Chapter 2
The trees grew dense, heavy with pine needles that were able to askew the bits of sunlight that bushed over the canopy. A bristling breeze sweeps through among the trees, cooling down the already calm area even more.
The group used their eyes carefully, Hunk had the front, Riot had the left side, Iron Mask glazed the right side and Ivy held the back, forming a barrier from any coming attacks. They had to be carefully, because 'The Subject' wasn't the only thing they had to fear.
"Wait stop." It comes out low and muffled from Hunk's mouth.
Their eyes roll against the ground of the path in front of them. Under some over hanging bushes, several bodies laid on the ground.
"More fucking zombies, just great." Riot strut through his mouth.
"No, there already dead, which means that something else has already been through here." Hunk rattles the words loose from his thoughts.
"Do you think it's our, 'objective'? Ivy questioned, but she could tell that Hunk already knew the answer.
"No, they're too clean of kills. From what White says, this "Subject" is suppose to be very brutal in its attacks."
Hunk comes down to his knee, bending over the one of the bodies of a collapsed zombie. With limp fingers, he pushes its face off the ground, spilling a fountains worth of blood on to the dirt, the whole left side of its face clumped into the other side, flesh, bone and sinew swamped into a thick mush.
"Looks like it has been…punched." Ivy stammers out.
"Yeah, but whatever did it had to have some incredible power behind it. It's just not normal for a regular human to be able cave in a face like this, nearly imploding its whole head. There's another BOW out there that White didn't tell us about." He speaks with concern, but its more of the fact that he's not surprised by what is happening.
"The Tyrant?" Ivy pastes in the air for Hunk to hear.
"I don't think so. A Tyrant would have done a lot more damage to it. But from the list of supposed BOWs that were being experimented on in the Arkalay Lab and Training Facility, none of them could be able to do what was done here. " Hunk mind wonders on.
"What about this one, its neck has been broken with such power that its head is facing the wrong way." Riot uttered as he taps the twisted head of the zombie with his foot, its lower jaw lays loosely crooked.
"Definitely not the Tyrant, since it doesn't have to capabilities of snapping a neck, as do any of the other experiments." Ivy retracted her earlier statement.
"There's something else in this forest, that I don't even think White knows about, they would be very pleased if we bring it." Hunk smiles under his mask, but all of them could feel it, they just knew that Mr. Death was always looking for something else to challenge him.
A waft followed up the Cliffside of the mountain, the gust coming from underneath, blowing through the standing being's heavy boots. The coolness of the wind not brining any relief the being's flesh, the right side of its face, chest, arm and stomach, scorched with clusters of chucky charred flesh that bubbled over itself, peeking from underneath red tender skin crept. The owner of the charred and flaky flesh gave a look over the domain of the Raccoon forest, a vista that it knew too well from childhood to present.
It gives one finally look, before its muscles let it waft in the falling air, plummeting to the cresting trees below. Once heavy and thick branches become twigs and flying splinters as the rushing mass carves through them. The plated ground rumbles and crumples under the stress of downing weight as a halo of dust and dirt circles around the impact.
"Magnificent!" The words are of excitement and pride.
The individual comes to his feet from his kneeling form; he stands against the bending trees. His mouth gurgles with a rush of coming blood, sending him back down to the ground to his knees.
"It's too soon, my body hasn't been giving enough time to take in the virus to its fullest potential, but I can feel it through my veins, already working. It sure makes a dead man feel alive again." He spoke under his breath, as he heaved for oxygen.
"The first thing to do is get out of this forest and then after that my plan goes into action." He comes to his feet again, his body busy with laughter that bounded through the forest.
The scope of trees broke into a broad clearing, with a silvery river running through the middle of it. They stood by the peddling creek and gave into the water.
"Ok, take a break for second and get some water." Hunk rasped out as he slips his mask away from his mouth as he pulls in his handful of water.
The rest of them join him, expect for Iron Mask, who stands behind them, surveying the bank.
"Shit, I forgot that he never takes over that damn mask. " Riot haunts about Iron Mask's weird guise.
Iron Mask doesn't even give a look towards him; he just continues his gape over the landscape. His frame was serious, just like his face. He was a solider and only a solider and that was only he was. If it weren't for Umbrella, he wouldn't have any purpose. They gave him reason in life and the ability to hide himself away from everyone, that's all he wanted, to be able to cover his identity from nosy eyes.
A swelling and heated bellow blusters from the jaws of a scuttling Grizzly bear that has wondered up behind them. You can just feel the details, patches of its fur scalped from its body, one of its eyes only oozing a mass of inners and blood down its cheek, the signs of the T-Virus. It spewing saliva squirting across Iron Mask's back, the stale heat of its breath drying against it as well.
Fear and dread didn't even enter Iron Mask's body; no emotion could ever touch him, no matter how close to it he was. He spins on his clunky boots, rotating on the random grave on the ground. The Shotgun blares with a burst of showering pellets that scraped against the bear's left shoulder. The blowing chucks of flesh and fur jerked away from the bear as it charged. The air swatted through its opposing claws as it colossal paw palms into Iron Mask's brawny chest, his ribs scattering into thousands of jagged splinters on impact.
The bear carried its paw to the ground, Iron Mask attached to it. Even through his grief and pain, Iron Mask lugs the shotgun up, the barrel resting under the hanging fat of the bear's neck. The gun shattered with the scattering shot, doing nothing more than strip more of the rotten flesh away. The bear craned its rotating neck, before its jaws swooped on to Iron Mask's neck. As a minor sum of pressure is applied, Iron Mask's neck is snapped.
