Chapter 7
Jill and Barry did not hear the shots because the dozens of walls between them and Chris absorbed the noise. And at the moment, they were too concerned with the other gunshot they heard, the one that sounded no more than a few feet away. That, and the blood-curdling scream that preceded it.
Barry stood by the side of the door. It was unlocked, so Jill pushed it open to reveal a hallway on the other side of the door, heading to the left and right. She braced herself in the left side of the doorway, aiming to the right, seeing nothing but two a pair of doors at that end. She switched positions and aimed to the left, seeing what appeared to be part of a room at the end of the hall. She saw a chair and an end table, and blueish twilight coming through a window.
But she heard something. She couldn’t exactly place it, but it was a wet, squishing noise, almost like the sound of someone chewing with their mouth open. Jill walked out into the hall and took a step to the left, Barry right behind her. As she approached the corner room, the sound got louder, and was accompanied by a muffled humming noise.
A man was lying on the floor flat on his back. Another man hunched over his chest, making the chewing noises. Jill felt her stomach turn upside down as her brain recognized exactly what was happening right in front of her.
“Freeze!” she suddenly screamed.
The man started at the noise and got to his feet. He was wearing a fashionable brown suit, and in the light from the window, the skin on his hands and face looked light blue. His brown hair stuck out in every direction, and when he turned to face Jill, her breath stopped cold in her chest.
Blood was smeared all across the man’s face and chest, ruining his expensive suit. His eyes were wide open and extremely bloodshot, his bloody teeth bared like a cornered wolf. He groaned and staggered forward, reaching for Jill.
She screamed and pulled the trigger, the gun almost kicking right out of her hands. The bullet hit the man right in the throat and the impact spun him around, knocking him into the wall. Jill screamed again and stumbled backwards, running right into Barry.
But the man was still standing. Even with a chunk of his neck missing, he staggered forward clumsily, arms outstretched, his ghostly moan turned into a sickening gurgle.
Barry did not hesitate. He fired his gun, the boom from the Colt almost deafening them in the enclosed space. The top of the man’s head disappeared in a sudden red mist, and he fell over backward, landing on the floor with a thud, his brains spilling out onto the tile like spilled tapioca pudding.
Jill tried to scream again, but there was no air left in her lungs. Sliding to the floor, she dropped her gun and lifted her hands to her face, gasping for breath to scream with.
“He was eating him!” she shrieked. “He was eating ... oh, Jesus!” She pointed at the other corpse on the ground.
Barry stepped over to the other body. It was a young black man wearing a heavy metal t-shirt and a red bandana on his head. Kenneth Sullivan, the point man for Bravo. His dead eyes stared at the ceiling, a terrified expression frozen on his face. His pistol lay on the floor just a foot away.
Jill stared at the body, horror gripping her heart as she realized what happened. How long had Ken been hiding in this room? Ever since last night? He must have heard Jill and Barry talking, or maybe heard the noise outside from before, and came out of hiding only to find the man waiting for him. He screamed and got a single shot off before he died.
Jill stared at the gun in her hand. She shot the man right in the throat and he kept coming. She shot him and he didn’t even seem to notice. He killed Ken, tore out his throat, and was eating his flesh. She felt bile rise in her throat and had the urge to puke her guts out. Her eyes drifted to the body of the dead man. He wore expensive leather shoes. What kind of psychotic maniac wore shoes like that?
Barry flipped open the man’s suit and pulled a wallet from his inside pocket. Jill could barely think clearly, but Barry followed procedure. A police officer was dead, and the first officers on the scene shot and killed the murderer in self-defense. It was time to establish the murderer’s identity.
“Harold Murphy,” Barry said in a flat voice, studying the man’s driver’s license. “Age fifty-one. Resident of Raccoon City.” He pulled out another card from the wallet. “He was an employee of the Umbrella Corporation.”
“What?” Jill managed to ask, her voice a pathetic squeak. She couldn’t seem to focus. The man work for Umbrella? That didn’t make any sense. She thought this place was supposed to be a government facility.
“This is a security key card,” Barry said, holding it up. It looked like nothing more than a credit card with a black magnetic stripe on the back. Except that instead of a Visa or Mastercard logo, there was the red and white octagon of the Umbrella Corporation decorating the front. Barry put the card in his pocket. For evidence? He tossed the wallet back into the corpse’s chest.
“Barry ...” Jill managed say. “He ... he was eating ... Ken’s face ...”
Barry knelt down and a perplexed look came over his face. “This man was dead.”
“We ... we shot him, Barry.”
“No, I mean this man’s been dead for hours. Days, maybe. Look at the wound here, there’s no blood.”
Still sitting on the floor, Jill craned her neck to see across the dead man’s body to the chunk of his neck her bullet took out. Then she saw what Barry meant. There was no blood pooling around the wound, nothing on the wound itself except for ragged flesh. There should have been blood, and a lot of it. The bullet must have hit a major artery or vein, even if it wasn’t the jugular. Even after Barry killed him, there should have been blood pouring from the wound.
