Belize

Chapter Twelve

Rebecca left the elevator with Billy following close behind. She went up to the man in the lab coat and stood in front of him with her arms crossed over her chest.

“Who are you?” she snapped.

The man waved her away dismissively. “It doesn’t matter. This has nothing to do with you.” He turned back to the blast doors and pounded on them. “I can’t believe these doors are closed! What’s the point in having an emergency system if they won’t let anyone leave? This is insane!”

“So it is an emergency,” Billy said. He stood next to Rebecca and put his hands on his hips, but for the moment his posture was more concerned than angry. He didn’t understand what was going on, but he had the feeling that Rebecca was suspicious, so he followed her lead. “You said it’s not a fire alarm. What did you mean by that?”

The man’s head perked up and he turned to glance nervously at Billy. He looked like he was being interrogated by the police and had just been caught in a complicated lie. “It’s … it’s none of your concern, okay? You don’t have anything to do with it. It’s … it’s classified.”

“What in the hell is that supposed to mean?”

The man turned and walked past them. “I’m going to try the other door. There’s got to be a way for us to get out of here.”

“Oh my God,” Rebecca said quietly.

Billy touched her shoulder. “What is it?”

“He’s not a doctor.”

“Of course I’m a doctor!” the man blurted out.

Rebecca pointed at the man’s belt. “Your ID badge. It’s not a hospital badge.”

He grabbed the edge of his lab coat and covered up the badge at his hip. “I’m … I’m in administration, okay? Listen, if you’re not going to help me open these doors, just stay out of my way, okay? You shouldn’t even be here.”

Rebecca looked up at Billy. “His ID badge has the symbol for Umbrella on it.”

“What?”

“I’m sure I saw it.”

As far as Billy was concerned, the word Umbrella was foul language. Just hearing the name of the company brought back terrible memories. He had only been exposed to a small fraction of the events in the Arklay Mountains, but he and Rebecca had barely survived. In fact, the monsters and undead things that he and Rebecca had faced on the train and the industrial plant were just the first wave of the outbreak that later struck Raccoon City. Neither of them were in the city during the outbreak, as they had both left long before that, but tens of thousands of other innocent people had not been so lucky.

“Do you work for Umbrella?” he asked.

The man didn’t look at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Billy glanced at Rebecca and sighed with resignation. She still had her arms crossed and just stared at the man with narrowed eyes. Clearly, talking to this guy was getting them nowhere. Billy knew that Rebecca wasn’t going to make a move, even though she definitely wanted to. So he walked off after the man and grabbed his shoulder to spin him around.

“What? Hey!”

Billy yanked the security badge off the man’s belt and shoved him away. He wasn’t in the mood for games. The man lost his footing and fell onto his backside, staring up at Billy in a combination of righteous indignation and honest fear.

“I’ll … I’ll have you arrested,” he said, but the threat didn’t have any weight behind it. He didn’t stand up, and instead backed himself against the wall and wrapped his arms around his legs. “Once the authorities get here, I’ll tell them you attacked me.”

Billy ignored him and looked down at the badge. “Antonio Williams. You work for Umbrella. It says you’re a level one employee, but I don’t know what that means.”

“What’s an Umbrella scientist doing here at the hospital?” Rebecca asked, coming forward. “Where does that elevator go?”

The man named Antonio shook his head. “I’m not telling you people anything.”

Billy handed Rebecca the badge. “What do you mean, where does the elevator go?”

“That’s not the regular elevator,” Rebecca said. “It’s a different one. The buttons for the upper floors don’t even work. I don’t think that elevator goes up at all, I think it goes down somewhere under the hospital.”

“Is that possible?”

She gestured at Antonio, who was doing his best to regain his dignity while seated on the floor. “Maybe he can tell us.”

Billy stood in front of Antonio. “Are you going to tell us?”

“I can’t tell you anything,” Antonio said meekly. “I’m not allowed to ...”

Billy reached down and grabbed his collar to lift him to his feet. Antonio squirmed and shied away, raising his hands in front of his face, but Billy merely pushed him into the wall and held him there. In truth, Billy didn’t have any qualms about hitting this guy if he had to, but he felt uncomfortable doing anything violent with Rebecca watching. He turned to look at her and she met his eyes and nodded calmly. Antonio let out a pathetic sobbing sound and wiped his face.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” he whimpered.

“Just tell us who you are and what the hell’s going on here,” Billy said. “The three of us are stuck here together. You might as well just tell us, because we’re not going to stop asking.”

“There’s a science laboratory under the hospital,” Antonio blubbered. “It’s a highly-classified facility. They’re going to fire me for telling you about it.”

“A science lab for Umbrella?” Rebecca asked. “Hidden underneath the hospital? Right in the middle of the city and no one even knows about it?”

“I told you, it’s classified.”

“That’s not what classified means,” Billy said. “It’s just a secret.”

“Do they perform biological experiments here?” Rebecca said, her voice raising for the first time. “Like the kind of experiments they did in Raccoon City?”

