Pandemic: Resident Evil VI

Chapter Thirty Nine: Project E

Jake was fuming with anger as he made his way down the sterile white corridor, anger at the man who had pretended to be helping him and Sherry, only to betray them, and cost the young man six months of his life. However, this anger turned into shock when he passed through the now unsealed hatchway, and the young man got a good look at the scene that awaited him in the central chamber. This much larger, open room was filled with sectioned offices and sealed lab stations, one of which was where the guards had always taken him for testing, but now this place looked like a warzone.

Brightly lit and sterile like the other sections, the walls here were dotted with bullet holes, with splatters and streaks of blood sprayed across the walls and floor… but with almost no bodies present. There were several piles of blackened ash with scorch marks on the tiled surface around them, almost identical to what was left after that Crimson Head burned up inside the cell, so… was that what happened here? The few bodies that remained were a mix of guards and scientists, all near the security station where Tobias Liquid was now sitting with his back to him, and all of them with looks of horror on their faces while their bodies had been left crumpled up in unnatural positions.

As for the yellow eyed man himself, he seemed to be ignoring Jake's approach on the monitors, instead looking over a piece of paper that was in his hand. For a moment the young man considered sneaking past him and exiting through one of the many doors around the central chamber, but then again they were probably locked just like the one at the end of his cell corridor, so instead Jake started looking for a weapon. Some of the guards' rifles were on the floor, but each one that he picked up was completely out of ammo.

"What the hell happened in here?" The young man asked, quietly picking up a baton before heading toward the security room. "Did you decide to dick these people over, too?"

"Actually, they dicked me over." Tobias replied, sighing as he set down the paper. "My wife had us take a chance on these people; she thought they could make her greatest dream a reality, but I'm the one who has to break Gillette's heart when I tell her that they failed, and… and I guess I got a little upset."

Upset, Jake thought in disbelief? From what the young man could tell, the yellow eyed man massacred everyone in this section of the laboratory with a mixture of his bare hands and more of those Crimson Head things. He imagined a whole squad of those things being unleashed against the surprised guards, tearing them to bits with their claws, and then all of the monsters combusting once the battle was over so that no evidence was left behind. The fact that Tobias killed all these people didn't really surprise him, but what did surprise Jake was when the yellow eyed man said that he had actually let him out of the cell to apologize to him.

"Apologize to me!? You let me and Sherry get kidnapped!" The young man exclaimed, gripping the baton tightly. "And then you locked me in the hallway with that red monster thing, and you think an apology is gonna work?!"

"No, no… see, I don't care about any of that." Tobias replied coldly while turning his chair around. "You were brought here to serve my purpose as well as that of the people who run this place, so… get over it. I'm apologizing because I took out some of the hatred I have for your father on you, and that was unfair of me."

The yellow eyed man explained that if his own son was still alive, he wouldn't have wanted anyone to punish him for what his father did, and doing that to Jake was wrong. After all, it wasn't the young man's fault that his father was one of the biggest pieces of shit to ever walk the Earth, but their faces were completely identical, which brought up some really bad memories. Tobias wished that he could have simply busted Albert Wesker back in Raccoon City, but the man was such a such a shady little coward that no one knew what he was doing until he started killing his own men. And then the piece of shit…

"Shut up!" Jake interrupted angrily, opening the baton. "My dad wasn't there for me, I'll admit that, but I'm not gonna just stand here and let someone like you badmouth him. You're a liar and you're not even human, so why should I believe a single word you say, huh?"

"Kid, whether you believe me or not is completely up to you." The yellow eyed man continued casually. "But if it's fact-checking you want, just ask your little girlfriend about him. Your fathers worked together in Raccoon City, and Sherry's dad was almost as big a scumbag as yours."

Before the young man could say anything else, Tobias picked up a plastic card from on the desk next to him, and tossed it to Jake. It looked like some kind of ID card, but he couldn't read Chinese or whatever the language was, and… and why the hell would the yellow eyed man give him this? As he stood up from the chair, Tobias explained that it was a security ID for the laboratory, but that Sherry was being held in the East Area, and no one knew that anything was wrong in this one… yet.

