Chapter Five: Buried
It didn't take a genius to figure out what had happened in the sitting room at the end of the corridor. If it had just been the glass everywhere and the broken furniture, he'd have said it was emotions bubbling over, or a disagreement between the miserable souls condemned to die there.
But the window had been smashed from the outside, and the floor was covered in black feathers. Black feathers and blood.
So it isn't just the dogs. All the animals in and around this place have gone insane. God, if even one of those things make it back to Raccoon...
He shuddered.
They already had. That was why they were here, both in the city and in the mansion. Even now, the escapees Umbrella hadn't caught might be staggering through the suburbs, looking for food they couldn't find in the isolated cabins on the outskirts. Their victims might be waking up, in their homes or in their lockers at the morgue.
That last thought drove the sick feeling deeper into his stomach.
If that happened, the R.P.D wouldn't be the first of line defence. They'd be first on the menu.
"Weird," Jill said. Her voice snapped him back to reality.
"What is?"
"No wood on this fire." She raked a hand through the ashes, long cold, and then glanced back at him. "Just paper. They were burning documents."
"You sure they weren't just cold?"
"There's plenty of wood," she said, nodding at the ruined furniture, "shame we didn't get here sooner. I'd have loved to see what was so important."
He nodded and hoped she couldn't see how glad he was she hadn't found anything. The letter was still burning a hole in his pocket, but so long as it stayed there, the only damage it could do was inside his own head.
Jill rose to her feet and walked to the room's second door.
He followed her through, hoping they weren't stepping into a gallery dedicated to Umbrella's sordid past. She was already suspicious. If they'd buried something here and she got even a hint of it, she'd dig until she found it. And then Wesker would kill her.
He couldn't buy her. Not the way he'd bought Barry.
He would have preferred to take the lead and check the place out before her, but the chivalrous routine would only work for so long. She had a hard head sometimes, and him pressing her to hang back would make her smell a rat all the quicker.
The next room was a gallery. More paintings. More statues. More track-lighting. This was the second one he'd seen so far, and Jill had mentioned a third on the first floor. Whoever owned this place loved their fine art. He couldn't tell if it was motivated by taste or greed, but he was erring towards the latter.
"Somebody's trying a little too hard to convince themselves they've got class," Jill said.
He smirked. So she'd been thinking the same thing he had.
"Someone oughtta tell them it takes more than money. So what are we looking for?"
"These." Jill fished something out of her pocket and handed it to him.
It was a metal plate about the size of his palm, hexagonal, with an engraving of a stylised moon on the front. The copper put him in mind of a giant penny. It was tarnished dark, like it had been sitting amid the lint in the mansion's back pocket for years.
"I don't get it."
"You remember that back door I told you about?"
He nodded. She'd mentioned something about a puzzle lock. One that had made her skills with the lock pick useless. He guessed this was a piece of that puzzle.
"You only got one of these?"
"I found one before I found the door. In the gallery downstairs. That one I found in a room full of suits of armour."
"Armour?" He shook his head. Everything about this place was ridiculous. "God damn."
She smiled and finished perusing the artwork by the door.
He watched as she took what was no doubt a vase so expensive it could have paid off his mortgage and set it down on the floor. Then, she wrapped her arms around the stone pedestal it had been sitting on and started to drag it towards him.
What was that Chinese thing Sarah had told him about? Something about moving furniture to make a room more lucky?
"Feng shui?"
"Just hold the door," she grunted.
He did as she asked and let her slide the column into place in the doorway. For whatever reason, the doors in this building were sprung to swing closed.
"So far, I've had to deal with falling ceilings, electrified switches and vents pumping poisonous gas. This time, the door stays open. Just in case."
"Booby traps? That's a joke right?"
"It's probably someone's idea of a joke," she said, patting the top of her makeshift doorstop, "now help me look for those crests. I'm getting a good vibe from this place."
They separated amid the glass cases, keeping one another in sight as they moved through the room. It wasn't hard. Nothing here came up higher than Barry's waist.
The collection on display was an eclectic mishmash of artefacts from around the world. Rifles, including an early model Lee Enfield and a German Gewehr 98, opposed in the trenches during World War 1, now united on a common wooden mount. Tribal masks that looked like the papier mache Halloween masks Moira and Polly had made at school one year.
There was even a scale model of the mansion itself. The detail was stunning. It must have taken days to put together.
