The heft of the grenade launcher in Rebecca Chambers' hands is an oddly comforting weight, the stock resting in the crook of her shoulder as she ascends what feels like the nine hundred and first set of stairs that night into the large foyer. Billy's boots are close behind as the clears the final step and they both peer around the impractically large, unsuitably grandiose, eerily devoid of life room.
"Out of these two doors, how much do you want to bet they're both locked?" Billy shifts the weight of the shotgun barrel down to his side and runs a hand through his hair.
"Remember that crank we found in that small study and you sent me up the elevator with it?"
Billy nods as Rebecca tries not to shudder, mentally trying to squash the memory of fighting another two of those grasshopper-ant-cockroach unholy chimera of all things Squishy and Buggy.
"It led to a room with a clockwork mechanism and, past that…" she points to a sturdy wooden door, mercifully free of bloody handprints but still worn with age and dust, "it leads out to a balcony with a fountain. You can see the facility entrance from there, s' where I came back in."
"Balcony, huh?" Billy sighs wistfully, "Think it'd be too much to ask to go outside, maybe catch a breather?"
He's smiling at her in that easy manner of his but he also looks a little weary. Rebecca can't exactly blame him; the air of the facility felt...heavy, weighted with something thick and foreboding, as if something was gradually pressing down upon them and making each passing moment more difficult to bear than the last.
She supposes the stench of rot and decay lingering in every corner contributes to that.
The S.T.A.R.S. medic checks the magazine (12 bullets. marginally more than she thought she had left.) of her Beretta M9 and stares at the door with distaste. "Zombie crows."
Her companion leans forward noticeably, almost as if he could not hear what Rebecca had said, his eyebrows raised in a manner she has rapidly grown familiar with.
"Ah."
Billy doesn't have to voice the why am I not fuckin' surprised.
On the far right side of the room is another one of the doors decorated on either side with statues of knights. Their crossed blades bar entrance to the room beyond, heavy steel forebodingly preventing any attempt at entrance.
"Do you think explosive rounds might blow through those statues?" Rebecca queries, her voice tinged with hope as she anxiously toys with the pink choker around her neck.
Billy shakes his head. "Nice idea, but I'd prefer to use ammunition like that against things trying to actively kill us."
"So basically everything else in this godforsaken facility, then." Rebecca crosses her left arm over chest, chin resting on the fingers of her right as she closes her eyes and thinks.
The unlocked door downstairs led to the art room, empty of everything except for the corpses of those nightmarishly large bug experiments. The only other door in that room was embossed in a cyan blue paint evocative of rushing water.
Also, locked.
Going back into the entrance hall would just leave them back where they started, with the eyes of that creepy portrait of James Marcus on their backs, leaving the both of them feeling like their every move was being watched with predatory eyes.
Her eyes open and her line of sight darts over to a console of machinery lined along the wall next to the door that led to the balcony.
"Billy!" She calls him over with a gesture, eyes roving around the chain that is wound to one end of the machinery. As he comes closer she places both hands on the lever of the only machine not broken and tries to turn it.
She grunts, straining against the heavy weight of the chain, trying to lift it by pushing with all the meager strength her torso possesses. Her feet slip on the tiled stone floor as she loses traction trying to push forward too much and for all her efforts, the chain hadn't moved an inch.
"Are you… going to help me out?" She manages through gritted teeth, trying not to give up even though the frustration is mounting and the muscles of her slender arms are burning.
"Don't hurt yourself." Billy's eyes are creased in worry and his voice is concerned, not at all patronizing like she might've expected. He comes to her side and her cheeks are starting to flush that familiar cherry red shade of embarrassment, a sensation that was occurring with increasing frequency when Billy Coen was involved.
"I guess my pathetic display was hardly inspiring." She sighs, the air leaving her lungs in one big exhale, frustration and shame evident in her voice.
"You keep getting down on yourself like that, Rebecca. Have you been paying attention to what you've been doing half the night?" Billy tells her as he squares his shoulders and begins to rotate the lever. His (not inconsiderable, Rebecca notes with awe before angrily staring at her own skinny arms) biceps chord tightly in effort as his body moves like a well oiled machine and the sound of the chain links klink-klinking together as they creak to a start fills her ears, shaking free years worth of disuse with a groan.
"No one even as half as competent as you would've got this far. Marines I've known for years, seen some awful shit, would've cracked long before now. You're young, you're inexperienced, and you might not have the most physical strength. But you're determined and willing to prove yourself and have one of the sharpest minds I've seen."
