Belize

Chapter Seventeen

Everything had gone to hell, and as far as Marco was concerned, it was all Heinrich’s fault. He cursed their late commander and swore that if he ever made it out of this lab, he was going to make sure the bigwigs at Umbrella knew how badly Heinrich had screwed up. And to think, he had liked Heinrich. It just went to show that being a solid commander was easy when you were doing training exercises. But you couldn’t cover up incompetence when you were actually leading men into combat. Heinrich had done just about everything wrong.

He should have given the handheld computer to one of the other men to make sure it stayed safe. He should have contacted the people in charge on the surface to inform them that experimental infected creatures had somehow gotten loose, since that had not been in the squad’s original briefing. The lab was only supposed to have second-stage human hosts, and they were not prepared to deal with other infected subjects like those insect things. Heinrich should have known that if they encountered more than one of those things, they would not be able to fight them off.

They never should have entered that big lab room, Marco thought. They should have waited in the doorway and called out first to see if there were any infected hosts nearby. If they had stayed right in the doorway, they could have prevented the creatures from surrounding them. That’s when it all went downhill. As soon as they started shooting wildly in every direction, it was all over. It was a miracle that they hadn’t all been killed right then.

Of course, all that was obvious in hindsight now. Marco hadn’t said anything or disagreed with Heinrich at the time, but he shouldn’t have had to. His duty was to follow orders, not give them. And Heinrich was dead, so he had paid for his stupidity.

Marco glanced back at the two civilians walking behind him. They should have stayed upstairs, that was also obvious to him now. Bringing them down into the lab was stupid and pointless, just one more dumb thing to blame on their late commander.

Now it seemed that Shen was the one giving orders. Marco didn’t really like how Shen had just stepped forward to be in charge, but then again, Marco certainly didn’t want that responsibility himself. If Shen wanted to be their new commander, that was fine with him.

This damn place was a maze. The hallway they were walking down looked identical to the two other hallways before that. Marco couldn’t figure out how anyone made their way around this place without a map. When they first came down, there were arrows on the wall pointing to different labs, but these walls weren’t marked. Marco didn’t know what lab section they were in now. He remembered that one direction had gone to labs A and B, and the other went to C and D, but he didn’t remember which direction went to which labs.

They passed by a couple of empty lab rooms full of computers and equipment that Marco couldn’t even name. A huge hourglass-shaped thing that turned on its vertical axis. Some long metal tubes arranged in a circle with numbers like 14-B-60-M marked on them. A maze of glass tubes that emptied into beakers and other containers. One room held a dozen small chambers built into the wall with all kinds of computerized displays built in. One of the chambers held the decayed remains of some kind of animal.

During his initial training, Marco had been informed of the nature of much of Umbrella’s scientific work in secret facilities like this, but to see it first hand was something else. Before now, it had all been theoretical. Those bulletproof mutant insects that slaughtered his squad had been created in small chambers just like that, probably. Some animal had been injected with one of Umbrella’s viruses, and that was the terrifying result.

No wonder Umbrella created the UBCF, he thought.

At the end of the hallway, it split to the left and right. To the right, puddles of blood were smeared on the floor in a few places. Shen ordered the rest of them to stay where they were, and he silently made his way down past the blood to a pair of lab rooms on opposite sides of the hall. He used the barrel of his gun to gently push one of the doors open, and poked his head inside.

“Is anyone in here?” Shen said in a low voice. After a moment with no response, he turned around and tried the other room, which had the same result. Satisfied that no one was hiding in the rooms, he trotted back to the others.

“Okay, I had to check,” he said unnecessarily.

They turned left and went down the corridor. Marco glanced behind him again, and saw the two civilians holding out their guns and looking around constantly. The man with the tattoo on his arm made eye contact with him, and he merely nodded.

It could have been worse, Marco thought. They could be dragging along a pair of civilians who were terrified and useless. At least these two knew how to use guns and seemed like they knew what they were doing. Although if they were telling the truth about living in Raccoon City – which Marco found nearly impossible to believe – then it made sense that they knew how to handle themselves in a situation like this.

The hallway had three rooms on the right side and one on the left, which they were able to look into from the hallway, since the wall was lined with windows. There were long tables with more computers and chemical apparatus, and a pair of large glass chambers that looked like cryogenic sleeping beds out of science-fiction movies. They were big enough for a person to climb into, with all kinds of tubes and cords dangling inside. Marco wasn’t sure he liked the implication of that. But the room was empty.

Shen went to the first door on the right and pushed it open. He waited in the doorway, with Marco and Njabulo carefully peering over his shoulder. Like the others, this room was full of lab tables. One of the stools was knocked over on the floor. The left side of the room had a doorway that Marco guessed led into the next room.

