Resident Evil, White Claudia

Part 3/7

By Fenris Ulf

Disclaimer: I do not own either Resident Evil or Silent Hill. Or any of the cool weapons. Darn it.

She had never really rowed a boat before, and like all beginners since the beginning of time, she spent a lot of effort into going around in very slow circles. She rowed with one arm while forgetting about using the other one. She cursed and swore and vowed to get even with the sadistic madman who invented the infernal device. Still, Sherry Birkin was the child of genius, so it only took her an hour to get the hang of the boat enough to make slow and unsteady progress for the island in the center of the lake.

She touched down on the tiny island. It was really tiny, a person could walk the entire length in twenty minutes. Which made the stone monoliths in the center easy to see.

Sherry looked at the stones. They weren't all that big, each one was about her height, but their shape and placement reminded her of Stonehenge.

"Stonehenge." Sherry looked at the standing stones for a few moments.

That was when she realized that she was straining to see them clearly, because it was getting dark.

"What the...?" Slowly at first, the entire area grew pitch black. She swiftly turned on her flashlight. She examined the stones. They were covered with carvings similar to the ones that she had on her PDA. She looked at the center stone, and she saw the familiar circle.

She got out her PDA and tapped the red symbol. It filled the screen and glared at her. She turned it so that it faced the symbol on the monolith.

"Gah," she gasped out as the pain began. The symbol on the monolith began to bleed. The blood then glowed, making it easy to see. Sherry spat out the blood pooling in her own mouth as she grimly hung on.

She heard the klaxon somewhere in the distance as the ground shook beneath her. The shaking drove her to one knee, but she held up the symbol. That was when she noticed the small hill with the stones was lowering into the ground. Earth was swiftly replace with a metal elevator shaft.

Sherry put the PDA away and got out her handguns. This was where things usually got ugly.

Just when she thought that the shaft went down to the center of the Earth, it stopped. Across from the blood-red circle was a high-tech looking, metal sliding door. The sort of thing that you'd expect to see in a White Umbrella facility.

Sherry sighed. "Maybe I was better off with the other monsters."

The doors slid aside quietly and smoothly when she got close enough. No killer monsters, killer security systems or nasty alarms. Not that that meant anything.

She cautiously entered the corridor. Instead of the clean lines of an Umbrella lab, it looked like the rusted, scabarous version of itself.

She turned to look as the doors closed shut behind her. No sooner than that event happened when she heard the retching hiss of the demon babies. She saw it in the dim light of the corridor. It had somehow acquired a pair of rotted zombie legs and was shambling its way over to her, its long, obscene tongue darting back and forth at her.

She paused for a moment to track its slow movements before shooting. Its head jerked back as the liquid-filled round smashed into it.

As it collapsed to the ground, Sherry saw something that made the bile rise in her again. The body became transparent and she could see someone else in its place. It was a young oriental man wearing a lab coat with the Umbrella symbol on it. Though he might have done unspeakable evil, what happened to him was not the just deserts of whatever blasphemous experiments he had participated in. Someone had done this to him.

The image did not go away as Sherry stared at it. She stared at the walls and found that she couldn't get away from it. She could see the old, clean lines with the layers of corruption over it.

Sherry was startled when her PDA beeped again. She took it out and looked at it. Some text was appearing on the screen.

"Favored child. Come this way."

The text then disappeared to be replaced with a floorplan. There was a green dot followed by some yellow arrows going down the corridor.

Sherry carefully followed the arrows. They led around corners and through doors. When she came to a security checkpoint, some instructions would appear to allow her to pass. She didn't see a single monster or zombie.

In a way, that made her more nervous than if she had to wade through them. While dangerous, the monsters she had encountered were not filled with malice, they were only driven by the terrible desire to devour her.

She glanced down at the tiny computer in her hand. Whoever was giving her this information probably wasn't going to have anything nearly as pleasent in mind.

She entered a cavernous room listed as the "South Specimen Storage Area."

"Welcome, Miss Birkin," came a familiar voice.

At the back of the room was a familiar looking barrier. It looked like a wall made of grey glass. She looked at the man.

"I should have known it was you," she said. "Ordinary evil couldn't have come up with all of this."

Don Simpson smiled at her. "Yes, it was all my doing. The hardest part was trying to figure out how to lure you here. Take a look at the diary."

Sherry took out the book. She was not dismayed or surprised to see that all the pages were blank except for the warning at the very end.

"It took me a long time to find that. No one really knew what happened in the final days of Raccoon City. Or, no one that currently works for White Umbrella."

She looked at him behind his barrier and began to seeth.

"Then you'll ask yourself why did I go through all the trouble of getting you here. The answer is this."

He held up a device that Sherry recognized as a pistol syringe. The liquid inside was a bright, purple color.

"The G-virus," she said to him.

"Yes. Thanks to this place, this town, the nightmare of the people who come here can be turned into reality. I have never seen the G-virus. Perhaps you have not seen it either, but you were near it, you experienced its awesome power. I was hoping that that would be enough."

"And how were you planning to take it from this place of dreams?" she asked him.

He then grinned one of the most evil grins Sherry had ever seen. He then stabbed himself in the stomach with the needle and he pulled the trigger.

Sherry recoiled as his eyes turned red.

"Grahhhhh!" he bellowed. His muscles bulged.

Sherry backed off as she wondered if it was any use to run away.

His shirt ripped as his chest bulged again. Sherry saw a metal disk fall from his pocket.

She hoped that it would work. She pulled out the PDA and she held it out at the disk. She instantly heard the sound of the chorus of the damned and knew it was working.

She then regretted it as she went to one knee with the massive headache pounded at her. This time, the pain was accompanied by a dreadful ringing in her ear. She hoped that the disk would give her enough power to get back to reality. She tried putting a hand over her ear to block the ringing sound, even though she knew that it wouldn't work.