The lever finally comes to a halt and Rebecca hears the whine of creaking metal. A cage, rusted and bent out of shape (with what Rebecca hopes is age and not the destruction of the bars by some imprisoned experiment) is suspended in midair above the caging area. It swings back and forth and the glint of metal below catches her eyes.
"Besides," he smiles at her, "we're a team. That hardly means I've been doing all the heavy lifting- well, maybe just this once."
He gives her a wink and a thumbs up and the flush returns to Rebecca's face. "Give yourself a little credit, Dollface."
Willing (and entirely failing to succeed at) the pink to recede from her cheeks Rebecca nods slowly, still not feeling convinced of herself but buoyed by Billy's kind words. She turns on her heel, footsteps echoing against the concrete around them as she jogs over to the caging area.
She descends the short ladder gingerly, silently praying for her boots to not slip on blood, gore, or viscera, thank you. That possibility seemed increasingly unlikely as the floor beneath her was covered in a thick layer of dirt and grime. In the corner are more of the steel cages, bent and rusted with age, coppered bars spiraling through the air like tree branches, others overturned with bars snapped, curling outwards.
Something had broken out. Something strong.
"These look bigger than the kennels those dobermen were kept in on the train," Rebecca catches herself thinking aloud, a kernel of worry sprouting in the back of her head. The virus had proved itself capable of cross species transmission and, presumably, the dogs infected on the train had been as much of an accident as everything else- scorpion, notwithstanding.
If they're experimenting with something larger, something deadlier… Rebecca worries the inside of her cheeks with her tongue, hesitant to speculate on what, exactly, Umbrella would be engineering considering the menagerie of horrors she'd had to face so far that night.
Her thoughts briefly meander away to a speck of silver among the grimey, dust covered gray of the concrete floor. Rebecca carefully maneuvers around piles of shit- both figurative and literal- until she can reach and grab the key lying beneath the cage suspended in the air above her.
Upon closer inspection, around the head of the key she sees a design scrawled to look like fire, the metal embossed with a garnet red.
The radio crackles at her waist and she picks up Billy's words, muted slightly with static interference.
"Find anything useful?" There's a note of hope in his voice and Rebecca wonders if he's expecting an ammo cache or perhaps a bomb to blow this facility to hell.
"Just…" Rebecca pauses for a second, trying not to feel monumentally disappointed. Little bit of metal to fit in her palm after all the zombies and personal space invasion by mutant bug monsters.
Big risks, tiny returns, Rebecca thinks morosely as she exhales and responds.
"Just a key. Surprise!"
Billy's response is a crestfallen one. "A key? That's all? Dammit. Well, once you get back up here we'll figure out which one of these many,many, many doors it unlocks."
The S.T.A.R.S. medic smiles despite the circumstances and brings the radio close, fingers pressed on the emission button. Any words on her lips are drowned out by the creaking of metal behind her. Rebecca spins around on her heels, grenade launcher nestled in the crook of her shoulder with finger on the trigger as the radio skitters on the floor forgotten. Her feet are spread for a firing stance as the grate in the caging area hits the ground and is crushed under the scuttle of what seems like endless skittering legs.
She doesn't even have time to fire, to shout for help as something is upon her. She cries out, more in surprise than pain as she is swept up, the grenade launcher knocked from her grip and clattering to the floor of the caging area. It seems like the world is rushing up, up, and a fetid smell permeates the air as she struggles in between what feel very much like large, serrated claws.
Rebecca squirms helplessly, her range of motion sorely handicapped. She looks up, trying to ascertain what kind of monster has her in its grip.
"Jesus shit," she swears. "A centipede?"
A very tiny, indiscernible voice, a whisper in the current loud chaos of her mind, the one that isn't overwhelming the rest of her senses with adrenaline, panic, with fear, jesus, all those skittering legs! says, Somehow, I'm not surprised.
The giant insect-arachnid- fucking bug monster- whatever the hell it could be called, Rebecca didn't specialize in entomology, aimlessly peers its oversized head as it clambers from the caging area. Its tiny eyes, beady and bulging, waver in the still air.
Rebecca tries again to move, to reach for her sidearm, hell, even a knife, but she's locked tight in the grasp of the mutant bugs arms. Or legs. Whatever she's currently being squeezed in.
The massive centipede begins to amble about the room, almost aimlessly, Rebecca swaying helplessly in its grasp, what seems like mile after mile of body and leg following after in a never ending example of mutated, scientific excess gone wrong.
"Billy!" Rebecca yells, detesting feeling so helpless, so overpowered by something normally insignificant.
