For all disclaimers: See Chapters 1 and 2.
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CHAPTER SIX Lost Souls/June 8th 1996, central Iraq/
Deep inside the complex, a middle-aged man in his mid-fifties with long grey hair held in a ponytail at the neck, sharp green eyes and a scowl stared at the Security camera feeds. Dressed in the green scrubs and long white coat of a Doctor, thick steel-framed glasses being perched on his beak-like nose, anyone would have guessed on sight that he was a Scientist and member of staff in this place. Almost no one would have guessed, however, just what it was he did there.
Professor Robert Creig was a man to whom happiness did not come easily. In fact, in abstract terms, he suspected that he had never actually been "happy" as such, since this implied a state of satisfaction with the way things were that he was incapable of accepting. Everything could be improved upon, from the Amoeba to the most sophisticated computer humanity had ever, would ever create. He should know, after all, the fact that his brain made him a certified off-the-scale genius was the reason Umbrella had appointed him as Chief Scientist in their little side operation in Iraq-but that was besides the point now.
They'd tried to tell him to scale down his activities, send them the research on Project: Nephilim, his baby and creation, a special offshoot of Project: Apocalypse. They'd said that he could continue working on it once they'd seen the data, of course, but they made the decisions and that was that.
They must have thought he'd had a partial Lobotomy or taken leave of his eyesight, anyone who paid attention knew Umbrella better than that. Men with guns and knives would have come to visit him the moment the information was no longer under his control, he had no doubt at all, so he'd taken steps.
First he'd disconnected the mainframe from external interface, preventing Umbrella from simply hacking out his Project records and ideas. Then he'd Locked Down the complex after calling his prime team into the central lab area, sealing the lab airtight after they'd entered. He'd shot all of them but Alice-she was sweet, after all, and very, very pretty-then gassed the rest of the complex with a Nerve Gas mingled with a variant form of the T-Virus, just to see what happened as much as anything.
Some man who had realised what was going on had managed to manually override the Escape Hatch-but he'd been too late, despite the presence of an armed guard with him. Only an Umbrella Spy with high-level access could have gotten past the Lockdown, so watching the T-Virus infected Wolf rip him half to shreds after almost cutting in half the guard on the Security cameras first had been modestly entertaining. That he'd managed to get out regardless was irrelevant, he was dead no matter what. He'd never doubted that releasing all of the Test subjects should this kind of event ever occur would be a good idea, now he'd been proved right. Joy.
Everybody else had, thankfully, had the decency to drop dead long before they got up again and started moaning and groaning like those silly old horror film Zombies, occasionally chewing on the remains of those few who had been unable to stand the idea of ending up products of the Virus and done what they had to do to make sure they never did. The prototype Behemoth class had performed particularly well so far. Attacked by a corridor full of Zombies it had summarily dismembered and mutilated everything in sight with effective speed and great efficiency and even remembered to conceal its leavings, as its Programming had dictated.
He planned on released the half-dead Ares Hound once it had fully resuscitated. Even in the state it was in it had required monster doses of Sedatives and Tranquillisers just to keep it out while it was attached to a steel stretcher with titanium shackles for emergencies-such as its insane metabolism managing to flush the drugs and wake it up abruptly, theoretically a possibility. Once it was awake the shackles would hold it for a minute, tops, then he'd see just what it could do off a leash.
All of the data was downloaded to his Laptop and wiped from the main system beyond all hope of recovery. His Agent was on the way-the entry of the Government team into the building had let him physically see his Agent to confirm that. The plan was on schedule and running perfectly-Alice was crying her eyes out behind him. Oh, yes. That.
