Mother Russia

Chapter Fourteen

The flight from Pakistan to Russia took just over six hours. Unfortunately, they couldn’t fly directly to Yatovska, as the outbreak and the communications blackout would make it hard to land safely at the airport. Instead, they flew to Irkutsk first and transferred from their plane to a pair of black Bell UH-1N combat helicopters. Tricell had no major holdings in Irkutsk, so the helicopters must have been brought in specifically for this mission. From where, Hunk didn’t ask. Wesker must have exerted some major influence on Tricell to get the helicopters there in time.

The helicopters were large enough to seat two full squads. The first squad, led by Captain Darby with Hunk joining them, took the first chopper. The second and third squads, led by squad leaders Njagi and Abdallah, were on the other.

Hunk and the others got a few hours of sleep on the plane on the way to Irkutsk, so at least they wouldn’t arrive groggy after being awake all night. In between short intervals of sleep, Hunk received updates from Wesker about the situation they were going into. The Russian government had initiated a total shutdown of all phone, radio, and internet in the city soon after the outbreak was announced, so they couldn’t receive any updates from the city itself, and all their information was out of date as soon as they heard it.

Umbrella’s UBCF was on site and had established a perimeter and blocked the few highways in and out of the city. According to their reports, the outbreak was not on the same scale as the one in Raccoon City, but it was still devastating. Thousands of people had been infected, and a large number of secondary hosts roamed the streets. At least one creature believed to be a primary host had been reported, although little was known about it and the specific virus strain was still unknown. The current theory was that at least one scientist at the Yatovska facility had unknowingly become infected and then left the facility and spread the virus to an unknown number of people. There was some speculation that the virus could spread through the air from a living host, which would explain the high number of secondary infections. In either case, the virus had spread exponentially after that, until the first wave of infected people succumbed and were reanimated as second-stage hosts.

That had occurred at approximately 21:00 hours, or nine o’clock in the evening. Hunk’s team had been activated less than half an hour later.

He checked his watch. It was 05:00 hours. They should be arriving in Yatovska in just a few minutes. It was still dark outside, as the sun wouldn’t rise until just after six, and Hunk looked out the small window to see the scattered lights of a city below.

Captain Darby stood up, gripping handholds on the wall to keep steady. “All right, everyone,” he said. “We’ll arrive shortly at the landing zone. UBCF on site have been informed of our arrival. We are to coordinate with their forces, but our designated landing zone is in a neighborhood not within the current area of UBCF control. Our orders are to determine the extent of the outbreak in that neighborhood and begin preparations for evacuation. Once we are on the ground, our transports will be used to evacuate civilians to a quarantine area that the UBCF has secured north of the city. We are ordered to exterminate any hosts we encounter, and we have the discretion to deny evacuation to any civilians that show signs of infection. Do you all understand?”

Hunk said nothing. If he was the one giving the mission orders, he wouldn’t have asked them if they all understood. Other than that, he thought Darby gave a pretty good rundown. So far, Darby had not conferred with Hunk or asked his for his advice, which was a good thing. Hunk didn’t want him looking for assurance or permission. He was the Squad Captain, it was his responsibility.

The other five members of the squad were Campbell, Snyder, Lambert, Beckett, and Okada. All of them had done well during the training sessions, especially Snyder and Lambert. Now that they were going to go up against the real thing, Hunk couldn’t help but wonder if his training was effective after all.

The helicopters swooped low over the city. Hunk had checked some maps beforehand to get an idea of the size of the place. The most recent update from Umbrella had been almost an hour ago, and showed that they had control over roughly 75% of the city. Most of the residential neighborhoods were under their control, and a large number of civilians had already been evacuated.

The more commercial areas of the city were still part of the hot zone. The outbreak just happened to occur on a Friday night, when lots of people went out to restaurants and clubs and the like. Those areas were the ones with the largest number of infected hosts, and some reports mentioned large crowds of hosts wandering the streets.

“Two minutes,” the pilot said. He was a gruff bearded man named Walters, and Hunk tagged him right away as a former mercenary. Hunk had worked as a mercenary himself, and he knew the type.

“Two minutes!” Darby shouted to the squad.

When Hunk made his escape from Raccoon City, he had promised himself that he was done doing Umbrella’s dirty work. And yet, here he was, going right back to the site of one of Umbrella’s biological disasters, doing their dirty work just like before. He didn’t even work for them and he was still cleaning up their messes. He shook his head and held his gun a little tighter.

Their helicopter swung around and descended. Just outside, Hunk could see trees swaying wildly from the wind off the rotors. The neighborhood they were dropping into bordered one of the main city streets that was lined with businesses of all kinds, from restaurants to hair salons. It was an older neighborhood as far as the map could tell him, so he expected most of the residents to be senior citizens or families. He felt a slight bump as the chopper touched down.

The door slid open and Darby ordered everyone out. Hunk opened his own side door and stepped down to the street, the wind buffeting him and making him squint. As soon as everyone was clear, Walters lifted the chopper back up into the air. Due to the possible threat of infected hosts reaching the helicopters, they would stay airborne unless they were loading evacuees.

Darby shouted to be heard over the chopper. “Campbell, Lambert! End of the block that way! Beckett, Okada, the other end! Let’s establish a perimeter! Snyder, you’re up!”

Only two members of the entire team – Snyder and an Estonian named Teeäär – could speak fluent Russian. Hunk knew a few simple words like “yes” and “no” but not enough to effectively communicate. Snyder was in Darby’s squad and Teeäär was in Abdallah’s squad, so that was the main reason the other two squads were combined for this mission. Teeäär would be the translator for both those squads, while Snyder would do so for Darby’s squad.

