Tie the Noose Chapter 37

“Danny?”

He heard it through the mask’s hiss and the distant ringing in his ears. The word was almost whispered, the voice tinny and muffled, the face hidden by the dark and the slight frame below him almost sinking into the floor, and yet… he would never mistake that voice, not now nor in a thousand years. His shoulders stayed locked for a fraction of a second, as if his body refused to accept her voice until his mind caught up. His grip tightened on the weapon in a panic, then loosened as his fingers failed to keep holding on. The barrel was still pointed down at her, still ready to end her like it had so many others, to add to the bloody harvest he'd reaped, and that realization struck harder than any blow. He was holding her at gunpoint. Not a monster, not another masked killer, not something crawling out of the facility’s filth and his own fractured nightmares, but someone he loved so deeply that the knowledge split through his numbness like a blade. Rebecca was beneath him, pinned in the dark, and his own hand had been ready to kill her.

The thought should have been impossible. She couldn't be here. She couldn't have crossed into this place, this nightmare made flesh, this buried hell where he had been tortured, broken, starved, and remade into something he no longer understood. For one shattered instant, his mind tried to reject her as a hallucination, a mercy conjured by exhaustion, pain, and blood loss. She looked like something his ruined thoughts had made because they couldn't bear the dark anymore, an angel forced into the shape of a memory, a figment sent to drag him out or punish him with what he had lost. But her voice... it was too real to be another whispered ghost. The body beneath him breathed. The eyes behind the mask looked up at him, alive and terrified and most of all, real.

He could never forget it, never let it go, never… never hear it again, or so he thought. That one, simple word washed out the hissing static in his brain, finally, at long last, after what felt like years. It cut through the muted ringing, through the mask’s stale breath, through the weight of the weapon and the black pressure behind his eyes. He drew a shallow breath that scraped at his throat, and the respirator’s airflow stuttered as he tried to steady it. It silenced the constant string of recriminations and damnations and screaming whispers of how he’d fucked it all up. It made the room narrow down to the tremble in his hands, the shape of her voice, and the impossible truth of her presence.

It quenched out the burning hate that pounded through his chest in the thing he called a heart. It didn't erase the pain, the exhaustion, the hunger, or the loss, but it reached through all of it and found him anyway. It was the one thing, the only thing that brought him out of this living, breathing hell of flesh and metal that he’d been in, from the endless dark and the memory of what had been done to him, from the cold certainty that nothing good could ever reach him again. Rebecca was there. She had found him in the place that should have swallowed him whole, and the truth of it left him hollowed out, stunned, and shaking, unable to decide whether to reach for her, run from her, or fall apart in front of her.

In that single instant, for the briefest, most flickering moment, he knew.

The gun in his hand, so heavy, and wicked, lifted up slowly from the gas mask. His wrist trembled and his elbow faltered, the movement slow, empty, almost listless as his eyes fixed on her. For a moment he couldn't seem to understand what he was doing, couldn't make sense of the weapon between them or the woman beneath him or the thin, impossible line that separated that recognition from the endlessly murderous drive that had propelled him. His arm had moved on reflex, the burning need to fight that had blotted out his thoughts before his mind had returned to itself, and now that it had, horror moved through him in a delayed, sickening rush. He had almost fired. He had almost put a round through the face of the person who had come for him, the person whose voice had reached him when nothing else could.

The gun hit the ground with a thud, nearly tossed away, the metal slipping from his nerveless fingers, forgotten, as he watched the woman under him reach up, and grab the edge of her mask. Her glove scraped over the frame, careful despite the way her chest rose too fast. The movement was small, almost cautious, but it drew his attention with a pull that left the rest of the room falling away. The mask was still between them, still hiding her from him, still letting some fractured part of his mind pretend this could be a mistake, a trick of the dark, another hallucination born from pain and deprivation. But her hands were real. The tremor in her breath was real. The way she treated him, like a skittish animal, with endless care even after he had pinned her down and almost shot her, was real.

It pulled away slowly, revealing someone whose face he’d seen in his dreams and his nightmares, her eyes wide, staring at him with near incomprehension, but somewhere, deep inside, there was a glimmer of hope, too. The rubber left her face, the fogged glass parting away, but her gaze stayed pinned on him as if she was worried he’d vanish if she blinked. Rebecca’s face emerged from the dark piece by piece, and the sight of her struck him with a tenderness so violent it almost hurt. She wasn't a ghost. She wasn't the lie his broken mind had offered him in his darkest hours, when he had imagined her voice and hated himself for needing it. She was here, close enough to touch, close enough that he could see the shock in her eyes and the stubborn drive buried beneath it.

That hope, that strength, that fear undid him worse than any torture could have. Hate would have made sense. Hate was what he deserved after what she had just seen, after the bodies, the blood, the weapon in his hand, and the thing he had become in this place. But she looked at him as if she was still searching for him under all of it, as if some part of her had refused to accept that the man she loved was gone. He couldn't bear it. He had survived so very much, had endured even more, but the sight of her looking at him like that made something inside him buckle. It was her face. His lover’s face. The one who had crossed into this nightmare and found him anyway.

He leaned back, barely, shifting his weight off of her, as he slumped back, as if he were afraid of her. His hands hovered in the air, unsure what to do with themselves now that there was nothing left to fight, to hunt, to kill. As if he didn't know what came next, what he could do in the face of this revelation, this person, the only one who seemed to matter to him any more. It was impossible… and yet the impossible was breathing in front of him, watching him with those eyes he knew too well, eyes that had once warmed at the sight of him and now had every reason to recoil.

The fear came then, sudden and inexplicable, sharp enough to cut through the shock. Not fear that she would hurt him. Not fear that she would raise her weapon or shout for the others or look at him like another monster in the dark. He could accept that, if she did. He could live with that, the wages of his sin, his death, and the peace that came with it. It was worse than that. He was afraid she would see him. Really see him. The ruined thing under the armor. The thing this crusade had carved out of Daniel Carter and left wearing his skin. He was afraid her face would change when she understood, afraid that the hope in her eyes would die in front of him, afraid that the love he had held onto in the deepest part of himself would break the moment it touched what he had become.