He looked over the miniature house for awhile. There was a card sitting in the flock grass at the front of the building. It said: "The Arklay Manor. Commissioned by Lord Ozwell Edwin Spencer. Designed by the late George Trevor."
He tried to find an exit other than the locked back door. But aside from the front entrance, there were no other ways in or out that he could see. And since the roof was fixed in place, he couldn't take a look inside the building either.
There was a brass plaque bolted to the wall opposite, nestled between two expensive-looking oil paintings. It was the most unexceptional thing in the entire room. So much so that it stuck out like a sore thumb.
This gallery stands in tribute to George Trevor, builder of this house.
Loving father.
Devoted husband.
Dear friend.
"Guess we know who to blame for this crazy place now."
"It's not the place that bothers me," Jill said, from somewhere in the corner, "I think I found something over here."
He saw her crouching down by one of the cabinets and felt a flash of fear. If she'd found one of the remaining crests then great, but what if she'd found something else? Something incriminating. He kept forgetting their aims weren't compatible.
He was quite happy to get the hell out of this mansion without finding a thing, but she was hungry for answers. That hunger would get her into trouble if he didn't keep an eye on her.
He swallowed his apprehension and walked over to where she was kneeling.
She had her hand pressed to the floor, fingers describing the gaps between the tiles.
He raised an eyebrow when she looked up at him.
"There's a draft here," she said.
"And?"
"And we're in the middle of the house. Air's getting in through the floor from below. It's hollow."
"Are you sure...?"
Her shotgun butt slamming into the floor cut him off. The tiles fractured. A couple more blows and they'd turned into a jumble of fragments on a background of bare boards. She started sweeping them out of the way, smashing any that stuck with the gun again. Pretty soon, she'd cleared a space about two feet square. All he could see was the wood beneath.
"Jill, I don't..."
She brought the shotgun down one last time. Wood splintered with a jarring crunch. Then she began to pry back the damaged boards.
She'd been right. There was a hole under the floor, one that dropped into darkness. God only knew how deep it went. She unfurled a sheet of paper from her hip pack and laid it out on the ground. It was a map of the mansion's ground floor.
"Where the hell did you find that?"
She smirked. "That'd be telling. Actually, it was just on a table in the smoking room where I found the shotgun. But as far as I can tell... This hole just falls into empty space between rooms. Pretty weird, right?"
"Right."
He watched as she peered into the black below, angling her flashlight left and right, trying to see what, if anything, lurked down there.
"I can see the bottom, but not much else. It's about ten feet deep." She clicked off the flashlight. "I'm going down to take a look."
"Now I know you're joking."
"Did I put on my clown makeup this morning by mistake?" she asked, standing up and uncoiling a length of rope that had been tied around her waist, "just hold this, okay? Trust me."
She slapped the end of the line into his hands and let the rest tumble away into the hole. She was going to do this. He could either help or get the hell out of the way.
"Okay, just gimme a sec," he said, wrapping the rope around his forearm and tightening his grip around it.
At a nod from him, she took it up, giving it a quick tug to check he had a hold on it. Then, she walked backwards into the hole.
It reminded him of the rappelling drills he used to lead when he'd been a Captain with SWAT. She was awkward with inexperience, but with a little practice, she could have been a pro. Even without, she seemed to understand the theory behind the actions.
He remembered Chris had picked it up pretty quick too.
She dropped out of sight. A few moments later, she touched the bottom and the line fell slack.
"Oh shit!" she yelled.
Cold fear prickled the back of his neck, but she answered before he could even ask what was wrong.
"There's a body down here. Looks like he's been dead awhile. A long while. He's practically a skeleton."
He could feel a rising urge to ask her if she was joking. Her tone was making it clear she wasn't.
"Any idea what killed him?"
"Does despair kill?" she asked, "he's curled up in a ball hugging his knees. God, Barry, he looks like he's been here for years."
Years. Before any of this even started. What the hell happened in this place?
"He got any ID on him?"
"Tailored suit. Expensive shoes. The owner, maybe?"
That wasn't likely. Wesker had said the mansion was owned by the chairman of Umbrella, and he was somewhere in Europe right now.
Then again, how had he acquired the mansion in the first place? Rich people tended to be a whole other level of crazy.
"There's a tombstone here," Jill said.
He balked.
"Dear George. Your trials are at an end. Rest now and live forever in our hearts. This inscription's downright sinister."
George? As in Trevor? The architect? Did they bury him in the goddamn walls? Stall for time. Need to think.
