Disclaimer – I have no legal rights to any of Capcom's trademarked content within.
A/N – Dear Readers, I've been going through a pretty deep depression lately. Not to get too personal, and not that any one specific thing caused it, but I've been going through one of those existential crises/crises of faith where I've been hugging my pillow so tightly at night that my chest constantly hurts. That being said, I didn't mean to abandon the story this long. Through all the constant sense of doom & gloom, I've been trying to spare a thought to Ashley & Will and the predicament I left them in whenever I could.
Xaori – I felt kinda bad, reading your reviews and realizing you were about to go from being relieved about making it from one cliffhanger, to another cliffhanger that I knew was going to be even worse because I was still trying to find the perfect way to proceed with this chapter!
Dizasteriffic – Welcome aboard! I'm glad you're excited about Ashley in the spotlight and her dynamic/relationship with Will. I'm excited to explore those things, too!
Rosita led Jill and Pierce down a dull, gray corridor and through another door labeled "Employees Only" into a darkened stairwell.
Jill could hear a steady pounding, followed by a loud crash, even as she fished out her flashlight and switched it on.
The beam caught a zombie in a housekeeping uniform as he appeared at the end of the stairway and began stumbling up the steps.
Jill aimed at his head and fired.
"No!" Rosita yelped. "Kyle!"
There was a small horde behind Kyle. Jill fired again, sending the next zombie to the floor.
"Sefina!" Rosita said, raising a hand to her lips.
Jill's hand began to shake. Rosita was continuing to list names of co-workers as Jill aimed her gun at the horde, humanizing them in a way that made her uncomfortable pulling the trigger. Rosita's friends and co-workers had turned into almost unrecognizable monsters, and Jill was putting them down, right in front of her.
"Look away," she insisted.
But Rosita couldn't. She just continued to stare at them, wide-eyed and helpless.
"I don't see what the issue is," Pierce said. "I'd love an excuse to shoot the assholes I work with."
"And I'm sure they feel the exact same way about you," Jill retorted.
Pierce practically blushed.
"I think that's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me."
"The sad thing is I think that's true," Jill said.
The zombies were getting close, crowding the staircase. Jill squared her shoulders and charged, knocking them off their feet and down the stairs.
Two more zombies emerged from the break room.
Tears were streaming down Rosita's face now as she recognized them.
"Juanita! Fernanda! No!"
Jill raised her gun.
"Please, don't," Rosita pleaded. "They're my cousin and my sister."
Jill swung the butt of her gun at their legs, watching them fall hard to the ground, then walked around the corner and through a door into the laundry room.
She noticed the body on the floor, fashionably dressed, missing a head. Rosita looked down sadly.
"And she was my boss."
"If she's gonna be this emotional the whole time, I vote we just ditch her now," Pierce said.
Jill rolled her eyes, remembering the way she'd just found him mere minutes earlier, needing to be coaxed out of his car.
"Not everyone's able to be as selfish and unfeeling as you," Jill said.
"You've got to stop it with the compliments," Pierce replied. "They're going to go straight to my head."
Jill surveyed the room. The floor was covered in slime, and they were surrounded by pieces of smashed up, gigantic bug carcasses. More colossal bugs were skittering across the ceiling.
She heard a rumbling, then a laundry chute opened and more zombies tumbled out. More bugs and more zombies emerged from a huge mound of dirty linen. And she could hear the break room zombies they'd left in the hallway coming nearer.
"I'm not feeling great about the laundry room as our hiding spot," she announced.
They stepped back into the hallway, and she observed the broken chains and padlock in front of the double doors to the lobby, next to a sledge hammer.
They walked through the double doors.
The lobby looked even worse than the last time Jill had seen it. The reception desk had been smashed to bits, as had a couch, a lamp, and several other pieces of furniture, and there was a huge jagged hole in one of the walls in the opposite corner.
Something else caught her eye, and she ran across the floor to pick it up.
"What's that?" Pierce asked.
Jill held up the the dark orange blazer, still warm from recent body heat.
"A friend of mine came this way," she said. "I just hope she's alright."
Heavy footsteps drew her attention to the administration offices. The B.O.W. she'd fought in the parking garage emerged, letting out a blood-curdling roar.
"Stand back," Jill said out of the corner of her mouth.
Pierce and Rosita backed away as Jill reloaded her weapon to stare down the monster.
"Sure you want to do this?" she asked. "I've already killed you once."
Meanwhile . . .
Discretion is the better part of valor.