Shen took a step inside and said quietly, “Is there anyone hiding in here? We’re with the UBCF.”

“Oh!” a voice blurted out, and a man in a white lab coat stood up abruptly from behind a row of lab tables. He was balding and had a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, and there was blood spattered on one of his sleeves. He raised his hands and hurried forward.

“Thank God!” he nearly wept, “Oh, thank God, you’re here! I’ve been hiding in this room ever since it started!”

“Calm down, please,” Shen said. “And lower your voice. Do you know where anyone else is?”

“No, no, I don’t know –”

The door to the other room suddenly burst open and a zombie lurched in, its arms outspread and mouth open. Shen shouted in fright and raised his rifle, and the scientist screamed, raising his hands to his face. The zombie grabbed him and immediately chomped down on the man’s neck just as Shen opened fire, his gun blasting open the zombie’s side and knocking it away with a groan. It staggered into one of the tables and turned to face them just as Shen’s next shots took half of its head off.

The scientist lay on his back, pressing his hand against his neck as blood spurted between his fingers. He gurgled something pathetically, looking up at the soldiers with terror in his eyes. Shen and Njabulo hurried inside and tried to find something to hold against the wound.

The door to the other room swung open again and Marco shouted a warning. Two more zombies, a man and a woman, squeezed through the doorway, drawn by all the noise. Marco and Njabulo opened up with their guns and blew the zombies away. They toppled over and Marco kicked the door open, but the room was empty. Those three zombies had been the only ones.

Shen yanked open cabinets and managed to find some cheap hand towels. He ran back to the scientist and tried to hold one of them against the wound to slow the bleeding, but it was already too late. The scientist bled out in a few moments and was gone.

“God damn it,” Shen cursed, standing back up. He tossed the bloody towel away and swore again, kicking one of the stools so it clattered across the room.

Njabulo once again prayed for the dead. Marco wished he would knock it off. God clearly didn’t care about any of these people. If God didn’t answer their prayers before, he certainly wasn’t listening now.

“We got company!” the civilian man yelled from the hallway.

Marco ran out to see a group of at least seven more zombies in the hall, coming towards them. How had they appeared there so fast? Marco had been looking down the hallway not more than thirty seconds before.

“Shen!” he called.

The civilians backed away, pistols ready, as Shen and Njabulo came back out of the room. Shen just shook his head bitterly.

“Take them down,” he ordered.

They aimed carefully and fired single shots to conserve their ammunition. The zombies all went down with shots to the head. Blood and brains splashed against the walls and dribbled out all over the floor.

A thump nearby almost made Marco jump out of his skin. They all spun around and saw a zombie inside the room on the left side of the hall, the one with the large glass chambers. The zombie was pushing against the door, staring at them through the window with crazed, bloodshot eyes. But it couldn’t get at them because the door opened inward, and the zombie was trying to push it instead. The absurdity of it almost made Marco laugh, but he felt if he started laughing he might not be able to stop.

He raised his gun, but Shen put his hand on it and lowered the barrel. “Don’t bother. Don’t waste your ammo. It can’t get us.”

The redheaded woman spoke up. “No, we shouldn’t leave him. No one should exist like that. We should ...”

“Put him out of his misery,” the man with the tattoos said.

The zombie moaned its hunger and leaned back, raising its arms. It swung down and slammed its fists on the door so hard the glass window cracked and whole door seemed to nearly break right off.

“Jesus!” Marco shouted. He knocked Shen’s hand away and then raised his rifle and put a round right in the zombie’s head.

“There,” he panted. “I put it out of its misery.”

Shen wiped his brow and said, “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

They made their way around the pile of corpses in the hall, trying their best not to step in any blood. There was still one more room on the right side of the hall, which Shen was unwilling to check at first, but he finally summoned up his nerve and opened the door. The room was empty, so they continued on around the next corner. Another door on the left led to a bathroom with motion-sensor lights that popped on as soon as they pushed the door open. No one was inside that room either.

“We found one survivor,” Shen muttered. “We’ll find another.”

“Yeah,” Marco said. “We found him just in time for the poor bastard to get killed.”

“He shouldn’t have talked so loud. He shouldn’t have ...” But Shen didn’t finish the sentence, he just shook his head again in disappointment.

“It wasn’t your fault,” the redhead said behind them.

Shen looked back at her. “I know. It’s just bad luck, that’s all.”

Marco ejected the magazine on his rifle and checked to see how many rounds were left. There were three, and he had exactly one more magazine, the one he had taken from Heinrich. “Yeah,” he said, “I think we’re all facing some bad luck right now.”

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