A/N: Xaori - I can't stop laughing. Only Redfield gets pants. HAHA. The way it should be. And somehow wrong.
Let's have everyone fight naked, shall we? Bahahha.
Unknown reviewers - thank you for reading and reviewing - I know the couplings are a bit weird in this tale. But I am known to most as the lover of the odd and crack pairs so there ya go. What can I say? I like exploring angles that we don't see in the game.
Thank you so much for reading this story.
Chapter 12: Eradication
"Swept aside, swept away, swept along…sweeping, steeping, stopping…she couldn't hold on."
Russia, April
The pounding in his head was like hoof beats from a thousand horses let loose from hell. He felt like someone had taken a ball peen hammer and was striking his brains repeatedly. If he shifted, would his skull split apart?
It was cold and damp and the floor beneath his cheek was freezing. His fingers brushed the concrete as he opened his eyes. His blurry vision cleared and he found himself staring out into a disheveled laboratory. Tanks filled with…creatures half formed and clearly born of nightmares floated in gelatinous green goo. Some were cracked and broken, spilling the dead out in an obscene puppet show.
Desks were over turned, tossed, papers littering the floor like confetti. Someone had barricaded the door with two pushed over file cabinets and their contents spilled around them. He shifted, pushed himself up in a push up motion and discovered that his head would not split apart after all.
He was dressed in black. Black tank top, black sweats. Someone had taken the time to dress him. A quick search of his body found him unharmed, save for the bandage on his chest that had been where they'd shot him. It was already forming into a nice pink scar. So this told him it had been some time since they'd taken him. How long was irrelevant. But he speculated it was a week at least if not more.
And then the room began to talk to him.
"Mr. Redfield – good to see you've awoken."
He looked for speakers or something that was offering the voice but in the age of tiny and hands free, he was wasting his time trying to find the source.
He hated asking the obvious but what choice did he have?
"Where am I?"
"The Maze." The voice sighed, "I've let the other rats loose too. The one who hits the feeder bar and doesn't die from the shock may even get out alive."
The face floated into his mind, familiar, so familiar. Where had he seen that face before? Where had he seen that face?
"The scientists all died so quickly. The data is really useless. They scattered, screamed, died. I need someone to FIGHT. So, I thought, who better then Chris Redfield? Who better than the man who survived Spencer – twice. Who survived the outbreak in China. Who seems to ALWAYS survive. Don't be afraid, Chris. You never die…the rest of the rats though? Who's to say."
He turned and found a gun laying on the floor where he'd been. He hesitated but finally picked it up.
"There you are. Now you're ready." A buzzer sounded somewhere in the distance. "The game begins. Access your memories and you'll be ready to play. I'll wait for you in the tower. Good luck!"
The silence was deafening and very brief. The tube beside him began to hum.
He turned, slow, horror movie slow, as it cracked, spider webbing across the glass in a series of endless lines. The thing inside snarled, twisting against the goo that held it. A hunter, a horrible, ugly, nearly reptilian beast with beady eyes on squat, heavily muscled body. And claws as long as a man's forearm.
He turned and ran. The file cabinets were blocking his only escape. He grabbed one and shoved, throwing all his weight behind it. It was intensely, impossibly heavy but he didn't lift weights for nothing. It moved, scraping with a metallic scream over the concrete. The door was still blocked by the second, tilted onto it's side like a death omen.
He grabbed it and shoved, shoved, and the tube behind him exploded in a shower of tinkling glass and goo. He heard it leap free, heard it land, and heard it stalk quick and hungry toward him. He didn't drop the cabinet he was pushing, he just changed angles.
At the last moment, he shoved the cabinet onto the hunter. It roared, catching the thing like a man might, pushing against the massive weight.
Chris didn't hang around to watch it wrestle that weight, he jerked open the door and ran through it. Barefoot, he was surprisingly fast. The hallway was long and narrow. There were two locked doors he came across while running and one wide open at the end of the hallway. Sure, he was being led. He knew it. But he ran anyway.
He burst into the room beyond the hallway and slid, jerking around to slam the door shut in his wake. The hunter smashed into the door as it slammed, snarling, roaring. He heard the squeal of claws on metal and it grated into his pounding head.
The door had no lock, no way to stop it from opening it. It smashed into the metal, screaming. Chris threw his body weight against it, desperately searching the room for some way to fight the thing. The little 9mm in his hand would just serve to piss it off. Like tossing rocks at it. Or spraying it with a hose.