He turned around and waved the gun in Alice's direction again causing her to screech with fear and terror again. A pity about the noise, really, it was the only actually bad thing about her. Long blond hair in a ponytail down her back, blue eyes, the smooth, delicate features of youth only adding to a fresh-faced beauty, perfect long legs, small bust emphasised by that tight shirt-why was she crying, screaming and snuffling with fear again? Didn't she realise that they were about to embark on a great adventure again? Well, she was going to bend over and provide most of the fun while he did all of the work, yes-
"Your INSANE!" she shrieked, again, her voice having risen a full octave since she started screaming the moment he gunned down the others, all three of them, seeping blood running across the floor, fragments of bone and flesh protruding from where bullets had entered and exited their bodies. Did she think that having no "social conscience" made him mad? Silly girl, of course it didn't. It just left him free of all those annoying inhibitions people who couldn't do his job had, little things like a "conscience" that was-why did you really need one of those at the end of it all in any case? All it ever did was hold one back from achieving your full potential.
"No, no, no, one last time, after me: I-AM-NOT-MAD. Madness would have been infecting myself with the Virus without taking the anti-Virus first, madness would have been letting Umbrella take what's mine. I'm not mad, I'm free. Now stop that whining, crying and moaning, sit up and smile more. Once my Hound gets here, we can leave, then spend plenty of blissful time together. I'm very experienced, I assure you... I just asked you to stop that wailing noise, didn't I?" grumbled Creig, as Alice started to wail in terror again...
Serena Baccarin was not happy, although, to be honest, it was mainly because she'd been covered in a variety of fluids normally internal to the human body, most of which smelt so bad they defied description and made her nose simply stop functioning. Of course, there was also the fact that pieces of flesh, bone chips and what looked like a large part of a human kidney decorated her clothes, skin and hair, a fact that /really/ annoyed her since she'd only just cleaned up after wearing that "native" dress for weeks on and off to maintain her cover. How anyone sane and with free will would deliberately wear those kind of clothes in this heat was beyond her...
She noted that the fall of rotting human flesh had finally stopped, put her arms back to her sides and looked around to get some idea of what they were dealing with. About...fifteen dismembered, lacerated, mutilated and shredded human bodies lay about in a variety of ways at a best guess. Everything that should have been seemed to be there somewhere, pulped bloody and almost unrecognisable in several cases, yes, but with anything capable of this level of violence one had to expect that-could she hear something...?
She looked back towards Stamper and Chris, wondering whether it was coming from either of them. Stamper was so pale and sick looking he looked as though he'd died and someone had forgotten to tell him, while Chris was apparently still throwing up off to the side. She couldn't blame him, what had happened here was ghastly at the very least, really horrific beyond description, but one saw these things in her line of work. Besides which, after what had...happened...to her all those years ago-well, she didn't get ill or disturbed on seeing even this screwed-up awful Godforsaken nightmare. She just recognised that whoever, or whatever, had done this needed to die, slowly and in great, great pain...
There it was again, soft multiple thumps, but there was more this time. Hunters ears could make out the scratching noise of something sharp scraping against a metal floor, as though something large was moving fast, or several smaller something's, an animal or several of a kind...several, she was suddenly certain. Coming towards them at an increasing rate of speed, as though whatever was out there had somehow sensed that they were here.
"CHRIS, Stamper, stand too and be ready to kill. We have trouble" she said, deliberately calling Chris Redfield's name particularly sharply since he was still dry-heaving, trying to vomit with nothing left to throw up. She had no more time to wait for him to recover, if this turned fatal she needed everyone mobile and ready in a second. She just hoped that Chris was enough of a soldier to work past his-admittedly severe-distraction. Thankfully, as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, raised his head and drew his Desert Eagle with a nod, she was sure that he could. Stamper drew his Glock 45.-then literally squeaked with a combination of fear and shock as the things that were hunting them came into sight down the left-side corridor, barely fifty yards distant .
Dobermen guard dogs, big ones, with muscles and big, sharp white teeth that were of a size to match. The biggest would have hit her height on its back paws standing against her chest, it was up to her chest walking normally. It and nine others trotted into view, but the numbers weren't what made Serena's eyebrows shoot up. What did that was one simple fact that you couldn't fail to take in on sight: quite simply, they dogs were dead.
