Disclaimer - I own no legal rights to any of the copyrighted or trademarked elements of this Resident Evil fanfiction.

The elevator door panels opened up and Carver stepped out, Carlos right behind him.

The panels closed, disguised by the two halves of a large painting in the middle of the hallway.

Carlos looked around.

"This isn't your floor," he said.

"Your situational awareness knows no bounds," Carver said dryly.

"The same thing could be said about your snark," Carlos retorted.

"That elevator only stops on certain floors," Carver explained. "We'll have to walk a couple floor down."

Carlos drew his sidearm, finger ready on the trigger guard, as he moved closer to the stairs. A door nearby had been completely separated from its frame. A zombie bound out through it, mouth opened as it lunged for Carlos' throat.

Gunshots landed in the center of the zombie's forehead and knocked it back to the ground. Carlos looked over his shoulder to see Carver holding a smoking pistol

Carlos hadn't been aware the doctor was packing heat. He didn't like the idea of an Umbrella employee walking behind him with a gun in his hand. Still, Carver had just saved his life instead of shooting him in the back. Even if he was plotting something, the odds were whatever he was planning on doing to him would still be less tortorous than what one of those creatures would.

A nearby closet door swung open, and immediately both Carlos and Carver had their pistols trained on it.

Will stepped out with his arms in the air.

"Carlos?"

Carlos looked back and forth between Will and Carver.

"He's with me," he said, to both of them, answering the question on both men's minds. "Dr. Carver. Will Bard."

"Any relation to . . . ?" Carver started to ask.

"No," Carlos responded, answering on Will's behalf. "No Dr. Bard in his family. Where's Ashley?"

Will looked around sheepishly.

"We got separated. I . . . I fell down."

Carlos noticed Will's gun.

"That thing loaded?"

"Not anymore. I had to get through a crowd of those zombies. And I'm not a very good shot."

Carlos reached into his ammo pouch and fished out a fresh clip to toss at Will.

"I won't judge you too much for being a bad shot, as long as you don't hit me."

"Ashley said the same thing," Will said, and his last memory of her actually brought a small smile to his lips.

"You think she's still okay?" Carlos asked.

"She's fine," Will said, not doubting it for a second. "She's a lot tougher than she looks."

"How'd you end up hooking up with the President's daughter, anyway?"

Will turned bright red and looked sheepish again.

"We . . . we've never hooked . . ."

"Relax, amigo," Carlos said as they continued down the hallway. "I just meant how did you and Ashley meet?"

Will relaxed a little and told them the story of how his human interest pieces in his local paper had somehow landed him the gig of Ashley's personal biographer.

"You mean you write the 'Little Girl and the Ganados'books?"

"It's mostly Ashley," Will said. "She comes up with the ideas and I just kinda help her put them in order. Plot and structure stuff."

"Now I definitely have to make sure you survive the night," Carlos said. "My kids love those. Have to hear all four back-to-back before they'll go to sleep every single night. I'd blame myself if you weren't around to write a part five. I don't know how I'd ever be able to look my kids in the face again."

"I'm sure Ashley would find a way to manage without me," Will said.

Carlos looked at him out of the corner of his eye.

"So, have you at least tried to make a move yet? Because it's pretty obvious you like her."

Will looked like a deer in headlights for a second.

"So, about you and Jill . . ."

"Nice attempt at deflecting," Carlos said. "But that's water way under the bridge."

Carlos would be lying if he said he didn't still think about it sometimes. What he and Jill had couldn't be called a relationship. Escaping a zombie infested city right as it was nuked was the exact type of intense experience that would make a terrible foundation for any relationship. But what they had, their fling, had been intense and passionate and a hell of a lot of fun. And being near her had brought back some of those feelings in a way the memories alone hadn't.

But they were different people now.

"I found my soulmate," Carlos said. "Settled down. Had a family. It changed my whole life."

He opened the door to the stairwell. He looked up and then down. The good news was there were no monsters in sight.

The bad news was something had completely decimated the staircase going down, and he wasn't willing to risk breaking his legs leaping down however many feet it was until the next intact step.

They turned around and made their way to the other end of the hallway.

"What about you, Doc?" Carlos asked. "How did you and your other half meet?"

"What?" Carver said. "Are we friends now? Casually making pleasant small talk?"

"Just trying to lighten the mood," Carlos said. "Help keep our minds off the certain doom lurking around every corner. But if you just want to stalk behind us and brood . . ."

"We were both students at the Sorbonne," Carver said. "There was a nearby bistro we both very much enjoyed. He'd read me poetry."

A smile graced Carver's usually stoic visage.

"Some of it he even wrote himself," he said. "Objectively terrible. But I loved every word of it."

Maria opened her eyes. And she immediately screamed and backed away.

Big creatures with exposed muscles and brains were crawling around in front of her on all fours, long tongues lolling out of their mouths.

