Chapter 32
Enrico took a deep breath, looked around steadily, and closed his eyes when he was satisfied that he was now alone. At his feet lay a corpse, but unlike some of the other corpses that he had seen in the last hour, this one behaved like the way corpses were supposed to behave. An eight-inch long combat knife protruded from the side of its head, and thick blood slowly pooled around Enrico’s boots. Enrico ran out of ammunition for his pistol less than fifteen minutes after he entered the mansion. The knife was all he had left.
He bent down and yanked it from the corpse’s head. A little spurt of blood splashed onto his pants, but he ignored it. He wiped the blade on his pants leg anyway. The condition of his laundry was the last thing on his mind.
Like the last zombie he killed, this one wore a lab coat with an Umbrella Corporation identification badge on its shirt. Whatever this place was, Umbrella had something to do with it. Enrico wished he had time to investigate more fully, but the last thing he wanted to do was go back inside that place.
He was outside now again, having somehow made his way through the mansion’s mazelike hallways to return to the rear yard. He lost his walkie-talkie when one of the zombies had knocked it off his belt in an attempt to grab him. As a result, he couldn’t contact Kenneth or Rebecca or anyone. He had no idea if any of them were still alive. Rebecca might still be alive somewhere, or Richard, but Enrico had a sinking feeling that he was the only one left.
The rear courtyard of the mansion was empty except for some potted plants and cement benches. In the rare moments when the moon shone through the clouds, visibility was pretty good. In any case, zombies were not stealthy or silent, and Enrico felt confident that he could spot them long before they got close. Shooting them or stabbing them in the head seemed to put them down for good, and that was enough.
Zombies weren’t the only thing he had to worry about, though. There were the fleshless dogs, of course. Enrico would prefer to use a gun, but until he found some ammo, his knife would have to do. And there was something else wandering around in the mansion. He heard what sounded like a woman crying a mindless scream and the sound of chains dragging. He didn’t think it was a regular zombie like the others, but he didn’t wait to find out.
He headed off at a brisk pace away from the mansion, debating whether or not to just keep going until he was back at the helicopter. Keeping his eyes to the left and right, he maintained a steady jog along the cement paths through the woods, listening for anything that sounded like a moan or a growl. His combat knife stayed right in his hand. He wished that it hadn’t rained; it would have been easier to hear approaching danger with dry leaves underfoot.
He stopped when he saw a light ahead through the trees. As he crept closer, he saw it was a porch light outside the front door of another building in the woods. Moths fluttered aimlessly around the bulb. It was a long, rectangular house with a plain slanted roof, with blue siding and little outside decoration. Above the front door were the words “Authorized Personnel Only.”
At this point, Enrico considered himself authorized for anything. He took another deep breath and looked around to assure himself it was safe, and went for the door. It was unlocked, and swung open easily.
It was warm and welcoming inside. The floor and walls were solid oak, stained and varnished to a beautiful shine. Dim lamps lined the hallway, giving the interior a warm, friendly glow. It was completely silent except for Enrico’s quiet breathing.
To the left was a long hallway lined with doors with numbers on them. Enrico braced himself and opened the first door, number 101, finding a small room with a bed, desk, and wardrobe closet. Everything was clean and in order. Even the bed was made. There was a phone on the desk, but it had no dial tone when Enrico checked it.
He looked back down the hall. The other rooms were probably all the same as this. The building must be some kind of dormitory for employees of Umbrella, assuming that this entire place was operated by Umbrella, which Enrico suspected it was. He opened the wardrobe and found nothing but clothes, then went to the desk and began pulling out drawers. Papers, folders, but nothing important or meaningful. In the bottom of the last drawer was what he had been looking for: an official Umbrella employee manual. By the look of it, it had never been opened.
Enrico tossed it on the desk and went back out into the hallway, feeling himself begin to get angry. He had lived in Raccoon City for almost his entire life, and he never knew that Umbrella owned property out in the Arklay Mountains. This entire complex, the mansion and dormitory and who knew what else, must have been kept a secret from the public. The only reason Enrico could see to keep it a secret would be if it was doing research the public might not like. The other labs in Raccoon City did straight medical research, but Enrico felt in his bones that this place did research on a much different level. And now their research was running wild, risen from the grave.
It was obvious that the train accident was a result of whatever happened here. These zombies, or whatever they were, must have made their way to the tracks and attacked the passengers on the train. And if they could get all the way to the tracks, they could follow the tracks right back into town. Enrico tried to imagine these things invading Raccoon City, but his imagination was not equipped to handle an atrocity like that. Whatever had happened here, whatever research Umbrella had been doing, had to be stopped. And if Enrico was the last member of Bravo team alive, then he would have to stop it himself.
There was a noise around the corner. A quiet thump and soft click, the sound of a door being bumped closed. And then a shuffling noise and soft moan. As soon as the zombie appeared in front of him, Enrico dove at it and jammed the knife directly into its temple. They crashed to the ground together and the zombie thrashed, groaning painfully. Enrico held one hand on its throat and twisted the knife with his other hand, feeling it scrape the fracture in the skull. The zombie twitched and went still.
It wore the uniform of a security officer. An Umbrella identification badge was clipped to its shirt like a mark of shame. Its holster was unfortunately empty, but attached to the keyring hanging from its belt were two security key cards, one red and one blue. Enrico yanked them off and looked at them carefully.
The word “armory” was scrawled on the back of the red one. Enrico looked down the hallway. He wondered if this building was the dormitory for the full time security staff. If so, where was the most likely place for the armory to be? Probably somewhere near the front door, so all the officers could get their weapons as they left and return them when they came back at the end of their shift.
