THREE: BLITZKRIEG

24 December
1830 Central European Time / Mitteleuropäische Zeit
Münster, North Rhine Westphalia, Germany

Rebecca Chambers was sitting at one of the many wooden desks on the second floor of the city-library of Munster, perusing through web pages that popped up on the screen of her laptop. As she read through article after article, her eyes expanded to almost the size of a walnut. She could not believe what she was reading.

Every one of the articles seemed to have the same headings: all described a brutal mass murder spree in a small county in England, all of which were similar in that the victims all died of massive trauma due to gnashed wounds that led to extreme haemorrhaging.

Another outbreak? She thought, as she scanned through the pages incredulously. One headline caught her attention most:

WATER CONTAMINATION IN COUNTY OF ESSEX

Essex, England—It has been reported earlier this week that the bodies of ten denizens living in the small county of Essex, England, were found yester-day piled on top of each other in the sewage system, stopping all water flow from reaching the water treatment plants. The corpses have contaminated the waters thusly, and work to filter out the bacteria and other agents in the decomposing bodies have commenced. Citizens are still cautioned that it is best not to drink from their faucets or bathe if there are any open cuts on the body for fear of any serious infections—one reported boy was sent to the hospital in London to day for serious rashes that appeared on his body after having drunken a cup of water from the faucet. His mother told The Observer that his skin began to peel every time the boy made contact with any object that rubbed against his skin. His condition has yet to be released to the press by the doctors….

She had no doubt in her mind that the deaths of these people were the cause of Umbrella's bio-weapons on the loose once more. It seemed to her that Umbrella's branches were endless, spilling over even into the depths of England, no doubt spreading rapidly through the veins of the citizens as she read the article. But now she wondered why had Umbrella not step into action to clean up their mess? Were they going to let the virus run amuck once more, but this time in England? Were they really going to allow the virus to spread through the waters throughout all of England like that? Wiping out the entire country—God knows they would do it, too.

Whatever the reason for Umbrella's detention, Rebecca was not too worried. Perhaps it was better that Umbrella laid off their hands from their work. Everything the corporation laid its rotting hands on only made matters worst. But there had to be something done about the spread of the contamination. She would not allow thousands of more innocent lives to die at the cloaked hands of Umbrella.

Slump. Slump. Slump. Several footsteps could be heard from somewhere in the distance of the darkening library. Rebecca quickly shut her laptop, trying not to make a sound. With her hands placed tightly on top of the computer she turned her body to survey her surroundings to make sure that no one was spying on her.

She peered past the parallel bookshelves that lined the second floor, but not a shadow moved. Moving slyly, she transferred her black laptop back into its case, slipped the strap over her shoulder and walked to the railing to peer over the balcony over the first floor to see if the noise had come from there. She stood there, her back turned to the rest of the room, bent over the railing, searching for any sign of movement; but there were no other persons in the library save for the two librarians lurking around their stale, metallic desks typing furiously at their keyboards.

Slump. Slump.

Rebecca instantaneously turned around, her heart beating insanely in her chest against her ribs. She reached down to her right thigh, feeling for it that was strapped on to her leg—she and the other ex-S.T.A.R.S. had to protect themselves at all times, so they felt.

"Who's there?" she questioned softly into the dimly lit library.

Using the balustrade as her guide, Rebecca inched toward the stairs to the first level. But before making for the stairs she questioned the darkness again: "Who's there?" but no one answered, only a slump was heard again and the noise of a soft moan from seemingly everywhere.

Could they be here, too? Could it have already spread over the Channel and into Germany? No! That would be impossible. It can't possiblyspread that fast! She thought, her mind tracing the information she had learnt on the T-Virus from the Raccoon incident.

Unnnnnnnggh.

The moan was closer this time, and it grew stronger. It was coming from somewhere to her right, near the stairwell. Rebecca immediately turned her body toward the sound and drew her standard S.T.A.R.S.-issued 9mm Beretta from under her mini-skirt and aimed it into the looming blackness.

She drew several short, but deep breaths, inhaling and exhaling, whilst still pointing her Beretta into the dim-lit corridors created by the bookshelves. And then it appeared with another few slumps toward her. The outline of a man's body came into view, its broad shoulders hung low, as did its arms—one arm was up scratching its head—and it moaned an awful moan.

Kill it, she thought instinctively. Kill it before it advances any closer to you! But she did not shoot the gun.

"Ungh, shit," the thing said. "Damn it, Mathius,"

It can talk? No, then it can't be…

Finally realising that the man in the shadows was not a walking dead, Rebecca immediate withdrew her gun and place back in its holster strapped onto her thigh.

