With his chest now bare, Kain could see the slight, thin shadows of discolouration on his skin that could only have been surgical scars left unhealed by his current state of weakness. Before, he had been too busy with William to notice the barely visible scratches spanning from his throat to his abdomen, but they were still there, possibly too faint for the poor resolution of the human eye to pick up, but they stood out to him like a thorn in his mind. To think the sadistic scientists had been tinkering with his insides while he lay unconscious and unable to defend himself… If he saw Birkin again, they would have to have words.
But now that he thought of it, he hadn't seen Birkins' soul in quite some time. Had he been in more of a benevolent mood (which was a joke, seeing as he never was in a benevolent mood) he may have wondered what had become of the mad scientists soul, but if it meant the crazy scientist would not make jest of Kains' hardships, then he would be quite happy to disregard him and pay more attention to what was happening in the now.
He had left the length of red material he had strapped to his body intentionally for Claire and Sherry to find and be told that he had gone on ahead to clear their path for them. Passing through a fairly uneventful room consisting of a hi-tech computerised sewage disposals system and a classical typewriter next to a large storage chest, an unmistakable, sweet scent filler the air around the small, red platform-elevator at the far end of the room: It was the musk of blood, fresh, still-warm blood oozing no doubt from hot, fresh, stinging wounds. It was fresh, yet dark, tainted by another strange and unmistakable smell… Gunpowder...
Taking the elevator down into the 'T' shaped narrow, dingy metallic hallway (Kain being at one of the two arms of the 'T'), he saw a crumpled heap of a man sitting directly ahead of him where the alleyway junctioned with a path to another elevator at the end opposite Kain, and the exit to the area. He shook his head to himself, recognising the figure as the young and naïve RPD rookie officer Leon Kennedy. His drooping head still wore the blemish upon his right cheek that Kain had delivered, but that was not where the odour was coming from. The blue clothing over his chest was tattered, matted in with blood, fresh and stale all fanning haphazardly from a hole around his right armpit. There, the blood and ragged flesh was so thick it appeared almost black, the hue of the blood brightening with the thin channels of freshly weeping fluid.
Before Kain even approached the boy, he could tell he was not dead, simply unconscious and had probably been drifting in and out of consciousness ever since the wound was inflicted upon his body but as he drew near, the boy raised up his head weakly to see what was coming.
"Kain…" He managed to murmur out weakly and huskily, his watery blue eyes still burning at the vampire with all the ferocity they had before. "Where's Ada?"
"I do not believe she is currently of your concern." Kain commented, finding it foolish that the young fledgling RPD officer cared more for the safety of the spy (though Kain had still refrained from telling him this) than his own life. The vampire grimaced (as he always seems to do) down at the young human before him on the cold, metal floor and to his curiosity, felt something more than blood lust stir in his soul…
"Please," He begged weakly one more time. "You have to find her. A woman with blonde hair started shooting at Ada… I got between them but if I hadn't then Ada would be"-
-"You mean to say you took the blow of a weapon not intended for you? And on purpose? Such selflessness will do a fool like you no good, Leon Kennedy!"
Leon dug into the hole on his right side with one finger bloodied in dry, dark crust and hissed in pain. He probed around, face creased in distress, until his finger re-emerged and the small metal 'ting' of a blood soaked bullet hit the floor.
To Kains' amazement, Leon then tried to get up. The vampire braced the poor stumbling human, clutching both of his uniform clad shoulders as he pushed himself from the wall only to fall into the arms of the vampire. Leons' body was hot all over, much from the shock of the wound as the shock of the situation on this night, but Kain was as cold as ice. Leon held his exhausted position for a few moments, head rested against the vampires shoulder as his cool body felt as if it were sucking the clammy heat from every sweat clogged pore. Leon wasn't sure he could go on much longer like this. Every step made the hazy world swirl in confusion around him.
Kain didn't know why he was putting up with it, but he was. The young, battered cop had fallen against him and hadn't had the energy to get up again. Kain was suffocated by the stinks of leaking blood and thick a suffocating cloud of human sweat that threatened to stay on him long after the officers' departure.
Kain cast his mind back to the last moments of his life as a human. He had been assassinated by a gang of hired brigands, you see, and had not simply fallen onto the blade, but had put up a considerable fight for his life. As the battle drew on, the amount of flesh the unskilled thugs had cleaved through his armour grew, despite his elite training as a nobleman, and he found it increasingly harder to even see straight. The killing blow was delivered to Kains' chest – he still bore the scar even now – and the particular brigand had struck when his disorientation was at its peak. Leon was now suffering a similar disorientation. Kain now new that the intense mental haze that had contributed to his death had been induced by his blood loss, and blood loss tended to dehydrate a human. Passing through the sewage control room before he had used the elevator, Kain recalled seeing a half-empty bottle of what appeared to be water by a computer desk filled with charts and notes. The only reason Kain had acknowledged it was because it was half empty, possibly indicating the drinker had died before he had a chance to go back to his desk and finish it. If Leon took this water, then possibly he would have enough mental stamina left in him to go on. Physically, Kain wasn't sure. He had seen humans die of lesser wounds, though Leon had proved with the probing of his fingers that the bullet had hit nothing major.
Kain helped him back to the sewage control room where Leon now sat clutching the bottle with his good hand. The water seemed to affect him much more quickly than he was expecting and was already getting his mental strength back, though he clearly wore a troubled expression upon his face. Kain believed he must have been still worrying about Ada, who had obviously abandoned the young cop but he cared for her safety nonetheless. Kain was going in that direction…. so he may as well… -
-"You wait here." Kain said ever coolly to the troubled cop, now knowing to fully ignore the part of him that begged for cruelty and malice. "I plan on travelling this route anyway and I shall find her upon it if she is still alive."
"Thank you..." Leon murmured feebly, unsure as to whether he should appreciate his assistance or scold his coldness but the cloud of fear, doubt and hesitation greatly stifled any emotion he was expressing at all. He played with the bottle nervously, tapping on the light blue lid with a finger, the skin of it dirtied in tiny dried veins of his own blood, much like the rest of exposed skin on his body. He looked as if he had fought a war and barely survived, which wasn't that far from the truth. Claire and Sherry would come this way if they followed him down, so Kain didn't worry about him much.
What did trouble him was the fact that the woman who injured Leon was attacking Ada, the spy no doubt sent to recover the G-virus, and was blonde. Wasn't Williams' neurotic wife blonde? Could it be so simple as a coincidence? Kain had emerged from the laboratory beneath the city into a sewer system – was it possible that she could be his wife?
Leaving the anxious Leon Kennedy in the relatively safe control room, Kain descended back into the 'T' corridor still stained on one wall with Leons' blood loss. The area beyond the 'T' corridor proved to be a bit more problematic than he expected.
The tainted, slimy green stoned hallways of the sewage system were sunken in compared with the platform he was on upon entering the room, but the unmistakable sloshing of water could be heard even before he saw it for himself. The whole entire winding passageways of this area was waterlogged with about a foot of dark water with a taint of green shimmering like dark velvet, cruelly reverberating about the corridor as if it had something to keep it moving... Kain gritted his sharp teeth and climbed in, hoping his hard golden hued sturdy metallic boots would prove themselves to be as water resilient as their material would suggest.
