Annette had made it to the computer room of the Chemical Plant with surprising ease. It was as if all the monsters she knew were running free about the labs since the city fell under the control of the undead were waiting for something, like a grand finale timed no doubt for when Annette Birkin planned to escape the facility with her husbands G-Virus.
At the time of the. . .. . . . initial leak, Annette's mind was in fragments brought on by the shock and sorrow of the death her husband that then received at tremendous after shock when she learnt that he had intentionally infected himself with the G-virus as his dying act. Because of this, she could barely tell up from down and couldn't grasp that as her world that she and William had built together fell apart, it was infact William himself who would deliver the killing blow and take out the city, but on reflection now, it did seem a lot like William to end his life in a way that was one huge giant 'fuck you' to the men that had been trying to take away everything he had worked for over the course of his entire life. Umbrella practically owned Raccoon City. It was a powerful playing piece to them, what with Arklay, the Chemical Plant and some of the shit they had going down in the Raccoon City Hospital. Even with Arklay taken out only a few months previously, it was still a thriving place for their bioweapons development programs. However, Umbrella had opted to do to William what they did to his mentor, James Marcus. Marcus was assassinated shortly after he developed the T-virus and the work (as well as the Raccoon City Chemical Plant) was handed over to William. Undoubtedly, the same was going to happen to William and he G-virus which was why after the Arklay incident (though it was a loss, it was the perfect opportunity to put someone else in charge of the Raccoon City projects and coincided nicely with the final synthesis of the perfected G-virus, ripe to pass onto young blood) William hired the Police Chief Brian Irons to protect his facility from spies. Almost all routes to the Chemical Plants Laboratories existed in the sewers, but could be easily manned by guards or obstructed in some way. The main route was from the R.P.D itself, though a sub-basement in the R.P.D's lower levels and all one had to do after uncovering the route to the sewers was follow the path, with the right trinkets to open the right doors of course. (There was a tram leading to the Chemical Plant that was locked with a puzzle mechanism consisting of two medals; A Wolf Medal and an Eagle Medal, exactly the same as the puzzle lock leading to the labs at the Arklay Laboratory. William was particularly pleased with that little example of attention to detail.) Brian was accepting the protection money but somewhere along the line he became overconfident . . . Two teams of Umbrella S.W.A.T made it through all the safety measures installed, got in. . . . . .. and took her William away from her. . ..
She shook her head violently and over-exaggeratedly, forcing her burning sorrow from her heart: If she dwelt on it, it would only cripple her, disabling her ability to do what she had to do. After all, William would have wanted her to protect his G-virus from whatever Umbrella spies were still lurking in the wreckage of Raccoon City and take the virus to safety. He'd sacrificed so much for that virus – they both had – and William treasured it so much he felt the need to take his own life for it (though in a dark part of herself, she knew that the bullet wounds he received would have been fatal anyway).
She had a memory though. A memory of witnessing something that she hadn't quite anticipated.
Through the thick, mind-altering haze of grief, hesitation, regret, horror and anger, she vaguely recalled running into him – the Vampire Kain – awake and alive and full of the divine power William had often described seeing in him. They'd taken him from his home world of Nosgoth while he slept a deep slumber scheduled to last 200 years (they had taken him sometime in the middle of this period) and had taken him to experiment on.
At first, William saw Kain as little more that a thing, a mindless cadaver with which he could perform his experiments and possibly enhance his virus definitions, but as time progressed and the expedition in Nosgoth became somewhat of a holy conquest, William began to change. At first it was subtle changes that only she (and a fellow Researcher named 'John Howe' who seemed to think differently from the other researchers) noticed. Silly things like William would occasionally look at him strangely when he believed no one else was watching him – a strange painful yet inquisitive look in his pallid blue eyes – and over time it progressed into more obvious things. The researches began to becomes seriously worried about William when at times he aggressively refused to be in the same room as the unconscious vampire, kicking and screaming and begging not see it, and at other times, John would find him leaning on him in an embrace like a frightened child in the night that had wandered into his parents bedroom after a terrible nightmare. They didn't know it at the time, but something in the Time Stream's of both their worlds had confused them for each other because of the sheer close proximity the histories of both their worlds were. Both worlds Time Streams' were like two rivers that had merged and could never be distinct again, and William and Kain were the ones most affected by this. Of course, in the time since they first travelled to Nosgoth roughly seven years ago, they had long since found a magic-based cure with the help of Mortanius for what had happened to them, but William had never been the same since. He seemed to be almost be in love Kain at times, but bitterly hate him also. It was difficult to explain. His felling for Kain were more apparent when William began to descend into a kind of insanity some time after they had taken him from Nosgoth, and when he got bad, he would scream things that didn't make sense, not even to him. One time however, he accidentally let slip in the middle of a conversation that Kain was the Scion of Balance, the vampire Messiah for example, something that this version of Kain they had taken didn't even know himself. It was Mortanius who pointed out to him that he had said it, or else he probably wouldn't even have noticed he said it himself.
