Bigger than usual chapter, and first time writing the whole chapter in first-person POV. Tell me if you like it.
Currently writing about Lisa's death with tears in my eyes, for all the poor innocent souls we lose in daily life.
*****
"Open fire!" Wilson roared, raising his rifle.
But what do you shoot? The floor was moving. The walls were bleeding leeches.
The windows shattered inward.
CRASH.
More leeches poured in from the outside. And with them, the infected Leechs.
They were humanoid shapes formed entirely of the slimy creatures. They pulled themselves through the broken windows, grabbing the nearest guards.
"Contact! Contact!"
Gunfire erupted in the confined space. Bullets tore through the Leech Zombies, splashing slime everywhere, but the creatures just reformed, the colony knitting back together.
"It's inside me!" a woman screamed, ripping her shirt open. A lump was moving under her skin, traveling toward her heart. She convulsed, foam dripping from her mouth, and collapsed.
A few seconds later, she stood up. Her eyes were gone, replaced by a smooth, grey film. She lunged at her colleague, biting his throat out.
The viral infection speed was accelerated. The Progenitor Virus strain in the leeches was potent, raw, and merciless. Additionally such a high amount of it got into the blood of these people. It didn't take hours; it took seconds.
"Fall back to the engine!" Wilson shouted, firing his shotgun at a mass of slime. "Detach the rear cars!"
But there was nowhere to run. The train was sealed.
In the conductor's cabin at the front, the driver screamed as the glass shattered. A massive scorpion-like claw—the Stinger—reached in and crushed him against the controls.
The train didn't stop. It accelerated.
The dead man's hand was jammed on the throttle.
The Ecliptic Express became a bullet train of death, hurtling through the darkness at eighty miles an hour, carrying a cargo of eighty fresh zombies and a swarm of prehistoric parasites toward the abandoned facility. The train will only stop when its power is out.
---
Location: The Arklay Forest – Sector 4 (The Deep Woods).
Time: 09:55 PM (Sunday).
The Arklay Forest was a lie.
To the hikers and the tourists, it was a sprawling, majestic wilderness—a testament to the untouched beauty of the Midwest. The pines were ancient, the air was crisp, and the moonlight filtering through the canopy painted the forest floor in shades of silver and indigo.
But I knew better.
Beneath the loamy soil and the twisting roots, the earth was hollow. It was a Swiss cheese of concrete bunkers, trams, laboratories, and chemical disposal sites.
Umbrella had turned this mountain range into a hollowed-out fortress. The Hive sat miles beneath the city, the Spencer Mansion perched like a vulture on the cliffs, and the Training Facility rotted in the deep valleys. It was a massive, subterranean tumor wrapped in the skin of a national park.
There was something perversely impressive about the sheer scale of the deception. Despite the billions of dollars, the bribes, and the construction, they had managed to keep the monster hidden in plain sight.
I'd almost call it beautiful, in a Machiavellian sort of way, if not for the filth they churned out in those labs.
I adjusted the strap of the Remington 870 Custom across my back. The weight was comforting. No backpack tonight. No T-Virus samples. Just me, the guns, and the hunt.
I wasn't running. I was stalking.
I moved through the underbrush with a silence that defied my new mass. My boots sank into the soft earth, but I made no sound. My Agility wasn't just about speed; it was about control. It was the ability to shift my center of gravity instantly, to step over dry twigs without snapping them, to breathe in sync with the wind.
I checked the Lightning Hawk magnum strapped to my thigh. Cold steel. Heavy stopping power. And at my waist, the Glock 19—reliable, high capacity.
'Overkill,' a part of my mind whispered.
'Preparation,' the soldier in me answered.
Shaking my head at the constant childish bitterness of my thoughts, I returned to the present and resumed my stride, keeping it slow instead of satisfying my growing urge to see just how fast I could go, as I was following the clues left by the prey.
But no matter how much I wanted to revel in the simple pleasure of superhuman movement, I was cursed with the peculiar ailment of not being an idiot.
There would be time to smash into them later.
I stopped near a large oak tree.
I crouched, running a gloved hand over the bark. There were deep gouges in the wood—three parallel lines, stripped clean to the white sapwood.
My walk around the roundabout was not a waste of time either, as my eyes were quickly drawn by the numerous marks dotting the land and trees around me.
Claw marks.
I narrowed my eyes, with my enhanced vision. The darkness of the forest seemed to brighten a little.
A quick glance with my eyes, and an even quicker calculation, and I had the approximate idea of what they all had on offer.
Too big for a wolf. Too jagged for a bear. And the smell... faintly necrotic, with a hint of sulfur.
Cerberus no not Cerberus but Zombie Dogs.
"Found you," I whispered.
My earlier talk with Tyron was nothing if not thought provoking, and finally I was able to stop worrying about the present and think about the future. For a moment at least.
And the future I wanted was as simple as it could be. Evolution was my passion, and my path to power.
It was my path to the peak.
Not the soft power of money or influence—Dr. White had those, and he was currently losing his mind in a bunker somewhere but the power of simply being greater than those who stood against you.
Power to see if absolute power truly holds the answer I want.
And of course in this path I can't forget about the dangly bits of my body. Why would I not want to experience all this wonderful life had to offer?
Shaking those thoughts away, to reach that power I decided on a few reasonable initial objectives.
Just as I was reflecting on my initial objectives, I heard the clear sounds.
Snap.
A twig broke to my left.
I didn't turn. I didn't flinch. I let my peripheral senses expand.
Grrr…
A low, wet growl vibrated through the air.
I slowly pivoted.
They emerged from the shadows like ghosts. Five of them.
