He shoved a key into the lock, the last key on the ring that he hadn’t found the room for, and slammed his shoulder against the door at the same time, the shark now only a few feet away.
The door flew open and Chris stumbled in, falling and kicking frantically. His boot connected solidly with the shark’s fleshy snout, deflecting it from the opening. In a flash, he was on his feet. He threw his weight into the door and in a slap of water, it was closed.
He sagged against the door, wiping at his stinging eyes with the back of his hand. The lapping water settled gently into smaller and smaller ripples as he caught his breath and his vision cleared. For now, he was safe.
He unholstered his Beretta and ejected the dripping magazine, wondering how the hell he was going to make it back upstairs. Looking around the small room, he saw nothing he could use as a weapon. One wall was lined with buttons and switches, and he trudged over to look at them, drawn to a blinking red light in the far corner.
Looks like I found a control room . . . aces. Maybe I can turn off the lights and get the shark to go to sleep. There was a lever set next to the flashing light and Chris stared down at the faded tape beneath it, feeling a numb disbelief as he read the printed letters. Emergency Drainage System.
You’ve gotta be kidding me! Why didn’t anyone pull this thing the second the tank broke?
The answer occurred to him even as he thought it. The people who worked here were scientists; no way they were going to turn down the opportunity to study their precious Plant 42, sucking up water from the man-made lake.
Chris grabbed the lever and pushed it down. There was a sliding, metallic noise outside the door—and
immediately, the water level started to drop. Within a minute, the last of it had flowed out from under the door and a gurgling, liquid gasp came from the direction of the broken tank.
He walked back to the door, opening it carefully—and heard the frantic, wet thumps of a very big fish trying to swim through air.
Chris grinned, thinking that he should probably feel pity for the helpless creature—and hoping instead that it died a long, agonizing death.
“Bite me,” he whispered.
Wesker had shot four of the shuffling, gasping Umbrella workers on his way to the computer room on level three. He hadn’t recognized any of them, though he was pretty sure that the second one he’d taken out had been Steve Keller, one of the guys from Special Research. Steve always wore penny loafers, and the pallid, dried-up husk that had reached for him by the stairs had been wearing Steve’s brand. It appeared that the effects of the viral spill had been harsher in the labs . . . less messy, but no less disquieting. The creatures that roamed the halls out-side seemed to have been totally dehydrated, their limbs withered and stringy, their eyes like shriveled grapes. Wesker had dodged several of them, but the ones he’d been forced to put down had scarcely bled at all.
He sat at the computer in the cool, sterile room and waited for the system to boot up, feeling truly on top of things for the first time all day. He’d had earlier moments, of course. The way he’d handled Barry, finding the wolf medal in the tunnels—even shooting Ellen Smith in the face had given him a momentary sense of accomplishment, a feeling that he was in control of what was happening. But so much had gone wrong along the way that he hadn’t had time to enjoy any of his successes.
But now I’m here. If the S.T.A.R.S. aren’t already dead, they will be soon—and assuming I don’t suffer some massive lapse of skill, I’ll be out of here within half an hour, mission complete—
There were still dangers, but Wesker could handle them. The mesh monkeys—the Ma2s—were un-doubtedly loose in the power room, but they were easy enough to get past, as long as you didn’t stop running; he should know, he’d helped come up with the design. And there was the big man, the Tyrant,
waiting one level down in his glass shell, sleeping the sweet, dreamless sleep of the damned.......
From which he’ll surely never wake. What a waste. So much power, crossed off as a failure by the boys at White. . . .
A gentle musical tone informed him that the system was ready. Wesker pulled a notebook out of his vest and opened it to the list of codes, though he already knew them; John Howe had set the system up months ago, using his name and the name of his girlfriend, Ada, as access keys.
Wesker tapped out the first of the passwords that would allow him to unlock the laboratory doors, feeling a sudden, vague wistfulness for the excitement of the day. It would be over so soon and there would be no one to witness his achievements, to share his fond memories after the fact.
Now that he thought about it, it was a shame that none of the S.T.A.R.S. would be joining him; the only thing better than a grand finale was a grand finale with an audience. . . .
SEVEnfEEn
JILL HAD TAKEN THE ELEVATOR INTO WHAT
seemed to be another part of the garden or courtyard, although the area had been isolated, surrounded by trees; she’d guessed as much from the few overgrown potted plants and the welcome sounds of the forest beyond the low metal railing. There had been nothing to see but a rusting door set into a nondescript, overgrown wall, welded shut—and a large, open well, like a stone wading pool. Inside had been a short, spiral staircase leading down to another small ele-vator.
Which I took—but now where the hell am I? The room that the elevator had led to was unlike any other part of the estate she’d seen. It lacked the strange, fetid charm of the mansion, or the dripping gloom of the underground. It was as though she’d walked out of a gothic horror story and into a military complex, a utilitarian’s bleak paradise. She was standing in a large, steel-reinforced con-crete room, the walls painted a muddy industrial orange. Metal ducts and overhead pipes lined the upper walls, and the room was rather aptly titled “XD-R Bl,” painted across the concrete in black, several feet high. Any sense she’d had of where she was in relation to the rest of the estate was totally gone.
Although it’s as cold as everywhere else, at least I know I’m still on the grounds. . . .
There was a heavy metal door on one side of the room, firmly locked. The sign to the left of it stated that it was only to be opened in case of a first-class emergency. She figured that the “Bl” on the wall stood for “Basement level one,” her theory confirmed by the bolted ladder that led down through a narrow shaft in the concrete; where there was Bl, B2 natu-rally followed.
