Mother Russia

Chapter Nineteen

Ada ran across front yards rather than the street, because it was easier on her bare feet. She passed by a few more zombies on the way, but she didn’t shoot them. She still had four rounds left in her pistol, and she wanted to hold onto them as long as possible.

She reached the end of the residential street and found herself in the middle of a huge intersection crossing six lanes of traffic. Looking around, she finally regained her bearings and realized she was back on Volodzny Street, which was the same street that she and Arkady had started on when they abandoned his car. She’d taken a short detour back in the direction she had come, but she was still generally going in the right direction. Her apartment was still another few kilometers away. If she took Volodzny Street another ten blocks or so, she could reach the street that led to the neighborhood where her apartment was.

At this point, she didn’t know if it was even worth it go there. If she could catch up with the soldiers from Tricell, she could get a gun from them if she needed one. Hopefully they had a way to leave the city, so all she had to do was find them. She took out her phone. Still no signal, but that wasn’t a surprise. It was finally getting light outside, and she guessed the sun would be up in another few minutes.

A long stretch of continued gunfire sounded from somewhere far away. Ada tried to pinpoint exactly what direction the shooting came from, and then there was more gunfire, and it sounded like more than one gun was firing. That was not a good sign. Had the Tricell soldiers run into some opposition? Ada still felt she had to try and track them down, but she didn’t want to put herself in the middle of a shootout either.

She walked out into the intersection as more gunfire echoed in the distance. It was definitely coming from ahead of her and off to the left. She looked down the street. It was lined with all kinds of businesses like restaurants, bank offices, and gas stations. Farther down the street on the right, there was an office building about five stories tall, in the middle of a large plaza of other offices.

Ada began walking down the street, passing by a few cars. A zombie trapped under one of the cars reached feebly towards her, but Ada ignored it. She kept her pistol in her hand, knowing that more zombies might show up at any moment.

Something screeched behind her and the sound sent shivers down her spine. She spun around just as a huge lumbering shape with blistered red skin emerged onto the street about a block from her. It roared and smashed a car out of its way, flipping it into the air like a toy. The car crashed back to the pavement, raining bits of shattered glass and broken fragments of plastic and metal. The creature growled so loud that Ada felt it in her chest, and turned its glowing red eyes in her direction.

It wasn’t Konstantin Rykov.

“Oh, shit,” Ada heard herself mutter, “It’s the other one.”

She turned and ran, her hair whipping behind her head, each step sending tremors of pain up her legs, her feet and knees bearing the worst of the pain. The pavement shook as the creature thundered after her, smashing aside anything in its way, its voice a deafening roar in her ears. She ran around the abandoned cars and cut across the grass median, knowing it was hopeless. There was no way she could hope to outrun it.

Up ahead, half-parked on the sidewalk, was a car that was still running. The driver side door was hanging wide open. Ada almost didn’t comprehend what she was looking at it when she saw it, and in a split-second she made her decision.

She ran to the car and practically leaped inside, slamming the gear shift into drive, and pounding her foot down on the gas. She was terrified the car wouldn’t drive, and maybe that’s why it had been abandoned, but it jerked forward with a start, the tires squealing as it scraped back over the curb and onto the street.

Ada spun the wheel to straighten the car back out. The creature behind her flashed across the rear view mirror, running on all fours like a rampaging gorilla. The car’s engine groaned as it picked up speed, and Ada managed to get ahead of her pursuer, screaming down the street. She steered around more abandoned cars and came up on the next intersection.

It was completely blocked. There were at least a dozen cars parked at odd angles all across the intersection, and there was no way Ada was going to be able to drive through. She cried out in dismay and turned the wheel, and the car jumped the median with a bang, rocking her in her seat. The car lost valuable speed and the creature charging behind her caught up in moments. Ada braced herself as the car clipped one of the parked vehicles, smashing a headlight and tearing away part of the fender. She struggled to keep the car driving straight.

On the corner on the other side of the intersection was a small store at the end of a row of businesses. The lights were on inside, and the front of the store was made up of full-length windows to display the goods inside.

