Jill hated the idea of splitting up but had no choice. They had to scope out the facility in detail and the only way to do it was to, as Billy so joyfully put it, "Split up, and look for clues, gang!" She took a stairwell that lead deeper into the facility and ended up on what she deemed to be the fifth floor. Not much could be seen of it, other than the lights above her that glowed an eerie shade of blue. The walls were lined with thick pipes and cables. Apparently, this corridor leads to the facility's power supply.
"Well, Jill, if worse comes to worse, maybe you'll blend in and nobody will see you," Jill says to herself, in a cheerful tone that she hadn't used since high school. Her voice sinks low and adds, "Yeah, and I get out of this without dealing with something completely unnatural."
As if on cue, some thing dropped from the ceiling, behind Jill. Heavy breathing reverberated around the hallway. Jill draws the Beretta and turns around slowly. Bathed in the eerie blue of the lights, Jill saw something she thought couldn't be humanly possible: A creature with serrated spikes sticking out of its body that still seemed to have life to it. Jill didn't know what to think of it, but that didn't stop her before.
"Eat this, shithead!" Jill shouts.
The Beretta fires, blasting the creature in the head. The creature staggers back, headless. Its body turns towards its assailant. To Jill's horror, another head sprouts out of its stump of a neck. Jill gulps and brings up the riot shotgun. She fires, the explosion of power rips through the thing's body. It stumbles back, but the blown apart tissue seems to grow back.
"Well, this is an exercise in futility," Jill deadpans. "How the hell do you kill this thing?"
Frustrated, Jill draws the Magnum, takes aim, and fires. The powerful bullet slams through the creature. It seems to suffer from a convulsion and it suddenly explodes. A more curious person would have wanted to know why the thing suddenly regenerated destroyed tissue and imploded when blasted in a random spot, but Jill could only come up with:
"Whoa."
Leon decided to take the fourth floor. His handgun made a sweeping motion as he traversed the floor. Limited lighting created an eerie sensation in the back of Leon's mind. He wasn't afraid of the dark, but he preferred well-lit areas to better see the enemy. The only thing he found on this level were disheveled desks and discarded papers. From what he could find out about this floor was that it was an office area. He found the area to resemble the offices in the RPD station, except the desks had different name plates. He happened upon a desk that belonged to a Sgt. Hank Kendo.
"All right, Billy, let's see what you got in here," Leon utters to desk.
He sits down in the chair and opens up the drawers. He found several papers detailing the life of the non-existent Sgt. Hank Kendo. Everything from where he supposedly went to high school and who his possible parents were.
"Jeez, Chris, how thorough are you?" Leon says, as if Chris Redfield was right next to him. "If I ever have to go undercover, he's the go to guy, no question about it." Leon shuffles the papers around and comes across a few opened envelopes. "What do we have here?" He takes a letter out of one of the envelopes and looks it over before reading it aloud:
"Dear Billy,
How have you been? Since last we saw each other, I found the remains of my team and the remains of Alpha Team. We eventually escaped the mansion and it's an experience I'm not looking forward to repeating anytime soon. You're gonna hate me for this but when I got to the house, I panicked and lost most of the weapons we found on the train and the facility. Don't be too mad. I'm still alive and hopefully we'll see each other again. You're dog tags are still around my neck, and some day you'll get 'em back.
-Rebecca."
"The letter of a girl in love with her knight in shining armor," Leon says dryly. "Some guys get all the luck."
He puts the letter and the papers back in the drawer. He stood up and stretched out his legs. Leon groans, having strained a muscle in his chest. A couple years ago, a sharp talon pierced through him between his right peck and shoulder.
A creaking sound immediately grabbed Leon's attention. He readied his gun and skulked through the office area. Suddenly, he felt a sharp pain in the back of his head and blacked out.
A figure in black stood over the fallen government agent. His once ice blue eyes concealed by a pair of thick, black shades. His pale face was illuminated eerily in the fluorescent lights and his slicked-back, blonde hair seemed to glow.
"So, this is the infamous Leon Scott Kennedy," the figure says. With the toe of his thick boot, he flips Leon onto his back, and picks him up by the neck. His shades lock onto Leon's closed eyes. "Kind of looks like that Burnside guy Redfield's sister ran into. What's so special about you, Mr. Kennedy?"
He suddenly drops Leon to his knees and pushes him lightly onto the floor. The figure in black had better things to do than wonder about the government's hiring policy. He walks to the stairwell, his eyes glow a strange red from behind the thick shades. Albert Wesker was sent here for a reason and he intend to stick to his mission.
