Resident Evil: The Hades Memoirs
Tyrell Patrick – Among Thieves
Operation Watchdog had set up shop in a little log cabin at the back of one of the city's many graveyards. It was a grim locale, but safe enough. Strangely enough, cemeteries were some of the few places left where the roaming dead weren't commonly found. Once embalmed, an infected body didn't wake up; there was nothing in them to reanimate, after all. Superstitious as human beings often were, hardly any of the civilians had thought to consider that fact and so most avoided the area.
That was another reason the location was safe. Unauthorised personnel were a security risk.
The shack itself was a small, two-room affair, originally used for storage by the graveyard's custodian. He had been an operative with Umbrella prior to his untimely death, ripped to shreds by a pack of ravening dogs. The main chamber was neat and orderly, its effects, including an old wooden table and chairs, and a collection of family photographs personal to the late owner, arranged neatly around a stone fireplace. The first supervisor on the scene had lit a fire in the hearth that had still been burning merrily when Tyrell had arrived.
"Very fucking Hallmark," he had commented when his eyes first took in the quaint scenery, with its mahogany furniture and pleasant decoration, and the gently smouldering embers in the grate.
Of course, that had been before they had shown him the back room. Hidden behind an otherwise unassuming panel, the kind that could only be found if one knew where it was already, was the hub of their covert mission. Originally, it had been utilised by the company's man for making his reports on clandestine body disposals in the lot he supposedly maintained and protected. It had become a necessary evil to resort to such low-tech methods after the so called "Dead Factory" had gone silent all those weeks ago.
Now it was their radio room, where they collated the data gathered by the individual agents into a single dossier, to be presented to the corporation's upper echelon after their escape. It had been a couple of days since he had first arrived, the third to do so, and gradually their numbers had been growing. They slept in shifts, no easy feat given that there were no beds, but even snoozing vertically was a pleasant change from the fatigue that came from running on constant adrenaline.
And from what the others had shared when they too returned, he was glad that he had quit the city when he did. The situation in Raccoon had gone beyond crisis to outright catastrophe and he didn't expect it to be long before Umbrella were unable to further delay government intervention. Fortunately, the sensitive information he and his colleagues had collected ensured that they would be spared special consideration over the regular hapless citizens. Unlike the rest of the U.B.C.S platoons that they had landed with, their tickets were not one-way.
It was his turn to rest when the call came in from the company. Hogan was in the back monitoring the transmitter, while Lowe and Svensk were patrolling the park. Their group of four were all that was left of the supervisors in that area. Two of the others had gone to investigate a commotion at the St. Michael's Clock Tower nearby and hadn't returned. On top of that, Yung was confirmed dead and Ginovaef hadn't been seen at all since the mission commenced. Tyrell didn't consider that to be a great loss, although he was eager to get out of the city before their numbers were whittled down further.
He hadn't been able to sleep, too focused on his thoughts of escape, and so he was in the middle of routine maintenance on his pistol when the radioman emerged through the panel in the wall. Turning his attention to reassembling his weapon, he looked up to find his fellow-mercenary brandishing a printout from the terminal in the other room.
"Word's in," the other man announced, slapping the report down on the table in front of him, "there was a unit of Army Rangers in place at the 'Dead Factory'. Apparently, they had a weapon they couldn't get sanctions to test on U.S. soil, so they were doing the trial run here; who's going to know, right? The guys at White hit them real hard a couple of nights ago and secured us a way out. We can go in and take their ride just as soon as we're good and ready."
"Then we move as soon as the others get back," he insisted flatly, sliding the components of his sidearm back together with seasoned aplomb, "when's the air strike due?"
"Dawn, they said; more than enough time."
"Not soon enough for this city," he mused, finishing with the Glock, before standing up from his seat at the table and tucking it into the waistband at the back of his combats, ignoring his holster through sheer force of habit, "I'm going out for a smoke."
"You know those things are bad for you, right?"
"Trust me, if I live long enough to die of cancer then I won't have any regrets."
"Amen to that, brother," Hogan drawled, sniggering to himself as he returned to his position in the next room.