Ada knew with a sense of finality that she was never going to be able to outrun the creature. She’d already lost her small head start, and if she tried to steer the car through the small parking lot and back to the street, it would catch right up with her. It would smash the car to pieces with her still inside. She simply didn’t have enough empty room in front of her to get away from it.

The car bounced over the curb, a shower of sparks blasting from underneath it, and banged to the ground, shaking Ada around like a sock in a dryer. She held her foot to the floor and tried to keep it going straight, closing her eyes as the storefront zoomed towards her. The creature took a swing and its massive clawed hand tore away the rear bumper. The car crashed over the cement blocks at the front of the parking spaces, and careened up and twisted sideways as it sailed into the huge front window and crashed straight through it in an explosion of glass.

The car blew through a row of shelves, blasting it apart like kindling, its momentum sending it forward in a tornado of papers, wooden splinters, and glass. Ada managed to keep her foot on the accelerator and the car tore through the front desk, smashing through it and driving forward until it finally came to a halt in a cloud of debris, the front end twisted and bent around a doorway behind the desk.

The creature pushed its way inside, the jagged spines sprouting from its back ripping up the ceiling tiles. It roared and swung its massive arm, demolishing more shelves of goods, and swung its other arm down like a hammer on the trunk of the car, smashing it flat. Immediately, the convenience store was filled with the stink of gasoline as it poured out of the punctured gas tank.

Her head spinning, Ada managed to crawl over the passenger seat and push open the door. It only opened halfway, blocked by the half-collapsed wall. She squeezed through the opening and crawled on all fours through the wreckage as the creature smashed the car to pieces in its frenzy to reach her. In the back of her mind, she wondered if she had been injured in the crash, but she didn’t have time to find out, she had to get away.

But there was nowhere to get away to. The car was wedged in the doorway and Ada couldn’t make her way through. If she got up and climbed over the top of the car, she might be able to get into the back rooms, but then the creature could grab her. She fumbled through the debris on the ground, her hands sliding across piles of papers and broken wood, soda cans from a shattered vending machine, parts of the shattered cash register as well as loose bills and change, packs of cigarettes that had been stacked up above the desk.

Ada’s hands closed on a tiny cylindrical item among the debris. Dimly, she looked at it, barely realizing what it was.

It was a cheap plastic cigarette lighter. They probably had trays of them near the cash register.

The creature bellowed its fury and smashed the car aside, so that it moved just enough for Ada to crawl through the blocked doorway. Gasoline splashed just next to her, so she hurriedly squeezed herself through the doorway and then flicked the lighter on and swung it down by her feet.

There was a sudden whoosh and a rush of hot air, and Ada felt a blast of heat wash over her. She scrambled away as a tower of flames erupted from the broken remains of the car, filling the entire store with a mushroom cloud of black smoke and a wave of suffocating heat. Ada managed to get to her feet and she staggered down a narrow hall leading to some storage rooms, gasping for air as the flames sucked the oxygen right out of her lungs.

The creature screamed and thrashed around madly, smashing everything in sight, tearing the entire interior of the store to shreds. Fire licked at its skin and scorched the remaining bits of clothing on its body. It tried to force its way past the car to chase after Ada, but it couldn’t fit its huge bulk in the small space, and within moments it was standing in the middle of an inferno as the fire spread all across the store.

Ada coughed and stumbled away. Her pistol was gone, she had no idea where. She made her way down the hall and past some supply rooms to a closed door at the end of the hall. She pushed it open and found herself in the lot out back. There were some dumpsters and wooden pallets and other refuse lying around. Holding one hand against her throbbing head, she limped across the lot and tried to get as far away from the burning store as possible. But she lost her footing and tumbled to the ground, and crawled into a small alcove near a garage door, trying to catch her breath.

Nearby, she heard the creature bellowing its fury. The entire row of businesses seemed to rock with the force of it smashing its way outside. It sounded like it had smashed its way right through a wall, but Ada didn’t have the strength to go look. She just wanted to sit there for a minute and try to make her hands stop shaking.

“Yeah, Wesker,” she mumbled to herself. “It’s been a real vacation. A walk in the park.”

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