Pandemic: Resident Evil VI

Chapter Thirty One: Rescue Operation

Very slowly pulling the roof access door open, and then stepping onto the stair landing as carefully as he could, Chris kept his rifle aimed downward as he quietly moved toward the first access door. So far no one had come out into the stairwell, terrorist lookout or otherwise, allowing the Captain to let out a sigh of relief once he crept past the fifth floor access door, and just like it had been planned, the next man coming down secured it. Chinese laws regarding fire codes made it so that public stairwells couldn't be locked, so Alpha Team used some pieces of wooden and plaster debris, probably leftover from repair work or something, and wedged them underneath the doors.

Sure, with enough force people would be able to get the doors open, but that was why this mission needed to be executed quickly, with the fourth door getting secured as well, and then two men sent down farther to barricade the second and first ones as well. All right, the easy part of the mission was over, but now as Chris slowly pulled open the third floor access door, he knew that the slightest mistake made from this point on could mean the life of the hostages or his own men. Piers had been right about one thing… focusing on this mission made it impossible to think about anything else.

Given that this was still an active residential area, the power was still on inside the building, and normal tactics like cutting it off would have only alerted the terrorists that a team was about to storm in. Still, this place didn't look like it was regularly kept up, since half the lights were out in the hallway, and a lot of the doors to the apartments were just kind of hanging open as if… wait a second, no… those doors weren't just hanging open… there was impact damage around the broken doorknobs, as if they had been kicked open.

Moving up against the doorframe and then listening for movement for a second before entering the apartment, the Captain scanned the room for threats as he passed through the broken door, and the good news was that there were no armed terrorists waiting for him. However, the concrete walls were scarred with the impact marks of what looked like bullets, while lying on the floor near the highest concentrations, were the remains of people who had been shot multiple times. The same scenario was discovered in the next apartment across the hall, with the family there having been gunned down in the same way… just as recently as the first.

"Stay sharp, Alpha Team, things just got worse." Chris said quietly into his radio. "We've got civilians down inside multiple apartments; the terrorists aren't playing around."

By this time a few more soldiers had made their way onto the third floor, so the Captain started moving forward, getting about halfway down the corridor, before having to hold up hand for the others to stop upon seeing the shadow of movement up ahead. Moving up against the wall to keep a lower profile, which was pretty damn hard while wearing body armor, Chris kept his rifle aimed at the approaching shadow while starting to hear footsteps and… some kind of growling noises?

Holding his breath as to not give himself away with any noise at all, he watched as a lone figure slowly came around the corner, a sight which made the Captain's eyes widen. Not only was this man carrying an AK-47 and dressed just like any Chinese civilian like they feared, but his face was twisted into a permanent scowl, his skin was showing signs of discoloration, and his eyes were so bloodshot that the redness could be seen even from that distance. Pfft-pfft-pfft! Upon seeing the team standing there, the deranged man growled loudly, running right toward them while raising his rifle, but all Chris had to do was pull the trigger.

Three bullets flew toward the deranged man, hitting him twice in the chest and once in the face, making him twitch heavily while dropping his rifle and falling to the floor. Crazy part was that the deranged man was still alive after that, crawling across the floor to reach his weapon, but stopped when the Captain rushed forward and kicked it away from him. Pfft! It was obvious that this man was infected with something, since he looked just like the J'avo had back in… back in Edonia?

Stepping back from the body immediately after firing the shot that finished him, Chris had to lean against the wall as the clarity that came from focusing on the mission vanished, replaced with more conflicting memories from six months ago. But then something strange happened when he focused on what he remembered about the J'avo, it was like… it was like being able to compare what he was seeing now to one of the memories back then allowed him to… I don't know, verify that the J'avo had been real, and now… now some of his memories were becoming less distorted.

"Captain, are you all right?" Piers asked, coming up to him. "Do you want to hang back for a minute?"

"No… uh, no, I'm okay." The Captain replied, moving off the wall. "Come on, we gotta get moving; if the terrorists somehow got themselves infected, then the hostages could be in real danger."