Skin was ragged and hanging loose or simply missing, gleaming red muscle, sinews and suddenly massive claws were abruptly all that mattered. Huge red eyes stared at them even as they stared straight back at the Hellhounds-or so Serena had decided to think of them, even as she noticed that she could see ones still apparently functioning lungs-the hounds charged.
Stamper screamed and fired first, his shot screeching a metre clear of the nearest dog as it ricocheted off of the wall in a shower of sparks. Serena had both her Smith & Wesson 9MM pistols in hand in a breath and was shooting next, shooting one dog in the head, a second in the heart, the bullets pulping vital organs as she fired with perfect aim. Chris's Desert Eagle roared once and a dog lost its front left leg as well as part of its chest, collapsing into a smear of blood as a huge chunk of its side was simply torn clean away. The injured dog Chris had shot kept trying to get up, though, and the dog she'd shot in the heart barely did anything more than stagger before, blood now pouring from its chest, it came on, all of the nine dogs growling, snarling with feral fury.
Serena fired three times with both pistols at the dogs, doubling up to be sure since she really wasn't sure what it would take to kill these things. Head shots every time, three more dogs collapsed before the remainder got too close to her for her to keep shooting. Chris's second shot pulped the head of a dog while his third shattered the spine of a third, leaving it limp on the floor but not dead. Stamper fired off shots so wildly Serena suspected it was lucky he didn't shoot her and Chris before his nerve failed him and he span, taking off like an Olympic Sprinter down the right-side passageway, straight away from the attack on them all. He was panicking, not thinking, having gone that way since they hadn't been down there yet so it might even be worse, but she had no time to think about that now.
One of the dogs went for her throat with a noise coming from its ruined body sent straight from Hell as she fired off a last snapshot, one of the three remaining mobile Hellhounds being catapulted backwards as the bullet took a chunk out of its skull, taking the greater part of its brain with it. She slammed her right-side pistol into the second ones head with such force that she felt the crack of bone as the pistol barrel fractured its skull before its simple weight and mass literally bowled her over, sending the two of them tumbling, but she ended up on top. Dropping both guns she grabbed her knives and rammed them into the things chest up to the hilts even as the Hellhound clawed and bit at her in a feral frenzy.
Abruptly glad her uniform incorporated body armour, she realised that wrestling an already dead guard dog was a bad idea to begin with, not to mention impossible in theory, so she suspected that trying to simply strangle it with her bare hands, her preferred next action, would have no effect. She had no intention of waiting until either it disembowelled her or took her face off if she couldn't do that, though, so she tried the next best thing since stabbing the dog was having no apparent effect. Ripping her knives clear even as she fought past its claws, she put both blades down crosswise against its throat-then thrust down while drawing across with every bit of strength she could muster. The knives dug into the steel floor, but the Hellhounds head rolled away clear of its body entirely leaving a stream of thin blood. It stopped struggling at that point. She scrambled to her feet to see what had happened to the last mobile one, which had gone after Chris-a broad smile spread across her face.
Chris, smoking gun still in hand, had managed a clean dead-centre shot with only a split-second to aim and fire. The last Hellhounds head was a splintered mass of blood and bone. The big bullet had done even worse damage, having torn its way out of the left-side chest, pulping various internal organs on the way, but it all added up to one thing. The damned thing was dead, which was all that mattered. With barely a glance she retrieved her pistols and blew out the brains of the two injured Hellhounds, the only injury which seemed to actually stop them for good.
"Good timing, Chris, I was beginning to think that I'd have to do everything myself" she said, not even trying to hide the broad smile that etched itself across her face and in her eyes. Damn, but she had to admit that standing there, smoking gun in hand, muscles all tensed up, handsome face set in a look of concentration, the young man looked /nice/...