So thought Carlos as he peeked around the corner towards the door leading to the skybridge to the convention center. Two nearby zombies were intensely focused on making a meal out of the mutilated corpse of an unfortunate hotel guest. Carlos had plenty of ammunition, but he still preferred not to aggravate them if they were distracted enough by their current meal.
He pressed his back against the opposite wall and slowly, silently crept along it until he reached the wall, then quickly bolted to open the door and pass through it into the tunnel.
He slammed the door as the zombies responded to the noise pressing their, faces against the heavy glass and smearing it with the fresh blood on their faces.
He could hear the gusts of wind outside through the glass and the loud pounding of the heavy rain against it. The occasional flash of lightning was practically blinding.
And then he was through the other door, looking out over the convention center.
There were several welcome packets for the pharmaceutical convention discarded conveniently on the landing where he stood. He flipped through one, skimming through the outline of the various lectures and panels, reading the two- or three- sentence biographies of the key speakers, paying particular attention to Cassius Carver's, but not gleaning much that he hadn't been aware of already. Then he tore the map of the convention center from the center of the pamphlet and dropped the rest back on the floor.
He peered down from the top of the inactive escalator, at the small clumps of convention goers. Now infected. At least a hundred zombies. But they were spread out widely across the convention floor. And they still seemed unaware of his presence.
Discretion is the better part of valor, he thought again. He compared the map with the scene in front of him and began formulating a path through the crowd below.
Several moments earlier . . .
Ashley looked over at Will. He was visibly shaking, his eyes hazy and distant as he tried desperately to make his peace with his impending doom.
"I wish you still had that hammer," Ashley said.
Will looked at her.
"It was heavy."
The monster charged through the front desk, smashing it to bits, showering splinters and sawdust everywhere. Will and Ashley scrambled out of the way, into a small lounge area.
They were both scanning their surroundings, looking frantically for a way out.
The monster was writhing around in the broken pieces of the desk, the head of Ashley's pilot reforming around the parasite peeking out of the neck, looking more deformed than before.
Ashley grabbed a lamp off a nearby counter top. As the monster stood up and charged at her, she threw it as hard as she could. It shattered across the pilot's face, and the monster stumbled again as Ashley and Will scrambled out of the way once more.
Will leaped to the floor behind a nearby couch. Ashley moved to join him when the tendrils that were the creature's fingers shot out at her. As she tried to lunge out of the way, the claws at the ends of the tendrils snagged the end of her blazer.
She planted her feet into the ground as the tendrils began to retract, frantically tugging at her sleeve, struggling to pull her arm out as the claw pulled the blazer tight.
Finally, she managed to free one arm from its sleeve, then wriggle out of the other.
"Fine," she said, as the monster dragged the jacket away from her. "You want it, just keep it!"
She jumped behind the couch with Will, but soon the claws poked through their hiding place like daggers, and the couch began sliding away from them, reeled in by the retracting tendrils.
Ashley and Will scrambled to their feet again, running back towards the administrative offices. Ashley watched out of the corner of her eye as her pilot raised his other arm like a club and smashed the couch to pieces.
Then he pulled his claws free and charged at her. Ashley dropped to the floor, tumbling forward, and the swinging claws missed her and embedded themselves in the wall instead.
She darted past the ruined desk into the administration offices, Will hot on her heels, and slammed the door as she watched the monster try to wrestle its claws free from the wall.
Ashley and Will each dragged a nearby filing cabinet in front of the door to barricade it.
"That won't hold him long," Ashley said. "We need a place to hide."
They explored closets, cabinets, and cubicles occupied by decaying bodies, finding nothing but manila files loaded with boring paperwork, before entering the general manager's office.
A beam of moonlight was streaming in through a small window near the ceiling. Ashley pointed.
Will reached up as far as he could, even standing on his tiptoes, but still couldn't quite reach it.
They could hear the din of wood and metal as their pursuer began smashing his way through their barricade.
"The desk!" Ashley said.
Will nodded and ran to the other side of the desk, crouching and putting his weight into it to push it up against the wall, paying no mind to the general manager's body as he displaced it.
Ashley climbed on top of the desk and began struggling with the window as Will frantically began moving every other piece of furniture he could find to block the office door. It shook as the monster pounded on it.
Will jumped on to the desk to help Ashley with the window. It slid open just as the monster charged into the room. Will squeezed through the narrow window into the mud and rain on the other side, then turned around to stick his arm back through to help Ashley climb after him.
