Escape From Raccoon City

Chapter Sixteen

Leon ran down the hall, chasing after the blonde woman. It was easy to follow her because she wasn’t running very fast, so Leon was able to keep up. He shouted for her to stop several times, but she kept going frantically, crying and sobbing as she ran.

“Will you just stop?” Leon shouted. “I’m not going to hurt you!”

They ran through two large rooms and the woman headed into another large area, where the walls were covered in metal panels. When Leon turned the corner, he slowed down as he saw the giant square shaft that dominated the center of the huge room. The floor here was concrete, and there was a wide walkway with a metal railing all the way around the open shaft, which was probably thirty feet wide and extended down at least that far. Above them, the shaft continued up, and Leon realized this was an unfinished elevator shaft. He could see the next level above them, but he couldn’t tell how far up the whole thing went.

The woman finally stopped running. She kept her back to him, one hand on the railing, as if to keep herself upright. She gasped for breath and stood up straight, putting her hands on her hips.

Leon lowered his gun but did not put it away. The woman still carried her gun, and he didn’t want to get shot at again. He’d had just about enough of that already today.

“I’m not going to hurt you, okay?” he said as gently as he could manage. “I’m a cop, my name is Leon Kennedy. You didn’t have to run away from me like that.”

The woman turned slowly and glared at Leon suspiciously. At one time, she might have been pretty, but the strained, haunted look on her face made her appear much older than she probably was. Her blonde hair hung limply across her face, and she didn’t bother to brush it aside. She let her arms hang at her sides, glanced down at the gun in her hand, and then tossed it to the floor with a despairing frown.

“You don’t have to drop your weapon,” Leon said. “You can keep it if you want.”

“It’s empty anyway,” the woman grunted. She cleared her throat and looked Leon unsteadily in the eye.

Leon slid his own gun into his back pocket as a sign of good faith. “Okay, I put mine away too. How about we just talk?”

“Okay,” the woman said, her voice monotone. “What do you want to talk about?”

“Well, let’s start with who you are. How did you get down here?” And then, he added, “By any chance, do you know how to get back to the city?”

“You don’t work for Umbrella?”

“No, I’m a cop.”

“So how did you find this place?”

“I was in the sewers,” Leon answered. “There was a doorway that led to some tunnels, so here I am. What about you?”

The woman sighed deeply and looked down at her hands. Her sleeves and the front of her white shirt were stained with blood, so Leon could take a wild guess what the woman had gone through so far. She fidgeted for a moment and then forced her hands to her sides.

“I work down here,” she said. “This new sector is still being built, but it connects to the main lab. This whole complex extends for a few city blocks. This is just one small part of the whole lab.”

“A lab for Umbrella, right?”

“Correct. I’m one of the senior managers here. My name’s Annette Birkin.”

“Okay, Annette,” Leon said. “If you know your way around, maybe you can help me out. There are some other people with me. I’d appreciate it if you could lead us out of here.”

“Why bother?” Annette muttered. “There’s nowhere else to go.”

“We’re trying to get out of the city.”

“Trying to get out?” Annette choked out a short, mocking laugh. “Do you think that they’ll just let you waltz out of here? Umbrella has the whole city blocked off, you must know about that.”

“I know they blocked the roads to keep anyone from getting in. But I also know that they brought in soldiers who are trying to find survivors. So there must be a way out. We just have to find it.”

“You can’t trust them,” Annette said darkly. “Those soldiers aren’t here to help anyone, they’re here to get rid of any witnesses.”

Leon didn’t contradict her, but he remembered back to the Umbrella soldiers he met earlier that day. They didn’t try to harm him, and their commander, a man named Victor, helped Leon before he died. Leon suspected that Annette had her own reasons for what she believed, but he wasn’t here to argue with her.

“We need your help,” Leon said, moving the conversation back where he wanted. “I have two other people with me, and we’re trying to get back up to the city. We’ve been running around for hours down here.”

Annette didn’t seem to care, or else she was so emotionally drained that she just didn’t react to what he was saying. So Leon added, “One of the people with me is a little girl. She’s very scared. If you could just help us ...”

As he spoke, Annette suddenly gasped and closed her eyes tightly, tears forming as she lifted her hands to her face. She sobbed softly and wiped her face with the back of her hand, sniffling and looking away.

“I have a daughter,” she whimpered, looking lost. “I ... I dropped her off at school this morning, and ... and I never saw her again. I know she’s probably ... I just ...”

Her legs seemed to give out on her, and she knelt down, burying her face in her hands, crying to herself, whispering so low that Leon couldn’t hear her. In the back of his mind, Leon considered the possibilities. But there was no way. It was just too much of a coincidence.

