was left of her strength just to keep from screaming in
suffering and frustration.
William, it hurts so bad, I'm sorry but I can't...
A young woman crouched in front of her, a look of
wary concern on her smudged face. She was dressed
in cutoffs and a vest, dripping with sewer water and
held a sleek and heavy handgun, not pointing it
directly at Annette, but not pointing it away, either.
Another spy.
"Are you Ada?" the girl asked tentatively, reaching out to touch her and it was more than Annette
could stand, to be touched in pity by some heartless,
scheming corporate pawn.
"Get away from me," Annette snarled, slapping at the girl's outstretched hand weakly. "I'm not your 'contact,' and I don't have it on me. You can kill me,
but you won't find it."
The girl moved back, a look of confusion on her
dirty face. "Find what? Who are you?"
The questions again, and the fury passed, leaving
her numb. Annette was tired of playing games; it hurt
too much, and she just wasn't strong enough to fight
anymore. "Annette Birkin," she said wearily. "As if you didn't know...."
She'll kill me now. It's over, it's all over.
Annette couldn't help it. Tears trickled down
cheeks, tears as futile as her plans. She'd failed
William, she'd failed as a wife and a mother and even
as a scientist. At least it would end now, at least there
would finally be an end to the anguish...
"Are you Sherry's mother?"
The girl's words stunned her, snapping her out of
her exhausted collapse as sharply as a slap to the face.
"What?! Who ... how do you know about Sherry?"
"She's lost in the sewers," the girl said, speaking quickly, her voice tinged with desperation as she
shoved her handgun into her belt. "Please, you have to help me find her! She was sucked into one of the
drainage shafts and I don't know where to look..."
"But I told her to go to the station," Annette
wailed, the physical pain all but forgotten, her heart
pounding out waves of horrified disbelief. "Why is she here? It's dangerous, she'll be killed! And the G-
Virus - Umbrella will find her, they'll take it, why is
she here?"
The girl reached for her again, helping her up, and
Annette didn't fight, too weak and terrified to fight. If
Sherry was in the sewers, if Umbrella found her...
The girl stared at her intently, looking somehow
guilty and afraid and hopeful all at once. "The station was overrun - where do the drains go? Please, An-
nette, you have to tell me!"
The truth dawned into her exhaustion and fear like
a ray of bitter light.
The drains let out into the filter pool - which hap-
pens to be right next to the factory tram.
The fastest route to the labs.
It was a trick. The girl was using Sherry's name to
get to the facility, to get information about the
G-Virus. Sherry was still at the station, safe and well,
and this was all an elaborate ruse...
... but Umbrella knows the way, why would she ask if
she knows already?It doesn't make sense!
Annette raised the gun, her aching wrist trembling, and backed away from the girl. Her confusion was
too big, the questions too many and because she
couldn't be sure of anything, she couldn't pull the
trigger.
"Don't you move. Don't you follow me," she
snarled, ignoring the pain, reaching back to push the
door open. "I'll shoot if you try to follow me."
"Annette- I don't understand, I just want to..."
"Shut up! Shut up and leave me alone, can't you all
just leave me alone?!"
She backed through the door, pushing it closed on
the surprised and frightened girl, squeezing her arm
against her bruised or broken ribs as soon as the hatch
was shut.
Sherry. . .
It was a lie, it had to be a lie, but it didn't change
anything, either way. She could still make it, she had
to make it back to the facility, to finish what she had
started.
Turning, limping and gasping, Annette stumbled
into the cold darkness of the connecting tunnel,
letting each terrible, aching step be a reminder of
what Umbrella had done.
* * *
A cold, silent cavern, the walls sheened with ice, and
I am lost. I am lost and exhausted, running and afraid
for a very long time, so I sit down to rest. So quiet, so
cold, but my arm hurts, I'm sitting against a wall that
has grown spines, and one of them is digging into my
flesh, piercing me. It hurts so badly, and I have to get
up, I have to find someone, I have to...
...wake up.
Leon opened his eyes, aware at once that he'd hazed
out again. The realization made him catch his breath,
the sudden fear jolting him fully awake.
Ada, Claire - Jesus, how long?
He gently pulled his hand away from his arm, the
blood gummy and thick between his fingers. It hurt,
but not as sharply as before and the bleeding had
stopped, at least at the entrance; the shreds of his torn
uniform had clotted to the wound, forming a stiff seal.
He leaned forward, reaching around to touch where
the bullet had come out; again, a hardening, tacky
patch of fabric beneath the pulsing ache of the wound.