“Danny? Is… is that you?” She whispered again, as she rose, wincing as she did, her stomach throbbing from the impact, from him pinning her, from the aborted fight. She braced a palm against her knee for balance, then pushed herself fully upright, shoulders tight with the effort to keep from showing how much the last few moments had hurt. She had recognized the gun immediately, shoved in her face like that, the barrel looking so wide even as her eyes traced the filigree across the barrel. S.T.A.R.S. it read, in sharp letters, along one side, and SAMURAI EDGE along the other. It was a gun she knew well, a gun she had carried with her every day since she cleared her Qualifications to carry, a gift given to her by the team, marking her as one of them.

The gun she held in her hands that day, when it all went wrong. The gun he took from her, in those final moments, what felt like a lifetime ago, before he was gone. Before it all went to hell. Before she finally started to understand what complicated was supposed to mean.

She moved towards him, and he shuffled back, like a spooked animal, cornered, scared, impossibly at odds with the unstoppable killer that she had thought he had been. The sight of it pulled something tight and painful through her chest, because this was not how she had imagined finding him, not after everything she had seen him do. He had cut through dozens of armed men with terrifying ease, an unstoppable, implacable machine that butchered his way through the power plant, leaving only scraps and dead bodies for her to find. Yet now, with her kneeling in front of him, with her voice barely above a whisper and his hands empty, he looked so small, so lost, as if the room had narrowed to only her and the terrible possibility of what she might see if she came too close.

His boots scraped against the floor, each backward step was uneven, panicked, pulling away from her. His voice rasped heavy, uneven, afraid, in a way that she almost didn't understand, like he was shying away from her even now. Even as she pulled closer, he fled, and it broke her heart, the wide, exhausted eyes she could see behind the mask uncomprehending as he moved, almost by instinct, like he was retreating from her. She tried to reach out, tried to cross that barrier, but he just slid back more.

She skirted an inch more, then another, slowly overtaking him as his back hit the console, nowhere left to run. The contact jolted him, and he flinched, surprised, as if he'd forgotten it was there at all. He looked at her through those crimson lenses, and even without seeing his face, she could feel the panic there, trapped behind the glass and metal. It was in the tiny shifts of his head, in the way his breath hitched through the mask, in the way he held himself as if one wrong movement from her would prove every fear he had already condemned himself with. She knew, in that instant, that she needed to get it off, to free him from the cage he'd build for himself to hide behind. To pull away the armor that he'd clad to hide himself away from all the dark feelings and crushing fears and blackest rages that she knew haunted him.

“Rebecca-” Jill started to say, but stopped when Rebecca held a hand up to her. Unsure of what to do, of what was going on, even, fast as things were shifting, she could only watch as the giant that had chopped a man’s head clean from his shoulders, that had blasted apart dozens of heavily armed and trained mercenaries, had torn through the building like a wheat thresher through a field almost seemed scared of the five foot tall, hundred pound soaking wet medic, his gun abandoned, the fight gone from him, as he seemed to almost collapse in on himself.

“I’ve got this, Jill. Please.” Was all she said, and Jill looked at her. Really looked at her, and she saw something else that she hadn’t seen in the short woman since this whole nightmare began. So she shut her mouth, and moved to the door. So she stopped, and swallowed her need to keep moving, her worries about Chris and the others, and her need to keep moving. It still took all of her discipline to recognize that it wasn’t the time. She had a million questions, a million things to say, but… it could wait. She was good at waiting, so she’d give them the privacy they needed. She’d guard the door, and when it was all said and done, then she could get her answers. Then she would go save the guys.

Rebecca, for her part, had almost climbed into Daniel’s lap by then. Her gloves had fallen away, revealing her slender fingers, her cold hands, bitter from the chill, yet like torches to him. She flexed her fingers once, working feeling back into them. Slowly, gently, she reached up to his mask. The crimson eyes glowed bright in the dark, flashes of something crawling across the glass and yet, past it all, she could see a pair of eyes, so very familiar, under the mask. His gaze tracked her hands in short, jittery movements, and he swallowed hard enough that she could hear it even through the thick armor.

She didn’t pull at it right away. She let her fingers settle along the hard edge where the mask locked into the helmet, feeling for the seams, the latches, the little places where armor connected, her face barely inches from his. It was heavier and more complex than the gear she knew, built less like protective equipment and more like a wall bolted over his face. The respirator housing covered his mouth and nose. The crimson lenses hid his eyes. The frame wrapped tight beneath his jaw and along the sides of the helmet, sealing him away piece by piece. It had protected him, maybe even kept him alive, but it had also turned him into something distant and faceless, something both less and more human, a thing of unbending will and fierce determination that hid away the most vulnerable parts of him.

She let out a shuddering breath, as her fingers found the first buckle. It came loose with a sharp hiss. The sound carried in the tight space, the pressure seal releasing its hold of him. She felt it loosen, just barely, and from it she could hear his ragged breathing speed up, as his shoulders tensed. One latch undone, and the mask shifted by the barest fraction, no longer perfectly married to the helmet, no longer an unbroken shell between him and the world. His breath caught inside it, rough and trapped, and her thumb brushed the edge of the buckle as if easing it open had eased something in him too.

The next did, too, and the third. Each one came free with another sharp hiss, another tiny surrender from the armor that had held him closed. Slowly, inchingly, the armored shield came down. She paused between buckles just long enough to confirm where her fingertips were, then continued slowly, steadily, inexorably. There was no force in it, no hurry, no attempt to pull him out of what had kept him standing. She removed it the way she would have removed a bandage from ruined skin, with patience, with care, with the understanding that what she was touching had become part shield, and part wound. The mask lifted by degrees, and with every fraction of space she opened, the person beneath it seemed closer and more terrified of being found.

She found the fourth, then the fifth, and the rebreather came loose. A thin gust of his breath escaped, warm and uneven, and he sucked in again as if he expected to choke on it. The sound was no longer fully swallowed by the respirator, no longer flattened into the mechanical rhythm that had made him seem less than human. It was his breath, strained and ragged, catching against his throat as the seal broke, but his nonetheless. The mask had been a literal barrier, but it had also been the last hard line between the thing he feared he had become and the woman trying to reach him.

