Resident Evil – Caliban Cove

by S. D. Perry

Yes, it makes sense, a trick question…

  They had twenty seconds left. "Anyone disagree?" David asked sharply.No answer. David hit the key, entered it…… and the countdown stopped, sixteen seconds to spare. The screen turned itself off. From somewhere overhead, the now familiar chime sounded. David exhaled, leaning back in the chair.

  Thank you, Rebecca!

  He turned around to tell her as much, but she was already bending to examine Karen's eye, fixated on her patient. "I need a flashlight," she said, barely glancing around as John handed his to her. She turned it on, shining it into Karen's eye as the rest of them looked on silently, watching them. Karen didn't look well; there were dark circles under her eyes, and her skin had gone from pale to almost sickly.

  "It's pretty inflamed… look up. Down. Left and right? Does it feel like there's something rubbing it, or is it more like a burn?"Actually, more like an itch," Karen said. "Like a mosquito bite times ten. I've been scratching it, though, that might be why it's so red."Rebecca turned off the torch, frowning. "I don't see anything. The other one looks irritated, too… did it just start itching all of a sudden, or did you touch it, first?" Karen shook her head. "I don't remember. It just started itching, I guess."

  A look of sharp, almost violent intensity flashed across Rebecca's face. "Before or after you were in room 101?"

  David felt a cold hand clutch at his heart. Karen suddenly looked worried. "After."Did you touch anything while you were in there, anything at all?" "I don't…"

  Karen's red eyes widened in sudden horror, and when she spoke, it was a breathless, quivering whis-per. "The gurney. There was a bloodstain on the gurney and I was thinking about…I touched it. Oh, Jesus, I didn't even think about it, it was dry and I, my hand wasn't cut and oh my God, I got a headache right after my eye started itching."

  Rebecca put her hands on Karen's shoulders, squeezing them tightly. "Karen, take a deep breath. Deep breath, okay? It may be that your eye just itches and you have a headache, so don't jump to conclu-sions here, we don't know anything for sure."

  Her voice was low and soothing, her manner direct. Karen blew out a shaky breath and nodded. "If her hand wasn't cut…" John started ner-vously. Karen answered him, her pale features composed but her voice trembling slightly. "Viruses can get into the body through mucous membranes. Nose, ears… eyes. I knew that. I knew that but I didn't think about it, I… wasn't thinking about it."

  She looked up at Rebecca, and David could see that she was struggling to maintain her composure. "If I am infected, how long? How long before I become… incapacitated?" Rebecca shook her head. "I don't know," she said softly. David felt as though a raging blackness had envel-oped him, a cloud of fear and worry and guilt so vast that it threatened to overwhelm his ability to move, even to think.

  My fault. My responsibility. "There's a vaccine, right?" John asked, his dark gaze darting between Karen and Rebecca. "There's a cure, wouldn't they have a shot or something here if someone got it by accident? They'd have to, wouldn't they?" David felt a sudden surge of desperate hope. "Is it possible?" he asked Rebecca quickly. The young biochemist nodded, slowly at first but then eagerly. "Yeah, it's possible. It's probable, they created it." She looked at David seriously, urgently. "We have to find the main lab, where they synthesized the virus, and quickly. If they developed a cure, that's where the information would be…"

  Rebecca trailed off, and David could see what she'd left unspoken in her troubled gaze; if there was a cure. If Dr. Griffith hadn't taken the information there, too. If they could find it in time. "Ammon's message," Steve said. "In that note, he said we should destroy the lab, maybe he left us a map, or directions." David stood up, his hope building. "Karen, are you feeling well enough to…" "… Yes," she said, cutting him off, standing up. "Yes, let's go."

  Her red eyes were bright with fervent intensity, a mix of despair and wild hope that made David's heart ache to see.

  God, Karen, I'm so, so sorry!"Double time," he said, already turning for the door. "Let's move."They quickly jogged for the front of the building, John's jaw clenched, his thoughts a grimly determined loop of angry intention.

