Uroboros: Resident Evil V

Chapter Twenty Nine: Tricell's Secrets

The door must've been locked form the other side, which made sense considering what this pen used to hold before it broke out, and there was no switch or anything that they could press in case of emergency. Chris figured that knowing Umbrella, they would probably just leave anyone who got locked in with the creature so that they could observe its abilities, but that knowledge didn't help much as the monster got closer to the glass. It appeared to have lost track of them as it wandered around near the hole, but it was only a matter of time.

"Sheva, we've gotta get out of here." Chris whispered as quietly as he could into her ear. "Please tell me you know how to pick a lock."

"It's no good, there's no keyhole." She whispered back while trying not to let her voice break. "I'd have to take the whole knob off, and for that I'd need a screwdriver, or…

Or a Swiss army knife! Ha, Chris mentally yelled with joy, he knew that the random tool the young woman scoffed at earlier would come in handy at some point, but the monster slowly got closer while she took it out of her pouch, and now it was just about to discover the hole in the glass. There were two cartridges left for his flare gun, but the amount of noise that would be generated by trying to reload it would probably lead the creature right to him, so he did the only other thing that he could think of.

Reaching down and grabbing a large bone from the remains of one of the thing's victims… probably a human by the looks of it, and tossed it through the hole in the glass so that it flew right over the monster's head. Clang! Striking one of the fallen metal cages behind it, the creature roared as it turned around with tongue flailing around like a whip to strike that exact spot. Cages were tossed around the room while the creature went wild with its tongue and claws, destroying some of the cages and putting several new marks into the walls... but then everything quieted down as the monster resumed its search.

Meanwhile, Sheva had gotten one of the screws out of the doorknob, and was working on the second, but because of the tool's length and how close the hole was to the knob, the process was slow. Come on, come on, hurry it up, the Agent thought in his head while picking up another bone to throw… but this time the monster ignored the sound of it hitting another cage completely. Aw crap, of course it had to be smart, he thought as its long tongue started to feel around on the floor in front of it… while the monster crawled its way through the hole in the glass back into the pen.

Baring its teeth now, and drooling heavily while slowly walking right toward the two agents, Chris was getting ready to risk trying to reload the flare gun, when the young woman next to him suddenly pulled the door open. Opening inward into the pen, the Agent shoved Sheva forward through it at the same time that the monster shrieked, and if he had been even half a second slower the monster might have cleaved him in half instead of sparking against the metal door when it was pulled shot again.

Now that the doorknob was removed, there was no way to lock the door again, but thankfully the creature didn't seem to understand that it opened inward, meaning that its savage attacks just kept the door shut so that the two agents could get away. There were more side doors going down this next corridor, but fuck exploration, because it was only a matter of time before SMASH! From behind them the sound of a metal door being completely destroyed echoed down the hallway, causing Chris and Sheva to stop in their tracks… now forced to silently tiptoe along the concrete floor while the creature's claws ticked along behind them.

Now that it had lost them again, the monster would take a few steps before raising its head up to sniff the air, and then repeat the process, allowing it to keep pace with the two agents as it felt its way along the hallway after them. As much as the Agent wanted to sprint away in the hopes of finding a way to escape, the speed that he had seen the monster move at while going after a target made him think that this was a bad idea. So the world's slowest high speed chase resumed, with both agents trying to move as quickly as they could without making noise… with the monster starting to gain on them.

Sheva was starting to breathe rapidly again, having to put one hand over her mouth in order to keep the noise down, so Chris took her hand and that seemed to help… along with the fact that there was another door at the end of this hallway. And it wasn't just any door, it was an elevator, but they were going to have to move faster if they wanted to be able to push the call button and get inside before the monster reached them. That is, unless he could find a way to distract it…

"Keep going." The Agent whispered into her ear, urging the young woman to go forward. "And get ready to run."

The look on her face said that she didn't understand, but the young woman kept heading toward the elevator anyway while Chris quietly turned the latch on an office door… before throwing it open as loudly as he could. Slam! The noise echoed, drawing the attention of the monster as it roared and sprinted in the direction it came from, running right into the office, and then shrieking in rage when he pulled the door shut behind it.

