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Tie the Noose Chapter 45
"Fuck!" Daniel screamed as the tentacles converged on him, diving out of the way as the chitinous limbs slammed into the concrete with bone-jarring force. He kicked off hard and scrambled sideways, boots skidding as he fought for balance, the air snapping with each violent strike that missed him by inches. The sound alone was enough to rattle his teeth, wet, cracking impacts followed by the shriek of stressed metal as nearby fixtures bent under the force of the blows.
One of the limbs crashed down where he'd been a heartbeat earlier, the impact shuddering up through the ground and into his bones. Dust and fragments of concrete burst upward in a choking cloud, peppering his face and stinging his eyes. He hit the floor, rolled through the momentum, and surged back to his feet in one motion, already bringing his weapon up toward the writhing mass. Shots ripped through the air, but they went wide, detonating against the far wall as he was forced to stagger out of the way of a lashing strike.
Another tentacle punched out, faster this time, clipping the edge of his shoulder as he twisted away. Pain flared sharp and immediate, a flare of sparks from the spines scraping the armored plates, but he ground it out as he fired again and again, clipping the tentacles but failing to get a clean hit, the impacts glancing off the armored limbs or exploding harmlessly after bouncing off. Daniel gritted his teeth, adjusting his stance, trying to anticipate the next strike before it came while tracking the coils with his weapon.
He steadied his aim for a fraction of a second, breath hitching as he tracked the chaotic twisting of the tentacles as they reared back. Daniel exhaled sharply, forcing his focus to narrow, locking onto a momentary opening as the limbs recoiled for another strike. The saiga barked in his hands, sending an explosive round into one of the heavy cables of flesh, the explosion echoing as the limb split open, rending a horrific scream of pain from the monster that had the building itself shivering, literally, as snow fell from the roof to crash down around them.
Chris broke hard in the opposite direction with Jill hooked under his arm, wrenching her away before the tentacles could catch either of them in their wild undulations, the sharp-edged armor kicking up ice and concrete as they hit the ground hard enough to shatter it. Her boots skidded over the icy concrete, one heel catching in a crack and nearly pitching her forward while his grip on her vest kept her upright. Pain punched through her wounded legs hard enough to make her snarl into her mask, the sound ragged and furious under the hiss of her filter.
She drove her wounded legs harder, her knees screaming as the abused bones ground together in a way she didn’t like, but she kept trying until she managed something like a sloppy gait. Her knees buckled once, dipped low, and then locked with a tremor that ran through her whole frame. Jill dragged the P90 up one-handed and squeezed the trigger, spraying a tentacle that came an inch too close to her in hot, armor-piercing lead that had it snapping away from her wildly, even as Chris fought to pull her along.
The compact weapon hammered against her shoulder, each burst jerking her arm while she fought the muzzle back down. Rounds tore across the oncoming tendrils in ragged diagonal lines, punching black divots through wet outer flesh and chewing loose strips of meat that slapped against the concrete. It wasn’t enough.
The fleshy length came in low, flattening into a broad sweeping lash that skimmed above the ground fast enough to cut off both of them at the knees. Chris forcefully dragged them back, one hand still hooked into the back of her vest while his other brought the Galil in tight. He pulled her down into the crouch as gently as he could, but she still let out a pained grunt as the tentacle cut through the empty space so close that the passing force ruffled their jackets, cracking like a taut whip as the thick spine on the top gouged into the wall beside them.
Chris fired three tight bursts from the Galil before the limb could recover, the heavier rounds slapping into the black, rotten meat, the holes punching through the limb leaving gouts of brackish fluid all over the ground. He was joined a second later by Jill, and between them they savaged the tentacle, the meaty mass whapping against the ground wetly before being sucked down below.
It was a momentary reprieve, one that died an ugly death as the ground bulged like a tumor and three more of the cables, thinner, but no less deadly, ripped through the ground in a cluster. Chris’s heart sank into his chest as they all turned to them, as if they were tracking the two STARS with an unerring hate.
“We need to move, Chris!” Jill shouted as the cables converged. He grabbed the back of her vest and hauled her sideways, dragging her hard enough to make her let out a wordless complaint, even as her legs heavily hit the ground, forcing her along. Jill twisted back, not letting the tentacles chase them, and fired past his shoulder, the pepper of rounds making the things recoil harshly.
It was too little too late as the three reared up in unison, just as her gun clicked empty. She turned to shout into Chris’s ear, but he was two steps ahead of her, diving for a concrete protrusion that, on further examination, looked like a bench. It was thick, made of hard concrete and metal, with two dead and frozen-over planters boxing it in. It screamed of a brutalist toughness that Jill hoped would hold up.
They slammed in behind it just as the limbs struck, and the impact cracked through the barrier with a brutal report. Chunks of concrete exploded outward, peppering the two with sharp fragments. Chris shoved Jill under him, shielding her from the worst of it as the rocks dug into them. In an instant he was up, rifle barking as he sprayed one of the limbs down in 7.62, the sound of Jill slamming a fresh mag home as she hauled herself up to join him.
It barely slowed the limbs down as they battered their bit of cover, the first strike collapsing one of the planters in, only to be clapped two more times, one shattering the concrete box and the next hitting the bench hard enough to wrench half of it out of the ground. It wouldn’t survive another hit, they both realized at the same time.
