Chapter Fourteen.
Seras awoke, knowing nothing but hunger. Something cold and metallic was holding her arms above her head and her wrists together, and it was annoying. She tugged, unable to gain leverage. Realizing she was sitting down, she used the shackles to pull herself to her feet.
It was cold wherever she was, and she didn't like it. The room was dark with a high ceiling and two large pillars in the middle of the room, blocking her view of what might have been stairs on the other side. On her right was a wall with a caged cell set into it. She could smell something that stank inside the cell, but a far more wonderful smell drew her attention to the other side of the room.
Her eyes had already attuned to the lack of light and she could see the room as though the sun were beaming down on it. The smell was coming from a charred corpse. All the juicy blood was still inside, not quite rotten, but probably getting there.
She didn't care how old the blood was. She was so hungry that any kind of blood would be delicious. Even the blood of a burned helicopter pilot, anything to fill the giant pit in her stomach. She tried walking forward, but the chain held her back. Letting out a small wail, not wanting to deal with being chained up, wanting only to bury her face in the corpse and gulp the blood inside, she yanked on the chain harder.
Yank, yank, yank, she could hear the bolts sliding out and she smiled. She was going to eat soon. It had been so long, she had been so hungry; all of those juicy people who had been with her before, would've tasted so good, would've filled her up to the brim.
The chain broke, letting her get the leverage she needed to break the manacles on her wrists. The steel cut her, but she didn't care as she ran across the room, her bare feet plodding over the cold floor, to the burnt body of the chopper pilot.
She fell on it, ripping the burnt cloth from the charred skin and sinking her teeth onto the fleshiest spot she could find. The blood was dead and thick from coagulation, but fresh enough to sustain her. Burying her face into the man's stomach, letting the blood and whatever other fluids fill her mouth, she swallowed and swallowed, and swallowed, letting the blood fill the gnawing emptiness inside her.
The longer she drank, the more disgusting the blood became. Her sense was coming back to her, much like a mother returning to the house from a walk and finding her child rooting through the garbage. Still, she kept on imbibing the substandard blood, knowing that she needed as much as she could get.
Unable to bear it any longer, she pulled her head up and crawled backward, wiping the blood from her face. Sitting on the floor, disgusted with herself, she realized that she was also naked from the waist up. Covering her chest with her forearm, she stood and took stock of her surroundings, not looking at the body behind her.
She was in some kind of basement prison. The stairs to her left lead up to a sturdy, metal door. She walked up the stairs, feeling stronger, much more so than she remembered feeling all day. Even the blood from the dead pilot had been like manna from heaven.
The door was quite thick and made of steel. Even with her strength, she doubted she would be able to break it down; at least not before any guards came running. Half-naked and unarmed, she had no desire to fight a cadre of hooded men.
Looking down into the prison, she could see what had been smelling up the cell built into the wall. Chained to the wall was something out of a gladiator movie. It was a tall, burly man with a gladiator-style helmet. From where she was she could see that his eyes had been sewn shut and wicked looking steel claws attached to his forearms.
While puzzling over what the thing was supposed to be, she spied a steel lever bolted to the wall next to it. Sighing, wishing she had a shirt, she went back downstairs and looked the room over for anything she might use as a weapon in case the creature suddenly became active.
Finding nothing, she walked carefully up to the bars and examined the monster more closely. It was alive, and moving slightly to keep from falling down, but otherwise seemed dormant. Gently, she pushed on the cell door and nervously watched the creature as the door swung inward.
More and more, it was looking like a complete setup. The body, the lever, the very fact that she was alive and not sitting in a pile at the bottom of an incinerator all pointed to this being someone's idea of a game. It would also explain her being minus one shirt.
"There's probably a camera somewhere," she said quietly to herself. No sooner had she set foot inside the cell when the chained creature's body tensed and its arms broke the chains holding them to the wall.
Raising its arms high and letting out a pig-like grunt, the weapons on its arms extended, perhaps somehow fused to the tendons. Seras backed out of the doorway and over by a pillar as the thing came rushing through, wildly swinging its bladed arms.
At came at her and she leapt nimbly towards where she had been chained up, letting the thing strike a wooden crate, destroying it. Throwing modesty to the wind, she crouched, ready to grab the thing's wrists if it came at her again.
It grunted angrily and retracted its steel claws. Looking up, it began walking around in small circles, unable to see her. As it turned towards the dead body she had eaten blood from, she saw a brown, pulsing growth attached to its back with tentacles.
The parasite had no eyes to see, and she thanked God for small mercies. Wiggling her fingers, she tiptoed her bare feet across the smooth stone, as silent as a cat stalking a mouse. When she got close enough, her hands shot out and snatched at the parasite. With the thing caught in her vice-like grip, she yanked it back hard, tearing the entire thing out of the creature's back like some kind of imbedded tick.
Grunting with rage, the monster staggered forward, trying to claw at its back. As the parasite melted in her hands, the man it had infested fell forward and stopped moving. Tired of being filthy, she wiped her hands on its pants and pulled the lever in its cage. As she suspected, the door at the top of the stairs slid open, letting a little bit of light into the prison cell.
After deciding she couldn't use the gladiator's claw weapons, not without wasting precious time, she went up the stairs with the idea of taking the robe of the first reasonable clean cultist she came across.
With her freedom gained and her hunger fed, her mind turned to Ashley. It was doubtful she had escaped Salazar's guards and Rip van Winkle. Likely she was now deep in the castle and under guard. Where she herself was in the castle, was also unknown and it didn't look like Luis or Leon was going to show up anytime soon either.
