“Stop!” Her voice was high and shaky, her expres-sion horrified—
• and she fired, once, twice, still backing toward Barry, her breathing fast and shallow.
“Get clear, left!” He raised the Colt as she moved out of the way, as a tall man stepped into view. The figure’s arms were stretched out like a sleepwalker’s, the hands frail and grasping.
Barry saw the creature’s face then and didn’t hesi-tate. He fired, a .357 round peeling the top of its ashen skull away in an explosive burst, blood coursing down its strange, terrible features and staining the cataracts of its pale, rolling eyes.
It pitched back, sprawling face-up at Jill’s feet.
Barry hurried to her side, stunned.
“What—“ he started, then saw what was on the carpet in front of them, laying in the small sitting area that marked the end of the corridor.
For a moment, Barry thought it was Chris—until he saw the S.T.A.R.S. Bravo insignia on the vest, and felt a different kind of horror set in as he struggled to recognize the features. The Bravo had been decapi-tated, the head laying a foot away from the corpse, the face completely covered in gore.
Oh jeez, it’s Ken.
Kenneth Sullivan, one of the best field scouts Barry had ever known and a hell of a nice guy. There was a gaping, ragged wound in his chest, chunks of partly eaten tissue and gut strewn around the bloody hole. His left hand was missing, and there was no weapon nearby; it must have been his gun that Joseph had found out in the woods. . . .
Barry looked away, sickened. Ken had been a quiet, decent sort, did a lot of work in chemistry. He’d had a teen-aged son who lived with his ex in California. Barry thought of his own girls at home, Moira and Poly, and felt a surge of helpless fear for them. He wasn’t afraid of death, but the thought of them growing up without a father. . . .
Jill dropped into a crouch next to his ravaged body and rifled quickly through the belt pack. She shot an apologetic look at Barry, but he gave her a slight nod. They needed the ammo; Ken certainly didn’t. She came up with two clips for a nine-millimeter and tucked them into her hip pocket. Barry turned and stared down at Ken’s murderer in disgust and wonder.
He had no doubt that he was looking at one of the cannibal killers that had been preying upon Raccoon
City. It had a crusty scum of red around its mouth and gore-encrusted nails, as well as a ragged shirt that was stiff with dried blood. What was weird was how—dead it looked.
Barry had once done a covert hostage rescue in Ecuador, where a group of farmers had been held for weeks by a band of insane guerrilla rebels. Several of the hostages had been killed early in the siege, and after the S.T.A.R.S. managed to capture the rebels, Barry had gone with one of the survivors to record the deaths. The four victims had been shot, their bodies dumped behind the small wooden shack that the rebels had taken over. After three weeks in the South American sun, the skin on their faces had shriveled, the cracking, lined flesh pulling away from sinew and bone. He still remembered those faces clearly, and saw them again now as he looked down at the fallen creature. It wore the face of death.
Besides which, it smells like a slaughterhouse on a hot day. Somebody forgot to tell this guy that dead people don’t walk around.
He could see the same sickened confusion on Jill’s face, the same questions in her eyes, but for now, there weren’t any answers; they had to find Chris and regroup.
Together, they moved back down the corridor and checked all three doors, rattling handles and pushing at the heavy wood frames. All were securely locked. But Chris had to have gone through one of them, there’s nowhere else he could have gone. . . .It didn’t make sense, and short of breaking the doors down, there was nothing they could do about it. “We should report this to Wesker,” Jill said, and Barry nodded agreement. If they’d stumbled into the hiding place of the killers, they were going to need a plan of attack.
They ran back through the dining room, the stale air a relief after the corridor’s reek of blood and decay. They reached the door back to the main hall and hurried through, Barry wondering what the cap-tain would make of all this. It was downright—
Barry stopped short, searching the elegant, empty hall and feeling like the butt of some practical joke that simply wasn’t funny.
Wesker was gone.
Six
“WESKER!” BARRY SHOUTED, HIS DEEP VOICE echoing through the chilly room. “Captain Wesker!” He jogged toward a row of arches at the back of the hall, calling to Jill over his shoulder as he ran. “Don’t leave the room!”