“Move, move, move!” Chris barked as he pulled her clear of the next swing, which ripped the bench out even more, mangling it as chunks of concrete scattered across the ground, the boring bolts the only thing keeping the crumbling edifice from being ripped away completely. “We gotta get out of here, Jill!”
“I know that, Chris!” Jill snapped back, teeth clenched behind the mask as she limped hard to his left and fired at the tentacle trying to loop behind them. “My legs got chewed on, not my brain!”
Chris let her take the lead and shifted low to the right, keeping his rifle clear of her while she forced her body through the pain. Her second step nearly went out from under her, her knees groaning as she nearly tumbled, almost dropping her P90 in the process. She barely managed to catch herself, turning it into a rough sidestep instead, and kept firing as the two tried to get clear of the lashing vines.
The limb curled around them, its inner teeth flexing open as it searched for anything it could sink those three inch needles into, something soft, something vulnerable. Chris put two bursts into the curling appendage, forcing it to rear up, exposing the soft inner flesh. Jill raked the underside from left to right until it peeled open under the hail of fire.
The tentacle slammed down between them, forcing them to roll away, avoiding being crushed just barely, but Jill wasn’t able to recover as fast as Chris had and caught the return swipe to her chestplate. She let out a sharp gasp as she was sent tumbling, and Chris saw red. He let out a titanic roar as he charged towards her, rifle barking until it clicked empty, dropping it without a second thought as he rapped his fingers around the handle of his handgun.
He ducked under the descending mass, felt the teeth scrape across the top of his jacket, ripping insulation and cloth, but missing anything vital, and drove the Samurai Edge’s muzzle up into the fold where the flesh opened. The rapid string of shots blew black fluid out through the back of the tentacle and forced the limb to recoil with a violent twist.
The tentacle sent running, Chris charged for Jill, his boots slapping hard against the ground as Jill grabbed his outstretched arm, hauling herself upright with him as the anchor, and both of them broke away before the next slimy appendage rose managed to find them. Daniel tried to send a few rounds downrange against the encroaching tentacles, but it was too little to make a difference, and his attention was ripped away as he faced his own problems.
The moment Chris dragged Jill clear, it was like the spigot was turned on, and he was the center of attention in all the worst ways. The ground shuddered under his boots, splitting open with a wet, grinding crack as several spines drove up through the concrete in a tight cluster, nearly splitting him in two as he stumbled away. Several tentacles coiled high in the air, rising fast enough to throw shards of stone outward in a jagged shotgun blast of shattered stone, their slimy bodies glinting in the light like flowing oil, thicker than the ones that came before, pulsing and throbbing as they flexed unnaturally.
Daniel brought the saiga up and fired half a dozen times in the span of a breath, the gun kicking in his shoulder as he jogged back. The shotshells ripping through the nearest limb just as it finished unfurling, punching thick holes in the fleshy tendril but not enough to even slow it down. It coiled violently, slashing at him as he danced with it, only to have to drop prone at the last moment to avoid a stabbing strike from behind that would have caught him clear in the spine. he rolled hard to avoid a downward slam and kicked his legs, the exoframe whining as it kipped him back to his feet.
Another tendril surged up after him with a vicious thrust that he felt rake across his arm, grinding against his gauntlet, pulling at the metal plates with a ripping force that would have split his arm from elbow to palm without it, and he was forced to bat it away with his gun before emptying the mag into it, the fourth that he'd emptied out in as many minutes. The gun clicked silent as the tentacle swished away, only to be replaced with another.
“Of fucking course,” Daniel muttered bitterly, already moving as he tracked the new threat. He hated to admit it, but the buckshot wasn't doing the job, and they were getting overwhelmed. Chris and Jill had been getting pushed farther and farther from him, getting isolated as he was caught up dancing with the slimy abominations. He needed to go back to the grenades, if only for the kick. Problem was, he was down to maybe six mags of those, despite HUNK's gift to him filling him up and him loading literally everything he had in his truck to make up for it.
Gritting his teeth and letting out a hiss of agitation, he fished out the stick of grenades and slammed it in, the gun chambering the round with a satisfying click. He would just have to be more careful, he decided, as he lined up his first shot. The gun kicked, and the detonation rang like a gong. The shell hit right at the base of a cluster of the things, uprooting several as they hosed the area in black, stolid-smelling filth. The nest caught one of the big, heavy limbs right in the middle, carving out a weeping crater of grey meat and brackish blood.
He fired again before the limb could recover, and the second shot split it apart mid-growth, the upper half shredding into a bloody, flagellating stump. The lower half recoiled and vanished quickly, but he was already firing into the hole from where it came. More tentacles burst through fresh cracks almost instantly, but were ripped to chunks as he sprayed the gap down with a dark cackle, scything the gun across to the next bundle like a harvester cutting wheat, if he was using an artillery piece to do it..
He cut between several, carving a path that managed to almost reduce the writhing appendages to something approaching manageable. His boots crunched over the shattered earth, skidded over broken concrete, and knocking debris aside in his unfaltering march across the field. The saiga barked as a near-constant herald, the blasts rolled across the ground in a string of brutal, rapid cracks. His armor caught the occasional bit of shrapnel, some even digging into his flesh, but he didn't feel it as the heat in his belly began to grow, pulsing with every shot like a heartbeat of fire.
