Resident Evil:
The Whole Story.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Wherever Billy was right now, he honestly did not care as he was warm and comfortable and someone was running his fingers through his hair and he did not want to leave if he could help it. It was hard to remember where he had been before, his memories were kind of fuzzy, but he knew that wherever he was it was better, a lot better, than wherever he had been before and he wanted to stay.
But something in him would not let him, some insticnt that told him that no matter how he actually felt he was not safe there and so he forced his eyes open and blinked at the blinding light that met him. He kept blinking till his vision cleared and he tilted his head to the side to look up at the angel who had craddled him in her lap.
She looked really tired for an angel, she was pale and their was a bruise on her face and her eyes were closed and Billy was certain that he had never seen anything, or anyone, more beautiful before in his life and he just spent a few moments looking at her for awhile and just like that, all the memories came rushing back to him. Just like they had done when he had crawled out of the train and found her.
Rebecca. Her name is Rebecca.
He had saved her from the monster that had been attacking her, the great slimy black thing that looked like it had crawled out of the deepest, vilest pit in hell. He had used the crowbar and shoved it through the monster, hitting the control box and then...and then all he could remember was the pain, and there had been a lot of it and then the darkness.
Billy groaned as he tried to sit up, there was pain and stifeness running through out his entire body and his muscles did not thank him for trying to move but it had to be done and so he pushed through the pain, his memories of being a marine had been soiled by what had happened in Africa but the training could never be forgotten, neither by his body or his mind.
He had learned how to push through the pain, and so soon enough he was sat up.
The first thing he noticed was that they were moving, the room they were in wasn't a room at all but some sort of vehicle, it was a smooth ride which seemed to suggest that they weren't on a road which more than likely ruled out like a car or a truck. As Billy forced himself up to his feet he saw was that they did have windows at the front of the vehicle but it was too dark and the windows were to dirty for him to see anything out there.
Looking at the controls didn't tell him anything either, or maybe they did but he didn't really know enough about whatever this was to be able to tell how far we had gone or indeed where we were going. So instead, he turned and knelt in front of Rebecca and placed his hand on her shoulder and gently shook her. "Rebecca, I need you to wake up. Come on, Princess. It's bad form to sleep on the job."
It did not take much for him to finally rouse Rebecca, her green eyes gently drifted open and as she looked at Billy it was clear to him that she was stuck in that place where you had just woken up and everything and everyone around you was utterly strange and alien. "Billy?" She asked as she looked up at him, a moment later she started and got up to her feet.
"You need to sit back down!" Suddenly all of the fuzziness was gone and Rebecca was trying to force him to sit back down which, considering it felt like he was trying to be manhandled by a bag of marshmellow fluff, was kind of pointless on end but all the same it did bring something like a smile to his lips, probabaly the closest he had come to doing so in months.
But he did allow himself to sit back down, mainly because he did feel like he was going to collapse if he did not and once he was down and Rebecca was checking him over, her touch gentle and through as she checked him over. It took quite a bit of willpower to not shut his eyes when a flashlight was shone into his eyes.
"What can you remember, tell me everything?" Rebecca asked as she checked Billy's other eye and he told her everything that he could remember, at least after the point that they had met. He told her about meeting on the train, about her S.T.A.R.S partner and how he had turned into a zombie at some point and they had founded him after the train crash and they had left him down in that tunnel.
Then, he told her about exploring the mansion together and being attacked and Rebecca nearly falling to her death and then the both of them finding the elevator down into the labs underneath the mansion and then being attacked by the monsters down in the lab and then saving her from the monster with a crowbar and then everything going black until he woke up.
"Well, your long term memory seems to be okay at least." Rebeca said with a hum as she turned her flashlight off and popped it back into one of her pouches and then let out a long sigh. "You saved me, thank you for that. I mean, I would be dead if you hadn't obviously but you could have gotten yourself killed by doing that."
"I mean, if I'm remembering what happened right then it wasn't like I had much of a choice when it came down to it." Something had to be done otherwise all that would have happened was after the monster had killed Rebecca then it would have turned it's attentions on to him and if it came down to it Billy would much rather die via electrocution than being torn apart by some sort of leech-man thing, whatever it was.
God, he hoped there wouldn't be more of them whereever it was that they were going as he really did not think it would be likely that there would be another conviently placed terminal to electrocute them if any more did turn up which meant that they would be screwed if it came to that so they would just have to hope there weren't any more.