The water offered little resilience to a powerful vampire like him, but he still took his care in order to avoid splashing. Partaking of the blood fountains of Nosgoth promised him immunity to the rain but he recalled no mentioning of splashes. He found himself unable to take his eyes from the movements of the water, lapping at his boots like hungry, heavy dark flames. He found the whole procedure very uncomfortable and unsettling. He would not claim to have been frightened, but some negative aspect of his vampiric nature had just as much of a psychological effect on him as his positive aspects. His natural blood lust tainted his mental perception of carnage to find unspeakable butchery enrousing his appetite, but in this case, his physical vulnerability to water gave him the mental vulnerability of a slight phobia. -
-There was an unexpected thumping sound originating from nowhere, which filled his ears, like padded hammers on a padded surface. He didn't want to move quickly in the sewage water for fear of splashing or slipping and falling into the acidic touch of the blackish fire. He didn't get much time to spin around, however, for the source of the thumping landed right in front of him.
He instantly recognised the large hairy body of a giant spider between the size of a dog and the size of cattle. It was simply a giant tarantula less than eight feet in front of him. He'd expect this kind of thing from Nosgoth but had expected the scientists of Raccoon city to have a little more imagination… -
- Until the impossibly giant animal reared up its fangs and bushy front legs, launching close to the amount of a bucketful of hostile liquid poison at him. The animal had attacked on reflex rather than intelligence and the poison fell sort of him by only a foot. If he knew the scientists that brought about the birth of such a naturally impossible creature (at least by this scientific worlds' standards), then the toxins that were meant for him had some terrible parasailing consequence on the nervous system and their effects were possibly instantaneous.
He didn't allow himself to think about the consequences of his actions. Kain jumped on top of its large lump of a hairy body and pinned it to the submerged floor, the extra weight on its body breaking every one of its eight legs. Stomping unemotionally, under his boot he crushed its' head section, and finally it was put to death. –
- But he heard yet more thumps closing in on his position. This time he had the chance to see them skitter across the ceiling, and he sighed in agitation. Couldn't Ada have put these to death on her way through here?
Those they were large and intimidating, they lacked power and could only travel quickly in perfectly straight lines and so posed little threat to the vampire, even in his weakened state. Travelling through a small gate at the end of the corridor, Kain could see that there was a curious waterfall at the end of this waterlogged hallway… There seemed to be a door beyond it and a strange device upon the wall needing two large discs to operate. Kain snarled as he became aware that the function of the device was a puzzle lock. Had he been a human, he could pass through the waterfall without incident but he was not. This meant that it was possible Ada could have travelled through this waterfall and the door on the other side and he would be unable to follow her.
The puzzle lock was on the wall next to the waterfall, and opposite that lock was another double door on a raised platform above the waterlev-
- Something knocked against Kains' boot from below the water level.
He jumped back with the yell of surprise, and then snarled loudly like an enraged animal at his own cowardice. The prescience of water had made him jumpier than he originally thought, as what had knocked against his boot was a corpse, and a non-zombie corpse at that. –
- Kain was sure that he recognised the garb of the human shaped body floating face up next to him in the water. It was wearing full-bodied black S.W.A.T style uniform, like the assassins that had shot at and died by the hand of William Birkin. If the bodies were here, then that must have meant this was the very corridor Kain had been in literally within an hour of his awakening at the heart of Raccoons secret laboratory! The flood of water had changed the area sufficiently enough for Kain to not have recognised it, but looking it over, Kain saw bullet holes upon the walls and an empty case floating a short distance from him. It was in that case that the G and T-viruses had been kept, and though the case was without any thought or feeling, Kain swore he could feel a thick, black threatening evil aura emanating from it.
Kain barely took his eyes from that fateful case as he exited through those double doors. An overwhelming sense of vertigo had befallen him that he could not shake off until he had moved beyond his vision of it.
The next room was quite different from the waterlogged corridors. It was very large in comparison to the narrowness of the alleys. It was predominantly tall, as the entire chamber seemed to act as a bridge section over a large, deep and empty pool of still water at the very bottom. The bridge, which was currently at the bottom for Kain to cross, must have been moveable somehow, as the platforms several meters above him seems to be a similar distance apart. It was just as well the bridge was down; Kain didn't think he could jump that far in his current state.
After passing through that dark, echoing chamber, Kain passed into a cramp narrow passageway that felt as if it went on forever. It was reasonably well lit in comparison to the rest of the sewage disposal areas, but the dirty completion of the walls made it appear darker and danker than it actually was. But upon coming to the end of the passageway – another large pool, this one lined with piles of garbage bags, discarded mattresses and broken washing machines – Kain recognised that someone was lying face down on the heap of waste on the right side of the room.
"Sherry!" He yelled over, the words seemingly a reflex action to him.-
- But his cries caused something else instead to stir in the waters of the sediment pool…-
- Something huge and green with scales burst from the waters with an almighty roar, and at the exact same moment, a gloved hand grabbed him form behind and yanked him over, barely avoiding the jaws of the beast snapping shut on where he had been merely moments before. He was on the floor now, meters from the giant bellowing Crocodile (or Alligator, but lets not get bogged down with technicalities just yet…) and from its breath wafted the hot stench of rotting meat.
The one who had saved him stood next to him now, firing the weapon they held trained in both gloved hands. It was Leon. He had followed him despite his condition.
"You fool – you were supposed to stay behind!"
"It's a good things for you that I didn't." Commented Leon, not looking away from his firing at the creature. It was hopeless, though. The bullets seemed to bounce from it hard scales and ricochet dangerously around the narrow tunnel. The cop finally lowered his weapon. "Man, this is hopeless…" But from a slow spreading smirk across his haggard features, Kain could tell he had an idea brewing…
The cop turned tail and raced down the corridor away from the beast, closely pursued by a mildly irate Kain. Though he could detect an ever-present smouldering fear in the young man, it wasn't to blame for his decision to flee. As Kain rounded a corner that the boy had just disappeared behind, he was greeted by a heavy gas canister clunking to the ground inches from his steel boots.
"Have you seen 'Jaws'?" He asked with a smile flickering across his serious expressions but he didn't feel the smirk inside – he had only done it to put some kind of ease into the heart perpetually angry vampire. This was one of the traits about Leon that Kain felt was a major downfall for him in this situation: He was much too kind to the others around him for his own good. Kain could quite easily tell that despite the tattered uniform he wore exceptionally well, he most likely hadn't served a day in his life with the R.P.D as doing so would have soon crushed that naïve, hopeful spirit of his.
