Calm Before The Storm

Chapter Eight

The sun went down behind the Arklay Mountains, painting the sky orange and making the range of mountains west of the city seem to glow as if they were on fire. And if Wesker could allow himself a poetic metaphor, they were certainly on fire right now. They were burning with the most destructive disease known to man.

He watched the sun set while sitting at a table near one of the large warehouse windows. On the table before him was a copy of the daily newspaper. The front page story had surprised him, to put it lightly. His gaze shifted from the setting sun to the words in bold at the top of the page and he let out a long, annoyed sigh.

Exactly how Chris and the others escaped was a mystery to him. They must have made it to the escape elevator, which Wesker had considered before. He intended to disable the elevator completely, but he got caught up with other things. He didn’t think it would matter either way, because the Tyrant could just follow them up and kill them out in the open.

The real hint was the number of officers who made it out. The newspaper said that four S.T.A.R.S. members made it back to the city and that they had returned by helicopter. A helicopter meant Brad.

Wesker felt himself seething with rage at the mere thought of his name. Brad, the one who completely screwed Wesker’s plans in the first place, by flying away and leaving them to outrun the dogs. And then he made up for that mistake by rescuing the other three surviving members of the team, screwing Wesker’s plans over even more. Brad, the most cowardly, helpless, absolutely useless member of the entire S.T.A.R.S. team. Brad, who could barely be trusted to tie his own shoes without proper instruction. The last person in the world that Wesker would have considered a threat to his plans.

If Wesker ever saw Brad again, he would skin the stupid bastard alive. He wouldn’t even kill him right away, he would torture him for awhile. He’d make the torment last.

Wesker tapped the edge of the table. Sitting a few inches from his hand was a pack of cigarettes. Strangely, it had taken Wesker most of the day to realize that he hadn’t smoked at all since the day before. Normally he needed a cigarette within minutes of waking up, but today he felt no urge at all to smoke. He attempted to light up sometime after lunch but tossed the cigarette away after only a few drags. Inhaling the smoke gave him no satisfaction at all, no pleasurable rush of nicotine into his system, no sense of relaxation and well-being.

He didn’t know if that was a good thing or not. He preferred to ignore it for now.

He walked away from the table and back to his makeshift lab setup. Almost everything was up and running now. Not quite a full laboratory, but enough to suit his purposes. Several computers lined up on some tables along with some microscopes and other regular lab equipment, two generators, three completely installed growth tanks, and an impressive array of genetic sequencers and other equipment. Wires and thick cables criss-crossed the floor like a collapsed spider web.

The first growth tank held the unfortunate associate of Nicholai Ginovaef. The soldier was stripped and dumped into the tank, where he was connected to the monitoring cables and then infected with the T-virus. Fully sedated now, his skin was turning pasty white and his hair had already fallen out. In another 24 hours he would be mostly transformed into a Tyrant.

The other two growth tanks were also currently occupied, which was a lucky coincidence. Wesker hadn’t expected to find a pair of volunteers so quickly. But after lunch, he went out to install some cameras around the perimeter of the warehouse as a basic security measure. Behind the warehouse in an empty lot were some huge stacks of discarded wooden pallets and other building equipment. A pair of vagrants had been nesting among the pallets, smoking crack together. Wesker smelled the sweet chemical scent of the crack smoke, even though he was more than fifty feet away. He offered the men fifty bucks each if they would help him move some heavy equipment in the warehouse. They jumped at the chance, and Wesker had incapacitated them both as soon as they were inside.

So now they were in growth tanks as well. One of them was also slowly turning into a Tyrant, but Wesker had other plans for the second one. He had a variety of other strains of the Progenitor and the T-virus that he wanted to try out.

One such variant was the N-strain. It worked much like the T-virus itself in that it killed the host and transformed it into something else. One major difference however, was the way that the N-strain remained contagious beyond the original host. A Tyrant passed on secondary infection to susceptible individuals, who became second-stage hosts much the same way they would if infected with the original Progenitor. Secondary infection turned them into zombies instead of Tyrants.

But the N-strain was much more virile. A first-stage N-strain host was capable of passing on the exact same strain of the virus by way of secondary infection. In other words, someone infected by an N-strain host would turn into another N-strain host instead of a zombie.

The N-strain was still pretty new, and not much work had been done with it. They had progressed their work just far enough to discover that fact about its contagious nature, but they hadn’t really managed to do much research into it. But like all their various strains and viruses, someone at the lab had given such N-strain hosts a nickname. A T-virus host was called a Tyrant, and similarly, an N-strain host was called a Nemesis.

There was now a Nemesis growing in the third tank. Wesker crossed his arms and looked at the poor, drug-addicted vagrant floating unconscious in the tank. His skin was peeling off like a bad sunburn, revealing pinkish layers of dermis underneath. The body was also beginning to look bloated and the sight of it was rather disgusting. Wesker turned away and walked back to the window.

Chris, Jill, Rebecca, and Brad were still alive. The paper did not say who the four surviving officers actually were, but Wesker knew. Barry might have survived, but Wesker doubted it. He was already wounded when the Tyrant came after them, and was in no condition to run for his life, so he must have perished. Considering the fate of his wife and daughters, perhaps that was a blessing.

The only thing in Wesker’s favor was the fact that they surely thought he was dead and weren’t looking for him. And the paper reported that the police department had not given any statement, which meant that Irons was going along with it for now. Irons probably believed that Wesker was dead as well. And at least for the time being, there was nothing that Chris or the others could really do.

They could try to go to the press, but what could they say? They could try to spin the reports that they had answered a call to a government site, but there were too many unanswered questions. They certainly couldn’t tell people the truth. Wesker took some comfort in the fact that the truth was so insane that no one would ever believe them. And Wesker had a feeling that the S.T.A.R.S. members would have to keep quiet for another reason as well.

If they said anything about a mission into the Arklay Mountains, or even hinted at the location of a government lab or an Umbrella lab, then some intrepid reporter or curious civilian would surely go looking for it. And Wesker counted on the S.T.A.R.S. team to avoid anything like that. The last thing they would want was for any more innocent people to get caught up in the events at the lab. Any reporter or investigator who went anywhere near that place was sure to find himself against a zombie, or even worse, one of the dogs roaming the forest. Telling people about a secret lab in the mountains would almost surely lead to more innocent people getting killed trying to find it.

But that didn’t mean that the S.T.A.R.S. team was harmless. They still knew far too much about the events at the lab, and Wesker’s complicity in those events. If nothing else, Wesker had to assure himself that the rest of the team died. If any of them managed to spread word of Wesker’s involvement, then his future would be on very shaky ground.

That was the real reason he was growing the Tyrants and the Nemesis. Not just as a continuation of his work, although that was part of it. He needed them to finish the work that the other Tyrant had failed to accomplish. He needed them to kill the S.T.A.R.S. team.

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