I woke from my drugged sleep when something thumped heavily on the steel "habitat" ceiling, and the light from the window shivered, as if blocked by something moving in front of the window. I watched, afraid to think, breathing as steadily as I could.
I knew, as well as Red Queen did, what the T-virus could do. I checked Red's heat cameras, and almost squealed with joy. Heat! These people were alive! As to whether or not they were Umbrella scientists...I'd have to take my chances, because if they left without me I might never get out.
I took a long, deep breath, then braced my back against the long, body-formed backrest I was laid upon, and pounded my fists as hard as I could against the ceiling.
Please hear me...please... I begged silently. The water was stirred into a frenzy around me. I kept pounding.
The sound of a body sliding off the box was the most wonderful thing I had heard since coming to this wretched place; or, it was until the horrible fear struck me. Don't let them be leaving! Don't let them leave me!
For a while it was silent. Frantically I stretched for the window, pressing my toes against the glass to prove I was human. I'm not an enemy! I'm just a girl! I wished desperately that they could hear my thoughts. The irony ofthis was not lost on me.
Glass shattered at the top edge of the box, and I heard the sucking sound of a seal breaking, muffled by water and the wax earplugs protecting me from overexposure to the water. A sudden desperation to be out of the box washed over me and made me flail at the ceiling-the lid, really-which was miraculously being shoved up and away by two pairs of arms. My desperation faded into apprehension as my frantic hands broke the surface of the water and were surrounded suddenly by air-cold, unfriendly air. I drew my hands suddenly back into the familiarity of the water. Carefully, carefully, I let one finger test the cold outside, then all of my fingertips, then one hand. Finally I reached my hands out of the water, my wire-and-tube-stuck arms reaching desperately for the dark haired man and woman who watched me from the other side of the meniscus.
Warm fingers wrapped around my arms at the wrist and elbow, between the protruding wires, and pulled me up into a sitting position. Sudden cold enveloped me, and I tossed my head to rid myself of the respirator, gulping the free air like a dying man.
"My god, she's just a kid!" the man growled, looking me over. I blinked my eyes frantically, trying to clear them after too long without use.
"Honey," the woman's low voice crooned in my ear, "I'm gonna try to take some of this shit off you, awright?" She was holding me upright with an arm behind my shoulders, a stripe of warmth across my back. I tried to make eye contact and nod, but I had begun to twitch convulsively and it was difficult. Painful spasms in my abdomen made me jerk involuntarily as the pair started plucking wires from me like stems from an over-ripe squash. Tiny fiery pricks heralded their progress. Wrists to elbows, elbows to shoulders, under the ribcage and at the base of the throat, sides of legs, ankles. One in the bottom of my foot. The water was tinted ever-so-slightly a dirty crimson when they finished.
"What were they doing to her?" the man demanded. I tried to answer, experimentation. What came out was a kind of strangled, ragged choking noise.
"Help me get her out."
I was lifted suddenly, fully into the cold air, and then set down on the concrete floor, which was even colder. Reflexively I drew my knees up to my chest, curling myself into a ball.
A warmth descended on my shoulders-a coat. I looked up and saw that the man was missing his, a black undershirt covering his chest instead. I tried to thank him, but instead I turned and threw up on the floor. Clear, bitter liquid spilled from my lips to the concrete. Of course, I thought wryly. Liquid nutrition only.
I tried to imagine how I must look to these two, my rescuers, and another man in a shirt and slacks that I now noticed was standing off to one side. Huddled on the floor, gasping and convulsing, soaked from heat to foot and wide-eyed in confused innocence and fear, like a newborn puppy. It must have been laughable. It didn't feel laughable.
I kept panting, not out of need but instead for the sheer delight of breathing real air, not the oxygen-enriched, artificially supplied crap that came through the respirator. Clean, cold air. I looked up, tears of joy sliding down my cheeks. Twenty-foot ceilings. Corridors stretched out on all sides. Just space. Beautiful, free space.
"Shh, you're alright," the man, whose coat I wore, said as he knelt beside me. He reached out to lay a hand on my head. I reflexively drew back the first time, but when he reached out his hand again I didn't move. His warm palm felt achingly familiar on my cold cheek. At his touch his name flashed through my mind- Joseph Demirez, but he was known as JD.
"Do you remember anything? Your name?" the woman asked softly. I tried to remember...but nothing came. My eyes fluttered involuntarily as I tried to find anything in Red's files on me. Not me as a test subject, or me as a project. Me personally. I gave him all I could come up with.
"NETH-2041"
My voice came out raspy and harsh, and I had to try three times in order to say even that, but I had spoken. That was something. JD gave me a strange look. I tried again.
"I d-don't rem-member my name," I said between painful abdominal convulsions. "B-but they called m-me NETH-2041. It stands f-for Neurological Ef-fects of the T-virus on H-humans, n-number twenty f-forty-one."