He couldn't be positive, but he thought that the bullet
had gone straight through the flesh, missing the bone
completely - which meant he was extremely god-
damn lucky.
Even if it blew my arm off, Ada's still out there and
I sent Claire after her. I have to go after them.
He thought it was the shock of the trauma that had made him black out, rather than the pain or blood
loss and he couldn't afford any more time to re-
cover. Clenching his teeth, Leon pushed himself up
with his good arm, his muscles cold and stiff from the
damp chill of the concrete.
His left shoulder brushed against the wall, and he
gasped as the pain intensified briefly, stabbing and
hot, but it ebbed, receding to the duller throbbing
sensation after a few seconds. Leon waited it out,
breathing deeply, reminding himself that it could
have been a hell of a lot worse.
When he was finally on his feet, he decided that he
could take it; he wasn't light-headed or dizzy, and
although there was blood on the floor and wall, there
wasn't nearly as much as he'd thought there would be.
Careful not to jostle his wound, Leon turned and
walked down the corridor to the closed door at the
end, moving as quickly as he could.
Through the door, he was faced with another water-
filled tunnel stretching off in either direction; there
was a ladder on the wall to his left, but he didn't even
want to guess at how to climb it without ripping open
the wound - besides which, there was a loudly spin-
ning fan at the top. He struck off to the right, stepping
down into the dark water and sloshing forward,
hoping that he'd see some sign as to where Ada or
Claire had gone.
Chasing after the sniper . . . how could she do that,
how could she just leave me there?
After their confrontation with the vomiting
monster-thing, he'd sworn to himself that he wouldn't
assume anything else about Ada Wong; she was alter-
nately flirtatious and standoffish, and if she'd learned
how to shoot by playing paintball, he was a bank
executive. But in spite of her confusing behavior and
probable duplicity, he liked her; she was smart and
confident, she was beautiful and he had assumed
there was a good, decent person beneath that contra-
dictory facade ...
... and yet she left you to chase after the shooter,
left you rolling on the floor with a bullet in your arm.
Yeah, she's great; you should propose.
He'd reached a split in the tunnel, and blocked out
his wandering attempts to figure out Ada's actions,
reminding himself that he could ask her when he
found her - if he found her. There was a locked gate
to the right, so Leon turned left, peering uneasily into
the thickening shadows as he trudged onward. He
shouldn't have let Claire go after Ada alone, he should
have pulled himself together and gone with her...
He stopped, hearing something. Shots, distant and hollow, coming from somewhere up ahead, distorted
by the winding maze of tunnels that made up the
sewer system.
Still holding the Magnum tightly, Leon pressed his
wrist against the bullet wound and started to run, the
pain going sharp again, making him queasy. He
couldn't manage much better than a shagging jog, the
water slowing him down almost as much as the nasty
bite of the wound, but as the last echo of the shots
faded away, he somehow found the motivation to go
faster.
There was a dimly lit offshoot to the tunnel ahead
and to the left, pale yellow light streaming out across
the softly slopping water. Even before he reached it,
he saw that he would have to make a choice. Straight
in front of him was a platform of sorts, a heavy door
set into the ragged bricks of the tunnel's end, water
dripping down from the ceiling in slender rivulets.
An obvious choice, except...
Leon stopped in the elongated patch of murky light,
looking down into the offshoot. Another door, and he
didn't have time to decide, the shots could have come
from anywhere...
Barn-bam!
To the left. Leon jumped up from the tunnel, feeling new pain, feeling hot wetness against his wrist as the
wound started to seep. He ignored it, hurrying to the
door and pulling it open, hearing more rounds fired as
he started down a wide and empty hall.
The corridor he'd entered was as shadowy and cold
as the sewage tunnels, but much bigger, wider, pre-
sumably some kind of transport hall for heavy equip-
ment. It twisted left and then left again, boxes and a
rack of steel canisters against the second comer, just
past some kind of a loading door.
. . . acetylene, maybe oxy, good GOD what takes
that many bullets and doesn't die?
He heard another string of shots, splashing water
and a different sound, a deep and guttural hissing that
chilled him to his core. Strangely familiar, but too
loud to be possible.
A million snakes, a thousand giant cats, some pri-
mordial, terrible dinosaur...
He ran, finally giving up trying to hold the bullet
hole closed, needing his arm free to pump for more
speed. The end of the tunnel was close, he saw a panel
of blinking lights and an opening to the left, another
huge loading door...
... and he stopped just short of running into the line
of fire as another rapid succession of shots sounded,
as a thundering crash of water sprayed out, water raining down on the floor in a thick sheet.
