Nemesis: Resident Evil III

Chapter Forty Five: D Class Emergency

While the remains of the Pursuer sank to the bottom of the waste disposal tank below, Carlos was now focused on getting himself and Jill out of the city before the nuclear missile was launched at dawn… and dawn was not very far off. The first step of this was to take care of the young woman's leg, at least as best as he could, given the situation, which meant helping her walk all the way back to the control tower in order to get the first aid box that he had seen hanging on the wall.

With the supplies inside, as well as the bandages left inside Nikolai's pouch, he was able to clean and wrap her wounded leg, at least enough to stop the bleeding. The young man knew damn well what an absolute prick the Lieutenant had been, but he still couldn't believe he went as far as shooting Jill just so that… well, he was glad that Nikolai was dead, so as far as he was concerned, the matter was settled. Using the last of the morphine to dull her pain, Carlos found a long segment of metal pipe with a curved joint on the end that the young woman could use for a makeshift crutch, and now they were ready to go.

"Okay, so how do we get from up here to down there?" He asked, pointing out the window at the waiting helicopter. "I haven't seen any rope around, and there's no ladder or stairs, so… what do you think?"

"Maybe we can only get there through another building." Jill suggested, leaning to look out the window at the surrounding facility. "Let's try going back outside."

Neither one of them wanted to backtrack all the way through this place, especially when the young man saw how hard it was for her to walk. Fucking Nikolai, he found himself thinking again as he helped the young woman walk back the way they came, piece of shit really got what he deserved, and as horrible as it was to see the Lieutenant's face just decimated while his body had been left lying in a twisted, unnatural position… Carlos couldn't help but smile a little.

He had to hold onto Jill tightly to keep her from falling down the stairs, and then he just decided to carry her so that they could get through the fumes of the waste disposal room more quickly… although he did stop long enough for the two of them to look down into the purplish liquid where bubbles were still rising from where the Pursuer had sunk to the bottom after falling in. Man, he was glad to see a weapon that actually worked against that monster, since after everything that it had just walked through, the young man had actually started to believe that it was invincible… heh, didn't look so invincible now, though.

Making their way back up the stairs that followed, Carlos helped Jill move around the machines and pipes that were between them and the broken front door of the old treatment plant, but as soon as they were back in the open night air, he wasn't sure what to do. Simply heading down Ivy Street into the forest was out of the question, since the young woman could no longer move fast enough for them to get away before Raccoon City was destroyed, and there were several buildings that made up the treatment plant as a whole, so which one should they choose?

Dawn was fast approaching, meaning that there was no time to try out each facility, so he helped her move around the outside of the plant until finding a door that they both liked, which happened to be at the front of a large square building. From the outside it looked kind of like a warehouse, and hopefully it would be just as wide open and empty as one, too, since if it didn't have a back door to the landing pad, they needed to know as quickly as possible.

The door was locked, and Carlos had to help Jill lean down far enough for her to be able to pick it, but with the time before the launch quickly ticking away, it felt like everything the two of them were doing was taking forever. The young man almost wished that there could have been an alarm or a countdown or something so that he would know just how much time was left before everything was destroyed, because without the prior knowledge that the missile was coming, tonight would have felt like any other night in Raccoon City.

Click, the lock popped open, allowing the two of them to pull open one of the heavy double doors before rushing inside, and… and what the hell happened in here? The building was definitely laid out like a large storage warehouse, with huge metal crates stacked up in rows of three, while the old incandescent light fixtures didn't cast nearly as much illumination as they should have… although it was enough for them to see all of the bodies.

Zombies, those red and green beasts that he had seen in the hospital, and even a few big things that Carlos had never encountered before were spread out across the floor, riddled with bullet holes and burn marks… and among them were armed men in uniforms with weapons, covered in teeth marks and deep slashes from claws. The armed men weren't wearing UBCS uniforms though, more like a camouflage pattern than standard olive drab, and the letters US were stenciled on some of their equipment. Were these guys from the US Army, then?

The young man knew that the American National Guard was securing the borders of the city to keep the situation from spreading, but he hadn't expected to see any of them within its limits, so what were all these guys doing there? Had they somehow known that this plant was an Umbrella facility, and tried to take it? Must have walked right into a whole nest of zombies and those clawed monsters, but… but there was one monster that looked different than all the others… it was mostly human looking except for the discolored bronze skin and bald head… and the massive claws at the end of its hands.

