Chapter 24
There was a large sign on the wall, with two arrows. To the left, it said, “Sigma Labs.” To the right, it said, “Theta Labs.” Chris sighed deeply and looked down each hallway, wishing that one of the arrows pointed to “Exit” instead. He’d been wandering around the hallways of this underground complex for how long now? Two hours?
The first half hour or so had been kind of tense. He expected to run into a zombie every time he turned a corner or opened a door. But he saw nothing. The mansion was populated with zombies, but the labs seemed pretty empty by comparison.
And then, right when he started to get bored, he checked into a lab room like a dozen others and ran into two zombies. After his initial fright, he put them down easily, but it reminded him not to get too sloppy.
All he found after that were more white hallways and empty lab rooms. Chris found plenty of evidence that the labs were in use until just recently, but there was no one there, undead or otherwise. He also found a few staircases leading downstairs, but none going up. At one point he discovered an elevator but was dismayed to find that it was out of service.
But still no exit in sight. And now another crossroads, but this time it was a choice between two more labs, better than his original choice of three, but still not very good. Theta was one of his choices at the first crossroads. No sense in going there, since he chose not to the first time. That left Sigma labs.
He turned left and started walking. The hallway turned right again and ended in a set of double doors. The doors had small glazed windows on them, and in a change from the ordinary, Chris saw lights flickering in the room beyond. And not just one or two of the fluorescent ceiling lights, it looked like some kind of electrical short affected the entire lab room, causing the lights to flash on an off rapidly.
Chris didn’t see anything suspicious through the windows, so he very carefully pushed one of the doors open and snuck inside. He could hear electronics sizzling and sparking somewhere, and smell the unmistakable odor of burning circuits. The lights above flashed randomly on and off like a strobe light, almost making the lab seem like an empty dance club. Like all the other labs, there were computer consoles, lab tables, and scientific hardware lying around.
But this lab room was much bigger than the others. It was probably fifty feet wide and at least that long, but it was in the shape of an L and Chris could not see around the curve to the other side. He walked slowly, keeping his gun out front, making as little noise as possible.
Suddenly, his foot crunched loudly on something and he froze. He glanced down to see shards of broken glass all over the floor. He cursed himself for not being more careful, and then spun to his left when he heard something.
A zombie rose from behind one of the lab tables. Like the other two zombies Chris shot earlier, it wore a standard white lab coat with an Umbrella ID card attached to the breast pocket. But unlike the others, this one did not die quietly.
Half of its face was stripped or chewed away, and a sickening amount of blood and gore spilled down the side of its body, soaking almost its entire arm in red. Most of its jaw was ripped away as well, leaving a hideous, gaping hole. Chris choked back vomit at the sight of the zombie, reminded of how Forest looked.
The zombie lurched around the table and Chris tightened his grip on his pistol, preparing to put a bullet in the zombie’s skull. The zombie gazed at him and grumbled sickeningly, more blood oozing down the front of its lab coat. And then it coughed, or at least that’s what it sounded like.
And then a burst of liquid spurted from its mouth, splashing onto the tabletop and spilling over onto the floor. Chris immediately put his hand over his mouth and gagged, about to imitate the zombie and vomit himself. And then he noticed the smoke rising from the lab table.
It wasn’t just liquid, it was corrosive acid. The table sizzled and smoked, as did the floor. Even the zombie’s face burned from where the acid touched it. That explained what happened to its jaw; the acid burned it away.
Chris closed his mouth tight and fired, striking the zombie right between the eyes. It tilted over backward and barfed up another gush of acidic vomit, and it all splashed down right over its own body as it hit the ground. Chris stumbled away, the stink from the smoke making his stomach twist and churn even more. He walked past the curve to the other half of the room and once again stopped cold.
At the far end of the room were three large glass water tanks. Built into the wall was a very complex computer console, with tubes and wires connecting to the base of each tank, presumably to extract a variety of information from the residents of the tanks. And the residents of the tanks were not pretty.
They looked like a cross between a miniature gorilla and a salamander. About four feet tall, with muscular arms that hung almost to their feet, slick green skin, and a wide reptilian mouth. Two of the tanks contained the creatures suspended in water, but the third tank was ominously empty.
Chris ejected the clip in his Beretta and replaced it with a full one. He did not want to run out of bullets at the wrong time. As he approached the tanks, the sound of sizzling electronics got louder. Directly behind the tanks was a wide metal grill with wisps of smoke and tiny sparks shooting out from under it.
As Chris feared, the third tank was not empty because it was not in use. The entire back side of the tank was shattered away, and chunks of thick glass covered the floor behind the tanks. Water from the tank splashed onto the electric panels, causing the shortage. The third creature was loose.
It was time to go. There were two other doors, one to the left and one to the right. The one to the right led to another hallway, while the one to the left probably led to a supply room. He headed to the right and stopped when he heard a tapping noise. He looked over his shoulder and saw that the creature in one of the tanks was awake, tapping on the front of its glass prison with long claws and a hungry look in its yellow eyes.
Yes, it was definitely time to get out of there.
