Chapter 37
The elevator door opened, and Billy and Rebecca found themselves underground. They stepped out into a long, dark hallway, illuminated only by the light from the elevator. Billy held the door open to keep them from getting lost in the darkness. For the moment, they just waited.
The place felt like a crypt. Rebecca wondered how long this place had lay unused. Years? Decades? And even more nagging was the reason for its abandonment. There were too many frightening coincidences. The dead coming back to life, a spooky abandoned mansion in the middle of the forest, and a company like Umbrella somehow involved in it all. Rebecca was not the type to give credence to conspiracy theorists who claimed that multinational pharmaceutical corporations like Umbrella engaged in illegal genetic experiments and such, but what were the odds that zombies would appear in a place like this? She had no doubts that they were about to enter an old research laboratory, hidden underneath the mansion above.
She took a few hesitant footsteps and flipped on a nearby row of light switches. For a moment, nothing happened, and they both feared that there was no electricity. But then the fluorescent lights above them flickered to life, glowing dimly at first, and gradually gaining strength until they spread pale white light across the entire hallway.
“Do you smell that?” Billy asked.
Rebecca sniffed the air and noticed the faint, lingering odor of chemicals. She couldn’t place it exactly, but it reminded her of a hospital smell. Disinfectants, or something similar. But it wasn’t fresh, it smelled old, like the inside of a time capsule.
Together, they slowly moved down the hall. Their feet made prints in the fine layer of dust on the floor, which was otherwise undisturbed, informing them that no zombies had been walking around there recently. Still, they took no chances. They walked side-by-side, weapons drawn and ready.
Rebecca nudged open the first door on the left, revealing a supply room of some kind. Each side of the room had a long, wide counter with cupboards above and below. The room was otherwise empty. Billy pushed open the door on the right, revealing a small bathroom. They let the doors close and continued down the hall.
“Look at that,” Billy said. Rebecca stopped to see, but Billy walked ahead of her, right to the end of the hallway.
The hallway ended with a door to the left and an open doorway to the right, leading to a large laboratory room. But the wall where Billy stood was badly damaged. The metal ventilation panel along the floor was perforated with holes, and the white plaster above it was gouged and chipped all over. There was no leftover debris on the floor, so it must have been swept up, but it looked like someone had taken a pickaxe to the wall. Rebecca stepped closer, and realized it hadn’t been chipped away after all.
“Automatic weapons fire,” Billy said, running his hand across the damage. “Small arms, probably an uzi or a small caliber submachine gun.” The wall to his right, directly before the entrance to the lab room, was shot up as well.
“Whatever happened, it’s been cleaned up,” Rebecca observed. “There’s nothing on the floor.”
Billy examined the wall closely. “That’s the chemical smell. They cleaned this place up pretty good, but blood is pretty messy. I don’t see any stains on the wall here.”
“What were they shooting at then?”
“I don’t know, but they have to have emptied two hundred rounds of ammo into this wall. They were shooting at something.”
Rebecca looked curiously into the lab to their right and walked inside. The room was about fifty feet by twenty. The far wall was taken up by tall cupboards that looked almost like lockers. The wall to her right was one long desktop, empty except for three computer monitors wrapped in plastic dust covers. The wall to the left was plain except for two large indentations two feet deep and four feet wide.
Billy seemed interested more in the bullet-riddled wall than the room, so Rebecca looked around. The chemical smell was stronger here, but still faint. She wondered about the two large alcoves in the wall, and examined them closer. There was a groove along the entire inside, an inch from the edge. It only took Rebecca a moment to realize that she was looked at an enclosed terrarium, now unused. The groove was where the glass had been. Right away, she noticed scattered holes in the wall. More bullet holes.
She called Billy over, and he gently touched the holes in the wall. There were a few on the wall itself, and a few along the inside of the terrarium as well. Billy looked back to the door and nodded to himself. “There must have been a stand-off. Someone was hiding in this room. That’s what all the gunfire in the hallway must have been about.”
“What do you mean?” Rebecca asked. “They shot someone in here?”
“He must have been at the doorway holding them off. I bet we could find more bullet holes in the wall by the elevator. They shot up that wall and the doorway trying to hit him. Then they came in here and gunned him down.” Billy stood in the middle of the room, facing the doorway. Rebecca, standing in front of him, could now see how all of the bullet holes in the lab wall were generally centered around where Billy was standing.
“How did you know that?” Rebecca asked.
Billy rubbed his chin and looked back at the terrarium. “I’m a soldier, remember? If there’s one thing I understand, it’s gun fights. With all the bullet holes out in the hall, there were probably three or four guys with automatics. In other words, trained soldiers. Security guards or civilians would have been using pistols.”
“Maybe it was a S.W.A.T. team,” Rebecca suggested.
Billy shook his head. “Do you really think that police officers have ever been down here?”
“But why would they send soldiers down here to kill someone?”
Billy folded his arms and stared at the terrarium. Rebecca felt her gaze drawn to it as well, and her imagination tried to conjure up what kind of creatures had been grown there.