  No way some goddamn bug is taking Karen down, no chance, and if I find the bastard who set this nightmare up he's Dead, capital D, Dead meat. Not Karen, no way in hell…

  They reached the front door and silently drew weapons, checking them, tensely impatient for David to give the signal. Karen, always so cool and collected in times of stress, had a shocked vagueness about her, like she'd just been kicked in the gut and hadn't yet managed to take a breath. It was the same look that John had seen time and again on the faces of disaster Survivors – the haunted disbelief in the eyes, the slack and terrible blankness of expression that spoke of a yawning emptiness deep inside. It hurt him to see her like that, hurt him and made him even angrier. Karen Driver wasn't supposed to look like that. "I lead, John in back, straight line," David said softly. John saw that he looked almost as freaked as Karen, though in a different way. It was guilt gnawing at their captain, he could see it in his reluctant gaze, the tight set of his mouth. John wished he could tell him that blaming himself was wrong, but there wasn't time and he didn't have the right words for it. David would have to take care of himself, just as they all would.

  "Ready? Go."

  David pushed the door open and then they were slipping through, back into the gentle hiss of waves and the pale blue light of the moon. David, then Karen, Steve, Rebecca, and finally John, crouched and running across the packed dirt of the open compound. There was darkness and the scent of pine, of salt, but John's soldier mind wasn't telling him anything he didn't already know as they pounded through the shadows. There was only anger, and fear for Karen……making the sudden blast of M-16 fire a total surprise.

  Shit!

  John dove for the ground as the thundering rattle opened up to their right, saw that they were just over halfway to block E as he rolled and started to fire. Then the air was filled with the blast of nine-millime– ter rounds, crashing over the steady pulse of automat– ic rifles.

  Can't see, can't target…

  He found the muzzle flashes at three o'clock and jerked the Beretta around, squeezing the trigger six, seven, eight times. The stutter of orange-white light blocked the shooters from view but he saw one of the flashes disappear, heard the clatter decrease and a rage overtook him, not the "soldier mind" but a blinding, screaming fury at the diseased attack– ers that far exceeded any he'd ever known. They wanted Karen to die, those numb, brainless night– mares wanted to stop them from saving her.

  Not Karen. NOT KAREN.

  A strange, feral howl beat at his ears as he pushed away from the dusty earth and then he was standing, running, firing. Only when he heard the shouts of the others, the Berettas except for his holding fire, did he realize that the howl was coming from him. John ran forward, screaming as he fired again and again at the things that meant to slow them up, to kill them, to claim Karen as one of their own. His thoughts were no longer words, just an endless, form– less negative – a denial of their existence and what had created them. He charged ahead, not seeing that they had stopped firing, that they were falling, that the shadows had fallen silent except for the thunder of his semi and the scream that poured from his shaking body. Then he was standing over them and the Beretta had stopped crashing and jumping, even though he still pulled the trigger. Three of them, white where there was no red, decayed flesh bursts covering their pitiful, wasted forms. Click. Click. Click. One of them had a face that was a mass of puckered scar tissue, twisting white risers of gnarled skin except for where a fresh, bloody hole had punched through its forehead. Another, one eye spattered against its withered cheek, pooling viscous fluid in the rotting cup of its ear. Click. Click. The third was still alive. Half of its throat was gone, tattered to pulp, and its mouth opened and closed soundlessly, opened and closed, its filmed dark eyes blinking slowly up at him. Click. He was dry-firing, the scream dying away in his ragged throat. It was
the sound of the hammer falling uselessly against hot metal that finally released him from the rage – that, and the slow, helpless blink of the wretched thing at his feet.

  It didn't know what it was. It didn't know who they

  were. Once it had been a man, and now it was rotting

  garbage with a gun and a mission it couldn't possibly

  understand.

  They took his soul…

  "John?"

  A warm hand on his back, Karen's voice low and easy next to him. Steve and David stepped into view, staring down at the gaping, blinking shell of humanity in the shaded moonlight, the last remnant of an experiment in madness. "Yeah," he whispered. "Yeah, I'm here." David trained his Beretta on the monster's skull and spoke softly. "Stand back." John turned away, started walking back for their last destination with Karen at his side, Rebecca's slight form in front of him. The shot was incredibly loud, a booming crack that seemed to shake the ground beneath their feet.

