They fell for hours, at least, to Ethan, it seemed like hours, and their plummet to the Center of the Earth (a/n: don't worry, they're not really at the center of the earth; it's just the foundation beneath the facility; it barely even scratches the crust) was surely going to pulverize their bodies into pico de gallo once they hit solid ground. The trust Ethan had put in Jill to keep him alive left his body and flew to Heaven, leaving panic in his nerves. Why, oh, why the hell did he believe Jill could fall this far and be perfectly fine, how could he be so stupid as to–
They stopped.
"Hold on, Ethan," Jill said, "there's rocks coming down at us, I have to dodge them."
She played a deadly game of high stakes hopscotch with the gigantic boulders of concrete that plummeted from the world above. One of them hurtled down toward them like an MZKT-79221 mobile launcher (a/n: you know, one of those gigantic trucks that the soviets used to launch SCUD missiles? I wish I had one of those; it'd be pretty boss to drive it down the highway even though I could only stop at Wal-Mart parking lots) leaping off of the Cliffs of Dover at the command of its psychotic driver and threatened to become their tombstone until Jill ran up the wall and backflipped onto this towering obelisk.
"Here, Ethan, use these!" Jill had apparently caught some of the weapons that fell from the ceiling: including, and limited to, the G41, a couple of its STANAG magazines, and some grenades, one red and one green. Jill, herself, was holding the SSK Fat Mac.
Their eyes adjusted to the darkness and the horrific visage of a four-story tall Rafflesia arnoldii with a Venus Flytrap mouth that fell perpendicular to its flower face so its sets of 'teeth' were on the left and right sides like some mutant slit from outer space, numerous giant, girthy vines that whipped back and forth like tentacles threatening to molest a girl in a hentai film, and big googly eyes. The plant creature roared its sickening Godzilla screech and its many pitcher plant appendages that some of its vines held like Pepsi cans hovered towards Jill and Ethan, looming ever closer like alien saucers coming to abduct them so their crews could probe them for their perverse, quasi-scientific, sexual curiosities.
Jill took aim with her .950 JDJ rifle and squeezed the trigger once. Immediately, Ethan's ears popped out and a horrifying ring resonated throughout his ears that radiated into his skull. He was able to catch a glimpse of Jill grabbing onto her shoulder, wincing in pain, and her rifle flying out of her hands because of its sheer recoil as he crouched down and covered his ears, dropping his G41 over the edge. He was unable to hear his own screams amidst the conflagration of noise in his own brain.
Jill's own ears were fine after a few seconds but, when she saw Ethan curled up in the fetal position with his hands on his ears and his pants stained with the fluids of his own cowardly bladder, her maternal instincts kicked into overdrive, she heaved him up, cradled him in her arms, and leaped towards a sheltered hole she spotted among a ravine of fallen debris.
One of the monster's vine nearly grabbed her by the leg but she was able to dive into the hole as a runaway pinball dives into an outlane. The vine tried to reach into the hole to grab the two but Jill had freed one of her hands to rapidly burrow into the rubble and she made a 45-degree turn and tunneled upwards to make a sinus that the vine would be no more capable of reaching than a finger would be capable of scratching the brain through the nose. That's not to say that the vine did not try to reach them, however. Jill could see the tip of the vine patting around the lip of the sinus' portal like Bugs Bunny's hand patting around the mouth of his rabbit hole for a carrot. She held tight onto Ethan and watched the vine wander around.
Her foot was too close to the hole. The vine was about to touch it. She lifted her foot to the ceiling. The vine passed by and made a frustrated gesture as if to say, 'Dagnab it, they're gone!' and slinked off.
Jill could finally relax her muscles and laid Ethan down. The sinus made an incline for him to rest as comfortably as one could on solid granite. She pulled off Ethan's shirt and covered his face with it so that she could dig a higher ceiling for herself without getting any dust in Ethan's orifices. When the ceiling was high enough for her to work without bumping her head she then hovered over Ethan and used her telepathy to diagnose his injuries.
Reading Ethan's mind was like being piss-drunk on a constantly spinning merry-go-round at a Death Grips concert. Although Ethan could not think in intelligible words, the buzzing tones and nauseous spinning sensations that Jill could vicariously feel told her everything she needed to know. The JDC 950 round she fired was loud enough to rupture Ethan's inner ear and he was suffering from tinnitus and vertigo. Nothing on Earth could cure him of the agony Ethan was suffering from. Nothing, except, Jill's X-virus infected saliva.
