Claire Redfield found herself believing the painful lump in her throat would burst kill her when she first saw the state of the Transport into the laboratory: almost as if a full scale war had broken out: the claw indentations ripped across the thick steel floor appeared as if the floor was torn like some kind soft, supple clay or even hot and living flesh. The large, yellow train-like transport had thick black patches burned into the side caused by some kind of flamethrower or something. . . What the hell had happened here? Any one of the others could have been on here when – whatever happened – happened. Was it Leon and that Ada woman he had mentioned? Had Kain and Sherry come through this point? Claire bit her lip at that thought. . . The state of the sewer corridor that lead to the abandoned Warehouse that held the Transport. . . It had been almost obliterated, only a few gaps in the wall of rubble allowing her passage to the secrets beyond. If Sherry and Kain had come through here, then either they encountered the creature that had caused such decimation, or it was closely in pursuit of them, and the state of the war-torn Transport confirmed that disastrous notion. Claire felt sick at picturing what could have been the scene; Sherry locked away within the Transport while Kain fought with the unimaginable beast outside as the machine descended ever onwards into the bowels of the facility. It was impossible to tell who had won: there were no broken bodies, human or otherwise - no spilt blood. . . other than the evidence of an obvious struggle, there was nothing indicating to Claire that there had been a battle with a biological killing machine. If a powerful bioweapon was indeed confronted here, then where were all the corpses? Where was all the blood and carnage? The fight couldn't have moved on elsewhere: the ride down the shaft lasted a full five minuets – more than enough time for a clear winner to prevail.
Claire held the black walky-talky that Leon had given her in her fingerless gloved hand, gazing at it precariously. She could call him. . . ask him if he knew what had gone on there, but she was afraid. What if she got no response? She'd fear the worse, but the chances were that he would be too busy to answer her right now. Since they both first delved into the sewers, the creatures inside had increased in numbers power. Living zombies were now a rare sight, as whoever had gone ahead – Leon or Kain – had cleared the path for her. However the trail of corpses had caused a few carrion-hungry creatures to intercept the slaughter. It must have been difficult for them to find a meal in a city where the dead become living again in a surprisingly short duration. Claire shivered at the thought that at one point, the zombies numbers were so thin that life could go on in the town without anyone being any the wiser of their presence, but as the victims of the undead joined their ranks, their numbers must have snowballed out of control, causing a sudden wave of the undead to appear as if from nowhere and take the still relatively significant number of the remaining living into the septic, dripping jaws. It couldn't have lasted long. . .
That all seemed like a distant and ancient memory now. . . Though Claire had arrived at nightfall and so had missed the initial takeover, it felt within her waters that this night had lasted an eternity, like she had been fighting the undead for as long as she could remember and the Claire Redfield she knew from her life before she walked into this apocalypse was a vague and fond ancient memory, like recalling the tattered fragments of ones early childhood. . .
Alone now, with the prospect of never seeing her friends alive again, Claire felt truly exposed and vulnerable for the first time since she left the R.P.D. She had followed the Transport down into Umbrella's secret facility, a place that reeked of an ungodly evil aura. Since encountering Kain, she had learnt to trust her more irrational senses, such as the overwhelming feelings of anxiety and disaster this icy, steel facility gave her. She didn't know why, but she just knew this was where it all began. The city was filled with the victims of a zombie-making virus wreaked of death and decay, yet in-between the bursts of revulsion and terror, Claire occasionally and unexpected experienced bursts of grief and sorrow through it all. She never really thought about it directly, but this city was little more that a giant graveyard and held the same melancholic sentiments. So much unimaginable suffering had gone on in this city, yet throughout the entirety of the night she had neglected this, focusing more on the horror of the now, of the suffering the survivors were forced to face as the broken, mutilated bodies of their friends and family attacked them and tore them apart. In fact, the true horror of this night was not the experiences of the survivors as the fought to escape the city of the dead, but the stories contained in the minds of the zombies as they shambled through the night like lost souls searching solemnly for an escape from the rotting flesh that incarcerated their souls within a body that they could no longer control. The pain, the horror, the true depths of suffering brought about by this night was theirs, and not the property of the few living survivors. Claire felt ashamed to think that she, when she first entered the city and ran into Leon, had it worse than those who had died in the opening act. The very existence of Kain and his supernatural abilities proved to her that human souls could be trapped within the flesh of undead organisms, and zombies were no exception.