Long story short, because of his strange illness (for some reason both the researchers who had accompanied William to Nosgoth and Mortanius refused to tell her just what he was suffering from) William knew things about Kain that even he didn't know just yet. He was filled with respect and admiration for him at some times, and bitter, unrelenting hatred at others. He had learnt to suppress his rage for some of the less admirable traits about the man (all of which existed mainly in this 'young version' of Kain they had acquired, which made it all the more difficult for William to deal with him) but his respect for him sometimes got in the way of his work.
This couldn't be truer for the cloning experiments they performed on him. It was a stupid idea to test directly on one of their most precious samples, so it was agreed to create copies of him to experiment on while at the same time perfecting their cloning techniques that they had failed to perfect comparison to their rival companies. You probably remember the tales about the Beta clone. (The original Kain was regarded as 'Alpha'.) It was the first Kain clone made and was an utter disaster. Within hours of being disconnected from life support, it started to deteriorate, its organs and skin turning to a thick, soup-like mush of discoloured blood and vague shapes of entrails. At the last minuet, William decided to stop (or at least slow) the degeneration using the T-virus. Whether he was using the Beta for a T-virus experiment or couldn't bear to let it die slowly before him like that, Annette would now never know.
The story concerning the Gamma clone however, was the most significant. Apparently, the degeneration in Beta was caused by gaps in the D.N.A sequence due to errors in the cloning process, so on their second attempt William patched up the errors in the sequence with his own D.N.A. Gamma clone, or Able as William 'affectionately' named him, had inherited some memories from the original Kain, which helped him become the efficient killing machine William raised him into. They became good friends, William and Able. William once described him to her as a less detestable version of Kain and in many ways he was right. When Annette met Mortanius, he told her that his 'son' Kain was an arrogant, pompous, self-indulgent sadist who had no hope of ever finding true happiness. She had met Able on several occasions, and though sometimes that 'Kain-like' personality came through, he was a good natured man (she didn't know who he inherited that from. . ..) with the most captivating smile she had ever seen.
Though he was William's friend, Able's function within Umbrella was their latest Anti-B.O.W (bio organic weapon) experiment. His vampiric skill mixed in with his training and the G-viral experiments William had enhanced him with made him absolutely unstoppable . . . Physically that was. . .
Sometimes, the only way you can hope to defeat an opponent vastly superior to yourself is if you wait for him to grow overconfident and make a mistake. Waiting for that mistake could cost you a lifetime, but it will happen eventually, nonetheless. Able's body was unstoppable but his mind fatally flawed. Able used the skill and memories he had inherited from Kain to fight the endless hordes of escaped bioweapons. (If not for Able, they wouldn't have been able to deal with half of the accidents the Umbrella S.W.A.T had been called to.) But the problem was that accessing Kain's skill and memories also had an intoxicating side effect of experiencing Kain's emotions in these kinds of blood hungry situations. Able became consumed by Kain's self-righteous arrogance brimming inside him and failed to request reinforcements when deal with a particularly large horde of Ma 121's - or Hunters as they are known - and it proved to be his downfall. He was killed in action and William's 'Able Project' was officially declared a failure.
