Resident Evil:
The Whole Story.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The elevator finally came to a stop and with a gentle chime the doors slid open to reveal a corridor, the ones up above had been like something out of a Gothic horror novel with marble floors, oil lamps which were mounted on to walls, a few rich thick carpets on the floors and ornate windows. This corridor was nothing like that.
It was was made of white plaster which had been scratched and the paint was peeling away from the wall, overhead hung a turned off florescent light and a large sign hung on the wall just opposite of the elevator and once Rebecca stepped out and moved close to it she saw that it was in fact a wall-mounted map that must have been used by whoever worked in this place to try and find their way around.
The map seemed to show the entire layout of this area, a handy colored mark on the map cheerfully announced where they were in respect to the map. Rebecca glanced over all of it, wondering where exactly they had ended up and where they were going to go now if she and Billy had any chance of getting back to safety.
Speaking of her partner, he was coming up behind her to examine the map, his dark blue eyes narrowed and his lips thinned out into a frown as he crossed his arms over his chest while he looked at the map. "Jesus Christ, this place is massive." He muttered as his eyes looked over the map for a moment, before he jammed his finger on a specific portion of it.
"An armory, I think we should head there first. If there are weapons there then we can just jump back into the elevator and head all the way back up and walk out of here."
Rebecca frowned at that as she looked at the map, it wasn't that she had any objection at the idea of going to get some weapons, considering all that they had seen tonight she was holding out hope that they would be able to find a tank and use that to drive out of the woods and all the way back to the city, but the idea of going back out into the woods, into the dark and the rain where anything could be waiting for them, even if they were armed was not a possibility that she wanted to explore.
Besides, she wanted to see if there was anyone still alive down here. Someone had used the elevator and nothing she had seen had given her the suggestion that any of the zombies retained the intelligence to operate an elevator.
Speaking of the elevator, a soft ping made Rebecca look back and she wanted to groan when she saw that the elevator door closed. They had been able to get into the elevator before it's doors had closed when they were still up above but now it was like as much that they were trapped down here, she doubted that anyone had written down the code on a scrap of paper after all.
Rebecca glanced back at the map, maybe they could find an emergency exit. There had to be one, right? In case there was a fire or something down here and they couldn't use the elevator. But no matter how hard she tried to find that exit she couldn't and so in the end it seemed that there best bet was to go to the armory and hopefully stumble on a exit that wasn't on the map, or to find the combination to the elevator.
It was really quiet. Above, even the training facility hadn't been this quiet. There had been the sound of the wind blowing outside, the rain hitting against the glass of the windows, the crackle of the fire burning in the fire place. But this underground facility was not like that at all, it was far too quiet and it set her teeth on edge.
It felt like they could turn a corner and a monster would be waiting to jump out at them but every time they turned a corner it was just another hallway and Rebecca knew that she should be glad about that but the way that it kept her on edge almost made her wish that there was a monster waiting for them, anything would be better than this endless tension, like a pile of stones weighing down on her back.
If Billy felt the tension, then he did his best not to show it. He simply kept his eyes straight ahead, almost marching forward like he was still a solider. It honestly did make Rebecca feel a little better even if he was just an unarmed as she was, it made her feel safer that she wasn't going through all of this alone. Honestly, if she was she would probably have just curled into a corner and waited until something found and killed her.
It didn't take them long to find the armory, but sadly it wasn't what either of them had been hoping for. There were racks that might once have held shotguns and rifles and benches were guns might once have been worked on but now there was nothing on any of them but thick layers of dust. There was a line of lockers at the back of the room but even they came up empty.
"Damn it!" Billy shouted as he slammed the locker shut, the sound echoed out from the room and out into the corridor and Rebecca looked up and crossed her arms over her chest, her mind spiraling as she imagined what could be out there that could have heard that noise and could be coming to investigate it. "There's not even a pistol in here, we need a weapon!"
"I think we should head back to the elevators." Rebecca said as she walked back out into the corridor, she couldn't see anything and she couldn't hear anything coming towards them but who knew how long that would last? "Even if we can't get back upstairs I think we need to take a closer look at that map, even if we can't find an exit then maybe we can find another armory or something else that could be useful."
Chances were that even if there was another armory down here that it had been cleared out just like this one had been but it beat sitting around and doing nothing as they waited to starve to death down here. Billy seemed to agree, he walked away from the lockers and left the armory and the pair of them began to trace their steps back to the elevators.
