The Elevator (2F) - Penny Corstorphine

[Admin]

You open your eyes and quickly realise that you are not in your apartment anymore. Panic quickly sets in. You don’t know where you are, or what you’re doing there. You wrack your mind, trying to think who would want to do this to you, but you draw a blank. Who would want to do something like this?

When your screams and cries for help bring no aid, you stop to look around. You’re in a small compartment, tall and square. It looks almost like an elevator, and you know that elevators have doors. You find a handle on one of the walls, which has an iron grille barring it. Neither are locked, as far as you can tell.

Your bag is lying beside you, and you’re still wearing the clothing you arrived home in last night. But you threw it down on the couch as you came in. The fact that someone brought it along with you is possibly more disturbing than anything else.

[Queen of Cunts]

Penny breathed. For a moment, that was all she focused on, trying to keep it steady, level, trying not to lose her head. She needed to think. She needed to figure out what was going on. For a moment, she wondered if she was dreaming, but no, there was a gravity to this that meant it could be nothing but real. The details were there, the creak of the elevator when she moved, the exact thickness of the carpeted floor, the coolness of the metal beneath her hands.

She gripped the grille and rolled it aside. It collapsed against one wall, folding together neatly, allowing her access to the door. She pulled that aside too, sliding its two halves in opposite directions. Another grille, and a corridor beyond. This was an old elevator. She’d never seen one quite like that. And it was cumbersome, and probably expensive. Whoever lived here probably had someone to open the door for them.

The décor was certainly expensive enough. Oak panelling on the walls, expensive and highly patterned carpet on the floor. The light fittings were ornate and seemed like they would take a lot of time and effort to keep clean and working. Her own home life was hardly uncomfortable, but this level of grandeur was completely beyond anything she had ever seen. She’d attended dinners in restaurants arranged by her adoptive parents, but even those establishments couldn’t compare.

But it wasn’t just the expense. It was the antique nature of everything, as though the house itself was a throwback to some bygone era. The owner clearly had a real taste for the classics.

For some reason, that made her feel safer suddenly. Maybe this was all some elaborate joke, maybe even something arranged by a client of her parents. Or perhaps she’d been brought here for safety. She’d heard that some districts were still plagued by zombie attacks. Maybe one had struck and she hadn’t even known it. Maybe this was where the survivors were.

If that was the case, she had to find her host, say thank you. At least, she had to find the others. She dried her eyes on her sleeve and hoisted her bag up onto her arm. Then, she took her first tentative steps into the strange house.

[Admin]

Before you even round the corner, a door bursts open and a man emerges, looking harried and concerned. Perhaps he was alerted by your screams, but he doesn’t look like he’s there to rescue you. In fact, he seems more interested in his own well-being. He’s wearing what was probably office attire, but is now stained with sweat and what looks like… Well, you’d rather not think about what it looks like. His tie is loosened to the point of barely being tied at all, and his sleeves are rolled up past his elbows.

In his hands he’s clutching some kind of weapon, a gun that you can’t really identify. He’s holding it like it’s his newborn, or his last hope for survival. The desperation in that alone is enough to make you think that you were wrong when you thought this might be some harmless joke.

“Who are you?” he asks, but it seems forced, like he doesn’t really care, “look, just stay behind me and keep quiet. I’ve found a weapon and I think I can work it. Follow me and maybe we can get the hell out of here.”

He runs on ahead, toting his weapon with the kind of stiffness that comes from not knowing how to work it at all. You follow, apprehensive, hoping for an opportunity to speak, to introduce yourself, to ask him what on earth is happening.

Only you don’t get the chance. The door ahead of him bursts open and, in his fumbling to work the weapon, he seems to forget to run away. Something, a creature that looks almost human but isn’t human in the slightest, latches onto him with emaciated, twig-like arms, wrapped in the remains of some kind of sports jacket. It seems almost to be rotting before your very eyes. In the next breath, its maw opens wide and the stink of its foetid breath rolls over you, even from so far away.