And considering the alternative, it looks like that’s where I’m headed. My other option is to go back through the underground tunnels.
She peered down the ladder shaft, only able to see a square of concrete at the bottom. Sighing, she held on to the Remington and started down.
As soon as she hit the last rung, she turned anxious-ly—and faced a much smaller room, as bland and industrial as the first. Inset fluorescent lights on the ceiling, a gray metal door, concrete walls and floor.
She walked through quickly, starting to feel hopeful that there were no more creatures or traps. So far, the basement levels had offered nothing more dangerous than a lack of decorum. . . .
She opened the door and her hope faded as the dry, dusty smell of long-dead flesh hit her. She stepped out onto a cement walkway that led over a flight of descending stairs, a metal railing circling the path. At the top of the steps was a crumpled zombie, so emaciated and shriveled that it appeared mummified. She held the shotgun ready and walked slowly toward the stairs, noting that there was a hall branch-ing off to the left where the railing stopped. She darted a quick look around the corner and saw that it was clear. Still watching the desiccated corpse care-fully, she edged down the short corridor and stopped at the door on her left. The sign next to the door read “Visual Data Room,” and the door itself was un-locked.
It opened up into a still, gray room with a long meeting table in the center, a slide projector set up in front of a portable screen at the far end. There was a phone on a small stand pushed up against the right wall, and Jill hurried over, knowing that it was too much to hope for but having to check just the same. It wasn’t a phone at all, but an intercom system that didn’t seem to work. Sighing, she stepped past an ornamental pillar and walked around the table, glanc-ing at the empty slide projector. She let her gaze wander, looking for anything of interest—
• and it stopped on a flat, featureless square of metal set into the wall, about the size of a sheet of paper. Jill stepped over to take a closer look. There was a flat bar at the top. She touched it lightly, and the panel slid down into the wall, reveal-ing a large red button. She looked around the quiet room, trying to imagine what the trap would be—and then realized that there wouldn’t be a trap at all. The mansion, the tunnels—all of it was rigged to keep people from getting here, to these basement levels. They’re way too efficiently dull to be anything but where the real work gets done.
She knew instinctively that her logic was sound. This was a board room, a place for drinking bad coffee and sitting through meetings with colleagues; nothing was going to jump out at her if she pushed the button.
Jill pushed it. And behind her, the ornamental pillar slid to one side with a smooth, mechanical hum. Behind the pillar were several shelves, stacked with files—and something that glittered in the soft gray light of the room.
She hurried over and picked up a metal key, the top of it imprinted with a tiny lightning bolt. Slipping it into her pocket, she flipped through a few of the files. They were all stamped with the Umbrella logo, and though most of them were too thick and ponderous to spend time sorting through, the title on one of the reports told her what she needed to know, what she’d already suspected.
Umbrella / Bioweapons Report / Research and Develop-ment.
Nodding slowly, Jill put the file back. She’d finally found the real research facilities, and she knew that the S.T.A.R.S. traitor would be somewhere in these rooms. She was going to have to be very careful. With a final glance around her, Jill decided to go see if she could find the lock that the key belonged to. It was time to place the last few pieces of the puzzle that Umbrella had set up and that the S.T.A.R.S. had sacrificed themselves trying to solve.
The twisted, gnarled root of Plant 42 took up a large corner of the basement room, the bulk of it hanging down in slender, fleshy tendrils that almost touched the floor. A few of the tiny, worm-like threads squirmed blindly around each other, twisting slowly back and forth as if looking for the water supply that Chris had drained.
“God, that’s disgusting,” Rebecca said. Chris nodded agreement. Besides the control room he’d escaped into, there had only been two other chambers in the basement. One of them had been stacked with boxes of cartridges for all kinds of weapons—and although most of them had been use-lessly wet, he’d found most of a box of nine-millimeter rounds on a high shelf, saving them both from running out of ammunition.
The other room had been plain, containing only a wood table, a bench—and the massive, creeping root of the carnivorous plant that lived upstairs. “Yeah,” Chris said. “So how do we do this?” Rebecca held up a small bottle of purplish fluid and swirled it gently, still staring at the moving tendrils. “Well, you stand back, and don’t breathe too deeply. This stuffs got a couple of toxins in it that neither of us want to be ingesting, and it’ll turn gaseous once it hits the infected cells.”
Chris nodded. “How will we know if it’s working?” Rebecca grinned. “If the V-Jolt report is on the mark, we’ll know. Watch.”
She uncapped the bottle and stepped closer to the twisted root—then upended the glass vial, dousing the snaking tendrils with the watery fluid. Immediately, a billow of reddish smoke plumed up from the root as Rebecca emptied the bottle and stepped quickly away. There was a hissing, crackling sound like wet wood thrown atop a blazing fire—and within seconds, the feebly twisting fibers started to break, pieces of them snapping off and flaking away. The knotted thickness at the center started to tighten and shrink, pulling into itself.
Chris watched in amazement as the giant, terrible root suddenly shriveled up into a dripping ball of mush no bigger than a child’s ball and hung there, dead. The entire process had taken about fifteen seconds.
Rebecca nodded toward the door and both of them stepped out into the drying basement, Chris shaking his head.
“God, what’d you put in there?”
“Trust me, you don’t want to know. You ready to get out of here?”
Chris grinned. “Let’s do it.”