"I can't say that I have…" Kain finally replied. He should really learn not to ponder such things during the heat of combat…
After Kain had moved from the path of the canister, the youthful police officer gave the heavy steel weight a solid kick of his boot, and to some wonderful twists of fortune, the corridor narrowly sloped in the correct direction, causing the canister to roll, picking up gradual speed towards the source of the snarling, bellowing rage at the end. It rounded the corner to greet them just as the canister reached the far end, and the monster pressed its long snout against one side of it, preparing to shove it from it path-
- Leon fired, the first bullet going wide and pinging from the floor, but the second bullet was an absolute bulls eye. The canister exploded, and boy, how it exploded! In a less than s split second the end of the passageway had transformed from a head of a giant Crocodile peering around the corner to push a large cylinder aside, to a cloud of red and grey smoke shaking the very earth beneath their feet and booming ferocious sound into their exposed ears. A second later, they were drenched with bits of blood and gore from the distorted animal like a thin sewing cloche being thrown over them. Kain was disgusted. It was not the blood, (obviously, seeing as in his youth one of his favourite spells was 'Blood Shower') but the odour of the blood that alarmed him the most. It was tainted with the same zombie-making disease that had befallen the humans to an extend that Kain momentarily flew into a panic over whether it could be transmitted into him through this exposure. Leon did not feel the same, however. Turning to the bloodied and bleeding officer, Kain was astounded into being stifled at the sight of the giddy, dazed grin on his face. The boy was admiring the brutally decapitated monster with a childish, innocent glee that he had never seen before even in the eyes of a vampire.
"Gotcha, you dumb shit…" And he grinned wide, exposing his teeth.
Kain progressed down the corridor. "You take a pleasure in killing that reminds me of myself in my youth."
Leons' grin vanished so abruptly it appeared almost comical. "I'm not like you." He half-spat, his natural good nature holding him back. It was astounding to Kain that despite the claw mark upon his cheek from earlier, the young officer had no more of a grudge against him that Claire seemingly had.
"True, you may not be like me now…" Kain continued, as they reached the conclusion of the passageway once more and found that an emergency lock had closed the door to the sediment pool when the Crocodile burst in. The lock was easily released with a control panel adjacent to it luckily. Had Leon really fled like Kain thought he would, he would find the doorway at the opposite end in a similar condition… He would have been trapped. Come to think of it, THEY would have both been trapped! Kain hadn't even noticed the canister so he wouldn't have come up with that idea any time soon…
Kain continued his lecture with Leon. "You may not be similar to me at first sight but when I was your age I believe I was somewhat similar to how you are now, before my spirit was crushed and reconstituted in that of a real mans'. I was also born with a madness infected upon me at the moment of my first cry and even now, after all these years I wonder that if I was not infected with this madness, whether I would be a much gentler man…"
Leon didn't say anything.
"Of course, ironically it would have been far worse for me if I had, for I wouldn't have was it takes to be the man I am today."
Again, Leon didn't say anything, but seemed to be brooding quietly to himself…
The murky waters of the sediment pool were too high for Kain to wade though safely wit his boots. While Leon jumped in without a thought for what the waters would do to his open wound if he were splashed, Kain had to jumped across onto the piles of rash that lined the pool, clambering across to the lifeless Sherry Birkin. Leon waded over to her other side, but something next to her caught his eye. +it was a large, strange silver disk with a wolf upon it..
"Sherry?" Whispered Kain to the unconscious little girl. Next to her lay a piece of inhuman flesh as long and as thick as a rod, covered in a thin layer of mucous. Kain shook his head. It appeared much like something he had seen in Bens' prison cell shortly before his gruesome death… -
-Gyrraaaaahhh!-
Leon and Kain both looked up towards the sourced of the cry, but it was distant, from somewhere above them. It was Williams' cry, and both looking at each other, Kain and Leon both realised what must have happened to Sherry.
Kain and Leon both crowded about the child, Kain shaking her gently.
"Sherry, Sherry wake up. Wake up now."
"That monster has implanted her with one of its embryos, hasn't it?" Asked Leon, anxious for the little girl. "Just like it did to Ben back in the prison cell."
Slowly, Sherry opened her eyes. "Kain?" but gradually, her expression twisted to pain. "My stomach…" She said, rubbing her hands on the source of the ache. "My stomach hurts…and my mouth tastes really weird…"
Kain and Leon both looked at each other mournfully. This displeased Sherry.
"What's wrong?" They ignored her.
"How long do you think it'll be before they pupate?" Leon asked Kain.
"What?" Said Sherry.
"I don't know… Ben had been infected for seconds before they burst out so in theory she should already be dead."
"Dead?" Said Sherry.
"So they could burst out at any time?" Leon asked Kain worriedly.
"Burst? Burst from where?" Said Sherry.
"It is a possibility…" Confessed Kain. "I don't want to have to say this…"-
-"Then don't!" Yelled Sherry.
"But maybe it would be kinder to kill her now so she doesn't suffer…"
"We can't do that!" Protested Leon. "There has to be another way to get that thing inside her out!"
"What's inside of me?" Sherry asked.
"Very well, but if I hear it move violently as it did inside Ben, then…" Kain found himself unable to continue. Kain tended to be unmoved when it came to carnage and suffering, and for Kain to trail off like that… it petrified Sherry to the core.
"What the fuck is wrong with me!"
Her voice echoed inside the chamber for a few seconds… Leon was wordless and sorrowful and looked to Kain helplessly for some help. He couldn't bring himself to tell her she was most likely going to die and considered Kain superior in the field of honesty where it was not tactful. Kain moved his lips to speak, but only a stutter came out. Where would be begin? What would he say? He eyes were so big and full of fear, how could he bring himself to tell her?
My God… His mind, the part of his he had switched off in order to rely on his survival instincts on this night, spat inside his head to him. He had forgotten how long it had been since he had engaged that part of his mind… He switched it off in order for him to do what he had to do without his vampire nature screaming at him for a little deviation of bloodshed and misery against one of those human beings. He understood that killing one of them could greatly alter his destiny and thusly his potential to get back to Nosgoth. Maybe… I understand that killing them could cause a major alteration in the time stream that could result in us not being able to return to Nosgoth for our vengeance against the Sarafan Lord but if it is the girls' destiny to die and you save her, it could have equally as disastrous consequences. Also, what is this 'being unable to look the girl in the eye and tell her she is going to die?' Not so long ago you would not have hesitated to look the girl in the eye and murder her!
Something was changing. That's why. Something was changing and he feared it might not change back.
"There's a monster inside you." Kain told her, feeling a regal strength fill him once more, a strength that had been leaking at such a gradual rate, he barely had noticed it. "And if we do not find a way to destroy it, it will burst out of you and kill you."
Sherry was distraught. Her expectant eyes broke down into dejected sorrow and she screamed into Kains' face. Shoving past both of them, she ran off back into the passageway at an exceptional speed. Kain realised that if he allowed her to keep that speed then she may not be easily recovered once more. He tried to follow but was stopped by an angry Leon.
"What is wrong with you?" He hollered. "And just when I thought you weren't such an asshole after all!"
"Let me pass!" Kain barked threateningly. "If she is lost then we may never recover her in time!"
