Resident Evil Legends Part Three - The Mansion Incident by Andreas Leachim
Chapter 38
Chris heard the loud volley of gunshots coming from the lab room, but when they suddenly stopped, he forced himself not to look back. He could grieve for Barry at a later time. Right now, the only thought in his head was to find a way to escape.
Rebecca was already at the end of the hall, at the first intersection. “Which way do we go?” she called to Jill.
Jill shook the map open as she ran, and frantically tried to figure out where they were. She put her finger on the circled area of the map where the lab room was located, and then traced along the hallways toward the actual location of the elevator. “Give me a second, I think it’s right here. Left, we go left.”
“It’s coming!” Rebecca screamed, pointing over their shoulders.
The Tyrant came down the hallway after them, moving much faster than it moved back in the lab. It seemed to gain confidence the more it moved, and was now coming at almost a slow jog. Its face remained completely impassive, but the blood splattered all over its chest and spiked hand was intimidating enough.
“Come on!” Chris shouted, grabbing Jill’s arm.
They ran down the hallway to the left and ran forward as fast as they could. Incredibly, the Tyrant came right around the corner and gained on them, slowly picking up speed. One of the Tyrant’s strides equaled two of theirs, and it came after them like a bloodhound on the trail of a fugitive. Its head frequently hit the ceiling because it was so tall, but it barely seemed to notice, and it left visible dented footprints in the tile floor. A trail of broken ceiling tiles and shattered fluorescent lights lay behind it.
Jill stopped momentarily to get a better look at the map. “We go this way!” she shouted, starting to run again. “It’s not very far –”
She was interrupted by a deafening boom that seemed to come from all around them, and then the floor was pulled out from under them. She hit the ground as the lights flickered and then turned off, leaving them in complete and total darkness. Just as Jill began to freak out, red light bulbs popped out of spaces in the ceiling and turned on, bathing them all in creepy red light. There was another muffled boom and a ceiling tile crashed to the floor just a few inches from Jill’s head.
Chris was the only one to remain on his feet when the entire hallway shook. Even the Tyrant fell off balance and smashed into a nearby wall, which broke apart like a sheet of styrofoam with the heavy impact. The Tyrant crashed right through, its legs hanging out of the hole in the wall.
“What was that?!” Jill cried, pulling herself to her feet. The eerie red lights made it look like the entire hallway was slick with blood.
“The generator!” Rebecca shouted.
Chris completely forgot about the power generator. It must have overloaded after all, and the resulting explosion rattled the entire lab. It was enough to slow the Tyrant down, but Chris realized that it was even more urgent that they get away. An explosion in an underground complex could bring the entire thing down like a collapsed mine shaft.
They continued down the hall, and once more Jill examined the map to figure out which way to go. Chris looked back behind them and saw that the Tyrant crawled out of the hole in the wall and was back on its feet. It seemed disoriented by the red lighting, but once it saw them, it started coming once more.
“This way!” Jill shouted, and they were off.
Another blast made the hallway shake, knocking Jill off her feet again. A nearby door crashed completely off its hinges when a heavy shelf inside the room fell sideways and crashed into it.
Rebecca scrambled to her feet and kept running. “Come on!” she yelled.
Chris looked up and saw the ceiling begin to collapse. “Look out!” he screamed, but it was too late for Rebecca to stop.
A huge chuck of the ceiling broke loose and fell down right on top of her, knocking her right to the ground. Half a dozen ceiling tiles caved in around her, along with a huge amount of insulation and paneling. Dust and dirt trickled down from the hole, and electrical wiring hung down like old cobwebs.
Chris ran to Rebecca and pulled her free from the debris. Jill pushed some metal panels off her legs and helped Chris pull her upright. Rebecca was completely motionless, and Jill thought she saw blood smeared across her face, but she could not be sure because of the red emergency lights.
“Oh my God, is she okay?”
“I don’t know,” Chris grunted, hefting Rebecca up to carry her over his shoulder. “I think she’s only unconscious. We have to take her with us.”
“The elevator is this way,” Jill said, checking the map again.
Behind them, the Tyrant was smashing its way through another collapsed section of hallway. It stepped through the broken ceiling panels and kicked them out of its way, walking steadily toward them. Its whole body seemed to glow red under the emergency lights, as if something stripped its skin away completely, leaving bloody muscle and sinew beneath. Chris immediately thought of the licker that he and Rebecca defeated earlier. But this time, they didn’t even have any guns to shoot it with. They could only run or die.
Jill followed the hallway on the map and stopped where Barry left his bloody fingerprint. “Down this hallway and to the right! It should be right there!” she cried. The Tyrant was pretty far down the hall, and would not catch them before they made it to the elevator.
