Read Resident Evil Legends Part Two - The Arklay Outbreak Page 34

  Chapter 34

  Lisa remembered the sun, but only vaguely. When she walked outside for the first time, she stared up at it in fascination until her eyes stung and black dots swam before her. It had been so long since she’d seen it, she felt that she was experiencing it for the first time. It was only a dim recollection in her mind, a fragment of a fragment of a childhood memory. Like so much of the rest of her earliest experiences, her memories of the sun were foggy and indistinct, so that she didn’t know what was memory and what was half-forgotten dream.

  It took her some time to get out of the long rooms under the ground, even longer since she kept spending time to investigate her new surroundings, but eventually she made it to the surface and rediscovered the sun among so many other things. There was a big building that seemed familiar. But it was the other things that caught her attention.

  She saw all kinds of plants and trees and animals, and was inundated with a whole new range of smells and sights to keep her entertained. She liked the feeling of grass under her feet, she liked the wind blowing through her hair. It was like entering a whole new world, and within hours she had mostly forgotten about her long captivity in her room deep underground. Only occasionally did she think about the years she spent there, even with her friends’ faces to remind her.

  Now that she was free, she remembered more things. She remembered the sun, she remembered trees and birds and flowers. Being out of the rooms underground made her aware of more things.

  When Lisa really tried, she could almost recall a time when she didn’t live with the caretakers in her room under the ground. In her dreams, she saw a woman’s face and knew who the woman was. It was her mother. But when she woke she would lose the vision and forget once more.

  She was free now, free to roam through the woods and smother herself in all these new wonderful experiences. She still had the restraints attached to her scabbed wrists, but that was okay, because they did not hinder her movement. She could move very fast when she walked to, running across the grass at great speed, leaping high into the air. All the time, her chains clanked and banged loudly behind her, but she was so used to the sounds that she barely noticed them.

  She came upon a ramshackle building close to the big building and decided to stay there. It was nicer than her room under the ground. It had a door so she could leave whenever she wanted. Once or twice, she encountered a new friend and took their face as a souvenir of the meeting. She had several faces now to remind her of the past. Several faces to keep her company.

  The woman in her dreams, the one she knew as her mother, used to be her caretaker. Lisa remembered that. She had not known about her mother when she was still in her room underground, but being outside awakened the memories. Her mother was a caretaker, but not like her other caretakers, who always wore white shirts and did not talk to her. Her mother talked to her.

  Lisa could not talk yet. She knew that people could move their mouths to make word sounds, but whenever she tried to make word sounds, it came out as gibberish. But she understood some of them, and wished she could find a new friend who might talk to her the way her mother had talked to her in the past, long ago.

  Her mother had been her first caretaker, along with a man whose name Lisa had forgotten. They were her first caretakers, but they were long gone now. Maybe they were dead.

  The thought surprised her. What did ‘dead’ mean? The word came to her sometimes but she didn’t understand it. Her friends weren’t dead, were they? Maybe she was the one who was dead and she didn’t know it.