"If you were a normal sized bug I would squash you under my boots!" She says angrily, wriggling her torso with little accomplished other than the centipede crushing her tighter against its body.
She sees a flash of movement and hears Billy scrambling closer to the centipede and his shouted expletive almost makes her smile despite herself.
"What the fuck!"
She hears the boom of the shotgun, and a strange hissing sound and a disjointed shuddering, the centipede swaying and Rebecca hopes, prays that Billy hit it somewhere vital, that most of the buckshot didn't spatter harmlessly against the concrete, that it didn't bounce harmlessly off of virally strengthened carapace.
"How am I supposed to kill this thing?" Billy's voice breaks with panic and he sounds about as terror fueled as Rebecca feels.
He steadies the shotgun against his shoulder again, pulls the trigger, pumps it to reload as gouts of blood burst from the centipede's segmented body. Bits of leg and gore crash to the floor, bursting outwards in a red shower and twitching with remnants of life, but the centipede monstrosity is largely undeterred, ambulating around the caging room minus a few apparently auxiliary body parts.
The centipede stops near the barred doors, the fore length of its body rearing up and Billy hears Rebecca cry out, whether from pain or fear he can't entirely discern.
"Shit shit shit," he swears, sweat pooling down from his brow into his eyes. He hurriedly wipes it away, feet pounding on the concrete as he hurries over to where the centipede is rearing about and pulls out his handgun and fires off one, two, three shots into its body.
The first one misses, scoring marks into the concrete pillar behind the monstrosity and that's just twenty bullets remaining now, great job, Coen.
But next two- nineteen, eighteen- seem to hurt something- Billy looks closely and it looks like one caught it in its right eye- and the centipede rears up even further, hissing and spitting from its elongated mandibles. The monster's antenna twitch rapidly almost as if in pain.
Rebecca seems able to move slightly and she turns her head, a small gleam of hope in her eyes even among the terror in her face.
"Do that again!" She urges, straining against the limbs restraining her, brows furrowed in concentration as she grunts.
"You mean shoot it?" He says pointedly and Rebecca stops her struggling to narrow her eyes for one brief, exasperated second.
"Try to hit the forcipules!"
"The what?" Billy tilts his head, eyebrows arching in confusion, raising his handgun nevertheless.
"The- the big fucking teeth!"
She gestures as best she can to the large pincer like mandibles jutting out from what could approximately could be called its face. There are too many waving tendril like appendages for Billy to even begin to ascertain what might be an eye or an antenna or god forbid, another one of its legs.
"I'm not risking hitting you!" He says, words sticking thickly to the back of his throat.
Rebecca stops her struggling for a moment and her face softens. She meets Billy's gaze, indecision and worry apparent on his features, and she nods.
"I trust you not to."
Billy is at a loss for words for one brief moment, his grip on the handgun slackening slightly as he processes what he just heard, that the young woman he'd been partnered with for only a precious few hours had faith in him, trusted him, believed in him- something he hadn't felt since Africa, since his sentencing.
That moment seems to be long enough for the many legged monstrosity to gain some semblance of purpose as it rears again, its legs rustling against the floor rhythmically as it drags Rebecca along. Billy raises the Army issue handgun and gazes down the sights at its twitching face, and pulls the trigger.
His shots seem to find their mark, tearing through the flesh of its overly large pincers, goring into its body; a plume of blood and bile spills from its wounds and it looks like to Billy that its blood might be steaming, and he keeps firing, three, four more and the Parabellum rounds lodge themselves into the insects' brain, chunks of gore and bone falling to the ground.
Rebecca is flung from its grasp with a yelp, the creature hissing, sputtering, flailing about in its death throes, whipping about and scoring marks in the concrete support pillars. With one last, dramatic, shuddering hiss, it falls to the floor and stills.
Billy pays no mind to the dead bug and runs to Rebecca's side as she is gingerly rising to her feet, his hand moving to the small of her back to help her up.
Her steps are unsteady at first as if she was unsure that would touch solid ground again. She touches her sides and abdomen briefly, appraising the damage, wincing slightly as she moves closer to her ribcage.
"Are you alright- ah, shit. Stupid question," Billy mutters, ruffling his hair sheepishly as he looks to the side.
"I am now. Thank you," she says, breathing out in relief. She looks over and up at her companion, who is staring pointedly at her face.
"What, is something wrong?" Rebecca's voice pitches up in alarm and she touches her nose, cheeks, and eyes, feeling for anything broken or out of alignment.
