• 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—//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.