Chapter 21
Leon turned down another street and drove through a small industrial neighborhood with machine shops and factories, hoping there might be less traffic and less people. Laura remained angrily silent, not anything for quite awhile.
Again, his mind wandered to the possible cause for the wave of insanity. If it really was something in the air, then both he and Laura were infected. And if they were, then Leon could not risk spreading the infection out of Raccoon City. Until he was absolutely certain that he was not carrying the disease, he was not going anywhere.
He slowed down at the next intersection, looking down the avenue to see if the other street was clear yet. And then he slammed on the brakes when he heard a very familiar sound coming from somewhere nearby.
“Did you hear that?”
Laura shook her head, looking away from him. Her arms were crossed fiercely over her chest. “No,” she said.
“It was gun shots,” Leon said. “I’m sure of it.”
“Whatever.”
Leon drove the Jeep down the street, trying to guess which direction the sound of gunfire came from. All around were small machine shops and other industrial businesses. He glanced at a crowd of people surging down another street, and hit the brakes again, the Jeep skidding to a halt. Immediately, he heard more shooting this time, coming from near the crowd. He opened his door and started to get out.
“No!” Laura screamed, grabbing his arm. “No! You aren’t leaving me here!”
“Don’t you hear that shooting?” Leon snapped. “That’s an M4 carbine. I’d recognize that sound anywhere.”
“Who cares? They’ll kill you if you go out there!”
“Someone is fighting them off! I’m not just going to drive away if there are other survivors out here!”
“You’re out of your mind!”
“Just stay here!” Leon shouted back. “If some of them come after you, just drive around the block or something.”
And with that, he shook off her arm and jumped out of the Jeep. He pulled out his pistol, tucking the holster and spare clip into his back pocket. He jogged down the street, out in the open, getting closer to the back of the crowd.
He heard the Jeep’s engine roar to life behind him, and turned around to see Laura in the driver’s seat, driving in a fast circle and speeding away in the other direction. Leon started to run after her but gave up after only a few steps. He lowered his gun as the Jeep disappeared around a corner.
“Shit,” he said, and cursed himself for being so stupid.
Back at the building, none of the insane people seemed to have noticed that anything had happened. They all seemed totally intent on the building in front of them, a square white structure with a small, empty parking lot. A faded sign on the front of the building said “McHenry Tool and Die.”
Leon stood on the sidewalk for a few moments and then resigned himself to investigating the building. He had little choice now. He ran forward and then ducked along the edge of the parking lot, which was surrounded in a rusted chain link fence. Overgrown brush and piled garbage were on the other side of the fence, and Leon snuck past it to get around to the other side of the parking lot.
The crazy people centered around one of the side entrances, forcing their way forward and groaning as they pushed on the door. Leon guessed there must have been seventy or eighty of them at least, most of them men dressed in dirty work clothes. They must have all worked at one of the companies in this area, and gone insane after they arrived at work.
Leon jumped the fence and ran around to the back of the building, where there was another door. There were a few old wooden benches and a picnic table with a couple of ashtrays on it, full of crumpled cigarettes. Leon braced himself and grabbed the door handle, and then eased it open.
It was dark inside, the doorway edged on both sides by tall metal shelves full of plastic cases of bolts, screws, and other metal fasteners. To the left of the doorway were a pair of cheap plastic tables with a couple of old chairs. Bits of metal and other equipment lay on the tables, surrounded by dirty rags.
“They’re going to break the door down!” someone shouted.
“Try to block it with something!”
“Oh God,” someone else groaned.
Leon crept forward out into the main shop floor. The building was full of drill presses, huge industrial lathes, and other machining equipment. The floor was covered in metal shavings and grease.
“He’s been bit! You know what that means!”
“What do you want me to do? Just leave him out there so they can eat him alive?”
“He can’t stay here! I’ll put a bullet in him myself!”
“Can someone help me with this door, for God’s sake?”
Leon saw three men wearing brown and green camouflage military uniforms, but it wasn’t any uniform that Leon recognized. There was a fourth man on the floor, cradling a wounded arm and moaning in pain. Two of the men were busy trying to push a large table in front of the door, and the third man was standing near the wounded one, an M4 carbine in his hands.
Leon had the sneaking suspicion that if he tried to get their attention, they would panic and shoot him on sight. So instead, he stayed hidden behind one of the lathes, and said out loud, “Hey, do you need any help?”
