Uroboros: Resident Evil V
Chapter Forty One: The Improved Batch
Now completely ignoring the pain in her wounded leg and shoulder, Excella stumbled forward at first, and then progressively in all directions as if she were confused. The woman was dripping sweat, breathing heavily, and crying out as if something were stabbing her repeatedly while holding her stomach, and then she dropped her briefcase as she fell to her knees. Coughing and then retching like she was going to vomit but with nothing coming up, Excella's eyes were becoming so bloodshot that they appeared to be almost completely red, and some blood came up with the next cough.
"Excella… what happened?" The young woman asked, taking a step toward her. "What did Wesker do to you?"
"Sheva!" Chris called urgently. "Sheva, you gotta get me down; we gotta get out of here right now!"
With the way the blond man had hooked him up there, the Agent's feet weren't touching the deck, so he couldn't free himself on his own, but he had to… Sheva had been inside that pod the last time something like this happened, but Chris knew exactly what Wesker had done to his partner… the same thing he did to everyone who worked with him eventually. Again, he called to his partner, this time managing to break her paralysis so that she ran over to him, and good thing, too, because after he was too weak to do it himself after three days of being the blond man's personal guest.
"Albert!" Excella screamed as snake-like shapes started to be seen moving around underneath her skin. "Albert… no… you said… you said we would… change the world… together!"
Upon reaching her partner, the young woman tried to get him off the hook by grabbing him by the ankles and lifting him upward, but they both knew that the Agent was too heavy for her. Still, he encouraged her to keep trying; suggesting that she try to find a box or something that Chris could stand on, but never once taking his eyes off the wounded woman. In typical Wesker fashion, the blond man had injected his partner with Uroboros, and just like with the man he saw in the underground facility lab, Uroboros was rejecting her… and there were a lot more bodies around.
"Sheva, shoot the chain!" He exclaimed, his eyes never moving from Excella, whose snake-like movements underneath her skin were getting more pronounced. "The virus is rejecting her, she's gonna turn into another one of those things!"
Bang! Taking out her pistol and shooting the short chain between his handcuffs, Chris cried out as the shock of the impact stung his hands as he fell down to his knees. He then reached up for her to give him a hand, but the young woman was gone… no, not gone… she was running toward Excella? The Agent yelled at her to stop, that her weapon wasn't worth it, but then she ran right past the rifle that she had put on the deck, instead making a desperate grab for the briefcase that the wounded woman had dropped.
As soon as her hand closed around the handle, Excella let out one last scream that was cut off as the black snake-like tendrils broke through her skin, swarming all over her until they looked like the creature that wiped out Alpha Team… and then it went right for the bodies. The only good thing about this was that if it weren't for all those easy targets right next to the monster, the young woman probably wouldn't have been able to get away, but now that the creature had another source of organic material… just like the one down at the lab, it was getting bigger… a lot bigger.
"Run, Sheva!" Chris yelled as she had to jump over an arm-like appendage that was reaching for another body. "Come on, run!"
She reached down to pick up the rifle without breaking pace, and then the young woman helped him to his feet once she got back to him, but before they made their escape, the Agent grabbed one of the red grenades that was on her belt. From experience, he knew that fire was the one and only thing that could actually hurt these monsters, so he pulled the pin and tossed it right into the center where Excella's body used to be, and then the monster shrieked when the small explosion caused its whole body to be covered in flames.
Roaring and flailing around, one of the arms busted a small hole in the deck before the creature's rapidly increasing size caused it to lose its balance and fall over… right on top of the pile of dead bodies. Hundreds of black tendrils had fallen off and shriveled into nothing thanks to the grenade, but once the monster had access to all that organic material, it not only stopped burning, but the size and mass of the whole thing increased geometrically until it was about ten times the size of the one he had seen in the underground lab.
With no choice but to run for it, he had to lean on the young woman a bit in order to stay on his feet, but the thing just kept growing with every single body that it was able to absorb… and God, there were a lot of bodies. Pulling the other red grenade off his partner's belt, Chris pulled the pin and tossed it backwards, again making the monster roar when the flames spread across its surface as if the whole thing was flammable, and now the tendrils that were falling off were the size of small tree trunks, which landed heavily on the deck with a loud thud before starting to shrivel up.