Rebecca’s fingers shifted to the last fastening point, the final lock that still bound the mask to the helmet. She could feel him trembling now, not violently, but in minute, exhausted shivers that passed through the armor and into her hands. He didn't pull away, but every inch of him seemed to brace against the moment when there would be nowhere left to hide. She reached for the sixth, the final one, and his hand came up, massive compared to hers, and gently wrapped around her own.

“No… please…” He whispered, and in that instant, free of the modulation, he sounded so raw, and tired, and pained. His once-husky voice was reduced to a hoarse rattle, desperate, afraid, hurting, and so very much his that Rebecca’s heart broke. His thumb pressed lightly against her knuckles in a pleading restraint that carried more exhaustion than strength. Her other hand came up, and wrapped around his, pulling it away, as she looked deep into his eyes, and saw the fear. It was a fear that had never been there before, that she’d never seen, or felt from him, in all the months they were together.

Not a fear of her, no. But a fear of what she might find. A fear that she wouldn’t recognize him. A fear that she no longer knew what he looked like. She pressed her forehead to his, gently, feeling the cool metal of his helmet, and peeled away the last buckle. The contact steadied her hands, and it steadied him too, if only because it gave him something solid to focus on. The mask came loose, and she slowly pulled it away. Inch by inch the metal fell, and she saw the person underneath for what felt like the first time.

He looked so tired, was the first thing she thought. He looked… so very tired, his eyes, those vibrant, beautiful eyes, were so dull, so worn, like rough-polished smokey quartz, the pupils constricted into pinpricks. He blinked once, slow and heavy, then held her gaze as if he was waiting for her to decide what he was. His eyes were black around those broken gems, ringed from exhaustion, from abuse, his nose crooked from being broken over and over again, his skin ghostly pale, and shallow. The new lines in his face didn’t sit right on him, and the stillness he held felt almost dead.

His beard was scraggly, unkempt, the hair parted awkwardly under a collection of new scars, a crisscrossing star that consumed his jaw, and an ugly, ragged rent from where she’d shot him, curled and angry. A sharp line crossed through his chapped lips, a drawn, white thing that left a divot at the corner of his mouth. Rebecca’s breath caught, and she forced it back down before it could turn into anything louder.

Her fingers drifted down, following the scar, and he breathed in. The breath hitched halfway through, then finished in a shaky exhale that he couldn’t hide without the mask. She froze, and he froze with her, as she pulled his lips back, revealing eight terribly long canines, two on the top, two on the bottom, mirroring one another, the fangs jagged, thick, like shark’s teeth, meant for ripping. Her hand stopped at the first real resistance, careful not to pull too hard, and her eyes tightened as she took in the shape of them.

Her fingers brushed them gently, eyes widening ever so slightly as she felt how sharp they were, before withdrawing her hand, just enough to let his mouth close. He swallowed once, slow, and his jaw tightened as if it hurt to hold still.

“Oh Danny, what happened to you?” She asked, her voice pained, the questions she had, the anger, the frustration, the fear… all if it was doused under a torrent of frigid, aching rage, kept carefully off her face as she slowly wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling him so close she could almost taste him. She anchored herself there, elbows tight, holding him in a way that left no room for him to flinch away without admitting he wanted to. He had been hurt, mutilated, and tortured… and she didn’t even know what else, or what had been done to give him those ripping fangs, to change him somehow, against his will, but in that moment she never hated anyone so purely and absolutely as them.

“Nobody is going to hurt you again.” She whispered, even as he froze under her touch, even as he tried so valiantly not to break, the taste of blood on his lips and the strain of carrying so very much all on his own. His shoulders trembled once, then locked, as if he could still hold the line by force of habit. She watched him, her soft eyes on his, even as he started to crumble under the impossible weight of it all, and just how much he missed her, without ever even realizing it. “I’m here. I found you Danny. I’ve got you.”

In all the weeks between the last time she saw him, and now, never in that entire time had she expected what she found. As her Danny seemed to collapse against her, the real toll of just what impossible weights had rested over him had brought both a horrible sense of dread and a sympathetic well of perspective. She had been mad at him, enraged even, when he had up and vanished on her, but she burned hot like her father. That anger had burnt out, giving away to frustration, worry and concern. She had desperately wanted to understand, to know why he had done what he had, to see things as he saw them and all the while she tried to convince herself that she'd been wrong.

Finding out the depths of what he had gone through... no not even that. Finding out just the barest beginnings of what he'd gone through had been shattering to her. It wasn't okay that he lied to her like he had, but she didn't know how he could begin to explain to her all of this. And he had done it to protect her, to shield her from the things he'd had to face, including being hung from a hook and tortured to near insanity, just so that she didn't run the risk of getting tangled up in things. How she had managed to earn that level of sacrifice in the bare few months that they'd been together, she'd never know, and while there was an edge to it, a frustration that she was STARS and that she should have been able to help him, she also understood.

Holding him like that, her man, her lover, her boyfriend, as he broke down from the unfathomable depths of stress he'd had to have been under even before someone decided to literally peel him apart was the least she could do. That it was all she could do now carved deep into her, wanting nothing more than to pull him into their bed and hold him from now until hell froze over, but knowing that they were all on a timer. he needed so much more, but all she had to offer was her support when it seemed like he had nothing else holding him up. Nothing but the armor he wore like a shell against the horrors of this place, against the pain it had inflicted, and the depths of terror that had infested it like a cancer.

No, he wasn't going to face any of this alone, not now and never again. She might not know everything, but she would learn, and she would fight, and fight, and bleed, and kill if needed to make sure that he knew he wasn't in this alone any more. Because it was too much for just one person, and she understood what he meant by that now. But maybe it wouldn't be for two. Maybe even three, if she could convince Jill to join in, and the others, and anyone else who would listen. Because this place... it was something straight out of the worst horror movies, monsters and all, but she refused to let it end like one. They would all get out of this in one piece.