Snyder was one of the three women in the team. She was a short, tough-looking German with reddish-brown hair in a proper military buzz cut. Once the chopper was far enough overhead that it didn’t drown out their voices, she took out an electronic megaphone and shouted, “Vnimaniye! My zdes, chtoby dostavit vas bezopasnoye mesto! Pozhaluysta, vyydi iz doma!”

Hunk couldn’t understand what she was saying, but he knew it was some variant of, “Come out, we are here to help you.” Snyder walked down the block, calling out over and over again, the megaphone amplifying her voice so that anyone inside would surely hear it. Of course, anyone who didn’t wake up when the helicopter landed in the street was probably deaf.

Darby looked around continuously, his rifle in his hands. At each end of the street, the other squad members were on guard, but Hunk knew from personal experience that infected hosts could appear out of nowhere. Any second now, a zombie might pop out from behind one of the houses, but so far the entire area looked clear.

It took a few minutes for the first person to summon the courage to come out of their house. The front door of one of the houses off to Hunk’s left opened up and an older man with a heavy beer gut and thinning hair poked his head out and said something in Russian. Snyder responded in kind and waved the man out. Hesitantly, the man did so, bringing his wife along with him, a portly lady dressed in sweatclothes and slippers.

“He says the police drove through here late last night and told everyone to stay in their homes,” Snyder said as they walked over. The couple glanced nervously at the soldiers and their weapons and huddled closer together. They looked like they had been awake all night.

“Have they been in contact with anyone since then?” Darby asked.

“Not since the phone and internet went down.”

“All right, tell them we’re going to get as many people as we can, and take them out of the city on the helicopter. Do they know if their neighbors are home?”

Snuder asked and then said, “As far as they know, yeah.”

Darby called the other squad members back over. Campbell, Lambert, Beckett, and Okada came running. “All right,” Darby told them. “Let’s go house by house. Knock on the doors and let’s get these people out of here.”

Hunk looked around the street. Everything was still dark and quiet, but he noticed lights on in one of the other houses that had previously been dark. The squad spread out and began banging on doors, but Hunk didn’t join them. He stood watch in the middle of the street, his rifle held loosely in his hands, scanning the dark spaces between homes and other places the dim streetlights did not reach.

He kept glancing at his watch. No matter how fast they went, it felt too slow. Minutes dragged by as the squad finally got lured some more civilians out of their houses, until they had a group of thirteen people ready to be evacuated. All the while, Hunk kept a look out.

Darby positioned a small microphone attached to his communications earpiece. Phone, radio, and internet had been jammed throughout Yatovska to prevent any messages out of the city, but it was still possible to communicate over short distances. Otherwise, it would be impossible for the UBCF to effectively organize any kind of response. The helicopter was directly over their head, so Darby was able to call Walters to bring it down when they were ready.

It lowered slowly and landed back on the street, and the squad quickly ushered all the civilians aboard one at a time, being as gentle with them as possible. They were all terrified, and Hunk didn’t blame them. For all they knew, they were abandoning their homes, never to return.

When they were all inside, Darby shut the door and tapped on the window next to Walters. “All right, you’re good to go!”

It lifted back off and swung northwards to the evacuation zone. Darby didn’t waste any time, he immediately ordered the squad to continue checking houses and knocking on doors. Hunk followed them farther down the street.

“Sir!” Okada shouted, suddenly backing away from the house he was checking. He pointed at the front window. Hunk and Darby both hurried over to see that the lights were on inside the house, and standing in front of the window were two figures, a man and a woman. The woman’s face was smeared with blood, and she bared her teeth at them, her eyes glazed over. The man beside her had his throat ripped open. Both of them pushed and pressed against the window, leaving bloody handprints.

“My God,” Darby said. He stared at the two zombies for just a moment, and then recovered himself enough to snap at the others, “Be careful! The other houses might have hosts inside! Everyone check your surroundings!”

The woman zombie leaned back and swung both fists at the window. Hunk knew that some zombies – although not all, for reasons no was was sure about – were strong enough to bash down a solid wood door. The front window took much less force, and it shattered immediately at her assault. Her momentum took her forward and she fell onto spikes of glass that stabbed into her chest. Ignoring them, she pulled herself upright and pushed through the broken window, tumbling through and falling down to the grass outside. The man, presumably her husband, came after her, slicing his arms up on the exposed glass.

“What’s the number one rule?” Hunk asked.

Darby looked at him, eyes wide. Then he nodded and said, “Stay calm.”

“Correct.”

Hunk raised his rifle, took aim, and pulled the trigger. Now that their helicopter was gone, the neighborhood was silent, and the crack of the shot was overly loud. The woman zombie spun over backwards, the back of her head blown out. The man got to his feet just in time for a bullet to strike him between the eyes, and he fell over backward, his blood splattered against the house.

Darby studied the corpses for a few moments, and then nodded again and went off to check on the squad. You never knew how you were going to react the first time you saw an infected host, but Hunk felt that Darby had handled himself well. All of them knew that they would likely have to shoot someone who had been infected, but until that moment, it was hard to tell who could handle it and who couldn’t. That’s why Hunk had chosen to take out the first zombies himself.

Killing infected hosts wasn’t their mission, though. They were there to rescue civilians and bring them to safety. Darby would be smart to remind the rest of his squad – and himself – of that. Focus on the people they could save, not the people they couldn’t.

There was something else on Hunk’s mind. He was there to assist the squads, but he had additional orders as well. He was supposed to try and locate Ada Wong. Right now that didn’t seem very much like a priority, but Hunk intended to follow those orders just the same.

But where to start? Ada could be anywhere in the entire city. For all Hunk knew, she was already dead.

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