It was a temporary solution though, as he slammed his third magazine into the saiga. The tentacles were tearing themselves across the surface now, dragging through the concrete with a slick, muscular pull that made it hard to predict where they'd be when he fired, and every miss was feeling more and more dire. Daniel shifted direction again to keep them turning with him, firing into anything that got too close, not trying to finish them anymore so much as force some space between them and the two STARS that had been reaping their own tally and keep their attention firmly locked on him.
Around his boots the courtyard dipped and cracked in erratic patterns, the sagging concrete flashing brief glimpses of the infected tunnels beneath. That was the other big threat with all the damage the damn things were doing to the ground. He'd had to be more careful with where he moved, unless he wanted to be dropped into the abyss below. Behind him the ground groaned and settled another inch, and he didn’t look back, since he already knew what it meant. If the lot gave out, all of them were going with it.
At the rate things were going, the ground itself was going to fall out from under them, and from the panicked look he caught from Chris and Jill, they had come to the same conclusion. The two had been moving from cover to cover around the edges while he played decoy, but the new holes in the ground were a combination of trap and spawning point for the tentacles, something the creature behind them was more than happy to take advantage of as it kept trying to catch him and drag him down.
Paradoxically, dropping grenades down the holes just made them wider, as he found out almost to his fatal detriment as a whole section of the ground collapsed with the shot, leaving a gaping hole that had dozens of the tentacles coiling out, turning a whole corner of the yard into a death trap. Nobody was risking getting close to it, though Chris had tried dropping a few grenades down the pit to see if it helped. It really, really didn't as the tentacles were all but fireproof and the ocean of sludge down there was anything but flammable. Things were looking dire, and they all knew it.
“Captain!” Chris shouted into his radio as he slid in behind Jill as the two scuttled behind an overturned utility cart and leaned out to fire. “What’s the hold up? If we don’t get this wrapped up soon we’re all fucked!”
Wesker answered through a line of static, calm but clipped, with the steady rhythm of keys clattering behind him. “There’s something jamming the door, and it’s not responding to the release codes. There’s a way to override the lockout, but it’s locked behind three administrative confirmations. I’ve bypassed two. The third is being… stubborn.”
“Stubborn?” Jill gasped, ducking down behind the cart as she reloaded, the snap of the magazine echoing over the radio as she charged it. “What the fuck does that mean, Cap!? What asshole designed this fucking thing!?”
“Whoever it was, I ardently hope they died screaming.” Wesker replied, his voice tightening as another burst of typing came over the channel. “Keep moving, but stay low. The cameras show multiple emergence points threading through the central lot, and they seem to be tracking you through motion and noise. If you can stay quiet, they’ll lose track of you. Carter seems to be the focus of their attention anyway.”
“Yeah, I fucking noticed!” Daniel barked as he slapped a red-banded stick of buckshot into his saiga and emptying half into a tentacle that tried to get a little too intimate with him. “Please get this fucking door open, Al!”
A tentacle lashed across his right side, fast enough that he had to eat the hit instead, letting out a pained grunt as his metal boots screeched across the ground in a shower of sparks. He wrapped an arm around it, ignoring the scraping sound of the teeth scrabbling against his chestplate, his fingers digging into the thing hard enough that the chitin started cracking under his fingers. It tried to force its way out of his grasp, but despite the slickness, he held it tight with a vice grip. His other hand found his axe and he started hacking away, chopping the limb free with a vicious roar, but it was a pyrrhic victory at best.
“Pigfucker.” He spat, as another limb rapidly took the place of the first, snapping for his ankle, teeth flexing open as it tried to cinch around his leg. Daniel stamped down on it with all his weight, pinning the slick flesh under his boot long enough to draw his magnum from his hip and fire. The gun roared beneath him, and the impact punched up through the fleshy mass, ripping it in two and leaving a divot the size of his fist in the ground. For a moment he was a touch stunned. That was new. The hell did the Survivalist do to this thing?
“Daniel, left!” Jill screamed and his head shot up as he threw himself into a wild dive. It saved him by inches, as a tentacle speared through the space where his head had been, the razor-tipped spine digging into the wall behind him so hard it got stuck. He ripped a new mag from his carrier and slapped it in, the old bouncing across the ground with a clatter as he pulled the trigger. The buckshot load punched through the tendril, rending the appendage that had just tried to turn his head into a kebab into strips of weeping flesh.
He didn’t see the second coming up until it whipped him like a lash, more flexible than the others, and moving as fast as it was, it was enough to lift his four hundred pound frame clean off the ground and send him tumbling across the field, almost into a tangle of flexible vines that sprouted from the ground, trying to catch him like a net. His exoframe screamed in protest as he dug his feet in like a baseball slide, stopping just short of the entangling limbs and scrambling away.
The bark of the shotgun peppered them with double-aught, and these sprayed out the brackish fluid like it was pressurized, shriveling as they were sucked back down. It made his breath catch in his throat before he screamed out across the line, “Two types! There are two fucking types! Watch out for the thin ones, they’re a shitload faster! Like the one that caught Jill!”
“Got it!” Chris shot back as he poured the fire onto one such tentacle that had been trying to snake around them. They poured fire into anything they could, tucked behind their cover, their rounds cutting into anything they could get a bead on, and the selection was only getting bigger. Jill fired in short bursts, conserving her ammo as much as she could, but still burned through the 5.7 at a breakneck pace. Chris, by contrast, had swapped over to the grenade launcher, shelling the clusters as they appeared, trying to avoid getting too close to Daniel who was in the thick of a dozen of them at least, one had holding the saiga, firing it like a pistol and seemingly uncaring about the wrist-shattering recoil in the process, while the other had wrapped around his axe, which he was using to chop away at the limbs like a demented lumberjack.