Its jaws clamp down around the man’s throat and, in an instant, he is dead, his twitching hands still fumbling with the weapon. You can barely conceive of the abruptness of it. You can’t think of any way to help him as his life is snuffed out. You don’t even think about the weapon he dropped. Instead, you run, hoping and praying that there is someone else out there to help you.

[Queen of Cunts]

Penny gripped her bag, knuckles turning white around the leather strap, as the man she had only just met, the man she had managed little more than a mumbled greeting to, was pulled down by the strange attacker. He hit the floor with a crash that shook the boards beneath her feet, the creature’s death grip on his arms dragging it down on top of him.

It had bitten out his throat. It had opened its mouth wide and taken a bite out of his neck, severed his jugular, cut clean through his windpipe. And then, as though that sight hadn’t been bad enough, it had swallowed. A sucking, mumbling grunt and the bloody morsel had slithered away down its own neck.

And now she was watching it, instead of running, instead of helping, instead of looking for help. It felt like watching was all she could do. It felt like if she watched it for long enough then it would just cease to be happening. This would all turn out to be a dream or a ruse or a delusion. But the hot stink of the dead man’s blood, the feel of her own fingernails piercing her palms, the sheer, absurd horror of it, meant that this was none of those things.

As she watched, the hunched shape lowered its peeling head, with matted chunks of hair and skin sloughing from its scalp, and tore off the fallen man’s cheek with its teeth. It had bitten off his nose and lower lip before she thumped backwards into the wall and only then realised that she had been retreating, her body acting almost purely on instinct.

The jolt brought her back to reality. She let out a strangled gasp and turned away, running in the only direction she could. She cannoned into something soft, another human body.

She looked up into large, red goggle eyes, the two pinpoints of light behind the lenses locked on her face in an impassive glare. The man - and she assumed from its size that it was male - was holding a pistol and, while he didn’t seem to be decaying where he stood, his appearance wasn’t much more settling than the monster behind her.

She backed away a step before she had even realised what she was doing. She was walking back towards the flesh-eating ghoul behind her. She was trapped between them.

[King of Cunts]

The woman bounced off his chest and then started to back away. For a moment, he wondered if he’d misjudged the level of her distress. Then he remembered that he was dealing with a civilian. She was probably in shock. Unfortunately, if there was one thing his training hadn’t prepared him for, it was how to deal with a hysterical female.

He caught her by the wrist as she tried to back away and jerked her towards the safety of the room he’d already cleared before she could get herself into even more trouble. The carrier had picked up on her movement and, driven by its imperative to spread the contagion, it was stumbling after her, ignoring its meal. The zombies only fed while they were undisturbed, but the moment fresh meat appeared in their line of vision, they locked on and followed.

He’d seen men disturb the feeding of a carrier and run three blocks, only for the creature to catch up to them, like the proverbial tortoise and hare. No concept of time or pain or discomfort, they were creatures of absolute patience and infallible persistence. There was almost something to be admired there, if they hadn’t just been reanimated sacks of meat.

He raised his pistol and squeezed the trigger, a single easy motion that put a bullet over the creature’s left eye. Before it had even staggered under the force of the blow, before the noise of the gunshot had even registered in his ears, he had fired twice more, burying a bullet into either side of its shrivelled heart. The triple-tap sounded almost like a single, long note.

The corpse hit the floor. Its mouth was wet, he noticed. The first order of business was to assess the woman for infection. Then, if she passed muster, it was time to get some answers.

[Queen of Cunts]

Ordinarily, Penny wouldn’t have stood for being moved aside by anyone, but this situation had been spiralling further and further away from normal since she’d woken up confined to an elevator. No sooner had she tried to create some distance between herself and the stranger than he was shoving her to the side gracelessly.

She staggered, managing to keep her feet under her by force of will alone, before collapsing to her knees just inside the doorway. She bit down on a cry of surprise, eager not to draw any more attention to herself.