Tyrell ignored him and stepped out into the cool night air, wrinkling his nose at the smell. Once again, he found himself immersed in the stench of rot that was permeating every inch of the city, rising from the living dead that paraded through the streets, or the actual dead that were lying in them. To make matters worse, he couldn't help but shiver with the sudden drop in temperature from the cabin's interior. Warmer climates were more to his tastes, having lived much of his life in areas around the equator.
Still, he wanted a cigarette, and he was well aware of the folly of smoking in a building made predominantly of wood.
He removed a battered cardboard packet from his tactical vest, one that he'd borrowed from a team mate before abandoning his original unit in the confusion of the landing. As he helped himself to the contents, he heard an all too familiar noise, a dull, faintly melancholic moan coming from somewhere behind the shack. It was a zombie; that much was clear even before he laid eyes on it. The creatures were everywhere in Raccoon, on every street and in every building, most likely. A dozen of them could easily turn into a problem, but one was hardly a matter for concern.
Moving none too quickly, he lit the cigarette protruding from his lips first and foremost, using one hand to work his lighter and the other to shield it from the light rainfall. Then, once he had returned it to the pouch he had taken it from, he withdrew his handgun, strafing casually around the structure that was blocking his line of sight.
He found the ghoul standing on the other side of the wrought iron fence that separated the cemetery from the street, which made it even less of a cause for worry than before. Smiling to himself, he approached, blatant contempt clear in his swagger, until he was standing just outside of arm's reach, watching as it turned to face him dumbly. There, he inhaled a lungful of smoke and breathed it into the slack mask of the creature's face, the mould-speckled features giving no hint that it even felt the foul cloud envelop it. All he was able to detect was the slightest hitch in its groaning, a dry, reflexive contracting of its windpipe in response to the airborne pollutants.
It began to try and reach for him through the bars, its limp, rot-encrusted fingers coming to within inches of his face and bringing a look of disgust to his face as the smell invaded his nostrils. Pearl white eyeballs stared out from its expressionless features, perfectly vacant of all thought, driven only by a subdued aggression that lacked all of the passion of real emotion. It was an instinct, but one that was as withered and decayed as both its body and mind. He sneered at it, securing his pistol a second time.
"Want some of this?" he asked it, his cigarette dancing between his lips as he spoke, pointing to himself as though offering his flesh as a meal to the zombie, if it could only find a way to claim it.
He balled his hands into fists and took on a mocking stance, as though he were a boxer and the dull-witted grotesque was his sparring partner. Hopping from one foot to the other and occasionally ducking his head as though dodging the blows of his nemesis, he lunged in and struck the carrier in the side of the jaw, snapping its head to the side. The knuckles of his fingerless glove came away sticky, part of its waxy epidermal layer adhering to the coarse material. Grunting in disgust, he scraped it off on his harness. It let out that same plaintive groan, almost as though it were disappointed that fresh meat had come so close, only for it to be denied. It was an illusion though; it couldn't feel real emotion.
He jabbed at it again, grazing its nose, before swinging an uppercut that connected with its chin and rocked it backwards. It staggered slightly, spared the worst that he could offer by his absolute disdain.
Unfortunately for him, the expression of arrogant derision on his face vanished when he swung a blow that narrowly missed its cheek, only for it to latch its emaciated fingers around his jacket sleeve. Its grip locked with all the finality of rigor mortis, skeletal digits snaring his forearm. He spaced his weight in an attempt to counteract the sudden change in balance, but his boots skidded in the mud, sending him sliding to the ground. The impact jarred the cigarette out of his mouth, the butt tumbling in a cascade of ash down the front of his uniform, and knocked his spectacles from the bridge of his nose into the mud.
Adrenaline blossomed in his veins. He brought his foot up and slammed it into the underside of the ghoul's chin as it lowered itself ponderously. The blow knocked it onto its posterior in the dirt at the other side of the fence, giving him enough time to scramble backwards, snatching his glasses from the puddle they had fallen in as he retreated. He rose to his feet, wiping clean his eyewear on the material of his trousers and sliding it back over his features, still trembling from the sudden rush of a lucky escape.
Growling low in his throat, he tugged free the Glock from his waistband and aimed it into the blank features staring up at him, slack with incomprehension, as the creature began to right itself. He wasn't about to let a pile of rotting meat get the better of him.