The Gamma clone was handed over to a Doctor Celia Griffin, who was head of biomechanics in Umbrella and basically where William was in the world of bioweapons, but only for the development in Cybernetics. (You might be thinking 'what would a pharmaceutical company want to research into Cyborgs and the merging of man and machine?' The answer is simple. Pace makers are types of machine added to the human body to help the patient with their condition. Perhaps in the future and with the right kind of research, humans could be assisted by mechanical implants to a greater extent.) Doctor Griffin was a bit of a bitch and took great delight in the company handing over what William was quickly regarding as a son for her to experiment on. By the time she was done with him, his entire body was covered with synthetic implants. Blood was replaced with chemical nutrients and flesh and bone was replaced with thick, feeling-less armour plaiting and an impossibly strong metallic skeleton. Barely an inch of his body was organic. He could feel no pain. Now, he was truly unstoppable and her Cyborg bioweapon received much acclaim from the higher-ups in Umbrella.
The utter lack of physical feeling was slowly driving his mind on a downward spiral, however. He knew he could get hurt, he could even feel his own body existing and once he described it to William in a brief encounter with the towering, unrecognisable Cyborg that it was as if his mind was floating above the ground. If you have ever knelt on your leg long enough for it to go totally numb, then you would understand that it was feel as if the limb was not there, and when you stood in it, you would find yourself tripping over it, Though Able had received the proper training to operate his body despite being unable to feel it, it couldn't prepare him for the psychological cost.
To add petrol to the fire, Doctor Celia had been giving Able what she told him was 'medicine to deal with the physical transition of flesh to metal' but was something utterly different. The drugs were engineered to bring out the dormant memories of the vampire Kain stored within his subconscious in order to make him the best warrior he could be. Able was his own man with his own mind and his own personality, so to be suddenly bombarded with the memories of an insane, psychotic murderer as if they were your own would be enough to push anyone off the edge of the perception of reality. Kain's memories, his own memories and even William's memories mashing together into an incomprehensible mush were it's no longer impossible to tell who you really are. . . Able couldn't take it anymore and went on a killing rampage before being stopped by William.
This deeply disturbed William. Apparently, the illness William was becoming consumed by was something to do with him merging gradually with Kain as a result of the two Time Streamer's being unable to tell the difference between them and William felt as if he had just looked into his own future if his disease progressed . . .
Top destroying the Able Cyborg with whom William related to, onto the recent murder of the Epsilon clone (the very first successful Kain clone. He was identical to the original Kain in every way) which was allegedly cased by Doctor Celia, resulted in William losing his mind to terror, uncertainly and sorrow. He shared a closer bond to Kain that Annette knew at the time, which was probably why William took it upon himself to re-build Able with funding out of his own pocket despite the clone having lost a great deal of its mind when William was forced to destroy his Cyborg self.
Jumping forward to the present age, William had released Kain in his final, precious moments of life and Annette felt like a fool to think for a moment that he would have done otherwise. Unfortunately, at the time it hadn't occurred to Annette to attach a tracer into Kain to find his current location. The tracers worked very easily. They were shaped like a pin and used the hosts' own electrical field to send signals that the surveillance room (where she was located) picked up. Problem was that Able was mainly a G-virus monster, and when G-virus monsters died, they tended to liquefy themselves. William used to joked about that: 'self cleaning mutant; leaves only the minty-fresh scent of pine' but in truth it was a major headache if the tracer was one that ran on the hosts electrical field. Once the monster had dissolved away, the tracer couldn't transmit a signal and if you weren't looking when the signals stopped, you'd utterly miss its last location. The Abel had stopped transmitting signals about half an hour ago (as far as she knew. That was when she last checked its progress, and it was somewhere in the sewers leading to this facility) and she had begun to wonder what was capable of killing the beast. Eventually, she came to the conclusion that it must have been Kain, the only man powerful enough who could beat the thing without using a tank. She was starting to wish she had the initiative to have lodged a tracer beneath the skin of the vampire when she ran into him when William was . . . . . taken from her.