They were about halfway back when the sound of a door creaking open reached their ears, it was so silent that it was as deafening as a thunder strike. They both glanced at one another and turned their gaze to the corner from where the sound had come from. Billy took the lead and Rebecca followed in behind him as they turned the corner.
There was a door at the end of the corridor. It was not fully open, but swinging and catching on the door frame as if there was a breeze pushing it and for a moment Rebecca had hope that maybe they had found a way out, a window they could use to climb out, but then she remembered that they were underground and there would be no reason for a window to be down here.
Which meant that whatever was causing the door to move was not natural and suddenly Rebecca wanted to run as fast as she could in the other direction but her feet did not seem to agree with her as she followed behind Billy as they got closer and closer to the door. Billy reached out and slowly pulled the door open, it's hinges screaming almost in protest.
The room on the other side of the door was almost insultingly normal, it was shaped like a rectangle and every surface was bare and covered with dust. The source of door being pushed open seemed to be the ventilation system, it looked very old and large, like the sort a grown man could crawl through. It ran across the ceiling and into the next room, but a section of it had fallen off but the coolness on Rebecca's face told her that the air was still moving and it must have been pushing at the door.
If nothing else, coming in here meant that the ventilation was still working which meant that they could at least rule out suffocation as a way that they could die down here. But something about it also sat wrong with her, by all accounts this place had been abandoned and yet the air conditioning was still on? And the fact that it hadn't been stuffy down here when they had came down in the first place suggested that it had been on for a while.
Something popped into Rebecca's head then, something that in the rush of everything that she had forgotten. When they had been in the entrance hall for the first time, there had been equipment in there. New equipment, stuff that had only been developed in the past few years or so and it was just standing around there.
And there had been the blood as well, old blood that had taken on a brownish tint as it stained the floors of the grand mansion above them but Rebecca had been too busy, too busy thinking about the zombies on the train and the crash and what had happened to Edward to stop and really think about what it meant.
But now this, the underground lab with the fresh air and the circulating air system even as there what looked to be years worth of dust on every single surface almost seemed to suggest that for whatever reason Umbrella had left this place to rot, they had decided to move back in. Or, at the very least, they had new interest in it for some reason.
And the zombies above in the mansion, now that she stopped and thought about them they didn't look as if they had been here that long, they were all injured and rotting but they did not seem to be that far along in decomposing. They did not look like she would assuming rotting corpses left in a building for whoever long it had been abandoned would look, and the dust suggested that it had been years.
So, what did all of that mean when it was put together? To be honest, Rebecca wasn't sure. She was still tired from everything that had happened up to now and she also knew that she should be focusing more on surviving and trying to get back to Raccoon but the thoughts would not stop swirling in her head, around and around and around again.
The murders had started up weeks ago, assuming all of them had been caused by the zombies then, did whatever cause the zombies come form this place? Was that why those people had brought their equipment here? They had been trying to find it and combat it, but if this place had been abandoned what could have changed to cause the disease, whatever it was, to start here.
None of it made any sense, there was a piece to all of this that she was missing but she had no idea what it was and might just end up driving her crazy. That was, if nothing else that had happened on this insane nightmare of a night didn't do that first.
Billy walked over to the nearest cupboard and pulled it open, it was as empty as Rebecca expected all of them to be. "Might as well check them for nothing." He said and Rebecca decided that she agreed with that, it beat doing nothing.
So while Billy checked the cupboards on the walls, Rebecca knelt down and checked the cupboards below the counter. All of the ones that she checked came up empty and it seemed that Billy was having the same string of luck when suddenly the idea popped into her head to look under the cupboards, the gap was pretty dark so she could not make anything out but she could, just about, fit her arm in.
Her fingers brushed against something smooth and she managed to grab it and drag it out into the light. It was a piece of paper that had been folded into a square and Rebecca quickly unfold it. "Billy, listen to this."
She waited for Billy to turn around and face her before she began to read from the paper. "Tom, I told you that I was right. Doctor Marcus does have his own private set of labs where he does his own work, stuff that he doesn't do in his personal lab on level 3. I found how we can get to them. There's a tunnel in sigma lab 4, behind one of the bookcases. I'm going to go and check it out, meet me there if you're in."