She felt a wetness there. She looked at her hand expecting to see blood. What she saw was a clear fluid. "With my luck, its cerebral fluid," she muttered before a heavy pain boring into the center of her skull caused her to grey out for a moment.

"Gah!"

Then, the pain was gone.

She unsteadily stood up and looked up at the sound of something cracking. It was the barrier that separated her from Don. As his body mutated with the sound of snapping bones, cracks appeared in the smoky glass.

Sherry was now acutely aware that that barrier was the only thing between her and the new G-virus Tyrant.

"Not good," she said shortly, bringing her new rifle to bear, for all the good it would do. She briefly debated on whether or not she should use the Ophiel symbol, but she couldn't depend on it. She backed up toward the door and watched as the glass broke. Instead of showering Don with shards, the barrier dissolved as it began to fall.

She opened the door and fell into the hallway as Don's mocking laughter boomed out over the hall.

She ran through the corrupted hallways, wondering when the Tyrant would rip through the walls to get at her. Or maybe he was merely waiting for his ultimate evolution into that hideous thing that simply expanded as a festering mass of teeth and tentacles. One of the doors opened as she passed it, and she gratefully darted in.

She spent a few moments sitting on the floor, gasping for air. She had been in pretty good shape, but it had been a while since she had anything to eat or drink.

As she looked around, the strange dictonomy overcame her again. She could see the facility as corrupted and disease-ridden. She could also see under that to the way it used to look.

In looking around, she could not see the bustle of people as she had earlier back at Toulca Labs. It took her a moment to understand why. The Toulca Labs had only a minor connection with White Umbrella. She would not find it surprising to find out that Don Simpson had been working there.

This place, however, was a White Umbrella facility through and through. Likely, when he had been ready, he had brought his people to the other side of the nightmare and did horrible things to them.

She clasped her hands together and tried to think.

The monster stalked the halls of the facility. He was powerful, no door could bar his way, no wall could stand between him and his prey. The demon zombies, men and women who had once done his bidding, were now no more than mere playthings under his might.

He burst into a room and saw something before him.

It was a woman, standing in the middle of the holding bay. The holding bay was a large room, equivalent to the size of a hanger bay. Her leather coat was puddled on the ground at her feet and she looked upon him without fear.

"I don't know if you're human enough to hear me, or understand me, Don. You lured me here in order to get a hold of a sample of the G-virus. It was a mistake. My father, evil as he was, was a genius. If you were half as smart as he was, you could have made the virus yourself."

The monster stopped, confused. It could comprehend creatures attacking it for dominence or attacking prey for food, but this girl was confusing.

"I don't know what you had in mind when you gave me these, if it was you, but now, I guess its time to show you how they really work."

She closed her eyes and a clear fluid trickled from her ear. A glowing symbol appeared on her cheek and the monster felt something else. It felt fear.

Before it could attack, sheets of smoke-grey glass appeared throughout the bay. Before it could take the half step that would bring it close enough to rip out her throat, another barrier sprang up, suddenly making her as far away as the dark side of the moon.

"Gahhh!" the monster bellowed as it slammed into the barrier.

Sherry watched him dispassionately for a moment before she raised both her hands, palm up to reveal the glowing symbol of Ophiel and the red symbol also glowing balefully.

In the center of the pen appeared a black lump of charred flesh. The monster turned around to look at it as it heard the heavy thump of it falling to the ground.

The mass began to expand and with the sound of breaking fingers, it began to stand up. It bulked huge with four arms, each one terminating in a lethal arrangement of bone spikes and claws. Set into its chest like melted wax was the flattened face of a human being. On one of its arms, a grotesque eyeball looked out over the surroundings.

Both monsters paused for a moment before launching themselves at each other with mindless ferocity.

The creature who had once been Don Simpson had not changed much, as these mutations went. He had grown a few feet taller with his jaw turned into the maw of a lamprey with rows of razor sharp teeth. His arms were both a dead grey color and covered with a scabarous carapace. He began by hitting the other monster who then slashed out with his murderous arms.

Sherry watched as first one monster, then the other would inflict dreadful damage on each other. She was not afraid this time, as she heard the awful wail of damned souls and saw Don Simpson's monstrous form fade away to be replaced by his more familiar one.

The other monster gave him a vicious swipe that sent him across the room.

"William Birkin," she called out to the monstrous form.

"Father," she said. The creature turned to look at her. One of its arms had been ripped off, and severe damage had been done to various parts of its torso.

There was nothing she could say, nothing to convey her wish to say good-bye, her hate of what he had become, her love. She let the symbols of the Dark Gods of Silent Hill vanish from her body and let the grey barrier and the monster dissolve back into nightmare.

"Ughhh," she groaned as the headache once more caused her to fall to her knees. With a great deal of effort, she put her coat back on and staggered to the pitiful body of Don Simpson.

He should have been dead. Various bones were sticking out of his tattered flesh like pikes over old battlefields. His body was crushed in some places, lacerated in others. He should have been killed when the first blow struck, or when his lifeblood spurted out of the various cuts.

He was weakly laughing at her.

"The G-virus revitalizes cellular function," she said to him.

"Yes, but there's something that you should know. Those who bind themselves to more than one of the Gods of Silent Hill are drawn too deeply into the darkness to ever return to the light."

He began to laugh, but gave out a rattling choke instead. He then began to dissolve into a pool of sanguine, his body bubbling as it melted away. In a few seconds, he was a red pool that was slowly congealing like an open wound.

She stood there watching his corpse as she heard the wail of the klaxon drawing her deeper into the nightmare realm.

To be continued...

Next part: Cyst.