“It looks like his blood is coagulated in his veins,” Barry said, looking closely. He pulled out his knife and cut away the man’s pants leg to look at his lower legs. Jill saw that they were a bruised blue color and horribly swollen. “Yes, the blood pooled in his legs. This guy has been dead a while, Jill.”
“But he was alive,” Jill said weakly. “I mean, he was moving. He ... Jesus, Barry, he killed Ken just a few minutes ago.”
“Yeah, I see that.”
“So how could he have been dead?”
“Well, he wasn’t alive. That much I can tell you.”
Arguing somehow made Jill feel better. It gave her something to focus on, something to talk about. She didn’t have to just stare at the two bodies on the floor and imagine the sight of the man coming for her with blood and gore dripping from his chin. She braced herself against the wall and pushed to her feet.
“Any coroner in the world would tell you that this man died yesterday, maybe even the day before yesterday,” Barry said. “I don’t know exactly.”
“That’s ... that’s just impossible,” Jill blurted out, pointing at the corpse. “He was standing and moving around! He was going to kill us, just like he killed Ken! Dead people don’t do that!”
“What about the dogs outside?” Barry asked, glancing to the window. “They weren’t exactly normal dogs, now were they? They didn’t have any skin,” he said, as if Jill needed a reminder.
“That was different! This is a person we’re talking about!”
“What do you think happened here?” Barry asked, rising to his feet. He crossed his thick arms, using his best authoritarian voice. “This is supposed to be government installation, right? But this guy worked for Umbrella.”
“So? What does Umbrella have to do with this?”
“You’ve only lived here a couple of years, Jill. But I’ve lived here my whole life, and Umbrella is a huge part of Raccoon City. They paid for half of the community service projects done here since I was a kid. They have a park named after them. At least two of our city councilmen used to work for them. Maybe they still do.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“They’re a pharmaceutical company, Jill. They have a huge lab right in the ce
nter of town that’s supposed to be a secret even though everyone knows about it. They do experiments there, chemical and biological things. I don’t know what, exactly, but I’ve been around and I’ve heard plenty of rumors.”
Suddenly, Jill found herself interested, and a little scared. “Like what?”
“Like the kind of tests on animals that scientists swear they don’t do anymore. Developing vaccines and medicines, dealing with some serious viruses and things. I’ve even heard they make chemical weapons for the military.”
“That’s absurd,” Jill said, more for her own benefit than Barry’s.
“Well, whatever they do there, they keep a lid on it. Like I said, everyone knows that they have the lab in town, but no one knows what they do there. What if they have a lab out here in the woods too? What if they were working on something and it got loose?”
Jill shook her head and waved her hand as if to dispel the words. “That’s crazy, Barry. It sounds like some wacko conspiracy theory. You can’t believe that, can you?”
“I’ve suspected it for years,” Barry said. “Remember when Wesker first told us where Bravo was, and you asked if it was a secret lab or something? I’ve been thinking about that a lot, and it’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“It doesn’t make any sense, Barry.”
“I’ve been saying all along that there is no way they would call in the local cops. Unless it was something so dangerous that they were desperate and needed a fast response. A terrorist attack, maybe? A natural disaster?”
“There’s an army base half an hour from here, right across the mountains,” Jill said, shaking her head as she realized how illogical it all sounded. “Why did they call us instead of the army?”
“Exactly. I don’t think that this is a government lab. This has Umbrella written all over it. They probably have half the city in their pocket, and that’s how they were able to manipulate Chief Irons into letting Bravo go to clean up their mess.”
“But Barry,” Jill said, but could not find the words to finish the sentence. It sounded completely ridiculous to her, and she couldn’t believe that Barry of all people was saying it. This was the same man who didn’t watch network television police dramas because he thought the plot lines were too farfetched. And now he was spouting an insane conspiracy and cover-up by a local company.
But the evidence was right on the floor in front of her. He was right about the body, she knew. She was no expert in forensics or biology, but he must have been dead for quite awhile for his body to look the way it did. And the dogs outside. Something melted their skin away and made their eyes seem to glow red. What could do that? What could make a dead man walk and turn a dog into a skinless monster? Some kind of new disease? Something that the Umbrella company created?
“I don’t believe it,” Jill said, even though she was beginning to.
“You don’t have to,” Barry said.
He looked down at Ken’s body and Jill could almost hear this thoughts. There was nothing they could do for him. No amount of medical attention could save him. Brad didn’t respond on the radio, so for now, they didn’t even have hope of getting Ken’s body out of here. All they could do was leave him. He was more than just a coworker, he was a friend, and he was murdered almost right in front of their eyes. And there was nothing they could do about it.
“Come on,” Barry said. “We have to get Wesker. It’s been ten minutes.”
They left the room and walked back through the dining room to the lobby without speaking. There was nothing to be said, really. Barry was too angry to speak, and Jill was too afraid. She didn’t know how they were going to tell Wesker about what they’d seen.
But they wouldn’t get the chance. The lobby was empty. Wesker was gone.