Billy crossed his arms over his chest as he looked down at her. "Okay, so how does that help us?"
Rebecca frowned as she folded the paper back up and slipped it into one of her pockets. "Well, if there are secret labs that the people in these secret labs didn't know about then that meant that Doctor Marcus needed to keep them hidden but what if someone found there way down there and he needed to get out? It's where I would keep an emergency exit."
It was a reach, she knew that and from the look on Billy's face he knew that as well but it was something to hold on to. "Alright then." Billy nodded. "Well then, let's head back to that map and see if we can find sigma labs." He reached his hand down to help her up and Rebecca took it and they then together left the room.
They had made it back to the elevators in less than five minutes and the both of them quickly studied the map, it seemed as though the maps were dived up into specific groups with one group being called alpha labs, one group being called beta and one group of them being called sigma. Each lab also had a number, so it did not take them long to find sigma 4.
The lab did not look like it had a tunnel on the map but that was just as like that the tunnel was meant to be a secret from everyone and so it hadn't been included on the official plans of it. Either way, it was the closest thing they had to an actual objective at the moment and so they sat off deeper into the complex of labs.
The map was mounted on the wall so they hadn't been able to take it with them to check their position so there had been a fair bit of stumbling around but they eventually managed to find there way to the sigma section of the labs and whoever had designed this place had decided there and then to show at least the smallest bit of mercy by having the number of the lab hanging next to it's door, so they were able to find sigma 4 almost instantly.
Inside, the lab was as bare as any of the other rooms that they had explored down here so far, there were bookshelves back the back wall that seemed to be attached to the wall but there were no books on them at all. What was odd, was that there seemed to be a large gap between two of the bookshelves, like there had been another one there before but someone else had taken it away.
Billy had noticed it too and was walking over to the gap and once he had crossed the lab, he knocked on the wall. "It's hollow." Billy said as Rebecca went over to join him. Billy rested his hands on the wall and began to feel it, probably looking from a seam or a latch that they could use to open it up but it didn't seem like there was anything like that.
"Maybe if we had a sledgehammer then I could knock our way through." Billy muttered as he stepped away from the wall. "But I doubt we are going to find anything like that anywhere down here, this place has been picked clean of anything even slightly useful."
"We can't give up." Rebecca said.
Billy laughed, it sounded bitter and made Rebecca turn around to look at him with a raised eyebrow. "What?" Billy asked with a shrug. "It's the truth, we aren't going to find anything that we can use down here and we can't get back up into the mansion because we don't know the code for the elevator. So, let's be honest. We are completely and utterly fucked, we are going to starve down here. No, you know what, I take that back. We will probably die of dehydration first."
"Stop it!" Rebecca shouted at him as something terribly familiar began to stir in her gut, the same sort of fear and panic that she had felt up in the mansion when she thought that Billy was going to kill her, the complete and utter lack of control that made Rebecca feel so helpless. "We aren't going to die down here, we're not! We just have to find a way through the wall!"
"Why? To find an emergency exit that you have no reason to believe is even there? Grow up Princess, for god's sake. We are going to die down here!" Billy shouted at her and he looked so terrifying for a moment that Rebecca could not help but take a step back. Billy suddenly look so ashamed and surprised and looked like he was about to say something to her, but he didn't. Instead, he simply sighed and bowed his head and walked over to the other side of the room.
Rebecca had never felt more lost in her entire life, not even when her Father had died had she ever felt like this. Her eyes were burning but Rebecca knew that she couldn't start crying, and if she did that then wouldn't be able to stop and so she brought her arm up to her eyes to rub at them roughly, desperate to stop the tears before they could start.
But it seemed that she couldn't even manage that as the sound of something wet began to hit the floor but Rebecca realized two things, one it was far to heavy to be her tears and two, it sounded like it was coming from behind her.
And so, Rebecca turned and look up only to find herself wishing that she had not done that. At first, she thought it might have just been a massive clump of mold in the ceiling but it had not been there when they had come into the room, she would have seen it as it was very hard to miss and it was moving, it almost seemed to be shivering at it rested there and every few moments a drop of slime fell off of it and landed on the floor with a heavy splat.
"Billy." Rebecca hissed but the man seemed to have chosen to ignore her and she was going to slap him, she walked backwards over to him while not taking her eyes off of the slimy black lump, which seemed to be following her, slowly sliding across the ceiling towards her.