Leon glared spitefully for a moment, but let Kain pass. "Just find her and save her, that's all you have to do for her… for all of us. If you cant even be bothered to be nice about it, just make sure you do it…" Leon was filled with a mix of emotions: Anger, pity, hatred, terror, pain, exhaustion but mostly he was sick and tired of everything this night had put him through. He now no longer had the fight in him to try and drum into the moral-less vampire why he was wrong. He preferred now to just let the vampire do his own thing, so long as it resulted in a positive outcome. Leon could now only hope, as the vampire rushed after the small girl, that her little emotional deviation wouldn't cost Sherry her life.
Sherry cried tears of bitterness as she ran blindly through the sewer system corridors. The disgrace was agonizing, Kains' icy words stabbing into her open heart like knives. She really cared about him but now he had torn into the heart he had won, totally unfeeling towards her. She didn't care about the thing inside her, infact; she had nearly forgotten completely what he had said to upset her so much. She just wanted to be with someone who cared. She had mistakenly believed it was Kain. Where was Claire? Why couldn't she have been there for her instead of him?
She wanted to go home… She wanted to go home right now more than she even wanted to survive this night! Why wouldn't it end? Why was it so hard just to get out of this nightmare?-
- She ran into someone, someone sturdy enough to bounce from them, causing her to hit the floor with a heavy bump. Of course, the floor was still waterlogged to it was more of a splash into sickening sewage water, and Sherry, being so small, fell in over her head, only to dash back up again, coughing and spluttering, angrily trying to glare at the person through eyes stinging with chemically water. The person did not move to help her up, or apologize in a vain attempt to make things better for her, but it could not possibly get any worse, not after hearing what Kain had told her…. Or so she thought.
He smiled down on the little child with cold black lips not quite strong enough to contain the encroaching saliva frothing out of his warm mouth like that of a thirsty animal. And in the light, he recognised her…
"Sherry…" He spoke softly, and grinned much from the glee of being able to say the words as finally running into the child.
Sherrys' frightened stare snapped up in recognition of the voice, and yet, she knew it couldn't be possible… she knew she had just dashed from him as fast as she possibly cold, and yet Kain stood here before her, grinning mindlessly down with warming, yet ironically cold eyes just like-
-her fathers…-
-Kain's eyes are yellow- this mans' are blue, just like hers, just like her fathers. –
Infact… his whole face looked like her fathers, the shape, and the eyes and even his smile all with the pale completion of Kain the vampire stretched over them. It wasn't Kain. It didn't look like Kain, yet it didn't look like her father. It was some strange blend of the two, psychically identical to the vampire but his facial features disturbingly different, like a nightmare where you run terrified and pleading to your parents only to have them turn around with somebody else's face in place of theirs.
She opened her mouth to scream, but even before she finished drawing the breath for the cry, its hand was clasped across her mouth, the other hand pressing her against its pale body. It even smelt differently from Kain… a darker animalistic odour, disturbingly different from Kains' clean, musky scent. Struggling didn't work, for it possessed strength even greater than that of the vampire. It observed her squirming with an expression of gentle delight, almost tenderly in its manner-
- Until Kain rounded the corner and interrupted the monster. He had separated from Leon, who had gone ahead to look for Ada and Claire and now had caught this mimic moments before it would have indifferently torn the small girl into pieces. His heart jumped into his throat at the resemblance he shared with it: This was another one of Williams' 'copies' of him, as upon the left side of its cold chest it bore the third letter of the ancient Greek alphabet 'gamma'.
From Williams' teachings, it sounded as if all attempts to copy him perfectly had failed in some way. When he fought 'Beta' version back in the R.P.D, he was comfortable with the knowledge that the error had been something to do with the copies genetics for it to deteriorate as rapidly as William had told him for him to resort to experimenting with T-virus on it and ultimately creating the gore-sodden monster he had faced. This one too had to have been a failed project, and yet it possessed sense enough to hush the girl before she cried out, implying it had not deteriorated and appeared perfectly sentient. Maybe this time Birkin had infected it with a superior virus to prevent the deterioration? Could he have gone so far as to experiment on it with his G-virus on it?
"Kain…" It muttered, smiling happily at him, Sherry now crying in his aggressive embrace.
"You know me, monster?" He barked.
The Gamma copy tossed Sherry aside into the knee high waters of the sewer as if she were not a living person, never taking its eyes from the vampire before it.
"…Kain…." It said again, this time affectionately whilst moving towards him painfully gradually. Kain noticed its feet were bare yet they were not burning in the sewer water. It wasn't a vampire. William couldn't experiment about vampire physiology on something that isn't a vampire. Maybe that's why it was classified failed? Then… what was it? And what had William done to it to make it different enough from himself not to burn in water and yet appear more or less like a vampire?
"Stay back." He spat. The monster did not comply, ever marching unhurriedly towards Kain. " I warn you, your countenance will do nothing to stay my hand!" It still did not stop. Kain backed away somewhat but stopped himself in realisation of what he was doing. He didn't need to run. He was the original Kain, the perfect Kain, and these were all experimental failures concocted by a scientist messing with forces he had never encountered before. Kain believed he was stronger. He always believed he was stronger, faster, smarter and better that all who stood in his way, friend or foe, and though this was often considered his best quality (the vampires were fighting in a war, after all) at many times in history and in the future, it had proven to be his one major weakness. In the past it had led him ignorantly into the hands of his enemy as their most powerful pawn, and in the future it would drive him to destroy the one creature that could have made him happy for the rest of his eternal life, causing him to betray his race in order to satisfy his own whim to rule Nosgoth.
It was his overwhelming self-confidence that betrayed him in this instant, for he saw the 'gamma' copy smile warmly and passively back at him and assumed he knew everything. Kain couldn't have known why it was so pleased to see him… but he certainly could have made a wild stab in the dark. Why would any genetically imperfect clone be pleased to see the perfect copy? Had Kain really forgotten what William had warmed him of literally at the beginning of his night?
Unexpectedly, the creature, that appeared to be little more than a man in every physical sense of the word, sank its own claws into its bare and bruised chest, digging its long pale claws deeply into its torso, sliding them down from throat to abdomen. Kain bit his lip at the scent of the copies blood; it was tainted – poisoned - infected and recalling Williams' words from earlier when he addressed the gamma clone as 'Abel' (Kain strained to remember through all that had happened on this night), it was deteriorating and could only become perfect if it assimilated 'the original' using the G-virus in its' blood. Kain frowned. Why couldn't he have remembered this when he rushed to Sherrys' rescue in the first place?
"Kain…?" Sherry stammered, fearing what the animal was doing.
"Run." Kain told her as the monsters continued to smile warmly as it dug its whole hands into its chest and pulled its flesh and muscle in half revealing its organs, unrecognisable from the thick black blood that spilled out and mixed into the sewer waters like an oil slick.
"No! He'll kill you!" Sherry barked, remembering her weapon Kain had given her himself and clutched at it as much for the comfort of feeling the solid weapon as to use it against the monster.
The monster pulled back its skin even further until it wrapped around its own body, exposing its internal organs for all to see, turning its body almost completely inside out. It was mutating into something else, and the skin that had folded over his back, arms hand head had closed up, and now its organs took on a level of movement that was not possible in a living thing. Its' drooping intestines unfurled themselves into many thick massive lengths of whipping tentacles and its ribcage grew in size and girth to form an enormous vertical pair of gnashing teeth.
