Biohazard: Resident Evil VII

Chapter Four: Mia Winters

A few times Ethan called out to the woman in the cell, but she remained unresponsive, even when he roughly rattled the door and chain, causing the noise to echo all throughout the basement. At first he was worried that she was dead, but when he looked closer he could see her ribs moving, meaning that she was breathing. Whether or not this woman was actually Mia didn't really matter at this point, since he wasn't about to leave anyone locked inside a cage like that, and there were no conveniently placed keys for the padlock lying around, so he went back to the toolbox, knocking the video camera back onto the floor as he reached for it.

There wasn't much left inside when he opened the top, followed by each drawer down the line; a few rusting wrenches here, a broken screwdriver there, nothing that could really help him out against the padlock or its chain. There was a drill bit in the third drawer, and that would have been great if there had also been a drill lying around somewhere, or a hand-bore, or something… but there wasn't. In fact, Ethan was starting to lose hope, when he opened the last, largest drawer, and could hardly believe what was inside.

"Well, what do you know?" He whispered, taking out the pair of bolt cutters.

They were rusting, like the wrenches had been, but the bolt cutters still seemed pretty sturdy when he tried them out, even though the rust made it a bit difficult for him move the handles. Regardless of the tool's status, it was all he had, so Ethan rushed back over to the cell door, and opened the cutter so that it fit over one of the chain's links. Even though it was thoroughly rusted, the chain was heavy, making it a lot more difficult to break than he had hoped, so instead of just a quick snap, he was left struggling with it for several minutes.

Not that he wasn't making any progress, since the cutter was slowly wearing through the chain, but now Ethan's arms were getting too tired to use it. So in desperation for a better way to handle this, he turned the bolt cutter sideways, and placed his foot on the handle nearest to him, while grabbing the far side with both hands. Now with everything he had left, he pulled with his hands while pushing with his foot, leaning backwards as far as he could, and crying out in fatigue, before the chain finally broke.

Unfortunately, Ethan had still been leaning backwards when this happened, causing him to fall backwards into the part of the basement that was starting to flood. The water was only a couple inches deep, but it was cold, making him shiver a little from the extreme temperature difference as he scrambled back to his feet. His now wet clothes were immediately forgotten, however, when he tore the broken chain from the latch, and pulled the door open; so nervous to see who was on the cot that his knees were shaking as he made his way into the cell.

"Hey, are you all right?" He said in a shaky voice, reaching to turn her over. "You aren't hurt or anything, are… Mia?!"

Jumping backwards from the pure shock of seeing his wife's face, Ethan stumbled a bit before falling to the floor, and then rubbed his eyes to make sure that he wasn't somehow having a hallucination. She was dirty, and her hair was unkempt, probably from the time spent in this place, but it was definitely her. However, she was still unresponsive, as if in a deep sleep, so he clumsily crawled back over to the cot, and sat on it next to her so that he could get her to sit up.

"Mia, can you hear me?" He asked, pulling her up into a sitting position. "Mia, it's me, Ethan. Mia, wake up!"

Shaking her a little, and lightly smacking her cheek a few times, nothing seemed to work. Maybe she had been sedated, or abused, but without getting her to wake up, there would be no way to know what happened. So Ethan propped her up against the wall, before leaving the cell, and spotting an old metal can on the floor that didn't seem to have any holes when he picked it up. Aside from what he had already done, the only thing he could think of to do was scoop up some of that really cold water into the can, and throw it in his wife's face when he reentered the cell.

This time there was a reaction; Mia's eyes snapped open, and she coughed a couple times, seeming like she had no idea where she was as she looked around the room. She tried to get up, but failed like a lot of people did when they first got up, and Ethan intended to slowly help her up before letting her finish waking up, but couldn't help pulling her in for a hug that might have surprised him even more than it did her.

"Oh my God, Mia!" He exclaimed happily, kissing her on the forehead before squeezing her. "It's you, it's really you! Oh man, Travis is gonna shit himself when he sees… Mia? Mia, are you okay? Can you hear me? Mia, its Ethan? Mia?!"

"E… Ethan?" She asked, barely a whisper. "Ethan, you're… you're here?!"

Suddenly the haze left her eyes, and then she pushed him away before backing up against the far wall of the cell. The good news was that she seemed to be wide awake now, and this time when she quickly scanned the area around her, it was not done in confusion, but more like she was concerned about something. Ethan's first instinct as her husband was to hold his wife and try to reassure her that everything was going to be all right now, but she just pushed him back again the next time he tried to touch her.

