Disclaimer – This is strictly fanfic. I have no legal rights to any of these characters or trademarks.
Xaori – Your burning questions will be answered . . . eventually . . . I think. I have vague ideas that are becoming more concrete with each chapter.
A/N - I promised another update would be ready to go soon, so here it is. I have a rough draft of the next chapter, as well, so hopefully that will be ready soon while I continue to organize the rough outline for the rest of this story I have in my head.
"So, there I was," Ashley was saying, walking with Will across the hotel lobby, her eyes constantly sweeping every corner of the room. "Back in my room in the White House, living in the lap of luxury. Constantly surrounded by Secret Service agents. As safe as I could get. But I kept having these nightmares. I was reliving it. Over and over. The kidnapping. The horrible rituals. Every terrible creature that came after me."
There was a tremble in her usually confident voice as she said it.
"I couldn't sleep at night. And even when I was awake, I was still seeing them. Everywhere. Like something was always waiting just around the corner for me. I was a total wreck. Then the agent who rescued me, Leon, thought it might help if I took some lessons in self-defense. He taught me how to fire a few different guns. Some basic hand-to-hand combat. Standard survival skills. Until I didn't feel so helpless anymore."
She smiled as she thought about it.
"He was like a big brother to me." Then the smile became wider. More wicked. "Except in my wildest sexual fantasies. In those, he wasn't very brotherly at all."
"Okay," Will interrupted. "You can stop now. I think I get it."
"I mean, he was an absolute hunk," Ashley continued, as if she hadn't heard Will at all. "Total hottie. Muscles like . . ."
She curved her fingers loosely around her own slender bicep to indicate how much bigger Leon's were.
"I get it," Will said again.
"I could go on for hours about his hair alone."
She closed her eyes and bit down into the center of her lower lip.
"Did the nightmares stop?" Will asked
Slowly, Ashley opened her eyes again, staring silently at him for a few seconds before responding.
"No," she said. "Not really. I still have them. A lot. But with everything Leon taught me, not to mention the best therapy sessions money and a father who ran the free world could buy, they became a lot easier to deal with."
Will looked down at the body of the downed zombie agent as he and Ashley stepped into the linen closet.
"Are those your shoes?"
Ashley groaned.
"I don't want to talk about it."
She made her way to the body of the maid and began searching her for something useful.
"So, these . . . things?" Will said. "You think they're zombies?"
"Yeah. They die and then get right back up, and if they bite you, then you turn into one of them. I'd never personally had to deal with them before tonight. I mean, technically. The Los Ganados were these villagers controlled by the Las Plagas, these weird squid-bug things living in their heads, so they were basically the same thing."
She held up a key card, proclaiming that it might come in handy. Then she rose to her feet, turning to a map framed on the wall.
"Here's the layout of the ground floor." She traced a route with her fingertip. "There's a rear entrance right here, past the swimming pool. We can try to get out of here that way."
They made their way across the lobby again, only barely bothering to glance towards the reception desk and the administration offices behind it.
"Those people," Will said. "In the hospital."
Ashley's fists clenched and unclenched as she remembered the catatonic little girl tightly squeezing the El Gigante plush.
"We'll find a way to help them," Ashley vowed. "But we've got to make it out of here alive first."
They made it to the corner of the lobby, to the door by the plaque indicating the swimming pool and the stairs were ahead, then Ashley inserted the maid's key card into the slot on the door. A second passed before the light on the pad changed from red to green and there was a faint hum and the mechanical click of the door unlocking.
They entered another corridor. On their left, they could see the swimming pool through a wall of paneled glass. In front of them, they saw two toppled over vending machines, surrounded by their spilled contents and broken glass.
Will stepped forward and tried putting his shoulder into one of the downed machines, grunting and groaning but unable to get it to budge. Ashley took a step towards him and then yelped.
"Are you okay?" Will asked.
Ashley lifted a socked foot and pried out the tiny sliver of glass lodged in it.
"I'll be fine. It's just a scratch," she said as a few drops of her blood stained the carpet She looked at the door in the paneled glass. "I think we can just cut through the pool."
Will tried pushing against the vending machine one more time before realizing he was only going to embarrass himself attempting to show off strength he didn't actually seem to have.
He nodded and backed away from the machines as Ashley used her keycard again.
They were greeted by flickering fluorescent lights and the scent of chlorine.
Ashley scanned the room, looking from the length of the pool to the hot tub in the corner.
"Shame I forgot to pack my bikini," she quipped.
She glanced over at Will, who smiled weakly. The shock had at least worn off enough that he could recognize she was attempting a joke.
They spotted another exit on the other side of the room.
Then something broke the surface of the water. Several somethings, as tentacles emerged from the pool, flailing in the air.
"Come on!" Ashley yelled, and she and Will began sprinting around the side of the pool, only for one of the tentacles to wrap around Will's legs.
He slammed against the tile as his feet were pulled out from under him, his glasses hitting the floor and sliding away, and then he was dragged under the water.
"Oh, shit!" Ashley said.
As quickly as she could, she removed her blazer, the gun and ammo holsters, and left them in a bundle at the water's edge before jumping feet-first into the shallow end.