She lifted Ethan's shirt off of his face and held it over the portal to shake the dust off of it. She then crawled up to Ethan's right ear, close enough to french-kiss it, and gathered all of the saliva and phlegm from her throat. She expelled it. The spittle raced into his ear and Jill flipped his head over to do the same to his other ear. To help her produce more saliva, Jill pulled a Snickers bar from her cleavage and took her time to chew on it. She grimaced while she ate it because, being pocketed in her well-endowed breasts had caused the candy bar to become melted but she endured the unpleasant, smooshie texture for Ethan's sake. When she got a good glob of spit ready, she expelled it into his left ear.
After a few moments: Ethan's eyes fluttered in wonder.
"My tinnitus and vertigo are gone! I can hear again!" cried Ethan, "It's a miracle! What the hell did you do, Jill?"
"I spit in your ears," Jill explained, "My saliva can repair damage to the inner ear because of my X-virus infection."
"You mean," Ethan was frightened to say what had to come next, "I'm infected?"
"No, the X-Virus isn't transmissible through salivary or sexual contact: it needs to be coated in a special protein casing of lots of different viruses and parasites before it can infect a host."
Jill grabbed onto Ethan's hand, "but, anyway, let's go outside to kill this plant monster. I saw you drop your gun off of the tower thing we were just on; I'll grab it for you. follow me!"
Jill jumped down through the sinus' portal and scurried off, crawling in a lizard-fashion like Dracula along his walls. Ethan followed her lead through the portal but could only manage an awkward duck-walk in the tunnel back to the open air. After a dozen steps or so, Jill appeared before him with the G41 he dropped.
"Here you go, Ethan, I found it," she said, "come on, I'll give you a piggyback ride. I'll just hold my arms up into the ceiling so I can make clearance for you head."
She turned around and crouched to allow Ethan to hitch himself up on her back. When he was saddled up: Jill rose up, threw her fists into the ceiling, and started sprinting for the entrance. Within a moment, Jill and Ethan shot out of the tunnel like a slug from a .45 and were now flying through the air.
The plant creature caught sight of them and brought its lumbering vine within their path. Ethan saw that the vine was about to whip them to the ground and shut his eyes.
FLAP. WHOOSH.
Ethan opened his eyes again just in time to see Jill bank to the right and do a barrel roll with a pair of vestigial wings she spontaneously sprouted so that she could maneuver like a flying squirrel or gliding lizard. And, with the gentle grace of a falling rose petal, they landed on a nearby mound of rubble. Ethan jumped off of Jill's back.
"Holy crap, Jill," shouted Ethan, "why didn't you tell me you could fly?"
"I had no idea that I could," said Jill as she shed her wings, "I did that completely by accident. I'm discovering new things about my body all of the time."
Her jumpsuit fell apart in two pieces, exposing her set of purple Victoria's Secret-brand plunge bra, v-string panties, and fishnet stockings. Her vestigial wings worked like a wingsuit so they attached her arms to her legs and the newly-formed skin had ripped through the fabric of her clothing.
"AAAH! Ethan! Look away while I sew my jumpsuit back on!"
Ethan turned toward the plant creature. Its vines were writhing, it's googly eyes were getting cross, and it was roaring from whatever body parts those noises came from. Within moments, the creature would strike them.
"Okay Ethan, you can look now," She said as Ethan turned to look at her with her jumpsuit, once again, intact as though it had never ripped in the first place, "it's a good thing I always keep a sewing kit on me."
That was a shame. Those purple panties and fishnets were total chub material.
"EEEK!" Jill lifted one of her legs toward her hips and crossed her arms across her chest in a baby gibbon fashion not unlike the protective cowering Ethan did on his helicopter ride to this place, "Pervert!"
Oh, shit. Had Ethan thought that out loud?
Jill's posture relaxed and she giggled, "I'm just kidding! I don't mind if you think of me like that."
Where did she get that lingerie, anyway?
"Carlos has access to your ex-wife, Sheila's, Victoria's Secret catalogs," in his mind, Ethan retched at the mention of his ex-wife's name. Jill continued, "He gives me the ones she puts in her recycling bin and he also gives me a marker so I get to pick out whatever I want!"