"Do you know where we're going?" Billy asked Rebecca as she sat down next to him and god, she really was so small wasn't she? How had she even managed to get into a police force, never mind an elite unit like S.T.A.R.S? He already knew that she was smart of course but Billy was fairly sure he had met toddlers that weighed more than her.
Rebecca shook her head at him, pulling at a loose thread in her pants. "It can't be any worse then where we just were." It sounded like she didn't believe that, which Billy could understand as everytime they had ended up somewhere new in this night that never seemed to end. He was honestly surprised that either of them had lasted this long.
They just sat their together as the cable car continued on it's way through the dark and for a moment, he had to assume that it was due to the shock of what had happened to him or something like that, he hoped that the cable car would simply just keep going and going and going on endlessly into the dark forever, it would mean that they didn't have to deal with the monsters again.
But he knew that wasn't going to happen, but all the same he liked to pretend that it could be even if only for a few moments. That he and Rebecca could spend the rest of their lives together in this metal box that nothing could get into, they could spend years together talking and getting to know one another and Billy could avoid being executed and it sounded so perfect.
So of course it was never going to be and the more that he was awake the more that the fog of confusion began to lift more and more and suddenly all of it had fallen away and the dreamlike quality was replaced by the cruel and the sharp reality of what had happened to him, what had happened to the both of them and what could be waiting for them.
He took a deep breath, desperate to stop himself from shaking. He had to get it together, he wasn't the one who needed to be protected and comforted right now. Rebecca was barely more than a kid, she shouldn't have been here at all. He needed to get her out of here, to safety, as soon as he could do so.
Moments passed after he had that thought and then, there was the sound of metal grinding on metal and the entire cable car lurched forward and Billy ended up on top of Rebecca, her face flushing red for a few moments before Billy scrambled off of her and cleared his throat, walking over to the doors of the cable car and stepping outside.
Wherever they had ended up it was clear that no one had been here in a very long time, the dock for lack of a better word looked exactly the one that they had left on the other side of the journey only there was a thick layer of dust covering every single inch of everything, from the control panel that was identical to the one on the other side to a few nailed shut crates.
His eyes soon drifted over to a metal door built in the wall, if their luck was going to take an upturn then hopefully there would be a set of stairs behind that door that would lead up the surface, to a parking garage filled with cars with full tanks of gas that would all have keys in them and there would not be a zombie or monster in sight and they would drive as far away as they could, Rebecca could go back to find the rest of her teammates if she wanted to do so and Billy would just drive in a random direction, disappearing into the wilderness.
Sadly, he doubted that was what was going to happen. Rebecca was still a cop after all and she and Edward had arrested him back on the train, she was duty bounded to bring him in and Billy sort of doubted that what they had been going through together was going to do much to change that, if anything at all and Billy wanted to punch something all of a sudden.
So, what did that mean for him? Would he just run off into the woods and hoped that Rebecca wouldn't follow him? She wouldn't be able to shoot him, putting aside the fact that he didn't think that Rebecca had it in her to shoot someone in the back she had already lost her gun back when the train had crashed and he had lost his own.
When it came to it, Billy was pretty sure that he would be able to out run her if it came to it but what then? If he did make it out of the woods then where would he go? He would be a fugitive for the rest of his life, always keeping one eye over his shoulder. God, he was truly fucked even if he did manage to survive the night, wasn't he?
"Where do you think it goes?" Rebecca asked as she came to stand next to him, breaking Billy out of his thoughts.
"Out of this nightmare, hopefully." Billy said and tried to give her a smile, but he really didn't feel it but the one that Rebecca gave him back was full of exhaustion as well so that was fair enough. Billy walked over to the door and Rebecca followed after him and when Billy grabbed hold of the handle of the door and pulled it open, the hinges of the door screamed and Billy's head throbbed at the noise. The door clearly hadn't been opened in a very long time, years and years maybe.
But opened it did, the corridor on the other side of the door was dark and when Billy stepped over the boundry the floor groaned, it was metal. The air tasted dry and Billy licked his lips, how long had it been since he had anything to drink? Not since he had left the base at least and god all he wanted was a glass of water, he'd kill for one to be honest.
For awhile, the two of them walked through the corridor until the found themselves at the foot of a set of stairs which they followed up to a door at the top of it and going through that they found themselves on a metal walkway, there was another set of stairs going up and another set of stairs going down and there were a few doors in the wall that the catwalk was built out of.
