Стефани Перри - The Umbrella Conspiracy

Which I took—but now where the hell am I? The room that the elevator had led to was unlike any other part of the estate she’d seen. It lacked the strange, fetid charm of the mansion, or the dripping gloom of the underground. It was as though she’d walked out of a gothic horror story and into a military complex, a utilitarian’s bleak paradise. She was standing in a large, steel-reinforced con-crete room, the walls painted a muddy industrial orange. Metal ducts and overhead pipes lined the upper walls, and the room was rather aptly titled “XD-R Bl,” painted across the concrete in black, several feet high. Any sense she’d had of where she was in relation to the rest of the estate was totally gone.

Although it’s as cold as everywhere else, at least I know I’m still on the grounds. . . .

There was a heavy metal door on one side of the room, firmly locked. The sign to the left of it stated that it was only to be opened in case of a first-class emergency. She figured that the “Bl” on the wall stood for “Basement level one,” her theory confirmed by the bolted ladder that led down through a narrow shaft in the concrete; where there was Bl, B2 natu-rally followed.

And considering the alternative, it looks like that’s where I’m headed. My other option is to go back through the underground tunnels.

She peered down the ladder shaft, only able to see a square of concrete at the bottom. Sighing, she held on to the Remington and started down.

As soon as she hit the last rung, she turned anxious-ly—and faced a much smaller room, as bland and industrial as the first. Inset fluorescent lights on the ceiling, a gray metal door, concrete walls and floor.

She walked through quickly, starting to feel hopeful that there were no more creatures or traps. So far, the basement levels had offered nothing more dangerous than a lack of decorum. . . .

She opened the door and her hope faded as the dry, dusty smell of long-dead flesh hit her. She stepped out onto a cement walkway that led over a flight of descending stairs, a metal railing circling the path. At the top of the steps was a crumpled zombie, so emaciated and shriveled that it appeared mummified. She held the shotgun ready and walked slowly toward the stairs, noting that there was a hall branch-ing off to the left where the railing stopped. She darted a quick look around the corner and saw that it was clear. Still watching the desiccated corpse care-fully, she edged down the short corridor and stopped at the door on her left. The sign next to the door read “Visual Data Room,” and the door itself was un-locked.

It opened up into a still, gray room with a long meeting table in the center, a slide projector set up in front of a portable screen at the far end. There was a phone on a small stand pushed up against the right wall, and Jill hurried over, knowing that it was too much to hope for but having to check just the same. It wasn’t a phone at all, but an intercom system that didn’t seem to work. Sighing, she stepped past an ornamental pillar and walked around the table, glanc-ing at the empty slide projector. She let her gaze wander, looking for anything of interest—

• and it stopped on a flat, featureless square of metal set into the wall, about the size of a sheet of paper. Jill stepped over to take a closer look. There was a flat bar at the top. She touched it lightly, and the panel slid down into the wall, reveal-ing a large red button. She looked around the quiet room, trying to imagine what the trap would be—and then realized that there wouldn’t be a trap at all. The mansion, the tunnels—all of it was rigged to keep people from getting here, to these basement levels. They’re way too efficiently dull to be anything but where the real work gets done.

She knew instinctively that her logic was sound. This was a board room, a place for drinking bad coffee and sitting through meetings with colleagues; nothing was going to jump out at her if she pushed the button.

Jill pushed it. And behind her, the ornamental pillar slid to one side with a smooth, mechanical hum. Behind the pillar were several shelves, stacked with files—and something that glittered in the soft gray light of the room.

She hurried over and picked up a metal key, the top of it imprinted with a tiny lightning bolt. Slipping it into her pocket, she flipped through a few of the files. They were all stamped with the Umbrella logo, and though most of them were too thick and ponderous to spend time sorting through, the title on one of the reports told her what she needed to know, what she’d already suspected.

Umbrella / Bioweapons Report / Research and Develop-ment.

Nodding slowly, Jill put the file back. She’d finally found the real research facilities, and she knew that the S.T.A.R.S. traitor would be somewhere in these rooms. She was going to have to be very careful. With a final glance around her, Jill decided to go see if she could find the lock that the key belonged to. It was time to place the last few pieces of the puzzle that Umbrella had set up and that the S.T.A.R.S. had sacrificed themselves trying to solve.

The twisted, gnarled root of Plant 42 took up a large corner of the basement room, the bulk of it hanging down in slender, fleshy tendrils that almost touched the floor. A few of the tiny, worm-like threads squirmed blindly around each other, twisting slowly back and forth as if looking for the water supply that Chris had drained.

“God, that’s disgusting,” Rebecca said. Chris nodded agreement. Besides the control room he’d escaped into, there had only been two other chambers in the basement. One of them had been stacked with boxes of cartridges for all kinds of weapons—and although most of them had been use-lessly wet, he’d found most of a box of nine-millimeter rounds on a high shelf, saving them both from running out of ammunition.

The other room had been plain, containing only a wood table, a bench—and the massive, creeping root of the carnivorous plant that lived upstairs. “Yeah,” Chris said. “So how do we do this?” Rebecca held up a small bottle of purplish fluid and swirled it gently, still staring at the moving tendrils. “Well, you stand back, and don’t breathe too deeply. This stuffs got a couple of toxins in it that neither of us want to be ingesting, and it’ll turn gaseous once it hits the infected cells.”

Chris nodded. “How will we know if it’s working?” Rebecca grinned. “If the V-Jolt report is on the mark, we’ll know. Watch.”

She uncapped the bottle and stepped closer to the twisted root—then upended the glass vial, dousing the snaking tendrils with the watery fluid. Immediately, a billow of reddish smoke plumed up from the root as Rebecca emptied the bottle and stepped quickly away. There was a hissing, crackling sound like wet wood thrown atop a blazing fire—and within seconds, the feebly twisting fibers started to break, pieces of them snapping off and flaking away. The knotted thickness at the center started to tighten and shrink, pulling into itself.

Chris watched in amazement as the giant, terrible root suddenly shriveled up into a dripping ball of mush no bigger than a child’s ball and hung there, dead. The entire process had taken about fifteen seconds.

Rebecca nodded toward the door and both of them stepped out into the drying basement, Chris shaking his head.

“God, what’d you put in there?”

“Trust me, you don’t want to know. You ready to get out of here?”

Chris grinned. “Let’s do it.”

They both jogged toward the basement doors, hur-rying out into the cold corridor and back toward the ladder that led upstairs. Chris was already going over escape plans for when they left the bunkhouse. It really would depend on where the exit led. If they ended up in the woods, he was thinking that they should head toward the closest road and light a fire, then wait for help to come. . . .