The three were a dervish of violence, but it was a losing fight. For every tentacle they destroyed, five more seemed to spawn, and there had to be dozens down there, and they only had so many bullets. The grenades were helping, closing up some holes, but the flames were short-lived, and with how wet and viscous the tentacles were, even they were proving to be remarkably flame-resistant, still Chris was hesitant to load the heavier explosives for fear of dropping one on Daniel. His armor was tough, but it wasn't that tough, and compared to a 40 mike mike, those party favors of his weren't anything.
Chris saw Daniel take hit after hit in that tightening kill box and knew they were one bad second away from losing him. The tentacles had risen high, low, and behind, crowding the seven foot brute until there was hardly any space left between the tangle of writhing vines. Daniel still moved inside that shrinking pocket, weaving with brutal precision and firing as fast as he could cycle the saiga, but even from where he stood Chris could tell things were turning against him. Every dodge bought less room than the one before it. Every shot Daniel fired only seemed to piss the mass of biting and stabbing tendrils off more.
Chris forced himself to calm down, reigning in the worry that had been gripping him. Panic would get Daniel killed faster than any monster ever could, and he needed to find a solution. So far he'd let the tentacles dictate the flow of the fight, fighting a never-ending stream of them was about as effective as punching a river, and just as useless in hindsight. No, they needed something that would work. Explosives could provide a moment's reprieve, but a single glance at the death pit that had cut them off from the exit gate was enough of a lesson in why that was a bad idea. No, there had to be something, anything, they could use to kill this thing, whatever it was.
That was when he spotted the barrels lashed into a shallow service recess by the wall. He'd almost missed it, hidden behind a half-open container door, but once he locked onto it, his eyes lit up. The stenciling was half-peeled off and crusted with grime, though enough of the warning text remained to matter:
WARNING! CAUSTIC AGENT
DO NOT EXPOSE TO HIGH HEAT! PRESSURE WARNING!
The idea hit him like a sledgehammer to the face. There wasn't enough to flood the underground, but there might be enough to discourage the damn tentacles from poking up out from under it. Glancing back, Jill continued to fire into the mass of undulating coils, but they'd lost interest in the two of them for the big, loud, noisy giant currently trying to rip one of the tendrils clean out of the ground. And succeeding, if the tearing muscle was any indication.
Chris grinned as he keyed the radio and shouted, “Carter, get them packed tight and keep them distracted!”
Daniel ducked a snapping sweep that would have taken his head off and roared back, “The fuck you think I'm doing, Redfield!?”
"You're doing a good job!" Chris shouted back, getting a curse in his direction but not much else as the giant's attention was torn elsewhere. Crossing the distance in several massive spans and sliding across the ground as he screeched to a stop in front of the doors. His fingers wrapped around the door as he pulled, getting an agonized screech as the rusty hinges came loose under his tender ministrations. As soon as he had enough clearance, he grabbed one of the barrels, giving it a pull, ignoring the tacky buildup that had crusted around the lid. He had to believe this would work.
"Whatever you're gonna do, Chris, do it fast! Dan's getting the shit kicked out of him!" Jill called over the radio as her P90 roared over the open mic. Daniel was silent, too busy trying to break out of the tangle of limbs that had coiled around him. The flash of an explosive shell popped in the mass, sending ragged chunks flying. If nothing else, he was doing a good job, as Chris started pulling one of the large drums over, rolling it over on its edge until he pulled up next to Jill.
“Here, take this!” Chris said as he reached her, unslinging the grenade launcher and practically dropping it on her as he wheeled the barrel around, dropping it to its side. Jill stared at him, uncomprehendingly, before the pieces clicked together for her. She checked the grenade launcher, seeing four more napalm rounds ready to go, and snapped it shut.
“When this gets close to that big cluster over there, hit it with a ‘nade. It should give those bastards a nice bath!” He shouted as he gave a heaving push, sending the thick barrel of caustic chemicals rolling down the rubble-strewn concrete. It bounced once, then twice, but managed to get within spitting distance of the coiled tangle that hunted Daniel.
“Fire in the hole!” Jill screamed over the radio as Daniel’s eyes landed on them and tracked their aim to the barrel. He didn’t hesitate for a second, getting the hell out of there as the launcher barked. A moment later of burning napalm washed over the barrel, the heat soaking into the metal as the sticky accelerant washed over it. It didn’t take long for the barrel to bulge obscenely, puffing up wildly as the fire bathed it, and suddenly a pop tore through the air, first one, then another, then a dozen, and like an overwrought can of soda left too long in the sun, the can itself spit open with a thunderous roar, exploding into a mist of boiling white that engulfed the tentacles, the wind carrying it in all directions as the aerosolized concoction filled the field. Then kept going. And going.
“Uh… I think we need to go. Like, right now!” Chris said, suddenly less sure as the thick cloud came closer and closer, the chemical heavier than the air, but that only managed to keep it at head-level. He grabbed Jill roughly, dragging her up as the two backed away, and suddenly a slash of something long and thick sliced through the air, cutting the mist like a knife. It was one of the tentacles, a thick one, armored and tipped with a stinger, of which it looked like it’d seen better days. The cloud engulfed it, but even from a distance they could see the acid was having a nasty effect on it.