She fought to open her eyes back up after reflexively closing them against the stinging chemicals in the water.
At least the chlorine's probably doing wonders for the hole in my foot.
She drew her knife from it sheath and kicked off the side of the pool towards the grotesquely mutated cephalopod in one clean movement.
There was a big glowing orange eye glaring at her from the tentacle over Will's stomach. Ashley latched onto the tentacle and shoved her knife straight into the pupil.
Its grip loosened on Will, at least. He immediately made his way to the surface, as another tentacle began wrapping around Ashley.
Will dove back under, looking at her, trying to figure out how he could help, even though he was completely unarmed.
Ashley waved him away.
She plunged the knife into the eye in front of her own stomach, rapidly and repeatedly, until it loosened, then darted towards the surface herself.
Will was doggy-paddling towards the other end of the pool, coughing and sputtering for breath. He began struggling, and Ashley submerged again to see another tentacle grabbing at his ankle.
A tentacle whipped towards her, and she slashed at it, then several others, until the tentacle grabbing her friend loosened and he was able to swim to the surface again.
The tentacles were spreading further, and Ashley beheld its deformed body and the giant eye blinking at it from its center. She swam into it, hacking and slashing at it until it seemed to recoil in pain, drawing its tentacles around it. Ashley surfaced and watched as Will finally managed to paddle to the other side of the pool, then breaststroked her way to join him.
Once they pulled themselves out of the deep end, they both backed into the wall, as far from the water as they could get.
"Wait here a sec," Ashley said.
Then she turned and began running along the side of the pool, back towards the door they'd entered from.
"Where are you going?" Will yelled.
"We need that gun," Ashley yelled back, "and I want my jacket!"
She ran faster, then found herself slipping in the water that had splashed everywhere. For a few seconds, she was able to stay on her feet, sliding towards her goal, but then she lost balance and fell to the floor. In the moment it took to recover from the sudden rush of pain in her torso, a tentacle wrapped around her ankles, and she sat up enough to hack at it with the knife until she chopped it off. Brown sludge sprayed from the wound, and the partial tentacle she severed flopped at the poolside like a fish. Ashley stood up, then turned towards the next tentacle stretching out of the water, hacking at that until it was separated from the cephalopod as well.
Then she snatched her weapon, ammunition, and blazer back up, adjusting them as she walked back towards Will, steely determination in her eyes even as they stung from the chlorinated water dripping from her bangs.
Another tentacle whipped towards her, and she jumped to the other side of a chaise lounge, flipping it on its side to duck behind it for cover, readying the gun and drawing a bead on one of the glowing orange eyes. She was startled when one of the tentacles snatched the chaise out from in front of her and dragged it to the water. But she squeezed the shot off, and then quickly aimed at the next glowing eye and fired again. And again. Until the tentacles straightened, shuddered, and disappeared into the water again.
She picked something up off the ground and shoved it into the pocket of her blazer, then made her way over to Will, reloading her handgun as she walked.
"Ashley, that was . . . " Will stammered. "That was . . . you were . . . you are . . . just, wow."
"Don't mention it," Ashley replied. "You would have done the same for me, right?"
They were dripping wet, Ashley's clothes clinging to her hourglass figure even more tightly than usual, Will's oxford shirt see-through and tight over his slender torso.
Ashley dug into the pocket of her blazer and fished out his glasses.
"You might need these."
He reached for them, but she hesitated before giving them back, studying his face.
"Has anyone ever told you that you have beautiful eyes?"
Will grabbed the glasses and turned his head, too late for Ashley to not notice his reddening cheeks.
"I think my mom might have mentioned it."
Ashley grabbed the hem of her blouse and twisted it in both hands, wringing out some of the water.
"We're not going to be able to move very fast in these wet clothes."
Will's jaw dropped. His face was now beet red. Ashley pointed over his shoulder.
"So hand me about twenty of those towels behind you, would you kindly?" she said.
Will obliged, drying his face in a vain attempt to hide his blushing.
Ashley worked the towel through her dripping golden hair as she watched the creature's tentacles whip out of the pool again. They were standing just beyond its reach.
"Just imagine how totally adorable that thing's going to be in our next book."
Jasmine pounded the corner of the table in frustration as Daniel simply stroked his chin.
"I didn't expect Ms. Graham to have so much fight in her."
"You're giving her too much credit," Jasmine countered. "The experiment simply under-performed. Haven't we done bigger, scarier tentacle monsters before?"
"Probably," Daniel said. "But how many of those were engineered to fit in a hotel kiddie pool?"
"The Kraken could obviously use some improvements."
"Kraken?" Daniel replied. "Is that seriously what you're going to call it? If we've already done scarier tentacle monsters, we've surely called one 'the Kraken' before."
"Well, what would you name the experiment?"
"I call him Jules," Daniel said. Jasmine narrowed her eyes at him. "After the visionary French novelist." She continued to look unimpressed. "Author of Twenty Thousand Leagues . . ."
"Just because 'Mr. X' started to catch on around the office," Jasmine interrupted, slinking away from the desk, "doesn't mean you're any good at nicknaming things."
"Mr. X was back when you were still eating crayons," Daniel muttered to her retreating figure. "You stuck-up fetus."