Ethan found himself spinning around in the air with a cacophony of noise that sounded like a bundle of dynamite going off. He was unable to realize that Jill caught sight of the plant creature's vine about to crash down on their heads and Jill had latched onto him before springing back out of the path of the oncoming tentacle.
Ethan found himself behind a hill of concrete, out of sight from the monster. As soon as he caught his bearings, Jill related her plan: "Let's split up, I'll take him from the air, you take him from the ground. Find a rocket launcher if you can."
Jill leapt away from Ethan. Ethan caught sight of her catching one of the vines and severing it with a judo chop. Ethan scaled down the mound of rubble, being careful not to get his ankle caught on any of the treacherous, jagged ground that could have spelled a broken nose and two poked-out eyes at best if he had fallen. Since the plant was distracted by Jill, Ethan did not need to worry so much about any vines or hovering pitchers.
A thunderous crack and a flash of lightning suddenly erupted from the plant creature's mouth and struck Jill. However, Jill's jumpsuit was made of rubber and her infection allowed her to redirect the electrical energy she had been bestowed with towards one of the creature's pitchers. It spun around like a Disneyland teacup and fired off its seeds in random directions which exploded in spectacular displays of color and sound, precisely like a salvo of Black Cat Sky Dancer rockets.
"It can shoot lightning," said Ethan, out loud to himself, "I'm really goddamned surprised."
"It might also surprise you to know that I can talk!" the plant creature said in a raspy Howlin' Wolf impression.
"What?!" Ethan was horribly confused. The plant, seeing an opportunity to take advantage of Ethan's distraction, knocked some of the ceiling down with its massive vines, which tore open a new hole in the floors above, causing some of the facility's nightclubs and petting zoos to give way to a torrential downpour of people and animals, including a P-virus infected orangutan dressed up as Santa Claus sitting on a Christmas throne that was holding two children on its knee, who all fell several hundred feet to their deaths, their bodies shattering into ludicrous explosions of gore like water balloons filled with goulash and mushroom soup bursting forth upon impact. Ethan deftly dodged a descending doodad before it could destroy him.
"'What!'" The plant mocked Ethan, "I'll tell you 'what'! I got chlorophyll pumpin' through my veins and a voltaic pile grafted in my brains! And I got's to have me some human flesh or else I'm gonna fade, ya dig?"
"What are you?!" Ethan
"Shit, maaaaan, Wesker's callin' me Plant 49 or sumth'in. Just call me 'Seymour'. It's got a nice ring to it, doncha' think?"
"You don't really have a voltaic pile grafted in your brain, do you, mister Seymour?" Jill asked politely. Since the plant could talk, maybe it could be reasoned with in a civilized manner.
"Awww, hell no!" shouted Seymour, "Umbrella don't do robots and I ain't no cyborg freak-a-nature. I've been genetically engineered to have the kind of electric organ you find in eels and sheeeit."
"Wait!, if you can talk and think like a human being," shouted Jill, "why would you want to follow the commands of an evil monster like Albert Wesker?"
"Fuck, girl, what'chu want from me? As far as I'm concerned: it's a win-win situation. I dispose of a few garbage bags full of shredded documents every week and I get to have some turkeys for dinner and not the kind of turkeys you get for Christmas dinner, I mean the jive kind. Heh heh heh!"
Jill wound up a spinning bird kick, "You eat people?" she said as she then back-flipped upside-down and rotated her legs as fast as a helicopter's rotors, acting as a weed whacker against Seymour's many noodley appendages.`
"Do I look like I can photosynthesize in this place? Of course, I got to eat people!" Seymour's vine-like appendages regrew, "Non-zombified humans are the most viable sources of essential nutrients for me, such as nitrogen, niacin, Vitamin A, and magnesium, and, besides," the vines grew tulip-like beaks that screeched like skidding monster trucks from Hell, "I love the sounds that humans make when they're being slowly digested inside my stomach acids and the feelings they give me when they scratch at my insides gets my stamens into pollen production overdrive, if you know what I mean, heh heh heh."
"I didn't know plants could orgasm." Ethan said as he unloaded an entire STANAG magazine into the creature's pitcher to no avail.