It was an odd place, the labs that they had come from had looked professional, like a ton of money had been budgeted and allocated for them and they had been constructed professionally but this place, assuming that it was meant to be labs, didn't look like that at all. It looked like it had been built by a small group of people, and it did not look offical at all.
The passage way to the tram car had been hidden, that thought just popped into his head. It had been hidden behind a hollow wall, a secret complex hidden from the people who worked inside the hidden labs. Did any of them who worked in this place know about this? A thousand questions, and he doubted that he would get a thousand answers.
Billy rested against the catwalk's railing while Rebecca began to walk down it to check the other doors, Billy peared over the edge and frowned into the darkness. He...he wanted to leave, he wanted to get as far away from here as quickly as he could. This place felt wrong, something terrible had happened here and despite all the horror he had seen tonight, all the horror he had seen in her service, nothing had ever felt like it had done right now.
"Billy?" He looked up at Rebecca's call to see her standing in front of one of the doors, it was open. "Come and take a look at this." Billy hurried over to her and together they stepped into the room on the other side.
This was someone's personal lab, mixed with a study. There were shelves filled with heavy medical textbooks and scientific volumes that looked like it would be very easy to beat someone to death with. Test tubes and beakers were placed on desks, and the broken glass on the floor spoke to the fact that some of them had been smashed and Billy leaned down when he noticed something.
A bullet.
The light wasn't great, but he twisted the bullet between his thumb and forefinger to see if he could identify the calliber of it but it seemed to be something of a lost cause. He rose to his feet as Rebecca walked over to the desk and began to open the drawers, a moment after opening one of them she let out a little cry. "Billy, look!"
Rebecca spun around and in her hand was a gun, it was a Colt handgun. To Billy's eye, it looked like it was an old service weapon from the second world war but it had clearly been well looked after. Rebecca, with practiced ease, took out of the magazine and checked it over before she slid it back into place. "Fully loaded, fifteen bullets and there's a box of bullets in the drawer."
Well, that was something. At least they had something to defend themselves with, if it came to it.
He was more than a little surprised though when Rebecca offered the gun to him, his surprise must have shown on his face though because she was soon explaining it to him. "Look, I'm not that great a shot and I know that you are a better one that me and I doubt that we are going to find anything else down here if it comes to it. We need to make every single bullet we have count, and I trust you. So, take it."
Billy breathed out and slowly took the gun from her, the weight of it was something that he was familar with and it soothed him somewhat. But more than that what Rebecca had said, that she trusted him. It...meant something to him, he wasn't sure what but it was something. Not that long ago, she had thought that he was going to kill her and now she was giving him a weapon, trusting him to use it, to keep her safe.
The silence that followed was long and neither of them said anything, what finally ended it was Rebecca clearing her throat and turning to walk back over to the desk, reaching into the drawer and pulling out the box of bullets which she flung over to Billy who caught it, opening the box he found that there were thirty bullets inside and began to take out each bullet and place them into his pockets.
Once the box was empty and dropped to the floor he looked up and saw that Rebecca was reading a book, with the metal clasp that hung from it it looked like it was some sort of journal. As she flicked through the pages, she seemed to get paler and paler and paler. Her eyes were wide and she swallowed roughly, putting the book in one of the pouches on her belt. "Let's get out of here.
"Rebecca, what is it? What did it say?" Billy asked, stepping towards her.
"It-it was. It doesn't matter, I just want to get out of here as soon as possible. And I want to go now, right now, please?" Billy nodded, they weren't here to find answers to whatever had happened here they were just trying to survive and if Rebecca wanted to get on with it then he wasn't going to argue against it.
They left the study/lab behind them and if an exit was going to be anywhere then it was probably going to be higher up and so the two of them walked over to the stairs that led up but before Billy could place his foot on the steps Rebecca let out a gasp, her face had gone even paler and her gaze was locked on something at the top of the stairs.
There was a figure at the top of them, shrouded in the shadows. Something primal stirred in the back of Billy's brain and he found himself rasing the gun to point at the figure, trying to keep his hands from shaking but not pulling the trigger in case he was about to make a terrible mistake. "Who are you? Answer me now!"
The figure did not move, at all. But a voice, it's voice, reached their ears. High and gurgling, like a songbird that had swallowed glass. "Hello meat."
End of Chapter Thirty-Nine
Sorry this took awhile to get to but here we are back again and the next chapter we see how another memeber of S.T.A.R.S is doing.
If you enjoyed this chapter, then please consider giving a favourite and a fellow and maybe even a review.
With much love,
DiscordantSymphony.