They had to dive to the deck in order to avoid a swinging arm that turned out to be going after another dead body, but as big as that food supply was, it wasn't going to last forever, and then the Uroboros monster would need to seek out more difficult victims in order to sustain its newfound mass. Sheva mentioned that Josh and his new team had come by helicopter, and then maybe one of them could circle back and pick them up, which was a fine idea if not for the fact that the monster's growth was allowing some of its arms to actually slide past them, moving further toward the stern of the cargo ship, and… and spreading until there was nowhere left to run.
It wasn't actively trying to trap them, not yet anyway, still going after the dead infected, and its tendrils getting even thicker as a result until there was nowhere for them to go but through the back door of the bridge tower. The Agent was glad to see that it was unlocked, although that changed as soon as they were through, but what if the monster had seen them go in? Was it even aware enough of its surroundings to start looking for them after all the easier meals were finished? Either way, Chris shut and locked the door behind them, and even though he was moving around a little better now, he still needed a little help getting up the stairs.
"Stay low." He warned, pushing down on her shoulder as soon as they reached the top. "If it finds us here, we're dead."
Both of them got on their hands and knees, crawling past the dead infected and the still smoking navigation console until they were able to put their backs against the wall that was right underneath the window, which was the hardest place for the creature to spot them if it happened to look through the window. Off hand, Chris didn't know if the thing actually had eyes, or if it hunted by sound or even body heat, but in this instance it was better to stay safe than sorry… especially since they only had her pistol, the rifle that she passed to him, and two green grenades with which to defend themselves.
"Sweet… Jesus." The Agent whispered after sneaking a quick peek out the window. "Sheva, contact Josh and tell him to get his men the hell out of here, right now."
He had expected the monster to have gotten bigger, but this… each of its individual tendrils that were moving around was now as big around as a five hundred gallon propane tank, and so long that he couldn't even see the end of them as they slowly moved around. The most frightening part was that now the monster was getting so big that it was spreading itself across the entire visible front of the cargo ship, and probably the darkened parts, too, which meant that it was more than likely heading back toward Captain Stone as well.
Sheva used her radio to warn them of what was coming, because fuck radio silence at this point, and if the survivors of the new team didn't get evacuated right the hell now, the monster would gobble them up just like it was doing to the infected… which was probably why it was still getting bigger. Heh… maybe if they were lucky it would eat up all the infected, and Wesker along with it… that fucking son of a bitch… he had tried to warn Excella about what he was like, but she just didn't understand that men like don't care about anyone but themselves.
The good news was that Josh replied that one of the helicopters had enough fuel to come back for the team, but they had to pull out right now or they would never make it back to shore… not that the two agents could have made it to the extraction point, even if they had been able to wait. Now a dark shadow was falling across the bridge, making Chris and Sheva have to get down as flat to the floor as they could to avoid being detected as a very big tendril slid its way across the window, leaving a trail of black ooze that obscured the view as it passed by.
Wesker hadn't been kidding when he said that the Agent's Daylight antibodies would improve the efficiency of Uroboros, and now Chris felt guilty like all of this was his fault for not being able to do something to resist the experiments that the blond man performed on him… and now that lunatic was planning to release this nightmare on the entire world. He had known that Wesker was crazy ever since the Spencer Estate, but this was just on a whole new level… how could something like this ever hope to usher in some new kind of golden age for humanity? The whole idea was just… stupid. It was stupid to the point where if he hadn't been so terrified at the moment, he might have started laughing.
"What the hell are we going to do?" Sheva whispered quietly. "If this thing keeps growing, it's gonna sink the ship, and us with it… and then what if it reaches the mainland?"
"We can not let that happen." The Agent whispered back. "But look at that thing, it's massive, and soon it's gonna be spread across the whole top deck. We… we'd need a damn hellfire bomb to even put a dent, or a nuke, or… oh my God, Sheva, please tell me you still have that satellite phone."
Thankfully, the young woman had it in one of her pouches just in case, and if he weren't married, he would have kissed her, since this little object that he thought was lost in the underground palace was about to save their lives… hopefully. She asked him what he was planning to do with it, but Chris was so focused on trying to make his shaking hands press the right numbers that he didn't reply. Okay, the call was going through… good, it was ringing… come on, pick up… please, pick up…
"Amelia!" He exclaimed when his wife picked up, then quieting down when Sheva shushed him and pointed to the window. "Hey baby, listen, listen, I'm in trouble, and I have a really important question to ask you… does Regia SOLIS still work?"