Antonio looked at her in confusion. “What? How should I know? They didn’t do experiments in that American lab, they just had a leak, I thought ...”

“They did experiments all right,” Rebecca scoffed. “We saw the kinds of experiments they did there.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We were in Raccoon City,” Rebecca said, her voice as cold as ice. Billy didn’t think he had ever heard her voice sound that way. “We saw what happened first hand. We saw the lab where the outbreak happened.”

“What?” Antonio said, baffled. He tried to shake her comment away. “I don’t … I don’t know what you mean. How could you have been there …?”

“They lied about the outbreak,” Billy said, feeling like he was explaining something to a child. “It wasn’t some accidental release of a virus that spread to the population. The lab where it happened was completely infected. All of their messed up experiments got loose. All of the scientists and people who worked there were exposed to the virus.”

“They were turned into zombies,” Rebecca said.

There was a moment of silence as Antonio stared back and forth between them, his eyes wide in panic and fear, trying to wrap his head around what they were telling him. In a strange way, Billy pitied him. It was obvious that he wasn’t some high-ranking scientist here. He looked like he barely knew what was going on himself. Billy guessed that the “level one” marker on his badge meant that he was a new hire or a minor lab assistant.

“Is that what happened down there,” Rebecca demanded to know. “Is that what this alarm is about? Did one of your viruses or diseases get loose again?”

“I don’t know … I don’t know what happened,” Antonio said, seemingly on the verge of tears. “I heard someone yelling, and we went down the hall, and … and we saw the Research Manager, he attacked another scientist, and there was blood everywhere ...”

Billy turned away from Antonio and threw his hands into the air. “Jesus Christ, I don’t believe this.”

Rebecca looked at Antonio with a disgusted look on her face. “Another outbreak. Another one of your experiments got loose and now more people are going to die. Umbrella already caused an entire city to be destroyed, and now it’s going to happen in your country too!”

“We should have kept on driving to Costa Rica,” Billy muttered to himself.

“No, no,” Antonio insisted. He raised his hands in defense. “I don’t know what kind of work they did in America, okay? We don’t have experiments. We don’t infect anything. All my lab does is study tissue samples. We just study the samples, we study the viruses and see how they work. The viruses have medical uses, okay? We try to understand how the different strains work and how to use them the most effectively.”

“Wait a minute, there’s more than one strain?” Billy asked.

“Of course,” Antonio said. “All viruses have multiple strains. Why do you think they haven’t cured the common cold yet?”

Rebecca cut him off. “You said your lab studies samples. Does that mean there are other labs down there? How many different labs?”

“Uh, four, I think ...”

“And you don’t know what they do in those other labs, do you?”

Antonio sputtered something and looked at her helplessly.

“Where do you think they get their samples from?” she asked. “They’re testing their viruses on animals or even people, and giving you little samples for your research.”

Antonio shook his head and whimpered, “No, they aren’t … we don’t do that ...”

“Let’s get back to the beginning,” Billy said. “You said something about an emergency system? What exactly does that mean? Does Umbrella know what’s going on here? Are they going to send someone here to deal with this?”

“Yes, they’re sending help. They’re probably on their way already. They’re specially-trained to deal with … with outbreaks like this.”

Back in the industrial plant hidden in the Arklay Mountains, Billy and Rebecca had encountered some of the “specially-trained” people that Umbrella had sent to deal with the situation. All of them had been killed and brought back to life as zombies. So Billy wasn’t overly optimistic about Umbrella’s capacity to deal with anything.

“How long will it take them to get here?” Billy asked.

Antonio shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. I’m sorry, I don’t know.” Then, his legs seemed to give out from under him, and he slid back down the wall into a sitting position. He raised his knees, wrapped his arms around them and lowered his head in shame.

Billy looked over at the blast doors. Five minutes, he thought. If he had arrived at the clinic five minutes sooner, then he might have caught up with Rebecca before she ever came down here. They could have talked upstairs and everything would have been fine. If he had arrived at the clinic five minutes later, then Rebecca might have already finished getting the supplies and returned upstairs before the blast doors came down. Five minutes either way, and they would not be stuck in this mess.

How could they have stumbled into another incident like this? What were the odds that two people from Raccoon City would come halfway across the world and find themselves involved in another outbreak at an Umbrella lab? The whole thing was so insane he couldn’t even comprehend it. If he believed in God, he’d think that God must have it out for him.

He stepped over to Rebecca and put his hand on her shoulder. She was tense, her muscles tightly wound up, her breathing barely under control. It was only with a supreme effort of self control that she managed to hold it together.

“What are we going to do?” she asked him. “I’ve been working here for months, and there’s been an Umbrella lab under my feet the whole time. This whole thing is crazy. How is this possible? How can we be stuck in the middle of another outbreak? We just can’t get away from Umbrella no matter where we go.”

“I know,” Billy said lamely. “I can’t wrap my head around it, either.”

“What are we going to do?” Rebecca asked again, putting her arms around him.

He held onto her. “I guess we’ll find out when the back-up arrives.”

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