Jill walked to the stairs, feeling almost dizzy. First Chris, now the captain. They hadn’t been gone five minutes and he’d said he was going to stay put. Why would he have left? She looked around for signs of a struggle, a spent cartridge, a spot of blood—there was nothing to indicate what might have happened. Barry appeared on the other side of the giant staircase, shaking his head and walking slowly to join her. Jill bit her lower lip, frowning.
“You think Wesker ran into one of those—things?” she asked.
Barry sighed. “I don’t think the RPD showed and snuck him out. Though if he did run into trouble, we would have heard the shots—“ “Not necessarily. He could have been ambushed, dragged away ...”
They stood silently for a moment, thinking. Jill was still a bit shaken from the face-to-face with the
walking corpse, but thought she’d accepted the facts pretty well; the woods bordering Raccoon City had become infested with zombies.
After a lifetime of reading trashy novels about serial killers, is a cannibal zombie so hard to swallow? Somehow it wasn’t, and neither were the murderous dogs or the secretly kept estate. There was no question that it all existed. The question was, why? Did the mansion have anything to do with the murders, or had the zombies simply overrun it like they’d overrun Raccoon Forest?
And was that creature the last thing Becky and Pris saw?
She rejected that thought almost violently; thinking about the girls now would be a mistake. “So do we go looking or do we wait?” Jill said finally.
“Go looking. Ken made it here. The rest of the Bravos could be somewhere in this house. It’d be easy enough to get lost. Chris . . ”
He half-smiled, though Jill could see the worry in his eyes. “Chris and Wesker got—side-tracked, but we’ll find them. It’d take more than a couple of walking stiffs to cause either of them any grief.” He reached into a pocket in his vest and pulled out something wrapped in a handkerchief, handing it to her. She felt the thin metal objects beneath the light fabric and recognized them instantly.
“It’s the set you gave me to practice with last month,” he said. “I figure you’ll have better luck with them.”
Jill nodded, tucking the lockpicks into her hip pouch. Barry had taken an interest in her former “career” and she’d given him a few pieces from her old set, several picks and torsion bars. They could come in handy. The small bundle settled on top of something hard and smooth—
• Trent’s computer! In all the excitement, she’d totally forgotten about her strange encounter in the locker room. She opened her mouth to tell Barry, then shut it, remembering Trent’s cryptic warning. “I
wouldn’t mention this conversation to anyone.” Screw that. She’d almost risked it anyway with Chris_
And where is Chris now? Who’s to say that Trent’s “dire consequences” haven’t already occurred? Jill realized what she was thinking and had to fight off an urge to laugh at herself. What had happened with Trent probably wasn’t even relevant to their predicament, and whether or not she could trust Barry, she knew she didn’t trust Trent—still, she decided not to say anything about it, at least until she had a chance to see what the computer held. “I think we should split up,” Barry continued. “I know it’s dangerous, but we need to cover a lot of ground. We find anybody, we meet back here, use this room as base.”
Rubbing at his beard, he fixed her with a serious gaze. “You up for this, Jill? We could search to-gether .
55
“No, you’re right,” she said. “I can take the west wing.” Unlike cops, S.T.A.R.S. seldom partnered. They were trained to watch their own backs in dan-gerous situations.
Barry nodded. “Okay. I’ll go back and see if I can persuade one of those doors to open. Keep an eye out for a back exit, conserve ammo . . . and be careful.” “You, too.”
Barry grinned, holding up his Colt Python. “I’ll be fine.”
There was nothing left to say. Jill headed straight for the set of doors on the west wall that Wesker hadn’t tried earlier. Behind her, Barry hurried back to the dining room. She heard the door open and
close, leaving her alone.
Here goes nothing.
The painted blue doors opened smoothly, revealing a small, shadowy room as cool and silent as the main hall, all in shades of blue. Muted track lighting illuminated framed paintings on dusky walls, and in the center of the room was a large statue of a woman holding an urn on one shoulder.
Jill closed the door behind her and let her eyes adjust to the gloom, noting the two doors opposite the one she’d come through. The one on the left was open, though a small chest was pushed in front of it, blocking access. It was unlikely that Wesker had gone that way. . . .
She walked to the one on the right and tried the knob. Locked. Sighing, she reached into her pack for the picks and then hesitated, feeling the smooth weight of the mini-disk reader.