So now she waited patiently in the surveillance room for some signs that Kain was approaching the lab once more, several of the cameras utterly blacked out, one or two showing nothing but aggressive static, but with a decent few still transmitting. (The system was very new, so she guessed it might have been possible for William to have destroyed the cameras while he still had a few shreds of human intelligence left within him.) So far, things had been fairly uneventful, just the occasional 'Re3' (Licker, as they were known) lurking around in the shadows. She smiled. William had crafted those animals. They were skinless and their brain was exposed, and they were utterly deaf, but still they were stealthy and very powerful if you got yourself into just the right position for them to deliver a killing blow. Still, they didn't satisfy William enough so he enhanced them slightly. These fairly new Lickers seemed to hang around the lab mostly. Instead of the three claws on each hand, they had long scythe-like appendages and their exposed muscle was hardened and greenish in colour to increase both their attack and defence. Aesthetically though, the old-fashioned Lickers were the most appealing.-
- Annette felt a shudder through her tired bones, followed by a mechanical whining from somewhere far above the facility. The whole room vibrated gently as the roar of machinery gradually increased in volume as it descended towards the underground lab. Someone was using the transport lift to get into the facility. It had to be a spy, hadn't it? Or was it Kain coming back for answers at to how to get back to Nosgoth? It was then that she remembered there was one camera operational on the Transport descending into the laboratory. She hurried over to it, not suspecting for a moment what she would see.
She threw her slender fingers over her face in shock. It was Sherry! She was wandering precariously along the side of the Transport, an all too adult look of stern concentration on her little daughters' face that sent chills up Annette's spine. What must she have seen to be that hard of heart already? Annette Birkin had sent her to hide at the R.P.D because she was confident that the cops would have what it took to hold of the zombies long enough to launch an evacuation. If she could get his far, it meant the R.P.D was crawling with monsters just like every other corner of the city. Annette could feel her tears dribbling down over her cold fingers: The things - the horrible, terrible things her little baby girl must have seen! What was she doing all the way down –
- Something long, hard and metallic catapulted from the platform, throwing her tiny daughter backwards from the shock of it. Annette felt her throat close up with anxiety and all she could do was watch.
Sherry looked up to the top of the Transport – the origin of the flying pole- and to the shock and terror of Annette, she saw the face of her husband atop a hideously deformed, massive monstrous build looking down mournfully at his own daughter.
"Oh Jesus. . . ." She wailed helplessly through her hands clasping desperately to her pale, crying face. "Let this be just another terrible nightmare. . . " Ever since she found William's dieing body she had been plagued with terrible nightmares of his distorted freakish body, so disturbingly so that she had been forcing herself to stay awake but found herself unable to stop dropping off unannounced if she took a quick break in a secure room. She prayed that this was once of those occasions. She prayed that she had dozed off while watching the monitors, but no such luck. This was actually happening. Her little baby was going to die and it was all her fault!
The Birkin monster started to change. Its head melted down into the thick mass of hideous muscle that was its chest and atop its powerful frame grew a new and far more demonic head. Its silver colour gave it the appearance of metal, though Annette knew that made no logical sense. It's eyes were a far more threatening shade of red that that of her husbands battered features that rested on top of the body literally moments before. A gaping black hole filled with distorted bone teeth heaved itself out of its chest area and took its place as a mouth at the bottom of the demons cruel face, and Annette knew at that moment that her husband had given up fighting the G-virus and it now had full control of its titan body.
I leapt from the top of the Transport, landing inches before Sherry in an earth-shattering thump she swore she could feel in her bones all the way from the elevator shaft. It slowly rose from its crouch, brimming with a sinister, formidable, unholy power as if drawing out Sherrys' fate deliberately to fill the small child with fear. Sherry backed off and fired the strange weapon she had in her hands and the creature was temporarily engulfed with a burst of electricity. It appeared to work for a few seconds, the massive black demon hugging its chest, but it snarled into the air as if calling upon the gods for strength, and resumed to launch its attack.
Annette found couldn't watch and threw her tortured sight from the screen, but the sudden movement mixed with intoxicating terror and aching fatigue made her nauseous and she threw up onto the cold steel floor of the sterilised facility. She chocked and spluttered on the acidic liquid for a second but forced the remnants of the vomit back down into her stomach and forced her gaze onto the monitor.
