Chapter 29
Claire ran as fast as she could down the hall, only daring to glance over her shoulder one time, catching a brief glimpse of Leon as he dove into a room and slammed the door behind him. The twisted creature howled and jumped at the door, going after Leon instead of Claire. She realized that he must have intended for the monster to go after him, giving her the chance to escape.
Zombies were everywhere, coming out of almost every room. Claire must have been suicidal to come to the police station, and she made it worse by bringing Leon with her. Coming here was an awful mistake. She would never find Chris with so many zombies on the loose. If Chris was alive, he certainly wasn’t here, and if he was dead, Claire would never find him anyway.
She turned and ran down another hallway, hearing gunshots behind her. It was Leon shooting at the creature, and Claire dared hope he would manage to kill it. But she could not go back, not with so many zombies between them. So she kept going down the hall, finding that it led to a dead end with several cramped corner offices, and a narrow staircase heading up to the third floor. She darted up the stairs two at a time.
A zombie appeared at the top of the stairs, an elderly man wearing a blood-stained blue business suit. Claire shot him in the head and ran past him before his body even hit the floor. She expected to see more zombies, but the top of the stairwell was empty.
Up ahead of her was a small waiting area, complete with plastic chairs and end tables covered in old magazines. There was a secretary’s desk with a sign-in sheet, and beyond that was an open area lined with desks. It was the main police area of the station, with rows of cluttered desks, where most of the police force did their paperwork on a daily basis. It was a disaster, with stacks of paper dumped onto the floor, chairs tipped over, and other items all over the floor, as if a whirlwind had blown through recently. She could smell burnt coffee lingering in the air.
Claire walked carefully through the remains of the disaster, stepping over discarded files and folders, around puddles of spilled coffee, telephone receivers hanging off the edge of desks like lynching victims, and black computer screens staring blankly forward. She tried to envision what had happened here in the early hours of the morning when the scale of the disaster first started to become known. At what point did the police realize that they had a full-scale pandemic on their hands?
A zombie stood up from behind a desk, only ten feet away, and she swung her gun up and shot him instinctively, the gun kicking in her hand. He slumped over backward and fell against a computer monitor, knocking it over as he collapsed. The monitor rolled off the desk and crashed to the floor. Claire stood in place, her breath coming fast, and scanned the rest of the room. If there were any zombies nearby, she expected them to get up at the noise, but she seemed alone for now.
She maneuvered through the room and looked into the side offices for higher ranking officers. Some of the offices were small conference rooms, with tables and projection screens, and they were all empty.
Claire knew that the S.T.A.R.S. offices were on the third floor, so all she had to do was keep going until she saw something she recognized. If she could make it to Chris’s desk, then maybe she could at least learn a clue as to his whereabouts.
She had the Glock in her hand and the Beretta stuck in the back pocket of her jeans. She still wore her black fingerless motorcycle gloves, and her hand gripped the gun’s handle tightly as she made her way through the office area.
She stopped suddenly, catching a glimpse of a newspaper buried under a stack of papers, part of the headline getting her attention. She walked to the desk and pushed the others papers aside, pulling the newspaper free. The sound of crinkling paper was loud in the empty area as Claire lifted the paper up and scanned the headline on the front page.
Mysterious Tragedy In Arklay Mountains: Police Officers Feared Dead
“Oh my God,” she whispered as she read the article. It was woefully short of useful information, but what few facts remained were enough to tell a horrible story. Claire remembered that Kendo was just about to tell her about Barry Burton when the zombies attacked them. This was the story he was going to tell her.
Barry Burton, Enrico Mancini, Forrest Speyer, and almost the rest of the entire S.T.A.R.S. unit was gone, killed in the mountains during some secretive mission. The news seemed to strike Claire right in the chest. She knew several of those officers, had been friends with them. Even Chris’s team leader Wesker was killed. According to the newspaper, the only ones who survived were Chris, Jill Valentine, Brad Vickers, and a new member of the team named Rebecca Chambers.
No wonder Chris sounded so strange on the phone. Somehow, Claire began to understand what he must have been going through.
She dropped the paper and walked away from the office area to the hallways at the other end of the large room. There was a large posting board on the wall, covered in notes and newspaper clippings. Claire looked to the left and right, unsure which direction to go. She headed right, holding her gun firmly in front of her. There were more offices and supply rooms, and Claire walked past them very carefully, glancing inside to make sure there were no zombies about to jump out at her.
The hallway turned to the left and Claire continued slowly, until she saw a break room and kitchen area up ahead, with a refrigerator and a few microwaves. She hurried to the room and glanced around. She recognized the break room from one of her other visits to the police station, and suddenly she felt more confident.
