Chapter 33
As soon as they heard Nicholai screaming, Jill grabbed Carlos’ arm and pulled him away, even as he was ramming another clip into his Desert Eagle.
“Come on!” she shouted. “We have to go!”
Carlos stuck the pistol into her hand and stood up, raising his assault rifle. “We can’t just keep running from it!” he said. “We have to try to kill it!”
“But we can’t kill it!” Jill cried. “No matter what we do, it just keeps coming back!”
“Where can we run to?” Carlos argued. “There is nowhere left for us to run. We don’t have enough ammo to last us very long. We have to try to fight it while we still have some strength left!”
Nicholai’s brutal screams were cut short, and then moments later, the doors swung open and his body came flying into the room, trailing a spray of blood. Missing his head and one arm, it rolled to the floor like a sack of meat. Carlos jumped back in shock, staring at the mutilated corpse.
“Por el amor de Dios,” he breathed.
“Nicholai must have had a plan when he came here!” Jill insisted. “He must have had some way out of here, a hidden vehicle or something! All we have to do is find it!”
Carlos hesitated, his gaze flickering between Jill, Nicholai’s body, and the doors beyond, where the monster waited for them. His finger twitched on the trigger guard, and he clenched his teeth, pressing the stock harder into his shoulder.
“There’s no time,” he said under his breath.
The creature knocked the doors back and stomped into the room, ducking under the low doorway, blood still dripping from its hands. Across its body was the evidence of their repeated attempts to destroy it, charred burn marks, gashes and ripped-up sections of its leather trenchcoat, pink gobs of flesh puffing from the holes in the leather, twisted red scars across its misshapen head. How many times had they blown it up, impaled it, drowned it, and crushed it? And yet, it kept coming, unwavering, unstoppable, driven by one mysterious singular purpose.
Forcing its way through the haze of her weariness and fear, Jill came to realize, however, that the creature’s purpose was not a mystery at all.
Its purpose was to kill her. She was its target, there was no doubt in her mind about that. It had pursued her relentlessly all day, ever since she first encountered it when she found Brad. It tried to kill Brad first, and only after Brad was dead did it focus its vengeance on her.
This creature, whatever it was, was deliberately sent to kill them. The reason flashed into Jill’s mind, as if she had always known it. Why would Umbrella create a creature with the sole purpose of tracking down and killing Brad and Jill? What did Brad and Jill have in common that would give Umbrella a reason to want them dead?
The answer was simple. They were the surviving S.T.A.R.S. members.
All of this flooded into Jill’s mind in the space of a heartbeat. Carlos, eyes wide, pulled the trigger and opened up a blaze of gunfire across the monster’s torso. Spent shell casings whipped up over his shoulder, streaming smoke. The creature merely raised its arms to block the bullets from striking its face, and continued forward, as if the gunfire was no more a hindrance to it than a heavy rain.
Jill screamed at Carlos, but he either could not hear her, or was too frightened to move. He suddenly swung the gun down desperately, trying to shoot out the monster’s knees, as Jill had done earlier. But the bullets missed their mark, striking the monster in the thigh.
It stalked forward and grabbed the gun, tearing it from Carlos’ hands and hurling it away. He tried to jump back, but the creature reached in and grabbed the front of his uniform to lift him into the air. Carlos struggled, trying to slide out of the jacket, but the creature held him high and Jill watched in horror as it reared back its other arm.
She knew what was going to happen next. She already saw it happen once before, in the parking lot of the police station. That time, she was helpless to stop it. But this time, she knew what she had to do.
“No!” she screamed defiantly, shooting the creature in the side of the head. It turned its face to the side as the shots thumped against its temple.
“I’m over here, you bastard! Over here!”
She threw the empty pistol at it, and the gun banged against its chest. The creature turned and glared at Jill, Carlos hanging from its outstretched hand, trying to twist out of its grip.
“It’s me you want!” she shouted angrily. She spread her arms, showing that she had no more weapons. “Come and get me! I’m the one you want! If you want me, come and get me!”
The creature’s oblong eye glared down at her, and then it opened its mouth to growl hideously, a line of spittle dripping from its lip. Carlos, stuck in its grip, stared at Jill, begging to know what she was doing.
“I’m right here!” she taunted it. “Come and get me, you son of a bitch!”
The creature growled and turned toward her. It glanced once at Carlos and swung its arm, tossing him across the room. He sailed through the air and crashed into the metal frame of one of the huge vats, crumpling to the ground in a heap.