The outer layer had been eaten away entirely, revealing pulsing, throbbing grey muscles that wept rivulets of black fluid, the teeth that lines it coming loose as the acid ate away at its gums, bleeding into the countless rents in the limbs and leaving a hissing, sulfurous stink in its wake. Another cut through, and a third, all of them dissolving in the wash of toxic fog, sloughs of chemically charred flesh peeling away like plastic dunked in boiling oil, curling up on itself as it crinkled and flaked. A horrific roar shook the world around them, massive and terrifyingly close, as the tendrils began to withdraw.
The two stood safely out of the range of the cloud as it began to thin and settle, Jill leaning heavily on Chris. She had pushed her mask up, taking a second during the momentary respite to shove a tincture of herb, the good stuff, a mix of red, green and blue she’d gotten from Daniel’s stash, down her throat now that she had a second to breathe. She hated how it burned through her system, making her vision swim and her senses go a bit haywire. She hadn’t dared to try it in the middle of a fight, knowing the side effects would hit her like they did, but now?
She was getting real goddamn tired of leaning on Chris, and she needed to be able to walk. The drugs did their job, as her head swam, but her bearings became steadier, and her legs finally stopped shaking as the holes closed up, at least mostly. The fact that some crimson still dripped fresh blood had her heart sinking into her stomach. Those herbs were hellaciously potent, and Daniel had the good stuff, according to him. Home grown, meticulously managed. There shouldn't have been anything left of her injuries, but even with the pain gone, she still bled.
“Fuck, Dan!” Chris’s shout caught her attention, ripping it away from her own wounds as she moved to join her partner, only for her breath to catch in her throat. Unlike them, Daniel had been in the thick of it, and he hadn’t gotten away nearly as clean. The sleeve of his BDU had been ripped away, and the skin underneath was blistered and angry. The burns weren’t as bad as she’d feared, but the four vials of herbal remedy laying next to him told a different story. He was in the process of fishing out a bandage from one of his side packs when Chris reached him. “Here, let me.”
Daniel just handed it off to the man without a word, his jaw no doubt clenched to keep from making a noise as the savaged skin popped and pulled against the gauze wrap. The milky fluid that dripped free of the fat blisters hissed oddly and stank of chlorine when they drained, and Chris went through two separate bandages, the drainage actively eating away at the dressing as he tried to get it cinched. There was barely any blood mixed into the drainage, but what came out was thick, almost congealed, no doubt some weird aftereffect of the exposure.
“How’s the legs?” The big man eventually asked, hissing in pain as Chris tightened the bandage. Jill shrugged, not wanting to get into it but also trying to be honest.
“Not great, but they’ll do.” She said, leaving no room for another question and turning away, her hand coming up to her radio. “Captain, we got the area secured, for the moment. What’s the ETA on that door?”
“I’ve about managed to crack whatever security lockout was stopping me.” Wesker said, not elaborating, but sounding oddly curious all the same. “I’m bypassing the last of the roadblocks, and the central security system should be online momentarily.” Then he paused, the typing on the other end of the line stilling. “Chris, Jill, Daniel, I’m getting some odd readings from the sensors in the tunnels under the facility. Something is setting off the motion alarms, and it’s moving fast. Once the door’s open, get in there and I’ll seal it behind you.”
“Wilco, Captain.” Chris said, checking that he had a fresh magazine in his gun. Jill did the same a moment later, and so did Daniel. Chris had a few mags left, as did Jill, but Daniel?
“I’m down to one and a half grenades. Still plenty of the other stuff but lets try to avoid another last stand, alright?” He grunted, trying to inject some levity into the tension the three felt, but it was a fool’s errand. Chris’s face was a knot of stress under the mask, as was Jill’s. Daniel briefly entertained the idea of jumping across the gap that stopped them from getting to the gate, but all three knew they had to see if there was something to stop the spread of whatever had infected Barry, and given the non-answer Jill had given them, she might need something too.
“Alright, I’ve got the first of the overrides bypassed. Releasing the locks on the vault door now.” Wesker said over their radio, and the three heard a shrill siren go off, beeping above the door as a spinning emergency light went off. “Damn, how did- no. Head’s up, it seems I just rang the dinner bell.
“Oh that’s just fucking perfect.” Daniel growled, low enough that only Chris heard him, but he could sympathize with the raw vitriol in Daniel’s voice.
The center of the lot bulged upward in a slow, ugly swell, concrete spiderwebbing out from the rise while something massive shoved at the slab from below. Chunks of broken stone began to hop and skitter away from the pressure, and the whole yard shivered as the ground creaked and cracked. Wesker’s voice came over the radio at that exact moment, sharper than before, with an edge that hadn't been there before.
"The sensors underground are going mad. Whatever is down there is angry, and it knows you're there. Spread out, don't give it an easy target, and godspeed." His voice was grim as he dropped those last words on them like the closing of a coffin. A gunshot of breaking pavers punctuated the message, and a slap of rock that had to weigh five tons rose up, shattering along the dozen trenches the smaller tentacles had carved up, creating a small mountain in the center of the lot. Huge rocks the size of a man began rolling off the upswell, nearly crashing into them as they ran.