The S.T.A.R.S. command center was just down the hall. Claire hurried down the corridor, noticing smears of blood on the floor, ignoring them for the moment. She breathed a sigh of relief when she saw the S.T.A.R.S. insignia on the large set of double doors, and stopped in front of them, listening carefully for any noise on the other side.
She held her breath and pushed open the doors with one hand, her gun in the other, aiming into the room. But it was empty, thankfully. Claire knew that there wouldn’t be anyone alive in the command center, but it might have been full of zombies.
Chris’s desk looked untouched. She walked up to it, her hand running along the back of his desk chair. There was nothing in the room to indicate that anyone had been there since the zombies invaded the police station. Everything seemed in its proper place. There was a framed photo on the desk of Chris and Claire with their parents, taken a few years ago. Claire smiled sadly at the sight of it and then focused her attention on the rest of the command center.
There were four other desks besides Chris’s. They belonged to Enrico, Richard, Barry, and Wesker, the four other senior members of the team. They also looked untouched recently. Claire noticed a crumpled cigarette on Wesker’s desk, as if he had crushed it into the desktop to put it out. Claire wondered how long ago that happened.
Chris wasn’t there, so Claire decided there was no reason for her to hang around. She poked her head back into the hallway and continued onward. To get back to the main floor from here, she had to go down a few halls to the elevator. If the elevator wasn’t working, she would have to take the stairs, but since there was still power in the building she had no reason to think the elevator was out of order.
She reached an intersection, where the hallway continued straight ahead and also split off to the left. Up ahead there were some supply rooms and evidence lockers, and down the other hallway were more offices and then the elevators. Claire turned to the left and then swung her gun up.
Zombies, several of them. Two men in police uniforms and two women wearing civilian clothes, one of them in a blue blouse and the other wearing jeans and a tank top. One of the women staggered forward and Claire put a bullet in her head. She turned the gun to shoot one of the zombie policemen, and the gun clicked empty.
The zombie lunged forward to grab her hands and she screamed, breaking free of its grasp. She knocked its arms aside and swung up her leg to kick it directly in the chest. The zombie reeled backwards but did not fall over.
Claire hurled the empty pistol as hard as she could, hitting the other female zombie directly in the forehead. The gun cracked into her skull and flew off to the side, breaking one of the nearby office door windows.
Claire yanked her Beretta out and shot the policeman in the face as he reached for her again. She aimed the gun up at the other two zombies, and felt her hopes sink as more zombies began to shuffle into the hallway from the adjacent offices, at least a dozen of them.
She shot the two closest zombies and then knelt down, desperately fumbling at the policeman’s belt, yanking his gun from the holster. She ran to the other cop and did the same, and then emptied her Beretta into the growing crowd, killing three or four more with head shots. But more and more were coming from farther down the hall, until the entire corridor was packed.
Claire gave up with an annoyed scream turned to run in the other direction. She debated going back in the direction of the command center, but knew there was nothing for her there. Instead, she went to the main hallway and continued straight down the hall. She passed a few supply rooms and the evidence lockers, and then stopped when the hallway went off to the left again.
She peeked around the corner and saw a wide foyer area with a set of double doors with large glazed windows. There were a few benches and some potted plants, and a pair of stairways, one heading up and one heading down. Beyond the doors, she could see blurred bodies milling around in the hallway on the other side. She very carefully crept across the foyer to the stairs and walked down them with soft steps, back to the second floor.
She stuck one of the police issue Berettas into her back pocket and flipped off the safety on the other. She made it to the bottom of the stairs and looked around the hallway. There was another zombie wearing a police uniform bumbling around, and Claire shook her head as she raised her gun. She tried not to think about the fact that she was killing former police officers. These men used to be Chris’s friends.
She squeezed off a shot and the zombie’s head jerked backwards, the bullet hitting him directly in the eye. The zombie tilted over and fell against the door of another small supply room, breaking the window on the door as it fell.
Claire flinched when she heard a shriek coming from the room, and she stood there stunned for a few seconds. Zombies didn’t shriek or cry out. Amazed, Claire rushed forward to the room, looking in through the broken window. Inside the room was dark, so Claire pushed open the door, seeing a small room lined with metal bookcases covered in cardboard boxes packed with folders and dusty sheets of paper.
Claire crept into the dark little room and reached up for the light bulb hanging from the ceiling. When she pulled the chain, the light popped on. Suddenly, something scrambled away from the corner and tried to dart past her. A small child wearing a blue shirt and a checkered skirt, with dirty blonde hair obscuring her face.
Claire grabbed the child as she rushed past, and together they stumbled into the hallway, over the dead policeman lying in the doorway. The little girl screamed frantically, pulling away from Claire.
