Resident Evil: Underworld (13 page)

—and with a shuddering crash, all the crates went tumbling down, and Claire plummeted into the dark.

* * *

When he heard the mighty flap of wings and the shrieking cries, John felt his skin go cold. He didn’t like birds, never had, and to run into a flock of
Umbrella
birds, in a sterile, surreal forest—

“Balls,” he said, and raised the M-16, pressing the plastic stock tight against his shoulder. Leon’s was also pointed up, the ceiling at least fifteen feet above where the tallest trees stopped and painted a deep twilight blue. The trees ranged in height from ten to maybe twenty-five, thirty feet—and at the very top, John saw that there were perching “branches” grafted on, each as big around as a basketball.

Bird’s gotta have some pretty big goddamn feet to need that to land on
…

The piping screams had stopped, and John didn’t hear the beat of wings anymore—but he wondered how long it would be before the birds decided to look for prey.

“Pterodactyls, gotta be,” Cole whispered, his voice cracking. “Dacs.”

“You’re kidding,” John breathed, and could see the skinny Umbrella worker shake his head in his peripheral vision.

“Maybe not real ones, it’s just a nickname I heard.” Cole sounded distinctly terrified.

“Let’s head for that door,” Leon said, already edging into the false, shadowy woods.

Amen to that
.

John started after him, ten, fifteen feet, trying to look up and watch his step at the same time. He tripped almost immediately, one boot kicking against a molded plastic rock, and barely caught himself from going into a full sprawl.

“This ain’t gonna work,” he said. “Cole—Henry?”

He glanced back and saw that Cole was still huddled against the hatch, his pale, weasely face turned up to the sky.

—
ceiling, dammit
—

Leon had stopped and was waiting, peering up into the spaced branches. “Gotcha covered,” he said.

John walked back, angry and frustrated and seriously uncomfortable; they were in a tight spot, David and the girls could very well be fighting for their lives on the surface, and he wasn’t going to waste time coddling some freaked-out Umbrella hump. Still, they couldn’t just leave him behind, at least not without making an effort.

“Henry. Hey, Cole.” John reached out and tapped his arm, and Cole finally looked at him. His mild brown eyes were positively glassy with fear.

John sighed, feeling a little pity for the guy. He was an
electrician
, for hell’s sake, and it seemed that ignorance had been his only real crime.

“Look. I understand you’re scared, but if you stay here, you’re going to get killed. Leon and I have both had run-ins with Umbrella pets; your best chance is to come with us—and besides, we could use your help, you know more about this place than we do. Okay?”

Cole nodded shakily. “Yeah, okay. Sorry. I just— I’m scared.”

“Join the club. Birds give me the creeps. The flying part’s cool, but they’re so
weird
, got those beady eyes and scaly feet—and have you ever seen a buzzard? They got scrotum heads.” John mock-shivered, and saw Cole relax a little bit, even trying on a quivery smile.

“Okay,” Cole said again, more firmly. They walked back to where Leon was standing, still watching the air above.

“Henry, since we got the guns, how ’bout you lead?” John asked. “Leon and I will keep watch, and we’ll need a clear route so we won’t have to worry about tripping over stuff. Think you can handle it?”

Cole nodded, and though he still looked too pale, John could see that he would hold together. For a while, anyway.

Their guide stepped in front of Leon and headed roughly southwest, weaving a crooked path through the strange forest. Leon and John followed, John realizing pretty quick that having Cole lead didn’t make much of a difference.

If you don’t look where you’re going, you’re going to trip
, John thought wearily, after the sixth time he ran into a fallen “log.”
No way around it.

The Dacs, as Cole called them, hadn’t put in an appearance or made any other sound. Just as well; John thought walking through a plastic forest was enough for them to handle. It was a bizarre sensation, seeing the realistic-looking trees and undergrowth, feeling the moisture in the air—but also being aware that there were no smells of earth or growing things, no wind or tiny sounds of movement, no bugs. It was a dream-like experience, and an unnerving one.

John was still edging forward, his gaze fixed on the crisscross of branches overhead, when Cole stopped.

