ResidentEvil: NoEndInSightToMy Nightmare: ChapterTwenty: DoALittleTwist
Leon stares at what lies before them, Claire herself at a loss for words and actions, but not Dusty, who promptly enters the room and picks up the grenade launcher. His fingers wrap around the stock, the barrel is snapped open, and he smiles at the brass shell resting neatly inside. Leon rummages through the boxes and bags in the rest of the room, hoping to find anything of use as Claire steps up next to Dusty.
"Give me," her voice is stern, eyes focused on the weapon.
The brunette clutches it, "No! It's mine, I found it..."
"Do you know how to fire one missing the sight?"
Dusty gazes at the weapon, realizing he's never really fired a grenade launcher, let alone one missing the aiming apparatus. With a heavy sigh the weapon is dropped in Claire's hands, the weapon being inspected with an eye for detail as Dusty joins Leon in the hunt for weapons and ammunition. Leon is halfway through the room already by the time Dusty joins in. As the cop opens a crate and shifts through the sawdust inside, his mind replays what has happened in the last half-hour or so.
Leon killed the Licker, then used one of its talons to pry his cell door open, promptly rescuing the other two, Claire first, of course. Dusty smirks, their interest in each other is completely obvious. How long have they gone with these unspoken feelings for one another? Once they were free, the trio quickly made their way up a couple of floors, dispatching the occasional infected lab worker here and there with basic melee attacks and a pipe Leon pried off the wall in a utility closet. About ten minutes before they found this room, something apparently woke up downstairs, the monster having caused such a ruckus that it was felt by each person in the group.
"Any more shells for the M79, Leon?"
"Four more. Got a handful of handgun rounds if we could only find a weapon..." the survivor replies to the redhead quickly.
Dusty shoves another box aside, finding a black case tucked amongst the cobwebs and papers, "Oh god..."
The two people with him are quickly at his side as the rather large spider crawls out from the handle of the case, "Jesus, kill it!"
Leon arches an eyebrow at Dusty's outburst, "Scared of spiders? Even after all this?"
"That thing is huge! Zombies I can handle... Things that can crawl inside my ears, mouth, nose, and have more than four legs, no thanks..." Dusty winces as his skin crawls, even after Claire smashes it with her hand.
11
"I'll take that then," Leon grabs the case and opens it slowly, a cloud of dust swirling around him.
Inside the case, tucked against egg-crate packing, is a Beretta M9A1, the silver magazines reflecting the fluorescent lighting back into his blue eyes, "I think this might be better than your brother's firearm, Claire..."
He picks up on the scoff before he feels her breath on the back of his neck, "I doubt that gun could take his Samurai Edge... He'd still shoot rings around you."
Leon flicks the safety off and checks the trigger pull, "A little heavy on the trigger..."
He pulls the hammer back and squeezes the trigger, "Single action is pretty smooth though. So we got what, two clips and a handful of rounds for it?"
Finally Leon notices that someone is missing, "Dusty?"
"Oohh... Pretty..."
11
Oh god, what did he find now? Claire turns around slowly, her eyes widening at the weapon the police officer has in his hands.
"A Beretta 93R... Umbrella does have nice taste in weaponry, that is for sure... I haven't seen one of those since Rockfort.." Memories of Steve, Alexia, Alfred, Wesker, even her brother flash through her mind.
Her daze is broken as Dusty looks at her, turning from her slowly, "It's yours, I got the explosives anyway... So, how many clips do you have for it, Dusty?"
The brunette smiles and holds up three clips, Claire immediately recognizing the magazine as a twenty-rounder, "So sixty rounds for that, forty-five for the M9A1, and five shells for the M79.. Not a bad haul I guess..."
Nothing else can be said as a sound like a snapping rubber band fills the room, the floor crumbling away as a twisted appendage tears through it, claws extending and grabbing onto the stable edge of the hole, "What the fuck!?"
Leon fires a few rounds into the arm, but the bullets just dig in, no blood, no tearing flesh, nothing. Dusty steps back and pulls off several three-round bursts from his own firearm, but curses and jumps back as a black form flies into the air. It lands almost silently, light finally covering the form. What appears to be metal body armor adorns the monster's body, covering twisted muscle and tendon., but apparently doesn't weigh it down enough to matter. Claire gasps when she realizes what it looks like, a Bandersnatch... The hyper-extended arm, the claws, they were harder to kill than anything else that wasn't a Tyrant-Class BOW. Two green eyes connect with four ice-blue orbs, a sickening soulessness looking back at her from within. It raises one arm above its head, then flings the appendage at the redhead.