  Not Karen, oh please not one of us. That's no way to go out, no way to die…

  Then David and Steve were with them and without speaking, they broke into a jog for block E, moving quickly through the emptiness that had claimed the night. The Trisquads were no more, but the disease that made them might even now be coursing through Karen's body, turning her into a creature with no mind, no soul, doomed to a fate worse than death. John picked up speed, silently swearing to himself that if they found this Dr. Griffith, he was going to be awfully goddamned sorry that they did.

  THIRTEEN

  The e block was no different than the first four they'd encountered, as bland and industrial and stale as the rest of them, a study in concrete efficiency. They moved quickly through the stuffy halls, turning on lights as they went, searching for the room that held the final clue to Dr. Ammon's secret. It didn't take long; almost half of the structure was taken up by an indoor shooting range, where David had found boxes of loaded M-16 mags, but no rifles to go with them. John had asked if he should retrieve the Trisquad's weapons, which Rebecca promptly vetoed. The rifles were hot, probably crawling with virus. Like Karen's blood by now, streams of replicating virions bursting from cells, searching for new cells to attach to and use and destroy… "Here!" Steve called from farther down the wind– ing corridor, and Rebecca hurried toward him, Karen and John not far behind. David was already standing with Steve by the closed door, the red, green, and blue triangles a sign that they'd hit on the right room. Steve's gaze seemed to seek her out, but was blank of all emotion except worry. She didn't mind, noted it only absently. Karen's infection, John's insane run at the Trisquad – there wasn't room in her for anything but the need to find the lab, to find help for Karen. Steve opened the door and they filed inside, Rebecca continuing to watch Karen closely for signs that the virus had progressed and wondering what she should do with the information she'd picked up so far about the amplification time. She didn't really have any doubts that Karen had been exposed, and knew that no one else did, either, but what should she say?

  Do I tell her that it might only take hours? Do I pull David aside? If there's a cure, she has to get it before the damage is too great, before it starts to fry her brain – before it dumps so much dopamine into her that she stops being Karen Driver and becomes… something else.

  Rebecca didn't know how to handle it. They were already doing all that they could, as fast as they could, and she didn't know enough about the T-Virus to assume anything. She also didn't want to see Karen any more terrified than she was already. The woman was doing her best to control it, but it was obvious that she was on the edge of a breakdown, from the desperation in her bloodred eyes to the growing tremor of her hands. And the Trisquads had almost certainly been injected with much larger amounts than Karen had been exposed to; maybe she had days…

  …first symptoms in less than an hour?Don't kid yourself. You have to tell her, to warn her and everyone else of what could happen. Soon.

  She pushed the thought aside almost frantically, looking around at the room they'd entered. It was smaller than the test chambers they'd come across, and emptier. There was a long meeting table pushed to the back, a half dozen chairs behind it. In the front of the room was a small shelf coming off the wall, only a few feet long and a foot deep. There were three large buttons on the flat surface, red, green, and blue. The wall behind the shelf was tiled in large, smooth gray tiles made from some kind of industrial plastic. "That's it," Steve said. "Blue to access." With barely a second's hesitation, David walked to the counter and pushed the blue button. A woman's voice spoke coolly from a hidden speaker above, startling them. It was a recording, the bland tone eerily reminding Rebecca of the final moments at the Spencer estate, the triggering system tape.

  "Blue series completed. Access reward."

  One of the tiles behind the shelf slid away, revealing a dark recess set into the concrete. As David reached into the hidden space, Rebecca felt a surge of frus-trated anger and disgust for Umbrella, for what she realized they had done. It was despicable. All those tests, all that work – set up to dole out treats to T-Virus victims. Get through the red series, good dog, here's your bone… and what was their reward, for making it through the tests? A piece of meat? Drugs, to ease their hunger? Maybe a brand new weapon for them to train with? Jesus, did they even understand what they'd been doing? She saw the same curled sneers of horror and disgust on the faces of the others and saw the same growing dismay as they watched David pull a single tiny item from the recess, what looked like a credit card with a slip of paper stuck to one side. They gathered around him as he held the item up, his dark gaze heavy with an almost manic disappoint– ment. It was a light green key card, the kind used to open electronic doors, blank except for a magnetic strip and the scrawled words on the small square of paper said only: LIGHTHOUSE-ACCESS 135-SOUTHWEST/EAST.

