Chapter Twenty-Three.
The elevator gave Seras no trouble; it was obvious they wanted her to come down, but into what, she didn't know. Her hope was that Wesker had underestimated her and she would easily tear through whatever he had set against her. Leon and the others were in The Bus above, running down the crowd of zombies that had collected outside the fence they had smashed through on the way in.
Her Harkonnen was slung over her back and extra shells were in a bandolier around her waist. In one of the slots was the syringe that held the tranquilizer she saved from her fight with the Tyrant aboard the ship she had used to cross the Atlantic with Integra.
In her hand was her machete, the weapon she had become partial to over the years. The elevator stopped, the door opened, and she was faced with a glass hallway. The floor was glass, and so were the walls. The ceiling looked normal, with vents and sprinklers. Through the glass walls, she could diodes set into the wall.
The door at the end of the hall was open and there looked to be nothing more than another hallway beyond it. Stepping into the hall, she was not surprised to see the door ahead shut along with the elevator door behind her.
What was slightly perplexing was the beam of the light than now stretched across the hall at the other end. It came sliding towards her, and she ducked. Her mouth dropped open in horror as the end of her Harkonnen barrel clanged to the floor in front of her; the tip had been sheared off at an angle.
"My cannon!" she said, her voice cracking. "Oh no."
The beam reappeared at the end of the hall and split into multiple other beams which turned at an angle and were joined by others, making a square matrix she wouldn't be able to fit through. "You ruined my cannon!" she shouted, forming her arm into shadow and driving it into the wall next to her. The glass splintered and the beams became erratic. She thrashed her shadow tendril around, hoping to hit the machine's guts and did, sending sparks shooting out the hole and shutting off the beams. The hallway went dim.
She un-shouldered the Harkonnen and set it down like a fallen comrade. "I'll fix you, I promise," she said.
The door at the end of the hall was torn of its hinges easily. She let it fall forward and peeked down both ends of the white hall. It was empty, but she heard rushing footsteps from both ends.
Running back to her Harkonnen, she picked it up. "Maybe you're still good," she said, rushing back. The barrel had lost a quarter of its length, but would still fire. From the sound, she knew two groups of armed men were at either side of the hall, waiting to shoot her if she stepped out. One side must have been ready to go first, so they wouldn't hit the other, and she wondered with it was.
She stepped out quickly and stepped back. As she had hoped, an overeager guard had fired, telling her the ones to her left were taking the lead. She pointed her Harkonnen around the left wall and fired. There was an explosion and screams, followed by automatic weapon fire from either end of the hall.
Breaching the Harkonnen, she loaded it and gave the other end of the hall a shot. More gunfire, more screams.
"Surrender, now!" she shouted. "We've come for Wesker. Give him over!"
Strong hands gripped her head from behind and twisted, snapping her neck. Her body went numb and she was kicked forward, striking the wall and dropping her cannon. Sending blood to fix her neck, she rolled and saw Wesker's boot just in time for it to be driven into her face.
She saw stars and felt Wesker's boot coming down on her repeatedly. Any normal person would have been looking at a hospital stay, or perhaps a few months in a coma. Deciding now was the time to pull out the stops, she embraced the sensation of having her head pulped; she imagined her entire body losing cohesion and becoming a fluid mass.
Instead of forming into a raven, she passed around Wesker's feet as he tried to step back. She enveloped his legs and formed her torso around his back, where she took hold of him around the neck with her now solid arm.
His grip was strong on her arm as he tried to pull her off, but she held on tight, and bit him in the back of the head for good measure. He grunted in pain and drove his head back into her mouth, knocking out one of her fangs.
"No," Wesker said. "You're not winning…"
"Yes I am," Seras said, forming her hips back into a solid substance along with some of the objects that had melded with her. One such object was the syringe, large and filled with enough tranquilizer to sedate a Tyrant.
She pulled the cap off with her bloody mouth and drove the needle deep into Wesker's ear. He sunk his teeth into her forearm out of desperation as she depressed the lever, sending the tranquilizer fluid directly into his braincase. He immediately began to foam at the mouth and sunk to his knees as Seras formed herself back into her original shape.
"D-don't move," a voice from behind her said.
She turned to see a security guard, dressed in black and pointing a shaky assault rifle at her. He was covered in blood and his ear looked burnt off. "Put that down," she said. "It's over."
"S-stay back," he said.
She looked at his scared, brown eyes and held them. Without moving her body, she pushed herself forward and felt something in him roll backwards. "I'm your friend. Put the gun down. You don't have to obey Wesker anymore."
The man, still shaking, set the rifle on the floor. His eyes were still held by Seras. "Okay," he said. "But who will turn off the self-destruct system?"
"I'm sorry, what?" Seras said.
The man blinked and seemed to regain his senses. "The self-destruct system," he said. "Who will turn it off if Wesker is dead? Dr. Isaacs can't, Hawks can't…I don't think Krauser…" he turned and ran down the hall, leaving Seras to stand over Wesker's body.
She knelt down and searched it looking for any kind of device or code that might turn off the self destruct sequence the man had been talking about. Wesker was carrying many odd things, but none of it looked to be what she wanted.
"I think he had the right idea," a voice said.
She turned and looked down the hall. An older man in a white lab coat stood near where a Harkonnen shell had exploded. "My name is Dr. Isaacs," he said, walking forward. "I've wanted to see you for some time, Seras Victoria."
"You're the head researcher of the Alice Project," Seras said. "We need you to make a vaccine."
"I'm afraid that's not possible," he said, stepping closer. Seras noticed his face looked terrible. It was sunken and purple. "Even if this facility weren't about to explode and I had the original Alice's cooperation, I'm in no shape to work, you see."
He held out his forearm where a nasty looking puncture wound stood out, bruised and bleeding. "I knew what would happen when Wesker activated the destruct sequence and came to fight you himself. He would die and all would be lost. Perhaps now, for a brief moment before my mind goes, I'll understand what it means to be one with the T-virus."
He was twitching as he walked and his arms bean to ripple inside their sleeves. When his biceps tore through the cloth, Seras could see he was mutating rapidly. He was also between the elevator and her. "Don't go that way," he said. "They never indented for you to leave, and neither do I."
Isaacs swung his arm at her, the mutated appendage stretching across the room , and swatted her hard in the shoulder. She slammed into the wall and drew her machete once she had found her footing. Isaacs swatted at her again, only to have his arm severed by a powerful stroke of her machete.
Shouting with rage, he ran at her. His other arm had blistered and ruptured into a giant claw, which she dodged by rolling away and taking a swipe at his legs as she went. She put a deep cut across the front of his shin, but it didn't cause him to falter. He turned and came at her again. This time she dissolved her arm and used the shadow tendril to shove him backward, knocking him onto his back.
Dropping her machete, she picker up her Harkonnen and loaded a shell into it. Isaacs sat up, a look of rage crossed his melting features as she fired a round into his face, obliterating his head.
Countdown sequence activated. Five minutes until detonation. All personnel proceed to the evacuation platform. A mechanical voice blared through the halls.
She didn't think she could meld her Harkonnen cannon when she shape shifted, so she hurled it instead down into the elevator shaft. If the explosion merely collapsed everything, maybe she could come back for it. Forming herself into a raven, she made to dart up the shaft but then remembered the others in the disposal tunnel. On the way back out, she saw a lose vent cover in the ceiling where Wesker had come out of to ambush her. How he had been so quiet and snuck up on her like he had, she would never know.
Flying down the halls, she reached out with her senses, trying to discern where the others were and how to get to them. The facility and the vaccine were a loss, but she could handle that if she found the others alive in time.
To be continued…