With last jerk of his tongue—which I wound around my hand—the Licker flew straight at me, but that fucking creature still managed to swipe a clawed paw through the air. I leaned back and crouched slightly, exposing the monster's tongue to its own strike. How it howled! And then came the blood, spurting from the stump of its tongue. At the sight of blood, my thirst stirred again.
What the hell?!
I'd been trying to determine the limits of my sensitivity, which was why I'd been sitting there watching the fight. But from that distance, neither zombie blood nor human blood affected me. And now, just a couple of drops (I'm exaggerating, but compared to the carnage below, it really was a drop in the ocean), and my mind was already being consumed by a thirst for blood. I would've understood if it had been human blood—but what was I reacting to? A double dose of the T-virus?
But the roar of the monster lunging at me cut off my thoughts, leaving me with rather mixed feelings about the situation. On one hand, I had done all this without losing control of my body. On the other hand, the way I ducked and stepped forward, letting its clawed limbs swipe harmlessly over me, was so precise and smooth it felt like I'd done it a thousand times before.
Finding myself close to its body, I simply straightened up and sank my teeth into the Licker's throat, swallowing the blood that gushed into my mouth with a quiet gurgle. The monster tried to resist during the first few moments, but my grip on its upper limbs—just above the elbows—prevented it from using its monstrous claws, and the rest of it didn't frighten me. True, it smashed my knee with a blow from one of its lower limbs, but I fell forward, pulling my prey under me and completely cutting off its ability to move.
Twenty seconds later, I rose from the creature's finally dead body and noted with satisfaction that, with the influx of blood, my regeneration was accelerating nicely. Beautiful! Except that my jeans now sparkled with small holes; the Licker had claws on its feet as well, even if they tended to be overshadowed by the ones on its hands.
Now it was time to go for a walk to the call I feel—at least to see what was out there. So, let's go!
Jumping across the rooftops—where the chances of running into someone were much lower and the speed much higher because there were no obstacles—I quickly made my way toward the forest. Although not without its flaws, this extreme method of transportation was something I was trying for the first time, so I occasionally lost my footing and had to move on all fours. But thanks to my claws, I could easily cling to any protrusions, climbing up walls and onto roofs while leaving small holes in the surfaces behind me. With my acceleration, getting onto each new roof took little time, just like my journey to the outskirts of the city.
By the way, it was strange that this place also wasn't fenced off, although I had already noticed plenty of flaws in the barricades—and on a couple of sides, there were none at all.
But I digress.
Jumping off the roof and landing, I spent a couple of minutes waiting for my legs to finish recovering from dropping off a five-story building. Then I was ready to continue running again. How good it was sometimes not to feel pain. The next five minutes of running through the forest were almost paradise for me. What, I didn't stumble upon zombies or anything else unpleasant, and I'd learned to run between the trees at the very beginning of my new life in this world. All I was missing was a basket of mushrooms and it would've felt like a normal walk.
When I reached the mansion, I realized I was a little off the mark. The call didn't come from there, and a short second run led me instead to some kind of pit. From there emanated that strange, inviting feeling—something only I seemed to sense. I extended my claws and began descending headfirst. I didn't experience any disorientation regardless of plane or orientation, so I could move like this even on a ceiling.
After half a minute—the pit was deep—I crawled down to the very bottom, stopping three meters above the ground and staring in surprise at the prisoner of this place. Right in the center of this dungeon stood a vaguely female figure.
Why "vaguely"? Because the writhing tentacles sprouting from the upper part of her body, the bald head protruding from the right side of her humped back, and the corpse-like color of her skin all suggested this could no longer be called a human being. And I didn't remember such a monster.
And then she turned around, which had been standing with her back to me. Ugh, damn! She was even uglier from the front. Yes, she had once been a woman—or rather, a girl—but now, even though her face retained its former features (she had two heads, the fucking mutant), the tentacles protruding from her left eye and mouth reduced her charisma to a solid negative rating.
But what was far worse was the hostility radiating from her, and in that moment I understood who I had stumbled upon.
Lisa Trevor—the one on whom Umbrella had conducted its most monstrous experiments, thanks to which both the T-virus and the G-virus came into being.
I was in trouble.
The professionals in canon couldn't kill her, and even an explosion hadn't worked. So what awaited poor me?