The intestine tentacles launched themselves suddenly at the vampire that still stubbornly stood before it and wrapped and coiled around every part of Kains' body, clasping roughly around arms and legs and choking him, wrapping around his open mouth and squeezing at his neck. He tried to bite down on the foul tasting appendage but the tentacle was strapped so far down his throat his teeth couldn't bite down on it.
Sherry aimed her weapon but found she couldn't shoot at the thing that had hold of the struggling vampire in its powerful embrace. She felt strangled and suffocated; he'd protected her from so much and now came the time to return the favour and she could do nothing to save him. She was so angry, terrified and disgusted with herself that she couldn't even force a tear from her scowling eyes.
From Sherrys' point of view from behind the now giant monster on human shaped legs, Kain was yanked into the creatures body with a force she doubted even he could have resisted if he had known his fate. He couldn't put up much of a fight, it happened so instantly. He was engulfed into the massive bone teeth and grasping, mutated organs and Sherry felt her blood run cold when she could hear it start to change him, the slicing of tearing flesh, the snapping bones and squelching organs being forced into positions that couldn't exist in nature.
She didn't care if she hit Kain, she fire the weapon at the back of the monster feeling that even the chance to free him would be worth any cost of injury to him. Kain hated the idea of surrendering to the wrath of the monsters and he wouldn't care for a gunshot wound if it rescued him from the walking cocoon of mutilated organs.
It jumped around with Kain inside, unconscious and wrapped and held in place with what was once the things intestines and contained behind an abnormally large ribcage. The tips of the cage were shaped to points and dug into Kains' chest. The tentacles fondled at the widening slit in his chest until they penetrated it. Kain moaned out in pain but didn't regain consequences. Sherry couldn't tell entirely, but the slimy tentacles seemed to be either pumping something into him or sucking something out…
From its back grew two huge arms, once they must have been the very arms that slit open the clones chest, but now the sprung from the back as thick as tree trucks with pale claws as long as human arms. With these dirty coloured arms it hauled itself along the sewer passage with them towards Sherry. She aimed for these arms, hoping to slow down its progress towards her, but all they seemed to do was mangle its arms briefly before the flesh grew back literally seconds later.
-But then she noticed something. Upon one of the walking cocoons of fleshes' sides was a giant and orangey eye, dripping wet with a thick liquid. She recognised that eye! The monster that had stalked her through the R.P.D had come dangerously close to capturing her once; she saw it from behind through a vent only briefly. It looked like a man with brown hair and one arm really screwed up. She sped off when it turned to face her, but remembered seeing that same kind of eye on the shoulder of the messed up arm glare at her. This eye upon the cocoons side looked just like it.
Sherry fired at its basketball-sized eye and it exploded in a shower of water like liquid. The thing roared and real back, massive arms whiling and demolishing most of the tunnel, the sewer water spilling out of the passageway and to Sherrys delight 'spitting out' its victim onto the now dry sewer tunnel floor. The towering cocoon collapsed as just like the hatchling that had emerged from Ben Bertolucci back in the R.P.D basement, began to liquidate itself after its defeat.
Sherry rushed to help Kain up-
-but froze in her steps when she noticed something strange on his back.
He was hunched over on the floor, clasping at his head in agony, his face hidden by the curtain of white hair that draped over his face and that something on his back blinked with its one tennis ball sized eye. Ironically, this eye was far more beautiful than the one on the Abel cocoon and the hatchling. It was not the massive orangey oozing lump rotating wildly within its fatty socket, but small and glassy like a marble and like a marble, the green colouring surrounding the pupil appeared strangely below the surface trapped beneath the glass like surface of the eye as if pure magnificent colour had been trapped in a clear, crystal amber. This one eye rested on a rather plane body of flesh, but from that sprang several flat tentacles that slowly crept across the body of the vampire. Kain looked up at Sherry suddenly, and to her horror, he was frightened. He, who had slain countless zombies with his bare hands, now lay crouched on the floor before her with his savage eyes wide with terror. Something very bad was going on inside of Kain that Sherry couldn't see on the surface and it terrified her even more than the cocoon that had him not so long ago. She never lowered her weapon still trained on him, the dangerous piece of black metal quivering in her tiny little hand.
His breaths became quick and shallow with a strange grey viscous slime oozing thickly from the corner of his dark lips, dripping slowly onto the still damp ground of the sewer tunnel in a small grey pool. The flat tentacles were granted an unexpected burst of growth, spreading and widening across his back, spreading over his terrified face so only one of his eyes peaked from the thick red-ish mask of flesh, over his left arms, warping flesh into a diamond hard hide, sprouting a spike of bone from his elbow and a strange find of flesh on his left shoulder. The still bleeding area upon his stomach where the Abel monster had sliced open to insert his tentacles now widened itself, growing into a second mouth rimmed with dozens of large, cruel teeth taking up all the area where his stomach should normally have been. Upon his right shoulder grew an entirely new arm, first the bone bursting upwards through his shoulder, ascending, forming joints and splitting off into three thick claws, closely followed by the same kind of tough flesh, creeping up the new-formed bone as if it were a snake gliding up a pole.
His right arm and his legs were left alone by the growth, at least from the outside, but it was the effect on his mind that was worrying Sherry the most. Kain had not yet lost his mind, and clawed at the mask of red skin with his one good arm, spasamed violently for a moment, then transformed in manner and poster, its action and moment becoming smooth and fluidic much unlike the desperate horror it express seconds ago. Slowly and assuredly it moved towards her, hunched over like an animal stalking its prey in the final moments of the hunt. She knew Kain was still in there somewhere, as for mere seconds it would break out of its inhuman confidence and begin its spasmodic flinchings once again, a muffled and pained moan of the vampire escaping the concealed lips, but the monster would always regain control, the teeth upon his stomach snarling out and shaking off the mind of the former vampire. It had her cornered and unless she was rescued by one of the humans she knew was running around in the sewers, it would tear her to pieces as Kain would fight the hijacker of his own body to stop it.
However as he know, the very reason Sherry had ran into the Abel monster in the first place was upon hearing the news she had been infected with an embryo that would hatch out of her, and that very embryo had been put in there by someone of blood relation to Sherry, meaning it was a lot less likely to be rejected and hatch far too early than that of any other available host. To the G-Monster that used to be her father, she was far too precious to be killed now.
-A deep hissing from behind Sherry, then the terrible squeal of iron bars being stretched into unnatural shapes caused her to spin around, not knowing what could possibly happen next. She felt too sick to cry, too sick to scream but what she saw made her want to die right there on the spot.
It was the monster that had been stalking her throughout the R.P.D, and seeing its face from the front, Sherry Birkin finally learnt that the beast was her father. His eyes, which were once a ghostly blue with a sparkle of quirky intelligence, were now blood red and burned down at her like searing hot spikes of absolute rage. His body was massive and as tall nearly as two grown men standing on each others' shoulders. His body was covered with a similar kind of diamond hard skin that had engulfed parts of Kains' body, only blackish in most areas reflecting its age and the punishment it had taken. Its one giant arm was still the dominant one, now little more than a thick appendage barbed with bone claws thicker than a human arm.