The room was a garden of sorts. It had a fountain in the center and herbs sprouting around it. It was ransacked as well, pots overturned and broken, the water in the fountain pink from blood. There was a ladder on the far side, offering a climb to the balcony above. As far as he could tell, the balcony was the only way out of the room.
But he'd never outrun the hunter beating on the door. No way. On his best day, he was only a passable runner. And that thing was bred for speed. It was stand and fight or die trying. The most he could hope for was a quick and merciful death.
He turned and jerked open the door. The Hunter lunged and he slammed the door in its face, once, twice. He used the door like a weapon, bashing it, smashing the metal into the charging thing with a nearly desperate speed.
When it got one muscled arm around the door and swiped those claws at him, he smashed the door on that arm and could only hope he broke it. The hunter screamed, screamed, the high pitched wail beating against his brain like angry fists.
It smashed into the door, once, twice, three times and he finally threw it open, wide. The hunter burst forward, it's gnashing teeth wrapped around the barrel of the 9mm and he pulled the trigger and kept on pulling it. The weight of the hunter atop him drove him to the floor with it riding him down. He kept inside its attack radius, using the meat of its own body to protect him from those swiping claws. Only one arm was working, the other dangling uselessly.
So at least he'd broken the arm after all.
One claw sliced a clean line over his left bicep but the pain was easy to disconnect. And after the fourth bullet went into his brain, the thing became dead weight atop him. The warmth of blood spilled over his chest and collarbone.
The sound of rushing water from the fountain was punctuated by his fast, scared breathing.
He lay there, for just a moment, and fought to remember he'd seen worse. He'd done worse. He'd survived worse. And he'd be damned if this was how he was going to die. As some rat in some psycho's cage.
He shoved the dead hunter off of him and climbed to his feet, splattered in blood. His arm wasn't badly cut, it was superficial at best. Most of the blood on him was from the beast he'd just slaughtered.
He moved toward the ladder and ejected the clip on the 9mm, checking how many rounds he had left. Nine rounds left. If he faced another hunter or two, he'd be deader than disco.
So he tucked the 9mm into the waist of the sweats and climbed the ladder. Because standing there wasn't going to do any good. And the only way out was to play the game. Win or lose, he had to play.
Claire felt the pain of her aching head. It rang like a bell inside the throbbing center of her forehead.
She twitched her face to see if it was broken.
Could a face be broken?
It would seem the answer would have to wait for another day because she was ok. Her face hurt, good lord it hurt, but she was otherwise unharmed.
Her arms tugged and found themselves unbound. Her legs shifted and were free.
She was lying on her back in the grass with a fountain burbling beside her. She was dressed - in the ugliest shade of purple ever - which totally clashed with her hair - and slowly got to her knees in the fog that slid thick and goopy around her.
Pea soup, Claire mused, which wasn't a good thing when one awoke alone in a potentially dangerous situation.
She glanced at the fountain, curious. It was just water, stone, and a delicate looking cat with its mouth open spilling water into the foamy pool that waited below it.
She wasn't sure why, but something about the whole thing made the hair on the back of her neck stand up.
Something shivered in the fog.
Claire shifted, eyeing the darkness. She scanned the fog, looking for anything to use as a weapon.
There was a heavy tree close to her. It had shed some rather large branches from its dying base. The leafless canopy of its naked branches jutted into the dewy sky forlornly, as if it were pointing toward the heavens to beg for relief from a slow demise. Claire gripped one of the branches and lifted it, checking for strength.
Good, it was heavy without being too heavy and made to be swung like a bat.
She braced herself, listening.
The sounds of approach grew closer, her shoulders tensed.
The fog split and the dog came from the misty air with a snarling burst. She swung, the rotting beast met the makeshift bat with a crunch and a yelp, and blood fell as it was tossed to the side to roll away into the fog that it had left behind.
Claire's pulse sped up, her breathing turned fast and ready. She listened again.
It padded toward her now, pacing and snapping its rotting jaws.
She eyed it daringly.
"Come on, you ugly bitch, you a coward? Come get some."
The necrotic mutt threw back its head and bayed its hunger to the swirling dark.
Claire braced, and it came for her one more time.
New York, April
"You're not trying hard enough! I should kick your ass for just SITTING HERE!"
The things on the desk went flying. They were scattered by an angry swipe. They were tossed to the floor with rage that knew no bounds.
Sitting behind the desk, angry blue eyes met rage-filled hazel.
"You better back down, kid, right now. It's my daughter who's missing too. MINE. Don't get in my god damn face and threaten me."
