Sherry's stomach pains were becomes close to unbearable. When she first entered the facility via the Transport, she almost passed out but the monster of her fathers' violent hiss snapped her out of it, the adrenalin leaking into her system making the intense soreness changed to a dull throb. She'd heard about that in science class. Animals in danger have the fight of flight response, which is where they make a split second option to engage the enemy or run. The adrenalin in the system numbs pain sensations, as it wouldn't do to feel the pain of a broken leg when fleeing from the predator could save your life.
After getting off the Transport, a brief search of the cupboards of the security room yielded a half-ful pack of paracetamol that Sherry took with some bottled water on a desk to sooth the burning. If anything, as the chemically tasting suds slipped down into her stomach, the pain and the burning increased in its intensity.
Sherry didn't know exactly where she was. . . She did know she was deep within the earth, possibly even miles and miles beneath the city, but she still didn't know exactly what this place was for. She tried at a guess: the Umbrella logos on the walls were an obvious clue that the pharmaceutical company owned this plant, but why would they need to hide it like this?
'Isn't it obvious by now?' A part of her mind whispered darkly to her. 'This is where all the zombies and monsters are coming from. Your mother and father told you they worked in a chemical plant at the city limits; this must be it, and seeing that thing that used to be your daddy should be the final piece of the puzzle: Your parents did this to the city, they did this to you and Claire and dragged Kain from wherever the hell he came from to endure this disgusting hell. It's all their fault, - and you, - as their child, shares the same dark heart.'
Sherry swallowed heavily. That didn't sound like her mind at all, but she had thought it nonetheless. This night, those zombies, Kain, this thing that was growing inside her – all of it had done something to her soul. She could feel it just below the surface in the deep pits of her heart, turning, twisting, searching for something to set it free. Something was wrong with her. She had felt her heart changing all night but only now did it occur to her that it was doing more than making her weak soul stronger against the horror, but changing her into something. . . . darker. What was most terrifying was that she had seen it in someone else. She had seen it in Kain. The way Kain behaved. . . she understood it now. Back when she first met him he made her sick. Now, he was all she could think about.
She hurt all over. Sherry was really beginning to wonder if she was ever meant to escape this night. Her father was defiantly dead, his tortured, disembodied soul filled with a remorse she'd never seen in him before and if he was gone, then her mommy had probably died too. She didn't like the idea of that. The monster that her father's physical body had become at least didn't look like him now, so she could pretend it wasn't him, that his spirit was most likely elsewhere and so it didn't count. Her mother on the other hand… . What if her zombie was around these laboratory halls? If she ran into it, she'd have to take it out. . . .. Sherry had changed, but not that much. . . right?
She swallowed hard as she searched the small security office for her trademark ventilation shaft escape route. At first glance she thought she couldn't do it, but pictured it in her head, picturing the sagging, rotting flesh hanging loosely from the bone and soulless, cataract eyes framed by that blonde hair her mother wore about should length, like a sickly ghoul that had taken her mothers shape. She pictured it waiting for her, pictured killing it, picture the slowly spreading pool of eerily discoloured blood hued a blackish colour and felt nothing.
Nothing at all.
She hoped it wouldn't be like that in real life. Hesitating to shoot the zombie of her mother may put her life at risk, but it was the one and only way she could prove her humanity without lying to herself. If she lost her weakness, lost her uncontrollable urge to vomit at the horrors of this night, then how much different from the monsters would she be? Sure she could think and speak, but how many more zombies would she have to kill to change all the way? Slowly, Sherry became aware of what she was changing into. At the beginning of this nightmare, she ran from the zombies, in the middle, she killed them out of necessity. She fear that by the end of this all, the blood, the violence, the increasing sensation of satisfaction she got from the gore spray she witness from blasting a hole in a monster, would become an addiction. She became afraid that after this night, she wouldn't be able to function as a human being without killing. When she stopped killing, it all became real. The zombies changed from targets to people, people with rotted, discoloured flesh hanging from their bones wailing out in hungry pain, gushing dirty inky, lumpy fluids. What happened if when she escaped Raccoon City, she'd have to go on killing to stop the horror from consuming her?
On the wall of the security office was a map of the facility. It was difficult for the girl to make sense of the diagram as, to her, it was just a big jumble of rigid lines, blocks and rectangles all overlapping. Reading the labels, it looked as it the whole lab complex with riddled with hidden shafts, service tunnels and various others of the like. Sherry sighed to herself. It was obvious even to her that if you were developing monsters, you would give them as little routes of escape as possible. Especially as it's placed beneath a large part of the city like this. She shook her head. This place was an accident waiting to happen.