“We’re—there’s kind of a clearing here,” he said.

Leon turned, frowning at John. “Should we skirt it?”

John stepped forward, peering through the seemingly random scatter of trees to the opening ahead. It was at least fifty feet across, but John would rather they go out of their way; being dive-bombed by a pterodactyl didn’t sound like fun at
all.

“Yeah. Henry, veer right. We’re going to—”

The rest of his words were lost as that high, warbling screech blasted through the unnatural forest, and a brown-gray shape dove into the clearing and flew at them, extending talons a foot across.

John saw a wingspan of eight or ten feet, the leathery wings tipped with curved hooks. He saw a screaming, toothed beak and a slender elongated skull, flat black eyes the size of saucers, glittering—

—and he and Leon both opened fire as the creature hit the line of artificial trees in front of them, its huge claws gouging into the solid plastic. It held on, spreading its vast membranous wings in a struggle to balance—

—and
bambambam
, holes punched through the thin flesh, streamers of watery blood trickling down from the openings. The animal
screamed,
so close that John couldn’t hear the bullets, couldn’t hear anything but that quavering, high-pitched shriek— and then it dropped, landing on the dark floor, pulling its wings in—

—and walking toward them on its elbows, like a bat, moving jerkily through the shredded trees, shrieking in short, sharp barks of sound. Behind it, another dropped into the clearing, gusting odorless wind across them as its wide wings folded closed, its long, pointed beak opening and revealing nubs of grinding teeth.

This is bad, bad, bad
—

The lurching animal was less than five feet away when John drew a bead on the bobbing head, on the shiny round eye, and pulled the trigger.

The taller one, John, pointed his automatic rifle at the Avl and let loose a hail of bullets. Like a stream of destruction, they hit the Dac’s aquiline skull and blew out the other side, dark fluids spattering across the freshly painted trees. Both eyes popped like water balloons.

Damn. Low threshold; it’s those hollow bones
…

Reston watched as the other gunman pointed his weapon at a second Dac that had landed in the clearing. Even without sound, Reston could see the handgun kick three, four times, hitting the specimen in its narrow chest. The Dac’s slender neck curved wildly back and forth, a squiggling dance of death before it sprawled, bleeding, against the ground.

He didn’t see any more of the animals touch down, but the three men were retreating, stumbling back into the woods. Poor Cole seemed quite undone, his mouth open in a silent howl, his lank brown hair practically plastered to his head with sweat, his limbs quaking.

Serves him right for not getting to the audio
. The lack of sound was annoying, although he supposed the footage wouldn’t suffer for it. People knew what bullets and screams sounded like already.

The three were moving out of range, heading west now. Reston switched cameras from the one in the tree to a long shot from the north wall. It was clear that Cole was trying to lead them to the connecting door—although he obviously didn’t remember that a second, larger clearing was now in their path. For the moment, though, the Dacs had also pulled back; they generally gravitated toward open spaces. The gunmen had only killed two, which meant that there would be six healthy specimens to greet them in the “meadow.”

Reston had released all of the creatures into their habitats just after the call had come on the cell line from a Sergeant Steve Hawkinson, the man who was leading the surface effort. He had informed Reston only that two Umbrella teams—nine men, including himself—were starting a sweep of the compound, and that the fugitives’ transport had been spotted; the three were still in the area unless they had a second vehicle, a highly unlikely possibility. Reston told him that the entry’s camera had been covered by one of them and asked for an update as soon as anything turned up, then settled in to watch the show.

He poured himself another brandy as he watched the three weave slowly through the trees, John with his weapon pointed above, the other scanning the shadows around them…

He needs a name, too. We have Henry, John, and
—
Red? His hair
is
sort of reddish.