Dusty tackles her to the ground as the curved arm slices by, the wind whistling from the speed of the attack, "Focus!"
11
"What in the hell has Umbrella done down here?" Thomas's purple eyes rest on the large explosive before him.
After releasing Twist from stasis, the human BOW has spent the last hour searching for his exit, as he is pretty certain Donnelly has no plans for anyone to escape Riley. His search turned up sour until he entered this room, which he is positive rests under City Hall in the center of the city. A tactical nuclear device rests before him, tubes and wires attached, keeping the device stable and safe. Someone out there holds the trigger, ready to end all of this, bury the evidence in another blast of fire and heat. While the government themselves took the destruction of Raccoon City into their own hands, it seems Umbrella plans to remove Riley themselves. Thomas smirks down at the bomb, resting a hand on it before ripping the beeping box off.
"What did you do that for!?" right on cue...
Thomas crushes the device in his hands and chuckles to himself, one hand covering his face as he speaks slowly, "This town will be destroyed when I want it destroyed... Not when some... CHILD thinks I need to be killed off... Or is the bomb not meant for me? Perhaps, the others? Do you have such a low amount of faith in me that you need a backup plan?"
Neal growls through the nano-com piece in Thomas's head, "You kill them all, and I'll personally be there to pick you up..."
"What makes you think I want anything else to do with Umbrella?" with that, Thomas places his palm against his head and sends a tentacle through, dropping to the metal flooring instantly.
11
Claire jumps toward Leon, Dusty following quickly behind as they all run out the door, the monster sending one hand after them, almost grabbing the younger male by his exposed ankle. Dusty rounds the corner just in time, the limb missing him completely. Claire slings the grenade launcher over her shoulder and pushes a door open, the three ducking in, Leon quickly dropping a cabinet in front of the door. Everyone catches their breath for a few precious moments, Claire the worse for wear. In a matter of an hour most of her horrible memories from Rockfort and Antarctica have come back in force.
This is when it hits her, "I've been working around it..."
Leon picks his head up, "What?"
She chuckles and slams her head into the wall behind her, "I never truly dealt with what happened with Steve... I just kinda pushed it aside and focused on getting my life started..."
"You dealt with it the best way that people like us know how to... I know it sounds cold, but think about it... What else could you have done? Chris, Jill, and the rest, they have their mission against Umbrella, their own personal vendetta... We couldn't join them, I had to take care of Sherry.."
"And what happened to her?" the words hurt Claire to say...
She watches him seize up, "Yeah, I made a mistake there... I'll admit that, but come on, Claire, the government was going to take her anyway... In the mental state I was in, there was no way I could've kept her... But I worked it out, focused on moving on as best I could..."
"You stayed close to me..." Claire hangs her head.
His nod is evident, "Yeah, I did... We survived together, Claire. We can get past it together... You and me..."
Thanks, Dusty... Claire appreciates the fact that her friend is staying out of it.
Leon offers her a hand to help her up, "Together?"
The words are unspoken, everything that needs to be said is conveyed through her action as she grasps his hand as tightly as she can, her eyes locked with him, "Promise me.."
"I really hate to interrupt, but we got issues here..."
Leon stares at the blinking light in the corner of the room, "Is that what I think it is?"
Claire's eyes reflect the flashing yellow light, "A nuclear leak?"
11
Thomas slowly moves, hands twitching at first, followed by a slow rise to his feet, the pain extremely prevalent in his present reality, "No more voice?"
There is no reply, no sound, no debilitating shock to the system, seems the tentacle did its job in destroying the nano-chip. The fact that he didn't die is impressive, this virus having remarkable regenerative capabilities beyond his earlier assumptions. Something pangs at him from the surrounding air, his eyes slowly lowering to the bomb before him. The pressure is off, his body picking up on it almost immediately. Seems him removing the remote detonator from the bomb made it unstable... This is definitely not expected, but not unwanted...
"Well I get my wish either way... Now, where to from here?" the train is gone, there will be no helicopter to take him away from here.
His mind flashes an image of a boat, "Of course... The river... How could I forget that?"
The creek that flows through Riley connects to the Ohio River, not that far of a boat ride, definitely more than enough time to get out of the blast radius of this nuclear bomb. Thomas quickly makes his way toward the elevator that takes him toward the Steel Refinery on the outskirts of town, a decently short walk to the pier that houses his only means of escape. The Refinery sends a chill through the BOW's spine, remembering earlier how the heat was able to singe his own virus-enhanced skin...
"No time like the present to face one's fears.."
END