weapons had the penetration to make it through his plates, none of them had the stopping power to slow him down. It was almost strange, looking at it. It was like their bosses wanted them to die, and he was more than happy to give that to them. Hell, he was starting to run out of targets, now that he’d cut through the majority of the USS operatives. There was one here and one there, but pickings had gotten slim.
That was what led him back to the main generator corridor. He still had to get the plant running, and that meant going through the whole priming sequence again. But that was the way things were. Always back and forth, go there, turn that on, hit this switch, and then it was back to the control room for him. With power back, that meant that the elevator that Gideon had taken would be accessible again, and assuming he didn’t just chopper out in the interim, well…
It’s not like he would do anything to the bastard, if he were honest. Fantasies of ripping his spine through his stomach would have to wait until Daniel found a solution to the fact that he’d been infected. He didn’t believe for a second that it was as simple as the corpse-faced bastard had said it would be, and he’d kept the injector and the spares tucked safely away behind the thickest part of his armor. No way was he risking losing it now. He’d rather die first, because if he did fuck up, then it would just be a question of when, not if, and he didn’t want to experience being transformed into some kind of rampaging bloodhungry psychopathic mutant. He’d eat a bullet before then. Or a grenade. He had options.
Fortunately getting the facility primed again was infinitely easier than before. No sudden attacks by those mutated zombies, no giant made out of bodies, no random fucking ambushes, nothing. It was almost too easy, and he felt a distinct sense of unease as he pumped the chargers, before flipping the switches. All three came to life without an issue, despite being covered in gore, filth and in one case, gallons of that black slime, and the trip back has been just as painless.
He didn’t hear anything other than his own heavy breathing, even as he made his way back up to the room full of monitors. From there it was an easy case of activating the routing system, running the primary charging cycle, and turning on the rotary pylon. Simple enough, right?
000
Jill and Rebecca flattened out against the walls as they heard it, the heavy, steel-on-concrete clomping of the Headhunter. Going up the stairs just as they slipped into the main control room. They’d been following the trail of bodies, with their throats ripped out and covered in deep cuts and broken bones. The bloody footprints that lead from body to body had been something Jill found odd, not really sure how a very likely naked and wounded Daniel had managed to go from person to person like that without being shot.
She’d seen the shell casings, the discarded weapons, and the bodies, to be sure, but it was clear, both the pattern and the trail. At first Rebecca had been worried, rightfully so, that one of the bodies was her boyfriend’s, but despite that, they hadn’t seen any evidence that the dozen or so soldiers had managed to put him down. It was as if he’d danced between the bullets, or managed to stop them somehow. Jill’s best guess was that he took a hostage, used them as a human shield, and gunned his way to wherever he wound up.
The path had led to the third floor, where they found a room marked as Central Power Control, a massive room filled with dozens of standing computers and terminals, along with a massive bank of monitors that all showed nothing but static as they crept in. The blood trail had ended there, in a great, long, bloody streak that was marked out with handprints and knee marks, like Daniel had fallen, but there wasn’t enough blood there to imply he’d bled out, despite the mess. Rebecca had crouched down to get a better look, when Jill had heard it. The steady stomping, distant at first, but moving at a sharp clip, getting closer, getting louder.
She had rushed over and grabbed Rebecca, shushing her as she pulled the two of them into the shadows, and not a moment too soon. Hidden in the dark, they finally managed to get a good look at the walking armory that had killed so many people. Standing at almost seven feet tall, and covered in armor from head to toe, the man’s inhuman proportions stood out in the stark light of the monitors. The heavy sheafs of solid plating on his chest and legs, the thick gauntlets that encased his hands, the mechanical apparatus on his legs, and the guns! Jill counted at least five, plus the axe, and looking at him, there was a massive knife strapped to his back too.
Regardless, he seemed rather relaxed now. Maybe he finally finished killing all those soldiers, along with everyone else he ran across, which painted a rather terrifying picture all its own. She watched as he unhooked his shotgun, setting it on the monitor table, followed by his backpack, unzipping it and pulling a chunky metal laptop that screamed military to Jill’s finely honed instincts, and started hooking it up.
If there was ever an opportunity to take him, this would be it. Looking at Rebecca, she motioned for the woman to move out and pincer him, while Jill went around the side. Rebecca, for her part, nodded, before spreading out to put the big bastard in a crossfire. They weren’t going to be taking any chances here. Slowly, inchingly, they got into position, watching the soldier plug in cables and hook up wires from his computer to the mainframe, before typing away at the terminal.
Jill took another step, and another, the P90 in her hands raised high, tracking his head. That was the only reason she saw his head tilt, almost imperceptibly, and in that moment she knew she was made.
“Surprise, asshole!” She shouted, as she ran forward, finger tight on the trigger and letting a stitching of rounds fly, ripping up monitor screens as he somehow dodged, impossibly agile for someone that huge. He closed the gap between them in an instant, a sweeping knife hand knocking the compact weapon almost entirely out of her grip, the impact rattling her as his fist came up in a vicious rabbit punch to her kidney. Distracted, she missed his other hand flashing out to knock her submachine-gun clear from her grasp. The weapon went off in a staccato roar as it was ripped from her grip and went clattering into the dark. An instant later, his steel fist slammed into her guard like a freight train, sending her flying off her feet and making her forearms ache as she was sure he bruised the bones, if not cracked them outright. Rebecca was rushing out an instant later.
“Freeze! Freeze or I’ll shoot you I swear to god!” She screamed, rifle up, as he landed a vicious kick to Jill’s gut and sent her rolling. In an instant, his hand shot down to draw a handgun from his hip, and with a sudden, impossible leap clearing the distance between him and the rookie, yanking her rifle to the side before she had a chance to react and shoved the gun into her mask, cocking the hammer.
“Not how you saw this going, is it?” The man asked, speaking for the first time, his voice grainy and electronic, as he pressed the gun to Rebecca’s facemask, only for the woman to freeze as she found herself staring down the barrel of her own gun. Before he could pull the trigger, in the gasping moments before Jill was forced to watch the young medic die, she heard her utter a single, shocked, pained word.
“Danny?”