The door directly to the right of the front door was marked “Supervisors Only.” The blue key card opened it. Inside was a small office with a desk and filing cabinets full of reports and other papers, and another door to the rear. The red key card opened it. Inside was a narrow closet space packed with guns. A dozen pump action shotguns were stacked up on one side, and the other side was lined with small shelves full of standard issue Glocks, each with a name tag for the user. In a drawer on the bottom were boxes of ammunition for both guns.
Enrico fit a box of pistol ammo in each of his cargo pants pockets, and a box of shells into one of the pouches of his supply belt. He loaded up a shotgun and slung it over his shoulder, put one pistol in his holster, another pistol in the front of his belt, and held another pistol in his hand. His trusty knife returned to the sheath around his ankle.
He debated whether or not to continue investigating the building. It stood to reason that there must be a road somewhere leading away from this place, and if he could find it he might be able to make his way back to Raccoon City to warn people. If there was a road, it probably went to the mansion, so he’d have to go back where he had just come from. And he had no idea where it might lead him; the road that led here might wind twenty miles through the woods before it reached a main highway into the city. Enrico did not look forward to running
through the woods like that, not even knowing where he was headed. A compass would be useful for a trip like that. A flashlight would be nice too.
The only other option was to keep going. Since he didn’t even know where he was, he had no idea how large the complex was. He didn’t know where it would lead him and he didn’t know what would be waiting.
But Enrico was angry, and when he got angry, nothing was going to get in his way. He was going to move farther and farther into this until he made it to the end. And no mindless zombies were going to stop him.
At the end of the central hallway was a set of double-doors with shining black handles. Enrico, gun drawn, marched right toward the doors and kicked them open. Beyond was a large, unlit room with a bar running the entire length of the far wall, lined with bar stools and silhouetted by glass shelves packed with colored bottles of alcohol. Standing right in front of the bar, facing Enrico, was another zombie wearing a security uniform. It went down with two bullets in its forehead, crashing into the bar stools and knocking two of them to the floor.
Enrico waited in the doorway but no other zombies announced their presence. He entered the room and felt on the wall beside him for a light switch. Finding one, the room burst into light, revealing a few tables and a small stage to his left, and to his right a pair of pool tables and a few arcade games. The security officers’ rec room and bar.
The dead zombie on the floor, in addition to the two new holes in its head, had at least four gunshot wounds to the chest, marked by the four circles of now-dried blood. Enrico looked around and saw the source. A dead man slumped in the corner, also dressed in a security uniform, pistol still hanging off his trigger finger. A bright oval splatter of blood was on the wall above him. Enrico stepped closer and saw that most of the back of his head was missing, blown away when the man stuck the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
The last living man in a building full of newly-created zombies. A man who watched his former comrade take four bullets to the chest and keep coming, and chose to take his own life rather than join his coworker in undeath.
Enrico knelt down and used the barrel of his pistol to move the man’s head. It lolled back to show the face of a young man, no older than twenty-five. His skin, although pale in death, did not show the ghastly gray pallor that the zombies all seemed to share. This man had not turned into a zombie. He killed himself before the infection got to him. That alone was an important clue. Whatever turned these people into zombies did not bring the dead to life, it turned the living directly into the undead.
Just as Enrico turned back around, he saw something moving above him and jumped away as a huge shape fell from the ceiling and landed on the floor with such a heavy impact the whole floor shook. Enrico scrambled backward, raising his gun but finding that he couldn’t pull the trigger.
It was a spider. A spider as large around as the tables in front of the stage. Standing up on eight legs as wide around as plates, it stood three feet tall. Its red compound eyes glittered like gigantic rubies. Its legs twitched once before it flew at him.
Enrico screamed and pulled the trigger, shot after shot blasting away a bit of the spider’s enormous abdomen, but the spider didn’t seem to notice. Enrico dropped the gun and grabbed a bar stool by the seat just as the giant arachnid reached him, and held it in front of him as the spider lunged. The force knocked Enrico off his feet but he held the stool in front of him like a lion tamer fending off a lion.
The spider surged forward, pushing Enrico along the floor. He hit the wall with enough force to knock the wind out of his lungs, but he held the stool steady. The spider’s mandibles clicked open and closed urgently, stringy venom dripping down onto the stool and all over Enrico’s vest. The spider’s legs scrambled along the floor, pressing Enrico back. His feet kicked at the spider’s abdomen, getting caught up in the remnants of silk clinging to the bottom of the spinneret. One of the stool’s legs got caught under the thorax and when the spider lunged again, it snapped right off, splintering like balsa wood.
As he struggled with the spider, Enrico rubbed his back against the wall and gradually eased the shotgun off his shoulder. He held the stool with one arm and grabbed the shotgun, holding it under the stool, pointing it directly at the spider. The arachnid lunged again frantically, slamming into the stool’s legs. Enrico braced his legs and used his knees to hold the pump handle as he pushed the shotgun forward, racking a shell into the chamber.
He jammed the barrel into the spider’s body and pulled the trigger. The blast knocked the spider away from him and the recoil almost broke his arm. He tossed the broken stool aside and pumped another shell into place. The wounded spider came for him again and he fired, hitting it square in the face.
He used the gun as a crutch as he got to his feet. The spider squirmed on the ground in front of him, legs writhing mindlessly, trying to reach the prey even as it had lost eyes to see and mouth to feed. Enrico racked another shell in and stood over the spider. The last shot blew it in half, separating the abdomen from the rest of the body. It stopped squirming and eventually went still, disgusting red and green blood oozing from the wounds and spreading out across the floor.
He stood for a few minutes and wiped his forehead, which was dripping with sweat. Exhausted, he slung the shotgun back over his shoulder and reached down to pick up the pistol he had dropped. He looked one final time down at the dead spider on the floor and slowly shook his head.
“I hate spiders,” he muttered.