"Stop, I'm coming in!" He shouted and heard Ada's voice, and felt a sweeping relief in spite of whatever horror was ahead. "Leon!"
She's alive!
Magnum raised, his wound bleeding freely now,
he stepped in front of the open door and saw Ada
across a lake of churning muck, boxes and broken
boards swimming through the turbulent liquid.
She was standing on a small ledge of concrete be-
neath a ladder, her Beretta pointed into the thrash-
ing pool.
"Ada, what..."
Splash!
A giant burst out of the lake and slammed him off
of his feet, knocking him back into the corridor. It
happened so fast that he didn't actually see it before
he was flying through the air, his mind feeding him
the picture as he hit the ground. He fell on his injured
arm and cried out, as much from the shock of what
he'd seen as from the stinging blast of pain.
- crocodile -
Leon was on his feet and stumbling away before he
even knew he could get up and the giant lizard, the
croc that was thirty feet long if it was an inch, stepped
into the corridor behind him with a mighty, bellowing
roar. The cement trembled as the mammoth reptile
crawled up from the waters of its home, gallons of
black water streaming from its toothy, grinning jaws.
- jaws as big as me, bigger -
Leon ran, there was no pain, his heart hammering
in a primal panic. It would eat him, it would shred
him into a hundred screaming, bloody chunks...
... and the beast roared again, an impossibly low
bellow that rattled his bones, that urged sweat to burst
from every quaking pore...
... and Leon shot a look back, and saw that he was
much, much faster than the grinning lizard. It was
still climbing through the loading door, its tree-trunk
legs short and squat, its incredible bulk too huge to
maneuver so easily.
Leon swapped weapons in a daze of terror, his
wound shrieking as he chambered a round into the
Remington. He sidled backwards in an uneven gait,
reaching a turn in the hall -
- and unloaded all five shells as quickly as he could
pump them, the heavy rounds blasting the monster
crocodile's hideous snout.
It roared, swinging its head from side to side, blood
erupting from its grinning face in buckets, but still it
came, lumbering forward, dragging its armored tail from the pool of slime behind it.
Not enough, not enough power...
Leon turned and ran again, horrified at having to
retreat, afraid of what would happen to Ada when he
left the crocodile behind, but knowing that it would
take another fifty rounds to stop it - that or a nuclear
blast, and why was he still thinking, he needed to get
away and then worry about what to do.
Hang on, Ada...
The booming steps of the giant filled his ears as he
ran past the boxes, past the row of steel cylinders
and stopped running. His instincts cried out for
sanity, but he had an idea - and as the terrible lizard
took another twisting, thundering step, Leon turned
and went back.
Let this work, it works in the movies, please God be
listening...
The row of five gleaming canisters was inset on a
thick shelf cut into the wall, held into place by a steel
cable. There was a release button for the cable on the
side of the shelf. Leon slapped it, and the heavy wire
drooped, one looped end falling to the floor.
Dropping the shotgun, he grabbed the closest of the
cylinders, his muscles straining, blood pouring from
his injured arm. He could feel thin, trickling trails of
it sliding down his sweat-slick chest but didn't stop,
rocking back on his heels to free the can of com-
pressed gas.
... there!
Leon jumped back as the silver can fell off the shelf,
hitting the ground and rolling a few inches. He looked
up and saw that the croc had covered another fifty
feet - close enough for him to see the dull, dirty pits
in its six-inch teeth as it roared again, close enough
for him to smell the rotting-meat stench of its hot
breath only a second later.
Leon raised one boot to the canister and shoved
with all he had, the can lazily rolling back toward the
gaining lizard. By some incredible stroke of fortune,
the corridor floor had some slant to it; the two-
hundred-plus pounds of cylinder seemed to pick up
speed, spinning in the croc's direction in a loose
semicircle.
Backing away, he yanked the Magnum from his belt
and pointed it at the shining can, forcing his fingers
not to pull the trigger. The crocodile plodded forward,
its tail slapping the walls so hard that stone dust
rained down with each violent whip. Leon was in a
state of total awe, in the grip of an instinctual terror so
deep that it was all he could do not to turn and flee.
Come on, you bastard.
Less than a hundred feet away, the crocodile and
the canister met and Leon pulled the trigger. The
first shot pinged off the floor in front of the rocking
can and the grinning jaws opened, the massive beast
lowering its head to catch at the obstacle, to push it
aside.
- steady -
Leon fired again, and...
KA-BOOM!
... was thrown to the ground as the canister ex-
