Resident Evil Legends Part Five - City of the Dead

  Chapter 38

  The lab was empty now, truly empty this time. Annette Birkin stood in the middle of the hallway and listened wearily to the ragged sound of her own breathing. Strands of limp blonde hair stuck to her forehead, the rest of it a wild tangle on her head, uncombed and sticky with blood. The front of her white shirt was covered in dried blood as well, and the thighs of her jeans were marked with bloody hand prints, although none of the blood was hers. She didn’t even know who the blood was from at this point.

  She was so tired. After the bloodbath at Sherry’s school, she traveled with the soldiers, who she quickly realized were from Umbrella. The men were from a special commando force, ready and waiting for the outbreak, although how in the world they anticipated something like that was beyond her. It probably had something to do with the release of the virus at the Arklay lab.

  She didn’t stay with the soldiers long, since they got caught up in a crowd of zombies soon after that and most of them were killed. Annette managed to escape that time, and other times, all throughout the day. She encountered more zombies than she thought could ever exist, and avoided getting killed more times than she cared to count. She found a few other survivors, other soldiers, but she was the only one still alive now. All the others were dead, as far as she knew.

  And what about Sherry? Annette tried not to think about her.

  She walked slowly through the lab, finding some of the dead soldiers from before, their bodies now cold and stiff. How long had it been since Annette came here and found all her coworkers dead? Thirty hours? It seemed like a year ago.

  She half-expected to find her husband still there, lurking the white corridors like a ghost haunting a castle. But Will was gone, although Annette didn’t know where he went, or how he managed to get out of the lab at all. But if he was there, she was sure that he would have made his presence known by now, and she’d most likely be dead.

  She wondered vaguely what he looked like. Her last glimpses of him before escaping the lab revealed a bestial new form, almost simian, although his humanity was still evident. Had his physical form been altered further? She didn’t know enough about the G-virus to know for sure, but she guessed that the mutative cycle of the virus would keep changing Will’s appearance as it molded his DNA. It was entirely likely that his physical form was drastically different now, maybe not even remotely human.

  Annette walked through the lab, going around the central lobby room where all of her coworkers were slaughtered. She had already seen that once, and didn’t want to look again. She looked around in all the labs, not really sure what she was even looking for. She was just tired and emotionally drained, and needed time to think, time to understand what was going on. That’s why she came back to the lab in the first place.

  She couldn’t do anything for the people in Raccoon City. But she knew that the epidemic was going to spread, despite what she assumed were Umbrella’s best attempts to stop it from doing so. Maybe there was something here in the lab that would help them fight the spread of the virus. At the very least, there had to be something to help her understand what happened to Will.

  She found another dead soldier near one of the secondary lab rooms, and walked inside to see blood splattered all over the floor near one of the lab tables. She paused for a moment and wondered why there was blood and no body. She crouched down and looked at the dried blood, which was smeared around as if someone had rolled around in it. Traces of blood were dripped here and there all the way to the door. Annette scanned the floor, not knowing exactly what she was looking for until she found it.

  A tiny glass vial, broken now. She knew right away what had been inside that vial, and suddenly understood what must have happened.

  “They shot him,” she whispered to herself.

  She wondered if he resisted and fought the soldiers when they showed up, or if they simply shot him on sight. Either scenario was equally plausible. But Annette was certain that her husband was shot right here, in this very spot, and infected himself with the G-virus before he died.

  “Will,” she said sadly, shaking her head.

  She stood up and left the room, wrapping her arms tightly around her, as if trying to shake off the cold, even though the lab wasn’t cold at all. She couldn’t seem to shake the vision of Will chasing after her earlier, his body warped and twisted, his face contorted into a bestial grimace, killing those soldiers so brutally.

  Will must have considered the possibilities. He must have known that the G-virus was incredibly unstable, and infecting a live host would have totally unpredictable results. Maybe he felt that even the slightest chance of survival was better than no chance at all, that the possibility the virus would save his life was worth the risk that it would destroy him. But how could he have anticipated something like that?

  Annette didn’t know what she could do, so she just kept walking.