The man that had once been one of Umbrella's finest opened his eyes to what looked like total darkness. He didn't recall when he had blacked out or why. There had been a time, back when he had been 19, when he had passed out in the lab for no particular reason and awakened feeling exactly like this... dazed, disoriented, confused. He was later told that he had whacked his head a good one on the edge of a desk on the way down. He had suffered from headaches for the next week.
Ada was gone, and the samples had gone with her, but that was in the back of his mind. His eyes began to adjust, and he realized that he wasn't in complete darkness, afterall. There was moonlight, but it was straining through the fog, casting a kind of otherwordly glow on the alleyway and the brick buildings that lined it.
Wait, his eyes had to adjust? He should have been able to see clearly, even at night. At least, that was how it had worked before.
His stomach ached. Not a hungry ache. He pulled himself onto his knees and ran his hand over it...
...And it almost went right through. He jerked his hand away as if he had burned himself. His fingers were wet, sticky, coated in deep red blood. Then the pain started. White hot flashes of it, surging through his stomach and chest. He remembered this feeling clearly. It was the way it felt after you had been impaled by a tyrant's claws.
'Impossible,' but he couldn't deny the pain, even if he shouldn't be feeling it so vividly in his inhuman state. Come to think of it, all of his senses except for that of pain seemed to have dulled considerably. "Ada!" he called, but his voice slammed against the brick walls and didn't go beyond.
'Really got yourself in a fix this time, huh?'
He was so busy musing over his current situation that he he didn't hear it sneak up on him. He felt a breeze against his left side, and something dark blurred past. His eyes shot to it immediately, but his vision was blurred.
No. It was just too fast to see. Too fast for human eyes to see. It was darting back and forth, making a strange sound. A familiar sound. It sounded like someone banging away at a computer keyboard. In any other situation, this would have been comforting. However, out here in the dark in Silent Hill with fog and human senses, this thing hopping around in front of him, comfort was the last thing on his mind. Hadn't the company informed him of all of their projects? What was this thing doing out in the streets? Ada's comment about a possible outbreak came to mind, but HCF was careful, dammit.
"What the hell are you?"
The thing clicked a few times in response, then it was right next to him, close enough for him to feel its acrid breath against his neck, and he insinctively shoved his hands forward, intending to push it away with enough force to send it out of the alley, unaware that the movement would send those flashes of pain back up through his abdomen. He cried out. It stopped moving for a moment and he could see it for what it truly was as it stared at him quizzically, hardly affected by his shoving.
This was someone's idea of a sick joke.
He and Birkin had only been employed by Umbrella for a month. He had awakened from a particularly nasty dream to someone, a male voice, screaming in the night. His blue eyes flew open and his first thought was, 'Something got out. Oh God something got out and it's going to come in here and rip our throats out and then it's going to kill everyone else in this lab, because it remembers who stuck the needle in and infected it with that poison. It remembers that I was smiling when I did it.'
Birkin was sitting up against the headboard of his own bed. It had only seemed natural that the two youngest and newest scientists share a room. Besides, Wesker found that he could tolerate William, and that had truly decided it. With moonlight streaming in through the small window, he looked like a ghost. Maybe that was because he had gone pale.
"Been going on for five minutes or so," he said quietly. His voice shook slightly and Wesker wondered if the same thoughts had crossed his mind. "I haven't heard anything else. Just that man screaming his lungs out."
Then there were footsteps in the hall. Both scientists tensed, hearing it come to their door. Then it sprang open and light flooded into the room. For the first and certainly not the last time in his lifetime, Wesker felt how thin the barrier between life and death was. His heart pounded until he could hear it in his ears, almost deafening.
"Don't leave this area!" a stern voice demanded. "Go back to sleep. We'll take care of this." Wesker recognized him as one of the facility guards, a dark-haired man that had to be at least seven feet tall, or so it seemed. He was holding a gun. He left the door standing open as he stormed down the hallway. The screaming was louder now.
Wesker slid out of his bed.
"I'm going."
