Mother Russia

Chapter Five

“The number one rule is to keep calm,” Hunk said, probably for the twelfth time. “If you panic, you’re as good as dead. If you remember anything at all from this entire training program, remember that.”

He leaned against a metal desk with his arms crossed, and looked across the faces of the people seated at long tables in front of him. Fifteen men and three women, three squads of six soldiers each. After two weeks of training, all of them had run the urban course at least twenty times, and all of them had “died” in at least half of the scenarios that Hunk had prepared for them. None of them had dropped out of the program, but all of them were appropriately humbled by the experience.

“Conserve your ammunition,” Hunk continued, again repeating something he had already told them before. “Don’t waste rounds on hosts that aren’t close enough to be a threat. When you shoot, shoot for the head. Don’t set your weapon for full-auto unless you are in close quarters and have no choice. And remember, running away is always an option.”

He paused and let the words sink in, although if they hadn’t sunk in by now then they probably never would. In Hunk’s estimation, only about a quarter of the soldiers in this room would be able to survive an outbreak like the one that had overrun Raccoon City. They were all capable soldiers – they wouldn’t even be in the program if they weren’t – but there was a difference between a soldier and a survivor. A good soldier could follow orders, protect their comrades in the heat of battle, and push themselves to the great feats of bravery when it mattered most. A survivor could do all of those things as well, but they could also think quickly on their feet, make difficult decisions that might contradict their orders, and above all, they could beat the odds and stay alive when everyone else did not.

What Hunk needed was survivors. In fact, what the world needed was survivors. And that, unfortunately, was something that Hunk could not train.

“With that in mind,” he said, “today we’re going to discuss some of the other threats that you may face in the field. Not just infected hosts, but other threats that are even more dangerous. I’m sure that all of you have heard stories and rumors about some of the experimental creatures that have gotten loose during outbreaks such as the one in Raccoon City. Well, today I’m going to show you some of them.”

He held out a small remote control and pressed a button to activate a projector installed in the ceiling. It flashed an image onto the white screen behind him.

Some of the soldiers sat back and gasped. Hunk heard one of them whisper, “Jesus Christ,” but he wasn’t sure who it was. A soldier named Garvey in the front row stared with his mouth hanging open. Hunk didn’t bother to look at the screen just yet, since he already knew what the creature looked like.

“We call this a Type 3,” he said. “It’s about the size of a Bengal tiger. Weighs around five hundred pounds, but they can get bigger than that. Claws are as big as butcher knives. Keen sense of smell and sight. They’re incredibly agile, and capable of jumping six feet in the air and climbing up sheer vertical walls. They’ll go right up a wooden wall with no difficulty, although a concrete wall might hold them back. Running speed is probably forty miles an hour, or sixty kilometers an hour. They also have a long prehensile tongue that can reach maybe four feet.”

At that point, he did finally turn and look over his shoulder at the image on the screen. They didn’t have any actual photos of one, so it was just an artist’s rendering, but it was quite accurate.

“Sometimes they’re called lickers, because of their tongue,” he added casually. “These things are just as nasty as they look. They’re brutal and relentless and very hard to kill. They’re also loud as hell. The one I ran into screeched like a demon.”

He heard a muffled gasp and turned his head. “Yes?”

“Uh, sir?” a soldier named Ortiz said. “You … you’ve seen one of these things up close?”

“Yes, I have. I encountered one in Raccoon City.”

“And you killed it?”

“No. I didn’t even have a weapon capable of harming it.”

“What … what did you do?”

“I ran for my life,” Hunk said. “Remember what I said earlier. Running is always an option.”

Some of the soldiers chuckled nervously, unsure if he was joking. He turned back to the image on the screen. “If you encounter a Type 3, your best bet is to run somewhere you can defend easily. The creature is too large to fit into tight spaces, so find yourself a narrow alley or hallway, or climb inside an armored vehicle if you can. I escaped one of these things by falling down an open manhole. But be aware that if the creature is able to squeeze into the space you’re defending, then you will be trapped and it will rip you to shreds.”