"Thanks" replied Chris, slowly, "I think. Just one thing: what-the-F-" he began, before being cut off by a very human, very scared scream-from the direction Stamper had fled. Serena and he glanced at each other, then he took off right behind her, her long-legged body and Olympic athletes physique letting her easily outrun him. She had to remind herself not to simply leave him gasping in her wake, but that didn't stop her from hearing him mutter "Later" under his breath...
Stamper fell over backwards, went head over heels, crashed to his side, scrambled upright desperately trying to aim-fired. The jaw disintegrated, taking half the left side of the face with it. The Zombies head snapped around, but it just looked straight back at Stamper even as awful deep red gore fell from the inside of its head to the floor, shuffling slow footsteps carrying it slowly closer to the terrified Scientist-Soldier. He screamed again, shot it in the heart at point-blank range, blood and gore mixed with organ parts exploding out of its back. It staggered, straightened and kept coming.
The language Stamper used at this would have made most of his few friends, who considered him incapable of any brutality, verbal or otherwise, faint in shock. He took a step backwards, another, then stopped one last time, aimed and fired-the Glock clicked on an empty chamber. Stamper nearly died of fright, but, panicked, did the worst thing he could have done-he dived forwards, under and past the Zombie, which wore the dark-green uniform of the Iraqi Republican Guard elite and still carried a holstered pistol, scrambled to his feet and sprinted away down the corridor, sheer terror lending wings to his feet. He ran so fast that he lost all sense of direction and time before skidding to a halt in front of one of five doors, all sealed by electrically powered double steel doors. All of them had blinking red lights above them and a keypad that required a code be entered before entry would be granted, but Stamper wasn't thinking rationally and tried to force the doors before trying the keypad, his agile fingers dancing across the keys.
Incredibly he managed to enter the Override Code with only his second attempt, the door-light flashing green before the outer door opened-a moment before the Biohazard symbol flashed up. Stamper, convinced in his own mind that the long-lost Zombie was still right behind him, paid no attention at all to this and was inside in a second, practically jumping up and down with nervous energy as he willed the outer door to close faster. If he'd been thinking rationally, he would have realised that he'd just gotten into an airlock. If he'd been thinking at all, he'd have made sure that he never got through to the inside...
Serena dropped the horribly injured Iraqi with a single snapped shot at full sprint, noting for future reference that the man appeared to have suffered massive trauma already, more than enough to kill him and then some. Racing down the passageway she abruptly came to five closed doors and stopped so sharply that anyone watching her would have blinked. Instantly her eyes were everywhere, missing nothing, absorbing every detail, her mind picking out and discarding every scrap of information-by the time Chris arrived, puffing slightly at trying to keep up with Serena, she knew where Stamper had gone.
Chris glanced about him, gritted his teeth and shook his head. "I hate this place already, anyone with this much need for secrets has far too much to hide. Did you see him? More to the point, did you see that.../thing/...back there?" he asked, pausing to catch his breath.
Serena just nodded, absorbed in studying a keypad. "The former, no, the latter, yes. Some drug combination, maybe? I've see men on PCP roll a car by ripping all of the muscles in their body without even knowing it before now. Quiet, need to focus" replied Serena, running her fingertips over the keypad.
Chris took the hint and barely even breathed for several long moments, then Serena sighed audibly. "Iraqi language which translates into English if needed, seven-digit code combining numbers and letters, possibly based on something personally relevant to the programmer. Lockdown in effect nullifies all base Codes excepting Emergency Override, which I do not know. How the blazes did /he/ get in here?" muttered Serena, not at all happy about what she was seeing.
Chris raised his hand, feeling like the class Clown but needing to ask. "Question: first, how do we know he went in here? Second, isn't the question not so much how /he/ did it but how /we'll/ do it?" he asked. Serena glanced at him for a moment, then looked back at the keypad.