Before he could pull the trigger, however, there was a noise that made him hesitate. A gunshot rang out from inside the cabin, the noise, even suppressed as it was, scaring a flock of birds from the shadow of a nearby tree.
For the briefest of moments, Tyrell wondered if perhaps Hogan had gotten some bad news from the corporation, something that had made death seem like an appealing option. He immediately discarded the notion, however; Umbrella wanted their information too much and would ensure their safe evacuation by any means necessary. On top of that, the supervisors had all been chosen for both physical and psychological robustness. They had the strength and ability to make it through a catastrophe like Raccoon, but they also had the drive and will to survive no matter what.
He had seen many people, both civilians and soldiers, die with their lips wrapped around the barrels of their own weapons, but not one of them had been a supervisor.
The zombie forgotten, he turned and advanced along the wall of the shack, pressing his back to the damp logs that made up its exterior and holding his sidearm at the ready. He reached the corner and peered around, waiting and watching silently for any sign of what had caused the sound that had disturbed him.
The door creaked open and a figure emerged, haloed by the luminescence of the porch light. It was human, that much was obvious from its upright stance, and clad in the dirty, blood-stained attire of a U.B.C.S soldier. Though he couldn't see its features clearly, he discerned short, white hair and a chiselled jaw. In its hand it was clutching a sidearm that it slid into the holster on its thigh, before craning its neck as though attempting to ward away fatigue.
His mind raced with the possibilities of who the new arrival could be. Possibly one of the rank and file grunts, someone who'd found out what Operation Watchdog entailed and hadn't liked it. That seemed likely; Tyrell wouldn't have been too happy hearing that he'd been sent on a suicide mission either, especially if it were just to test out some corporation's new line in biological weapons. Then again, there was also a chance that it was one of the other supervisors, maybe even the missing Ginovaef. It wasn't as though he himself hadn't thought about how much more valuable the information would be if he was the only one that had it; surely they had all thought that.
But he had decided against it; there was safety in numbers, after all.
Of course, that plan was now shot to hell courtesy of the interloper and he was damned if he was going to go down with the ship. The first course of action was to get rid of the killer. Then he would snatch up the data from the guy's laptop, providing he was a supervisor, and add it to the collated files he already had a copy of on his own. He'd need to get his machine from his knapsack in the cabin for that. Once he had taken care of all that, he just needed to make it to the "Dead Factory" and then he was home free. It would be an absolute pleasure to say goodbye to Racoon City and finally get his paycheque for the ordeal he had been through the last few days.
He started to move around the corner, Glock leading the charge, intent on ventilating the second man's skull. Before he could do so, however, he felt something snag his jacket, ripping the material with an audible tearing noise. His eyes widened as the target spun on his heel, whipping his own handgun up and around. Tyrell fired a panicked shot, the bullet hissing high and left over his fellow-soldier's shoulder, before a hail of retaliation pulped the log wall directly next to him as he spun back into cover.
A curse rose in his throat when he realised that he had snagged his arm on a rusted nail jutting from the side of the cabin. Another swiftly followed, as a gnarled hand snatched a fistful of harness at his lumbar and dragged him backwards into the metal railings of the graveyard's fence. His spine clanged against the bars, moments before gore-slick teeth clamped around his shoulder, the bite agonisingly subdued in pace but unforgiving and mechanical in pressure. Flesh came apart with ease as solid pegs of dirtied ivory tore into it.
He screamed in spite of himself, levelling his sidearm next to his own head and squeezing off round after round at point-blank into the creature's face. They smashed the zombie's skull to pulp, but it wasn't until he could turn and push the practically decapitated corpse away that the jaws sheathed in his upper arm came loose.
His opponent heard the battle and strafed into view around the shack; Tyrell saw the empty eye of the sidearm centre on his forehead. He leapt aside, full stretch, left arm cradled against his stomach as he dived into the lieu of a grave marker nearby, the solid stone protecting him from the barrage of bullets that followed. Adrenaline once again burst into being in his veins and he channelled it, forcing his wounded limb to obey so that he could reload his weapon.
"You had best give yourself up now, before the infection sets in," the other man called, voice resonating, cold and hard, with the stiff enunciation of a Russian accent, from somewhere beyond the cover he was huddled behind, "you should know as well as I do that there is no cure for you. I assure you, I will make it quick and painless; it would be most efficient that way, anyway."