The bear's muscle wrapped shoulders fountains with globs of waxy blood as intruding 9mm rounds disperse against them. Its body becomes heavy with lead as the remaining members empty out the clip fed rounds. The crackle of snapping fire ceased as time was given for them to reload another waiting clip in to their empty guns. The bear's wobbly jaws fasten around Iron Mask's neck, and beings to drag the corpse away from the clattering noise.
Ivy's finger relaxes from their sweaty, tense grip of the handle of the drained gun. Those same fingers found a new confront in the feel of her Vp70 handgun. Ivy's legs give chase, spreading over the landscape like a springing runner. Her image manifested in the bear's gaping eye, before the barrel splattered through it. A single round popped, no blood, but the bear's skull glowed with the flaming shot.
His eyesight shaded in the darkness and enraged, the bear harvested Iron Mask's body in its jaws and scuttled away back into the forest.
Their heads lowered, their teammate being carried away and not one of them knew what he looked like. He was just another body now.
The man that once existed, the man that died during the Arkalay Mountain labs, lumbered through the forest. His flesh smoldered and charred by the explosion of the laboratory. His past was behind him, as well as the name, Albert Wesker.
The trees barked and snarled lowly at him. Thirsting teeth howled from the shadow of the wood as four skinny, but bountiful legs leap against the wind. It's muzzle snapped, as its canine form came closer. It once was a normal dog, but the T-virus had made it even more of a killer.
Wesker swiftly backhands the bounding dog, still standing tranquil as the dog's skull is fractured enough that it starts to seep through its broken wounds. The flaccid body whips through the air before hurtles into the trunk of a tree, splattering the once whole body into a wad of loose organs and flesh.
"I don't see what Umbrella saw in these pathetic creatures, trying to rationalize them as more than just test subjects, no wonder this company is going to fail." His words are bitter and venomous.
Another of the zombified dogs knotted its teeth in antagonism. Its eyes filmed with red, almost a burning. It skips over the ground and vaults of the smooth flesh of Wesker's throat. Wesker's loose fingers wrap onto the creature's upper jaw, with a slight pull, the wet and frail tissue strips from the rest of the body, like a peeling band-aid, letting the top of the monster's skull ascend away from the mass of its body.
The last one edges its body, its muscles harvesting for the lunge, its legs scuttle. Wesker does the same. The two appear as two charging bulls, each bearing their horns. Wesker snags the Cerberus around the throat and crushes it against the bark of a nearby tree. The whimpering dog squirms under Wesker's grip, a rope of bundled nerves hanging loose from its eye socket, tipping the end, its white marble eye. Wesker presses his weight; the creature's head crumbles in his hand.
Wesker's heart beat no sound as he left his ruin.
"It's this forest, we have no sight on could be walking up on us. We have to hurry up before all of us are killed." Riot jawed his complaints, his eye shifting unevenly under the infrared lenses of the Gas Mask.
"Be calm, the objective can't be that far from us, those screams that we heard earlier that to come from 'The Subject." Ivy heaved from her mouth.
Hunk didn't join in their rambling; he was too concerned about lied a head. Leaves and tree limps were singed, a sign of an explosion, they were getting close.
The ground scuttled with racing legs and an acute shrill, sharp and thin. Ivy and Riot twist around in hast and surprise, readying for whatever their ears just picked up. But only the leaves blew across the path,
"I know that sound…. Hunters." It seeps from his mouth as he turns around towards Ivy and Riot, but his eyes are not on them, but on the trees.
The branches sagged with bouncing weight, the leaves moved with green. Hunk's sub-machine gun crackles with tattering bullets. The leaves dry with dipping crimson, as a swollen dark olive body pitches from the hanging branches. It was bundle of thicken muscles, its upper body shaped like that of a gorillas, its legs taut and lean, each hand was placed with four honed, ivory claws. The oddity of altered nature's head was square, a v-shaped brow shading over its red diamond eyes, and a wide slit of a mouth, mounted with firmly placed rows of stripping teeth.
Another squeal coils off the trees, like an anger crying pig. The grove of trees wish with blurs of flickering red and an after shadow of green. Scattered leaves halo in the air as the second Hunter burst through the over laying branches. Its fingers lace with eagerness and attitude as they aim for the slender neck of Ivy.
Ivy's body bundles into itself, as he ducks the greasing claws that glide through the vacant air. As the Hunter stands disorientated by its flesh-less claws, Ivy's body takes the waiting time and twists the necessary muscles to circle out a roundhouse kick to the creature's broad jaw. The Hunter tilts to the ground, its face scraping in the dirt and rocks that scored the path. Ivy positioned her foot in-between the creature's shoulder blades. In her clasping fingers, her VP-70 held tight. The Hunter fidgets under Ivy's simple weight.
"Freak." It's said simply; no anger or emotion added to it, the single round that tunnels through the Hunter's head does all the talking.
"Get over here right now." Riot shouted over the gunshot as it faded out through the area.
Hunk and Ivy came alongside him, stopping next to the edge of a huge basin; the bottom of it glittered with dying cinders. The ground had been molded by pushing fire that dug deep through the layers of the terrain. Along the sides, lumbering pieces of ratty wood blacken to behind recognition laid. The air hung obese with smoke and fluttering embers.
"It's where the mansion once was. Our objective can't be too far from here." Hunk turned away from the sight and return back into the shadowy forest.
