Mother Russia

Chapter Three

The six soldiers crowded into the narrow alley felt like they were being cooked alive. The blindingly-bright sun, directly overhead, baked the sandy pavement underfoot and reflected off the tan brick walls of the buildings on either side, trapping the heat in a sweltering corridor without the slightest breath of wind. Underneath their uniforms and body armor, decorated with brown and tan urban camouflage, the soldiers were already soaked with sweat.

The squad leader, an Englishman named Darby, glanced back at his comrades and then pointed forward. As a group, the soldiers silently moved down the alley, weapons raised and safeties off. They were armed with stocky modular assault rifles similar in appearance to a Remington ACR. In addition, they carried Beretta M9 sidearms, plus smoke grenades, flashbangs, combat knives, and other equipment. Sewn onto the shoulder of their uniform was a small patch composed of three pentagons facing each other in a triangular configuration, one dark green, one light green, and one light blue.

The alley continued for forty feet and then opened up into a small courtyard strewn with trash and debris. Waves of heat came off the pavement, making the whole area shimmer like a mirage. Darby stepped into the open and the others followed behind him, carefully spreading out. The courtyard split off in four other directions, leading to four more narrow, cramped alleyways.

As the squad paused at the entrance to the courtyard, they encountered their first zombie. It was a man wearing a dirty gray shirt and shabby brown slacks that were tattered at the hem around his bare feet. He shuffled aimlessly from the alleyway to their left, looked at the soldiers and then began to move towards them.

Darby pointed and nodded. One of his men came forward and squeezed off a three-round burst, and the target stumbled backward and fell to the ground without a word. The gun was equipped with a suppressor, but the shots still reverberated uncomfortably down the connected alleys.

The soldiers grinned at each other. “That wasn’t so hard,” one of them muttered.

A flimsy wooden door to the soldiers’ right suddenly burst open with a crack, and three people staggered out, arms outstretched. Like the other zombie, they were dressed in cheap, dirty clothing, and they wordlessly launched themselves at the soldiers. One grabbed the nearest soldier, a Canadian named Beckett, and pulled him down as the man shouted and tried to get his gun between them. The other soldiers backed away in a panic and opened fire, riddling the zombies with shots. But it was too late for Beckett.

“Cease fire!” Darby snapped. He took a few breaths and pursed his lips anxiously as he looked around at the buildings that surrounded them. All were dotted with numerous recessed doorways and boarded up windows, a hundred places where zombies could hide. He looked at the bodies sprawled on the ground. They had barely begun their mission, and they had already lost a man.

“Snyder, Lambert,” he said. “Stay here and watch our backs. In five minutes, if nothing shows up, come after us.”

He and the other two soldiers, named Campbell and Okada, made their way directly across the courtyard and down the next alley, which twisted left and right, cutting off their lines of sight. In the distance somewhere, they could hear the dim rumble of traffic. They passed some old wooden garbage bins that were full of crumpled paper and filthy plastic food containers. Flies buzzed in the air.

As they turned a corner, they encountered another zombie. Darby studied the alley carefully, noticing that one of the nearby doors was slightly open. He took down the zombie himself, hitting it squarely in the head, and then hurried to the doorway. He pointed at Campbell, who reared back and then kicked the door open, storming the dark room within.

But the brightness of the alley had ruined their vision in the dark, and Campbell had to wait for his eyes to adjust. By the time he sensed two shadowy figures lurching towards him, it was too late. Campbell scrambled backwards, shooting nearly blind into the darkness, and went down with a pair of zombies crawling on top of him. One of them lurched upright and grabbed for Darby, but he back-pedaled and swung his gun up, shooting the zombie in the chest and head. It fell back down on top of Campbell’s motionless body.

Darby stared down at Campbell and could only shake his head. That was two men down, a full third of the entire squad.

Okada suddenly shouted and opened fire. Darby spun to see three more zombies coming down the alley ahead of them. Three women, wearing colored dresses and head scarves. They collapsed into each other and went down under the wave of gunfire, tumbling to the pavement.

“Come on,” Darby said angrily, waving Okada after him. Instead of going in the building, they continued down the alley, past the three female zombies. They found an open doorway farther down, and this time Darby hesitated.

Just then, he and Okada heard shots back in the courtyard, and they both bolted back the way they had come. Okada was the first one to reach the doorway where Campbell lay, and as he ran past, another zombie jumped from the shadows and landed directly on top of him. He shouted in surprise and spun around, shooting wildly into the wall. Darby opened fire, shooting the zombie in the back, but he didn’t hit it in the head. It tore at the back of Okada’s neck as they collapsed to the pavement together. Darby shouted in frustration and shot the zombie in the head, and then ran for the courtyard.

He immediately shrieked as four zombies swarmed into the alley towards him and reached out with clawing hands. Darby backed up and opened fire until his gun was empty. He skirted past the bodies now clogging the alley and reloaded his gun.

The shooting in the courtyard had long since stopped. The other two squad members, Snyder and Lambert, were down on the ground, surrounded by a dozen more zombies, not including the ones they had already taken down. Darby stared in dismay at the mob of zombies as they began to shuffle in his direction. Angrily, he raised his gun and opened fire, shooting them all until his weapon was empty once more. The entire courtyard was now littered with bodies. He couldn’t walk to the other side without stepping on one of them.

He fumbled with another magazine and stepped back, but a zombie came at him from the side and grabbed at his gun. It had four shots across its torso, but somehow none of his shots had hit it in the head. The zombie yanked at the gun and reached for his face, throwing him off balance. He kicked the zombie away and tried to run, but two more came at him and tackled him, driving him down to the ground. The two zombies held him down and looked at him expectantly.