This cold and emotionless laboratory was the womb from which the virus and disease wretched free unto the world and the surrounding innocents. It was like a cancer burred deep within the heart of a happy and healthy animal that had devoured the creature to the peak of its prosperity. . . And from the newfound knowledge Claire had received in the form of compromising documents found within the R.P.D (anyone would think that Brian Irons had the sense not to write incriminating evidence into his own diary, considering that he was the chief of police), it seemed to her that Sherry's own parents had more to do with it all than she could ever have guessed. Kain too informed of her a connection with Sherry's father back when they first met, he even went on to tell her that he was infected with a virus. She wondered what kind of virus was contained in the body of the Vampire and why it hadn't done to him what it had done to all the other creatures she had encountered in this night.
There was one in particular that worried her: The trench coat monster, or Mr. X as she had come to refer to him as. He looked like a man in many ways, not like all the other monsters. Except he was twice as tall as she was and built impossibly big, each perpetually balled fist the size of a human head. It was bald, but its eyes were strange. . . like it had no iris or pupils, like the zombies only much more powerful and intimidating. It wore a large muddy green trench coat, the sort of colour one associated with the army, but the thing that frightened her the most was the way it behaved. It was far more intelligent than a zombie, who would shamble hungrily in the general direction of sound or movement. Mr X marched titanic thumping steps single-minded in the direction of human prey, climbing up balconies and even at one point demolishing a wall to intercept its target, which seemed to be her at this moment in time. But at one point she wondered who would go out of their way to make and deploy this into the R.P.D to track her down. It must have been Umbrella for some reason, but what chilled her was how similar it was to Kain.
At first glance, one would laugh at this statement: How can a sentient Vampire be anything like this mindless man-made monster? Claire had found documents. Those documents said that Kain was the only Vampire recorded to have been made by another human, and not by a fellow Vampire. It seemed that he had been crafted by some kind of necromancer, who then orchestrated it so that Kain would feel compelled to eliminate the necromancers chosen target. Kain was mentally inclined to stop at nothing to achieve what he thought was his revenge. . . And that scenario seemed all too alike to how a scientist would create a monster like Mr. X. X had been created to intercept and eliminate human threats to the company. Just as Mr. X was created by the hand of man to serve him as an unstoppable killing machine, so too had Kain been created. The addition of a virus to Kain's blood made her wonder how truly trustworthy he was. Was he now no longer a Vampire, but an Umbrella-owned bioweapon designed to carry out a specific task? Whether Kain realised he was doing their will or not was irrelevant; he had been made to play the pawn once before and - judging by his character - he was the kind who never learned.
Claire pondered this as she delved further into the emotionless mechanical laboratory. She searched the floor the Transport had dropped her off in and found a security office. Inside it was fairly uneventful, desks covered in stationary, computer cables and folders full of documents, but what really caught her eye was a small looking disk that lay innocently on a sheet-less bed to one side of the room. The label read 'M.O. Disk'. She didn't know what it was for, but took it with her anyway just if she needed it.
Beyond the area where the Transport had concluded its decent, was a massive chamber with three bridges that connected at a centre pillar which housed the main fuse for the lab, leading to two areas of the main lab – east and west (the third bridge was the one she was on. an unmarked that lead to the Transport and a locked emergency elevator that she couldn't get into without some kind of master key.) Moving along the bridge hued a strange reddish colour from the electric lights, Claire hazarded a look downwards to see the chamber lead down into an inky blackness: it was impossible to tell how high up she was, and looking upwards offered the same effect. This facility was impossibly vast and Claire dared to this that it might even rival the city in its size. According to some inconspicuous signs she had a brief glance at as she departed from the Transport, this was the main section of the laboratory. It held the emergency train and something called the 'P4-Laboritory', which according to the sign was the main laboratory for the lead researcher (and she assumed the boss of) this lab complex. There were many other sections to the facility, but Claire felt shed only need to stick in this area to find a way onto the emergency train, and hopefully, Leon, Ada, Sherry and Kain would all be well enough to join her. –
- Her walky-talky beeped. Leon was calling her. She snatched at it and activated it, the sound quality poor and crackling but relived to be getting a signal on it at all despite being deep beneath the crust of the city surface.