Looking over the map, she saw that there were no vents in this immediate area for 'health and safety reasons'. The Transport had descended miles into the earth to the sky wasn't visible from the bottom of the shaft. It was, however, open to the air, and in the event of an emergency, the elevator and mechanical door that lead into the labs automatically locked, as it was the most obvious route the monster would take in the event of a breakout. They would be drawn to the unusual sensation of fresh air seeping into the harsh, artificial odour of antiseptic and would have used the vents to get to this area, then up the shaft and to freedom. The fact that the transport worked, however, was a major clue that main power had been restored to the lab. She hoped that the emergency train that lead out of the labs had defrosted and was operational, because if it were, there'd still be hope. . ..
.. . . . Hope. . . . The emotion brewing inside her didn't feel like hope. . . she felt . . . . strangely nauseous in the pit of her stomach . . .
She forced that from her mind. She knew if she dwelt on these odd emotions she was having, she'd never keep it together enough to. . . escape.
Again, she felt that odd emotion, so she changed her priorities from escape, to finding her friends again. Claire, that young cop, possibly her mother. . . They'd all be heading for that train on what the map had shown to be the lowest level of the subterranean laboratory. According to the map, she could take the main elevator all the way down to the train, which was right next to the security office. She doubted it would be that simple so just to be on the safe side, she pulled out a sheet of paper that was in a type writer by the door and scribbled down a rough map. She tried to be as scant with her map as possible, of course, leaving out the levels she knew she wouldn't need to go on. Other than the elevator next to the security room, an alternate route to the lowest level - and the emergency train - there was a huge main shaft that lead to the east and west wings. She had to go through the west wing to another large shaft, that had a long ladder leading all the way down to the lower levels. After descending that ladder, she need only go through a corridor to get to the main doors for the emergency train. After that she didn't really need a map. The path was a direct route, a strange diagonally moving elevator would take her straight to the platform. . . . assuming someone hadn't already taken the train out.
Reloading her handgun, but keeping her electricity shooting spark shot holstered across her back for a quick draw in case of emergency, Sherry left the relative safety of the security office and tried the elevator, just in case. It seemed to be fully powered and even opened up, but to her great dismay, there was a console on the wall directly opposite of the doors, a console that required a master key of some kind to unlock the emergency route to the train. She went back to check the office, but her search came up with nothing. She was going to have to take the long route. She sighed and looked back at the map on the wall of the office, comparing it to the scrawled doodle she had drawn to check for last minuet errors, when her eye was caught by something familiar on the diagram. Looking at it again, she swallowed hard. It was her fathers name, written right next to a room marked prominently as the 'P-4 Laboratory'. From the looks of the bold highlighting of the outline of the room, it looked as if it was the main laboratory of the whole lab. . . and where it all must have begun. She ignored it, or at least tried to. It was only a short walk from the entrance route to the emergency train.. . . she could take a look. . . or not. . .
Now wasn't the time to get all sentimental and doomsey. She was so close, so close to the thing she had desired throughout this nightmare, for what felt life an entire lifetime –escape – and in some sick way, part of her was seeking every opportunity to delay her getaway. It had to end, either with escape or death, and Sherry was too afraid to die. She took to the route planned out on her map, forcing all thought and feeling from her once delicate mind and relying on animal instinct alone to see her through. Sherry passed through the door to the main shaft, a massive chamber, like the inside of a giant, bottomless pipe lined with machinery and cables and a large, pipe-like structure at it's centre where the three walkways (east, west, and the one which she entered the area from) met up. However, when she entered the cavity, she heard a somewhat distant mechanical whine – the sound of the doors opening and closing – from what sounded like the door to the west area. She glanced, wide eyed over to it just in time to see the door sliding to a close. At first she was about to run, to catch up with the person who had opened it, but then froze. There was no guarantee it was a human that had operated that door. The doors were automatic to an extent from what she saw. There was some kind of electronic card reading device that automatically opened the doors for lab personnel that wore their I.D card. Usually, it wouldn't open for anyone else, but the lab had suffered a massive attack at the hands of it's own research specimens, and the crisis situation caused an override to take over. A push of the big red button labelled 'emergency' next to the door opened the doors without security authorisation. If what went through that door was a zombie of a lab worker or worse, her father, then those doors would open for them without the use of any intelligence. She might be running into a trap.
Sherry proceeded slowly, hesitantly, reaching the entrance to the west wing without allowing her footfalls to make a sound on the metal bridge linking the entrance to the west area to the main shaft; a technique she had mastered during her stay in the nightmarish parody of Raccoon city. She was hesitant in pressing the door release, but drew her sparkshot to give her some sense of security. She held it limply in one arm and pressed the door release with the other, but the second she hit that button, the heavy weapon was aimed at the door with both hands. She was afraid – of course she was afraid – but what terrified her even more was the empty passageway that greeted her. If it was a monster, better to blow it away now than to go on through the sinister complex wondering feverishly if it'll be around the next corner, waiting for her. . .