Okay, danger was kind of an understatement, since the moment these people got infected, they probably started hunting down everyone who wasn't, explaining the innocent people in their apartments. Whether the infection was intentional or not, the UN workers probably didn't have long to live, if they were even still alive, and well… at least now Alpha Team didn't have to worry about the terrorists warning each other… could the J'avo communicate? Now moving faster through the halls, Chris was surprised by how few of the infected men were found, in contrast to how many civilians were gunned down in their apartments.

So far no sign of the hostages, though, at least not until the team entered the very last apartment, where some of the mystery was solved. There were even more bullet marks on the walls, with several armed men lying on the floor, uninfected by the looks of them, and there were several empty syringes scattered on the floor nearby. Okay, some of the syringes were empty, while others were shattered, as if the people holding them had dropped them for some reason… maybe they had some of their people test the injections first before the main group?

"So they got infected and killed each other… just like those mercenaries in Edonia." Piers said as the team investigated. "After they killed their comrades, I guess they stormed the whole floor and just gunned everyone down."

"Yeah, could be." Chris commented while looking around. "But where are the hostages? None of them were Chinese, so they should stand out pretty easily here, so where are they?"

The answer to this question came as soon as one of the soldiers called out from the apartment's bedroom, with the Captain and Piers rushing in to find him standing there with the closet open… and a large hole broken right through the concrete floor. You have got to be shitting me, Chris thought just as the Lieutenant verbally said the same thing. So what did this mean? That at the same time that the local police helicopters were distracting the terrorists from Alpha Team's rooftop landing, the scumbags were breaking a damn hole to get the hostages to another floor?

If so, that meant that there could be even more terrorists down below with the hostages, and these poor saps up here were left behind to infect themselves and stop the BSAA at any cost. The Captain's first instinct was to drop down the hole and go after them, but then again, that was probably just what the remaining uninfected bioterrorists wanted them to do. No, with so many people's lives at stake, Chris was going to do this as safely as possible, so instead of heading right down the hole, he ordered his team to seal it up with something heavy before all of them fell back to the stairwell.

Now sealing the third floor access door like they had with the others, the Captain decided to have his team split up, with him leading half of them into the second floor, while Piers took the others to check the first floor just in case. He was a little more nervous now, having only half the backup that was present on the third floor, slowly opening the second floor access door, and gasping as he was met by… a middle aged man carrying a basket of laundry toward the door. Upon seeing them, the older man dropped the basket, holding up his hands and quickly saying… well, Chris didn't speak a word of Chinese, so he had no idea.

"Keaton, you speak Chinese, right?" The Captain asked. "A little help here?"

"He's speaking Mandarin, ni zhongzu zhuyi zhe de hundan." Keaton replied as he came forward. "Yeah, I can help you out, Captain."

According to the translation, everyone on the second floor was getting nervous and annoyed with the constant helicopters flying around the building, and now it sounded like people were trying to break through the ceiling of one of the apartments. Chris cut him off there, asking Keaton to have the older man take them to where the sound was coming from, and thankfully most of the residents had the good sense to stay in their apartments instead of… seriously, who the hell tries to do laundry while there's a major police action going on? Apparently, America wasn't the only country in the world where some people just didn't know what was going on around them.

The older man led them toward the far end of the building, to the apartment directly below where the hole had been, and then he ran off, with Keaton translating that he just didn't have time for this shit. That was fine, since it got the civilians out of the way, and then the Captain shouldered the door to the apartment open, wanting to take anyone inside by surprise. However, this apartment was completely empty as if no one lived there. Empty, that is, except for one important feature: Inside of the bedroom's closet, the sealed hole to the third floor was visible… as was another one in the floor.

"God damn it… Piers, come in." Chris said into his radio. "Second floor's empty, we got another hole coming down to your floor."

"Hey, I'm right below you, I can hear your voice." The Lieutenant replied, calling up from below. "There's another hole down here, too… looks like they've moved the hostages down into the basement."

Seriously? How the hell did they have time for that? The Captain gritted his teeth in anger, hating how the bioterrorists seemed to be jerking him around, and then he told Piers to regroup at the stairwell. The building didn't have an exterior exit from the basement, so there was nowhere left for them to go… it was time to end this.