'Claire, do you copy?' came the ironically professional comment of Officer Leon; he wasn't an R.P.D officer anymore, seeing as the R.P.D no longer existed, but that didn't stop him from trying to be like a cop. His voice sounded rough and exhausted, but he hadn't given up yet. At least he was still alive.
"Yeah." Replied Claire. It may not have been the best response in the world, but he wouldn't have contacted her unless he had something important to say.
'I'm inside Umbrella's secret research facility. What is your location?'
Claire's heart soared with hope. "I'm there too! I just came down in the Transport!"
'Ada and me came down in the Transport not so long ago, too. It overheated and stopped mid journey to I went into a service duct to find a way out, but before I could go back and tell Ada what I'd found, then Transport had cooled its engine an went on down.'
"So she should be here too?" Claire questioned, switching the walky-talky over from her left hand to her right to get a better grip of the device.
'Yeah' Replied Leon. 'but for the engine to overheat when I used it before you, that must mean that someone else has been on it recently before we came along?'
"Sherry and Kain?" Claire fearfully asked.
'I found Sherry in the sediment pool in the sewers.' Leon explained.
"She and I were separated when a drainage system activated! She must have ended up there. . ."
'Right, but Kain came along and sensed something had been implanted inside of her. Claire, if it's anything like the thing that got Ben Bertolucci back in the cells of the R.P.D then Sherry's in serious danger. We all sat there and watch Ben get torn apart from a monster that had been implanted inside him. Sherry could go the same way! Kain told her what was going on and she ran off, he followed her but when I ran to catch p with them after finding Ada, all I found was the corridor had been torn apart by a massive confrontation with some kind of monster!'
"Oh, Sherry! Are they okay?"
'They must have been if they took the Transport down into the labs. Look out for her and Kain, okay? They're in there too.'
Leon shut off the walky-talky and Claire was left wit a resounding white noise in her right ear. She shut off the walky-talky thoughtfully. . .She had to find a cure for Sherry, but finding Sherry at all would be a task. . .
Claire headed onwards into the facility feeling a strangled uncertainty grip a hold of her. They were so close to escape, but the facility at the heart of the evil that had befallen Raccoon city could contain horrors the like of which they hadn't encountered yet. Getting everyone to the train in one piece, finding a cure for Sherry. . . It was as if someone had choreographed their final escape to be the most difficult challenge yet. All she could do was take care of herself and pray that the others did as such.
G-virus sample in one hand, gun in the other, Annette Birkin race down the hallow corridors of her husbands facility with a new kind of panic and energy filling her weary body and soul. If Sherry was her, not only would she be in danger of the multitude of horrific things that still lurked in the shadows of the laboratory Annette hadn't dare to explore, but she would be in danger of discovering the terrible truth about her family, that her father was the man that had caused this terrible thing to happen to the city Sherry grew up in. Annette prayed that Sherry hand't already figured out that the monster she fought on the Transport lift was her father. If she had, then she might have figured out her fathers' role in all this; Sherry could be a surprisingly sharp girl at times.
Annette had recently just left the P4-laboritory, which was the very room in which her husband William made that fateful choice to inject the G-virus into himself as a final dying act of revenge. His blood was still all over the place where he lay against the desks, bleeding to death while those men snatched his lifes work right out from under him. In the P-4 lab, Annette had spent the last half hour synthesising a sample of the virus. It was the sample she planned to take with her when she blew this lab sky high. She'd set the clock just after she left to look for Sherry: Twenty minuets of silent countdown, but after ten minuets the system automatically launched a verbal warning to encourage the 'employees' (now all dead) to head to the emergency train a short distance from where she was. She had passed the locked entrance to the lift that would taker her to the emergency train on the way to the P-4 lab. It would take her less that a minuet to reach that entrance, and another three minuets to get from the lift to the train. It would be no problem. No problem at all. . . If Sherry descended in the Transport, then Annette knew exactly where she would be right now. The East wing was fairly pathetic in size: it housed a cold room, some sleeping bunks, and the capsule room, which was there they stored some early G-virus tests that they had performed. The West wing lead down to the section Annette was in now. There was a very daunting ladder one had to descend in order to get here: now only was it so long you couldn't see the bottom of the tunnel, but at some point during the virus leak, a gargantuan column of slimy, virus enhanced plant growth had ascended the far wall of the tunnel like a giant pillar. Once you got past that, you would pass the corridor that housed the passage to the emergency train, and beyond that was the surveillance room, then beyond that, corridor Annette was in right now.