"What can I say?" Seymour said as he tried to bite at Ethan with one of his tulips but he stumbled on a piece of rubble and narrowly avoided getting chomped, "you learn something new everyday. Kind of like how you're both going to learn what it feels like to get your face disintegrated by a carnivorous plant's digestive enzymes! HEH HEH HEH HEH!"
Jill kicked off of one of Seymour's vines and leaped against a wall. Then, she planted her foot firmly against it, positioned herself towards his flower. If this creature could talk then it surely is a plant/animal hybrid with a brain. She shuffled to one of its googly eyes and took a deep breath.
"Oooh, girl, you betta not be doing what I think youze gonna do!" Seymour chided semi-seriously. Jill blew her dragon's kiss and fiery lance thrusted forth from her lips and pierced the eye, melting it into a viscuous, effluvial soup, "YOWWW! Oh, that's it! You're in for it now, bitch!"
Seymour's vines wrapped around Jill's ankle. She yelped in surprise and kicked furiously as the vine craned toward one of the pitchers.
Ethan looked on like a spectator in the nosebleeds of Wrigley Field rooting for the Cubs to start an unbreakable winning streak in next year's World Series. Surely, she would find a means to get out of there.
The vine released her and she tumbled down, shrieking. Her legs kicked out, nailing a perfect splits on the lips of the pitcher plant. For a moment, it looked as though she would be able to launch herself upward and take out more of Seymour's vines but they lashed out and pummeled her into the pitcher trap. She was now sealed inside, swimming in the digestive fluid, and banging on the pitcher's transparent walls.
"Ethan! Don't worry about me, my x-virus infection protects my skin against scalding liquids and my jumpsuit is weaved to accommodate hazardous environments like this so my lingerie will be okay! But, anyway, I put some grenades on your kevlar vest while you weren't looking."
But he wasn't wearing a kevlar vest…
"I put one on you while you weren't looking!"
Ethan looked down at his torso and saw that he was, indeed, wearing one after all. And, just like Jill said, there were two grenades clipped to it: one green, one red.
"Ethan! Listen carefully to my directions!"
He was bad at following directions. His head was always in the clouds where it was easier to tune other people out. He had to concentrate in order to remember people's names when they introduced themselves and, even then, he was lucky to retain their first names because their last names were often weirdo ethnic names that were hand-me-downs from their immigrant ancestors. And not only that, but…
He recoiled at a piercing shriek that sounded throughout the subterranean cavern where this battle was taking place. Vines had been creeping up on him while he was thinking to himself and he had left himself open to them but he was saved by Jill's valkyrie screams and the vines retreated to Seymour's flower-head to cover where his ears would be if he had them.
"Ethan, pay attention! My X-Virus infection allows me to emit supersonic-pitched screams that can improve memory and strengthen retention as well as irritate plants, animals, fungi, protists, and some monera, but not all of them!"
Was it because she could only scare Archaea and not Bacteria?
"Oh, that's right!" Jill slapped herself on the forehead but forgot there was stomach acid on her hand and it seared the skin on her forehead but her healing factor fixed it a moment later, "I'm sorry; when I was in middle school: we got outdated textbooks for science class so I keep forgetting the monera kingdom was split into two domains! Anyway, you have to follow these instructions very carefully, there isn't much time!" She emitted another wail to keep Seymour at bay.
Seymour expressed his displeasure, "Girl! You best be stopping this shit, or I'm going to need to send my vines into the Popeye's on Floor 2 to pick up some Ghost Pepper wings so I can digest you much faster and much badder than I was before!"
There was a Popeye's in this facility? Ethan was super stoked; he had another reason not to advocate for blowing the facility up. If only he had money with which to buy some of Popeye's new ghost pepper wings: he wasn't sure if they were cool with bartering and trading one of his guns for a nice, big ol' bucket of succulent, savory chicken with crispy...
"Ethan! Stop thinking about food and listen! You have to throw the grenades into the two pitcher plants that are blue in color! Ignore the red and green ones!"
Ethan didn't pay attention to the coloration of the pitcher plants but he did see that there were two blue ones that… Seymour was bringing to him… Wait, what the hell was he doing?
"My screams manipulated him into bringing his pitcher plants towards you, I think!"
Seymour interjected, "Actually, I thought I'd humor him by making it a little easy on him. Go ahead boy, try slapping the backboard on these hoops! HEH HEH HEH!"
Without a moment's hesitation, Ethan pulled the pin and chucked the green one towards the mouth of the pitcher plant… And missed. The grenade was a dud, anyway and failed to detonate.