She bumped into Billy's back and when he turned to face her she jammed her finger towards the mass on the ceiling and when Billy tilted his head up, he stared at the mass for half a moment before he reached down and grabbed hold of her wrist. "Let's go, let's go right now."
Rebecca nodded and they began to move towards the door, that she only just now realized that they had not shut when the came into the lab, but the mass on the ceiling shifted and quivered for a moment before it fell to the ground and Billy pulled her back as it landed near their feet. The mass began to rise off the floor, shacking and twisting into some new form.
It almost looked somewhat like a man, but only in the vaguest sense. It had long stretch limbs of slimy black flesh hanging off of the large bulk that might have been it's chest that could have been it's arms, similar looking limbs that must have acted as it's legs that did not look strong enough to support the weight but somehow managed to do so.
It was terrible to look at, and the smell was not much better either, but the face was the worst thing about it. It was utterly blank, a mass of withering flesh with no eyes or anything human but Rebecca knew that it could see them, even though it did not have any eyes. It didn't have a mouth either, but somehow it could still scream, a scream that sounded like it must have come from the very depths of hell itself.
It drew backwards, it's chest almost seeming to fold over itself, and it's arms drew back as well before it launched them forward. Billy grabbed her around the waist and threw the both of them out of the way as the monster's arms collided with the hollow wall and going by the sound, she didn't need to look to know that the wall had been caved in.
Rebecca didn't have time to consider all that had just happened as Billy was already moving, getting to his feet and dragging her up to hers and pulled her along quickly over to the door of the lab, but he wasn't quick enough as the monster leaped over to them, swinging it's arms in a wide arc to try and crush them, and if it wasn't for Billy who made them both duck just in time, it probably would have managed to do so.
They wouldn't be able to get past it to get to the door so there was only one place that they could go and Rebecca ran for it, the monster's hit had caved in the hollow wall and even if there wasn't an emergency exit waiting for them in the labs behind it, that didn't matter. All that mattered was to somehow get away from the monster.
Billy said nothing but the heavy sound of his footsteps told her that he was at least following her, and the shriek of the monster also announced that it was following them and Rebecca sent up a silent prayer that they were not walking straight into a dead end. The tunnel behind the wall was rough, with earth all around them and only a few basic support structures to stop the roof from caving down on top of them.
The tunnel was long and dark and it was hard to breath with being so far underground but they reached the end, and at the end of it was a plain metal door and someone must have been watching over them or at least her luck had decided to change as the door was not locked and Rebecca barreled through it with Billy following behind her, slamming the door shut and pressing his full weight behind it as the monster shrieked again and began to slam on the door.
This did not look like a lab and for a moment Rebecca did not understand, the floor was a metal grating and there seemed to be a draft and it was only when Rebecca stepped towards the draft, that she saw it. It was some kind of cable car, with a track running along the roof of the cavern and Rebecca wondered if they had finally found their way out of this awful place.
Even if they hadn't, it would take them away from that thing. "Billy, I think we have a way out!"
Billy grunted as the door began to shake, the screams of the monster beginning to sound more and more like it was screaming in rage. "Yeah, I can see it." A large slam against the door made Billy's entire body shake and he grit his teeth and pressed his body against the door again. "Look, that thing is going to get in here. The second I step away from here it is going to knock the door off of it's hinges, so, does that car have any power going to it?"
She had not actually stopped and thought about that, the labs they had come from might have been bare but the lights had been on and the elevator had been working, so there was power but this platform was dark and the car was dark itself and Rebecca hurried over to it and pulled open the sliding doors of the car and ran inside.
The console was dark and no matter what button she pressed or lever she pulled, there was no response at all. The monster's screams were getting louder and louder and Rebecca knew that it would break down the door in the end even with Billy standing in front of it. There was power, the cable car just wasn't getting any. So, how did she fix that?
The answer wasn't going to be in the car itself, clearly. So maybe it would be on the platform itself. Rebecca ran back outside and looked around, the side of the platform looked pretty bare from what she could see so she was going to have to check the other side of it. She ran as quickly as she could, knowing that every second was the second that could make the difference between life and death.