"Fuck you!" he shot back angrily, trying to ignore the weeping, throbbing wound on his shoulder and knowing that he was fighting a losing battle.
Even if it were possible to survive a wound as deep and heavy as this one without immediate attention, the infection that was beginning to thread itself through his system would soon begin to take hold. Once he became symptomatic there was no turning back.
He made to open his med-kit, only to remember that it was still resting on the table in the cabin, along with his rucksack. Even if he won the firefight that was sure to follow, he wouldn't be able to reach it in time to apply one of the herbal sanitizers to his injury. The virus would already have begun to wreak its insidious damage on his body. Fortunately, his white-haired assailant didn't seem to have any knowledge of the experimental antivirus that had been all-but perfected at the nearby hospital. It had been Tyrell's mission to monitor its progress and, until the data collation, he had been the only one to know about it; he'd hidden a sample of it in a safe there, just in case.
If he could reach it, he could arrest his deterioration, hopefully, before it even started. But he had to leave now.
He leapt up, scrambling across the open ground as bullets grazed the dirt at his heels, returning fire but unable to see his own target; the Russian had covered himself too well. His boots kicked up clods of dirt, walking the thin line between retreat and desecration, before he skidded to a stop in the dewy grass, once again hidden behind a tombstone. Breathing heavily, he reloaded a second time, listening intently for any signs of movement from his enemy. Silence reigned in the cemetery, however, save the distant moans and the rumble of fire as it slowly consumed the city.
The wrought iron gate that led out onto the streets stood open and unguarded by living or dead alike. It beckoned to him, but he knew that incaution would be rewarded with a hole in the head. Readying his pistol, he made to lean out from his cover, to see if he could discern any hint of olive fatigues or white hair. He didn't have time to even look, however, as a slug ricocheted from the top of the headstone he was crouching behind and send him ducking back down. Sharp, concrete shrapnel sliced into his forehead and sent a trickle of blood running slowly down from his hairline.
"Fuck this," he grunted, wiping the crimson bead away irritably, before scuttling towards the gate on his hands and knees, doing his best to keep the grave marker between himself and the direction of the shots.
Once he had reached the road beyond, he stood up and bolted, hoping that he was far enough from the other soldier not to make a target of himself. Ahead, car wrecks smouldered and bodies littered the sidewalk. It was worse now than it had ever been, but fortunately the zombie presence was low. The few shambling figures he did see were emaciated and slow, which would make dodging or dispatching them a simple task.
Though the majority of his equipment, his assault rifle, his med-kit, was still in the shack, the pouches on his harness still held ample ammunition for his Glock and several frag' grenades. To be going up against a city filled with the living dead, it wasn't much of an arsenal, but it was unfortunately the best he had. If he could reach the antivirus sample then he could worry about escape, and retribution, later.
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His legs gave out as he entered the laboratory, sending him shunting into a desk laden with empty beakers and stacks of documentation. A paper avalanche cascaded across the tiled floor, the rustling punctuated by the shattering of a rack of test tubes, which exploded on impact and sent glass skidding in all directions. Rain water ran out of his cropped hair, tainted with dirt and sweat, streaming into his eyes and forcing him to remove his spectacles while he wiped them clean.
It had been an arduous journey to the hospital, with his condition deteriorating the entire time. The wound in his shoulder was still bleeding, his jacket soaked with crimson, but he was more concerned with the other potential dangers of an infected bite. Once he was certain that he wasn't going to end up a flesh-hungry walking corpse, he would treat the injury more thoroughly. In the mean time, he had to cope with the hot, irritating feeling that had settled in his shredded flesh. He had probed the hole during his hike and even pulled out a couple of teeth that had embedded themselves there. It had taken all of his willpower not to rip at the opening with his fingernails to sate the hellish itching while he did so.
Replacing his glasses, he forced himself upright with a heartfelt groan and staggered deeper into the room. Everything seemed to be taking more effort now and he couldn't tell if it were fatigue from the run or the virus taking its toll. Inside his clothing, he felt feverish and sticky, and a part of him couldn't help but assume that it was already too late. With an effort that made him cry out, he dragged himself in the direction of the safe on the wall, using a shelving unit as a prop. When he saw it, sealed and secure, just as he had left it, he felt marginally better.