Was this a bad dream? The last thing she remembered was reading one of those crazy monster books to her kids as she tried to put them to bed. That would certainly explain the nightmare.

She pinched herself. It didn't wake her up.

The memories started coming back. Carlos' friends knocked out on the floor. The man in the army uniform pointing a gun at her children. And then her.

Of course it wasn't a dream. She'd seen bioweapons like these on the news several times. They'd been a frightening part of reality for the last two decades. She'd always hoped she'd never have to see creatures like this up close. So much for that.

She stepped forward and touched the thick glass pane in front of her. She could see now that the monsters were held in a similar glass cage some distance across from her.

She turned her head to look away from the creatures and saw a decrepit old man in a wheelchair, a pretty young Indian woman sitting in his lap.

"This job was below me," a familiar voice said. "Attacking a woman and children. Don't see why Fabron couldn't have handled it himself."

Maria turned her head again and saw the man in military regalia that had knocked her out and then, presumably, brought her here.

"Fabron has enough of his own work right now," the Indian girl said in a plush British accent.

Maria began pounding on the walls of her glass prison cell. The old man laughed at her.

"Dear girl," he said. "If that cell couldn't contain you, do you honestly think it could them?"

He pointed at the monsters.

"Once I get out of this cell, I'll turn you inside out so you'll look just like one of them," Maria threatened.

"Threatening an elderly gentleman who can't even walk?" the girl in the old man's lap chided. "Not very classy."

Maria spit in the direction of the wrinkled old face, then watched as the thick wad of her own mucus and saliva slowly dripped down the glass.

Another figure entered the scene, opening a small panel at the bottom of the cell wall to slide a tray under. There was a steaming bowl of instant noodles and a tepid bottle of water.

"You must be getting hungry and thirsty," the old man said.

Maria eyed the tray suspiciously.

"So you can poison me?"

"Think about it, my lovely," he said. "If I wanted to kill you, why would I go through the trouble of bringing you all the way out here?"

The girl rose from George's lap and smoothed down her pencil skirt.

"I'll leave you to your fun, my darling," she said. "I have other matters to attend to."

She leaned over and air kissed near, but not quite on, his lips before disappearing into the darkness beyond the glass cells.

"Eat," the man said said again. "After all, the Hotel Malebolge aims to provide only the best experience for all of our guests."

"Where are my kids?"

"Exactly where you left them," the man in the military uniform insisted.

"I see no reason small children need to be dragged into this," the old man said. "And soon, you'll be reunited with your husband."

Carver watched Carlos as he looked at the approaching zombies through the glass panel of the door. He took a deep breath.

"Okay. Let's do this."

Carlos kicked the stairwell door as hard as he could. There was a disgusting splat as the heavy door slammed the already rotting shambling corpses into the wall.

The three men opened fire on the rest of the zombies in the hallway.

When the zombies were all down, Will looked in shame from his empty gun to the bullet holes in the wall.

"Waste of precious ammunition," Carver said.

"At least he didn't hit us," Carlos said, slapping Will on the shoulder. "I call that a W."

Carver walked forward, approaching his hotel room. Something caught his eye, and he quickly walked backwards.

"What is it?" Carlos said. Quietly, but still not as quietly as Carver would have liked. "I thought the whole reason we came here was so you could grab something out of your room."

Carver's expression, even more serious than usual, silenced Carlos as he and Will followed him around the corner.

Carver reached into his lab coat and pulled out a key and a small box of tiny vials, both of which he thrust into Carlos' arms.

"Look," he said. "There's something I need to take care of. I don't think you'll see me again after this. Here's the key to that elevator. And these contain the anti-virus and vaccine. You should be able to use it to stop the disease's spread."

"How will I know where I can access the elevator?"

"You'll have to figure that out yourself. I don't have much time. I'm afraid I won't be able to provide you with all my notes the way I promised. You'll have to make due with just this."

"But what about you?"

Carver shook his head.

"Don't worry about me. Just take this and get as far from here as you can manage. I'll have to be content with this ensuring a better world for my family."

Carlos opened and closed his mouth several times, for the first time in his life at a loss for words. Will, who'd had even less time to get to know Carver than Carlos had, just awkwardly looked away from the conversation, pretending to ignore it.

"Adios, Doc," Carlos finally said.

Carver just nodded in response, then walked to his room as Carlos and Will walked in the opposite direction.

The door was already slightly ajar, and Carver took one last long breath, bracing himself before entering.

Daniel was sitting on the hotel bed, one of Carver's many plaques in his gloved hands. Carver, as always, kept his upper lip stiffened.

"The Sorbonne, yes? I was never a student there myself, but while still in my hometown I passed by the university on a nearly daily basis. Beautiful architecture. I'm sure it was an honor to . . ."

Carver cleared his throat.

"What do you want, Fabron?"