But that was for later. For now, she would be there for Danny, for all the nightmares and impossible demons he'd faced. Both within and without. Because that's what a real relationship was. For good and for bad, and even though it had been such a short time, she was sure. She loved this man, who had suffered and sacrificed and fought and bled, in the face of evil, fighting the good fight, even as he risked losing everything in the process for it. Because he was a hero. He was her Hero, and now, in the dark, in this cold, miserable, wicked place? She would be his.


000


Alone, Jill stared out across the hall, towards the staircase and pretended not to listen. She watched, and waited as the quiet sounds of whispers and rain faded. Her ribs ached, despite taking a herbal pill, and she really didn’t know what to think about the fact that Daniel Carter was… here. Dealing with all this. She had questions. Of course she did, and they didn’t… really have time for this. Chris and the others were still out there, dealing with god only knew what, and she was here babysitting someone who up to this point, she had thought was a few screws loose of an engine.

More fool her, she supposed. Given what she’d seen, and the fact that she wasn’t an idiot, it wasn’t hard to figure out the reason Daniel wasn’t able or willing to talk about what he was doing. Because who the fuck would take someone going on about mutant zombies seriously? Aside from him, apparently, who took it so seriously he wandered out here dressed like a space marine from that weird little soldier game Vickers was always going on about with Aiken. Oh, not to forget the goddamn grenade shotgun either, (which she still wondered how he got ahold of) and now?

She could only guess. She needed to link back up with the boys. They all did. She didn’t know how Carter was operating out here or what he was doing, but it had been stupid dangerous. Dangerous enough that an unknown PMC was fucking about here, caught him, tortured him for funzies apparently. Then, he broke out and proceeded to start massacring the shit out of them. And it was a massacre, make no mistake. She had seen less bloodshed when she was in Africa in ‘92 hunting down guerrilla warlords in the congo and the hellscapes they left in their wake during the genocide.

Under that dopey buddy-buddy exterior had been a stone-cold killer capable of doing some horrific damage, all in the name of… doing something. She would have to find out, they both would, and finally get some real answers out of the man. Much as it might hurt Rebecca to do it, too. She wasn‘t unsympathetic either. Torture changes a person, and from what they heard on those tapes, there had been a lot. And there had been tapes of that shit. She checked, before they started tracking Daniel. That Pip guy had half a dozen on him, all from different sessions, and it had been messy from what she heard. She’d done her best to keep Rebecca from hearing it, using her earbud, and she didn’t like it either, but she wanted to know what she was walking into.

In all honesty if someone did that to her, and she got a hold of a grenade launching shotgun, she likely wouldn’t have done any differently. Though… how he was still walking was something of a question, if not an important one. Even she could admit that Daniel Carter was made of sterner stuff than a lot of the men she knew. She could respect that, even as she worried about what was going on in his head now that the shooting was done. Civvies didn’t take to this kind of violence well… but he wasn’t one, was he. The sooner she got that out of her head the better.

The sounds of shuffling behind her pulled her back from her thoughts. Turning, she saw the man in question pulling his mask back on, not recovered, but less tense. Rebecca was still staring at him with a sad look, but she wasn’t the panicked mess she had been, not any more. Both looked better, far as she could tell, but that was all.

“I… know that you have questions, Valentine.” Daniel said, his voice sounding autotuned by the mechanical hum of his mask, “But right now there’s a lot going on. I filled Becca in on some of the basics, and I’ll tell you too, but we need to get the power plant back online. I have the startup protocols there,” He pointed to the still-glowing laptop resting on the control panel, “And the system is primed, but we aren’t going anywhere without the walkway heating system online. I’ve been out of action for almost a week, and from what Becca told me it’s a whiteout out there, so we need to get it online if we want to get anywhere.”

“We came from the underground, and the rest of our team are all down there.” She said, and Daniel’s head shot around, his eyes on her. Before he could speak she stopped him cold. “Before you ask why I haven’t brought it up, it’s been over an hour and a half since we got stuck up here. The way we came was destroyed, and even if there was another way, given what’s down there, and the time it took us to get to this point, even if we left as soon as we found you it wouldn’t make a difference. They’re either dead or they escaped to somewhere secure.”
Her next words hit Daniel like an ice pick to the chest.

“And even then, you weren’t in any shape to move. You were a liability, and because you were, so was Rebecca, and I couldn’t carry both of you.” Jill said, matter-of-factly. “And we can’t help them if either of you get hurt. You were overwhelmed, Carter. Rebecca’s been on the edge since we got here, and it’s nothing personal but I don’t trust you at my back right now.”

“Jill, that’s-” Rebecca started, but Jill wouldn’t hear it.

“No, Rebecca, and this is for you too, Carter, but he’s unstable. Putting aside the massacre here, which is a big fucking ask on it’s own, he hasn’t slept, barely ate, and was impact tortured for days. I can tell he’s running on the very last dregs he’s got left, and so can you, Rebecca.” The hard look on Jill’s face softened, “He needs to rest, at the very least, and so do you. I’m not going to let either of you get killed haring off trying to help the others, and it kills me to say that. We need to regroup, and come up with a plan of action.”

“I hate to agree, but she’s right, Becca.” Daniel said, and visibly swallowed down his feelings, forcing his hands to steady as he focused on the now. “I have a base camp set up at a security station on the edge of the campus. It’s got food, supplies and is reasonably secure. Plus, once the power is back on I can also take a stab at pulling the facility map from the mainframe. There’s an uplink there.” Daniel moved back over to the computer, Jill and Rebecca following him. Looking over his shoulder, the two were greeting with a complicated diagram covered in symbols neither of them recognized.

“The hell is this, Carter?” Jill asked, as he typed away at the computer. It had, fortunately, survived the close encounter with the P90, the rounds having shredded a monitor bank above it. Daniel just shrugged.

“It’s a generator diagram.” He said, as he pointed to something, “Inputs, outputs, voltages bypasses, it’s not particularly complicated when you get down to it, and I’ve done this before. Several times, now that I think about it.” He said, and seemed to think about it for a moment. “Either way, the trick is to get all the capacitors charged, run the primary override, secondary override, flip off the safeties, and then activate the thingy.”