Jill ran for it. She bolted back the way she and Carlos had come, through the doors and back to the hallway that was now littered with zombie corpses. She heard the monster howl in fury and come after her. She sped past the bodies and back down the next hall, her lungs burning, her heart pounding in her head.
Whatever tiny reserves of energy she still possessed were now stretched to their limit, and she felt her whole body begin to resist the constant pressure, her endurance just about at its end. She had maybe a few minutes of stamina left, but a few minutes was all she needed. She had a plan, and knew that in the next few moments it would all be over no matter what.
The creature was only a few footsteps behind her, so she fought against the pain in her legs and forced herself to run faster. She slammed through the next set of doors and once more found herself in the Disposal and Recycle Room, which she passed through not too long ago.
A metal walkway circled the entire room, with a control panel covered in switches on the left side. The center of the floor had a long crease down the center, where puddles collected. Jill jumped up onto the walkway and looked down on the control panel, taking just a moment to take it all in. She saw it earlier, but was too focused on her pursuit of Nicholai to realize what this room was for.
She looked up as the doors smashed open, one of them flying off the hinges. The creature ran into the room and focused on Jill immediately, like a heat-seeking missile. It charged across the floor, murder in its eyes.
Jill stared right back at it, and slammed her fist down on a huge red button on the control panel. A loud, blaring alarm sounded in the narrow room, and even the creature stopped momentarily at the sound, looking around in bewilderment.
And then, with a grinding creak, the floor opened up underneath its feet like a trap door. What Jill had not realized before, but understood now, was that this room was built to dispose of used and contaminated chemicals. The seam in the floor was where it opened up to drop the materials down into the recycler.
The creature whirled backward, spinning its arms to regain its balance, but the entire middle section of the floor dropped away. The creature tumbled backwards and fell through the opening, and down into a huge pit below the room, filled with a bubbling yellow pool of chemicals. It dropped down and splashed into the mixture with a tortured scream, the chemicals splashing up onto the sides of the floor as they hung down. It emerged from the pit, swinging its arms in a futile effort to stay above the surface, screeching in pain as the chemicals burned into its flesh.
It writhed and splashed, trying to climb out, but the edge of the floor was too high above its head, and the corrosive pool of recycling chemicals ate into its body like acid, melting its flesh and dissolving its leather coat. Thrashing and twisting madly, it howled as its body was eaten away.
Jill stared down, watching in sick fascinati
on. Her stomach churned in disgust, the stink of the monster’s burning flesh reaching her nostrils. She gagged, about to throw up, but she clamped her hand down on her mouth and continued to watch as the creature fought for its life in the huge recycling pit.
Suddenly, there was the sound of tearing flesh and the creature thrust its arm upward. Its arm split open along the edge of its forearm, and a squirming purple tentacle burst through the skin, shooting up and out of the pit like the tongue of a frog. It snapped up toward the control panel and immediately wrapped itself around Jill’s lower leg like a whip, pulling her forward.
Jill screamed as she was pulled into the railing, the tentacle gripping her around the knee. She grabbed for something to hold onto as the monster pulled, trying to take Jill down with it.
She lost her footing and both her legs slipped between the horizontal bars of the railing, and the tentacle yanked down, sliding down around her foot. Jill screamed, her fingers digging into the edge of the panel, desperately trying to keep her grip. The monster, howling and burning away inside the pit, roared as it tried to pull Jill down in after it. Her whole body seemed to stretch, her legs dangling down above the pit as the monster pulled her down.
Jill wrapped one arm around the top of the railing, feeling as if her leg was going to be ripped right off. With her other arm, she reached to the control panel, fumbling at the other switches. She felt her hands losing their grip, her body slipping closer to being pulled right over the edge.
With her last ounce of strength, she pulled back and slapped the palm of her hand down on one of the other buttons. With a loud click, the floor sections began to rise back up, the monster screeching in agony as the floor began to close above its head.
Jill’s arms gave out and she was pulled free of the railing. At that exact moment, the floor sections joined once again, slicing right through the slimy purple tentacle, and Jill fell down onto the floor. The tentacle uncoiled from her leg and twitched once before going still.
Getting onto her hands and knees, Jill crawled away. When she reached the doors, she painfully got to her feet, limping heavily on one leg. The other leg felt like it had been yanked from its socket.
She stopped and looked back into the room, as if expecting the floor to break apart and the creature to come after her again. But there was nothing. She couldn’t even hear it screaming. Maybe the recycler would truly kill it and maybe not, but Jill was certain that she had seen the last of it. The creature was finally gone.