"Scatter!" Jill shouted, her beet pounding on the ground as she tried to dodge the wave of debris that came flying at them from all directions. Chris let out a curse as one of the rocks caught him in the ribs, another ricocheting off his mask, leaving a long crack down the side of the glass. Daniel just raised his arms to cover himself, already knowing trying to avoid getting pelted was a lost cause. Stones and rocks cracked off his armor as he kept his back to the massive vault door, but the sound of metal groaning louder than the avalanche of concrete had him shooting around. It was almost too little, too late as the whole slab lurched off its rollers and came free. The door tipped, hit the concrete on one edge, and rolled away through the lot with the speed of a dropped coin, except this coin weighed more than a truck. Chris dived left and Jill dove right while Daniel threw himself clear a fraction before the slab thundered through the space they had occupied. It rolled across the yard, crushed a line of broken planters flat, and buried itself against the far wall in a shower of sparks and shattered stone.
At the same time the concrete below them finally gave way, sliding apart like the shell of an egg, and from it a thick tentacle, nearly as wide as Daniel was tall and stretching thirty feet into the air lanced through the ground. It was covered in thick, heavy plates of bone and chitin, lacking the rows of teeth that its smaller cousins had, but instead ended in a massive knot of bone that was covered in three foot long spines. It reminded Daniel of a stegosaurus tail, if such a tail had a dozen spikes that were ribbed with saw-teeth and stood high enough to block out the sun. But that wasn't all this new horror show had to offer.
As the dust cleared, sitting so close to Daniel that he could feel the fetid breath caressing his back, a wall of flesh that had consumed the entrance to the research center. Beyond the ruined threshold, in what should have been an open vestibule was filled wall to wall with a pulsing sphincter of pale flesh lined in long, razor teeth. The thing flexed wetly inside the doorway, as several long, sucking tentacles emerged from the pulsing anus of moist, writing pucker, each one tipped with a lamprey-like mouth that hissed in Daniel's direction.
He raised his gun to fire but it was too little too late. The smaller tentacles whiplashed around with furious speed and coiled itself across Daniel’s chest and stomach, wrapping his armored torso in constricting loops before lifting his massive frame clear off the ground. The saiga bounced loose from his grip, flailing on its strap wildly as he punched one of the mouths away before it could clamp onto his head, reaching with the other hand to find his axe, and wrenching it loose. Chris turned to fire on the sphincter as Daniel flailed, only for Jill to scream out a warning at the last minute.
“Chris, move!” The urgency in her voice cut across the radio and Chris was moving before his brain consciously interpreted the order, the STARS pointman barely diving out of the way as the massive tail slammed down right where he was, the long spines churning the stone like it was soft sand under a rake as the bony spines long enough to go from head to asshole whizzed past him.
The armored appendage whipped across the lot in a murderous backswing a breath later, forcing Jill into a weaving retreat while Chris rolled across the ground in a desperate attempt at keeping himself from getting pulped. He got two steps before the tail reversed direction and caught him across the hip, his bones creaking from the pain, but despite being inside the murderous spines' reach, the wall of bone-laden flesh was almost as dangerous. The impact spared him a closed casket but launched him into the air anyway, hurling him into a stack of crates hard enough to explode half the wooden boxes into splinters around him.
Jill danced through the next three strikes in a frantic, disciplined scramble, every movement tight and vicious, the massive scale of the limb hiding its deceptive speed as the spiked thagomizer smashed craters into the brutalized concrete. She kept firing in short bursts from the P90, stitching rounds into whatever soft tissue she could find, but the results were miserable. It was like trying to kill a whale with needle pricks. Even with the armor-piecing rounds, the bone plates were just too thick and too layered to get any good penetration.
“Chris, get up!” Jill shouted, worriedly looking at her partner as he lay dazed in the pile of debris, hidden from a killing blow by the giant tail but still horrifically vulnerable until he got his wits back. She silently worried that something was broken, or worse, but his strangled voice a moment later put those worries to rest.
“I'm almost out! Tangled in something!" Chris's strangled voice poured through the radio as the tarp he'd been enmeshed in came loose. A moment later the man pulled himself from a pile of splinters, a bit bruised but still walking, at least she thought so, until he stumbled unevenly. She could see he was in pain, but forcing himself through it, the stubborn ass. Then her attention was ripped away as she was forced to roll under another wild swipe of the notched tail, the brush of the wind washing over her as the wall of oily flesh missed her by inches.
Daniel let out a warcry, feral and hateful, slamming his axe down on one of the snapping Lamprey maws that nipped at him, severing it. The second slammed into his back, jarring his arm and forcing him to lose his grip on the hatchet. He snarled, his hand shooting out, catching it in his crushing grip and yanking it over. The smaller mouth strained against his hands, fangs grinding, tendons bunching, but he didn't care. Ramming his fingers into it and grabbing hold with a clenched fist, he began to pull, the flesh distending grotesquely as the grey-tainted muscle began to split open.
The creature screamed right in his face as he kept pulling until the whole mouth ripped open in a wet, snapping tear. The coils around his chest spasmed loose at once, and Daniel dropped out of them with a heavy, thrumming crash, gasping for air as two of the mouth tentacles flopped around helplessly, the third almost confused as it flailed around. Turning, he stared into the yawning abyss that had forced itself into the portal the door had once sat in, puddles of drool and filth roiling down its body.