The stranger’s weapon barked she didn’t know how many times, but the first short, sharp bark of noise was enough to steal her hearing, like someone had just screamed directly in her ear. She couldn’t hear well what was happening in the passage. She wanted to make sure that what had happened to the first man hadn’t happened to him, and that what had happened to the creature wasn’t about to happen to her.

Her hand dove into her bag and retrieved her compact. She’d used it to check inside the bathroom stalls at the centre, to make sure the place was empty when they locked up for the night, and to be certain they weren’t being misused. Now, she angled it around the doorframe to see what the man was doing.

The creature was lying dead at his feet, as she’d partly expected. Unlike the first man, this one wielded his weapon with practiced ease and frightening speed. The complete lack of hesitation as he had taken a life had been chilling. It dawned on her that perhaps it wasn’t the first time he had done it. At least, this wasn’t the first time he had seen one of the creatures that had pursued her. That thought made her feel like crying. It meant there had to be more of them out there somewhere.

He came back her way and she quickly palmed the compact, rising to her feet and backing away from the door as he came towards her.

“Please, I… I don’t know what’s going on here, b-but this isn’t anything to do with me. I-If you’re the one who brought me here, please, just let me go,” she stammered, raising her hands as though to keep him away.

She tried to remember dealing with the hostile and the despairing at the shelter, keep her tone even and pacifying, but she wasn’t used to speaking to murderers.

[King of Cunts]

He cocked his head as she started rambling. He didn’t understand much, but what he did understand definitely seemed to point to the fact that she didn’t know anything of any worth. If she didn’t know of anyone who would do this to her, then she probably didn’t know Wesker, even casually. There was a distinct lack of guile in her movements and behaviour that was indicative of someone who didn’t run in his circles. Not to mention how she’d reacted to the zombie. Even the most privileged and sheltered of the Company’s power players knew what a zombie was.

That was a shame. Her usefulness was probably going to be negligible. What had seemed like a promising start had run fairly quickly to a dead end, particularly because she seemed to be newly acquainted with the mansion. She hadn’t even had time to form any attachments he could make use of yet. Talking to her was probably going to be unproductive. Still, he needed a little background on her, if he was going to put the pieces together.

“Calm down,” he told her flatly. It was probably the closest he came to being reassuring. “I’m not here to hurt you, and I’m not the one responsible for this.”

He took a moment to reason out a suitable strategy for gaining her compliance. There was an old USF standby, the fake extraction, that would probably work here. It essentially involved pretending to come to the aid of a target and leading them into a compromised position, making their elimination several degrees easier. He’d need to tweak the play for this, since she wasn’t really the target, and saying that he was there to rescue her would most likely seem far-fetched. Especially since he didn’t know who the hell she was.

“I’ve been sent to investigate this mansion. My employer believes there are innocent people here. I’ll need you to come with me.”

[Queen of Cunts]

At first, she found herself shaking her head. She really didn’t want to go anywhere with this man. He was not the rescuer, the reassuring presence, that she had hoped for. Even though she didn’t know what he looked like without the gas mask, he seemed very, very scary. It was an appearance that was compounded by how little the dead body lying in the corridor concerned him. She wasn’t sure how she could feel comfortable around someone for whom death was such a casual thing.

She tugged a loop of hair at the side of her face. It was an old quirk, something she’d always done since she’d been a little girl. The reality sank in. She didn’t really have a choice. He hadn’t been asking her. In fact, what he had said had only been a shade away from an order.

She was trembling as she took her first tentative step towards him. It was like walking on broken glass. Every fibre of her being seemed to want to shirk away from him. It felt too much like she’d be going to her death if she went with him. But she knew that if she didn’t comply, he would move her forcibly. He didn’t seem like the type with a lot of patience. If he started to manhandle her, she wasn’t sure she could manage to keep her growing hysterics in check.

