The Library - Hunk

[Admin]

Your mission parameters are clear. Your target is Albert Wesker, but first there’s the small matter of finding out what game he’s playing. Intel gathering is the primary agenda here. Wesker’s been using a lot of Company resources on this little project of his, and it’s high time someone took him to task for it. If there’s one thing you know, one thing you believe, it’s that no one is bigger than the Company.

The trail has led you here, to the mansion. You’ve been wondering for some time what kind of simulation he seems to be running and you’re underwhelmed. It’s just a dusty old house. You don’t understand the significance. Either, way, you infiltrate. The answers lie within.

You see entry points on the ground floor, but they’re reinforced or guarded, sometimes even trapped. You slip in through a gap in the net they’ve drawn up around the building and scale the wall to the roof. There’s a couple more entry points here, and the closest seems to be the best. You break a window and slither inside.

You’re in a library, standing on a balcony on the second floor. It seems like a likely place to start. You get to it. You have a mission to complete.

[King of Cunts]

The balcony gave him an excellent view over the room. There were books strewn all over the floor, as though someone had already been in here, looking for something. He glanced around, switching his goggles from low light to ambient. Nothing out of the ordinary. Definitely no survivors, unless they were hiding.

He switched again, from ambient to thermal. Still no one. A fading warm spot on the floor where someone had to have been lying, and a couple of small heat signatures, no larger than his fist. Cameras, positioned to capture the room from every possible angle. It was too much to hope that he hadn’t been made, but he was in the dark. With any luck, that meant all they had was his outline.

He removed the laser pointer from his pocket and cycled spectrums. He picked his target and angled the light into one of the camera lenses, counting off until its circuits fizzled. He struck them each in turn, until he’d checked off all of the small devices in his field of vision. No way he could do that for the duration, but for now he needed to buy some time.

Maybe, if he was lucky, the action was elsewhere, and the owner of this fine establishment had been ignoring this room completely. He’d be undetected until he was ready to actually reveal himself.

Knowing Wesker, that wasn’t likely. Even if he hadn’t been looking, the moment he saw the cameras go out, he’d be poring over the surveillance tapes for any sign of the perpetrator. Hunk had only worked with him a couple of times, but he made Cain look like a lazy slob.

He switched back to ambient and moved to the ladder. He clamped his boots to the sides of the uprights and slid to the floor in a single motion. The moment he hit the ground, he drew his pistol and swung it, slow and steady, across the room. He kicked aside a couple of the hard-cover tomes littering the tiled floor until he found one with a hole cut in the pages the size and shape of a key. A book-box. He hadn’t seen one of those in… In his lifetime, come to think of it. They were a cliché from pulp fiction, the kind the other soldiers read between missions that dulled their instincts and made them ask stupid questions on the job.

There was a card on the floor, amid the rope cuttings and the broken pair of scissors that had been used to remove them from around their human captive. It said: “Do not allow overconfidence to rule you.” It was a good lesson. Hunk wondered if whoever it was intended for had listened.

Someone screamed in the passage outside, high and desperate. It was a prolonged scream, the kind someone made when they were trapped, not when they were in imminent danger. Rescuing survivors wasn’t in his remit, but he had been ordered to gather Intel. The kind of subjects taking part in the game would probably tell him what kind of game was being played. And why.

The screaming stopped as he made it to the door. There was movement in the corridor, hushed voices talking with the rapid, disjointed pace of the trapped and paranoid.

And then, more screaming. The horrified, disgusted screaming of someone coming face-to-face with their first virus carrier. Only one scream though. The second person he’d heard was either already a pro, or already dead. Either way, he couldn’t afford to lose both leads. He tightened his grip on his pistol and ducked out into the hallway.