Its glowered shifted from her to the small in comparison Kain monster, gritted his jagged broken teeth and hissed, the noise twisted by the growths inside its body to change the sound into something less than human. The Kain monster barked angrily back, lunging its head and chest somewhat as if to project its sound and hatred. Sherry turned her head back to the Birkin monster in time to see the expression on it face become even more infuriated, its ragged bloodied hole of a mouth opening wide into a furious howl. The Kain monster became infected with rage too at the response to its threats it received, its deep, bark-like snarls becoming more violent, baring the fangs in its stomach, balling and un-balling its clawed fists and hunching over as if readying itself to pounce. Sherry sensed a fight was going to break out soon and in the heat of the mixture of subhuman hisses and angry roars, Sherry pressed herself up against the wall, despite her disgust and terror and slipped past the Kain monster before dashing over to the end of the tunnel, where there was a door guarded by a waterfall and a puzzle lock with one medal in place, a medal of an Eagle. Sherry quickly produced her Wolf medal and tracing her fingers across the out raised image of a wolf, her mind was drawn back to the monsters currently non-violent confrontation a shot distance. She envision two snarling wolves with their yellow eyes burning and their grey fur fluffed up snarling and baring their teeth at the opposite wolf to ward them off shortly before a fight broke out between them. Setting the wolf medal gradually into its slot, the roaring waterfall came to a sudden stop and the mechanism beeped its conformation.
The Kain monsters suddenly broke out of its animalistic warnings to the Birkin mutant and span around to behind its prey escaping through the red rusty door previously blocked by the dirty waterfall and made a step in her direction-
-but was fly swatted into the splintering brick wall by the Birkin monsters' powerful mutated arm for turning its back on it for that split second. The fight had begun and had begun with an almighty dirge of tremendous inhuman cries, shrieks, howls, hisses and roars from both creatures that threatened to deafen anyone in the area, including the diminutive Sherry Birkin. She could help but pause for a moment with the door ajar at the incredible battle that had arisen between the titans. The Kain monster launched itself from the crater in the wall to attack the Birkin monster clinging to the top of its immense body and swiping furiously at its face and head with its large claws in an attempt to decapitate it. The much larger Birkin monster flailed its mighty claw and one human arm in the air, smashing down wall and ceiling alike until its human arm somehow found the Kain monsters neck. The scene Sherry Birkin closed the door on was of her father, the larger of the two monsters holding the wildly clawing and scratching Kain creature in the air by the neck drawing back its colossal clawed fist for a tremendous punch the likes only a highly advanced G-mutant could deliver.
Sherry had escaped for now and made sure she moved quickly down the short underground tunnel of dirty and earth held up by planks and boards like a mineshaft. At the conclusion was, to her surprise, sky tram, which was a train that travelled on overhead rails. This one still had its headlights switched on, or maybe someone had recently put them on? Moving up to the entrance of the train, she looked down between the small gap between platform and train to see a bottomless pit of blackness beneath. She hoped his train was in good enough nick after everything that had transpired on this night to not fall down into that abyss of black night. She often worried about silly little things like crashes that probably would never happen to her in her life but considering what lay behind her, she came to the conclusion that dying in a train crash probably wasn't the worst death she could face tonight.
The controls were pretty straight forward once she got inside; just two big buttons, one red with stop on it and one green with – guess what – go on it, and thank god, too. She feared she might have had to feverishly hammer at complex train controls to get this thing moving while the two monsters abandoned their fight and decided to get her instead.
Once the train had stopped, Sherry passed through narrow corridor after narrow corridor filled with a number of zombies, yet oddly enough, she found killing these zombies far easier than even seeing them was for her that the beginning of all this… It perplexed Sherry as to how the mind had desensitised her to such horror so that she could kill step over these walking human corpses with such indifference. Back in real life, she would be sickened by her lack of sympathy but now she was thankful for it, for if her own mind hadn't desensitised her to such a level of brutality then she too may have become one of the mindless zombies that stalked the night. Not once had she tried to picture the story of their death behind the zombie. Some of them had bite marks and ragged, unleaking holes on their stomachs and throats, so thick with decay they were and others had almost totally unbroken skin and could still pass for human if it weren't for their blatant zombie-like behaviour and cataract eyes. She even had the courage to search a seemingly freshly killed body of one of the workers of this factory for an impressive looking electricity based weapon thankfully with most of its charge left. Its working end was shaped like a plug; two prongs that shot electricity, and was rather impressively emblazoned with a black and yellow diagonal striped pattern along its sides that indicated danger to her. Its appeared crudely soldered together which led Sherry to believe that maybe one of the workers had made this themselves as a makeshift weapon… It was just as well she found the strange killer spark shooting device, as she was down to only ten round on the handgun Kain had given her all that time ago.
Finally she reached a rather long ladder that lead to a cabin on the roof, some sort of control tower (more like box) for something mechanical, judging by the extensive amount of fairly basic computer terminals on the opposite side of the room with only one black and white monitor at the workstation that seemed to be having a tough time showing anything on its screens. She smiled warmly at the sight of an old fashioned typewriter on a table in the middle of the small room. The R.P.D had several of these in various rooms and sometime they would even have writing left upon them by officers, sometimes serious reports and the like, and sometimes something not so serious they had forgotten to take out and throw away. Sherry moved over to the typewriter and pulled out the sheet to find it had quite a bit typed onto it.
'To whoever may find this; if your going down into the lab, make sure you have a good weapon by your side first. You'll thank me for it.'
Sherry frowned. This sounded very suspicious.
'We killed those green hunters but there could be other things down there we didn't run into. That lab is a big place. A lab worker down there called Monica was killed by something bursting out of her chest that was put in there but something we haven't run into yet. It got very large very quickly, but take my advice; always aim for the giant orange eye usually on the shoulder or back. That really gives them something to hurt over.'
Orange eye? Her father, the Kain monsters… all these creatures had a giant orange eye…. Sherry felt her heart flutter… Her father worked in the 'Umbrella chemical plant' and now close by was a laboratory were a giant eye monster was seen… Was this all connected?
'If your going down there, the place should have warmed up since we unfroze it so those monsters would have been given a new lease of life from the heat, but it also means that by the time you get down there, most of the emergency train controls should have unfrozen offering you an escape route. We couldn't take it because of the ice and water all in the workings.'
An emergency train? Could it be a possible escape route? It sounded like an underground lab. An underground train could take them right out of the city!
'If you find Leon, tell him I said hi.
Officer Kevin Ryman'
An R.P.D officer that knows Leon came this way?
'PS: The key is in the trunk'
Key? Trunk? Sherry looked around the room and found a large chest hidden in the corner next to the computer machinery. Opening it on its loud and rusty hinges, inside she found a small key with a yellow tag and handle on it.
