Nemesis: Resident Evil III
Chapter Thirty Three: The Hospital
The one and only good thing about what was happening was that Jill was finally able to get some sleep, Carlos thought as he looked both ways down the street after leaving the office where he had left her, trying to be positive. But what was there to be positive about, really? Aside from the young woman lasting a whole lot longer already than Murphy had when he was bitten back at the pharmacy, Jill getting infected by that monster was the worst thing that could have possibly happened, and although he wasn't fond of admitting this… Carlos was scared.
Only a few hours ago he had met this amazing woman who was beautiful, intelligent, brave, good in a fight… and now after everything the two of them had managed to survive to get this far, it was a microscopic virus that was threatening to take her away. This T-Virus, as Jill called it, was not something that could be treated by normal means, and now the only hope of saving her rested in something Mikhail had said back in the helicopter before the mission started, and honestly… the young man was not sure that he heard it correctly.
Getting into a crouched position in the shadows by the office door where the streetlights didn't reveal him, Carlos looked both ways down the largely unobstructed street, relieved to find that there were no zombies or other monsters around, before moving on. Maybe all the monsters had been drawn toward the noise and light around the other side of the clock tower, since the fire could still be seen and heard even though the battle with Jill's stalker was over… whatever the case, the route over to the hospital was clear, so the young man stood up and ran toward the illuminated red cross in the distance.
The gray and white four story building towered over everything else around it except for the clock tower… well, even that now that the clock part had been destroyed, and with all of the air conditioning ducts and compressors that he could see outside, the door that he was approaching must have been the back entrance. Of course it was… had to be since there was no parking lot, nor any reserved spaces along the road for ambulances to pull up for bringing in critical patients. There was just a set of glass double doors with a white light over it for illumination, a sign that said the hospital's normal hours… like that mattered anymore… and a strong smell of death that made him take a step back after pushing the door open.
"Dios bueno." He said having to hold his nose. "Que demonios es eso?"
Carlos had been right about this being the hospital's rear entrance, with the glass doors opening up into a small lobby with white walls and a tile floor, illuminated by over a dozen small single blub fixtures that were probably supposed to induce calm with their dim light. It was a pretty typical setup for a hospital; rows of uncomfortable looking seats for the patients, a couple vending machines against the wall in the back with an out of order sign on one of them, and a small television on a wall mount, displaying the rainbow colored Emergency Broadcast System logo… for an audience of the dead.
More than a dozen people, all infected by the looks of their skin and eyes, lie motionless on the floor or across the rows of seats, with countless bullet holes peppering the walls behind them, and several more UBCS soldiers scattered among them. Like his own team, these guys must have been ambushed immediately upon arrival… and overwhelmed just like all the others. There was something else there, too… some kind of… creature lying there on the floor, and it certainly didn't look human.
It was dead; its large, gorilla-like body riddled with bullet holes, while the discolored green substance pooled around its body was clearly the source of the overpowering smell of the room. Good thing it wasn't alive, too, since the thing had some nasty looking claws at the end of its powerful arms and legs, their effectiveness shown by the deep slashes through some of the nearby bodies and even across the walls. The teeth visible in its partially open jaw were not quite as bad as the claws, although still large and sharp, and it looked like the creature's whole body was… skinned?
Zombies, giant insects, Jill's stalker, and now a kind of skinned gorilla with claws? What the fuck was going on in Raccoon City, the young man wondered as he took cover behind one of the rows of chairs in order to look down the corridor that went further into the hospital. Even though the unit there had been wiped out, it looked like they managed to secure the first floor, but this didn't help him find the groundbreaking vaccine that Mikhail had mentioned. After all, it wasn't like there was going to be a sign on the directory board that said experimental vaccine this way, now was there?
Drawing on what he knew about hospital layouts in general, Carlos knew that the first floor was mostly for admissions and surgery, which didn't leave much room for secret projects with so many civilians wandering around. Personally, if he was going to keep something stored inside of a hospital that no one was supposed to find, there were two places that the young man would have considered using. The very top floor of any hospital was normally used for the most violent patients or for those in quarantine so that it was harder for them to escape… but there were also the basement levels where only the hospital staff were allowed to go.