"What?" JD growled. He looked angry.
"I'm s-sorry," I whimpered. His eyes grew wide, and he said, "No, not you, not you. Were you..."
I nodded. An experiment.
The spasms were calming down. "Th-they were testing to see what the neurological effects w-would be if they injected a controlled strain of a v-virus they created into a human."
Rain and JD traded a look.
"These bastards just think they own everybody," the woman said in a voice that, while soft, held a wealth of danger. She whipped a piece of broken glass across the narrow hall between the boxes. It hit another box and tiny pebbles of jagged glass scattered across the floor. I jumped.
"What'd they do, kidnap you off the street?" the woman asked coldly. I shook my head, gradually recalling. They had taken away my past, once. But after they gave me the virus, even they couldn't stop my remembering. Except my name...why can't I remember my name?
"M-my father left my family to live in the Hive, to work here for Umbrella. When I found out he was leaving-though obviously not where he was going-I hid in his car. When he got out at the entrance, this gorgeous old mansion, I followed on foot. I had just gotten inside the actual structure of the Hive when they caught me. They were going to kill me, I think, but my father convinced them to put me in testing instead. I think he considered it a mercy." I laughed bitterly.
"I was twelve at the time. I spent three years in a little white room full of one-way mirrors. The only outings I got were spent unconscious and being jabbed full of needles." A hand went subconsciously to the back of my head, where my skull met my neck. I knew there would be a hundred circles of needle-pricks, layered each on top of the others. My ankles and inner arms looked much the same.
"I used to love my hair," I added absently, twirling a re-grown strand between my fingers. "It was one of the few things I liked about myself. They shaved it off to stick my skull full of probes and cover my scalp with electrodes. And then, when I was fifteen, they decided they were done with me and stuck me in a fish tank in a room full of mutant bunny rabbits," I finished, my lip curling in disgust. I hated them. Hated them!
"How long were you in there?"
I searched Red Queen's files on me, my eyes slipping out of focus as numbers and letters seemed to flash before me in rows of red on black.
"Three years," I answered, amazed. I was an adult, a legal adult now; I was eighteen. Yet I felt more like a child than ever before. A cold, frightened child.
"Holy shit," the woman exclaimed. "How can you even still move?'
"Side effect of the virus. Regeneration of dead cells. It would be pretty near impossible for my muscles to atrophy."
Amazed looks. I wanted to cry.
"Can you help me get out? I have a chance now, now that they're all dead. But I can't get out alone," I pleaded.
The woman's eyes sharpened, her dark gaze becoming suddenly intense.
"How did you know about-"
Unlocking from Secure Mode
Manual Unlock Procedure-not authorized
Initiate Emergency Weapons System
I screamed. The woman stopped talking, startled. They both stared.
"You aren't the only ones?" I cried, eyes wide with desperation. "Why didn't you tell me you weren't the only ones?"
Four warm bodies appeared in red in the booby-trapped hallway from the Central Entrance to the Queen's Chamber.
Shut down weapons system.
Shut down weapons system! I demanded desperately. A sudden stab of pain sent me sprawling on the cold concrete.
What the...?
"Inhibitors," I gasped, rolling over onto my back. The probes weren't enough for them? They had put inhibitors directly into my head!
In the trapped hallway, the first laser traveled slowly across the path at neck-level. Three of the red bodies hit the floor, alive. The fourth fell, too-in two pieces, slowly cooling and dimming from view.
My fingertips darted across my scalp, pressing tentatively here and there, feeling along the mesh of wires just under the skin that had been part of a poorly designed monitoring system. I found the irregularity almost immediately, a square bump that didn't fit the pattern of the rest.
"Hit this with your gun," I told the woman hurriedly, getting up on my knees and parting my sodden hair.
The second laser went out, ankle-level. Two warm bodies had gotten up-the third remained on the ground for some reason, and it was cruelly severed by the laser.
"Hit it!" I yelled again.
The first of the two remaining bodies tried to jump the laser-just as it moved upward, back into his path. The body fell in even halves, its warmth beginning to dissipate.
"You have to hit it! If you don't, they'll all die!"
The last living person cleverly avoided the high laser, throwing Red a bit of a loop. Up until now she had been following the pattern for energy conservation. On the next one, she would pull out all the stops.
I gave up on the woman, instead snatching her knife from her belt and sliding the sharp point under the little box on the meshing, ignoring the prick of pain. Levering with the knife, I pried the inhibitor free with the sharp noise of cracking solder. I sent the command to shut down weapons systems-
-just as the impassable web of lasers passed through the final body, reducing it to a heap of cauterized tissue and charred cloth.
I moaned and fell back against the box, my hands clenching in my hair.
"What?" The woman asked.
I began to cry, letting their questions melt into the quiet of Dining Hall B unanswered, curled up on the cold floor of a fortress full of the dead.