He reached for the keypad, but froze when he heard movement in the corridor behind him. For the briefest of moments, he wondered if perhaps the Russian had followed him all the way from the cemetery. He discarded the thought out of hand, reasoning that the assassin would have just killed him in the street if he had wanted to. More likely it was simply a zombie he had missed or one of the laboratory staff, maybe even the doctor he had colluded with in the production of the vaccine. It wasn't like his fellow-soldier would have been able to access the basement, not without some way to circumvent the voice recognition lock on the elevator.
Still, if his white-haired assailant had even the vaguest idea what Tyrell was searching for, or how valuable it was, he didn't want to take the chance that he hadn't been tailed.
He slid into cover behind the shelves, watching the door through a space in the equipment arrayed there. His Glock remained braced in his right hand, ready to be brought to bear, but his movements were beginning to feel sluggish and effortful. Worse still, his thoughts seemed laboured and recalcitrant, his mind unable to focus for long before the object of his concentration, whatever it may have been, slipped from his mental grasp. Whoever the interloper was, he needed to dispatch them quickly and inject the antidote before the infection progressed too far.
The figure that entered the lab was U.B.C.S, that much was clear from his attire, but he wasn't the same individual from before. His features were tan and vaguely Hispanic, possibly Central American; on top of that, his hair was lank and dark, messily framing his face. The waiting soldier realised that he didn't recognise the other man in the slightest, probably because he was a nobody, just another mercenary grunt hired by Umbrella to serve as zombie fodder. A sardonic smile split his features as the new arrival approached.
"Can't say I was expecting to see another guinea pig alive after all this time," he commented nastily, as he emerged from behind the shelves, aiming his Glock into the face of the intruder, "I figured you'd have all been wiped out by now. Colour me surprised."
"Hey, easy, hombre," the other man responded quickly, abandoning his determined stride towards the room beyond in favour of lifting his hands in an attempt to pacify the stranger who had leapt out at him, "we're on the same side, remember?"
"You don't have any fucking idea what's going on here, do you?" Tyrell scoffed, his shoulders beginning to shake with the onset of laughter before a spasm of agony stopped his mirth in its tracks, turning it into anger, "we've never been on the same side. You guys were just meat for the grinder - fucking test data. That's all the company wanted you for; we were the real deal. At least, until that Russkie son of a bitch capped Hogan and God knows who else."
"Wait, a Russian?" the intruder asked, apparently no longer concerned by the sidearm pointed at his head, "with white hair, looks like his nose was broken one too many times?"
"That's him," he acknowledged, reasoning that they must have been talking about the same person for him to have reacted that way; perhaps Ginovaef wasn't too good at making friends, "but I don't have time for this bullshit."
He stepped back, clenching the fingers on his left hand to work up some feeling in their tips, refusing to lower his weapon and work the safe's lock with his good arm. Using touch alone, he located the keypad and punched in the four digit code, before flipping the door open. There was a hiss of escaping gas as the refrigerated atmosphere of the interior met with the mild air outside. Before he could reach in for the antivirus capsule, however, the Hispanic's eyes widened in alarm and he threw himself aside.
Tyrell felt his pulse quicken as he glanced back, his sight locking upon the block of plastic explosive that was sitting in the place where the vaccine should have been. A scream of disbelief rose in his throat, but the detonation stole the noise away. The concussive force blasted him into the shelving unit, his back striking solidly against the metal frame, before he slumped limply to the ground. His face was now little more than a mass of scarring, his jacket and uniform shirt welded solidly to his torso, which flaked and oozed blood from between charred scraps of fabric. Beneath the flesh, his ribs fractured from the pressure of the blast, puncturing his internal organs in places too numerous to count.
For a moment, all he could smell was melted skin and burned hair, and then his nostrils fused shut from the heat, as did his eyelids. The ringing in his ears slowly faded, as did the pain that wracked his entire body. Most importantly of all, the disturbing numbness that had begun to settle over him, the result of the infectious bite he had suffered, began to wane, giving way to a more pleasant, peaceful feeling.
Suddenly, trapped inside the cocoon of his own injuries, this was all happening to something else, an outer shell to which he was no longer connected. A final gasp escaped his slack lips, almost a sigh of relief, and then he lay still.
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