"...find her, Barry. I mean it...how can they all go missing and NO ONE HAS A CLUE HOW TO FIND THEM!?"
Piers and Barry held eyes. It sparked and flashed with stifled fear.
Barry finally answered, softly, "Because somebody on the inside paved the way, you know that. You already know that. It's just too fucking horrible to admit it."
"Somebody turned Benedict Arnold." Piers breathed, so softly.
"Oh, yeah. Somebody close to the top. Somebody sold them out, all of them. The question is: who?" Barry rose, pacing a little. His huge body was carefully contained in a suit that was missing the tie with the jacket left open over a wrinkled white shirt, "We can't do shit until we know where they are, Piers. But we can do this. We can find the traitor. We can find the mole."
They locked gazes again.
Piers finally nodded, slowly, carefully, "Who has access to that kind of information, Barry? Some of it is classified so far up the wire that I can't see it. Shit, I wonder if CHRIS can see some of it."
Barry glanced at his laptop. He hesitated.
And then he said, "I can access all of it. And so can whoever's been ghosting my machine."
They locked eyes again. Piers jerked a little. "Somebody has eyes on you?"
"Oh, yeah. IT found it just this morning. A backdoor virus of some kind. Likely got in through an attachment on a classified file. Whoever it was sent me an email with legitimate information, I clicked the file, and POOF opened the gate for them to ride right on in and get confidential information. Boom. Instant access."
Piers clicked a few keys on the laptop. "Anybody speculating on the WHO?"
Barry sighed, shifting, "I've had ten emails just in the last ten minutes. The list is about twenty people long right now. The bad news is that once the person opened the door, who knows who they were sending the intel to. Without knowing the mole, we can't even begin to track the leak back to the source."
Piers smiled, slowly, slyly, "You know what? I think we can." He shifted and started typing.
Barry eyed him, brow lifted, "How so?"
"I'm going to leak "intel" on here. Set up a false trail. If the person clicks it and forwards it, we'll have our direct link to them. It's a backwash program. The second the leak takes a "sip", it'll spill right back into their mouth."
Impressed, Barry watched him key in a weird combination of buttons. Computer mumbo jumbo always confused him. He'd read somewhere that the kid was a whiz on the programming. It was speculated if he hadn't gone into the fight, he'd have been some kind of nerd at the keyboard.
"How long will it take to set up the program?"
"Not long. I figure in an hour, we'll know who sold everyone we care about to the bad guys."
Barry cracked his knuckles. "Kid...keep making promises like that and you can knock all the shit off my desk anytime you want."
With a small chuckle, Piers started making a trap for a very unfortunate spy.
Russia, April
The cold seeped inside, stifling her breath, stiffening her muscles. She shifted and found herself bound, tightly, to the floor on which she lay. Her hands pulled, finding the bindings tight and expertly done. It didn't scare her, not much could, not anymore. She was almost immune to situational fear.
She rolled to a sitting position, her bound hands trapped to the chain that held her to the floor. She was in a wide open room with a dirty wide mirror high above as if it were a gallery and she were being observed on the other side of that glass. There was a rusty horse trough a few feet from her and a set of double doors on the far side of the room.
She wasn't alone in this dungeon. A tube was there with her. And in the tube floated the sexless, horribly familiar presence of a tyrant. The tyrant still slept, kept in stasis until whoever had orchestrated this horrible freak show released it, most likely to end her life.
Ada pulled against the chain that bound her and looked down at her clothes. Red sweats and a red tank top. And the number #11 tattooed on the inside of her arm. She sighed and shifted again, feeling the aches in her body. They'd tranqued her, clearly. And there was dried blood on her face that was itching. So they'd knocked her around some in transport.
Where was Chris? Was he alive?
These questions would have to go unanswered. Because he wasn't the priority. She was. And Ada Wong was very good at priorities. She assimilated the room in a handful of minutes. And the jingle of another set of chains drew her attention.
There was movement, just behind the test tube.
"Hello?"
Female. The voice was female and lilting with the first edge of fear. "Who's there?"
Ada sighed. Fantastic. A tag along. Nothing like being forced to friend up to a piece of human waste. This person, this other girl, she was dead. Maybe not now, but eventually. Games like this never end well for extra people. She was the fifth man on the Star Trek Away Team. She wouldn't survive the episode.
"Are you chained up too?" Ada answered, ignoring the query of who she was.