“No!” Claire said, grabbing her arm. “It’s okay! I’m not a zombie! It’s okay!”
“Let me go!” the girl screamed.
“I’m not going to hurt you!”
“We have to go! We can’t stay here!” the girl cried. “There’s more of them! They’re everywhere! Look!”
Claire looked over her shoulder and saw zombies appearing at the end of the hall, attracted by the sound of the girl screaming. The girl managed to yank her sleeve out of Claire’s hand, and immediately bolted down the hall, her black dress shoes clicking loudly on the linoleum floor, her hair flowing behind her.
Claire got up and ran after her. The girl headed down another hallway and Claire heard a scream as soon as the girl was out of sight. When Claire turned the corner, she saw the girl scrambling away from a tall zombie that was reaching for her. Claire slammed into the zombie and knocked it to the floor.
“Come on!” Claire shouted, grabbing the girl’s hand and pulling her to her feet.
They ran full-tilt down the hall, and Claire saw another pair of staircases at the other end. But before they got there, a zombie lurched out of a room and into the hall, turning its bloody face in their direction.
Claire stopped to draw her gun, but the girl kept running. As Claire shot the zombie, the girl ran right past and headed for the stairs. The girl glanced toward the down staircase, but instantly ran upstairs instead.
“Not that way!” Claire shouted, running to catch up with her.
Suddenly, a creature bounded up the stairs from the first floor and landed with a howl, facing Claire. It was another of the bizarre, mutated monsters that she and Leon ran into earlier, just before getting separated. This one was not as large as the other, but it was still a terrifying sight, about the size of a large dog, its body rippling with exposed muscle and tissue. The creature opened its jaws and roared, saliva spewing from its mouth. Its huge claws scraped the floor as it jumped towards her, its long whip-like tail lashing back and forth.
Claire had nowhere to run. She drew her other pistol from her back pocket, flipping the safety with her thumb, and aimed both pistols right at the creature. Standing right in the middle of the corridor, she braced herself, locked her arms, and squeezed the triggers, her guns blasting repeatedly in the hallway like the sound of a machine gun. Muzzle flashes lit up the barrels, lighting the hallway like a strobe light.
The twisted monster howled as bullets ripped into its glistening, muscled hide, tiny bursts of blood and clear fluid erupting from the flesh. It charged at her and then cried out and flopped to the floor, sliding a bit and stopping just a few feet away from Claire. She breathed heavily and pulled the triggers again as she aimed down at the beast, each gun clicking empty, smoke pouring from the barrels.
She dropped the guns and ran for the stairs. When she reached the top, she ran down the closet hallway and stopped when she saw the little girl peeking at her from a nearby doorway. The girl waved her over and Claire gratefully went inside.
They were in a little conference room with an old table and a few rickety wooden chairs, and a dry erase board on the wall covered in multi-colored scribbles.
“We can’t stay here long,” Claire said, gasping for breath.
“Is that so? Where do you think we can go?” the girl asked. “There’s too many of those crazy people out there.”
“We’ve got to try to get out,” Claire insisted. “It’s too dangerous here. If we can get out, we can try to leave the city.”
The girl looked at her, almost hopefully, and then shook her head. “No, if we stay in here, we’re safe. As long as we stay quiet, they won’t hear us.”
“Listen,” Claire said, kneeling down. “We can’t stay here, alright? Maybe a few minutes, enough to rest for a little while. I know you’re scared and everything, but we can’t stay. We have to try to get out of here. Do you understand?”
The girl’s expression hardened. “You don’t have to talk to me like I’m an idiot.”
“Then don’t be an idiot,” Claire snapped. “You really think we’ll be safe here in this room? If we stay here much longer, we’ll be trapped and we’ll never get out.”
The girl shook her head and turned her back, and then sat down against the wall, wrapping her arms around her legs and resting her chin on her knees. She stared forward and narrowed her eyes. There were smudges of dirt on her face, and blood splattered on her shoes and socks. One of the sleeves of her school uniform was ripped at the shoulder.
Claire didn’t want to know how the girl managed to survive, but she figured she could make an accurate enough guess. The girl must be awfully tough to have lasted this long. The hard-bitten look in her eyes told Claire all she needed to know.
Claire leaned against the wall and stretched out her legs, looking down at herself. There were bloody fingerprints on her arm from a zombie’s grasping hand, and her bla
ck boots were soiled with blood from the puddles she splashed through. Her hands shook just a little bit, and she convinced herself it was from shooting the guns and not from fear.
“My name is Claire Redfield,” she said.
The little girl did not respond for a moment, and then said softly, “I’m Sherry Birkin.”