Calm Before The Storm

Chapter Seventeen

Twenty minutes later, Annette arrived at the lab. It had numerous entrances through several buildings, and she normally used a single-story office building where a dentist office and temporary employment agency were located. As she got out of her car in the parking lot, she failed to notice the black helicopter taking off from the tall office building at the other end of the block.

Birkin said he had some last-minute work to clean up, but promised her that he would be done by noon. Together, they would go to the elementary school and pick up Sherry, and then stop back at the house one last time before leaving Raccoon City for good. Annette almost couldn’t believe how fast things went, how much work they did in such a short time, but everything was finished today. As soon as she picked Birkin up, they would both be officially unemployed.

She walked briskly through the front doors and headed down the hall to the stairs into the basement. Entering one of the unused offices, she took the secret elevator down into the lab.

The doors opened and she stepped out into the hall, glancing into the break room near the elevator. She expected her husband to be there waiting for her, but the room was empty. She took a few steps and then paused curiously, breathing in through her nose.

It was not an odor that many people would have recognized right away, but as a biological scientist, Annette knew blood when she smelled it. She stood in the hallway and breathed in, getting the distinct metallic, copperish smell of blood. She tilted her head and listened, but heard nothing.

She walked slowly to the end of the hall, walking carefully so that her sneakers made no sound on the white tile. She peeked around the corner and saw nothing, and headed for the north wing main lab room across the hall. Like the break room, it was empty, which she found strange. There were always one or two people working in the main lab room.

She thought she heard something, and went back out into the hallway. She wanted to call out, but something in the back of her mind instructed her not to. She could still smell the strong odor of blood in the air, and the whole situation felt wrong. She quietly walked down the hall, glancing into a few side room, finding no one there either.

At the end of the hall was a central lobby area near some more elevators. Annette slowed her pace as she approached the doors, seeing a reddish tint through the glazed windows on the double doors. She swallowed hard and felt the hair rising on the back of her neck. Her hands almost trembled as she pushed one of the doors open.

And immediately, they jumped to her mouth to suppress a scream. She stumbled backwards, the door swinging shut again. It swung back and forth on the open hinges, giving her brief glimpses of the room beyond the hallway, flashes like a nightmare strobe light. Blood smeared across the floor like spilled paint, mangled bodies wearing lab coats strewn around like broken mannequins, the walls smashed in and crumbling, the entire room like a grisly tableau.

Annette crept forward and held the door open. She tried to count the bodies, but some of them were incomplete, torn in half and dismembered. At least seven bodies, so brutally mutilated that they were completely unrecognizable.

She carefully stepped around the shimmering pools of blood. It wasn’t the blood and gore that horrified her, as she was used to that. She had seen horrors just as gruesome in her years with Umbrella. But the butchered corpses here were not expendable test subjects or experimental animals, they were the scientists and researchers that she worked with. People that Annette knew personally.

Just as she made it across the room, a loud roar of noise erupted nearby and she fell to her knees, covering her head with her hands. She gasped and looked down the other hallway, seeing nothing there. Then the loud noise again, the unmistakable sound of a machine gun opening fire.

She stumbled down the hall, reflexively cowering in fear every time the machine gun opened fire. Halfway down the hall she stopped as a pair of men burst into the hallway, spinning to turn their guns toward her. They were military commandos, dressed in all black, with large mirrored goggles on their faces

She screamed, waving her hands defensively, and one of them roughly pulled her to her feet, screaming at her. She didn’t make out what he said because the other was firing his gun around the corner.

“Go! Go!” the other screamed, “Get out of here!”

Annette tried to shake loose from the soldier’s grasp but he dragged her back down the hall. The other soldier ran after them and suddenly, a fierce inhuman roar shook the hallway, so loud that Annette had to clap her hands over her ears. The soldier stumbled and they both fell to the floor.

She glanced up in time to see a spinning body collapse to the white floor at the end of the hall, where the soldiers had come from. It was only a torso and flailing arms, with ropy intestines spilling from the abdomen and quivering like ribbons in the breeze. When the body struck the wall, blood splashed up like a burst water balloon.

The soldiers kept shooting as they retreated down the hall, dragging Annette with them. She finally managed to get to her feet and broke free, pushing the soldier out of her way and running off, the edge of her lab coat flapping wildly behind her.

“Come back here!”

“Run after her! She must know the way out!”

Annette ran as fast as her trembling legs could carry her, away from the soldiers and away from whatever horrible death awaited them. She barreled her way through the next set of doors and kept going.

The doors slammed open behind her and she heard the loud footsteps of the soldiers running after her. And again, the horrifying roar of whatever creature was loose in the lab. Annette couldn’t even imagine what it could be, as there were no dangerous host monsters at the lab. All work along those lines was done at the Arklay lab. But something was loose, something had killed off all the scientists, something seemed immune to the bullets that the soldiers were using against it.

She managed to glance over her shoulder as she ran, seeing the two soldiers in hot pursuit, and a flash of something dark in the other section of hallway. And then the doors smashed open, flying clear off their hinges, and the beast was right there behind them.

Annette didn’t stop screaming. Her lungs burned, and her legs felt like they were about to give in. One of the soldiers aimed his gun over his shoulder and opened fire in a desperate attempt to slow the creature down. But he was too late, and the monster slammed into his back, knocking him to the floor.

He rolled onto his back and tried to scream. His fellow soldier did not stop to help him as the monster tore into his body with huge hands, ripping him limb from limb. His anguished screams became nothing more than a death gurgle.

Annette was far ahead of the soldiers when she reached the elevator. It was not the elevator she had entered from. This one went to a two-story office building across the street from the building she normally used.

She slapped the up button and the doors opened immediately. She dove into the elevator and scrambled to hit the top floor on the control panel.

“Wait for me!” the soldier screamed. “Jesus, don’t leave me!”

Annette cowered on the floor and pressed herself into the back wall, holding her knees up against her chest, staring in terror out into the hall. Slowly, so slowly she wanted to scream for them to hurry up, the doors began to slide closed.

“No! Wait!”

The monster raced around the corner right behind the soldier, howling maniacally, its huge body almost entirely filling the hallway, its massive simian arms smashing the sides of the wall, its hideous face contorted into a nightmarish mask of rage. Annette trembled, helpless and defenseless, and watched in slow motion as the elevator doors closed.

Just as they closed completely, she saw a narrow glimpse of the monster land on the soldier’s back and tear his head off his shoulders. Then the doors closed, and the only thing Annette saw was her own terrified image reflected back at her.

She crawled back to the control panel and pulled down the emergency section beside it. Her finger seemed to move by itself, pushing the lockdown activator and entering in the five-digit authorization code. Immediately, the elevator’s lights flashed red and she heard the deafening crash of the emergency doors slamming shut at the bottom of the elevator shaft.

The doors slid open and she crawled out into an empty hallway on the second floor of the office building. Sunlight poured in through the windows, bathing her in warmth. Her whole body trembled, and the warm sunlight did little to change the overpowering cold she felt running down her back and along her extremities. She sat on the floor, back against the wall, and buried her face in her hands.

Tears streamed down her slender face, and her shoulders shook as she cried. Her whole body seemed about to pour out her grief and horror like an emotional tidal wave. She sobbed uncontrollably, images of the past few minutes still burned into her brain.

She could not deny what she saw. The monster had been a man once, as it wore the tattered, blood-stained remains of a lab coat and gray pants, torn apart by the growth of its huge body. Annette saw its face clearly. Even distorted by the horrific mutations, she saw its large brown eyes, and the tangled dark brown hair on top of its head.

“Oh Will ...” she sobbed, “What have you done?”

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