Billy looked at her as she ran past and Rebecca could not bring herself to look at him. It had been her idea to come into the labs to try and find the way to the secret labs in hope there would be a way out in them even though she had no reason to think there would be, if she got them killed, then it would be completely and utterly her fault.
She turned the corner, and there was a console waiting for her. And atop that console, was a single blinking red light. Rebecca almost could not believe what she was seeing but she knew that she didn't have time and so she hurried over to the console and hit the button with all the force that she could muster in herself.
And the entire platform light up so quickly and so brightly that Rebecca let out a cry as the light burned her eyes, she shielded them from the glare with her hands but then she heard it, the low but powerful him of the cable car powering up.
They had their way out of here.
But she didn't have the time to enjoy it as the sound of the door crashing down and Billy crying out in pain, followed by a sudden silence, was deafening. She swallowed roughly and tried to speak, to call out to Billy but the words would not come out no matter how hard she tried to make the words come. She began to walk forward.
And then a shadow fell in front of her and Rebecca screamed and stumbled backwards into the console as the monster rose to it's full height in front of her and slowly stepped towards her and Rebecca knew that she was staring at her death and when she had decided to be a police officer she knew that there would always be a chance that she would die in the line of duty and that she would always try to be brave.
But how could she be brave when she was faced with something like this, how could anyone ever be brave? She shut her eyes, and just waited for the end to come as she shook with fear and loss.
"Get down!" The voice didn't make her open her eyes, she just did as it told her to do and so she ducked out of the way as she sound of something being punched through something wet filled her ears. Half a moment later something wet and cold and slimy brushed against her and made her she shiver and a moment later there was a shriek and the sound of something snapping and cracking and a cry of pain followed later.
For a moment, Rebecca was too afraid to even consider opening her eyes. "Billy?" She called out but there was no response and she was terrified of what that meant, but the fact she hadn't bee killed yet had to be a good sign?
So, she opened her eyes.
The first thing that she noticed was that the console was sparking and smoking with the jagged edge of a crowbar was jammed into and the crowbar itself was covered in slime and when Rebecca looked down she let out a cry of disgust and scooted back as far as she could. There were leaches on the ground, there were the biggest leeches that she had ever seen in their life and there were hundreds of them, making it look like there was a black pond on the floor.
The monster was gone, it must have been electrocuted but...did that mean that the monster had been made up of the leeches? How could they do that?
At some point, Rebecca supposed that she would have to abandon any hope that logic would renter the world. There were zombies and now there were giant leeches that could form together in the shape of a man, that was now the world that she lived in.
And now she had another problem, Billy was on the floor and he wasn't moving. Rebecca hurried over to him and fell to his side. "Oh god, oh no. Please, don't be dead."
He had a pulse, thank god. But it wasn't as strong as she would like and he had some burns on his hands and his wrists and up his arms to his elbow. Rebecca was about to get her medical kit and check him over but before she could, a scream filled the air and echoed down from the tunnel, followed by another one at a slightly different pitch.
There were more of them. And they were coming.
There wasn't time and so Rebecca stood and slung her arms underneath Billy's shoulders and began to drag him, even with the crowbar in the console the power was still on the engine of the cable car was thrumming. The doors of it were still open and she was able to get Billy inside and left him on the floor as she closed the doors and walked over to the controls.
Thankfully, it all looked fairly simple. She hit a switch that was labelled to control the brakes and shut them off and then she took hold of the lever that looked like it would move them forward and pulled it down with all of her might.
The cable car lurched forward and for a moment Rebecca thought that they were going to brake off of the track but in the end that did not wind up happening and the rest of the movement was smooth.
Rebecca held her breath until a few minutes had passed and they were away from the platform and there no more cries from the monsters to suggest that they were being followed and so she allowed her legs to buckle and to fall to the floor of the car and shut her eyes and begun to cry, the car seemed sturdily built and surely if she just shut her eyes and rested then they would be safe?
But for all she wanted that, she was still a police officer and Billy was still hurt. If he had suffer any internal damage then there was little that she could do but what little she could do, she would.
And so she got her kit ready, got her supplies, and set to tending him. As the cable car carried on into the darkness.
End of Chapter Thirty-Seven
I hope everyone enjoyed this chapter,
Please consider leaving a review, a follow and a favorite if you did. Constructive criticism is always welcome.
With much love and respect and gratitude,
DiscordantSymphony
