Chapter 11
Dusted
Marco unscrewed the lid on the canteen. He tilted his head and chugged. His Adam's apple bobbed like a buoy.
He wiped his hand across his lips and offered the canteen to Krauser. "Go juice, Jack?"
"Go juice' was a special antigen cocktail blend. A tart tasting smoothie of amino acids, enzymes and whatever voodoo hocus pocus Wesker threw in just for kicks, designed to keep a viral enhanced body from disintegrating into an untimely puddle of blood and melted bone. The usual delivery method was an intravenous line with a continuous feed sluiced from a bag sewn onto the body above the abdominal aorta.
Krauser accepted his share with a disgruntled frown. It smelled worse than dirty pussy and tasted foul as rotted road kill. This shit hadn't been properly tested in the field. He preferred the safety of the bag and the reassurance of a constant antigen flow. Wesker was gambling. Staking Krauser's renewed life, and the skin on his back-literally-on an experiment.
Marco pointed at Leon and the doctor, hunched over and spent, standing on the ridge top.
They were in the midst of an argument. Agent Cucumber Cool's voice teetered on the brink of exasperation. "Damn it, Downing! Move…"
Krauser smiled. Professor pain in the ass was the least of Leon's worries. He'd let them sweat it out just a little while longer, and then, when he was ready, dice Mr. Cucumber into minced relish.
"What a couple of morons. Didn't you say you used to run with the jackrabbit?" Marco slapped Krauser's shoulder with a good-natured swat. "Get it, run."
Jack clamped a palm over Marco's hand. Jagged, icicle pointed tentacles burst from his knuckles. Coal black, oil slick tendrils seeped into the gap between Krauser's fingers like warm syrup. Pulsing. Squeezing.
The whites of Marco's eyes devoured his eyelids. "It was a joke, Jack. A stupid fucking joke."
"Apologize."
Marco planted his feet, wrapped his free hand around his entangled wrist, and pulled. "Let go!"
"Apologize."
"I'm sorry. Jesus, I'm sorry. It was a joke. Get it off me. I'm sorry."
Krauser's lips curled. "Apologize, for touching me."
The tentacles slithered up Marco's forearm, and coiled bubbled, sticky, malodorous ooze around his bicep. His pretty boy tan blanched bell pepper red. The skin seared like bacon in a pan.
"Burns, don't it?" Krauser said.
The tendrils wormed their way across Marco's chest. His shirt threads devoured in a caustic, slurping slime glide. They crept over his collarbone and twined around his neck like a vine.
Marco plucked at the tentacle pressed into his windpipe. His fingers slid into its slippery warmth. The tips came away crimson.
"I'm sorry," he wheezed. The mottled color in his face faded ashen white.
The protrusions recoiled in a whiplash snap. Marco fell to the ground. He gagged. Coughed. His throat dripped blood onto the viral gunk and funk splotches splattered across his face and chest.
Krauser's head turned to the sky and a buzzing sound rising up and over the crumbled rock shelf where Leon and Downing stood. An airplane dropped into view. As though it had fallen from a trap door in the clouds that skirted the edge of the ridge.
The pumpkin orange painted hunk o' junk was sinking fast. Headed straight for them. Churning up dust mounds and belching gray smoke tufts from its back end.
Wesker had said there might be a few players out here lookin' to score on this particular shag and bag, and to treat 'em all, friends included, as foes.
One scrub flyin', soon to be St. Peter greetin' or-depending on religious preference-lower level life form reincarnation comin' right up.
Krauser tossed his canteen, gripped his gun, and swung his arm up. Shit nails and spit shells! He'd ask questions later. "Fire! Take that son-of-a-bitch down!"
Marco obliged with a half-hearted volley delivered from his knees.
Bullets tinged the propellers with a popcorn kernel in hot oil pop.
The crop duster rolled right. Its wing sucked perpendicular. Orange underbelly exposed. It swiftly rotated back to horizontal, and took a sharp dip to the left.
"Again!" Krauser yelled.
The nose thrust upward in a blast of smoke. The body of the aircraft pitched onto its side, rolled upside down, and back to upright in one fluid motion. The wings rose and fell with the rhythm of a seesaw, riding an invisible fulcrum in the sky.
Ten yards out the front of the plane shot down in a spiral on a collision course with the earth and leveled out the last breath before impact. Its wheels suspended in the air a few feet above the ground.
"Move!" Krauser shouted. He dove for the dirt.
Marco injured, blood flowing out his neck faster than bullets out of his gun, didn't move fast enough. The wheels trimmed his head closer than a bald man's barber, batting his skull from his neck like a baseball off a tee.
A thick white veil, jettisoned from the underside of the plane, enveloped them in a smoky haze.
The tingle started in Krauser's eyes. Battery acid tears poured out his tear ducts rained red rash down his cheeks.
His throat was on fire. Molten lava burn cascaded down his windpipe. Noxious fumes rushed into his lungs. The air was heavy as concrete and dense as lead. It was choking him, strangling his oxygen supply.
The tingle spread to his arms and legs. The muscles pulled taut to the bone. His back arched upward, caught in a seizure cramp spasm that started in his calves and quickly worked its way up his spine. Rigor Mortis stiff, he began to shake. His body threatened to quake the flesh from his bones.
Cries caught in his throat. Limbs jerked. Tentacle offshoots erupted through the blood pustules on his skin, flopping beside his incapacitated body in a wave of rippled tremors.
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Leon couldn't have helped but admire her aerial cartwheels. Graceful tricky stick dodge and weave maneuvers that carried the same flair as the woman behind the controls.
"I don't know, agent Kennedy. I think I am now officially afraid of flying. The thought of getting into any airplane piloted by someone with that kinda' loop-de-loo crazy carries the same appeal as eating my own liver with a spork."
"Bon a petit," Leon replied. "This is one gift horse I'm glad we've got. That's our ticket out of this mess. If you had any sense of gratitude you'd be on your knees thanking your lucky stars."
"Ladies first."
As the smoke parted Leon could just make out the blurry outline of one of the pursuers fish-floppin' on the ground.
Ada had done an about face and now chugged and buzzed back in their direction.
"I think this is our cue, agent Kennedy."
It was the smartest, and least annoying thing, Downing had said all day.
"I agree," Leon replied. "Come on, follow that plane."