Billy decided to stake out the monitor room so he could keep tabs on Jill and Leon, and because he's the only one in the group who knew how to get past most of the locks in the facility. He sat at a computer terminal, watching Jill skulk around the facility's mini-nuclear power plant. Billy's heart rate increased slightly, hoping that nothing else was in the room that would cause the ex-S.T.A.R.S. member to unload a few shells from that riot gun or Magnum. One stray shot, and that'd be all she wrote.
Jill just examined the power regulations and various computer screens before moving on. Billy let out a sigh of relief. He didn't know how good a shot she was, but if she was on Chris' team, she had to have a pretty steady arm. He diverts his attention to another image. He wasn't sure why, but he lost track of Leon. The static surrounding the fourth floor cameras suddenly dissipated.
"We're stuck underground and he takes a nap?" Billy asks the screen in front of him.
Leon visibly groans and stands up. He rubs the back of his head and hunches over. That was all Billy needed to know: someone came up from behind him and knocked him out. Having been in a similar situation with the butt of a standard-issue rapid-assault rifle out in Africa, Billy sympathized a bit with Leon. He wasn't entirely sure what to think of him yet but any guy who saved the sister of one of his best friends couldn't be all bad.
A shuffling noise of sorts brought Billy out of his daydream. As far as he knew, no one else was on this floor except him and whatever survivors Jill thought were here. Apparently her mentality to save lives in a desperate, hopeless situation didn't fade away, even after being trapped in a house infested with the dead. Needing the distraction anyway, Billy grabbed his rifle and slowly headed toward the shuffling noise. It lead him to a wall, but there were no stairs of elevators near it. In fact, the only entrance was on the other side of the room.
Billy lightly taps the wall, hoping not to disturb whatever is on the other side. After a few minutes of waiting, Billy knocked a little harder.
"Hollow?" he says, the confusion evident in his voice.
He runs his hands against the wall, until he comes to rest it on a small indent just below his waist level. He gives it a quick touch and a small section of the wall opens up. Billy looks around his new surroundings and sees a stairwell and limited lighting.
"When'd they put this in?" Billy asks himself. "Well, you're one to be asking after they blindfolded you, drove you through the desert, and took you on an alternate route to this place. My shrink's gonna have a field day with this when everything is said and done…and I'm talking to myself again."
Billy activates his rifle's laser sight and descends down the stairs. It didn't go very far, which Billy somewhat relieved about. On the last step, he came to a stone floor lined with pillars from the ceiling to the ground. He scopes the area out, not finding too much wrong with this picture, except for the cell-like structure imbedded into the left wall. Billy gave it a quick once-over, finding the bars to be ripped out by whatever was held in place.
Billy uneasily backed away from the cell, sweat pouring down his face. He didn't scare too easily these days, but something able to rip through a steel cage certainly got his adrenaline pumping. Then he heard the shuffling noise again. He couldn't see anything else in the small room, until he looked up. He saw a man hanging from the ceiling, somehow. Billy took a few steps back, his boots making a loud echo in the confined space.
The man on the ceiling released his grip on the ceiling and fell to the floor. Four steel blades seemed to pop out of the man's forearms. Billy jumped out of the way before the blade-wielding maniac got too close. The man-thing's claws slammed into the concrete floor. He struggled to get it out, and roared inhumanly in doing so. Billy staggered back and raised the rifle.
"Vaya con Dios," Billy mutters and fires at the man-thing's chest.
The blast from the rifle wretches the man from the floor, freeing his arm weapon. That's when Billy got a good look at him. His face was covered in a white mask that has seen better days, with a snake emblem etched into it. A similar snake was tattooed on the man-thing's chest, along with a scar from the top of his shoulder to his abs.
The man-thing seemed to shake the blast off and caused his primary weapon to retract into his arm. Billy was puzzled why it didn't decide to run him through with those claws of his. Ever one to learn more about his enemies, Billy unsheathed his knife and threw it in the thing's general direction. It reacted to the noise the knife made when it impacted the ground. The creature than slashed furiously at the knife's general area.
Billy grinned evilly. "He's blind, eh? This'll be fun."
He raises the rifle and aims for the thing's back. Not the most honorable thing, but Billy figured that honor could take a back seat right now. Billy fires at the clawed-thing, the rifle's bullet burrowing into its back. The creature screams in pain and flails wildly. Not waiting for an invitation, Billy brings up the TMP and fires its entire fifty-round clip into the creature's back. The clawed thing collapses to the floor, and a murky black fluid seems to spew out of the opened wound.
Billy ejects the TMP clip and slams another one into it before slinging it over his shoulder. He kicks the rifle into semi-auto mode and approaches the fallen creature. Small tentacles sprout of the creature's back. Not taking any chances, Billy grabs his knife of the ground and digs the tentacle thing out of its host. He examines it, not sure what it is.
"What the hell is going on here?"