"WEEEELL, now ain't that just too bad! UH-UH-UUUH!" Seymour wagged one of his vines at him, "heh heh heh. But, don't get too down on yourself, you still got one more free throw left!"
Ethan pulled the pin on his last grenade and tossed it directly into the mouth of the pitcher plant to his left. It blew up and engulfed its interior in a brief flash of hellfire… But it had no real effect on it and Seymour remained unperturbed.
"Well, what do you know? That didn't do jack shit! Looks like you suckers are both mine, AHAHAHAHA!"
Seymour laughed hysterically.
Jill tried to scratch the walls of her acid maiden (a/n: that's like an iron maiden but with corrosive chemicals, although it doesn't necessarily have to have acids in it as it can also have caustic bases in it too) with her fingernails. She tried using her x-virus augmented alpha-keratin growth to grow freakishly long fingernails that had purple nail polish on them because her x-virus infection allowed her nail matrices to evolve glands in the cuticles that produced nail polish but they broke against it. She was now reduced to yelping for help like a princess kidnapped by a dragon.
Ethan was not the Prince Charming she needed him to be at that moment. He was powerless to help her and he assumed the fetal position and resigned himself to his fate while Seymour's mocking laughter continued to bounce against the walls...
"Yow!" Seymour sounded a little surprised, "Hey what the-?!"
Ethan's ears perked up. He could hear Seymour in distress and he was yelling like an irascible grandmother, whose grandchildren were only 7-14 years her junior, from Compton demanding a refund at Guadalajara Beauty Salon.
"AAGH! Wesker! You moh-ron! I told you not release the lepuses until I said so! Now I'm getting my ass chomped! Ah, baby, don't let me die! AAAAAGGGH!"
Ethan was afraid to stand up and see just what 'lepuses' were. But he swallowed some imaginary liquid courage and gradually worked up the strength to heft himself a little bit further.
"Ethan, look!" Jill shouted, "It's bunny rabbits! Honest-to-God giant bunny rabbits! They're eating Seymour!"
Ethan leaped up. His eyes darted back and forth to witness this most incredible sight of giant killer rabbits leaping to and fro at Seymour's vines. Some of the rabbits were chowing down on Seymour's flower-face while he continued to scream like free jazz vocalist.
One bunny leaped up to the vine attached to Jill's prison like a dog catching a stick, an impressive feat for a woman like Jill to perform but totally ordinary for a rodent such as itself, and the hatch to Jill's prison opened up as a reflex to the lepus's digging incisors. Jill promptly jumped out, did a triple salchow, a double lutz, and stuck a back-inside-edge landing in front of Ethan.
"Cover you ears, Ethan, I'm going to kill all of these rabbits. I read their minds and they're all BOW's and they're out for blood."
Ethan did as he was told and, in the time it takes to listen to Crackity Jones by the Pixies, various gunshots and audible neck snaps with brief bunny death knells penetrated his just-too-flimsy hands.
"I'm back!" Jill announced, oddly chipper for having just killed a bunch of adorable fluffy varmints.
"Oh, Ethan, when you've killed as many deadly mutants as I have: you need to have a chipper attitude and look on the bright side of things. Otherwise, you might find reasons to stay inside and be a broody-brittany on a warm and sunny summer day!"
Even in within this cavernous chamber of death, Jill was a golden ray of hope and sunshine.
"Ah, Ethan, that's so sweet of of you!" Jill closed her eyes and tilted her head like a doting Doberman puppy.
Ethan appreciated Jill's affection but a verbal acknowledgment would have to wait. They still needed to escape from here and were going to need whatever guns got lost when the floor collapsed.
"I'll do just that, Ethan," Jill said, "hold on!" And, like a phantom, Jill moved to one of the fallen boulders of concrete with such supernatural speed that she seemed to teleport. She wound her fist up above her head and thrust it into the gargantuan chunk of debris. It shattered into dust with a deafening crack and it was followed by another one, and another, each signifying another haymaker. Eventually, the cracks stopped and the dust swirled into a cyclone that spiraled into Jill's mouth like water going down the drain.
What the fuck was that? Ethan could not find the strength to say this but the sentence exploded in his mind like a pile of all the semtex in the world gathered together and painted like an easter egg to look like a mountain of abc bubblegum.
