Chapter 17

"Orderly Disposal"

July 31st 1995

Jay ran the whole way from the helicopter landing pad to the female subject's room, his Army boots thundered down the hall making researchers, soldiers, and subjects think a tornado had struck the earth above their heads. He only stopped outside of her door to catch his breath and hold his flank in an effort to make the growing side-stitch go away. Through his labored breaths, he heard Brian reading out loud;

"'All is silent in the halls of the dead. All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. Behold the stairways which stand in darkness; behold the rooms of ruin. These are the halls of the dead where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one.'"

Jay did not know that the lab he worked in would become the halls of the dead his friend was reading about in a little more than three years time, but he did know that the passage that he had just heard held a large amount of truth about the place of his employment in the present. There were a few spider webs in the corners, and it was, quite literally, the halls of the dead.

Jay pushed all this to the back of his mind and entered the room to see his friend facing away from him.

Brian was leaning back in his chair, his boots resting on the table in front of him and turned the page in his book as he read softly by candlelight, careful not to wake the female subject.

Jay however, was not so considerate; "Brian, come with me! Now!"

The shouts scared his friend so much that he tipped over in his chair and landed flat on his back. The yelling from the frantic soldier he also startled the female subject and she awoke with a jerk, her chains rattling loudly.

Brian got to his feet a split second after he hit the floor, rubbing the back of his head, "The hell, man?"

"Wesker's back and Burkin's in tow!" Jay said in one breath, as though that simple statement could convey everything he needed to say.

For a second, Brian could only blink, then he patiently said; "Albert Wesker has been in the information department for 17 years, Jay. William Burkin hasn't been in charge here for a good long while. Now why is their return so important that it requires you to shout at the top of your lungs?"

Jay grit his teeth, they didn't have any time to waste and shouldn't be standing around talking like this; "Because they're back to 'dispose' of her!" he jerked his thumb at the female subject.

Brian's brain shut down for a moment, "What? Why?"

"Because she can think now," Jay said sarcastically.

"What just because she bit the hand that feeds her a few times?"

Jay blinked and looked at his friend as if to ask, Are you really that stupid?

Instead he said, "She didn't bite the hand that feeds her, she ripped the faces off of three female researchers and wore them like Halloween masks!"

Brian seemed to have squirted some WD-40 on his brain because he suddenly reached into the pockets of his lab coat and withdrew a sterile syringe and a packaged needle. He tore the package in two with so much force that the needle flew from the paper, spun in the air twice, and landed in the same pocket it just been inside, like a competition diver going for a number ten from the judges.

He fished the needle from the pocket and poked himself twice doing it. Brian attached the needle to the syringe and opened the drawer to his desk before pulling a vile from inside.

Jay saw that XNB-1 had been written on the label with a black ink pen.

Brian stabbed the needle into the rubber cap and filled the syringe. He jerked the needle from the vile, aimed the needle's point at the hanging light in the room and pushed the air from the tube until liquid squirted out of the minute hole in the thin metal.

Jay watched as Brian injected the female subject and saw her wince when the needle pierced her skin and entered her vain.

No sooner had Brian tossed the syringe into the hazardous materials container and stuffed the vile into his pocket than Wesker, Burkin, and the new lab director John had walked through the door.

"You can't do this," Brian told them, "She's still a human being. She should be treated like one."

"We have to, Brian. Stand aside," Wesker told him.

Brian sighed, seeing this was pointless; "Alright. But at least let me stay with her."