“The thingy?” Rebecca questioned, chewing on the word. Daniel pointed to one of the monitors, showing the big metal crankshaft in the central chamber. It was one of the few active cameras.

“The thingy. Supposedly it’s a kind of semi-perpetual piston generator. Uses magnets and stuff. I have a dossier I can give to you later if you want to read about it. It generates enough juice to power the whole place but the USS kept it on reserve. They didn’t want anything frozen to wake up but also didn’t want to freeze to death here in the process.” Daniel’s voice had a forced calm to it, as he pondered it. “Fuck ‘em.”

“USS? So you’re familiar with these people?” Jill said, after the two women had fallen into a tense silence behind Daniel. He hadn’t noticed, as he ran through the capacitor balancing system, tweaking things so the safeties wouldn’t trip. Again.

“Yeah. This was my third run in with them. Umbrella Security Services, Viperstrike team, led by one Jacob MacKinnon.” Daniel froze, then let out a dark little chuckle that put her and Rebecca on edge. “Formerly.”

“Why does that name sound familiar?” Rebecca asked, choosing not to dwell on whatever that was.

“He was the guy who came with the Birkins to your Thanksgiving party, Becca. Don’t worry, I didn’t recognize him at first, either. Not that that’s a concern any more.” He said, glibly. His heartbeat seemed to be steadying as he worked, diving into the task. 

“Wait, hold up a second. Are you saying those people were with Umbrella? Like the pharmaceutical company Umbrella.” Jill said, her voice incredulous, as if she couldn’t believe what she’d heard.

“Yes, that Umbrella. Bringing you green herb, first aid spray, bandages, makeup, medical equipment, and coming soon to a shelf near you: the ravenous undead.” Daniel shrugged as he shifted something on the screen, before typing in a number of commands. Jill just stared at his back like he was insane.

“...Why?” Was all the brunette could ask, before shaking her head, “No, no, I can understand why. There’s money in weapons, that makes sense, but what you’re talking about is…”

“Impossible? Jill, we know what we saw.” Rebecca said, quietly, and that brought Jill up short. “Whatever those things were, they weren’t human any more.” She turned to him. “But what I don’t get is the logic. Umbrella is a near-trillion dollar entity. What could they have to gain from making some kind of zombie plague?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. I’ve been on them for months and I barely have anything more than what I started with. All I do know is that Umbrella is responsible for the Alphabet viruses and they have about as high of safety standards as a Chinese virology lab.” Danny chuckled, but neither woman got what was so funny about that.

“Alphabet viruses?” Rebecca finally asked.

“Yeah. There was a bunker in Hooverville that had some lunatic ex-Umbrella psychopath trying to make pus monsters with something called the P-Prototype, then there was the Arklay Hospital and it’s plant-based T variant, then there’s just plain old T-Virus, G-Virus, probably a few more besides that. All of them do the same thing, though. It’s a mutagenic retrovirus, capable of jumping cross species from people, to animals, to plants and insects. Causes all kinds of mutations, gigantism, raises the dead somehow, and from what I can tell is capable of infecting you through functionally every vector you can think of.” Both women froze as he broke it down, almost blase in how he described a virus that, for lack of better word, was apocalyptic in proportion and capacity. Rebecca was the first to recover, she had to know, had to ask, but Daniel beat her to it.

“There we go, I think I got it.” He hummed, and hit the enter key. In an instant the whole building gave a rumble as they heard a loud groan of metal. On the screen they saw the massive pylon begin to rotate, a shower of sparks pouring into the long, deep shaft as the metal pistons began to pump. One minute passed, then another, then another as electricity started to lash up and down the building-sized rod, thrumming over and over again with an electric whine. One by one the monitors sparked to life as the full system was restored, and the lights, which had been relegated to emergency yellow, exploded into the pure white of fluorescent incandescence.

All along the building the power kicked in to full, and with it, the capacitors and junctions slowly switched from red, to yellow, to green as the system was flooded with enough juice to power a decently sized town.All along the walls, floodlights flared on, as the insides of buildings burst into full activity. Automatic doors and bulkheads came to life, their keypads flaring, and the buzz of automated machinery filled the air as systems came alive with their last programmed orders. Hundred of miles of heating pipes flared as heat pumps and exchangers activated, their electric boilers fed by an underground river that dumped tens of thousands of gallons of fresh water into the system, running them through compression vents and to their nozzles, releasing a hissing mist of pure white-hot steam into the snowbanks, rapidly melting them and replacing the evening air with a dense cloud of fog and mist.

All this was visible from the power plant control room, as the once dead mine slowly, achingly came back to life. It would be a while before the worst of the banks were cleared out, given how the system was set up, working its way along the most vital access points before branching off. But even as it charged, the heat rumbled through what seemed like a thousand miles of pipes, the rumble and the roar echoing through the dark confines below, the dead facilities above, and the depths of the mine beyond, awakening something dark, and ancient in its wake.

“Well, that was a bit anticlimactic.” Jill grunted, as the machines around the room started to sputter to life, lights blinking into activity and systems powering up. The monitor bank in front of them started to show more and more readouts, all of which were foreign to her but not so much to Daniel as he continued typing away at the laptop. “Was something supposed to happen?”

“Generally? No. It’s not like in the movies, where there’s some big cutaway of all the things turning back on. Usually the lights come back on, stuff starts working again, and all the shit that was stuck behind whatever electronically locked doors had been sealed from the power out usually comes pouring in.” Daniel paused, before looking at Jill. “You did say the underground access to this facility had collapsed, right?”

“As far as we saw. We got cut off from Chris and the others down in the access tunnels and some huge thing made out of a bunch of bodies went after us. It was too big for the access hatch we went through, but it threw a tantrum in the process. Tore the whole corridor up.” Jill confirmed, and Daniel tensed almost imperceptibly. “It led out to a pit under the big power crankshaft that was full of crushed up bones. It’s how we got in.”