Thinking quickly, Annette raced through the automatic door that wined mechanically as it allowed her through the empty surveillance room and to the corridor that housed the entrance to the train. There were some zombies at the far end, but they hadn't noticed her and simply stood as if waiting for some prey to emerge from the opposite side of the corridor. Annette tapped the open button for the thick steel doors emblazon with the biological hazard symbol to allow her access, but there was a buzz sound from the controls, and nothing happened. She tried again, her heartbeat increasing with her mounting anxiety and some of the zombies on the opposite end of the corridor finally started to notice her. She got the same reaction from the computer, and this time read the error message that came up on the screen.
'Please insert M.O. Disk'
What? You mean it's not in there? Annette checked the Mini-Disc tray, her hands shaking and feverish with panic and found that it was empty. Someone had hidden the M.O. Disk that she needed to open these doors! She had set the self-destruct for twenty minuets, but she could be here all day looking for that thing! Annette felt her throat close up with stress. Things were rapidly spiralling out of control, the zombies at the other end of the passage lurched mindlessly towards her and she was forced to double back and head back to the corridor that held the P-4 Laboratory. Her breaths were sharp, the only nose slicing through the air of the empty corridor. Annette considered searching the P-4 lab for the disc, but thought that would be too obvious so instead headed for the computer room that was off right of the corridor she had emerged from (the P-4 lab was off to the left). She'd been in there once before tonight. It was full of giant eggs covered in a strange sewn-like silk that clung to everything, picking up a mucky green tinge from the dried dirt and dust that stuck to it. One of the eggs had hatched and from the thick leathery casing sprang a giant moth. She took care of it with a flamethrower she had found. She had to discard the flamethrower: it had run out of fuel.
Annette used her lab key card to gain access to the room and once there, brushed roughly at the dirty, sticky goo that coated the desktops trying desperately hard to locate the all-important M.O. Disk. It wasn't here. Annette's heart sank: What if it wasn't anywhere? Annette bit her lip. She bit her lip so hard it drew a bit of blood, the streamer of red crimson running down her flawless chin and staining the collar of her white lab coat with spots of red. She rushed out of the automatic door and raced over to the entrance of the P-4 laboratory-
- To find someone standing outside it, preparing to enter.
Annette froze, regarding the person with her deep blue eyes. It was a young woman, no older nineteen or twenty, wearing pink cut-off denim and big boots, her hair in a ponytail. Annette's shock and bewilderment began to melt into a hot, burning, offended rage.
"Who're you?" She spat, training her weapon on the back of the intruding girl. She span around but froze at the very moment her dark, youthful eyes touched the sight of Annette's weapon trained between her sweating, shaking hands. Annette smirked a cruel smirk of satisfaction: the girl was afraid and so she should be if she was about to do what she looked like she was about to do. Those men that killed William came for the G-virus sample, but when William injected the sample into himself, he stopped those men from getting away by killing them all and injecting the stolen samples into himself. If Umbrella wanted the G-virus, then they would have sent a spy to recover it from the labs synthesis machine itself, which was located in the P-4 Laboratory, the very lab Annette had caught this sickly little rat sneaking into.
The girls' eyes looked into hers. "Are you Ada?" She asked cautiously.
"You think I'm Ada?" Annette chuckled at that preposterous assumption. Annette had seen a woman she had recently learnt to be Ada Wong - a spy for hire that had been paid to get close to John to learn all that he knew on the new virus synthesis - with a young cop back in the sewers. Annette had fired a few shots at her, but hit only the cop. Her shot wasn't fatal, though: She'd seen him on the monitors sneaking into the facility through a duct. "Don't be so foolish! I'm not your contact!"
"You contact?" Said the young girl, her eyes filling with confusion. "What are you talking about?"
"Give it up" Spat Annette, growing frustrated. "I know you're sent by the company to steal my husbands G-virus. Stop pretending you don't know!"