"Go!" Chris yelled as he started to run. "Hit the button!"

Sheva was ahead of him, so she had pressed the call button before he got there, but the car had still not arrived by the time that the creature started clawing its way out of the trap. The office door wasn't made of metal, so it easily splintered apart under the power of the monster's claws, but thankfully the elevator doors started to open with a soft ding. Getting inside the car and pushing the only button available, the monster finished braking down the office door and ran toward them just as the doors started to close, forcing Chris to respond with the flare gun that he had reloaded after closing the office door.

Fwoosh-BOOM! Firing the cartridge through the closing doors, the hallway was illuminated with a flash of red light that went off just in front of the monster, forcing it to stop, and it was a good thing too because they would have never escaped if it had been able to leap at that moment. Hearing it let out one last roar of rage before the doors sealed, the elevator started down, and Chris was surprised when the young woman suddenly hugged him tightly. She was terrified by what just happened, as was he, but they had survived, so… oh what the hell, there was nothing wrong with a hug.

"How are you not falling apart right now?" Sheva asked when the embrace ended. "Is this kind of thing normal to you? Is… is this what your missions are always like?"

"Well, some of them have gone bad, sure." The Agent replied. "I mean, I've never had to go through an underground city before, but…everything's going to be all right. Just watch, one day we're going to look back on this and laugh."

In response she made a comment about laughing from her cell in the looney bin, and there wasn't a lot he could say back to it because the whole talk was bullshit. The Spencer Estate had happened more than ten years ago, and Chris had yet to find any part of it funny… nor was he amused by Rockfort Island, or the Queen Zenobia… at least a few good memories came from Antarctica. Not the ones about Wesker beating up Claire, but… watching Alexia thrash that sunglasses waring prick was great, and then…

Ding, startled by the sound of the elevator doors opening again, the Agent hadn't even been aware of the car stopping before a much brighter light washed over them. Taking a second to load the last cartridge into the flare gun before stepping out into the whiteness, Chris found himself in awe at what he saw as his eyes adjusted. Just like the Umbrella base felt like a time jump from the ancient city, he now had that same feeling again as he and Sheva stepped into the modern age of white steel and hard plastic construction.

This chamber was bigger than all the others so far, shaped like a big round room that went up to a brilliant light source, and then down further than their eyes could see. The elevator doors had opened up onto a catwalk, and now the two agents were holding onto the white metal guardrails as they approached a central platform that was almost as wide as the room itself. Other than that, the chamber's dominant feature was the pods… large metal units that glowed with orange light from inside a Plexiglas window, and all of them mounted onto the walls so that as many could be packed in as possible.

"Didn't we see some of these on Irving's PDA?" The young woman asked, squinting to try and see them better in the light. "There must be hundreds… thousands of them… what do you think they're for?"

He was about to answer that he didn't know, but was interrupted by the sharp whistle of an alarm going off as a spinning yellow light activated on top of one of the higher pods. The alarm only lasted for a few seconds, and then there was a burst of pressurized gas escaping as the metal container began to open. A bunch of water poured out as the main cover opened, revealing that a person was inside, but… they looked awful… malnourished and with discolored skin as the restraints holding them into the pod released, and they… fell out?

Yeah, as soon as the restraints released, the malnourished man tumbled out of the pod, falling past the platform and then vanishing into the abyss below. He must have already been dead, because the poor bastard didn't make a sound on the way down, but… oh shit, did that mean that all of these pods had a person inside? Looking around at the platform again, he saw that it was dominated by a large control computer that had the Tricell logo displayed larger than life on the monitor… so what the hell were they playing at? If all this really was Tricell's doing, then how was it possible for them to get this many people without anyone noticing? What did they do, kidnap them from all over the world?

Rushing over to the control computer, which turned out to be more like a library's card catalogue than anything else, the Agent found that not only was the system unlocked, but that he was also able to scroll through a list of names of the people inside each pod, along with age, gender, country of origin, all kinds of data. So he took the easy route and typed Valentine, Jillian into the search box, with an hourglass icon appearing while the machine's inventory was searched, and then he gasped when a single message appeared on the screen:

SUBJECT LOCATED