"Ethan, what the hell are you doing here?!" Mia demanded, almost angrily. "You can't be here! How the hell would you even find this place?!"

"What are you talking about?" He asked, considering trying to touch her again, but reconsidering. "Mia, you told me how to find you, remember? You sent me an email with this address, and told me to come get you… have you really been here all this time? Mia, what happened to you? What's been going on these past three years?"

She made a sort of surprised comment about three years, with disbelief in her voice, but that was as close to a response as Ethan was going to get apparently, as his wife resumed looking around the room, this time venturing out of the cell. Mia put a finger to her lips in a gesture for him to be quiet while she crept over toward the darkened hallway, where she stared off into the darkness for several seconds, before coming back.

"Ethan, you have to get out of here, right now!" She said, constantly looking back toward the hallway. "You're okay as long as no one saw you… Ethan, please tell me that no one saw you! We can't let daddy know you're here; come on, this way!"

"What? Daddy?" Ethan asked, before Mia suddenly took off running. "Oh, damn it, Mia, wait!"

Running after her, he was so focused on catching up to his wife, that Ethan tripped over the camera he had knocked over earlier, and his reward was a face full of concrete when he fell down. Of course, this momentary distraction allowed him a few seconds to think, and now the knot in his stomach was returning as he thought more about what just happened. Apparently someone had locked Mia up in a cage, probably hurting her in ways that he didn't even want to think about… and based on what she said before running off, there was more than one person involved.

Clearly the people who lived around there were dangerous, just like Travis had predicted, meaning that there would be trouble if he ran into any of them. Therefore, it was probably a good idea to find something to defend himself with, and the only thing around that he could imagine using to fend off an attacker, was that pair of bolt cutters. Every second that he stayed down there was more distance for Mia to put between them, so he grabbed the heavy tool from the floor, and then went after her.

"Mia!" He called, rounding the corner. "Mia, come back!"

Leaving the workshop, and passing back through the darkened hallway, Ethan stopped for a second after thinking that he heard something. There was nothing that he could hear, and nothing that could be seen moving in front of the lights from either the workshop or the stairwell, so he concluded that it must've been his imagination. Either way, Mia was clearly not in her right mind, leaving a risk that she could get hurt if he left her on her own for too long, so he rushed through the hallway, and started back up the creaky stairs.

Forced to slow down a bit, since the old, wooden stairs felt like they were about to collapse, with the way they shook back and forth, Ethan realized that he should probably stop moving so fast or making so much noise. After all, he had already spent the last couple hours screaming all around the property like a jackass, and if by some miracle none of the people that kidnapped Mia had heard him, he wasn't about to do anything else that might draw attention.

The sun was still shining in through the cracks in the boarded up windows, although the light was significantly dimmer than when he had entered the basement, meaning that the sun was setting. This still left him some time to search around and find Mia, but he would have to hurry if he didn't want to realize Travis's earlier spoken fear about having to stumble around in the dark. So Ethan was just a couple steps down from the door, when he froze as the sound of something shattering reached his ears from behind.

Quickly spinning around, he saw that the light from the bottom of the stairwell was now out, leaving only darkness. Due to how tense this whole situation was, it took him a second to realize that the thing he heard shattering must have been the light bulb, and even longer to realize that those things didn't just fall out of their sockets… but by the time that he realized all of this, he felt the stairs shake a little as if someone else had stepped onto the bottom of them.

Keeping a tight grip on the bolt cutters, Ethan squinted to see what was there as the stairs moved again… and again… but without the light bulb, the sun coming in through the windows on the first floor wasn't enough to see more than a couple stairs down. For a moment nothing moved, but then his mouth ran dry when the stairs shook again, and now he could hear the very slowly approaching footsteps as well.

"I… see… you." A harsh female voice whispered.

One more step, and Ethan gasped as the barely visible figure of a person appeared in the darkness. But instead of continuing to advance, they just stayed there, making it impossible to identify them as they began to slowly breathe in and out. The figure's breathing was soft at first, but labored, and each new breath was louder, soon sounding more like an animal than a person… but then they backed away, taking a single step, and vanishing back down into the darkness.

Something moved behind him, causing Ethan to turn his head, but it was only a trick of the light as the sun continued to set, so he turned back toward the stairs, only to gasp in shock as the figure rushed out of the darkness, snarling as she grabbed him by the shirt. It was hard to see in the decreased light, but her face was twisted into an evil grimace, and she growled before shoving him backwards… so hard that his feet left the ground as he cleared the rest of the stairwell, slamming into the wall by the windows, and crashing to the floor.