"Have you already made it to our part of the lab?" Yamata asked.
"Yes, though it took some effort. I've moved all our belongings—and the ghouls—to a different, more secure location outside. Now we can only hope they don't scatter without our supervision—since they devour ordinary infected without hesitation." I replied, and we cut the connection.
"Kate, we're heading back. Stay sharp. These defective Lickers are getting on my nerves," I called over my shoulder.
And they truly were. Not only did it seem as though they had built a nest somewhere in the ventilation system and kept pouring out of it, but now some of them had turned bluish, with a single massive, curved claw instead of hands. They were tougher, too. Even a headshot didn't always put them down on the first try.
"Got it. You too," I heard the reply from the girl, armed with part of Yamata's arsenal. She had securely fastened the rest of the gear to her pack and now carried it on her back.
"And what's this supposed to be?" I tilted my head to the side, my voice taking on the tone of an overexcited young enthusiast.
And I had every reason to. Right in front of us stood a grotesque hybrid—part human, part what? Locust? Grasshopper? Some other insect entirely? It didn't matter. It seemed I had just encountered the first harbinger of the city's deeper infection—a Drain Deimos, or simply a DD. Possibly a variant known as a Brain Sucker, though those were supposed to have two heads?
While I was still considering it, the creature pushed off the floor with its insectile legs, leapt onto the wall, then sprang sideways at me.
So slow!
One step back. My fist slammed into its flank, hurling it onto the laboratory corridor floor, and the knife in my other hand pierced the infected's skull a heartbeat later.
"Kate, don't just stand there. We need to move. I think it's only going to get worse from here, and I'd rather not stick around to confirm it." I turned my head toward Miss Warren.
"Right." She shuddered, staring at the corpse with a mixture of disgust and unease.
As if in defiance of my words, the return trip proved relatively calm—until the final third, when the emergency system began blaring warnings about the base's imminent self-destruction.
"Cain, can you hear me?" My communicator crackled to life.
"More or less," I replied.
"I split up from Claire and I'm heading toward you. I want to warn you: when we were in the control room, we contacted Leon—he showed up on one of the camera feeds. Ada slipped away from him somewhere. Be careful. She might decide you're a worthwhile target—and a generous bonus on top of her primary objective," Yamata warned.
"Understood. You be careful too. No telling what she might have noticed. And you're the one carrying the pure G-virus sample," I answered just before the connection cut out.
Birkin wouldn't leave my mind, so I picked up the pace. We met Yamata halfway—she had clearly understood everything and confirmed it with a few sharp gestures—and together we continued our sprint toward the train that was bound to be attacked by the mutant.
But we arrived with some delay—and there it was: the train, and the creature itself, as large as the tunnel and having finally lost even the faintest trace of a human form. If I'm not mistaken, it had dropped to all fours in the previous stage. Now it had shed any recognizable shape altogether, becoming a mass of something unidentifiable, with tentacles and a massive jaw, slithering rapidly after the train.
"I'm no expert," I muttered, watching Birkin vanish deeper into the tunnel, "but we'd better hurry. This place is about to blow."
"Took the words right out of my mouth," Yamata snorted, already reclaiming most of her weapons from Kate—on the run, no less!
Quick descent into the tunnel and we moved along it. After some time, explosions sounded behind us—but by then they were already far away. Still, we hadn't caught up with the train, while the chain of blasts was drawing closer.
"Over here!" Kate pointed toward a small recess in the wall once it became painfully obvious that we wouldn't win this race.
We dove into the alcove—whether it had once been a maintenance room or some kind of control station, I couldn't tell. I positioned myself in front of the girls and even spread my wings. I was the most durable one here, after all.
Flames roared past and above us. As always, there was no pain—only the sensation that, at some point, I had lost control of the wings on my back. Nothing lasts forever. Eventually, the torrent of fire subsided.
"Cain… how are you?" Yamata asked.
"As always—dead." I shrugged, hearing a faint crackle from my own body.
I stepped out of the alcove, noting the heavy soot coating everything around us, and glanced down at myself. What can I say—the lab coat had definitively ceased to serve its purpose, reduced to little more than smoking sleeves. My wings were burned almost to nothing; when I looked over my shoulder, I could see charred crusts along both shoulders. Regeneration was going to take a while. And I had no desire to find out what my back currently looked like.
"You're going to let them go?" the Four Eyes asked pointedly, nodding down the tunnel where three unmistakable red lights receded into the distance.
"Yes," I answered simply, resisting the urge to shrug. No need to complicate my own regeneration.
"Why?" Kate asked.
"Maybe I just wanted to prove—to myself, at least—that there's still something human left in me by helping them get out of here. Who knows?" Closing my eyes, I spoke, while turning the situation over in my mind. All those combinations, the effort to improve relationships, and everything else… Really,why bother?
Most likely for that very reason—to prove I'm human. After all, an ordinary infected would have taken the simplest route: attack and devour. I didn't want to become like them. So I chose the longer, far more tedious path instead.
(End of Chapter)
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