Leon let his breathing normalize as he leaned against the brick wall, his chest heaving. He listened over his deep breaths for any other noises that might reverberate through the tunnels, but there was only the steady drip-drip-drip of a pipe leak in the distance. Nothing—for now—was following him, or hunting him.
Leon took the reprieve to check his gun. He popped out the clip to find that it was only half-full. He had seven bullets before he was alone with the monsters that prowled through the tunnels. The damp tunnels reminded him of other, now long-destroyed tunnels from the summer of '98, and his shoulder ached from the combination of the memory and the damp.
Leon slammed the clip back into the gun and breathed out, his heart beating at a more normal pace. He just had to meet up with Helena ahead, and they could make it out of there. He checked his comm device, but there was still no signal on it underground. He stashed it in a pocket and looked back the way he came. Nothing was following him. He knew that already. Damn, Leon, he thought. This probably isn't the best time to get all paranoid…
He turned the other way and started a light jog to the direction he hadn't come from. His hands were together, clasped on his gun, and his boots pounded softly on the cement floor. He turned a corner and stopped in his tracks for two reasons.
One: he heard the far-off scream of a woman, a woman who sounded very alike Helena. Two: a pair of zombies stood in the tunnel ahead of him. They caught sight of him, and began half-stumbling, half-running at him. Leon fired a shot at the one closer to him, catching him in the gut, stringing out skin and guts behind the zombie like some sort of saturated pulled pork. It kept coming toward him, undeterred by the large section of missing stomach. Leon lifted his gun a bit, aiming for the head, and squeezed the trigger, exploding the zombie's soft skull like a ball of play-doh hitting the floor.
Leon's eyes darted to the next zombie, and he fired a shot, which buried itself into the brick wall behind the zombie's shoulder. She took a few more shambling steps toward Leon, and he could see that one of her legs was broken, the bone sticking through the tissue paper skin. Leon held up his gun to take another shot, but he heard the scream come again. The inflection, the tone—it had to be Helena. Leon felt his gun and decided that the four bullets he had left would be better served elsewhere—helping his partner. Conservation of ammo was something he had learned in Raccoon City, as well.
Leon ran toward the zombie, and shoved it by the chest and arm to the side and leapt over it. Something yanked him back, though, and he landed on the ground with a thud and a shooting pain in his stomach that filled his whole body. Leon tried to roll over but found only more pain, and he lifted his arm just enough to plant a pullet into the soft soil of the zombie's forehead. He dropped the gun against the cement floor and tried to push himself up from the ground.
Blood dripped off of Leon's nose from the scratches on his face, and his arms trembled as he tried to lift his body. The pain he felt in his midsection was beyond anything he had felt before. He rested his forearm across the floor, holding himself in the position as he tried to catch his breath. His forehead rested on the hard, gritty floor as he experienced another shot of pain, originating in his stomach and penetrating every bit of his body from there.
Leon tilted his eyes downward, over his arm and below his chest, and was able to discern the shape that penetrated his stomach. The bottom of the zombie's leg, barefoot and ragged, was planted firmly on the ground, with the upper part of the bone disappearing into his midsection. Leon let out a panting sigh. He pushed himself onto his side, off of the bone. The hand which had gripped the back of his shirt disengaged easily without a voracious zombie to command it to grab him. The pain filled him as he moved, and he squeezed his eyes tightly shut against it.
Leon moved his arm down to the leg and placed his hand around the ankle of the leg. It was clammy and slightly squishy, and a wave of nausea washed over Leon. He stayed still and waited for a moment for it to pass. He then took a deep breath and yanked at the leg, pulling the jagged broken bone out of his stomach. The leg was still attached to the rest of the zombie by a little bit of skin, and Leon just dropped the leg to the ground.
He undid his holsters as gingerly as possible, staying in the same position on the floor, moving as little as he could. Once his holster was removed, he grasped his knife and worked at his left sleeve. He felt a warmth around the source of the pain in his stomach, and he knew that he was bleeding bad, both internally and externally. He needed to cover his wound, and he needed to do it quickly.
He finished cutting the sleeve off at the shoulder and pulled his arm out of it, wincing as more pain filled him when he moved. He pushed himself upward, into a sitting position, against the brick wall. He clenched his teeth and leaned his head back, bracing himself against the almost paralyzing pain that electrified him. He carefully tied the sleeve around his stomach, being careful to put pressure on his wound, but not wanting to crush any damaged organs inside. He didn't think that anything was too damaged, but he also couldn't tell what hurt and what didn't, because what he felt was so fully permeating.
Once his makeshift bandage was tied, he breathed a sigh of relief, which dealt only a minimal amount of extra damage to his condition. He could just sit here, and Helena could come and find him, and help him, and hopefully he wasn't infected from the wound, at least he could hope that…
His thoughts were interrupted by the scream. Helena's scream. Leon couldn't stay put. He and his three remaining bullets needed to help his partner, who was in trouble. I'm in trouble, thought Leon.