“Fuck.” Was all the man said, hand coming up to rub at his masked face with an almost pained groan. “I was worried about that.” He turned to Jill, “And you’re sure that it was made up of a bunch of mushed together bodies, about eight to ten feet tall, insanely tough, crazy aggressive?” Jill nodded again. Daniel let out an exhausted sigh. “It’s always fucking something, isn’t it. Goddamn stalkers.”

“Stalkers?” Rebecca asked, and Danny nodded, as he closed his laptop and started disconnecting it.

“Stalkers. Big, annoying fuckers that’re too tough for our own good and have some kind of trick or gimmick attached to them. It’s not the first time I ran into one, and I’m familiar with it. They’re usually able to regenerate, mutate into larger, scarier versions of themselves, with more claws, mouths, tentacles, armor plating, you name it.” He said, and started telling them about his encounter with this particular flavor of horror. He worked methodically as he spoke on it, his tone even, neutral, like he was reciting a shopping list. He touched on the weaknesses he’d spotted, on how it moved, how it acted, how it responded. He even told them that he had a body camera that got the whole fight if they wanted to see it later.

Both women shared a look as he broke it down, his almost blase tone at odds with the literal stack of revelations he was dropping on them. A silent conversation went past him as he loaded his bag, before shouldering it and grabbing the shotgun, the question of just what he’d gone through to be so blatantly casual about something not even their worst nightmares could conceive of. Like the viruses, and Umbrella, and… Christ, neither even knew where to begin. There was just so much, and not enough time to go into it all.

“You said this isn’t your first time dealing with something like that?” Rebecca finally asked, as Danny started heading towards a door that had gone otherwise ignored for the whole conversation. An elevator, from the look of it, as he hit the button, and almost to his surprise, the machine responded.

“It isn’t. I ran into one when I was at the Arklay Hospital back in November of last year. A T-variant was being used to test cancer cures and caused an outbreak that turned into a plant-hybrid mutation. It was using bodies as seedbeds, first patients and staff, but after the place got shut down it started to spread to the nearby woods. One of the victims was a news reporter that had been up there in the early days that had been killed and infected by a patient. In the intervening time he was infested with the plant variant, and started hunting and killing hikers and forestry people before dragging them back to be implanted. We- I called him the Axeman, on account of wearing an executioner’s hood and a fuckoff huge woodcutting axe.”

“And he was one of these ‘Stalkers’? Wait, I heard about the old hospital burning down last year. It was in the news for like a week. That was you?” Jill probed, as Danny seemed to check the inside for something. Then she asked, “Also, what are you doing?”

“Yeah, turns out Umbrella just let that shit run wild for years, trying to gather data on how the virus worked, what mutations it made, that kind of stuff. By the time I got there things had spiralled enough that viral blooms were all over the mountain. It was… messy.” The word was loaded when it came out of his cold autotuned voice. The way he talked about it, there was just so much there, so many questions, details, just the whole story itself. It would take hours to parse it all, and Jill let it hang. That would be for later. “As for this? I need to go up to the top level. There’s a master control system for all the power junctions and I need to make sure power is going to where I need it.” He hummed, before pausing, and correcting himself. “We need it. Where we need it. I’m also hoping that I’ll be able to access the mainframe from here. I doubt it, but hope springs eternal.”

“Uhm, why, if I could ask?” Rebecca stepped in, pulling his attention. It was… odd, seeing him like this. While he seemed to know what to do, watching him go through it almost mechanically as he did was disconcerting. Danny paused, as if the question had never even occurred to him.

“Because if I can get access to the mainframe, I might be able to pull some files from it before whatever anti-tamper counterfunction blows the computer up. Get some insight on what was going on here and where anything useful might be. Speaking of-” He stopped, fishing around in one of his pockets and producing a gold coin. “You haven’t seen any of these around. Or just… random gold, jewels, bars of valuable metals, things like that?”

Jill blinked at the aside, as the three piled in. “Why?”

“Helps fund the operation.” Daniel shrugged. “It’s just something I’ve learned to keep an eye out for. I got most of the stuff lying around here, but you never know.”

That got another shared look from the two women, before Rebecca asked delicately, “Where do you usually find these things?”

“Depends. The first go I found them on plaques, shelves, bodies, the usual suspects. They were put up in weird shrines made out of twigs and shit at the hospital. Sometimes the zombies or whatever other freaks are wandering around have them too.” The words were way too calm for what he was describing, and there was a hard frown on Rebecca’s face at the uncaring, almost detached statement. Jill shared the look, but didn’t comment.

It made sense, in a way. Guns were expensive, equipment was expensive, and they didn’t even begin to know where to start with the fact that Daniel was wearing what looked like millions in advanced kit. The money for it had to come from somewhere, and neither really knew how to feel about the reality of how that came about. On a moral level it was graverobbing and trophy taking, but neither was innocent enough to not understand what the stakes he seemed to be operating under were. He was just so casual about it that it left a bad taste in their mouths. The dangers of being cops, Jill supposed. All that sense of justice, even as reality sees it and laughs.

“Either way, keep an eye out. Speaking of, though, do either of you need ammo, or meds? I have a decent stockpile. I should have asked while we were still in the control room.” The sudden turn in topics was welcome, letting both just… ignore the ethically dubious nature of just how Daniel was keeping his operation afloat. And as it turned out, yes, they did need ammo and supplies. The fact that he had dozens of shotshells, pistol rounds, grenades, a menagerie of medical supplies and herbs, and more, was a bit stunning, but it made sense to Jill after a moment’s thought.

She was aware that she was getting caught up in his flow, even though earlier she said she wouldn’t. It was largely because he did seem to have some idea on what to do, and had his own goals, ones that neither woman had tried to dissuade him from, seeing the futility of it. Better to save their energy for something productive, and there was some comfort in the fact that he did indeed seem to know a lot about what was going on, the questions kept mounting, and the answers seemed to just spawn even more questions, enough so that she personally didn’t see a point in touching base on the apparent revelation that the fucking bandage company is also making world-ending zombie plague.