It was almost as big and imposing as the Pursuer, and thankfully it was dead; just kind of slumped against the wall right below a large impact mark, as if it had been thrown backwards and then just collapsed where it fell. The gigantic hole in its chest explained the cause of death, but now Carlos couldn't help wondering what kind of weapon could do that to such a creature… until he found the answer after looking back in the direction that the shot had come from.

A clear path had been made between it and the other end of the warehouse, with the edges around what remained of the metal crates twisted and burned like a missile had come flying through, so he and Jill followed the path of destruction all the way to the other end of the building, where they discovered two very important things. The first one was a metal door that must have led out to the landing pad based on where it was located on the wall… and the other was a huge machine that almost looked like some kind of… maybe a… uh… maybe a cannon out of a science fiction movie.

It was bigger than the shipping crates, with a huge barrel sticking out of one end, and a mess of cables and wires coming out of the other, as if this weapon was meant to be mounted on a truck or something, and these soldiers had decided to try setting it up inside this room for some reason… probably for shooting that big thing over there. Looks like the weapon worked, but it wasn't enough to stop the entire unit from being massacred… then again, the monsters didn't exactly win either, so these Army guys did a hell of a lot better than the UBCS when they first landed.

"This would have been nice to have earlier, huh?" Jill commented, scoffing as she looked at it for a second. "Come on, we gotta get to the helicopter."

She was right of course, so the two of them walked over to the back door, where he pulled on the latch, only to discover that it was locked. This was no big deal, since the young woman still had her lock-picking set, but unfortunately there was no keyhole. No keyhole, no locking bolt, no nothing… just an electronic control panel that looked kind of like a card reader… except the card reader had been ripped off, replaced with a series of wires and cables that plugged right into the building's power supply and ran right over to the cannon… but why would someone do such a thing?

Carlos wasn't exactly an electrical engineer, nor was Jill by the way they both started pulling on the door in frustration, meaning that without being able to use and somehow bypass this card reader, there was no way for them to get through the door. No windows around the warehouse, either, and the walls were concrete, so there was no way to break through… nor was there any time for them to go back outside and hope to find another access point to the landing pad.

"So… what… did they use the building's power to make the cannon work?" The young man asked, looking over at the weapon. "Now, I'm no electrista, but it doesn't seem like a warehouse like this would be able to supply that much… I mean, the lights are barely on in here."

"Not for the cannon, no." Jill replied, following the cables a little more closely. "But maybe for its control unit, do you think?"

It was worth a shot, so the two of them traced the cables from where the card reader was, all the way over to the giant weapon, where they found, as she thought, that they were plugged into a kind of control station that was sitting right next to the weapon. From this, she deduced that the controls had simply replaced the card reader, but since it was probably still connected to the door's electronic lock, maybe it just needed the right stimulus in order for the door to open… but what was it?

Simply turning the device on seemed to be the logical way to start, so Carlos pressed the power button, and then jumped a little when there was a hard click that echoed throughout the room, followed by the crackle of electricity as the indicator lights, both on the controls and the cannon began to light up. A sharp beep also came from back over at the door to the landing pad, giving the young man even more hope when a red light appeared above the socket where the card reader was once mounted. Great, the lock was at least active now, although the sound of something slowly building up power kind of disturbed him as the lights on the cannon got brighter, so…

Crash! Bam! Whump! His thoughts were interrupted by the next sound that echoed through the warehouse; pieces of metal and roof materials falling down to the floor from above when something broke its way through. Falling down from the ceiling and landing hard onto the concrete floor, at first Carlos didn't understand what he was looking at… the whole thing was scarred and deformed, consisting of a large arm that was covered in what looked like burn marks, and… and for a moment the whole thing looked like a dismembered torso, if not for the… holy shit, was that a mouth attached to the stomach where the legs were supposed to be?

Yeah, there was a kind of… insectoid looking set of mandibles underneath the torso's stomach, but the scars and burn patterns on this… abomination looked familiar, but no… that was impossible… how could the Pursuer still be able to function in that condition? How had it gotten out of that tank of purple stuff? How had it found them without a head? The answer to all this came when the monster plunged its mandibles into the body of the largest monster in the room, looking like it was trying to… feed off it?

And then it started to get bigger.