Chris went through the door into the hallway, where the lights weren’t flickering. There were doors on each side, some of them open, but Chris was not concerned with checking out any more lab rooms. He was going to stick with hallways from now on. But before he even got to the end of the hall, a zombie came out of one of the open doors.
Chris put it down with one shot, which was immediately followed by an ear-piercing shriek from down the hall ahead of him. The doors crashed open and the third lizard creature, the escaped one from its tank, came through and charged right at him. Chris braced himself and squeezed the trigger.
He missed once, then hit the creature twice in the upper chest. It did not stop, but it slowed down, screeching its pain. Spittle sprayed from its mouth as it flashed its razor-sharp teeth. It jumped up and Chris followed it with his gun, firing again. One bullet struck the center of its chest and the other hit it right in its open mouth, splattering blood onto the ceiling. The monster crashed to the floor five feet away from him and made one final desperate grab before Chris fired right at its head, killing it for good.
A loud crash came from behind him, the sound of exploding glass and rushing water. A heartbeat later, the doors burst open and another creature ran out into the hallway, dripping wet and shrieking madly. Chris turned and opened fire once more, hitting it four times right in the chest. It screeched pathetically and collapsed to the floor.
Chris took a deep breath and lowered the gun. And then a zombie that silently crept out of the room next to him groaned loudly and made a grab for his arm.
Chris jumped back and pulled the trigger by accident, shooting the floor. He swung his arm up and emptied the gun into the zombie, hitting it in the chest and face. It fell over backward in the doorway, right on top of its dead companion.
“Take that!” Chris screamed. He leaned against the wall and let his arms fall to his sides, suddenly exhausted. He looked up and down the hall to make sure nothing wa
s trying to sneak up on him, and took a few more deep breaths.
At least zombies were slow. It was relatively easy to take them down with one shot. But these things were much faster and harder to shoot. Not harder to kill, just harder to hit. It didn’t even take a shot to the head to bring them down, which Chris found surprising. And they certainly weren’t just undead creatures, like the zombies or the dogs. These were something else entirely, some kind of genetically mutated lizard.
Chris wondered what other monsters might be lurking down here, and if he was destined to run into any of them. He wondered what sort of creatures Barry and the others might have discovered so far.
It also occurred to him that the first zombie in this hallway actually saved his life. Chris might have walked all the way to the end of the hall and opened the doors to discover the lizard monster there. He probably wouldn’t have been able to shoot it before it attacked him.
He ejected the empty clip and fished into his pocket for his extra bullets. He snapped the bullets into the clip one at a time and let his mind wander. And then he heard the familiar sound of shattering glass and splashing water. The monster in the last tank.
Chris went to the closest door and opened it. He flipped the light on to make sure the room was empty, which it was, and then went inside, closing the door after him. Silently putting the extra bullets and clip back into his pocket, he snuck behind a filing cabinet, just in case the creature was smart enough to look into the rooms.
He took out the half-full clip he replaced earlier and slid it into the pistol as quietly as possible. Out in the hallway, he could hear the creature moving around. It was probably investigating the dead bodies of its companions. Chris was okay with that, since it was about to join them.
It was only then that he looked up and noticed the dry erase board on the wall next to him. Notes and equations scribbled across its surface in a variety of marker colors, along with crudely-drawn diagrams of the lizard monsters. Chris skimmed the notations and tried to get an idea what they all meant.
The lizard monsters were labeled “hunters,” which Chris felt was a pretty accurate description of their appearance, with the note “Rana clamitans” below it. He didn’t know what that meant, but he guessed it might be a scientific name. But the hunters weren’t the only ones shown. There were drawings of two other creatures as well, and if anything, they looked even more dangerous than the hunters.
There was a drawing of a larger animal with four legs and a thick body, with a short tail and what Chris guessed was a long tongue. It was called a licker (Felis catus). There was a strange insect-looking creature with six legs and a pointed tail. It was a stinger (Apis mellifera). What friendly-sounding names, he thought. Hunters, lickers, and stingers, oh my.
Next to each drawing, there were several notes with arrows pointing to parts of the body. Surprisingly, there was no drawing of a gigantic spider like the dead one he saw back in the guard house. Maybe that wasn’t even one of their projects, maybe it mutated on its own. There was also no diagram of the zombie dogs.
Absentmindedly, Chris flipped the catch and the Beretta’s slide clicked loudly back into place, chambering the first bullet. Almost immediately, the hunter out in the hallway shrieked and slammed into the door, knocking it right off its hinges. It smashed to the floor and the hunter leaped into the center of the room.
Chris ducked out from behind the filing cabinet and fired two precise shots, hitting the hunter in the head both times. The creature howled and keeled over, dead before it hit the ground.
Chris took the time to refill each clip with bullets before he left the room. He considered retracing his steps and checking out Theta labs instead, but he kept going forward. The hunters, despite their speed, were about as hard to kill as a zombie. Shoot them once in the head and they would probably go down. So hopefully, Sigma labs did the work on hunters. If he investigated the other labs, he might just run into the lickers or the stingers, and they might be harder to kill.
Besides, he just killed three zombies and three hunters, and he didn’t want all that effort to go to waste.