“Jesus Christ!” one of the men shouted. “Who said that?”
“I did,” Leon answered. “Don’t shoot me, alright? I’m not insane like those people outside. I heard you shooting and came to help.”
“Fine, come out in the open.”
Leon stood up and walked casually toward them, his gun still in his hand. The man with the M4 carbine looked down at Leon’s pistol and said, “You’re armed. That’s good.”
“How did you get in here?” one of the men by the door snapped. He looked frantic, with a sheen of sweat on his forehead.
“Back door. It wasn’t locked.”
The one with the carbine said, “Go check on it, Paulo.”
They all wore similar uniforms, lacking any rank insignia, with a red and white octagon emblem on their shoulder, which Leon recognized as the logo for the Umbrella Corporation. They were clearly not U.S. soldiers, so they must have been some kind of private security force, but their presence in the city made no sense at all. The only possibility was that they were in the city to deal with this epidemic of insanity, but how could they possibly been mobilized so fast?
“I’m Victor Belinski, and I’m the Captain of this squad,” the man with the carbine said. An unruly mop of black hair sat atop his head, and his chin was rough and unshaven. “So who are you?”
“Leon Kennedy.”
“And how did you manage to stay alive so long, Mr. Kennedy?”
“I just arrived in the city less than an hour ago,” Leon said. “I have no idea what’s going on, and I was hoping that you could tell me.”
The people outside were still banging heavily on the door. The table the soldiers pushed in front of it rattled each time the door shook. Leon glanced at the top of the metal frame on the doorway and saw that it was breaking loose. The door shook violently as the mob outside slammed against it.
“How did you get into the city?” Victor asked. “All the roads are blocked.”
“I drove through the mountains, on an old dirt road.”
“What happened to your vehicle, then?”
Leon sighed. “Let’s just say I’m on foot now.”
“Sure,” Victor muttered. “Paulo,” he said over Leon’s shoulder, “You secure that door?”
“Yeah, boss,” the soldier answered. He was a young man in his early twenties, with dark skin and a Spanish accent. He carried a Desert Eagle in his hand, and looked suspiciously at Leon.
“Can you tell me what’s going on here?” Leon asked directly. “What’s causing those people to go insane?”
“They ain’t insane,” the third soldier said, glancing out one of the dirty
windows. “They’re dead. They’re all dead, man.”
“Shut up, Erik,” Victor said.
Suddenly, the man named Paulo pointed toward the front of the shop and shouted, “Boss! Look!”
There was a crash, and suddenly one of the front windows shattered as a body fell through it, flopping down across the windowsill as a gush of thick blood poured down the wall. All of a sudden there were tons more people right in front of the windows, banging on them relentlessly. Another window smashed open and one of the people crawled through the opening, the jagged shards of glass tearing open his arms and chest.
“Go!” Victor shouted, raising his gun. Paulo and Erik rushed forward, guns drawn, and opened fire, blasting bullets across the front of the shop, striking the people trying to crawl in through the broken windows. They fell limply through the windows and onto the floor. A few of them managed to get to their feet before being shot down.
Just then, the door finally broke open, and the people outside shoved forward, pushing the table aside as they flooded into the building. Victor turned to the side and opened fire with his M4 carbine, riddling the first few people through the door with bullets. They shuddered with the bullet impacts and staggered back, slumping to the floor as more people trampled right over them.
Leon raised his gun in shock and pulled the trigger, shooting a middle-aged woman in the center of the chest. She barely noticed, coming right forward with a glazed expression in her eyes.
“The head!” Victor cried, fumbling with a new clip. “Shoot them in the head!”
Leon raised his aim and fired again, striking the woman in forehead. She tipped over and was knocked aside by half a dozen more people surging through the doorway. Leon fired again and again, backing away as his shots seemed to have little effect. For every person he shot, three more poured into the building.
Paulo threw his empty pistol at the maniacs coming through the windows and ran for it, heading toward the back door. Erik kept firing, laughing the entire time as more and more people came through the windows.
“Come on!” Victor shouted, running after Paulo. “There’s too many of them!”
Erik shook his head and walked over to the fourth member of their team, who was still lying wounded on the floor. Leon watched as the man reached feebly up at Erik, who then aimed his gun straight down and shot the man directly in the head. As people started to surround him, he then stuck the barrel of the pistol right into his mouth and pulled the trigger again, blowing the top of his head right off. The crazed people were on thrashing at his body before it even hit the ground.