He sighed, remembering his own close call with death. He’d already been badly injured in the streetcar crash, and when he encountered the licker, he jumped down into a sewer headfirst to avoid being sliced clean in half. It was not a pleasant memory.

Turning back to face the soldiers again, he said, “You can kill one of these things if you shoot it enough times, but you have to shoot it lots of times. Your standard rifle magazine doesn’t carry enough rounds. I suppose if you were carrying a minigun, you could take one out fairly easily. Explosives would certainly work if you can get them to go off right under the creature. But barring that unlikely situation, my advice is to run.”

Hunk clicked the remote in his hand to activate the next screen. It showed a hideous bipedal reptile creature with mottled green skin, long and lanky arms, and a huge mouth lined with razor-sharp teeth.

“This is a Type 4,” he said. “It’s a mutation based on some kind of lizard. We know that some specimens got loose in the Arklay Mountains prior to the Raccoon City outbreak. They’re known by a multitude of names, including hunters and slashers. Some documents simply call them frogs.”

For the next half hour, Hunk clicked through screen after screen of strange mutated creatures and infected animals. He showed them pictures of skinless undead dogs, huge fleshy spiders, man-sized snakes with two heads, and savage infected chimpanzees. As the lecture went on, he occasionally glanced at his class to gauge their reactions. Some of the soldiers looked on in utter disbelief at the images on the screen, some stared in outright horror with their hands clutched in front of them or held over their mouths in shock, and some listened with keen interest and studied the images carefully. It was that last group that Hunk was interested in.

It was okay to be scared. Fear was a perfectly acceptable reaction. Only a complete fool or a violent maniac could look at those pictures and not be scared out of their mind. Those creatures were monsters straight out of a nightmare. Fear was normal and healthy, and important as well.

But fear was also dangerous. It was easy to give in to fear and let it overcome you. How many soldiers in Umbrella’s UBCF had let their fear get the best of them? Once the fear gained control, they were as good as dead. The soldiers in Hunk’s training program had not even faced any of these creatures, but already he could see on some of their faces the overwhelming presence of fear that would get them killed as quickly as a zombie biting their neck.

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

Most of the soldiers, distracted by his sudden change of topic, blinked in confusion and looked at each other. However, one of the women sitting in the back row – a soldier from Germany named Snyder – said loudly, “Keep calm, sir.”

“Correct,” Hunk said. “You may never have to face creatures like this. It is my sincere hope that you never do. But if there’s an outbreak and your squad is sent into a dangerous area crawling with infected hosts, then you may encounter a licker or a stinger or any of these other things. And if you do, you must remain calm. I cannot stress that enough. Keep your head, remember your training, do what must be done. If you panic, you’re dead.”

He turned the projector screen off and set the remote down on the desk. The soldiers needed some time to think about what they had just seen, and Hunk felt like taking a break.

“You are dismissed until eighteen-hundred. At that time, report to the briefing area in sector one. Tonight, you’ll be going into the compound for another training scenario, but this time you will be going in at night.”

He left them in the classroom and walked across the compound to his command center. His leg bothered him a little bit, but he didn’t let it affect his gait. Every morning, he ran two miles on a treadmill, and sometimes it was agony. This morning, it had only been excruciating. The scar on his thigh was an ugly sight, but he supposed it was better than having his leg amputated, which might have happened if a woman named Ada Wong hadn’t cleaned the wound and stitched it up for him.

When he made it to the command center, Chanelle Robertson, the Tricell manager, was seated at one of the computer stations, stretching her back with her hands behind her head. She looked up as Hunk walked in.

“Classes are done for the day,” he said. “Tonight they’ll have their first night scenario.”

“Do you think they’ll do well?” Chanelle asked.

“With any luck, a few of them might survive.”

“That doesn’t fill me with confidence.”

“My job is to give a realistic assessment, not inspire confidence.”

Chanelle frowned at him and then directed her attention back at the computer screen in front of her. She lowered her arms and placed them in her lap. “There’s something here you might want to see. It’s not new, it happened a few months ago. It didn’t get any international coverage, but one of our agents in Mexico got wind of it and sent us a news report.”