Birkin stared at him. His eyes looked haunted, but he stood, anyway. His lab coat dangled to his ankles and Wesker wondered how he could sleep in it, and why. He personally found lab coats to be hot and uncomfortable.
"You're not leaving me in here by myself. Not with... whatever this is... going on."
So he had followed at a considerable distance. The room with the screaming man was at the end of the hall. It was a small lab. Shadows danced against the wall. There was a struggle.
Wesker slid around the corner and stood, completely still, his eyes on the mess before him.
"Go back to your dorm!" the guard screamed. He didn't care. Another scientist was going insane before his eyes. He was an older man, just beginning to go gray, his hair thinning in the center. His lab coat was a strange red color.
No. It only seemed that way. It was red because it was covered in blood, and it was covered in blood because he had been busy slicing something to pieces - something that looked vaguely human, but had probably only been a test subject. After all, he/she was on the examination table. The arms were slashed to thin ribbons with large, gaping holes here and there where the scientist's weapon of choice had stabbed. Only a scalpel could do that kind of damage. Wesker heard Birkin let out a small gasp from behind him.
The guard was trying to get the man under control. At some point, he had dropped his gun. His shoulder was bleeding where the scientist had slashed at him with the scalpel he know held tightly in his hand. The guard twisted his arm and he released it with a cry of pain and desperation, and then sobbed loudly. Almost as loudly as he had been screaming.
"Let me out of this fucking prison!" his voice was hoarse, but clear. "Let go of me! Let go of me, you bastard!" He kicked and flailed. The guard dragged him toward the door, still twisting his arms painfully. Wesker and Birkin moved out of the way.
As he was dragged away, the old scientist's eyes fell on the two young men, and he smiled an eerily knowing smile. 'He knows. He knows everything about me. About what I've been doing.' Wesker's heart seemed to stop.
"This place deals in human monsters, too, you know..." Blood dripped from his lab coat to the floor in a thin trail. "You think you're immune? Look what it did to me!" He was laughing then, a shrill, horrible laugh. Something had snapped. Something vital. His eyes were dead.
Then the guard... 'Sam.' Wesker recalled, dragged him around the corner and through a doorway and it was over.
He and Birkin had not talked that night. Nor had they slept.
The thing that now stood before Wesker, who was much older and much more experienced then the young man that had just started out in Umbrella, looked like a demented parody of the old scientist. It's mouth opened and a dry little croak came out, but it was trying to laugh -- trying to laugh because it remembered him, and maybe, just maybe, Wesker had been part of the reason for the man's downfall. Albert had learned later that Umbrella had been meaning to 'let the old man go' and replace him with two younger men. This, of course, meant he would be properly disposed of.
"Got you..." that voice managed to slur as its hand darted out and almost seemed to materialize on Wesker's shoulder. The boy that had hidden within the man for so long wanted to scream. The thing's touch was revolting, so wrong somehow, and its very existence seemed to shatter his concept of reality. Wesker was a man that particularly liked reality.
He shoved it again, adrenaline coursing through his veins, and it fell over with a dull thud. But then it was getting up again, quickly, faster than it should have been able to move, and it was trying to laugh again... only this time, it was succeeding. Little choked giggles came out, along with that strange typing sound.
Wesker turned, tried to leap, tried to dart... but ended up running as fast as his legs could carry him with the thing that looked like the old scientist behind him. His stomach seemed to have turned into nothing but a big ball of pain and he was choking on something that tasted like blood, but he ran.
And hated himself for it.
And hated Umbrella.
A/N: I suppose that this chapter will make more sense to you if you've played the Silent Hill series and you understand the nature of the town. SH specializes in unearthing those things inside of us that we bury so deep they're nearly unretrievable and shoving them in our faces. In case you hadn't noticed, Wesker has been stripped of his inhuman powers and is now functioning as a human being for the first time in years, and the town isn't done with him yet.
Hope you enjoyed, and whether or not you did, how about a review?
Next Chapter: What Ada's been up to, and where's that damn warehouse?