"Oh, let me explain. My X-virus infection makes me strong enough to shatter boulders into fine particles and it also gives me the ability to suck them up like a vacuum."
More like, Kirby.
"Oh, yeah, like Kirby! So, anyway, I can suck them up and my digestive enzymes can liquefy them into a concrete-like substance that I can save for later and then I can regurgitate it to trap bad people who would want to hurt us."
Ethan understood completely. He only wondered where the guns were.
"Oh, they're right here, I even found some blankets to lay them down on so they make a nice little display. Some of them were broken, but I found a workbench that came with all of the tools and manuals I needed next to that dead Orangutan dressed as Santa Claus so I used it to restore them."
She had managed to gather every single weapon and spread them out neatly, with each of their muzzles pointed to Ethan's left, on some blankets like food at a picnic and each weapon even had labels next to it printed with meticulously detailed specifications.
Ethan looked at Jill for a moment and she showed him the marker she used to make them, "It ran out of ink right when I finished the last one."
Ethan went back to scanning the secessionist potluck of small arms. The RPG-7 and Panzerfaust-3 lay on the blankets like meatball subs and their warheads sat next to them like ostrich eggs on kebab sticks. The Vzor 58 was displayed with its finely shellacked wood furniture exposed like a naked Zagnut and the receiver, magazine, and barrel proudly coated with Butterfinger cocoa coating and the Ruger revolvers were like licorice candy sticks placed next to each other in single file like an Amtrak train… But the Desert Eagle, that damned wrist cracker, stuck out like a stainless steel circus peanut…
"Hey," said Ethan. "I deliberately threw away this Deagle because it was a piece of garbage."
"Oops, I'm sorry, let me take care of this." Jill pulled back the Desert Eagle's slide eight times to eject all of its cartridges and put them in her cleavage. She then greedily gorged on the pistol like a sloppy, greasy slice of pizza from a New York street vendor whose ragged used Kleenex of cheese and pepperoni threatened to fall onto the sidewalk and fry in the August sun. As she was chewing on it, she said with her mouth full of steel, "my ekth-viruth infeh-," she gulped. "Sorry. My X-virus infection hardens my teeth, allowing me to chew steel. My digestive enzymes also melts down the steel and I can spit it out later to make origami with it. See, watch!" True to her word, Jill regurgitated some glowing hot molten steel into her hand. She waited for it to turn to a cool, Delorean grey and shaped it into a swan. She then used her fingernails to carve 'FOR ETHAN WITH LOVE,' into one of its wings. "Here you go, Ethan, I made this for you!" She gave him a sweet, dopey smile the sort of smile a bigger-than-average German Shepherd would give to her master after catching a tennis ball, and held her hands together, waiting for his approval.
"Thanks..." said Ethan.
Jill's smile waned and became the kind of despondent countenance of betrayal that that same German Shepherd would make when, having run to retrieve her tennis ball, looked back to see that her master had only used this game of fetch as a pretense for distracting her so he could go inside his house without having her rush in and make a nuisance of herself. Tears began to drip from her eyes, making her eyeliner run a little, "...YOU DON'T LIKE IT?"
"It's beautiful… It's just..." Ethan couldn't finish his sentence.
"You haven't met many girls who were also refineries, huh?" Jill said.
"No, no! You got it all wrong! You see," his voice fried a little, "I... just... love it when a girl is full of surprises and I'm thinking..."
"That I might be the one and you've been too shy to say it!?"
"...Yeah."
Jill ran up to Ethan and hugged him like a cuddly boa constrictor, "Oh Ethan, you're the most wonderful man I've ever met and I want to get married to you and have lots of beautiful children with you RIGHT NOW!"
That actually sounded great to Ethan. It was too bad that Jill was unable to have children.
Jill's embrace slackened. Ethan wrapped his arm around her and pulled her in and Jill's embrace tightened once again, more desperate and wary than before.
Ethan's heart fluttered. What truer love could there have been between a man and a telepath? There could be no accusations of lies, affairs, concealed gambling debts, or covert drinking problems. There could only be invincible, absolute trust… But yet, he would have no privacy with this woman. No intimate secrets he could keep to himself and no filter with which to moderate any passionate thoughts that might hurt her. However, the creature comforts of private thought were things he was willing to sacrifice. Jill would always know to trust him and she would always be willing to forgive him if he ever hurt her in a fit of passionate thought. Surely, this was an Orwellian romance if ever there was one. He felt secure to know that Big Sister was always watching and that he loved her back for it…Perhaps, they would both get married after they escaped from the island.