"What's this meant for?" Sherry asked herself aloud clutching the key in her hands, feeling it was pretty important for that R.P.D cop that knew Leon to put it in a safe place rather than toss it aside when he was done using it.
Sherry exited the door on the left of the ladders she had came in and found herself on the roof. The sudden blast of cold air gave her a fright, but looking out to where the gust had come from, she saw an unusual sight. It looked like a big yellow train on the roof with a single light upon its front and with two large rails bracing it either side. It was on a huge octagonal platform on the roof and moving closer to it, she could see the entire platform was outlined as if it was meant to descend….
Next to his strange yellow transport was a narrow and equally as yellow control panel, with a keyhole… Sherry smile, and running over onto the clanging platform she inserted the key-
-but didn't turn it, for she heard a noise somewhere towards the back end of the transport that barely sounded above the icy howling winds that she could have sworn she recognised…
She clutched at the spark shot gun she had acquired back in the narrow passageways of the factory and crept around the transport to see where the strange sounds had come from-
- to see a man in a thin white cloth coat and jeans looking out over the night, his back to her, leaning on the wall that came up to his waist and muttering something she couldn't make out over the eerie howling of the wind from the deep, almost blackish blue of the night sky that brought with it the smells of burning, decay and the occasional wailing cry of something far off into the distance.
As she crept hunched over to the man weapon in hand, she noticed something was odd about him… As she got closer, she realised she could just about make out the edge of the wall he was leaning on through him, as if he was not all there, faded out ever so slightly… She rubbed her eyes with her hand, feeling either they were playing tricks on her or she was hallucinating, but he didn't disappear.
Lowering her weapon, she felt no real harm could come to her if she tried speaking with the man, and approached his side-
- He turned to face her, and simultaneously a look of shock swept across both of their features as they recognised each other.
"Daddy?" It was her father, all human, and looking down at her with that large blue eyes with a combination of shock and remorse. What unnerved her father even more than the fact that she could see him in spirit form was that his daughter didn't rush to embrace him as he thought she would.
"Hello… Sherry…" He muttered to her, deep cerulean eyes filled with an apologetic, yet fatigued grief. The chilly autumn wind blew hard, bringing with it more burning smells of a malevolent Halloween. The brisk night air did not disturb the hair on her fathers' head as it raged through the emptiness of his non-corporeal body.
William sadly turned his head to the moon; great and full in the deep blue night sky like a silver disc, as ghostly as the scientist who beheld it.
"We're lucky tonight…" He said abruptly to his daughter, his almost colourless face unmoving from the modestly magnificent supernatural disc in the distant heavens. "Vampires are stronger on the night of the full moon: If it was any other night… Kain…" He trailed off.
"A monster got him…" Sherry whispered gently, feeling her little heart heave at the gradual understanding of what had just happened to her Kain. She thought she couldn't look her father in the eye without bursting into tears. "He's did just so much for me… but when I had to do something for him instead, I could do a thing!" She felt a sudden cold on her back, and appreciated that it was her fathers' hand. He couldn't touch her but tried to comfort her the very best he could.
"This isn't the end of the story, Sherry; I've seen it." William told her mournfully. "In the world we found Kain, I found more than I could have known." Sherry swallowed the lump in her throat. She could feel in the pit of the stomach the suspicion growing that her father was the cause for all this death; He was a scientist - he found Kain in another world. Her father was working on far more than medicines for hospitals like he had always told her. She didn't interrupt him. "There - seven years ago - I saw the future… saw the future of this world without Kain, and almost exactly the same thing happened as it did today…" He turned to her grimly, fixating her eyes with his own serious stare. "…up until this point." He swallowed hard. "Sherry… If you don't find a way of changing Kain back… Then I fear that Leon will be the only one who survives this night." Sherry raised her eyebrows. She had had her soul twisted to tatters after Kain, a man she trusted with all her spirit, told her that she would die from the thing inside her stomach and now her OWN FATHER was doing the same! Her father continued. "There's a thing latched to his back that has control of him, my dear." He told her, trying hard not to cry himself. "The night of the full moon will give him the strength he needs to recover, IF you can tear that parasite from his body."
"What happens to me if I don't?" Sherry asked with a confidence of voice that was simply unnatural for a chid of her age.
Her father stared at her, shocked by her clear tone of voice. "You want me to tell you how you'll die?"
Sherry nodded.
Her father hunched over, leaning his elbows on the low wall of the edge of the roof and ran his fingers through his hard hair that shimmered in the moonlight like rippling water. Because of his hooked posture, Sherry couldn't see her fathers' face. She couldn't tell if he was traumatized, surprised, cross or on the brink of an emotional breakdown. –
- He looked up suddenly with tear-filled eyes. A flame stabbed at her heart like a spear of fire, yet despite her instinctive yearning to apologise and throw her arms around her beloved Dad, she knew that even if this were the situation to do so, she would most likely fall through his spirit-body entirely. It was a terrible feeling to watch your father suffer and having to stop yourself from giving up that wall you've grown over your soul and just letting go of your control over your wants and fears.
- "Virtually every person who dies before their time has 'that moment'" William said abruptly, his voice laced with his sadness, that also ran down his pallid cheeks in think strands of tears of liquid-glass, the very blood of human souls. He hung his body limp against the wall, gazing down into streets rendered into nothingness from darkness far below. "There's this one moment…" He mused, sharing his ramblings of his broken will to her, gesturing slightly with one hand. "One… final moment of your life…. when you comprehend you're about to die…. that you are looking at the last very last moments of your life and it all comes together in conclusion. I have often tried to picture what oblivion would be like… not be floating in blackness but to cease to exist entirely and it always scared me… I often wondered how I would die… I often wondered who would be there, how long it would take… how far I would have come… what I would leave unfinished… and what that one last final moment would be like. Everyone had that last moment of life, whether they're looking into the eyes of death himself or not…" William turned back to his tiny little girl and spluttering, his words stammered and quivering from the bleeding of his very soul now cascading uncontrollably down his soft cheeks, he wailed: "I n-never had that!… I'm … d-dead and I don't k-know when it happened!" He slammed his fists down on the wall violently, crying loudly to himself, his strange tears, lacking the heft of human tears, floated off into the breeze, sparkling as they streamed off into the night and seemingly towards the full moon. "I don't deserve to cry!" He barked, his voice distorted by his sorrow so that Sherry barely recognised it. "Animals can't shed tears of sorrow, and that's what I am! I killed everyone, EVERYONE but I'm here! I'm a SOUL. How can I be a soul if a damn monster don't have one!" From the distance came the screams of a young woman with stopped uneasily abruptly somewhere off in the destroyed vast city, huge plumes of fire dotting its landscape as if a war had just gone on. "I single handedly created this…" He said, his voice low and twitching, his head buried in his leaning arms so that his voice came through muffled. "So many people… How can anyone have any idea what I've done without living through this? I can still remember the screams as the zombies first attacked, as if the entire city was shrieking out for help… Those screams lasted…. they lasted for only about half an hour… Half an hour and the entire city died… the unlucky few fighting on… You know, practically all but a small handful of the people who survive this night will be alive and watching when the bombs hit… Can you imagine that Sherry? Looking into the sky after everything you've survived, and seeing two stars in the night sky coming to put an end to it all, including you? It won't happen until tomorrow night, I think… Plenty of time… plenty of time… You'll either be gone or dead by then."-
-"How do I die if I don't save Kain?"
