Uroboros: Resident Evil V
Chapter Forty Four: Complete Global Saturation
Well, so much for sneaking up on him, Chris thought just before both he and Sheva landed on the metal floor below with a hard, echoing thud. The drop had only been about twenty feet, which although not enough to cause serious harm, still hurt really bad, and now the Agent was struggling to get up while Wesker casually made his way down the stairs. As for the infected, they ignored the intruders completely, continuing with their business of loading missiles onto the cargo jet as if nothing out of the ordinary had been happening.
"Sheva, come on." He said, grabbing his partner's arm. "You gotta get up… he's coming."
Still lying where she hit the floor, the young woman appeared to have been injured a lot more by the fall than Chris had, since she was balled up into a fetal position, and crying out loudly when he tried to help her up. The blond man, who had reached the bottom of the grated stairs by this time, laughed about Sheva's misfortune while walking toward them, but then reassuring the Agent that he would be more than happy to keep him company for a little while.
Ratta-tatta! Since Chris still had the rifle that the young woman had given him, he aimed it and pulled the trigger, but was only to get off a short burst before his enemy was on him. Becoming a blur again while doing a kind of spinning flip to avoid the bullets, Wesker closed in and pulled the weapon out of the Agent's hands, tossing it toward the plane, before slapping Chris in the mouth. This wasn't enough to knock him down, but man did it sting, and then the blond man honked his nose, following this by smacking him on the stomach so hard that the Agent fell on his ass while a red handprint started to appear.
"Seriously, Chris, what was your plan here?" Wesker asked as he tried to get up again. "We've done this a half dozen times since the Spencer Estate, and it always turns out the same way… or were you trying to sneak past me in order to sabotage the plane?"
"There's no point in stopping the plane." Chris groaned, stumbling a bit as he got up. "Sure, you got plenty of missiles, but your fuel tank's too small to reach more than, what… two cities from here? And Regia SOLIS can target those places just as easily as this ship, even if NATO didn't shoot down your plane… that isn't even a stealth model, you moron."
He expected the blond man to become enraged upon realizing that his plan was doomed to fail before it even started, but instead he just chuckled to himself, commenting that even though the Agent had all the pieces to the puzzle laid out right in front of him, he was still too stupid to figure it out. Apparently, Wesker had been well aware that the fuel tank was too small to go around launching missiles at individual cities, on top of the fact that there were no launchers on the plane, and that he had specifically chosen the aircraft because it wasn't made for stealth… he just needed the massive cargo space.
"But that doesn't make any sense, even for a lunatic like you." The Agent replied, taking a quick look at the plane. "Everyone knows about Uroboros and the mission here, and as soon as they detect your plane, they'll blast you out of the… oh, my God."
"I see you're finally starting to catch up, Chris, good for you." The blond man continued, smirking again. "I wasn't joking before when I mentioned complete global saturation, and there's no better way to achieve this than an explosion in the upper atmosphere."
Chris started to get chills as Wesker elaborated on his plan, explaining that he was going to fly the plane into a steady incline, and then lock the autopilot while he bailed out, so that by the time the United Nations were able to launch a missile, the explosion of all those little warheads would create a cloud of Uroboros that would easily coat the whole upper atmosphere… and then come back down with the rain. The blond man might have been completely unhinged at this point, but that plan of his sounded like it could actually work… no matter what, the Agent had to stop that plane from taking off.
Running toward Wesker and ramming his shoulder into the blond man's stomach, Chris actually succeeded in driving him back a step of two, before crying out and falling to his knees after feeling his enemy's fist connect with his back. Taking a second to breathe, the Agent tried to come back up with a punch, but Wesker caught his fist with one hand, only to backhand him with the other. Not letting go of the captured fist, the blond man pulled him back for another hit… and then another… and then another, before finally allowing him to fall down.
Chris landed on his face, and was about to try getting up again, when he was pushed back down when the blond man stepped on his back while walking away. The remaining infected must've finished loading the missiles, since they were taking the empty carts and leaving through another large door, probably going back above deck to fill in for the ones who had been controlling the ship before, and now Wesker was walking… away from the plane? Aw crap, he was walking toward where Sheva was still lying on the floor.