Also that Rebecca’s boyfriend was the reason behind Irons’ being exceptionally thunderous after the old Arklay Hospital burned down. Especially when he had shut down any investigation into it after the fact, supposedly at the behest of the mayor, which… didn’t speak well of either. Which then had her wheels really turning, because there was no such thing as a coincidence when it came to that level of intervention. More than a few of her fellow STARS had found it odd that the whole thing had been quashed. Then there was the Umbrella connection.

She wasn’t sure what to do with that. Daniel seemed very convinced about the company’s guilt and she didn’t really even know what he knew to convince him of that, but again, he seemed to know a lot about this, so she was giving him the benefit of the doubt. It was like the old saying about the improbability of the impossible. And that was her great frustration, really. There was so much that needed to be aired and as much as she hated to say it, getting the thing from someone who was running on what felt like a combination of jittery resolution and very likely pure adrenaline was going to be difficult.

The fact that he seemed so scatterbrained paid testament to that. Things he was realizing almost after the fact, aborted thoughts, a general twitchiness that seemed to pervade him when he stood still and more, it all compounded to reassure her of her decision to, at the very least, get him to the camp he’d told her about that according to him was secure enough to rest at. Doubly so with Rebecca hovering just outside his bubble of personal space like a mother hen. Her focus was almost exclusively on him, and that was just as potentially dangerous to them all as Daniel’s exhaustion was.

“According to my map, the head administrative control is on the top level.” Daniel said as he swept out into the hallway beyond the elevator doors. The distinct lack of fire put paid to the concern that there were any USS remnants left up there, but Jill knew enough to not be lulled in by the lack of security. “There isn’t much up here, just the plant manager’s office and the control room, and the roof access for the helipad.” That last bit sounded almost annoyed, she noted.

“Anything to worry about?” Jill asked, as Daniel raised his gun and started the march forwards.

“If you see a huge man with grey skin, don’t engage with it unless it attacks. Tyrants are Umbrella’s bread and butter stalker-type. Extreme bullet resistance, regen, very volatile and as far as I know have a computer for a brain. Very strong, too.”

“You’re familiar with them, too?” Jill queried, and got a nod in return.

“Tangentially. I’ve only had one run in with them, but they weren’t interested in me. I don’t think they’ll be around, but that is wholly dependent on if their master is still here.” Neither woman liked the sound of that as they stopped outside the manager’s office. Jill saw that it required a keycard to access, and let out a curse.

“Fuck, you wouldn’t happen to have the keycard on you, would you Dan?” She grumbled, testing the solid oak door. It wasn’t budging. “It might be in the-” She began, only to be greeted by the sound of splintering wood. She spun to stare at Daniel as he rammed a crowbar into the frame, pushing and prying as the thick oak started to give. After a moment he stopped pushing, and with a harsh grunt kicked the bar, and the door cracked in two with the bark of a gunshot. He then ripped the two halves down, the magnetic latch and securing bar coming loose as he violently pulled it all down. “Or you could do that.”

Inside they found a lavish but otherwise normal office, not unlike the one the chief had laid claim to, but this one not filled with a bunch of creepily stuffed trophies. Daniel was inside in an instant, striding up to the desk, and then pausing with a sour look on his face. On the burnished wood was a card with his name on it, along with a tiny device that rested next to it. He lifted the card, and the device, before pocketing it. He then stared at the card for a long, long time.

“Danny, what is it?” Rebecca finally asked, breaking her silence for the first time in what felt like forever. He wordlessly handed it over, and she read it aloud. “A thank you gift for dealing with a certain snake in the grass. V. Who’s V, and what’s that?” The words tumbled out, and Danny tensed. Fingering the device, he flicked it, and a little silver tag slid out.

“V is a man by the name of Victor Gideon. He… did something to me.” The man didn’t elaborate. After a moment he reached up to his shoulder and slid out a thin, rectangular device that had wires running from it into his helmet and armor. He plugged the device in, and hummed ominously. “As for what that was, it was a USB key with the map schematics of this place. Including all the additions. My systems identified it the second I touched it. Seems ole’ Vicky wants me going on a wild goose chase.”

“What do you mean, Danny? What did he do to you?” Rebecca asked, but Daniel shook his head.

“Later, Becca.” At her frown, he added, “I promise. But for right now I need to get hooked up to…” He trained off as he pulled out the computer tower that had been tucked under the desk, only to find it shredded. “Oh that pigfucking son of a bitch.” He growled, and pulled the whole unit out roughly. The back had been torn open and the parts inside were smashed to pieces. He reached in and pulled out a mangled hard drive, before tossing it against the wall with a crash. The desktop followed a moment later.

Jill watched on impassively as Rebecca’s boyfriend raged, cursing whoever this Gideon person was with an impressive list of epithets. Rebecca put a hand on his shoulder, which seemed to calm him down immediately, and they shared some private words. Jill, for her part, went to the desk and started digging through the paperwork that had been left piled up, popping open the drawers and fishing around while Daniel got himself under control. Admittedly this being the second outburst was concerning, but she didn’t know if the instability was from the trauma or the exhaustion. All the times before he’d been very even tempered, almost meek on occasion, and generally nonconfrontational.

Well, barring that last time, but she was willing to chalk it up to the nature of what went down. The aggression was new, though. At least for her, anyway, but she was glad that he seemed to have enough of a handle on it to not lash out at them. Everything else was fair game, though. Distractedly, she shook her head. Focusing on the task at hand she finished running through the desk. Most of it was largely useless. Reports on power usage, repair requests, notices of increased power draw and… she almost missed it, buried as it was, but the fact that it was hand-written was enough to catch her eye in the bottom of one of the last sheafs.

“You might not have the mainframe access, but I think I found something else. Take a look at this.” Jill called out, grabbing both the others’ attention. Holding it up, Rebecca took the bundle of papers.

“What is it?” She asked, as she started leafing through it. It started simple enough, just a bunch of notations on there being an added power draw being allocated for the mine. Something about a backup system being installed in the outer tunnels. It was all written in code, for the most part, but when she got to the last two pages the tone abruptly shifted.