Both places seemed like ideal hiding places for secure items, like vaccines for example, but Jill got closer to succumbing to the viral infection with every second that passed by, so a decision had to be made. As this was a public place, the elevator was real easy to find, right on the other side of the vending machines, and thankfully there were no zombies inside when the doors opened, but that didn't mean he hadn't kept his rifle aimed just in case. Once inside, the doors closed quietly, leaving Carlos with a selection of four floors, three not including the one he was already on, and a single basement level… so which one?
"Basement… fourth floor." He said to himself, looking back and forth at the buttons. "Basement… fourth floor… way up high… underground."
After remembering what happened with all those giant insects the last time he went underground, the young man was suddenly a bit more eager to go upward, so he pushed the button marked 4F without another thought. The button lit up, and a moment later the elevator started moving, going past the second floor… the third floor… and finally coming to a stop on the fourth. Ding… it was at the moment that the bell rang that Carlos realized just how cornered he was if there was, say, a whole herd of zombies waiting for him when the doors opened, for example, so he raised his rifle, aiming at the center of the doors as they slid open to reveal… nothing.
This place was even quieter and more sterile looking that the waiting room had been, white walls and floor without bullet holes or bodies, just a corridor with big fluorescent lights that ran both left and right from the elevator. Wait, there was a body hidden around the corner where the young man hadn't been able to see it until he actually stepped out… it was another of his UBCS comrades, collapsed on the floor like the ones downstairs, but… he didn't look infected… and the only damage to his body was the small hole right between his eyes… like he had been shot.
Except for the poor bastard in the clock tower's chapel who had taken his own life, this was the first soldier's body that Carlos had seen with a bullet wound, who hadn't been infected by the T-Virus. This wound was too big to have been self-inflicted, since the man's hands were still on his rifle, which used 5.56 mm rounds, while the hole between his eyes was much bigger… looking more like a 9mm pistol round, if he had to guess.
It was disturbing to think that this soldier had been shot without being infected, but regardless of why it had been done, there was nothing the young man could do for him… not while Jill was still down in the office fighting against the T-Virus. Like with all hospitals, there was a directory sign on the wall right in front of the elevator so that people could see it as they stepped out onto the floor, and it showed… a bunch of patient rooms… a surgical wing… and a place that was marked as DATA ROOM.
What was a data room, exactly, he wondered? Was it like a patient records library, or maybe a treatment log center? This data room sounded like a good place to start, so the young man followed the sign, taking the corridor to the right, and trying not to make a sound while walking across the overly cleaned floor. Another body was waiting for him around the next corner, UBCS with rifle in hand, dead from a single gunshot wound like the first one, leading Carlos to a grave conclusion.
So far the only monster that he had seen use a weapon was Jill's stalker, and that thing's hands were way too big for conventional firearms, meaning that a human had come through this way, very recently by how fresh the blood was that was dripping from their wounds, and shot these men for… well, that part didn't make any sense at all, now did it? Why on Earth would someone trapped in a city full of undead monsters want to kill people who weren't infected? Especially armed ones who could have helped protect each other?
Bang! Bang! Carlos froze as the unmistakable sound of a pistol being fired reached his ears, echoing through the corridor, and shattering the sterile silence of the hospital. A scream was heard along with the shots… wait, no there were two voices, a deeper one that sounded like it was in a lot of pain, and the other having to belong to a woman… a woman who was frightened. Neither of these voices sounded like someone who would have been firing a weapon at the time, so what was going on?
Of course, the shots and screams came from the direction that the young man was headed, so he picked up the pace, keeping crouched down and moving quietly all the way to where the hallway ended at a door labeled Data Room, and there were voices coming from inside, but… they were too quiet to be understood, even with his ear up against the wooden surface. Two voices, a gruff male with a harsh voice, and a scared woman… no sign of the one who had cried out in pain… forcing Carlos to very carefully turn the knob, and even more slowly open the door.
"Why are you doing this?" The woman's shaky voice asked as he crept inside. "We're all in this together, what could you possibly gain by…
Whack! At first the young man thought the owner of the other voice had smacked the unseen woman when he heard the sound, but realized that it was more of a hard thump with something solid… like a pistol going across her face, followed by a crash when she fell over something like a table, causing a bunch of glass to shatter on the floor, before she yelped after being hit again.
"We are in nothing together, you bitch." A painfully familiar voice said in a thick Russian accent. "Give me all data now, and maybe I let you die with dignity intact."
Aside from Mikhail, Carlos only knew one other Russian who talked like that, and the Captain was dead, so… was it possible that Jill had been wrong when they were leaving in the cable car… could that voice really belong to… Nikolai?