Jake got what he was saying; the young man was going to have to be clever and somehow break the blonde out of wherever she was locked up… but at the same time the man who had betrayed Jake's trust and gotten him locked up and tortured for six months was now standing right in front of him. His grip tightening on the baton, the young man was considering whether or not he could move quick enough to surprise Tobias with a fast strike before proceeding to beat his brains out… but then his enemy smirked as if he were already expecting it.

"Letting you out was my apology, so you've got two choices, kid." The yellow eyed man said, blinking so that his eyes started to glow. "You can be a man once in your life, and go save the pretty girl… or you can attack me, in which case I'll just break your neck, and leave Sherry here to rot. Choose now… you won't get both."

Now he was just standing there, glaring at the Jake with those horrible yellow eyes, and to make matters worse, the young man didn't know how his enemy got those Crimson Head monsters… or if he still had a few of them. He wanted to kill Tobias… he wanted to kill him so bad, but Sherry's life was at stake, so as much as it pained Jake to do so… he slowly moved out of the way so that Tobias could pass. The young man expected him to say something rude or humiliating, but the yellow eyed man's mind must have been on other things, because he just kept walking until passing through one of the hatchways, and then he was gone.

It was probably only a matter of time before someone from one of the lab's other sections came to check on this one, so Jake needed to hurry if he was going to rescue Sherry, but… but what was it that had upset Tobias badly enough to make him kill all these people? Yes, it was a risk with each passing second that he would get caught, but the young man walked back into the security station, and picked up the piece of paper that his enemy had been looking at when he arrived.

PROJECT E

FINAL STATUS REPORT (SUMMARIZED)

STAGE 1: OBTAINED GENETIC SAMPLES FROM SUBJECT C-008 AND P-001 (SUCCESS). OBTAINED DATA FROM FAILED D SERIES (SUCCESS).

STAGE 2: COMBINED C-008 AND P-001 GENETIC SAMPLES (FAILED/UNSTABLE). SECOND COMBINATION ATTEMPT USING D SERIES REVISION DATA (FAILED/UNSTABLE).

STAGE 3: OBTAINED BIOLOGICAL SAMPLES FROM G-002 AND W-014 (SUCCESS). THIRD COMBINATION ATTEMPT USING G REGENERATIVE PROPERTIES AND W ANTIBODIES (FAILED/UNSTABLE).

CONCLUSION: GENETIC SAMPLES OF C AND P SERIES BOWS ARE JUST NOT COMPATIBLE. EVEN IF A VIABLE SAMPLE COULD BE CREATED (IMPOSSIBLE) IT WOULD NOT LAST MORE THAN A YEAR BEFORE TOTAL CELLULAR COLLAPSE.

PERSONAL NOTE: THIS WAS A BAD IDEA FROM THE START… NOW WHO IS GOING TO TELL GILLETTE LIQUID THAT SHE AND TOBIAS CAN'T HAVE A DAUGHTER?

Jake looked over the paper a few times, trying to understand exactly what he was that he was reading, but it didn't really make much sense. No, the young man wasn't exactly a scientist, but it looked like he and Sherry had been kidnapped so that their antibodies would make it easier for the yellow eyed man and whoever Gillette was to have a kid together? That was just crazy… but then again, so was Tobias, and either way the project was apparently a failure, so it really didn't matter anyway.

Dropping the paper where he found it, Jake left the security station and started to follow the path that his enemy had taken, but then he noticed that the words East Area were painted over a different door. Unfortunately, the security station only had cameras in this area, so the young man would be going in completely blind, and armed only with a baton… oh well, it was better than being completely unarmed, and… and wait a second. He might have been an escaped prisoner who was unarmed… but did anyone really need to know that?

Not all the guards in this part of the laboratory had bene incinerated, some of them just had their necks broken, and one of them had to at least be close to the same size as Jake, right? So he went back and checked over the bodies, and while it wasn't a perfect match, one of them was pretty close to his own body size… at least enough to get by. He had never stripped down a dead body and stolen their clothes before, so that was an awkward experience, but pretty soon the young man looked just like another security guard.

Now he had a baton, a rifle with no bullets in it, and well… hopefully the disguise would work as door opened, and he started down the corridor into the laboratory's East Area.