"Just… that'll leave a nasty bruise," Billy says softly,reaching out to touch her right cheek where she had reunited artlessly with the ground.
Rebecca doesn't move to break contact as his hand touches her face gently, almost hesitant.
His thumb glides against her cheekbone and the rest of his fingers ghost softly across the slightly tingling skin of her cheek, and she couldn't be entirely sure if it was the sensation of his touch or the persisting pain from her fall.
Neither of them say anything as Billy's hand lingers on Rebecca's face for a little too long.
Finally Billy draws away- not without reluctance, Rebecca notes- and he stoops over to pick up the small key that had been jarred from the S.T.A.R.S. medic's grip.
"Care to see if this key was worth all the trouble?"
Visions of two doors they'd noted in passing flickered in her mind- one in the dining room and one in the same hallway that housed the restroom where they had fought the leech zombie, both embossed in the same red color evocative of flames. She nods, taking the key from Billy and making for the stairs back to the main foyer.
"Next time, I vote that you get kidnapped by the giant monster and play damsel in distress," she tells him as she quietly nudges open the door into the foyer, sweeping her handgun and flashlight around before giving the all clear. She brushes brown bangs threatening to fall in her eyes and sighs wearily as they descend the steps past Marcus' painting and enter the dining room.
"Because shit's getting old."
Billy snaps a smart salute in response, "On your orders, Officer. Don't think I'd do as cute a job at it as you, though."
Billy is spared Rebecca's snappy comeback as she fiddles with the lock on the red door and opens it.
To their surprise the room they enter is well lit, a stark change from the score of rooms they've entered illuminated solely by diminishing light.
Immediately in front of the pair, on the prep counter, sits a hunk of raw meat that neither are quite comfortable with identifying. Blood- still bright and wet and recently spilled- is spattered across the steel countertops.
The only sound in the room is the intermittent dripping of water, drops periodically splashing and dispelling the otherwise eerie silence.
Rebecca scans the kitchen for anything useful, hopes rapidly dimming as the only thing to catch her eye is various cooking utensils. "Their kitchen is locked by one specialized key found in a completely unrelated location and the only thing we find is dirt and blood. Should I be surprised?"
"Not at this point, no."
She folds her arms across her chest in resignation as Billy rummages through the cabinets and drawers and starts to worry if anything they have accomplished that night meant anything other than not dying messily at the claws of some giant bug monster.
"Bingo!" Billy declares, a statement that buoyed Rebecca's spirits slightly; their ordeal in the caging room had been worth something, however small.
"Lighter fluid!" His face lights up jovially as Rebecca nears. "Was starting to run low, now we shouldn't be in such poor shape if we run into any more of those leech zombies."
"Do you remember that painting in the study? The one with the old man and the candle?"
Billy nods, an expression of slight confusion on his face as though he doesn't quite recall what Rebecca is talking about but he gamely plays along.
"There was an unlit candle there! I bet now that we have fluid to spare we can unlock the door there- and that might lead to an exit, or answers, or if nothing else, more keys. Come on!"
Rebecca grabs Billy's wrist and drags him along at a full tilt run and Billy can't help but be pulled along. A clearly defined goal in mind seemed to boost Rebecca's flagging spirits and seeing Rebecca so focused inspired Billy in turn.
It wouldn't kill us to be optimistic- everything else is doing a fine job at that. Billy thinks as they re-enter the study. Rebecca hadn't let go of his hand their entire sprint through the hallways and Billy is sorry when her hand untangles from his.
She brushes dust and spider webs clinging to the frame of the painting and peers at the writing inscribed beneath it.
"This light shall guide you to a greater truth," she recites as Billy gently holds the flame to the candle tip. It sparks to life before them and they hear the familiar sound of a locking mechanism being released, gears turning. Rebecca tests the door to find that the knob turns and, right hand firmly on the grip of her Beretta, she pushes it open.
"What do you want to bet that 'greater truth' means 'zombies'?" Billy asks behind her.
The locked door led into a small study, bookshelves filled to the brim sitting next to a computer desk with a monitor that lights the room in a dim glow, a computer that, knowing their luck, likely has encrypted files. To their right on a small raised landing are more bookshelves, but their attention is drawn away from that at the two zombies in front them, attired in ratty labcoats, kneeling on the floor as they mindlessly bite and scrabble at their dead colleague on the floor.
Sightless eyes turn on Billy and Rebecca and they lurch to their feet with a groan, arms outstretched. Rebecca draws her handgun and tries not to smile as Billy brings the shotgun up and lines his eyes up with the barrel.
"Told you."