William didn't get up from his exhausted slouch, face still muffled by his arms. "It's because of him being in this world that the possibility of your death is existent… But if you don't change him back into a vampire by the time you get on the emergency train… you're going to die…" He didn't sugar coat it; the part of him that saw the point of it had eroded away with the bombardment of thousands of horrors over the course of the night. William looked up, and in his eye Sherry saw a look she couldn't describe, but it was a look that frightened her so entirely that she felt the need to speak up.
"What's wrong?" She asked fearfully. William regarded her only for a short moment before chuckling to himself, surprisingly.
Slowly, he placed one knee onto the wall, shortly followed by the other and stood tall upon it, staring down at the drop before him with a content smile upon his face. He was going to jump.
"Daddy - What are you doing?" She shrieked, flying into a terrified panic.
William responded with an emotion permeating his body that could only be described as euphoric sorrow. "I always wanted to know that last moment, and I didn't get it. The all want me to suffer…" He said, Sherry suspecting he was referring to the zombified victims of his terrible deed. "They all want me to hurt so much for all I've put them through; I can hear it. I can hear their names when they wail; I can see their deaths when I look into their empty cataract eyes and – my God – every last man, woman and child had that final moment I crave so much forced upon them in an orgy of the purest of terrors, purer than any fear any human being can ever imagine… I can hear them call out my name from the world of the dead. I can feel them press against the very fabric that separates the two worlds of dead and living in an attempt to snatch at me and claw at my soul for all eternity…" He shook his head. "But more than anything, I want to die all over again so I can have that suffering I so… thoroughly… deserve." He spread his arms. "And need."
And with that, as if the act itself mattered less than the speech he had just given, he threw himself from the towering building into the blackness below, feeling his non-existent heart flutter in untainted ecstasy as drifted so softly, so gently down… coming one step closer to his repentance.
Sherry didn't stop him. She knew doing so would only worsen his self-hatred. All she could do was wonder herself about her own death that had been prophesied to her by her own father as she activated the transport and it too descended down into the bowels of the city. On the inside of the transport these was one single bench upon which she rested, mind reeling at the implications in her fathers' words. When – IF – she died and her soul went to the world of the dead, what would the souls of those who died in Raccoon city do to her, knowing who she was? She bit her lips, discovering that the horrors of the city were her fathers' legacy to her. The Legacy of Birkin: This inherited nightmare full of the purest misery, the greatest human disaster for a great many years, and quite possibly for a great many years to come. This city and all the monsters within it, were hers.-
- There was a thumping – more like a pounding that shook the entire transport - that shook her very bones – upon the transporters roof, louder than even the deep and all consuming mechanical roar of the working gears of the huge descending platform.
Followed by a deep and gruff semi-human hiss…
"Daddy…" She whispered, still recognising her own fathers' voice regardless of its inhuman, savage warp… He founded pretty big now… She tried to picture it, but could only envision a black mass of enormous body consuming all light around it, like a dark demon absorbing evil. Sherry gripped the Spark Shot weapon she picked up back in the factory… would it be powerful enough to kill the monster that had taken her fathers' body once and for all?
She became scared, shaking her heard rapidly from side to side at the very idea of battling the monster of her father… but then she remembered something her father said…
"If you don't change him back into a vampire by the time you get on the emergency train… you're going to die." She repeated aloud. The emergency train was in the depths of the underground (and possibly massive) lab she was descending into… meaning it wasn't her destiny to die, at least not yet. If she went out there to kill the Birkin monster, then she was guaranteed she would survive… She hoped. The lock on the door released fairly easily when she put into it that it was an emergency situation and taking a deep breath, she exited the relative safety of the large yellow transport and braced herself for the fight…
The cool rough ride down was illuminated only by faint mercury lamps on the rails ascending into the tiny speck of sky that was barely visible at this depth, and disappearing rapidly. The transport shook with heavy thumps at regular intervals, leading Sherry to believe at first they were heavy, pounding, marching footsteps of something drawing near, but it was just only a bump after all and Sherry let her heart calm down a bit before continuing her search of the transport… She moved close to the wall that was whirly past her at a moderate speed and stayed relatively away from the transport she had exited for fear on being dragged beneath its underside and mauled by the thing that used to be her father… She was sucking so hard at her lips with her nerves that both were folded into her mouth, her tong rubbing wildly against them until they became numb and tingling. She kept telling herself in her mind the words of her own father, - that it was her destiny to die – if at all- on that strange emergency train mentioned in the notes but oddly enough, the truths did little to calm her shallow, rapid breaths and shaking body. Her sweat was cold – a horrible slick feeling dampening her clothes, causing them to cling to her grimy body… She preyed she wouldn't wet herself when them monster jumped out on her…
- Something hard catapulted from the platform literally inches in front of her, a spray of sparks bursting and a squeal of unappreciative metal from the contact point and the object bouncing a few feet into the air before clunking to the grey steel floor. Something had just thrown a large and hefty metal pole at her from on top of the transport but rather than fly into a panic over how close she had been to dying at that second, she darted instinctively backwards, her eyes shooting to the top of the transport and to her attacker.
His left arm, one of the last few remaining human features on his body, was still drawn out from the lazy yet impossibly powerful throw of the pole he had tossed moments ago at his own daughter. He couldn't have been her father now, could he? His body was in such an advanced stage of mutation that it appeared to be one great black mass of impenetrable muscle and bone claw, the giant bulbous, grotesque eye on his shoulder large and full; apparently highly prosperous from its parasitic relationship with its maker. Some scraps of clothing still clung overstretched onto his massive body: His lab coat was now just a meagre tatter halo of fabric around his enormous mutated right arm, a right arm that was bigger and broader in size than Sherrys' own body. His overstretched pants – which could still fit an adult in their size – appeared more like shorts on the humongous beast, the tight dirty blue denim cutting into the flesh of its legs, but drawing no blood. The monsters was such in size and power that Sherry honestly believed it could not bleed - so much of its body was muscle, claw diamond hard flesh.
Chillingly, for all of its mutation, one area of its body remained relatively untouched: Its face. She found herself gazing painfully into the creatures' all too familiar features and aching at the prospects of causing it harm. Even in the dim light she could see, for some reason, his eyes were now red in colour instead of their haunting blue…. The same shade as hers….. Looking into his mournful red eyes, she swore she could still see her fathers soul in there, fighting against whatever pestilence had consumed all of his body except his head, and looking over his whole body, despite what he had become she was sure of it. He was tired of fighting the virus. That she could tell from the lazy, outstretched stance he adopted now. His face a visage of grief and woe, as if about to shed a tear of sorrow for him inhuman red eyes, she realised that when he threw that pole at her, he wasn't trying to kill her……
He was trying to warn her.