"In the order they were asked... First, moisture, also known as sweat, on the keyboard keys, scuffs on the floor from his boots-and where do you think a frightened techie, that /is/ what he is, Chris, would go for safety in a panic? The nearest closed room with a door which locks and seals, preferably with a lab. Second, I can Hack with the Masters, all I need is time" she replied, tapping in a Code on the keypad and not liking the results. Chris stepped backwards, having nothing else to say, and let her work.
Serena tapped in a series of codes, fingers dancing over the keys with incredible speed and agility, but seemed to be getting nowhere fast. Loathe to distract her since they needed Stamper for his irreplaceable skills and knowledge concerning what they were here for, Chris didn't say a word. However, images of things which just couldn't be floated past his minds eye again and again and again: dead dogs tearing at people fighting for their lives with tooth and claw, a dead man standing up staring at him with horrifically pale eyes that saw almost nothing, every vital part torn, ruined and bloody a second before a bullet tore through an eye socket and out the back of its head, taking blood, brain, skin and skull with it. Dozens of dead people dismembered and terribly, horribly abused in almost every way imaginable, including some ways which no-one had any right to ever think of, things which made him feel his guts twist just to think about... This /could/ not be, /was/ not happening. If he admitted that it was, he would simply go insane, but those dogs were dead... No, they'd had some horrible disease that had done that to them, made them less than alive, more than dead, made them something else altogether, the Bio-Weapon, if that was what it was, loose in this place. That had to be it-but did that mean that all of them were going to end up like that too?
"Aaaaand.../action/!" announced Serena abruptly, as she evidently made a breakthrough. The door motors hummed and the outer door slid open slowly-a second before the Biohazard symbol flashed in the door Open/Closed flasher. Serena saw it and said something no one would repeat in polite company, loudly. Chris just stared at the symbol for a long second before it blinked off, the door switching to green to symbolise Open.
"Jesus H. Christ on a bicycle, what /NOW?!/" Chris almost shouted, throwing up his hands in utter frustration and a little fear at, yet again, the deadly unknown. Serena shot him a look that made him calm down in a second-he almost wanted to apologise for feeling fear, which was ridiculous-then stared at the airlock as though she was watching the end of the world from the front line.
"Alright, stay here and shoot anything you don't recognise, I'll be back shortly one way or another. The Code is 7321-X5 by the way" announced Serena, before stepping into the airlock chamber. The door motors immediately began to hum, the door beginning to close even as a startled Chris stared at Serena.
"But-" he began, almost moving to join her before she held out a hand to stop him. The way she did it would have given the President pause, Chris would later reflect with a smile.
"/NO/ buts, Chris, I'm doing this. Your on your own for now, watch your back" Serena replied, then she gave him a thumbs-up as the door slid shut. Just what, he couldn't help but wonder, was she getting herself into by doing this? What was he getting /himself/ into just by doing this thing...? Wh-did he hear something? Could he /smell/ something? The stench of recent violent death, rotting flesh, awful released internal gases, fresh blood dripping still... The scratch-clang of something big, heavy and metal being half-dragged, half-carried by something that wasn't quite steady on its feet with the weight. He raised his gun, wondering whether he should or could risk exploring further down the passageway, the direction the sound was coming from...
At about that same moment in time, he heard some very strange sounds-grunts, groans and gurgles, shuffling feet perhaps? Those sounds were coming from behind him... Worse yet, could he hear skittering sounds coming from behind all of the doors except the one Serena had gone through, maybe even in the walls? As though a great many very small something's were inside and trying to get out. It was time to admit it like a man, he was so scared that he was in serious danger of humiliating himself in front of Serena, an idea which he /could not/ tolerate in even the slightest way...
His almost-forgotten radio abruptly came on, nearly giving him a heart attack. "Reaper, this is Iceman. Are you out there somewhere? Come back" came Tom's voice...
/End of Chapter Six... Well, what do you think? All Reviews welcomed/