"Are you all right?" She asked the man in German, who was now bent over, almost collapsing on the floor. She ran over to help him, to make sure he was all right. "Are you all right?" she asked again, this time in English, placing a hand on the man's shoulder. He willed his head to turn up toward Rebecca.

His face was finely chiselled, his cheekbones protruded from his face, but not too much where it was grotesque, just enough to define them as being cheek bones. His nose was aquiline and sharp, and did not look bad on him at all. It sat well between his thin, almond-shaped eyes, which were grey in colour. His lips were thin and tight, glossed over with lip balm because of the harsh winter that Germany was experimenting. His amazingly handsome features caught Rebecca by surprise.

"I'm—okay," he responded in English, his hand not moving from his forehead. "My friend, you see, hit me over the head with a book—he isn't right, y'know, in the head." He stood up now, towering a whole head above Rebecca. His accent was unmistakable that he was a Briton.

How ironic, she thought, remembering the articles she had read on the incident in England just a few minutes before.

"Where's your friend?" Rebecca queried, looking around the library for another person. "I didn't know there was someone else on this floor," she finally said after a long while's silence.

The man looked down to her. "This library's pretty expansive," he said. "You never know if you're truly alone or not." He gave a short chuckle, but grunted immediately after, still in pain from his head injury.

"Well, where's your friend?"

"He could be anywhere on this floor, or the third, or the first. I don't know. He won't leave this building, though. This is the only real place he's familiar with."

"What's wrong with him? If you don't mind my asking."

"No problem," he replied, his hand still on his forehead. "Uh, he was in this car crash about a month ago, you see, and he was hurt real bad. He began to haemorrhage, uh, I mean, bleed dramatically from his head and elsewhere. He suffered a lot of brain damage, especially to his cerebrum—that's largest part in the human brain that controls the conscious and voluntary processes. And he hasn't been right since. Been real ill."

Rebecca gave a short sigh, only because he had tried to simplify his story, believing her to be just another kid in the library. Irked by this, she moved back from him, turned away and walked down the stairwell without saying a word.

Bastard.

It was already dark outside, the chill air swept through the busy streets fiercely, sending chills all over Rebecca's body. She was on her way back to her apartment from the library, her laptop case still strapped over her shoulder. As she pushed her way through crowding sea of people, her mind quickly reverted back to the articles she had read earlier about the killing spree in England. Flashes of memories scrolled instantaneously through her head. Images of blood and gore splattered its way into her head again. The rotting flesh that stalked the night and the monstrous roars of indescribable creatures lurked in the deep and dark crevices of her mind, waiting for their prey to make their move. Secret underground laboratories loomed amidst the growing forestry; and torrents of raw sewage rampaged throughout a water treatment plant somewhere deep in the pit of the Raccoon Forest. She was there again; she was in that train again and then the military training facility and then the treatment plant and then the mansion and then on the run from Umbrella operatives and finally she was in Germany. And now she knew that she had to be in England to stop Umbrella before the problem escalated to another Raccoon City situation.

She needed to get home now to share the news with the others. She needed to go after Umbrella one last time to annihilate the monster corporation that took too many lives already—this was a vendetta.

She made a sharp turn around a corner into an alleyway behind a butcher shop—taking a shortcut back to the apartment. Water leaked from pipes and heat rose from nearby gutters, creating a foul stench that she nearly vomited, but held it back. Instead, she began at a sprint down the alleyway, holding on tightly to her computer by her side but then immediately stopped when she heard someone's voice from somewhere around one of the many corners.

"S.T.A.R.S…." they said in a low, raspy voice.

Rebecca halted in her place and once again reached down for her Beretta, ready to shoot at whoever or whatever had made the noise.

"Who's there?" she asked, remembering her run-in with the man in the library. No one answered. She could hear nothing but the drippings of the water from the pipes and the steady bleats from the streets that seemed miles away now.

There were suddenly several footsteps that made its way out of the shadows of the buildings, slowly but surely lurching in Rebecca's direction. She unlatched the gun from its holster, raised it to about eyelevel and cocked it, her finger lowly pressing down on the trigger of the gun.

Her pulse was beating heavily in her ears; her body began to perspire as her hand stayed steady on the trigger of the gun.

"NO!" came a scream from behind her. She quickly spun around, her gun still in hand, and saw a man sprinting down the alley toward her, his arm outstretched.

Rebecca watched in almost fright as she watched the man run toward her, almost as if he were going to run into her, but as he neared her he began to slow down until he finally came to a halt in front of her, bent down, resting on his knees trying to catch his breath.