“I bet that’s why they closed this place,” Billy said. “One of their scientists went too far and they had to silence him.”
“This is crazy, Billy,” Rebecca said. “We don’t know what happened down here. Maybe a wild animal got loose down here and they had to put it down.”
Billy smiled at her. “Do you really think that?”
“All I’m saying is that we’re making wild guesses. It must have happened years ago, and we can’t start making up crazy theories. Who knows what happened? We should focus on getting out of here alive.”
“You have a point,” Billy conceded.
“Good, now let’s get going.”
They left the room, went across the hall, and through the door to another hallway lined with thick glass doors and windows. Each room was about five feet square, with nothing but a large ventilation cover in the ceiling. Windows allowed people in the hall to look into the rooms, even though the doors were glass. There were half a dozen such rooms.
“I don’t like this,” Rebecca said nervously.
“Observation rooms,” Billy said unnecessarily. “They did experiments here.”
“Look at that one.”
The window to the room at the far right was damaged. It was safety glass, but something had struck it hard enough to leave a spiderweb crack pattern. Billy ran his hand along the glass.
“It’s bulged out here,” he said. “Whatever hit the glass came from the inside.”
“Something trying to get out?”
“Seems that way.”
“What could have hit it that hard?”
Billy slid open the door and stepped inside. Rebecca looked at him worriedly, but he waved her off. He pulled out his pistol and fired unexpectedly at the window. Rebecca covered her ears with her hands and shrieked loudly.
The window did not shatter. Now, there were two large spiderweb patterns in the window, almost exactly the same size. “It’s bulletproof, even,” Billy said, half-surprised. “Someone shot at the window from inside here.”
r /> Rebecca moved her hands over her mouth. “Oh my God,” she whispered, understanding the implications.
Billy returned the pistol to his back pocket, coming out of the room. He touched Rebecca’s shoulder. “Come on, we should keep moving. Some bad things happened here.”
They kept going through another door, leading to yet another hallway. Two doors were on the right, both empty. When this lab was shut down, the scientists must have looted it for every available piece of equipment. It was strange, because the mansion above them was apparently still furnished exactly as it had been while it was still in use. At least it looked that way. Why would they leave the mansion so undisturbed, but take everything of value from the labs below?
“We need a map or something,” Billy said. “We’ll might get lost down here.”
“At least we’re safe from zombies and dogs. I’ll settle for being lost if it means being safe.”
Through the next door was another large laboratory room, with more terrariums. Unlike the other lab, this one was larger and more complete, and all the terrariums were still intact. The floor was metal grating, and it clanged gently with their footsteps. Three large machines were against the far wall, silent and useless. More covered computer monitors were on a long desk. But also on the desk were several cardboard boxes.
Billy took a seat, cradling his shotgun in his lap. He faced the door as if guarding it, while Rebecca pulled the cover off one of the boxes and tossed it on the floor. Inside, she discovered dozens of colored folders stuffed with papers. She pulled one out at random and flipped it open.
The letterhead on top of the papers could not be more clear. “Umbrella Research Laboratories, For Authorized Research Personnel Only,” it said in large red letters. Each paper was a mass of scribbled notes and diagrams Rebecca could not decipher. She set the folder aside and opened another, finding it much the same.
“Anything useful?” Billy asked, taking a look.
“Not really. It’s all just notes and things. I can’t read the writing.”
“Looks like diagrams of molecules,” he guessed. “I didn’t take chemistry in high school, though.”
Rebecca went through the folders one by one, looking for anything useful, although she doubted she would recognize useful information even if she saw it. Most of it was nearly illegible, full of unknown abbreviations and arrows pointing from one note to the next. Rebecca saw the letters “L” and “P” referenced over and over, but she didn’t know what they stood for. There were also dates on most of the papers, but it was obvious that they were not placed in the folders in chronological order. The most recent date they could find was over a decade earlier, giving them at least a minor time frame.
Together, they skimmed most of the papers, looking for anything valuable. Against all odds, they hoped to find a map of the lab, or maybe notes about how to kill zombies, or at least the names of the people involved in the experiments. If she ever got out of here, Rebecca intended to have some evidence to bring to her superiors. She grabbed some of the papers and folded them up, stuffing them into one of her supply pouches.
“I can’t find anything,” Billy finally said. “This all might as well be written in another language.”
“There’s got to be something here.”
“They probably took all the useful information away when they cleaned the lab. This is all the extra crap they didn’t need.”
“They didn’t need it, but there’s got to be something we can use.”
Billy opened another box and began riffling through the papers. “This stuff is pretty old,” he said. “The date on this one is 1985.”
“Let me see,” Rebecca said. The paper was full of more notes in the same handwriting, but it was slightly more readable.
“This has some names on it,” Billy said, handing another sheet to her.
It was another older one, but instead of haphazard notes and scrawled diagrams, it was just a list of first initials and last names, but the paper didn’t say who they were. Rebecca read them quickly, recognizing none of them until she reached the last name on the list.
It was “A. Wesker.”