“We can get out of here, all of us,” he said gently, stepping toward her. “We can help you find your daughter, I promise. I know what you must have been through, but you don’t have to give up, okay?”

“Maybe ... maybe if I’d have gotten here earlier,” she whimpered, “then everything would be okay. This wouldn’t have happened ...”

Leon had no idea what she was talking about, and didn’t ask. When he tried to help her up, she slapped his hands away and got up on her own, stepping away from him.

“They killed my husband,” she said through her tears. “He was a good man ... and we were going to leave before the infection spread ... but they wanted to take it from him. God, they killed him, they just killed him,” she sobbed.

“Please,” Leon said, not having any idea what else to say. Annette was lost in her own world, and he had to bring her back. “It’s going to be okay, I promise.”

“No,” Annette whispered. “It’s not going to be okay.”

So Leon tried a different track. “If you want Umbrella to pay for this, you have to help us escape. The world isn’t going to find out what Umbrella did here if no one survives to tell them.”

Annette lowered her hands, the tears on her face smeared with the dirt on her cheeks. “You just don’t understand,” she said weakly, staring into space. “I’ve worked for Umbrella for twelve years. I know things that you wouldn’t believe. They won’t pay for this, they’ll never pay for anything.”

“They can’t cover up a hundred thousand deaths,” Leon said. “If we can get out of the city alive, we can tell everyone that Umbrella is responsible. People will listen, they’ll have to. But we have to get out of here first.”

Annette placed both hands on the railing, looking down into the bottom of the huge empty shaft. “Just leave me alone,” she said softly.

“You have to help us. This place is a maze, we can’t find our own way out.”

“Just go that way,” Annette snapped, jerking her arm up to point down the hallway they came from. “There’s a yellow arrow on the wall. Follow that and you’ll find one of the elevators back in the main lab. Just get the hell out of here.”

“You’re not coming, then?”

Annette sighed deeply once more. Out of sadness or irritation, Leon couldn’t tell. She turned to look at him sideways and paused, as if looking for the right words. Her hair hung over her face like a veil.

“Just leave me alone,” she said.

Leon looked at her for a long moment. If she didn’t want to come with him, he certainly wasn’t going to make her. But he wondered just what had happened to make her so insistent on staying. Had she completely given up hope? Or did the death of her husband and daughter affect her so deeply that she couldn’t function?

As Leon stepped away, there was the sound of a tremendous impact above them. It was so heavy that the floor seemed to shake. Leon glanced upward, reaching for his gun, and even Annette was shaken out of her reverie. There was another pounding crash, and the sudden sound of crumbling rock, like a wall collapsing above them.

And then the scream. It was a long, tortured scream that echoed loudly on the concrete walls, and it sounded awfully familiar to Leon. He backed up, pointing his gun into the air, knowing that it was useless.

Annette seemed possessed. She let go of the railing and her arms fell to her sides, and she stood, transfixed, listening intently to the sound as it echoed away.

And then, from the level above them, Leon caught movement at the edge of his vision. He turned and saw the twisted shape of a creature that might have once been human. It leaped off the edge of the level above them and crashed down to their level, its impact shaking the floor underneath their feet.

One huge arm with a bulging, pulsing shoulder, with a sickening yellow eyeball right in the center. The rest of its body was equally distorted, like someone viewed through a funhouse mirror. The other arm hung limply, apparently useless, but it ended in a large hand tipped with razor-sharp nails. The small human head sunken into the thick torso, a tiny mop of black hair and two tiny eyes that glittered like black diamonds. Clothed in nothing but shredded rags, its body growing oversized and mutated, its whole monstrous form coated in slime and a sheen of something that might have been sweat, it hunched over like it was unable to balance.

But then it ran, zipping toward them like a blur, shrieking like a banshee as it swung its huge, alien arm at Annette, who just stood there, unmoving. Leon reached out helplessly and cried out. Somehow, above the screaming, Leon heard her weak, plaintive voice.

“Will,” she whimpered.

The monster swung its arm down and slammed its huge fist into Annette’s body, sweeping her right off the concrete ledge, smashing through the railing and ripping it right out of the floor. Annette’s broken body sailed limply off the walkway and down into the bottom of the shaft, followed by the broken chunk of railing.

Leon ran for it, but he didn’t have a chance. He spun around just as the creature jumped at him and swung its brutal arm once more. He dove out of the way, but there was nowhere to go, and he toppled back over the railing, flipping upside down and falling over the edge, his pistol flying out of his hand as he desperately tried to grab for anything. The railing ripped out of the floor with a screech of tearing metal, and Leon lost his grip.

He tumbled away from the edge, the broken railing flipping over his head, and followed Annette down to the bottom of the shaft.

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