Sherry was still alive and fighting the beast that was once her father with her electric weapon. Annette gazed in weary amazement as she realised that Sherry was holding her own against the monster considerably well . . . The black mass of power swiped its massive bone claws at the tiny girl that wasn't even half its size and she rolled from the path of attach into a crouch at its size and fired her weapon, bracing herself to the recoil as if she had experience with handling weapons. She was strong and brave and for a few second, Annette though that for a moment, maybe she wasn't her little girl . . . . . Where in the hell did she learn to move like that?-
- Something on a monitor on the opposite side of the wall of surveillance screens moved in an unusual way that indicated to her trained eye that it was neither a Licker nor was it a zombie. The monitor displayed a grey, dreary service tunnel that's end was obscured with an inky black darkness. Something lurched forward from the fog of darkness into gradual view like a ghost materialising onto the monitor's screen. The lack of audio was haunting as its walk, hard and sturdy, swayed from side to side inhumanly. The creature continued to emerge and the image became clearer; Annette could see that a mutilated third arm with three thick claws at the top was protruding from the monsters back. Its torso was covered in a network of hard callous sewiny-like material that reached up its neck and had moulded entirely over its once human face. The lack of a face made the creatures' appearance seem even more inhuman than if the hard flesh callous hadn't formed and had left what the virus had done to his face for all to see. Annette vaguely remembered some old tales she heard from William and John that in the old times, masks were considered unholy as wearing them was a rejection of your humanity and the face god intended for you. The virus callous across its face was struck her as the symbolic and complete rejection of gods design.
The creature marched ever onwards as if in slow motion and further into view and Annette could see it had white hair protruding from the mask-like growth across its face. . . Able had white hair, didn't he? But the Abel beast had been killed; the tracker wouldn't have stopped sending signals if it hadn't (and those tracers lodge themselves beneath the skin). She remembered she guessed that Kain would have been the most likely creature to put him down. . . but what if the Abel monster had the initiative to ensure its survival by infecting its closest genetic relation before its death?
"Oh my god. . ." The monster that could only have been the infected vampire Kain now lurched so close to the camera that Annette swore she could feel its eyes on her even though its eyes were obscured from view. It could still see somehow. . . she just knew it. It stopped right before the camera, turning its non-existent gaze eerily steadily hers. She froze: it could see her, it could feel her terror: it had to! It was a vampire-monster; it didn't have to follow the rational laws of science: that much she understood. It was plotting her downfall; that's what the vampire Kain did and even in this ghastly, revolting shape that leered at her through the camera lens was still the sadistic taint to screw with his victims' minds. –
- The picture disappeared without warning into an incomprehensible burst of static. Annette let out a puff of relief but knew inside that this was hardly the time to be relaxing. It was going to get her - shit - it was even inside the facility! And Kain had a reputation for drawing out the inevitable fate of his helpless victim to purify their blood to its very finest of flavours. That was all he really cared about. That and the usual things sadistic murderers cared about; the thrills of seeing the life drain from the pleading, fearful eyes of the victim and so on. . . William watched Kain sleep a lot but she only did it once. It was strangely thrilling, like watching a Lion sleep without the protection of bars. . . A very attractive and sexy, dangerous Lion. . . . She compared her memories of watching him sleep with what she felt when she ran into him. Everyone seemed more beautiful and innocent when they slept and Kain was no exception. . . Running into such a powerful animal like that in the flesh. . . she thought she was going to die.
Her attention turned back to her daughter Sherry and was startled to see in time the monster that was once her husband leap onto the walls of the Transport and disappear from view as the platform descended ever downwards. She had driven it off, or it had picked up on something beyond the humans' sensation and gave up on this stalemate. She was safe for now, but Annette climbed shakily to her feet, feeling her maternal self click back into action. She thought her soul had withered and died in the carnage of the first wave of attacks, know her beloved William had caused so much hurt, not only to the entire innocent city, but to herself and her child too. Seeing Sherry survive that fight awoke a flame within her, a flame she would use to intercept her child and take the emergency train with her and the G-virus sample out of this nightmare. At first, seeing Sherry descend into the pit of hell that was this facility filled her with fear for her only precious daughter but seeing her take on William and fend him off. . . Perhaps her newfound skills would keep her safe long enough for Annette to find her and take her away from all this hell, but not after blowing Umbrella's precious facility sky high.