"One thing at a time," she said, covering her chest and walking into a carpeted hallway. "Get a weapon and a shirt, then worry about Ashley and saving her."
Part of her hoped she wouldn't run across Luis or Leon before finding something to cover herself with. She imagined Alucard would think her modesty was funny, and he was about the only person she would allow a laugh at her expense in such a situation.
Opting for the long end of the hall, she enjoyed the feeling of the expensive carpet on her bare feet. Shoes was another item on her list, and she wondered if she would be lucky enough to find a cultist sporting a pair of combat boots in her size.
Rounding the corner, the ceiling dropped a little and the hall became more of a series of rooms, perfect for someone to hide in for an ambush. No sooner had she realized it, then two men in black robes, bald, pale, and holding crossbows, stepped out from behind the walls.
Full of blood, the bolts seemed to come at her at the slow speed of punches. She sidestepped one and ducked the other. Running forward while the robed men reloaded their bolts, she grabbed the on the right's crossbow and yanked it from his hands, sending it clattering to the floor.
The other ran, not wanting a close quarters fight armed only with a crossbow. The one she had attack attempted to grab her throat, and she let him, not concerned about having to breath.
Seras reached up between his arms, grabbed the back of his head with one hand, his chin with the other, and snapped the cultist's neck. Dead, he fell to the floor while the other locked his bolt into place.
His second shot was as easy to duck as the first. The bolt struck the stone above her head, nearly hitting her when it ricocheted. The crossbowman ran from Seras as she gave chase. A kick to the back sent him sprawling forward. Sitting down on him while he struggled, Seras snapped his neck as well.
Wasting no time, she searched the pocket of his robes and found a knife. A short, double bladed one, likely used for ritual purposes. Using it, she cut a wide strip of cloth from the robe, which was happy to see was clean and only smelled a little musty. Tying it around her chest, she now felt much more comfortable, although now it looked as though she were wearing a tube top. The hard part, however, was cutting another piece of cloth and using it to wipe the massive amount of blood from her mouth and chest.
She didn't dare put on one of their robes, lest she catch a bullet in the back of her head from Leon if he happened across her and saw her before she saw him. Examining the dead cultist's feet, she saw that he wore sandals, not something she wanted to deal with.
Making her way through the castle's hallways, and having taken the crossbows along with two dozen bolts, she kept her now very acute senses on full alert for any sign of movement.
Feeling as though she were becoming hopelessly lost, she stopped when she walked past a wooden door at an odd position in a long, bland hallway. Putting her ear against the door, she wasted no time opening it after she realized the sounds she was hearing was that of gunshots.
The door led into dark, dank tunnel with running water coming out from the low-set floor and running down into drains. The place smelled faintly of sewage, but she wasn't paying attention to odors much anymore, just the sound of sporadic gunfire.
Getting her feet wet, she bolted down the slippery corridor for about thirty meters, where it hooked right and into a large, square collection pool. Seras jumped down into the knee high water, wincing in pain as her feet took the force of her fall. She slogged over to the ladder on the other side, hoping the sounds of gunfire would continue while she clumsily made her way up the ladder with a crossbow in her hand.
Once on the other side, the shooting was now louder and likely coming from the next room beyond a wooden door to her right. Bursting through the door, she thought she was going to be shot by Leon as he turned his gun on her.
The room they were in looked like another prison cell, with a hole in the ceiling large enough for five men to fit. Leon was shooting down the hall to the left, while Luis stood behind him, glancing to the other side of the room where another door was set on the other end of a pit like the one she had come from.
"Seras!" Luis shouted. "Get over here!"
She started forward, but stopped, seeing movement in the hole above Leon. Something, maybe the size of a person, was moving out of the hole and along the ceiling, towards Leon. It was almost as though the ceiling itself was moving, or the creature moving along had some kind of optic camouflage.
Hoping they weren't in for a Predator reenactment, Seras put a bolt into what she thought was the creature's center. It made a rattling kind of screech and fell from the ceiling next to Leon. As its camouflage faded, Seras saw that it was some kind of insect, perhaps a cricket, only it was the size of Leon if he were to get down on all fours.
Luis used his revolver to stop the thing from moving, while Leon kept firing down the hall. Seras ran over behind Leon and began to load another bolt in the crossbow.
Looking over his shoulder, she saw what might have been six of the creatures scuttling over the corpses of the ones Leon had already killed. "My belt," Leon said. "Grenade."
Setting the crossbow down, she took a grenade from Leon's belt, pulled the pin, and tossed it down the hall into the mass of mutant crickets. It exploded, sending bits of insect raining down on them, ruining Seras's recent cleanup job.
"What the hell are those things?" Seras said, looking at the intact one off to her side. "Now they've got giant crickets?"
"Lets talk about this later," Luis said. "Except, uh, where's Ashley? And your clothes?"
"Kidnapped and stolen," Seras said, as the three of them crossed the pit, which Luis had been waiting on to drain. Through the door on the other side was a much dryer and cleaner series of passageways. The trio stopped in an alcove and sat down. Leon and Luis using the time to rest and reload, while Seras stood guard with her reloaded crossbow.
"Stop looking at me," Seras said to Luis. "You to," to Leon.
"I'm guessing you've got a story for that," Luis said, pointing at her chest.
"Yes, but…"
"How about you tell us the 'what happened to Ashley' story first," Leon said, snapping a fresh clip into his gun.
Sighing, Seras began to relate the tale of her encounter with the castle's master and the Millennium liaison.
To be continued…