"Anything else?"
No answer. He thought he could hear rustling. And then...
"Can't see anything," she said, "okay, I'm coming back up."
Think fast, Barry. Is Wesker gonna be okay with her knowing this? And even if he is, you think you can keep her in the dark forever? Now or never. Time to take control of this.
His free hand dipped to his belt, sliding the hunting knife from its cover. He felt the rope pull tight in his hand as Jill started to make her way back up. He hesitated for a moment, and then cut the line.
He winced when he heard her hit the floor with a thud.
"You okay, Jill?"
She swore and blew out a heavy sigh. "Yeah, fine."
"Just a moment. I'll go look for another rope."
And think about what the hell I'm going to do now.
"Take your time," she called after him, "I'm not going anywhere."
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Wesker was emerging from the storeroom when he reached the bottom of the stairs.
Barry felt dread settle in the pit of his stomach like brick dust, weighing him down until his footsteps became a shuffle. Every time the Captain showed up, this mission got worse.
"I trust your search is going well," he said.
"Yeah, sure. I need a rope. Jill's stuck in a hole upstairs and I have to get her out."
He brushed past him and into the room. There was a lot of old junk there. A big wooden trunk with a heavy lid and an iron latch. A dusty old typewriter. Some cardboard boxes filled with bags of some kind of compost. There was even a busted old shotgun that made his inner gunsmith weep at its neglect. It pleaded with him to pick it up, to rescue it from its dismal fate, but the last thing he needed was to be carting broken weapons around.
"If Miss Valentine has been rendered inactive, it may be in our best interests to leave her that way. For the time being, at least."
Barry rounded on him. "You may not feel any loyalty to these people, but I do. I can't just leave her there. She's expecting me to go back for her."
"And you will. But only once our mission is complete."
He growled. "Wesker..."
But he was right.
If Jill stayed in that hole, she'd be safe, not only from the monsters, but from herself. It was best if she stayed there, much as he hated to admit it. And he did hate it.
"Care to explain to me why the architect of this place is bricked up in the walls?"
Wesker raised an eyebrow. It was the closest to surprise he seemed to come. "This building was constructed before my time. All the same, the organisation's protocol has remained largely the same. If he was deemed to be a threat to security, he would have been eliminated. I can only assume he was interred here for want of a better location."
"Like it did you any good. All those people you must have killed to protect your dirty little secrets and you couldn't even keep the lid on it yourselves."
"What you are seeing here is the worst case scenario, Barry. Umbrella's role in biological warfare is preventative, as an extension of the Department of Defence. Procedures were in place to avert an outbreak, not to contain it. That is why I am here, and why I have enlisted your assistance."
"Extorted is more like it. You honestly expect me to believe I'm betraying good people for some higher purpose?"
"You may choose to believe what you like. Ignoring Umbrella's research into combating biological terrorism, the economic impact of this incident, should it be discovered, could be devastating on a global scale."
"So we just ignore whatever companies like them do because it suits us? We just accept it, or turn a blind eye, or help them get away with it?"
"If we value the benefits that outweigh the costs, yes."
"You're a real piece of work, you know that?"
"Morality is not the only factor that needs to be considered. Your family, for example."
"Don't talk about them. Don't you dare talk about my family."
He clawed at the back of his head, because it itched and he was frustrated. He couldn't think. The dilemma was swirling around in his head, uprooting thoughts and smashing them against the walls of his skull. Nothing seemed definite anymore.
What was right? What was wrong?
Was it right to let these bastards get away with this? Was it right to let thousands, maybe millions, of people lose their jobs, lose their livelihoods, lose the medicines and procedures that could save their lives, all for the sake of his clean conscience? Could he even afford to have morals right now?
"Enough people have died today, Barry," Wesker said.
He frowned. That wasn't something he'd ever expected to hear the other man say.
"With your assistance, I can complete my mission. Our colleagues will never learn what really happened here, the evidence will be destroyed and the case will be closed. It will end with us. But only if I have your assistance."
He dropped his face into his hands. He wasn't sure how he was going to live with himself after this. But he couldn't see an alternative.
Damned if you do. Damned if you don't. Great choice.
He blew out a breath and lifted his head.
"What do you need me to do?"
-x-x-x-x-x-
A/N:Critique appreciated, as always. I'll get writing the next chapter as quick as I can. Hope everyone enjoys this, and sorry about the wait.
Thanks to CJJS for tips to improve.