"Your husband. . .!" The girl exclaimed out loud. "Then you must be Annette. . . You've got to listen to me, Sherry's here in the facility with Kain somewhere and I think she might be infected with one of William's embryos. You have to tell me how to cure her!"
"What?" Annette was stunned into shock for a few moments at the mention of Sherry's name, and her terrible fate at the hands of her father. Part of her screamed inside herself for sanity: she could be a spy still, she could be lying and using Sherry's name to get to you. "But you said Kain's with her. . ." Asked Annette. This was something a spy simply wouldn't make up. The company knew Kain's past. They knew he bitterly hated humans for all the atrocities they had committed against his race, so if this girl was cooking up a cover story, why would she suggest such an unlikely team? "Kain is fiercely anti-human! Why would he risk himself to protect my daughter?"
"I don't know. . ." Confessed Claire. "And I don't think he knows why, either. All I know is that the two of them came down here together and now I need to find them!"
Annette suddenly recalled what she had witnessed back in the surveillance room. The Abel monster was dead so it couldn't have been that, but she had seen a creature inside the facility that had all the psychical attributes that could only have pointed to one man: Kain. This had confirmed it.
"Kain's dead. Or as good as dead." The young girls glimmer of hope dulled and disappeared from her youthful yet dirty face. The crestfallen girl gave Annette a painful reminded of the hope she lost when the virus had taken her William from her. Part of her soul died - rotted away in her chest - when she saw the bodies of those soldiers that William had mutilated. Seeing that sight made her truly aware that her William would never come back.
Annette continued, trying to be gentle with the girl, feeling awkward inside at the fact that she knew the pain the girl was experiencing right now. "I saw him on a monitor in the surveillance room: he's become a monster now . . ." Annette thought quickly. "But I don't think he'd want you to get distressed by it. . . You have to survive no matter what."
The girl was silent for a few moments, and for those few moments, Annette believed she was going to cry until abruptly, she filled with a wilful strength once more and spoke up.
"Annette, you have to help me. I can find a cure for Sherry and you can make contact with Leon and Ada and tell them to get down here. I've got the M.O. Disk to open the path up, but I wont leave without them!"
"Are you insane?" Barked Annette, getting her nerve back and remembering that this girl was still a potential threat. Annette became aware of the gun in her hands once again and aimed it directly at the girls pretty little head. "Ada is s spy sent by the company to steal William G-virus and I wont give it up! This virus is the most significant piece of research my husband has left with me!"
"Ada may be an Umbrella spy but she'd still a human being!" The girl defiantly argued as if the deadly weapon wasn't trained on her head. "She deserves to get out of here with her life just like the rest of us!"
"No!" Screamed Annette fiercely tempted to pull the trigger. "How dare you even suggest that we escape with a woman who could snatch William's research out from under me?"-
- Annette abruptly dived forward and tore the M.O. Disk from the Claires' grasp. She couldn't do much to resist her for fear of being shot, and dared not give chase as Annette raced down the corridor towards the surveillance room with her gun aimed roughly in her direction, but swore she'd get to her before she took that train out of the facility. Annette was a heated woman emotionally. She wasn't thinking straight, and if Claire allowed her to get away, then she would be ditching her own daughter in this hellhole with no means of escape.-
-Something from the corridor where Annette had disappeared crashed down, like a ceiling panel being thrown forcefully to the ground. The ground shook from the impact of some unseen creature in the corridor beyond. Claire couldn't stand around here listening in. She rushed in pursuit of Annette-
- To see a massive black mass of flesh and claw towing over the woman. Its body was a mass of black, hard muscle with a puckered and pulsating hole rimmed with teeth at the centre of its immense chest. It had four powerful arms that were tipped with sets of bone claws, five claws on the top arms that were the largest, each the width of a human body, the bottom set that hung where one would expect human arms to be placed, with only four, indicating they were not the arms the magnificent man-beast was born with. It was the head that gave away what it was: Those glowing, intense red eyes on a head that seemed metal in appearance with a hole of a mouth filled with jagged bone-teeth. It was William Birkin. When he had originally been infected, his wounded body was covered in a thick red growth that reached across his flesh like vines, like muscle tissue of a more powerful animal growing over the weak and feeble human body perfecting itself further. Now it seemed the process was in its final stages, after the human flesh had been overwritten with a more powerful muscle structure, a thick black callous grew over the top and the head was replaced with a perfected one; when the creature had it's back to you one could see the human brain that formerly belonged to William peaking out of the back. When William was originally infected, he also only had the one giant, oozing, slimy eye on his right shoulder. Now he had several dotted all over his body, one of his left leg, one on his back, but the one on his right shoulder still remained the dominant one. Its forehead was pointier now, causing it to resemble the head of a shark somewhat and the rows of sharp and organised teeth (unlike the haphazard mess of teeth that stage 2 – fought by Sherry- possessed) added to the predatory look. It had perfected and evolved into a more powerful and precise, less clumber some killing machine.