“What if it doesn’t work?” Chris asked, panting heavily. Rebecca’s limp body was a heavy weight, but he was energized by fear and barely slowed down.
“It’s an emergency elevator! If this doesn’t count as an emergency, I don’t know what does!”
They turned the corner, and as promised, the elevator was right there. More like a freight elevator then a regular elevator, it was framed in a massive metal box with a thick metal grating on the door. A huge sign above it labeled it for emergencies only, and orange warning stripes on each side marked it as such. Jill hit the red button with her palm, and the doors immediately opened with the sound of metal scraping on metal.
They rushed inside and Jill hit the button again as Chris set Rebecca’s body on the floor. The metal doors scraped closed and the elevator grumbled as the motor came to life. Through the grating, Jill saw more pieces of ceiling tile tumble to the floor as the lab trembled under the force of another small explosion. Even the red lights began to flicker, which meant even the emergency power generators were having trouble.
“She’s breathing,” Chris said, leaning over Rebecca’s body. “She’s unconscious, but she’s alive.”
“Is she bleeding anywhere? I thought I saw blood.”
“I don’t think so. I think she’s going to be okay.”
Jill felt as if she should be relieved that Rebecca was still alive, but to be happy about anything right now felt wrong. She was glad that Rebecca was okay, but at the same time, she was still saddened and heartbroken that Barry was not with them.
As the elevator started to rise, Jill went down on one knee and closed her eyes, lowering her head solemnly. She let out a long, tired sigh, and shrugged away the urge to cry. There was no point in crying now. Too many deaths already, too many lives lost. She could not focus on one death in the middle of so many. At least Barry’s death was voluntary, Jill reasoned. If they tried to carry him to safety, they would never have escaped the Tyrant. He willingly chose to remain behind, rather than slow the rest of them down.
But that was little consolation. Barry was dead, and they had left him to die.
Chris said nothing. After checking to make sure Rebecca was okay, he sat back and stayed lost in his own thoughts. He probably felt the exact same way that Jill felt, or at least she hoped he did. She didn’t want to be the only one.
Below them, Jill heard the screeching sound of metal ripping apart, and then the elevator abruptly jerked to a halt so suddenly that she almost lost her footing. The motor squealed in protest and the elevator started to rise again after only a second or two.
“W
“I don’t know,” Chris said. “Maybe –”
The elevator jerked again, harder this time, and the floor underneath Jill’s feet buckled upward. With a groan, the metal bent up and split apart like a banana peel, and a huge spike burst through the floor.
“Jesus Christ!” Jill screamed, scrambling away.
The spike pulled back out and then burst through the floor again in another spot. Chris pulled Rebecca’s body closer to the edge of the elevator and stared at the spike in disbelief. The Tyrant punched through the floor again, perforating the thick metal panels like they were made of cardboard. The entire elevator rumbled and jerked with the extra weight, and they could hear the motor grinding in vain. The lights flickered randomly, turning the elevator into a claustrophobic box with a strobe light in it.
“We’re trapped!” Jill screamed. “What are we going to do?!”
“We don’t have any guns! We can’t do anything!” Chris shouted, holding Rebecca’s body out of reach of the Tyrant. “We weren’t more than a story or two underground! We have to reach the surface soon!”
“And then what?!”
The Tyrant’s spike hand burst through the floor again, only a few inches from Jill’s leg. The elevator rocked back and forth, and she braced herself in the corner to keep from falling over. She could feel the entire compartment grind and scrape against the inside of the elevator shaft. It jerked hard again and she had the terrifying thought that the cables would snap under the weight and send them plummeting to their death.
But as soon as the thought passed, the elevator finally slammed into place with a groan and the doors began to open. Chris got to his feet and pulled Rebecca back over his shoulder. Jill jumped over the holes in the floor and helped him walk around the edge of the elevator compartment and get through the doors. Almost as soon as they were out, the Tyrant smashed its arm into the floor, breaking it upward like a box lid. Through the gaping hole, Jill saw the giant albino hanging underneath the compartment by one arm. It stared right at her.
Huge metal doors opened and led them outside. It was still the middle of the night, and the moon gave faint silver illumination to their new surroundings. The emergency elevator led to an area with a wide concrete patio and a few small buildings, surrounded on all sides by trees. But the road they expected to find was nowhere to be seen. They ran to the center of the concrete patio and Chris dropped to one knee, sliding Rebecca’s body off his shoulder to set her on the ground.
“There’s nowhere to go!” he shouted angrily, looking at the forest around them. “There’s no road! Where are we supposed to go?!”
“Well, we have to go somewhere!” Jill shouted back. “We sure as hell can’t stay here!”
“I don’t know how much longer I can carry her,” Chris said. “And there’s no way I can carry her through the woods.”