  "Handwriting's the same as on Ammon's note," Steve said hopefully. "Maybe the lab is in the light-house…" "One way to find out," John said. "Let's go."He seemed angry, the same look he wore since their discovery of Karen's exposure to the virus. After watching him charge the Trisquad outside, Rebecca almost hoped that they'd come across Dr. Griffith; John would tear him apart. David nodded, slipping the card into his vest. The fear and guilt that he felt were obvious, playing across his features in a constant, twitching mask. "Right. Karen…?"

  She nodded, and Rebecca saw that her already pale skin had taken on a waxy tone, as if the top layers were becoming translucent. Even as she watched, Karen started to scratch absently at her arms. "Yeah, I'm good," she said quietly. She has to know. She deserves to know.

  Rebecca knew it couldn't wait any longer. Choosing her words carefully, aware of their limited time, she turned to Karen and spoke as calmly as she could.

  "Look, I don't know what they've done with the T-Virus here, but there's a chance that you could start to experience more advanced symptoms in a relatively short amount of time. It's important that you tell me, tell all of us how you're doing, physically and psycho-logically. Any changes at all, we need to know, okay?"

  Karen smiled weakly, still scratching at her arms.

  "I'm scared shitless, how's that? And I'm starting to itch all over…"

  She turned her red eyes to David, then to Steve and John before looking back at Rebecca. "If… if I start to act… irrationally, you'll do something, won't you?

  You won't let me… hurt anyone?"

  A single tear slid down one pale cheek, but she didn't look away, her wet, crimson gaze as firm and strong as it had ever been. Rebecca swallowed, struggling to sound confident and reassuring, awed by the bravery she saw in Karen's eyes – and wondering how much longer that bravery would hold up beneath the roar of the T-Virus running through her veins.

  "We're going to find the cure before it comes to that," she said, and hoped that she wasn't telling Karen a lie. "Move out," David said tightly. They moved out. The grounds of the facility were on a definite gentle slant, rising to the north, but as they left the
E block and started for the towering black structure that perched over the cove, the curving slope became much steeper. The rocky soil angled up sharply, maybe as much as a thirty-degree incline, making the half kick walk into a hike. David ignored the strain in his back and legs; he was too worried about Karen and too busy tearing away at his own incompetence to bother with physical discomfort. They were closer to the shimmering waters of the cove than they had been since climbing out of them, and the cool, whispering breeze off the moonlit sur– face would have been pleasant on some other night, in some other place. The swaying ripples of soft light and the soothing murmur of waves were almost a mockery of their desperate situation, such a sharp contrast to the chaos inside of him that he found himself almost wishing that there were still Trisquads roaming around.

  At least then this would feel like the nightmare it is. And I could do something, I could fight back, defend them against something tangible…

  Ahead of them, the rising land curled around to the east, dropping away to a foaming sea far below. The cove itself was fairly calm, but the sound of waves smashing against the cliffs grew louder as they hurried on, approaching where the ocean met towering, cave– riddled rock walls. John had taken the lead, Karen next and then the two younger team members. David brought up the rear, dividing his attention between the compound to their left and behind and the dark structures ahead. Directly in back of the lighthouse was what had to be the dormitory, a long, flat building almost twice the size of the concrete blocks they'd left behind. They hadn't come across quarters for the Umbrella workers anywhere else, and it had the look of a bunkhouse – designed for sleeping and eating, no thought given to aesthetic appeal. They probably should check it out, but David didn't want to waste a moment in their search for the lab. The thought brought on another wave of guilt and angst that he tried unsuccessfully to block out. He needed to be effective, to get them to the laboratory as quickly as possible without floundering in his doubts and emotions, but all he kept thinking, kept wishing was that he'd been infected instead. But you're not, some tiny part of him whispered, Karen's got it and wishing is pointless. It won't cure her and it will cloud your ability to lead.