Dobermans, once. Now, they were skinless nightmares. Their muscles were exposed, glistening with slime and raw nerves. Their eyes glowed with a crimson, viral luminescence. Patches of rot marred their flanks where the T-Virus had accelerated their evolution.
They circled me, their movements jerky and unnatural. Pack tactics. They were trying to flank.
"Cute," I muttered.
The Alpha—a beast with half its face missing—lunged.
It moved fast. Faster than a human could track.
But I wasn't human.
To my eyes, the dog was moving in slow motion. I saw the muscles in its hind legs bunch. I saw the saliva fly from its jaws.
I didn't panic. I didn't scramble.
I reached over my shoulder and drew the Remington. The motion was fluid, a singular arc of steel.
CLACK-CLACK.
I didn't aim. I pointed.
BOOM.
The shotgun roared, shattering the silence of the forest.
Kendo wasn't lying about the choke. The explosive slug caught the Alpha mid-air. There was no yelp. No whimper. The dog simply ceased to exist from the shoulders up. It disintegrated in a spray of gore and bone fragments, the blast wave knocking the two dogs behind it backward.
"This baby is pretty neat," I said, admiring the smoking barrel.
The remaining four didn't flee. They were incapable of fear. They scrambled over their fallen leader, snarling.
Two attacked from the front. I side-stepped, swinging the shotgun like a bat. The heavy stock connected with the first dog's skull.
CRACK.
It crumpled.
I spun, racking the slide one-handed—a trick that required immense wrist strength—and fired again.
BOOM.
The second dog was blown in half.
Snap!
Pain flared in my left calf.
The last dog—the runt of the litter—had flanked me. It clamped its jaws onto my leg, its teeth tearing through the denim of my jeans.
I looked down.
The teeth tore through the denim of my jeans in an instant.
Then they sank into the flesh.
I felt the fangs puncture the skin of my calf, seeking the bone to crush it, to sever the fibula and bring me down.
But then they hit the Skeletal Reinforcement.
CLACK.
It felt like the dog had bitten into a steel pipe wrapped in meat. The fangs scraped aggressively against my high-density shin bone, unable to crack the calcium-lattice structure. My leg didn't snap. It didn't even buckle.
The structural integrity held absolute.
I sighed, looking down at the creature trying to gnaw through an unyielding pillar while my dark, silver-flecked blood began to ooze around its teeth.
"Bad dog."
I reached down. I didn't use a weapon. I grabbed the dog by the throat with my free hand.
It thrashed, growling, its claws raking uselessly against my tactical gloves, blood dripping from its muzzle—my blood.
I lifted it into the air. It weighed eighty pounds. It felt like a feather.
I looked into its glowing red eyes. There was nothing there. No soul. Just hunger.
I squeezed.
CRUNCH.
The sound was wet and final. The vertebrae collapsed under my grip like dry twigs. The dog went limp instantly.
I threw the carcass into the bushes, watching as the puncture wounds on my leg stopped bleeding almost immediately, the Constant Regeneration already pushing the torn tissue back together as nearly all blood flowed back inside.
"Too easy," I muttered, ejecting the spent shell. It pinged off a rock. "I need bigger game. This isn't hunting; it's pest control."
I reloaded the shotgun, thumbing fresh shells into the tube. One. Two. Three.
Then, I paused.
My ears twitched.
Thrummm... thrummm…
And then, a second sound cut through the rain that had started to fall.
Whup-whup-whup-whup.
I looked up.
Through the gaps in the canopy, a searchlight cut through the clouds. A helicopter was flying low, struggling against the wind.
It was a sleek, police-issue bird. On the side, painted in white letters: S.T.A.R.S.
Bravo Team.
"Right on schedule," I whispered.
I watched, tracking its trajectory.
Suddenly, the engine note changed. It went from a steady roar to a sputtering cough. Smoke began to trail from the tail rotor.
"Engine failure," I deduced. "Courtesy of Albert Wesker."
The helicopter banked hard, losing altitude. The pilot was trying to flare, trying to bring it down in the dense forest near the old rail lines.
CRASH.
The sound of metal shearing through ancient timber echoed through the valley. A fireball erupted, brief and angry, followed by a plume of black smoke rising into the night sky.
I stood there for a second, the rain hissing against the hot barrel of my shotgun.
The board was set.
The train was full of leeches and highly trained victims.
The helicopter was down.
And inside that wreckage…
My mind flashed to the game lore. Rebecca Chambers. The rookie medic. Sweet, innocent, completely out of her depth.
But then I remembered the face I had seen in the police cruiser this morning. The blue beret. The steely eyes.
Jill Valentine.
"Let's see who the universe decided to punish tonight," I murmured.
It was midnight. The witching hour.
"Who knew my light hunting trip would turn into a rescue mission?" I grinned, the expression feral in the dark. "Lady Luck truly loves me. She throws the best meat right at my feet."
I racked the slide of the shotgun one last time.
"Time to crash the party."
I engaged my leg muscles. My Skeletal locked into place.
I broke into a sprint.
I didn't run like a man. I ran like a car. Trees blurred into streaks of green and black. I vaulted over fallen logs, smashed through underbrush, moving faster than any human in history, heading straight toward the rising column of smoke.
It was almost laughable, really. The sheer convenience of it all gnawed at the back of my mind as I tore through the woods. I had stood on this exact soil yesterday night, playing God with rabbits and chickens, hearing nothing but the wind and my own ambition. I had planned to come back tomorrow, fully prepped, specifically to hunt down the Leech Queen and the train. But tonight? Tonight was supposed to be a filler episode.
A quick XP grind and some detective work for B.O.W's. And yet, here was the main plot, crashing down right in front of me as if waiting for my arrival. If I didn't know better, I'd say the world wasn't just spinning on its own axis anymore—it was spinning around me.