Continuing onward only filled her with more primal dread. Apparently, there had been two plant monsters waiting for her –things that looked half man-shaped but with green tentacles and the head of a budded flower that opened to gush a paralysing acid in preparation for consuming its prey. At least, that's what she could tell from what was left of them. They both lay, tentacles twitching in a puddle of strange, greenish-black blood right before the door that lead to that long ladder she needed to descend. It looked like something had punched a hole right through their chests where the heart was located on a human. Sherry neared the bodies, but the tentacles - apparently acting with a separate will from the dead creature - reacted to her prescience and whipped at her bare legs. They missed, but only by a hairs length. Had they touched her, they would have flayed the skin and muscle from the bone. This didn't bother Sherry nearly as much as it should have. . . She didn't let herself think about that. She was dehumanising herself by fighting, by surviving. No one said surviving this hell wouldn't come without its cost. She knew that. Dwelling on it wouldn't help anyone.
Wherever the monster was that did that to the plants, it wasn't around anymore. Even when Sherry accessed the shaft with the ladder, it didn't seem to be around. The ladder went down for hundreds of feet but there was no sight of it.. . well. . . it wasn't like the shaft was empty, though. On the opposite side of the shaft was a giant column ascending and descending further than Sherry's eye could see, reaching off into the foggy shadows at either end. The column was plant, but with mindlessly flailing tentacles and giant, orange puss covered eyes peering out from all angles. It looks similar to the strange growth covering her fathers' body, only plant like in nature. It seemed fairly immobile though, and didn't bother her. Climbing onto the ladder, she smiled. Before, she had a fear of heights, but now she felt nothing. Nothing at all. . . not even the adrenaline burn that she had gotten used to throughout this nightmare. It had gone. But there was something wrong. The adrenalin burn wasn't there, but a different kind of burn was. She'd forgotten all about the thing in her stomach, but she wasn't forgetting it now. She stopped feeling that adrenalin burn like the fire had been sucked out of that parasite within her had fed on it. She could feel it moving inside her and it caused her tremendous agony. Her grip loosening on the metal rungs of the ladder, she hauled herself back onto the platform desperately through the pain.
As suddenly as the pain began, it ceased. For a few moments, Sherry lay sprawled on the floor next to of the ladders with her tiny pale hand clutching at the fabric covering her stomach. She didn't want to try those ladders again before certifying that it wasn't about to start up again. Her adrenaline rush from the monster that had killed the plants and them climbing down ladders that seemingly descended into nothingness had caused the creature within her to excite for some reason. Maybe adrenaline equalled fear and thusly danger towards the parasite within her, causing it to become anxious itself. If she were in its place she wouldn't want to hang around a host that was sending chemical messages indicating it was going to get wasted. Sherry breathed deeply. Fear caused the thing inside her to excite, and she didn't like the feelings of splitting pain that raced through her as it struggled within her. Now that it had stopped moving, all that was left was a hot glowing feeling in the pit of her stomach, like she was bleeding inside. She tried her hardest not to let this odd feeling make her afraid again.
It was only then that the question struck her: Why was she doing this? Why fight? Why go on living? Have you any idea of the death and suffering that had been endured by thousands of innocent people on this night? What gave her the right to survive? For the first time this night, Sherry wasn't sure what to do. Before everything had been so clear - fight, run, hide, survive – those commands were as plain as the nose on her face and always she had obeyed them, but now, she wasn't so sure anymore. What good reason did she have to live through all this? She didn't have any friends or family left, if she lived, it was only a matter of time before the government got their hands on her and did god knows what to her, being the daughter of two great scientists like this. If she lived, what would happen to her could be far, far worse than what would happen to her if she died here in Raccoon City. The shaft was a long way down. . . If she hit the bottom, death would be instantaneous. . . The fear would disappear after she jumped. . .
Something was holding her back. Sure she was afraid to die but that fear lurked inside her at every waking moment on this night. At first, she hid because of this constant fear, but now she travelled around with it still within her soul. She had learnt to cope with it. Death was no longer the end to her; she had seen her father; there was something beyond. There was no guarantee the souls of the dead would do anything to her if she passed on, so why was she still so damn willing to live?
A face appeared in her mind, a face that made her smile warmly. It was Kain. He was the reason she was still going on. In some crazy part of herself, she didn't believe the parasite that had dominated his body would be enough to destroy him for good. Also, she didn't want to disappoint him. She wanted to live for him and it was a peculiar sensation to her. He had placed a great deal of faith in her abilities, far more than she believed she would ever understand. To give up now would be the greatest insult to his memory she could muster.
Sherry started down the seemingly bottomless ladders, filled with a new sense of purpose.