Hunk walked over to the computer. It showed a news article from the Central American country of Belize, about a bombing at a hospital in the capital, Belize City. There was a single photograph of some people being led out on stretchers, surrounded by soldiers in military uniforms.

“That’s the UBCF,” he said immediately.

Chanelle nodded. She scrolled down the page to allow him to read the entire article. He leaned over her shoulder as he read it. Apparently there had been a bomb threat at a hospital, resulting in a partial evacuation, and then the bomb exploded and killed at least thirty people, although the total number was unknown.

“Why haven’t we heard about this?” he asked.

“They put a pretty tight lid on it,” Chanelle said. “It looks like the local authorities did everything they could to keep the news from spreading. The major news networks didn’t report on it at all. The only articles we have are from local reporters, and there’s only a few of them. I’m trying to get more information, but there’s almost no other reporting on it.”

“Can Tricell send someone there to investigate?”

“They already have, but they won’t arrive until tomorrow. We only found out about this a few hours ago.”

Hunk stood up straight. “They had an outbreak.”

Chanelle turned in her chair. “It must have been a Level Two. We’re trying to learn how many people died, but it couldn’t have been much more than the thirty they already reported.”

“I can’t believe they ...” Hunk trailed off. He was about to say that he couldn’t believe they could cover something like up, but then reality took hold. He’d let the constant coverage of the Raccoon City incident distort his common sense. Of course Umbrella could cover it up. They’d been covering up similar incidents for years.

Six years ago, fourteen scientists at a small lab in Miami had become infected. The year before that, forty-three people died in an outbreak in Gaziantep in Turkey. Hunk knew first-hand of at three other incidents. In each case, Umbrella covered them up with the full cooperation of the local and even national governments. Money changed hands, promises were made, threats were insinuated, and the deaths were ignored and hidden away like a dirty secret.

But they couldn’t cover up Raccoon City. They couldn’t hide tens of thousands of deaths, an entire city devastated and swarming with thousands of infected hosts. It took a while for it to happen, but they finally had an outbreak they couldn’t sweep under the rug.

“What do you think?” Chanelle asked.

“It’s going to happen again, you know,” he said.

Chanelle nodded. “Well, that’s what we’re doing here, isn’t it? Preparing for something like that.”

Hunk could only sigh and shake his head. “I fought my way through one outbreak already. I’m not looking forward to another.”

After a few moments, Chanelle said, “I listened to your class, you know. There’s a security camera in the room. Were you serious about fighting a Type 3?”

“I didn’t fight it,” Hunk said. “I ran away from it.”

Chanelle just looked at him. “I didn’t know you really encountered those creatures. I mean, I know you were there during the outbreak. But I didn’t know that you actually … you know, fought infected things like that.”

“Lots of things happened in Raccoon City that people don’t know about,” Hunk said vaguely. He was still looking at the computer screen. “Things Umbrella doesn’t even know about.”

Chanelle looked at him expectantly, so he explained what he meant. “Umbrella did all kinds of viral experiments, but they didn’t expose the virus to every kind of animal, every kind of insect. So when the city became infected, the virus was exposed to all kinds of creatures that Umbrella had no information on. Mutants were created that Umbrella had never seen before. We have information on fourteen types, but that’s not all of them. There are probably thousands of different mutations, and that’s only from one particular strain of the virus.”

“Of course. There’s different viruses, different strains,” Chanelle said, nodding to herself “I know about some of that. So if an outbreak happened with one of the other strains ...”

Hunk didn’t finish her sentence. The hard truth was that all his training with these new squads was predicated on the assumption that infected human hosts would behave the same way that the ones in Raccoon City did. But Hunk – and his boss Wesker – both knew that wasn’t necessarily the case. Each different strain of the Progenitor affected hosts in different ways, through both primary and secondary infection. One strain might turn a human being into what Umbrella called a Tyrant. Another strain might turn a human into the creature that had attacked the streetcar right before the crash. And there were dozens, if not hundreds, of different strains.

What Hunk feared the most was that he and his team would be sent in to deal with another outbreak, but it would be a completely different strain of the virus, and all of their careful training would be for nothing.

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