“Now!” Victor screamed.
Leon tore his gaze away from the horrifying situation in front of him and followed Victor out of the building, through the same door he had entered from. Paulo was already long gone. Victor headed around the other side of the building, running full speed. As he reached the corner, a man in a gray mechanic’s outfit jumped at him and attacked, biting down hard on Victor’s cheek. They fell to the ground, and Leon swung his gun up and shot the mechanic right in the side of the head. He flopped to the side and Victor pushed him angrily away.
Lying on the ground, Victor reached up and touched the ragged flesh of his cheek, moaning to himself.
“Come on,” Leon said, sticking out his hand.
“It doesn’t matter now,” Victor said, his voice flat. He stared at the blood on his fingertips, devastation in his eyes. “He bit me. Now I’ll turn into one of them.”
“What are they?” Leon finally asked in desperation. “They aren’t just insane, are they? They aren’t even human anymore!”
“They’re zombies,” Victor said matter-of-factly.
“Don’t,” Leon said fiercely. “Don’t say that. Zombies aren’t real, they can’t be real.”
But Victor merely shook his head. “They’re the dead come back to life. We were sent here to try and contain the infection, but we didn’t have a chance. We never had a chance against so many.”
“There has to be somewhere in the city that’s still safe,” Leon said. “Somewhere that the survivors can go.”
“Our command center is in the city park,” Victor said. “But I don’t even know if its safe there either. I don’t know how to get there anyway.”
“Are you just going to stay here?” Leon asked. “You can come with me if you want.”
“In half an hour, I’ll be too tired to move,” Victor said slowly, rubbing the pistol in his hands. “In an hour, I’ll be dead.”
Leon didn’t know what to say to that, so he just looked Victor in the eye and said, “I’m sorry.”
Victor reached into a holster, pulled out another Desert Eagle, and handed it to Leon, who took it reverently. “I don’t have any more ammo, I’m afraid.”
“Are you sure you aren’t coming?”
“Just go,” Victor said.
Two zombies stumbled out of the door and shambled forward. Victor raised his pistol and shot them both in the head, but more of them were coming through the doorway before the first two even hit the ground.
“Go!” he shouted at Leon. “Maybe you can make it out of this hellhole alive!”
Leon stepped away and then ran for it, heading across the adjacent parking lot and back to the street. He heard three more shots in quick succession, and then one more shot a few seconds later, but he didn’t bother to look back because he knew what he would see.
His only hope now was to make it to the city park, or to some other safe location if he could find one. He still felt that the police station was his best bet. It was only a few miles away, if he remembered how to get there.
A clip in the Glock, another full clip in his back pocket. Plus the Desert Eagle. He was pretty well armed, but he had a feeling that he would run out of ammo soon enough if he came upon another huge crowd of insane people.
Zombies, he thought. They weren’t insane, they were undead. The whole concept was ridiculous, but he realized now that he knew it long before, just refused to admit it to himself. He saw Erik and Paulo hit some of them with five or six shots to the chest before they went down with a bullet to the head. There was really only one word for people like that. And the way they viciously attacked Erik’s dead body ...
Leon saw more of them as he ran down the street, but they were in smaller groups and he ran past them easily. He crossed another street and found himself in a more commercial area of the city; instead of machine shops, there were banks and restaurants around.
In another couple of hours it would start getting dark. Leon definitely did not want to still be stuck outside when the sun went down. Even if he didn’t find more survivors, he wanted to be safe inside a building. The soldiers had the right idea by trying to hide in one of the industrial sections of the city, since there would be fewer zombies around. In the residential neighborhoods, which were full of homes, and the more commercial districts, there were bound to be more zombies, since there would naturally be more people. Leon considered turning back around and heading to one of the other factories, since it might be safer there.
And then he heard another familiar sound, that of a helicopter. He looked up to see a huge black chopper fly low across the city, towing some huge container on a cable underneath it. Leon tried to guess what was in the container. Some kind of vehicle? It seemed too small for that.
There were zombies on the street with him, so he ran off down the sidewalk, keeping a careful eye on the doorways and alley entrances to make sure no zombies would jump out and attack him. Glock in one hand and Desert Eagle in the other, he kept a steady pace down the street. He only fired a few shots, when there were larger crowds of zombies and some of them got too close for comfort.
Maybe if he reached the police station, he might find some safety. At least he hoped so, because right now there wasn’t anywhere else for him to go.