Chapter 16
Barry casually flipped open the chamber on his Colt. He dropped two empty casings on the floor beside the two dead zombies. One wore a white lab coat now smeared with blood, and the other was a young woman in a professional business suit. He tried not to think about who they were before they became infected with whatever disease created this nightmare.
Barry did not give in to fear very easily. In place of fear, he felt only anger. Anger that he and his fellow officers were lied to and anger that some of them died because of it. He kept a list of the casualties in his head.
Joseph. Kenneth. Chris.
And the three innocent people turned into monsters by whatever biological research done here. Harold Murphy was downstairs. According to their identification badges, the two bodies on the floor were Margaret Hastings and Steven Thorpe. Barry did not doubt that there were many more zombies to be found. Just more victims.
He snapped the chamber closed and pulled the hammer back. Clipped to the front of Steven Thorpe’s lab coat was a security card with a magnetic strip like the one he took from Harold Murphy. Somehow, thinking of the zombies as people made him feel more comfortable.
He walked through the next door to a white hallway going to the left and right. Two doors to his left had restroom icons. Barry checked them just in case.
He headed to the right and went around a corner, finding two doors. They were locked, but each had a card reader beside the handle. Barry took out the security card and slid it through the first reader and opened the door.
Inside was a clean white lab room with assorted shelves and countertops filled with beakers and test tubes. There were a pair of refrigerators and an oven as well. Taped to the wall were half a dozen folders with numbers on them, each stuffed with papers. Barry pulled out the papers from the first folder and flipped through them. They were schedules of some kind, listing dates and times along with long identification numbers. He tossed the papers into a waste basket and ran his hand along the edge of the counter, scanning the labels on all the beakers.
He didn’t know what he expected to find. Beakers containing samples of anthrax and the black plague? Cages full of failed experiments? A typed report conveniently laying around that would explain everything that happened here? What he really wanted was a name. He wanted to know who was in charge here, who allowed something like this to happen. He wanted to know who was responsible. And then he wanted to find that person before anyone else did and beat them until he was convinced that they properly regretted their involvement.
He used the security card at the next door and entered a smaller room with a one-person elevator taking up most of the space. One bookshelf against the wall was full of thick books and instruction manuals, most of them with the Umbrella logo on the cover.
Barry got into the elevator and saw that there were only two buttons, an up arrow and a down arrow. If there were any answers to be found, they would not be out in the open here in the mansion. He tapped the up button without pressing it. He didn’t think the mansion was more than two stories tall, but he didn’t really have time to look when they first entered. Maybe three stories, but how about basements?
Barry told Jill about the Umbrella lab in the center of town. Even though its existence was technically a secret, everyone knew or at least believed that it extended quite a distance under the streets of Raccoon City, a huge underground lab complex. Could they have the same thing here? Could Umbrella have built a gigantic scientific lab under the Arklay Mountains, out where no one would find it?
Barry decided to find out. He pressed the down button and took a deep breath as the elevator doors hissed shut. He felt his stomach shift and remembered why he disliked elevators.
The doors opened to a small white cafeteria with some vending machines and a coffee machine against the wall, and a few scattered tables with plastic chairs. On one of the tables was a newspaper several days old and a half-empty cup of coffee long gone cold. Barry held his gun in front of him as he walked out the open door and into the hallway.
The hall was thirty feet wide and at probably two hundred feet long, with bright white fluorescent lighting and white tiles on the floor, and only four doors. Two on the right, one far down on the left, and a set of open double doors at the end of the huge hall. Barry realized that the elevator must have skipped the first floor of the mansion completely and gone right underground, because this hallway was twice as long as the dining room and his sense of direction told him that the lobby would be right in the middle of it.
His boots echoed uncomfortably on the floor, announcing his presence to anyone listening. He glanced at the door to his right but there was no light on inside, so he passed it. At the end of the long hallway, he saw what appeared to be a large lab room through the open double doors. He listened intently for any sound other than his own footsteps, and stopped in his tracks when he heard something. A low moan, coming from the lab at the end of the hall.