It was a hideous thing, a puckered asshole with teeth that had been hounding them for what felt like hours at this point, despite it being barely a few minutes. Reaching down, he picked up his combat axe, and felt the ground rumble as the massive tentacle behind him slammed down, crushing a new crater into the ground as it sought out the two scrambling STARS.
“I am done with this bullshit.” He growled, viciously as he ripped the ARM-059 off his back, pulling the top-mounted charging handle back and grinning at the satisfying snap of the three receivers moving in unison. By then the third mouth had recovered enough to go on the attack, but it was too little too late as Daniel brought the gun to bare, lining it up with the pulsing sphincter and pulling the trigger.
The roar of the gun swallowed everything else. All three barrels fired in a screaming blur, dumping two hundred and forty rounds of 7.62 Hurricane into the soft, pulsing mass at obscene speed. Teeth blew free, flesh exploded inward and outward in equal measure, as an ocean of brackish blood and other, less mentionable fluids hosed out from the impact shock, coating the walls, the ground, the creature and Daniel in a torrent of fire. The last tentacle ceased to be under the onslaught, vaporizing as the withering hail of fire turned it into mince, leaving scraps behind. The whole doorway became a storm of shredded meat, collapsing in on itself from the weight and punctuated by a waterfall of flying brass behind him. The burst only lasted seconds, yet it left the creature pulped and torn nearly beyond recognition.
The tail behind him went wild, slamming down erratically as he filled the creature with a respectable percentage of flying metal per pound of viscous flesh, the flailing tower of chitinous bone and spikes digging man-sized furrows into the shattered pavement, coiling in on itself and pulsing erratically. Jill and Chris wasted no time in taking advantage, their guns filling the air in a cacophony of shots that ripped weeping rivulets into the massive tail, finally able to unload on it with reckless abandon.
Somehow the thing was still moving when they ran dry, but instead of wasting more ammo, Chris had a better idea. He grabbed the fallen grenade launcher, cracking it open and dumping the spent shells before slamming several high explosive rounds into the cylinder. It snapped shut with a glorious crack, and he raised it up.
“Time to trim this tail.” He said, posing like an 80s action hero, not even caring that Jill had paused to stare at him like he'd grown a second head. He pulled the trigger, and a loud thunk announced the shot, the round dropping squarely on the base of the tail, blowing a melon-sized chunk out of it. The next round hit it almost spot on, and this time, it carved out a hole that Chris could stand in if he felt so inclined. The massive tail started to tip, muscles failing it as the thick central spine began to splinter. Chris dropped one more right in the center of it, a perfect hole in one, and the thing split like a cut tree, listing dangerously to the side, twirling once, twice, then flopped over with a wet crash that shook the ground they stood on, landing across the broken pit that had cut them off from the exit.
"Timber, motherfucker." The pointman grinned, inordinately pleased with himself. Jill just shook her head.
Silence reigned over the ruined lot, the ground torn to shreds, covered in craters and exposing the underground tunnels like sickly veins crisscrossing the mine as a whole. It looked like a warzone, but despite that, somehow they'd managed to kill whatever that thing was. But that just left them with a new question. How were they supposed to get into the facility? Despite the flailing tentacles, the giant tail, and the ugly sentient asshole that they'd taken out, the building itself had taken remarkably little damage.
“Alright. How the hell are we supposed to get in there now?” Jill asked, finally, as the three caught their breath after everything. Daniel wiped a string of black slime off his visor with the back of one glove, the man looking rough but seemingly unbothered by the ocean of filth that had been dumped over him as he slotted in a new box of ammo into the three-barreled terror he'd stolen, the compensators still slightly red and steaming from the assault.
He just shrugged at her. “I can see light on the other side.” Despite it all, there was a grimly amused lilt to his voice, as he pointed to the shredded ring of flesh that was still dripping with viscous fluids. Jill looked from the gore-slick hole to him and made a strangled sound of what could only be described as disgusted pain.
“Oh, fuck you, Carter.”
000
Oswell Spencer leaned back in his chair, watching the three on screen as they began forcing their way through the wall of flesh. Even after grabbing some of the loose tarps, he didn’t envy them their journey, even if he knew their destination. In truth, he didn’t particularly care about what they might discover inside. The labs were full of dead-end research projects that he’d had such high hopes for initially, but as the mycete proved to be more resilient to outside manipulations he’d drifted away from the mine facility wholesale, seeing it as more of a teaching opportunity for young Victor than anything.
That it gave him what he was considering his greatest success to date as an unintended consequence was just more evidence that the attempts to guide, direct and ultimately harness the mold was a foolish distraction from his true goals. It was a shame, too, considering what he’d had to trade to his erstwhile mentor to get the location of this nearly untouched supercolony but such was the nature of science. One pressed and pressed and pressed until they found the levers needed to move the world. Just the chance to find one such lever was worth the billions in equipment and samples he’d given the woman.
It was also nice to see her again, though she hadn’t aged a day since last they met, all those decades ago. She was one of the few he still called a friend, a precious commodity that had only dwindled over the many long years, some proving to be unworthy of the title, but more simply succumbing to that ever-damned clock that ticked above them all. Still, moving past that old complaint, he was finally seeing a return, and in the most unlikely of places.
He’d been watching, piggybacking off the camera network that the only valuable member of Project-W managed to get back into working order and what a show it had been. The tension, the drama! He’d laughed and clapped along with every blow, gasped at every setback, and even cheered as the mettle of the three overcame the machinations of biology and slew the beast. Granted, he’d stretched things out, blocking the administrative release until the tension reached a crescendo and the monster was ready to be revealed.