He stood up. It was a slow process, a painful process, and halfway up, he almost collapsed on himself, but gripped the wall for support. Once standing, he looked down at his holster on the floor, decided it wasn't worth it to pick it up, and held the gun in one hand, pressing against his stomach, while the other hand was pressed against the wall for support. It was in this position that he went in the direction of his partner's screams.
Every few steps, Leon had to stop and catch his breath, waiting for the immense surges of pain in his body to abate. He made it to the end of the tunnel, turned left, and could see by the light of an old, bare light bulb a metal door with a firm handle and a deadbolt. He lurched his way toward it, cringing with every step. He knew that he was bleeding, even with his makeshift bandage. His bare arm's hairs were all sticking up on end.
It took him a good couple of minutes to go down the fifty feet or so to the door. He stopped there, catching his breath, feeling a heat in his lungs. He wondered for a moment if his stomach had been punctured. That would be very bad news, because then his hydrochloric stomach acid could back up into his lungs for the worst kind of heartburn that anyone could ever imagine.
Leon pulled on the handle, but found that the door would not budge. He put some more muscle into it, and he soon had to stop, the pain from his stomach filling his core, his chest, and his arms with the exertion. He leaned back against the wall and let go of the handle. He let the pain die down a bit, and he pointed the gun directly at the deadbolt, hoping that it wasn't bulletproof. He didn't need it to ricochet—he already had a hole in his stomach.
The gun went off in his hand, and the deadbolt was completely destroyed, bending outward to the other side of the door. Leon held the gun, which now only held two bullets, to his side, and pulled open the door.
The large, spider-like B.O.W. stood over Helena, who was crawling backward away from it. "Helena!" Leon shouted.
The B.O.W. snapped its head at him, and Leon saw that it was some sort of ultra-mutated derivative of the C-virus. Its head was covered with multiple eyes, all of which blinked out of unison, probing him. Its insectoid legs all protruded from a single human body, which from far away Leon could not tell if it was male or female. Its original human legs hung down, limp and useless, but its arms had mutated into large claws that held suspended in the air over the special agent.
The B.O.W. skittered massively toward Leon, and Helena scrambled to her feet. Leon could see that she didn't have a weapon of any kind, and he backed up, finding himself against the wall. His left arm pressed to his stomach, Leon held up his handgun with his right hand and fired a shot at the thing's head. The shot missed, but the creature hesitated for a moment. That moment was long enough for Helena to pick up a length of pipe from the floor and swing it, hard, at the creature's back leg.
The creature called out in a screech of pain, from a line-thin lipless mouth Leon hadn't seen before. It was at the bottom of the creature's head, and reached from where one ear should have been to the other. It was full of tiny, pin-sharp teeth. One of its large, multi-jointed legs swung around, catching Helena and throwing her across the room into the wall. Leon watched her start to get to her feet and shuffled to his right, away from the door. He winced in pain, and the thing locked in on him as a target again.
"Leon!" shouted Helena, but he saw it coming already. The monster swung a leg at him, but he was ready for it, and ducked out of the way. He tried to land in a crouch, but the pain that ripped through him was too much, and he collapsed to the ground. He worked himself slowly back to the wall to get back up, and as he did, he saw Helena retrieve her piece of piping and duck out of the way of another swing from the B.O.W.
Helena ran underneath the B.O.W. and swung her pipe with all of her might. The metal connected with the joint on one of its legs. It let out another inhuman screech, and with two of its eight legs out of commission on one side, it teetered for a moment. Helena took this opportunity to run through its legs on the other side and meet up with Leon, who had made it to a standing position, leaning against the wall.
"What the hell happened to you?" she asked, eyes flitting from his down to the stained sleeve around his middle, and back to his eyes again.
"Fell on a protruding bone," said Leon. "I'd like to say it's a long story, but it isn't." He gave a little laugh, but gasped when this reignited the pain. Helena slipped her arm under his, holding him upright.
"Did you find anything your way?" she asked.
"Nothing," said Leon, "save for some poor dead bastards."
"I guess you're lucky I did better," said Helena. She pulled a roll of paper out of her back pocket. "I have the key files on everything we need to know, and I found the auto-sanitation switch for this whole facility."
"Thank God," said Leon. "So we can just get out of—"
Leon was cut off by the hulking shape that neither of them had seen sneaking up on them while they were talking. He made eye contact with a few of its many eyes, and a shiver went down his spine. Helena's eyes slipped to the pipe on the floor, which she had dropped when taking up Leon. Leon knew that the pipe wouldn't take out the B.O.W. in the end. He didn't need the pipe, because he had one bullet left in his handgun. His stomach clenched, which sent sharp stingers of pain through his whole being, but he ignored these, shut one eye, and lined up the gun with the large eye near the center of the beast's head. "Didn't see this one coming, did you?" he asked. He pulled the trigger.
Helena pulled Leon out of the way as the B.O.W. crashed to the ground, one of its large claws falling right where they had been just a moment before. "Now," said Leon, his chest heaving, heavy with pain and exertion. "Let's get the hell out of here."
Helena helped him to the door, out of the large room, leaving the room and the B.O.W. behind, for good.