A few heartbeats later, a zombie shambled into the doorway and looked toward Barry. Like all the others, its skin was pasty white and its mouth was hanging open. It moaned once more and took a step forward. Barry was only halfway to the end of the hall. There was plenty of time to take aim before he pulled the trigger.
But before he did, something in the lab room flew past the open doorway in a blur, and the zombie’s head slipped off its shoulders and thumped to the ground, decapitated completely. Its arms fell to its sides and the zombie collapsed in a heap right in the doorway. Barry froze in place, his gun still aimed at the doorway.
Faintly, he heard a steady clicking noise, like claws on concrete. It made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. Something was in the room with the zombie. Something with very sharp claws. Even as Barry imagined what it might be, the creature sauntered into the doorway and stared right at him.
It was about four feet tall, with slick green, reptilian skin and a small, squat head with bright yellow eyes and a wide mouth. Most of its height was torso, as its legs could not have been more than a foot and a half long. But its real feature were its arms, which were incredibly muscled and reached right to the floor like a gorilla’s. Its large hands ended in long yellow claws like butcher knives.
The creature jumped into the air and sailed through the doorway as if shot from a cannon, making up half the distance between it and Barry in the blink of an eye. It was readying for the next leap when Barry pulled the trigger. The Colt boomed in the confined hallway and the creature spun over backwards, the bullet striking it right in the center of its chest. It spasmed once and sprawled on the floor, thick red blood staining the white tiles.
Barry resumed breathing and lowered his gun. He walked up to the creature and began to comprehend exactly what he was up against. Umbrella created some sort of plague that brought the dead back to life, but they did much more than that. They created actual monsters right in the lab. Barry didn’t believe for a second that this beast was some kind of accidental result, some kind of unintentional side project that escaped by accident. This monster, this mutated lizard, must have been created with a purpose in mind. A very obvious purpose. They intentionally mutated and bred it, and they did so right here in this lab. He wondered if there were any more of them running around.
It didn’t take long for his question to be answered. Just as he heard the telltale clicking on the floor from the creature’s massive claws, the second one launched itself from the lab room and right at him. It landed right on top of its dead brother and swung its arm up, knocking Barry’s Colt right out of his hand. He backed away as the creature made a second swipe at him, tearing a long gash in his red vest but somehow not penetrating the bulletproof kevlar underneath.
The creature lunged at him and Barry grabbed both its wrists in his hands, holding it at arms’ length. He outweighed it by probably seventy pounds and stood two feet taller, so overpowering it was surprisingly easy. But
he backed away as it pressed him forward, struggling to get loose of his grip. Its wide mouth snapped open and closed, showing off long rows of razor-sharp teeth, spraying drool as it screeched its frustration.
Barry’s gun was on the floor a few feet away. He grunted in exertion and began to turn himself in a circle. The creature’s legs were so short that it could not keep up with him, and soon, Barry was dragging the creature as he turned in a circle, faster and faster. Without its legs to brace itself on the floor, the creature was unable to successfully struggle in his grip, and instead simply shrieked at him frantically as he sped up until its legs left the floor completely.
The hallway was wide enough that he had plenty of room to spin it around. He had played airplane with his daughters hundreds of times when they were little, so he had lots of practice.
He let go suddenly, feeling so dizzy he could barely stand. The creature flew away from him and crashed to the floor, trying to scramble to its feet on the slippery tile. Barry lost his balance and fell to the floor as well, crawling to where his gun lay. He turned onto his back, his head still spinning so fast he could barely see straight.
The creature jumped at him as he pulled the trigger, hitting it square in the stomach. It screamed and feel to the floor a few feet short of him, a bloody stain marking the wall behind it. It staggered upright and raised its arms to stab down at him, and then he pulled the trigger once more and the top of its flat head disappeared. It fell over backward and went still.
Barry’s arms dropped to his sides in relief, and he breathed heavily, trying to stop his head from spinning. He kept his eyes on the door to the lab, though, just in case there were even more of them. Thankfully, there were only the two, and a minute later, Barry felt well enough to stand.
He reloaded his gun again and looked down at the two mutated creations on the floor, wondering what other twisted genetic nightmares might be lurking down these hallways, and if he would be unlucky enough to run into them.