His hand on the knob, he turned back, and she realized that there was nothing she could tell him that made any sense. Everything was happening so fast, there was so much wrong with this situation that she didn’t know where to start—
And he’s a trained professional, and so are you. Start acting like it.
“Take care,” she said finally. It wasn’t what she wanted to say, but it’d have to be enough. Chris gave her a lopsided grin, then raised his Beretta and stepped through the doorway. Jill heard the ticking of a clock and then he was gone, closing the door behind him.
Barry caught her gaze and smiled at her, a look that told her not to worry—but Jill couldn’t shake the sudden certainty that Chris wouldn’t be coming back.
* * *
Chris swept the room, taking in the stately elegance of the environment as he realized he was alone; whoever had made the noise, they weren’t here. The solemn ticking of a grandfather clock filled the cool air, echoing off of shining black and white tiles. He was in a dining hall, the kind he’d only ever seen in movies about rich people. Like the front room, this one had an incredibly high ceiling and a second-floor balcony, but it was also decorated with expensive-looking art and had an inset fireplace at the far end, complete with a coat of arms and crossed swords hung over the mantle. There didn’t seem to be any way to get to the second floor, but there was a closed door to the right of the fireplace. . . .
Chris lowered his weapon and started for the door, still awed by the wealth of the “abandoned” mansion that the S.T.A.R.S. had stumbled into. The dining room had polished red wood trim and expensive looking artwork on the beige stucco walls, surround-ing a long wooden table that ran the length of the room. The table had to seat at least twenty, though it was only set for a handful of people. Judging from the dust on the lacy place mats, nothing had been served for weeks.
Except no one is supposed to have been here for thirty years, let alone hosted a formal dinner! Spencer had this place closed down before anyone ever stayed here—
Chris shook his head. Obviously someone had reopened it a long time ago ... so how was it that everyone in Raccoon City believed the Spencer estate to be boarded up, a crumbling ruin out in the woods? More importantly, why had Umbrella lied to Irons about its condition?
Murders, disappearances, Umbrella, Jill. ... It was frustrating; he felt like he had some of the answers, but wasn’t sure what questions to ask.
He reached the door and turned the knob slowly, listening for any sound of movement on the other side. He couldn’t hear anything over the ticking of the old clock; it was set against the wall and each move-ment of the second hand reverberated hollowly, am-plified by the cavernous room.
The door opened into one side of a narrow corri-dor, dimly lit by antique light fixtures. Chris quickly checked both directions. To the right was maybe ten meters of hardwood hall, a couple of doors across from him and a door at the end of the corridor. To the left, the hallway took a sharp turn away from where he stood, widening out. He saw the edge of a patterned brown run on the floor there.
He wrinkled his nose, frowning. There was a vague odor in the air, a faint scent of something unpleas-ant—something familiar. He stood in the doorway another moment, trying to place the smell.
One summer when he was a kid, the chain had come off his bike when he’d been out on a ride with
some friends. He’d ended up in a ditch about six inches away from a choice bit of roadkill, the dried-up, pulpy remains of what once might have been a woodchuck. Time and the summer heat had dissi-pated the worst of the stink, though what had re-mained had been bad enough. Much to the amusement of his buddies, he’d vomited his lunch all over the carcass, taken a deep breath, then puked again. He still remembered the sun-baked scent of drying rot, like thickly soured milk and bile; the same smell that lingered in the corridor now like a bad dream.
Fummp.
A soft, shuffling noise from behind the first door to his right, like a padded fist sliding across a wall. There was someone on the other side.
Chris edged into the hallway and moved toward the door, careful not to turn his back to the unsecured area. As he got closer, the gentle sounds of movement stopped, and he could see that the door wasn’t closed all the way.
No time like the present.
With an easy tap the door swung inward, into a dim hall with green flecked wallpaper. A broad-shouldered man was standing not twenty feet away, half-hidden in shadow, his back to Chris. He turned around slowly, the careful shuffling of someone drunk or injured, and the smell that Chris had noticed before came off of the man in thick, noxious waves. His clothes were tattered and stained, the back of his head patchy with sparse, scraggly hair.
Gotta be sick, dying maybe—
Whatever was wrong with him, Chris didn’t like it; his instincts were screaming at him to do something. He stepped into the corridor and trained his Beretta on the man’s torso. “Hold it, don’t move!” The man completed his turn and started toward Chris, shambling forward into the light. His—its—face was deathly pale, except for the blood smeared around its rotting lips. Flaps of dried skin hung from its sunken cheeks, and the dark wells of the creature’s eye sockets glittered with hunger as it reached out with skeletal hands—
Chris fired, three shots that smacked into the crea-ture’s upper chest in a fine spray of crimson. With a gasping moan, it crumpled to the floor, dead. Chris staggered back, his thoughts racing in time with his hammering heart. He hit the door with one shoulder, was vaguely aware that it latched closed behind him as he stared at the fallen, stinking heap.
• dead, that thing’s the walking-goddamn-dead!
The cannibal attacks in Raccoon, all of them near the forest. He’d seen enough late-night movies to know what he was looking at, but he still couldn’t believe it.
Zombies.
No, no way, that was fiction—but maybe some kind of a disease, mimicking the symptoms. He had to tell the others. He turned and grabbed at the handle, but the heavy door wouldn’t move, it must have locked itself when he’d stumbled—
Behind him, a wet movement. Chris spun, eyes wide as the twitching creature clawed at the wooden floor, pulling itself toward him in an eager, single-minded silence. Chris realized that it was drooling, and the sight of the sticky pink rivulets pooling to the wood floor finally spurred him to action. He fired again, two shots into the thing’s decaying, upturned face. Dark holes opened up in its knobby skull, sending tiny rivers of fluid and fleshy tissue through its lower jaw. With a heavy sigh, the rotting thing settled to the floor in a spreading red lake. Chris didn’t want to make any bets on it staying down. He gave one more futile yank on the door and then stepped carefully past the body, moving down the corridor. He rattled the handle of a door on his left, but it was locked. There was a tiny etching in the key plate, what looked like a sword; he filed that bit of information into his confused, whirling thoughts and continued on, gripping the Beretta tightly. There was an offshoot to his right with a single door, but he ignored it, wanting to find a way to circle back to the front hall. The others must have heard the shots, but he had to assume that there were more creatures running around here like the one he’d killed. The rest of the team might already have their hands full.
There was a door at the end of the hall on the left, where the corridor turned. Chris hurried toward it, the putrid scent of the creature—
• the zombie, call it what it is—
• making him want to gag. As he neared the door, he realized that the smell was actually getting worse, intensifying with each step.
He heard the soft, hungry moan as his hand touched the knob, even as it registered that he only had two bullets left in his clip. In the shadows to his right, movement.