Resident Evil, White Claudia
Part 5/7
By Fenris Ulf
Disclaimer: I do not own any of this. If this gives you nightmares, that means you can't blame me.
For a moment, no one breathed a word.
"Really?" Lisa asked him. "Is it really possible?"
"The forces at work in this place makes it impossible to move everyone," Jim said to her, "but I think there's a good chance that most of the people who wander into this place can make it. It will be hard, however."
Lisa, her eyes shining brightly, turned to Ben and Sherry. "Will you help?"
Sherry looked carefully at Jim. His face was an unholy rictus of ecstacy, a mirror of the wax image of her mother, which was frozen in a rictus of hate. Still, she knew almost nothing of the dark realm.
"Of course I'll help," she said to the nurse.
"Count me in," Ben said to her.
"Lisa, I'll need someone to help me with my plans. Ben, if you could round up everyone that's here and keep them in the hospital."
"What do I do?" Sherry asked, not the sudden messiah, but Ben.
Ben scratched at his beard for a moment. "Take an inventory: weapons, ammo, food. See what we have, what we might need, and what can be converted."
"For what sort of mission load?" she asked, this time looking at the wiry mystic.
No one spoke for a few moment. Ben sighed, then signaled to Sherry. "I think that we'll leave you two alone for a while."
"I'll talk to you later, Ben," Lisa said.
As the two left the ward behind them, Sherry looked up at Ben. "I don't trust that Jim guy," she said bluntly.
"I've always thought that he was crazy, but we can't stay here forever. We have to try something."
Sherry nodded. "For now, I'll just concentrate on inventorying what we have in the way of weapons and medical supplies. I hope this all works out."
It was hard to say in this place, but a few days passed in which Ben gathered the night walkers who survived the dark and Sherry prepped the equipment that they might need for whatever method or madness came thier way.
"Attention everyone," came the voice of Lisa over the PA system. "Can everyone please come to the Dining Hall? I have something I want to say to all of you."
Sherry was a little disturbed to see about twenty people in the dining hall. It had never occured to her that more people might have been drawn into this nightmare world. Ben had told her that this wasn't even half of the people that he remembered passing through on thier way to the light.
"Hello everyone," Lisa said. "Can you all hear me? Okay. I'm not sure if Ben told you what's going on, so I'll start from the beginning. Jim said that he has a plan to return some of us to the real world."
There was a murmur at that. Not glad whoops, not fustrated growls. Just people who were used to having thier hopes raised and dashed in a moment.
"Now then, the first thing I need to do is give you these." With that, she reached into a shoebox and took out a peice of wire. It was a peice of metal grating, cut so that the rounded-diamond shape was in the center with waved bits radiating out from the corners. It looked almost exactly like the burn mark on Lisa's cheek. Sherry nodded as the minor mystery of how Lisa got the mark was solved. "I made these, with Jim's help. They're, uh, magic. When you hold them, it'll keep the darkness away. But it won't protect you from being attacked, so you'll need to be armed."
"What exactly are we doing?" asked a thin black man. He was wearing a tattered business suit and was wearing glasses, but the easy way he carried his MP5, ready to fire at a moment's notice, made it clear that he was a veteran here.
"Well, we're going to support Sherry. Jim's been waiting for her." All eyes turned to the blond woman. All those eyes boring into her made her more nervous than crawling through Silent Hill. "Sherry, go to Jim's room and he'll explain to you what needs to be done."
"There you are," she heard. "Its good that you're here."
"What can you tell me about all this?" she asked him. "What is it that you want me to do?"
He smiled. "What I want, is nothing less than to strike down one of the dark gods of Silent Hill."
Sherry waited for a few moments. "And what is it that you want me to do?"
"You are the one I've been waiting for. The perfect sword to use against the god nearest to us. Lobsel Vith. When a person does magic using the gods of Silent Hill, what happens is that you take a part of the dark god within you. The god has power over the nightmare world, where dreams and nightmare can take form. When the wizard is done casting the spell, a portion of the dark god remains within him. In time, a person will be totally consumed by the dark god they court.
"You are different, Sherry Birkin. I have never seen this in a human before, but when you invoke a dark god, they cannot reside inside you. You can summon thier power, and they cannot refuse you. They fight against you when you summon them, but they must do your bidding."
She took out her touchstone and looked at it. "And how does this make me a sword?"
"The dark gods cannot ignore your summons. What I propose, is that the people here extend this hospital while you go out and summon the Yellow God, Lobsel Vith. When he comes, you must use this to draw him from this world, into this hospital." He extended a hand and showed her the diamond talisman.
She took it into her hand. She started as she heard the klaxon. Then she stopped caring as a massive headache slammed into her.
"Not again," she gritted as she felt something crawling through her mind. An alien presence that was trying to slither into the deepest recesses of her being.
Then for a moment, she briefly glimpsed the face of Lisa before the headache disappeared.
She looked down at her hand to see the talisman fade away as if it never was. On her touchstone was the rounded diamond symbol with the words Lisa Garland under it.
She looked back at Jim.
"Yes, she has been too long in the darkness. She can never return to the light, yet Alessa, Cheryl, Heather, or whatever name she goes by these days, did what she could for Lisa. I don't think that she knew what she did to Lisa, I don't think that it was something planned. For whatever reason, Lisa Garland is now a god of Silent Hill."
"Does she know?"
"No, she doesn't know. I think that its best that she not know about this."
Sherry continued to look at her touchstone. "And I now have four gods linked to me. Am I damned now as well?"
Jim smiled an evil smile. "I don't think that Lisa will bind you to the dark as tightly as the others. If we get rid of Lobsel Vith, that might be enough to bring you back to the light."
To be continued...
Next part: Marshal
