Chapter 34
Claire coughed, the smell of smoke in her lungs, and crawled toward Sherry. Leon, nearby, rolled onto his side and groaned in pain. He got up onto his elbow and stared back at the roaring inferno. The entire train yard, once dark except for the scattered lamp posts, now was fully illuminated by the bright flames.
Claire turned Sherry onto her back and leaned over her anxiously. “Sherry? Sherry, are you okay?”
For a heart-stopping moment, Sherry did not respond. Then, slowly, her eyes opened and she gazed up wearily at Claire, breathing a low sigh.
“Is it over?” she whispered.
Claire nodded, her lower lip trembling. “Yes, I think it is.” She brushed hair from Sherry’s face and managed a smile, even as tears ran down her cheeks.
Leon got to his feet, but he had no energy to do anything else. He stood, his arms hanging limp at his sides, and stared into the flames. The shockwave had completely demolished one of the nearby gray office buildings, and the wave of destruction spread out like a crater, casting a spray of wreckage a hundred feet in every direction. He stared into the fire, trying to comprehend everything that had just happened, to make sense of such devastation.
Claire helped Sherry to her feet, but like Leon, both of them walked unsteadily, their legs weak and sore from so much walking and running. Claire limped next to Leon and followed his gaze into the fire. They felt the heat on their faces from where they stood.
For a few moments, Claire said nothing. She wiped her face and put her hand on Sherry’s shoulder, squeezing gently.
“I guess I was wrong about her,” she said softly.
“We were both wrong about her,” Leon said.
“Do you ... do you want to wait and see ...?”
Leon shook his head. “There’s no way she could have survived that.”
“We can go and look, if you want.”
“We’d have to wait for the fire to burn out. But we won’t find her. There’s no way anyone could have lived.”
Together, they watched the flames for several minutes, letting the emotional impact slowly seep into their subconscious. Each would have to deal with it in their own way. All the events of the past day settled into their minds, and the realization that even after all of that, they were still alive. The constant rushes of adrenaline over and over again had completely drained their stamina, and the continuous images of horror and terror seemed to numb them to anything else.
Sherry looked up at Leon. “Can we go now?” she asked plaintively. “It’s really over now, isn’t it? We can leave, can’t we?”
Leon nodded but said nothing, reaching into his pocket. He still had the keys.
“She gave the keys to us because she didn’t think she’d make it,” Claire said, realizing it even as she said it. “She knew the only way to kill that monster was to blow up the whole building.”
“Yeah,” Leon said. “She must have gotten there just a couple minutes before us. She probably found the keys upstairs in one of those offices.”
“Why didn’t she just shoot the monster again?” Claire asked. “She could have just shot it again and slowed it down long enough for all of us to escape.”
“Maybe,” Leon answered. He looked down at the keys in his hand and closed his fist around them. “But she had to make sure it was dead. If she only wounded it, then it would heal again and come after us, even stronger than before. And we had no weapons left, nothing to fight it with.”
“But she had the keys.”
“We don’t know what car they go to. We have go looking for it, and how long is that going to take? That thing would have time to heal again. It would have attacked us again long before we found the right car.”
Claire frowned and started to say something else, but decided to let it go. Leon knew she would understand eventually, even though it was hard to accept right now. They could go over it in their minds an infinite number of times, but the reality would stay the same.
Had Ada really realized what she was doing? She must have, or else she wouldn’t have thrown the keys down to them. Because she only had two real choices, and they had nothing to do with Leon, Claire, or Sherry.
Ada could have chosen to try to escape again, or to kill the monster when she had the chance. That was the choice: fight or flight.
Leon knew, just as Ada had known, that the only way to kill it – the only way to absolutely guarantee that the monster was dead – was to blow up the propane tankers. But she couldn’t blow up the tankers and still save her own life, as she also must have known. The one thing she could do was at least give Leon and the others a chance to get out alive.
“All right,” Leon said after awhile. “Come on, let’s go find the car these belong to.”
Half an hour later, they found a pair of white maintenance pickup trucks parked on the other side of the row of small gray offices buildings. They were loaded with equipment, including a huge tool box attached directly behind the cab, and a metal frame welded to the bed with a ladder and other supplies hanging from it.
The engine roared to life when Leon turned the key, and Claire almost shouted for joy, embracing Sherry enthusiastically. Sherry smiled for the first time that day, a slight glimmer of hope finally showing on her tired face. She sat in between Leon and Claire and dutifully buckled her seat belt.
Leon drove the truck along the edge of the yard and down the train tracks. He slowed down when they passed by the hangar, which was still wreathed in flames, although it was gradually burning itself out.
Leon turned to look at Claire and Sherry, who smiled back at him. “Are you ready to go?” he asked Sherry.
She nodded, her hands in her lap, feet bumping against the underside of the dashboard. She almost looked like a normal child again, except for the filthy, blood-stained school uniform.
“Yeah, let’s go,” she said eagerly.
With that, they drove off down the side of the train tracks, the truck bumping along the gravel. The tracks led from the train yard through an industrial area, bordered on both sides by rusty metal fences, the entire area deserted. Within a few minutes, they came out into an open field, and then started heading uphill into the mountains, following the train tracks the entire way.
They left the remains of Raccoon City behind them, and didn’t look back.