"No." The girl eased around the tube. Her hands were bound together but she wasn't bound to the floor. She was pretty and very young, blonde. She was wearing pink sweats similar to Ada's red. She was also familiar. Ada prided herself on never forgetting a face. But this one was hanging around the edges of her recollection like a phantom.
What was it? Her brain was generally sharper than this. It was almost embarrassing.
"Let's try to get me unhooked here," Ada slapped on a friendly smile. She was going to try to play friends with the girl. Maybe it would put her at ease and help them both. "I don't like the look of that thing in the tank there."
"Me either." The girl moved to the center of the room to check where the chain was bound. "No one to break the chain here."
She rose, scanned the room and moved toward the far wall. There was a rusty fire ax just lying there on the floor. She picked it up, studying it. "This won't work. It'll break the second it hits that chain."
Ada sighed and shifted. And the intercom spilled a voice down upon them.
"Good morning ladies! Welcome to the Maze! It's lovely to see you both! So different, so beautiful, and perhaps with more in common than you think! You've met before or maybe you didn't? You've been inches away from each other more than once! Maybe we'll see if you can figure it all out AND escape! I'm getting bored up here so I have to move this little reunion along. I'll be waiting in the tower if you can find me! Toodles!"
Ada watched the light turn from red to green on the isolation tank. The liquid began to drain out the bottom.
"Oh my god," The girl breathed in terror.
And the eyes of the tyrant opened. The tube opened, slowly, and the cables connecting the tyrant to stasis snapped off with wet, audible pops. It stepped, slow and terrifying, from the platform. The tyrant was a horrible creation. It was naked muscle and bone and sexless, shapeless fear. It had one hand fashioned into a claw with nails as long as the forearm of a man. It had red beady eyes in a featureless face that might once have resembled a man.
It moved forward, slowly, watching Ada with an almost human intelligence.
Well, she thought, at least it would be quick.
The girl whistled, drawing its attention.
"Hey, big ugly! Yeah you, you ugly fucker. Why don't you come get me?" She lifted the rusty ax as if it would do any good against the thing bred and built for murder.
It changed course and moved toward her. The girl backed up and prepared to make her stand. Ada figured she was stupid, brave, but stupid. It lifted its clawed hand high, higher and brought it down in a swinging arch.
A handful of seconds passed before the girl rolled, ducking left and rolling. Those claws swiped close enough to whack off an inch of her blonde hair but missed taking her head with it. And they smashed into the floor beneath…and severed Ada's chain.
Surprise slapped at her as Ada pulled herself free on her bindings. The cuffs were still on her wrists like ugly bracelets but at least she was free to move. And so she did. She dashed for the doors as the thing advanced again on the blonde.
She was grateful for the help, she was. But she wasn't going to die for this girl.
The doors were locked tight.
"Son of …" She turned and whistled. "Hey!"
The tyrant turned and charged her. One, two…she rolled, as the other girl had done, at the last second. And the tyrant took the doors out in his charge. He went straight through them with a roaring crash and freed the way.
The girl was right behind her as they rushed out of the room behind it. There was a split second to decide where to go.
The hallway was split left or right. They went left, running at full tilt. The tyrant was running fast, faster, fastest behind them.
They slammed into another room and Ada threw the door shut and locked it. As if it would do any good at all. With still no time to plan, they moved. It was a laundry room, essentially with no way out. But Ada wasn't waiting to die here amongst old linens and the smell of mold and mildew.
She ran to the trash chute and shoved the half-full cart of garbage out of the way.
"Go!"
The girl did. She went. She leaped into the chute and shoved herself down without asking why. Good girl. Ada thought maybe she wouldn't die after all.
She climbed into the chute and the door burst open. The tyrant rushed through, screaming in rage. It swiped and she felt those claws slash the air above her as she tumbled, sliding like an excitable child down the chute at an impossible speed.
She rolled as she came out the other side. The smell of old garbage welled up around her. And med squished over her arm and shoulder as she came out of the roll.
They didn't pause for longer than a moment. The girl and Ada started running for it. She didn't think the tyrant could fit down the chute but she wasn't taking any chances. The fog swelled around them thick and dense.
They raced blindly through it and Ada heard the impossible. She heard the tyrant burst out of that chute. It must have found a way to compress its body to fit. Which made it smarter than any tyrant she'd ever seen.
They barreled through the fog, feet barely touching the ground. Ada followed the sounds of water, thinking if they could just reach it, maybe they could find a place to hide…or a weapon…or something.
Or maybe they'd just run right into the arms of their waiting death.
But at least by running...they stood a chance.