Chapter 20
After about an hour or so of keeping watch I started getting sleepy. So I grabbed a small notebook out of my pocket and started planning on how I was going to survive the following apocalypse that would be Raccoon City in a few months.
I wasn't going to be able to stop the fall of Raccoon City. I had to accept that first. By this point Birkin had already allowed some of the Umbrella Research facilities to be compromised and it had already started to begin affecting the general populace. So I instead had to work on making sure that the people I was close to made it out before the city was destroyed.
I could get the STARS team members out of the city early if they survived the mansion incident. But I also had to consider that some of them would stay. Barry would probably leave with his family, and I knew that Chris would want to take the fight to Umbrella like he did in canon, but I wasn't sure how the rest of the team would go, and I had to figure out how to get them out of the city before we were hunted down by Nemesis.
I stopped taking notes for a minute as I heard a noise in the corridor, so I put my notebook away and picked up my rifle before crouching and aiming at the door. I was fairly certain that it was a zombie given that it was shuffling along the floor and causing a fair amount of noise. But it was also possible that it was Lisa. The poor girl still roaming the halls of the mansion complex and looking to recover her mother's body.
Keeping the door shut, I held my breath as the door handle rattled for a minute before the shuffling continued away from the door and down the halls of the mansion.
I let out the breath that I had been holding at that and went back over to my corner where I looked at my notes and then balled them up and shoved them into the bottom of my pack. I could work on that once we had made it out of this godforsaken mansion.
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"Hey," I shook Edward awake a couple of hours later. "I need to rest a bit."
"Alright," Edward replied as he eased himself up and rubbed at his eyes. "Still feel like shit, but I feel better than I did before I took a nap."
"Good," I looked at my teammate who looked more rested than I felt. "Don't open the fucking door unless it's a member of our team," I pointed at the door that I had further barricaded with a dresser and some other stuff shoved in front of it.
"I won't," Edward said as he met my eyes and nodded. "I've got you covered, now get some rest."
"Here," I unslung my rifle and passed it to him. "Some extra mags are in the hard corner over there."
"Copy that," he took my rifle and went to the corner that I had kept watch in. "See you in a couple of hours."
I sat down on the bed and set the pillows up so that I could still aim at the door if something tried to break through before leaning back against them and closing my eyes and falling asleep as the exhaustion took me.
"Finally," Richard said as the members of STARS Team Bravo reached the mansion. "This place was further away than I thought it was."
"Agreed," Forest said as he stopped to catch his breath for a minute. "And was it just me, or did the underbrush get thicker as we got closer to the Mansion?"
"It did get thicker," Kenneth agreed. "I believe that once the owners of the mansion ceased the proper maintenance on the area surrounding it that it grew back with a vengeance."
"Well, either way we need to get in there," Captain Marini stated as he walked to the front of the group. "There's a chance that Mark and Edward are here, and there might be a working landline as well."
"Let's go in and find out then," Rebecca said as she walked over to the big double doors of the Mansion. "I'm ready to get this adventure over with."
"We do this by the book," Captain Marini reminded the rookie. "I'm not writing any letters today."
"Got it," Rebecca said as she took the lead on the stack into the room. "Slice the pie Rebecca," She muttered as she led the team in breaching the main entrance of the mansion. "Clear!" She yelled as she cleared her corner.
"Clear!" The rest of the team responded as they began to check the nearby doors to make sure that they were locked/closed.
"Captain!" Forest yelled from a place over by a couple of doors. "I've got burn marks on the floor here and a messed up MP5."
"And there's a couple of 10mm shell casings here too," Richard said as he picked up the brass off of the floor. "Edward and Mark were here, but where is the thing that they fought for Edward's MP5 to end up this way?"
Then, the door behind Richard began to creak open as a familiar face peeked out.
"You son of a bitch!" Forest smiled as he pulled Edward into a bro hug. "It's good to see you man!"
"Yeah, give me a minute guys," Edward separated from the group. "I've got to go wake Mark up, I was on second watch."
"I need to give him a look over anyway," Rebecca said. "He got a pretty nasty concussion when he hit his head."
"He's been operating well all night," Edward said as he led them into the bedroom that he and Mark had been barricaded into for the last few hours. "But just before we got to the mansion he started talking about how he had first dibs on killing Captain Wesker for some reason."
The rest of Bravo Team just exchanged glances before Kenneth pulled Edward to the side in order to show him the evidence that they had found.
"You need to wake up," Rebecca shook the other medic awake and stood back as he jolted upright with a gasp.
"Hey," Forest said, catching the attention of the older medic. "You're okay, we're just checking up on you."
"You all made it?" Mark asked as he let Rebecca check his head where there was still a large amount of swelling.
"How are you still walking around?" Rebecca asked Mark as he stood up and shouldered his pack again. "You should be in a hospital, not walking around with the kind of head trauma that you've got right now."
"Can't afford to lie down and die," Mark shrugged as he accepted some anti-inflammatories from the other medic. "There's too many creatures and other things around here for me to be willing to rest without someone to watch my back."
"Well, the pills should help keep the swelling down," Rebecca said as she put her medbag back with the rest of her kit. "But I think you might have a minor skull fracture and we need to get you checked out when we get back to Raccoon City."
"When I get the chance to get checked out I'll take it," Mark replied before turning to look at Edward. "Hey, I need my rifle back," The dirty blond operator said as he caught the AR-15 and slung it back over his back before grabbing the magazines that had been left on the floor and loading them into his pouches. "Now, y'all look like you've had an adventure of your own, so should we exchange stories before we continue this song and dance?"
"I think that's a great idea," Captain Marini said as he closed the door to the bedroom. "We need a bit of a break anyway, and a short powernap couldn't hurt either."