“God damn it,” he said, resting his head on the hot pavement.

From a rooftop overlooking the courtyard, a man in a combat uniform identical to the squad’s placed one black boot on the lip of the roof and leaned forward to survey the scene below him. He was tall and powerfully built, with piercing gray eyes and sandy blonde hair in a short buzz cut. His birth name was Theodore Hunklemeyer, but no one called him that. Everyone called him Hunk.

“Congratulations,” he announced loudly, “you’re all dead. The zombies killed all of you in less than fifteen minutes. If it makes you feel any better, you lasted about five minutes longer than I thought you would. All right, everyone get up.”

The zombies on top of Darby gave him an apologetic look and got to their feet. They helped Darby stand, as the others in the courtyard, zombies and soldiers alike, all got up. The soldiers looked either annoyed or embarrassed at their complete failure to complete the mission, especially Beckett, who had lasted barely two minutes before getting eliminated, and they all kept their eyes on the ground rather than look up and meet Hunk’s judgmental gaze. The zombies, however, grinned and some of them patted each other on the shoulder, pleased at a job well done.

Hunk put his hands on his hips and looked down at the crowd. “Squad leader, you and your men report to the briefing room and wait for me there. The rest of you can take a break and head for the cafeteria for lunch if you want. I’ll meet with you later.”

As the crowd below broke up, Hunk turned and walked across the roof. They were in the city of Khuzdar in central Pakistan, and the entire neighborhood was actually a walled compound owned by the Tricell Corporation. There was a set of stairs heading down to the building’s second floor, where Hunk had his main command center set up. He favored his right leg as he descended the stairs. At the bottom, he opened a door and stepped into air-conditioning.

He wasn’t surprised that the squad had performed poorly, but next time they would have no choice but to do better, now that they had a grasp of what they were actually up against. The “zombies,” on the other hand, had done a fantastic job. The Tricell squad was armed with paintball guns mocked up to look and feel like real firearms, and their grenades were little more than firecrackers that produced a lot of harmless smoke.

The zombies all wore heavy plastic face shields and body armor under their clothing, to protect them from getting hurt. They were locals from Khuzdar, hired and trained to behave like infected hosts. Fifty of them were scattered throughout the compound, and Hunk had spent almost three weeks working with them every single day, explaining their role in these training scenarios. He showed them how to move and how to react, based on his own personal experience fighting large mobs of zombies back in Raccoon City a year before.

In his command center, twelve computer monitors, two rows of six each, were arranged in a semi-circle, each one showing the viewpoint of a different security camera. There were over one-hundred such cameras in the compound, giving Hunk eyes in every alley and every building. He had watched the entire brief mission from this room, switching between cameras to keep an eye on the squad.

“Well, that could have gone better,” the woman in the room said. She stood in front of the monitors, her arms crossed severely over her chest, and didn’t bother to look at Hunk as she spoke.

“I thought it went rather well,” Hunk said casually. “I wasn’t lying when I said they lasted longer than I thought they would. I deliberately gave them very little information about how the hosts would behave during this exercise.”

The woman turned to face him. She was African-American, nearly as tall as he was, with large brown eyes and short black hair. She might have been thirty years old or she might have been fifty, Hunk couldn’t tell. Her name was Chanelle Robertson and she was the acting Tricell supervisor on site.

“And why did you do that?” she asked.

“Because they thought it would be easy,” Hunk said. “They always think it’s going to be easy. You saw them on the cameras, how cocky they all were. They thought this was a joke. After all, how hard can it be to fight off something that doesn’t shoot back and can’t even run after you? They expected it to be simple, and I wanted to discourage them of that notion.”

“Consider them discouraged,” Chanelle said, turning back to the monitors. “Those men are supposed to be highly-trained, some of Tricell’s best, but they looked like a bunch of incompetent amateurs.”

“The men in Umbrella’s UBCF were highly-trained, too. And most of them are dead. My job is to make sure these men understand how to fight a threat of this nature. If there’s another outbreak like the one in Raccoon City – when, I should say, not if – they need to know how to survive.”

Chanelle pursed her lips and studied the screens. “Well, this is your show,” she said stiffly, “but some of the higher-ups are not completely sold on this whole idea. If I think we’re not making any progress, I’m authorized to take over this operation. Do you understand?”

Hunk nodded. “I understand completely.”

He liked Chanelle’s style. He suspected that she came across as harsh and humorless in an effort to be intimidating, but Hunk appreciated her no-nonsense approach to management. He wasn’t intimidated at all, of course. He had worked with violent psychopaths like Nicholai Ginovaef and deranged madmen like Albert Wesker. It was hard for him to feel intimidated by anyone after working with people like that.

Although technically, he still worked for Wesker. Hunk had to remind himself occasionally that although he had done his best to escape from his employment with Umbrella, all he did was wind up working for one of Umbrella’s high-ranking research directors at another company. Sometimes he marveled at the insanity of it. His intention was to find work with some private security force, fighting criminals and terrorists like a normal soldier. The last thing he wanted was to go back to fighting the undead. And yet, here he was.

But he was in charge now, that was the difference. The only person above him was Wesker. Despite Chanelle’s claim that she outranked him, Hunk knew that he had absolute authority here. This entire training exercise was his idea and he was going to see it through.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s go talk to the men and tell them everything they did wrong.”

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