Not really, but it would do, just as “Dac” worked for the Av1s. There was no relation to pterodactyls, of course, and the “Av” was for “Aves,” birds—and in fact, the Dacs were closer to bats than anything. There were just too many in the mammal series already. At the request of Jackson himself, the specimen growers had added some new classifications for clarity’s sake, using some of the secondary contributors to that series’s gene pool. Like the Spitters, who were closer to snakes than to goats, but’d been labeled Ca6s, for Capra, because of the cloven hooves…

…and the Dacs do look like pterodactyls, or at least our modern concept of them
, Reston thought, looking at the screen that showed the cage entrance. Two of the animals were still inside. The streamlined, muscular body and the narrow beak, the bone “comb” on the top of the head, the fibrous wings… they were really quite elegant in a brutal sort of way. The two in the massive behind-the-scenes “cave” were clearly agitated by all of the excitement, crawling back and forth on their folded wings and swinging their heads from side to side. Reston didn’t know much from the biological end, but he knew that they hunted by motion and scent, and that just two of them could take down a horse in under five minutes.

Not so efficient being shot at, however
.

It didn’t make a difference, really. The Av1s had been created for third-world situations, where machetes still outnumbered rifles. It
was
too bad that they died so quickly, the handlers would be disappointed by the loss—but they would have been tested against firepower eventually anyway.

And speaking of…

The three men were getting close to the clearing, moving out of the north camera’s view. That would be where the Dacs would make their play. Reston leaned in to watch, realizing that the scenes he was recording would make his career—and that regardless of that fact, he was thoroughly enjoying himself.

* * *

David opened fire as soon as the thug’s light found them, hearing the single shot of a weapon down below—

—and felt the splintering of wood to his left, a flurry of splinters spraying his arm. He was too intent on taking out the shooter to stop firing, but he knew with a burst of dread that they were about to fall, that both young women would smash into the concrete if he didn’t
do
something—

—and then he was falling, too, the wooden slats beneath him disappearing suddenly, plunging him through the icy dark. David held on to his weapon, pushing his arms out and bending his knees in the half second of blind free fall—

—and then his knees connected with cardboard, with an unseen box that collapsed beneath his weight, sparing him the worst of it. Instantly he was on his feet, turning toward the other flashlight, which was still shining out from halfway across the warehouse, the first man already down. No time to check on Rebecca, on Claire—the raised shouts from outside were almost upon them.

The torch-bearer went down in the short line of bullets David sent from the M-16, a guided four-foot arc across the darkness behind the light. The flat echoes of the rounds blasted through the alleys between boxes, and as the flashlight dropped, a single grunt of pain and surprise going down with it, David turned the gun toward the open door.

Come on, then
—

Rattatattatt
—

Submachine gun fire from outside, a sweep across the door… but no one stepped inside. David moved left and sent a burst from his weapon in response, not expecting to hit anyone, the bullets crashing uselessly into the door’s frame. He needed to buy them time, even if only a few seconds.

“Uunh,”
a soft, feminine groan from behind him.

“Rebecca! Claire! Sound off!” He whispered harshly, still watching the pale, empty square of open door.

“Here. Claire, I mean, I’m okay but I think she’s hurt—”

Dammit!

David felt his heart skip a beat and he backed up a step, his thoughts racing, a knot of dread in his belly. It had been less than a half-minute since the first shot, but the Umbrella team would have already surrounded the building, if they were any good at all. They needed to get out before the attackers were firmly organized.

“Claire, come to me, follow my voice—I need you covering the door. You see anyone, even a shadow, shoot to kill. Understood?”

He heard her shuffling movements as he spoke and reached out for her as she came close, grabbing hold of her arm.

“Wait,” he said, and let another burst from the gun fly, hammering into the wall near the door. He immediately unslung the M-16 and handed it to Claire as the submachine gun returned fire, a rattle of bullets spraying directionless into the dark.

“You can use this?”

“Yeah—” She sounded anxious but steady enough.

“Good. As soon as I say, we’re going to start moving for the west door; you’ll be covering us.”

He was already turning toward the corner, where Rebecca would be. He heard another muffled murmur of pain and fixed on it, moving quickly, dropping to his knees and feeling for the injured girl. He felt silkiness beneath one hand, Rebecca’s hair, and ran both hands over her head, feeling for the sticky warmth of blood.