Forgive an old man his foibles, it’s rare for him to be able to truly enjoy anything nowadays, much less from a stage of such quality. That thinking men and women managed to overcome that monstrosity was just validation to his belief that it was mankind who was destined to rule this world, not a sentient colony of semi-sentient fungus. Oh, the arguments he had with Miranda over the years about the superiority of their inventions, oh the ideas that spawned from those conversations, and the fond memories that came with them.
He would have to make sure to send a video over to the woman sometime soon, just to rub in how much better his latest and greatest project was proving to be over the unrestrained creations of the megamycete. True, it had been a brilliant and intuitive study watching just how the mold managed to slowly infect the camp, and its recombinant nature was going to make for a fine addition to some of the later iterations of T and the other alphabet viruses.
Much less how Daniel would respond to it now that he got some of the pure strain into his system. Oh right, he would need to tell Victor about that as well. The man had been in transit back to Europe when Daniel fought the multiform-class Tyrant outside of the worker facilities, besting it as Spencer had expected him to, and then consumed its central core. Dhampir had already consumed whatever was left in his system from the P-Protype (and wasn’t it a shame that he’d run most of it out of his body in the six months between his initial exposure and now) and T-JCCC203 in the interim. It was fortunate that he had taken the antigen when he did, as it put the virus into its most inert form.
The blood that had been taken post-D injection had been doing some very interesting things with his genetic code. It had already isolated the gigantism and muscle densifier genes, and his skin was already transitioning to the ultra iron-dense skin that gave the strain its grey pallor. He was still soft shelled, as the design and incubation crews called it, but in another two to three months he would be as indestructible as the namesake that made up Umbrella’s bread and butter product line.
Actually, he made a note to ensure that Daniel would encounter one at the next earliest convenience once he finished the state-one transformation. It would be excellent growth data to see how he was coming along, and just how his full absorption of megamycete genetic coding would take form. Spencer was careful not to let his own hopes override what was proving to already be an unusual study though. He was far too experienced to taint the experiment with his own preconceived notions.
A lesson poor Victor had yet to learn, but the man was barely in his mid-twenties. He needed a few more years of seasoning, but would make a fine catspaw when the time came. Like all the others, he was a creature slaved to his expectations. It was a tragic reality of taking on the young and ambitious, and he had to admit the almost dogmatic attention was useful more often than not, but Victor was all too certain of his conclusions and prone to basing everything else off of those conclusions, regardless of how valid they would prove to be, or disprove, in this case.
No, Victor didn’t see what he did in Daniel, a discard that had proven the old adage of adversity being the truest crucible. Honestly, these last nine months had awakened something that a lifetime of training and preparation had failed to ignite. Granted, his conscious mind knew precious little about it, but his body remembered. It was elegant proof that nature could be nurtured to a fruitful end, even when the nurture is later removed, leaving only the genetic echo ingrained within his neurons.
If Lester were still alive, the man would be due for a promotion. Damn shame that he let himself be consumed by something so uncomplicated as love, to his ultimate end. His work on memory manipulation was inspired, even if it was for the flawed purpose of transplanting his wife’s thought patterns into a more pliable host. Wiping information was much simpler, and much more precise than implanting false memories instead. Easier to drain a river than divert it, as further experiments had found. The channels would always be there, and recidivism was much higher when the metaphoric river was refilled with something.
Granted, nature abhorred a vacuum, as Mr. Carter had proven. Despite having everything of note removed, he’d still managed to construct a functional personality, delusions or not, and he knew the Survivalist had something to do with it. He’d been frustratingly evasive in his explanation of just what he’d done and no amount of treasure or favors could shake those secrets loose. Apparently it was something of a trade secret the man had that only those of his ilk were allowed to know. Annoying, but that was just the man’s nature. He was in love with his secrets, they all were, but him especially.
It had to be another actor in their network. There were always others, always testing the limits with what was possible unconstrained by the frustrations of paltry things like ethics or morals. Spencer could think of a dozen such projects being run right this second. More than a few openly sought him out for references and insight, and the rest cribbed his work like the fumbling children they were.
None of them could see the Vision. But Spencer could. Spencer looked through his wall-spanning screen, watching the titan walk among the ants, fire and thunder in his hands and such passion in his heart, such drive! Dhampir was going to make him the one true ubermensch in a way that simple eugenics could never achieve. That was the truth of it, and when he was ready, once he had consumed and contained all the other monsters out there, Spencer would offer him the purest strain he could gift, the Progenitor, and then?
He glanced out the window, at the massive amber construction that still pulled from the walls and walls of embryos, and the tragic but necessary process being used to create his other masterpiece. As the Progenitor was his magnum opus, if all went well, Elpis would be the cleansing that would wipe the canvas clean. Once Daniel was perfect, he would remove the infections that made him vulnerable, and harvest the pure strain, untainted by the lethality of its ancestors. Then he would inject it into an untainted retroviral agent, and he too would be free of this battered, withered shell.
And then, as the God of this, his new species, his cleansed and completed people, he would lead them into a glorious golden age of science and innovation. Of peace. Of harmony. Of Perfection.
Whether they wanted it or not.
Because Utopia was still Utopia, regardless of how many bodies made up the foundation.