"Please," he wheezed. "Please don't shoot him. He's not—" he looked up suddenly. "Oh it's you," he said with a slight smirk upon his sweaty face. "You just left so suddenly I almost didn't realise,"

Rebecca cut him off, wanting to know why his friend had called out "S.T.A.R.S.", but of course she did not ask it directly. The man walked over to a wall and rested on it, then spoke softly.

"I don't understand why he left the library so suddenly. It was like…it was like he was after something. And all I could do was follow him, but then he disappeared, but I found him now. I found him with this," he reached into his pant pocket and pulled out a small device about six inches in length and almost as thin as a CD case.

The man then got back up on his two feet and walked briskly over to his friend, wrapping one arm around his neck and spoke childishly to him. "Let's go. We have to go, Mathius. Come on, this way, boy. Good."

As they walked past Rebecca, Rebecca turned away and strutted down the alleyway, back toward her apartment when she heard something plop softly onto the floor. She turned around again and saw a flashing screen on the floor. It was the man's tracking device. She looked around the alley but saw no one in sight. How'd they—

She walked over to the device and picked it up, it was still on and working properly. On the screen a red dot was displayed, moving around in what seemed to be a maze. But further observation proved that what she was looking at was in fact a map of the city. She pocketed the contraption and headed back toward the apartment, this time at a sprint.

When she finally reached the apartment complex, Rebecca burst through the entrance on the ground level and instead of waiting for an elevator to arrive on her floor she took to the stairwell and ran several flights of stairs to reach her flat on the third floor.

The flight of stairs flew past her as her body shot up them, not stopping for a single breath. Her legs were pumping harder and faster than she was used to, but she would not allow herself to stop. The others needed to know about Umbrella's whereabouts immediately.

"Chris! Jill! Barry!" she cried out when she reached her flat, storming through the door and down the hall into the living quarters of the apartment. Rebecca then took her laptop from her side and placed it onto the coffee table centred in the room, unzipped the case and turned on her notebook and showed the others the hundreds of articles pertaining to "accident" in England.

Chris read over the articles time after time, hardly believing what he was reading. He turned away for a second, turning his attention toward Jill who looked up at him as well, and in turn they both looked toward Barry's direction who's expression was just as incredulous as theirs.

"How'd you find this?" one of them asked Rebecca. Rebecca kept her eye on her computer screen, and then finally answered.

"A correspondent of mine in America sent me one article, and then I just followed the links that led to the other ones."

"Correspondent?" Chris asked, almost worried that Rebecca was keeping in contact with someone whom he did not know about.

Rebecca got up and walked away from the group and into the dining room. "That doesn't matter right now. What does matter is that we head out to that place in England and stop Umbrella right now."

Chris stood up. "Rebecca, we can't just rush in there unprepared. We need weapons and shit. We can't take on an entire army of Umbrella bastards with just a handgun."

That never stopped us before, Rebecca thought, feeling for her handgun on her side.

"And we can't just go out and buy the guns and stuff, we hardly have any money as it is. We could barely afford this place!" Chris said, extending his arms as if he were able to grab a hold of the apartment complex in his arms. The apartment was not shabby, but not exactly beautiful either. The ceiling was vaulted and lamps hung low from the ceiling. A metal ladder was used to get up to the loft—the entire apartment had an industrial feel, almost retrofitted.

Rebecca turned back toward the others, a determined visage contorted in place of the usual cheerful and youthful vibrancy that was Rebecca Chambers. "I'll go in with whatever artillery I have. I am not letting Umbrella claim thousands of more lives just for game. I'm going." She stormed over to the metal ladder, climbed them and began packing 9x19 mm parabellum ammunition into a side pack, strapped that onto her waist, then grabbed a satchel and threw her medical kit in it along with a few herb mixes she concocted whilst learning about old Native American medicine in her bio-chemistry class when she was still in school.

"Rebecca!" Jill called up to her. "Rebecca, you're not going in alone."

"What?" Rebecca called back down, not hearing what Jill had said through all her rummaging for supplies. "What did you say?"

Jill's head poked up from the edge of the loft, she then lifted her body onto the landing and stood on the edge, looking compassionately at Rebecca with a sisterly stare. She repeated: "You're not going in alone. You're right; Umbrella needs to be stopped before this situation gets out of hand. The virus might already be spreading through the bodies of the victims. Before we know it, we could have another Raccoon City on our hands.

Jill walked over to Rebecca and wrapped her arms around Rebecca. "We'll make it a blitzkrieg—they won't even know what hit them." Jill said, patting Rebecca on the back.

"This is gonna be one helluva Christmas!" Barry called from below.