Mother Russia

Chapter Fifteen

Ada suddenly jerked awake and fumbled around in a panic. She was trapped in a dark, confined space, and strange X-shaped shadows criss-crossed her body. Disoriented and frightened, she made a move to sit up, but then froze as she finally remembered where she was.

It was still dark outside, but nearby street lights cast enough light to see. Ada was laying on the ground underneath a raised porch, accessible only by a broken gap in the wooden lattice. The criss-crossing shadows were from the street lights shining through the lattice, making Ada feel like she was trapped in a meat grinder.

After Arkady died, Ada had attempted to continue to make her way to her apartment, but during the frantic escape, she had lost her bearings and wasn’t entirely sure how to get there now. The Umbrella scientist Konstantin Rykov was still on the loose in the vicinity, and occasionally Ada heard him roaring nearby. She found herself jumping at every noise and shadow. She had only barely escaped him the first time, and didn’t think she would be lucky twice in a row.

When she had heard him again, terrifyingly close by, she had no choice but to find a place to hide for a little while. She found an apartment building with a raised front porch, framed on each side by decorative wooden lattice. Under the porch, a section of the lattice had been broken away, leaving a gap. Lacking a better place to hide, she crawled under the porch and lay there for a time, waiting until she was sure that Konstantin was gone. But somehow, her exhaustion must have gotten the best of her and she fell asleep.

She couldn’t believe she had somehow fallen asleep at a time like this. Her body ached from lying on the ground so long, and she knew she had to hurry up and get to her apartment. But first, she checked her phone. She still couldn’t make a call, but at least the clock worked.

It was nearly five o’clock in the morning, meaning she’d been asleep for more than six hours.

Ada stared at her phone in complete disbelief. Six hours? How could she have possibly slept for six hours?

She crawled over to the gap in the lattice, and suddenly froze when she realized she wasn’t alone. Four figures stood unsteadily out on the lawn near the porch, wavering back and forth as if sleepy or drunk. Unfortunately, they were neither. Ada peered at them through the lattice, barely ten feet away. There were three men and one woman. Two of the men seemed uninjured, and one of them was wearing just a pair of green sweatpants. The woman and the other man, however, looked like they had been attacked by wolves. They were grisly and bloody, their faces savagely torn up, bits of flesh flapping from open wounds.

Normally, Ada could have easily run past them, but she needed to climb out from under the porch first, and she could hardly do that quickly or quietly. By the time she managed to squeeze herself through the broken gap in the lattice, one or more of the zombies would already be on her.

This was literally her worst-case scenario. She was trapped somewhere relatively safe, but now she couldn’t leave because there were too many zombies just outside. It was exactly the situation she had tried to warn Arkady about, exactly the situation she feared ever putting herself into, and now she was stuck in it. She knew she had to keep moving, knew she couldn’t risk staying in one place too long, and somehow she’d been stupid enough to fall asleep for six hours and now she was trapped.

And to make matters worse, she had to use the bathroom. She really, really had to use the bathroom.

Ada cursed herself silently. She wanted to curse herself out loud, but she couldn’t even do that. The zombies were practically close enough for her to reach out and touch. None of them noticed she was there, but if one of them did, then it was all over for her. There were only four of them, but it might as well have been forty. Actually, for all she knew, there were forty. There could be dozens more of the damn things in front of the porch just out of her line of sight.

She had five rounds left in her pistol. That was enough to take out the zombies, but she didn’t want to waste all her ammunition just yet. She tried to think of another way out. She had no other weapons, not even a nail file. Her evening dress, now filthy and ruined, left far too much skin exposed for her to feel safe. Maybe if she was wearing a coat and pants she might risk trying to get away, but then it would be even harder to squeeze through the broken lattice. She already had to be careful to avoid cutting or stabbing herself on the sharp splinters of wood.

The only thing she had going in her favor was that the zombies didn’t notice she was there. But that could change at any moment. If an infected dog showed up, it would almost certainly spot her, and there was no way she could possibly stop it from getting in. All she could do was lie still and hope the zombies went away.

As awful as it sounded, she hoped another survivor might show up to draw their attention. Maybe someone would drive by in a car and the zombies would lurch after them, giving her a chance to escape. But she doubted anyone was still on the move at this point. Anyone with the ability to drive away from the city had probably done so hours ago. Everyone else was probably in the same situation she was, hiding somewhere and waiting to be rescued.

She listened carefully for any sound that might give her an idea of what was going on in the city, and after a few minutes heard what might have been gunfire, but it was so far away it might have been anything. She didn’t hear Konstantin Rykov, so at least she had that going for her. Checking her phone again, she saw she still had no signal.

The outbreak in Raccoon City had started in the early morning, and Umbrella had not made the decision to destroy the city until the following morning, perhaps twenty hours after the initial outbreak. The outbreak here in Yatovska started in the evening, so if events played out the same way, Ada figured she still had most of the day to get out of the city. The possibility existed that Arkady was right and the outbreak here was not as bad as Raccoon City, but Ada wasn’t going to take that chance.

But first, she had to get out from under the porch. As quietly as possible, she checked the other side, but the lattice there was firmly in place without any gaps for her to escape through. However, as far as she could tell, there were no zombies on that side. She checked the side facing the building in case there was a tiny basement window she could climb through, but there were none.

She checked on the zombies again. There were just the four she could see, but one of them had wandered closer to the street. Ada pulled out her pistol and re-checked how many rounds she had. She tried to determine if she could just shoot the two zombies closest to her, and then climb out in time to get away from the other two. She thought it might be possible, but killing the first two zombies quickly wasn’t a guaranteed outcome. Even if she managed to shoot them in the head, she was firing from such an awkward angle that the bullet might ricochet or miss the brain entirely. And if she had to use three or four shots, then it would be a complete waste of effort. She wanted to get away with at least three rounds left, just in case she ran into more trouble.

Suddenly, one of the zombies looked up and opened his mouth to moan. It was only then that Ada noticed the low humming sound coming from overhead. In a few seconds, it became the dull thumping sound of a helicopter. Ada couldn’t see it, but it must have been right overhead. The zombies all dumbly looked up and moaned, and then started to wander off in the direction the chopper was flying.

Oh, thank you, Ada thought.

She tucked her gun back into its tiny holster on her thigh and then made her move. She stuck her arms and head through the gap in the lattice and looked around. The zombies hadn’t noticed her. Carefully, she eased herself forward until she was halfway out, and then balanced on one foot so she could lift her other leg through. She managed to get almost all the way out before she lost her balance and slipped, and her other leg scraped hard against one of the broken pieces of wood, cutting her down the side of her calf.

She gasped in pain and fell onto her side. One of the zombies, the man in sweatpants, turned and then groaned when he saw her. The other zombies were still distracted, but he stepped towards her.

Ada fumbled for her gun and drew it. She fired once, hitting him in the eye. As the other zombies turned at the sound of the gunshot, Ada finished crawling through and got shakily to her feet. She ran along the side of the apartment building, putting distance between herself and the zombies until she was out in the parking lot nearby. Her leg was bleeding and it hurt, but it was just a surface cut and didn’t effect her ability to run.

The helicopter was nowhere in sight. She tried to guess which way it had been flying, but there was no way for her to know, so she just kept going in the direction she had already been going. There was only one reason a helicopter could be flying over the city, and it was that Umbrella was sending help, and that meant the UBCF.

All Ada had to do was find them.

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