"One of these days, Chris will learn to stop bringing his women along to face me." The blond man said, reaching down and grabbing her by the hair. "So, what shall we do while he is lying over…
The Agent was using the door of a nearby forklift to pull himself up just as Wesker was forcing Sheva to stand, when suddenly the blond man grunted in surprise while taking a step back and looking down at the small object that was sticking out from his chest. It took Chris a second to realize that it was the injector they had been planning to stab his enemy with, and now that the young woman was on her feet, he could tell that she had been faking her injury ever since the fall in order to lure him in.
Letting go of her and stepping back long enough to look down and remove the now empty injector from his chest, the blond man started to become angry as he tossed the syringe aside and reached out to grab her… only to miss completely as he took a stumbling step sideways. Bang! Bang! Bang! Seeing that he was being affected by the injection, Sheva took out her pistol and started shooting, actually managing to hit Wesker in the arm before he became a blur to back off. Funny thing was, the blond man stopped for a second mid-run and stumbled again, only to blur over toward the plane, where he stopped again and fell to his knees just shy of the cargo ramp.
Wesker tried to get up, but had to lean on one of the ramp's hydraulics to keep from falling over again. The wound in his arm was already healed, but the blond man cried out in pain as he ripped off his sunglasses and dropped them on the deck, revealing that his glowing red eyes were now flickering rapidly as if the overdose of his stabilizing virus was causing some kind of malfunction in his body. If that was true, then this was their chance to stop him once and for all, so Chris started running toward the plane… just as Wesker became a blur to move up the ramp.
Without the ability to run like the damn Flash, it was a long distance across the cargo bay, with the Agent having to run around fork lifts and step over the empty pallets that once held the missiles. When he was about half way there, an alarm started going off, with spinning yellow lights activating as… as the whole back wall of the cargo bay started to slide open. Chris had been right, this place was meant for vertical takeoff, meaning that there was only a very short time to get there before the blond man's plan was put into action.
Reaching down to grab the rifle from where he landed, the Agent didn't break pace, continuing to sprint as hard as he could, and now the plane's engines were starting to warm up. Even with vertical takeoff, the plane was still going to have to drive over to the edge of the platform, giving Chris the time he needed to jump aboard just as the ramp was starting to raise. Grabbing onto the hydraulic and turning around to give his partner a hand, the Agent gasped when he saw that although Sheva was running as fast as she could, she was still a good distance away.
"Sheva, come on!" He yelled as the ramp got higher. "You can make it!"
The young woman was sprinting for all she was worth, huffing and puffing as she slowly closed the distance, and in another couple seconds she would be there… if the engines hadn't started to rev up. Waving her off while frantically yelling for Sheva to get back, the young woman seemed to understand a second before the engines fired at full power, with the force of the vertical takeoff throwing his partner backwards, sending her rolling back across the cargo bay just as the ramp closed.
Hopefully, she hadn't been hurt too badly by the engine wash, but there was no way for him to check on her as the plane was felt lifting off, tilting heavily upward so that he fell against the closed ramp. All of the missiles were securely tied down against the walls with cargo netting and ratchet straps, and the only light inside the aircraft was coming from dim red bulbs that were mounted right into the walls, as was standard procedure in almost all aircraft flying at night. Up ahead at the other end of the plane, however, the door to the cockpit was closed, with Wesker no doubt already plotting a course into the upper atmosphere… but Chris wasn't about to let that happen.
Even though the cockpit door was both sealed and strong enough to withstand anything he could do to it, the Agent was a trained pilot, and he knew exactly what would happen to the aircraft's course if, say… the cargo ramp were opened mid-flight. There were safety features against hitting the release button, but nothing controlled from the cockpit could override the manual release crank. So Chris unlocked the safety lever, and started turning it, causing a sudden lurch in the plane's engines as the pressure escaped and howling wind began to rush in. Alarms were going off throughout the plane as the whole thing suddenly started leveling off, unable to keep climbing because of the drag.
Unless Wesker wanted to lose all his fuel and crash before even reaching the altitude needed for his plan to work, he was going to have to come out of the cockpit and deal with the problem manually… and Chris would be waiting for him with the rifle ready when the door finally started to open.