"The island," Jill said, repeating Ethan's thoughts, "Right. So, Which weapons do you want to take along?"
Why not all of them? Couldn't Jill find some attache cases or duffel bags to fit them all in? If she found some blankets and posterboard to make labels with, she could surely find…
"That's a great idea!" Jill said, panting like a dog, "Don't mind if I already ran off to get one!"
Jill had apparently used her pathogenically-augmented speed to hunt down a steamer trunk with little rollers on them.
"Oh, this isn't a steamer trunk, it's an Item Box! Umbrella mastered sixth dimensional storage back in the 90's so we can put lots of stuff in here!"
The weapons had disappeared. Ethan caught a glimpse of Jill cramming a ball of cluttered metal, wood, and polymer into the item box and slamming its lid tight. Jill's limp fist was now clutching the box's handle, lugging the item box around on its rollers as one would take along their overhead storage.
"So," Jill said, "Are we ready to go?"
"Yeah," said Ethan.
"Great, let's go West," Jill pointed her finger in a seemingly random direction, "this way!"
How did she know which way West was?
"When Wesker was doing his experiments on me, he injected mercury into my brain and my X-virus infection prevents me from suffering any ill effects. In fact, the mercury pools to the north side of my skull so I always know where North is!" Jill touched her temple with her finger even though the Mercury wasn't actually pooling at that spot because that wasn't where North was at that moment.
The item box would be a bitch to bring along, though. It was quite heavy and weighed down further with an entire arsenal. It would be enough of a slog to go through a maze of winding tunnels drenched in waters of every color.
"Don't worry about the item box, Ethan. Since it has sixth dimensional storage, we can just find another one somewhere else in the facility and grab the same weapons we put into them from those," Jill hopped to the direction of the sewers and started loping her way west with Ethan shadowing her movements with timid footsteps.
For a moment, Ethan stopped to hesitate for he was still a bit nervous about entering the sewers, in spite of the G41 he was carrying.
"You can still hold my hand if you want to." said Jill.
Ethan looked at Jill's hand, then turned his gaze up to meet Jill's, her Mona Lisa smile stretched a little bit. But what about the item box?
Ethan gave her a smile of his own and took her hand. Jill's eyes fluttered shut, her smile grew wide, and her head tilted, more like a Rottweiler puppy this time.
Jill skipped ahead into the sewers like she was following the Yellow Brick Road from Wizard of Oz, dragging behind her daisy-chained captive who felt more like they were skipping down a gray brick road to K-Mart where they were going to buy a shotgun from the sporting goods department to kill themselves with.
Nevertheless, they kept on walking and didn't look back.
Ethan kept thinking that they were lost and Jill would keep assuring him that her X-Virus infection gave her a keen sense of direction. Nevertheless, Ethan was too neurotic to keep his mind off of his feelings of being lost. He read a story on the internet long ago about a girl who got lost in an uncharted network of catacombs under some city in a former soviet puppet state after she got high during a rave that was being held in some corner of the maze and disappeared. Her body was found a few weeks after she had died of... something. Whether it was fright, thirst, starvation, or La Bruja de Monterrey: could never be known. She was too bloated and the vermin had gotten to the carrion she left behind. Ethan did not want that same fate to befall either him or, especially, the love of his life.
"Oh, Ethan, stop being such a Fidgety Florence, everything's going to be okay and my keenly-honed hearing and intuition does not detect any BOW's in this place. You're letting your imagination..."
"GET THE BETTER OF YOU?" A devilish voice with a thick Russian accent, filtered with an otherworldly electronic vocoder called from the darkness.
"STOP WHERE YOU ARE AND DON'T MOVE!" a vocoded female voice with an American accent also called. Ethan and Jill turned to see two figures in gas masks that had their laser sights set on them.
"Ethan, put your hands up and do what they say," Jill whispered with a harsh rasp in her voice.
Ethan could not believe what Jill was saying. She could have killed these spooks without batting an eye by now and, here she was, insisting on surrendering to them as if either of them needed to wait and see if they had the best of intentions or not. Just how could she let this happen? HOW?!