“Lost thirteen on the project, electrical specialist Hernandez called it in. There was a delayed backfire in the system and the grid they put down fried seven men when it activated. Still not sure why the boss ordered in a security grid in the main access shaft, but putting in a series of hydrazine cutting lasers in is a fiasco. Those were some of our best service techs that fuckup chopped up, and we haven’t been getting in replacements like Director Spangler said we would. I don’t know what they’re thinking at the top, but we can’t keep losing people like this.” She read out loud.

“Seven more caught that weird disease that’s got Earnhardt and all her little minions wet, and that just adds on to the thirty three from last week, the nineteen from the week before and the hundred-odd some from last month. At this point there’s more sickies than there are healthy miners, and everyone in the maintenance and service teams is nervous ever since they put the blackout in place. Even my managers are starting to ask uncomfortable questions, and I need answers, from you or from the top, I really don’t care which. We need those replacements and the parts you were promising to get the capacitors back up to full, or else we won’t even be able to turn on those goddamn ‘countermeasures’ if we need them.” She finished, handing it over to Daniel, who skimmed it. It was signed by the power plant administrator, a guy by the name of Sutla, and painted an uncomfortable picture.

“Color me un-fucking-surprised.” The armored man sighed, the sound audible even with his helmet in the way. “If I had to guess, whatever that security grid is, we’re going to have to get it turned back on if we want a chance and shutting all this down. But at least it’s something.”

“That your experience talking, Dan?” Jill asked, a little sardonically, but the laugh he gave in response was anything but encouraging.

“It’s always like that. These people are obsessed with coming up with every flavor of containment known to man, only to fuck it up somehow. Then it blows up.” He grunted as they stepped back out into the corridor. “It begs to wonder just how they managed to get so big while being this goddamn incompetent, but I’m pretty sure once the people at the top get what they want they just… stop caring. So what if it gets a thousand people killed in the process. Their bottom line needs another percentage point in the black.”

The walk to the control room was done in silence at that. Daniel took the lead, with Rebecca following him like a stressed out mother hen, and Jill brought up the rear, the procession almost peaceful as they made their way to the main control room. Getting there, the breach was too easy, the lack of anyone or anything in the comparatively compact room at the top of the pyramid-like structure opening up into a triangular panopticon of thick glass and several monitor banks connected to a big screen that was covered in pieces of the facility’s diagram. Each one was lit red, yellow or green, and each one had a stream of scrolling readouts.

Looking out the window below, the air was choked with low-hanging steam clouds, the apparent heating system billowing out to try and melt the thick mountain snow that had literally cloaked most of the buildings in the intervening weeks. If they had to guess, the snow was as much as fifteen feet deep in some places, the frigid altitude freezing the endless white into thick layers of sandwiched ice between the drifts, the top layer melting in the sun, only to get buried with the next snow drift, over and over again, making the process of melting it all a slow and arduous one.

“How the hell did you manage to get up here without taking the underground, Danny?” Rebecca asked, slightly incredulously. The top of the pyramid put that at almost six stories above the ground and even that was partially buried. Almost halfway up on one side.

“It wasn’t this bad when I made my way up here. I tried to time it right after the last major thaw. The storm came in from Canada when I was mostly here, so all I needed to do was get the gate working.” He shrugged. “Honestly I was expecting to get the power plant on and all those heating systems going days ago. It’s going to take forever for this shit to clear up enough to get access to the other facilities.”

“Well, we could do with a snow day, doncha think?” Rebecca tried, quite valiantly, to say cheerfully. Both Jill and Danny turned to look at her. “What?”

“Nothing, rookie.” She said, a bit amused, but mostly sardonically. “So we’re here, Carter. What are we doing here and when can we leave?”

“In a minute. I just want to make sure that the system is focusing on the things we want it to, and also isn’t going to explode and kill us all, along with, presumably, everything on this side of the mountain. Only one of those things is preferable.” He said as he walked over to one of the PCs. It was local network only, but that didn’t surprise him. What did was that it was still largely intact. Most of the draws were going to where they wanted them to, mainly to the defrosting system which, if the numbers were right, was drawing enough juice to power a municipality, along with the lighting, security, and some of the automated maintenance systems.

It was a mixed bag of things. A lot of the active systems weren’t accessible to him without some kind of direct access to the right authorizations, many of which needed approval through the Admin office in the worker barracks. Things like the ventilation system, which seemed to be now working overtime, probably blasting stagnant mine air directly into the snow, or god willing, into the freezing air where the cold would sterilize any contaminants, of which Daniel was sure there were tons of. The other systems were flagging warnings that the capacitors were only running at a fifth of their usual storage, the batteries mostly fried or otherwise non-functional, limiting how many ancillary systems could be used at a time. What that meant for them, he didn’t know, but it wasn’t good. There would be no reactivating the countermeasures without repairing or replacing those parts, so that was great.

All in all it was about as bad as he expected it to be. He was able to get power to all the main facilities, so doors, power locks, and most importantly, heating was back online, and each facility had its own battery bank that would let it draw power from the plant until they were full. So long as it didn’t die before they were charged up, each one could run the essentials for several days a piece. There would be no more scrounging for breakers to run the backup-backup generators.

In theory.

He hoped.

“We can leave now, Jill, Becca.” He looked up, and saw both women standing at the window. Walking up, he saw immediately what they were staring at. The worker complex across the way was covered in smoke as a whole section of it burned, sending a pillar of black into the sky. A moment later an explosion rocked the mountainside, the blast so loud they could hear it through the thick windows of the panopticon as it shook the building. There wasn’t any doubt as to who caused the explosion, or the confirmation that it brought to everyone there. Jill had said that there was nothing they could do because they didn’t know where the rest of their team was or if they were moving. That question was answered with a pillar of fire that went a hundred feet into the air.

“We need to get down there.” Jill stated, with the surety of the tides and the firmness of a mountain. Any other plans were put on hold. There would be no argument.

“Then we will be.” Daniel said, as he eyed the door on the side of the room that led out to the helipad, and checked the power supply on his exoframe. More than enough. “How do you feel about taking the express?” He asked the two women, suddenly.

As it turned out, neither seemed to like it all that much as they clung onto him for dear life as he jumped off the roof and into the snow below.