“Maybe ...” Jill said, her mind racing, “Maybe you can just leave her in the woods for now. That monster probably won’t even notice her, or it’ll think she’s dead. It will focus on chasing us instead.”
“I can’t just leave her, Jill,” Chris said. “And it doesn’t even matter, cause there is no way that we can outrun that thing. It will track us down and kill us in five minutes, and then come back to kill Rebecca as well.”
“We have to try!” Jill shouted. “We don’t have anything to fight it with! And I’m not just going to stand here and let it kill us!”
Behind them, the Tyrant smashed its way through the wreckage of the elevator compartment and climbed out. The doors began to close, but it pushed them back open effortlessly, and began walking toward them. It did not even seem tired, or even bothered by its exertion. There were still smears of red blood all down its spike hand, as well as blood splattered all over its torso, mixed now with oil and grease from the elevator cables. It came at them like some unstoppable robot, a soulless killing machine.
Jill froze in place, suddenly unable to move at all. She desperately wanted to run away, but she could not leave Chris and Rebecca there, no matter how much she wanted to. Overcome both by blood-chilling terror and personal responsibility, she could do nothing but stand there as the Tyrant walked toward them.
In the midst of her own panic, Jill could hear Chris whispering to himself. “I’m sorry, Barry. Sorry, but we won’t get out of here after all. I won’t be able to keep my promise ...”
Jill and Chris felt the concrete tremble underneath their feet, and then the ground jumped under the force of another tremendous explosion in the labs below. The Tyrant almost fell over, but remained standing.
And then one of the small buildings nearby burst into flames and exploded. The ground underneath the building burst apart and a tower of fire shot into the air like an erupting volcano. The building was blown to pieces in an instant, blasting a wall of debris across the entire area, and the shockwave knocked the Tyrant off its feet. Jill and Chris crouched over Rebecca’s body as flaming chunks of wood and other wreckage landed around them.
The Tyrant stood back up and looked at the fiery remains of the building, as if hypnotized by the flames. The entire area glowed seemed to glow orange, illuminated by the bright column of fire rising from what was left of the building. After a few moments of watching the flames, the Tyrant seemed to remember its purpose, and turned to face Jill and Chris. It started walking toward them as if nothing had interrupted it. Surrounded by burning rubble and silhouetted against the bright flames, the Tyrant seemed like a demon rising from the underworld.
Jill knew they could never escape it. If they tried to run away, it would never stop chasing them, and it would never get tired, and it would never lose track of them, and it would never give up. She could have tried to run into the woods, but in the dark, she would not make it very far. A stray branch or root would cause her to trip and slow her down, while the Tyrant would walk through such obstacles like a tank. Chris was right, the Tyrant would catch them in less than five minutes.
The Tyrant halved the distance between them in a few steps. But then, a strangled cry bellowed from the direction of the elevator doors. There was a crash, and a body suddenly launched up through the trashed elevator. Flames flickered on the edges of its clothing and long brown hair as it crashed into the solid metal doors, knocking one completely off its hinges in a screech of shattered metal. The figure sailed into the air and landed on all fours, shaking like a wet dog to try to extinguish the bits of flame. It wore a ripped up blue shirt and brown slacks, and two long lengths of chain were manacled to its wrists.
“What in the hell is that?!” Chris shouted.
“It’s the woman! I don’t believe it!” Jill blurted in shock.
At the sound of their voices, the woman hunched up and looked quickly from Jill to the Tyrant. There was a moment of indecision, and then the woman’s eyes opened wide. With a howl, she suddenly launched herself up and slammed right into the Tyrant’s back, swinging her chains like whips. She wrapped her arms around the Tyrant’s head and screamed in fury, pulling back on its neck, knocking the creature off balance.
“She’s fighting it!” Jill cried. “She’s trying to help us!”
The Tyrant shrugged the woman off, but she jumped back up and swung her long arms at its face, slamming into his white flesh with a sickening thud. The chains whipped across its impassive face and left long gouges in the flesh. The Tyrant swung back, but the woman leaped straight into the air and crashed down on top of it, pummeling the back of its head with her fists. The Tyrant reach up and grabbed her neck in its hand and wrenched forward, pulling the woman off and body slamming her into the concrete.
As she got up, the Tyrant reared back and thrust its spike into her chest. Jill almost screamed in fear, but the spike barely slowed the woman down. She knocked the spike aside and leaped once again at the Tyrant’s head. She scrambled up onto his back like a monkey and wrapped her arms around his head, pul
“Wait!” Chris shouted, looking up into the night sky. “Do you hear that?”
Jill looked up as well and could suddenly make out a loud, thrumming sound in the sky above them. A steady pounding noise, and the sound almost brought tears to her eyes. From the darkness emerged a large black helicopter, hovering in the air almost directly above them.
“It’s Brad!” she screamed. “He came back!”