Annette was consumed by a stunned awe. For a few moments she didn't speak as she regarded the enormous monster that had once been the man she loved. In return, it regarded her but not in curiosity but in a cold and emotionless, icy stare through fiery red eyes. Claire couldn't shoot it. Annette was in the way of her line of fire. Claire held her breath and prayed that it remembered his wife. . . how much in love they were with each other and how he never would have raised his fists against her as a mortal man.
"William . . ." Annette breathed in a strange mix of sorrow, horror and relief. "You're alive!"
William's stare was empty, just as it was empty when its immense claws tore across his wife and sent her crashing into the wall with a painful crunch of bone and a tortured cry from the woman. Both she and the virus she had held in her hand were smashed, both their fluids leaking onto the floor like free flowing water. Annette's blood ran from the place on the wall she had hit and joined the rapidly spreading pool in which she lay.
The monster looked at Claire, It's red eyes fixing to hers and Claire felt herself freeze. It could have gone after her next. It could have torn into her just like it had its wife. But it didn't. It jumped back into the whole in the ceiling from whence it came.
Annette's broken body was still moving in the puddle of her own blood, and Claire raced over.
Annette's face did now show the physical pan she was in, but the pain she felt inside at being struck down by her own husband.
Claires' voice took on a begging tone. "Annette, you have to tell me how to cure Sherry, PLEASE!"
Annette coughed through the blood and the pain. She didn't have long, but at least Sherry could be saved. . .
"Go to the P-4 lab. . ." She said quietly. "There, you'll find a vaccine cartridge with the base vaccine inside: I prepared it earlier. Put it into the vaccine synthesis machine and take the blue test tube that comes out. You have to do it. . . Save my Sherry. . ." Annette closed her eyes, unable to continue through the pain but she had told the girl everything she would need to know."
The girl nodded and ran back to the P-4 lab, leaving the dying Annette Birkin alone. She hurt all over, both inside and out but she'd be damned if she died here in some sterilised laboratory corridor like this. Williams' attack had left almost every inch of her body feeling cut and bruised but she would not die like this. She refused to fulfil those ghastly rumours she had heard from the other researchers. When William descended into madness all those years ago and started divulging the future he had seen because of an accidental curse inflicted on him by the Time Streamer, the other researchers spoke to each other about the things he had been crying out in his delirium. He hated himself because he would kill his wife and wouldn't be able to stop it, and he hated Kain because he awoke from his two hundred year slumber in Nosgoth, he would do the same thing. The only difference would be that Kain had a choice. He could have spared her life. He could have forgiven her. But he didn't. He wouldn't. He won't. And that's what William hated about Kain so much. William admired Kain in every way except that. William was driven crazy by the knowledge that he would kill the only woman in the world that could love him, the only woman in the world that he could love back, and he couldn't stop it. He kept saying it was his destiny. He kept saying it was Kains' destiny to throw it all away like it was the kind of thing that you could throw away and it would keep coming back. Kain would kill this woman because he believed she had betrayed him. Annette now understood that the reason the William monster had killed her (her wounds were mortal) was because of that sample of G-virus she carried; it believed she was taking it away, taking it and betraying him and his G-virus, but it was all just a big misunderstanding. Annette wasn't taking the virus to steal it, and maybe the woman Kain would kill, would be doing the same thing as her. . .
Annette forced herself to get up, relying on the wall rather than her own beaten legs for support. When Claire would travel back through the passage with the G-vaccine, all that would be left in the corridor would be a puddle of blood, the M.O Disk, and a trail of red handprints across the walls of a woman filled with a desperation to defy the fate this worlds Time Stream had written for her.