Instead, Ashley ran the opposite way, jumping off the desk as the monster growled and raised its claws to attack. Ashley plunged her knife into the glowing orange eye, pulling it back out while the monster howled in pain, then dropped to the floor, out of Will's sight. Will watched as a hatch on the floor, which must have been hidden beneath the general manager's desk, flew open. Then Ashley was back up on the desk, holstering a new gun and shoving clips into her ammo pouch. She grabbed on to the windowsill and put her feet to the wall just as her pilot clubbed the desk, smashing it in two. Will helped pull her the rest of the way out. They ran as the monster's arm reached out through the window. They'd already put several feet between them and the hotel when the tendrils shot out, reaching for Ashley's ankle, but stopping just short of it.
Finally out of its range, they collapsed to the mud, panting for breath in the mud, getting soaked in rain as they looked up at the stars.
"Well, at least we finally made it out of the hotel," Will said.
"Yeah," Ashley replied. "Now, we just need to find a way back in."
They slowly rose to their feet. Suddenly, there was a loud shriek behind Ashley. She spun around just as something swooped down at her. She swung at it with her combat knife.
The fat, dirty white-feathered bird fell to the ground. Its beak was stained with blood. Several of the gray feathers on its wings were just nubs or missing entirely. And bones and bloated organs protruded from its torso.
"Give me a break," Ashley muttered. "Just what we needed."
"Zombie seagulls?" Will said. "Really?"
Loud screeches filled the air. A whole flock of the little beasts was swarming behind them.
They ran as fast as they could, Ashley slashing at the birds with the knife and knocking them out of the sky when they got too close.
They soon caught sight of the beach and a small wooden shed on it. Ashley turned towards the flock of birds and began firing the gun she'd found in the general manager's hidden compartment at them as Will worked on getting the double doors to the shed open. They threw themselves inside, barring the door behind them.
They could hear several of the birds splat against the entrance. But the birds were only silent for a moment before they could hear several more squawking loudly just outside.
Will sat down on one of several upside down kayaks on the boathouse floor.
"Any chance we can just stay here for a while?" he asked.
A huge gust of wind made every wall shudder. The windows rattled. Pieces of the roof caved in, letting in several steady streams of rainwater in addition to those already leaking through existing cracks and holes in the ceiling.
"I don't think so," Ashley said.
They could hear the cawing of more gulls outside.
And then one flew full-force into one of the windows, causing cracks to spiderweb through it. The bird disappeared for a moment, then reappeared with another at its side, both throwing themselves against the splintered glass now.
"We can't just stay here all night," Ashley said, taking a seat next to Will. "So let's just take a moment and find a way out of here."
Will was staring at something on the wall.
"That's a weird clock."
Ashley followed his gaze. The top half of the clock was folded back over a small ledge, while the bottom dangled over it, misshapen and drooping like it was melting.
"Like a surrealist painting," she said.
"Yeah," Will said. "Salvador Dali. Those, too."
There was another clock by each of the four walls. One bright orange, one drooping over a thin rail, and another hugging the back of a vaguely horse-like figure.
"Not exactly the kind of painting I'd see myself in the center of," Ashley said.
There was a loud thunk, startling both Ashley and Will, as more of the mutated gulls flew into another window.
"Merde!" Daniel screamed, removing the headset and pulling off the heavy gloves that piloted Minos.
He punched the nearest wall as hard as he could.
Jasmine just watched with a hint of bemusement.
"Are you ready to start taking this experiment seriously yet?"
Daniel looked at her with murder in his eyes, clenching and unclenching his fists.
"These controls are clumsy," he said.
"Looked like user error to me," Jasmine said, ignoring Daniel's rage as she turned back to the monitors. She tapped one displaying a view outside the hotel, where a flock of seagulls was forming. "Maybe the Harpies will be able to do what you couldn't."
Daniel let out an almost inhuman roar and slammed both his fists on the desk. Jasmine just continued to stare at the monitors.
"Cheer up," she said. "You're about to get another opportunity to experiment with Minos."
Daniel straightened his back and ran his fingers over his slick hair, and then leaned closer to the monitors. He could see Jill Valentine and her companions coming from the laundry room into the lobby.
"What are the odds Miss Valentine will try to just climb out a window rather than put up a fight?" Jasmine asked.
Daniel grinned.
Then he slipped back into the headset and gloves.
As Minos stepped out of the administration offices and let out an intimidating roar, he heard Jill Valentine speak.
"Sure you want to do this? I've already killed you once."