Penny gave herself a pep-talk in her head, trying to rationalise her situation, to place the control back in her hands. She had seen the way he dealt with her attacker. Going with him, she would be safe enough. If he had wanted to kill her, he probably would already have done it. Instead, he wanted to take her with him. The only reason could be that he was actually interested in keeping her alive. It wasn’t like he needed the help. And he could obviously see that she did.

“Okay, I’ll come with you,” she said, nodding, happy to continue entertaining the delusion that she had a choice.

But as she started to move to follow him, she caught a glimpse of something moving high above from the corner of her eye. At first, she thought it was the ceiling that was moving. Fear seized her as she envisioned the roof of the building collapsing on them. But she saw the light shimmering on something that, up until now, she hadn’t even noticed. Amid the dark beams high above, it had seemed inconceivable that something could have been lying in wait there. Now, as it uncurled, she saw it.

It unwound from the beam it had been coiled around. She could see the end of its tail appearing and disappearing with each loop of itself it unfurled. Its head dropped slowly, without urgency, and turned so that it was right-side up. Scaled lids rose from over slitted eyes. A tongue, easily as long and thick as her arm, flicked across its snout. Then its mouth opened, fangs unfolding from within its maw, saliva gushing out in thick torrents to cover the tiled floor.

The snake hissed, and Penny started to scream.

[King of Cunts]

It seemed like he’d just about convinced her to follow him when it happened. At first, he wasn’t sure what was making her scream. The library was empty and the corridor had been successfully cleared. His first impulse was to clamp a hand over her mouth or hit her at the base of the skull with his weapon. A quick and effective way to shut her up and cancel out the hysterics, but it would probably hurt any use he might have for her later. If he was going to have her serve as an intermediary, he couldn’t do that if she was wary of him.

Fortunately, her panic attack hadn’t been brought on by nothing. She was screaming because a monster had appeared in the Library behind them. It wasn’t like anything he’d ever seen before. Umbrella’s manufactured BOW units were rarely recognisable animals. He would have believed that this was an accidental mutation, a snake that had ingested infected meat, if it hadn’t been for his foreknowledge of Wesker’s game. This thing had been engineered to be like this. He wasn’t sure what the motive was yet, but this piece had been put in the game in this form on purpose.

He grabbed her wrist and jerked her out of the library forcibly. He didn’t have time to exercise any care or caution, he needed out of the way before it attacked. Her movement provoked it, and its head snapped towards them, powered by the solid length of muscle that was its body. It had to be a good fifty metres in length to be holding itself in its elevated position and still be able to attack.

He threw himself into a roll, shooting from the shoulder with his handgun. The calibre of the bullets was too weak to cause much damage - the toughness of the snake’s scales had grown exponentially with its body mass. He holstered the pistol and levelled his sub-machinegun at it instead, raking its flank with .45 slugs. Penetration was still poor, but blood sprayed from spaces between its scales, or from the bulging sores that had grown between them the length of its body.

It attacked again, its yawning mouth opened sideways to trap him between its jaws. He threw himself flat to the ground, and the snake closed its mouth in time to crash snout-first into the bookshelves. There was a crash as the contents were dumped unceremoniously onto the floor at once. Hardback tomes bounced around him like wreckage from a car crash.

A book skittered past him on its spine and then fell open. He glimpsed something shining inside, before the cover snapped back into place. Another book box. He grabbed it and forced himself up, turning as he rose to face the snake. It arched its body, turning its head back to face him. The tongue flickered between its lips again, tasting him in the air.

He tossed the book to the woman, reasoning it might help her to keep her head. “Hold on to this,” he ordered, “and get ready to run.”

The snake coiled itself tighter, preparing to lunge. Hunk had never really been trained to handle snakes. They weren’t a good subject for T-infection, not the way mammals were. Even the Hunters, though scaled, were based mainly on mammalian DNA. But he knew there was a cluster of nerves on the snake’s snout that made an excellent target. He brought his weapon up to his shoulder again.

“Move!” he yelled. The next second, it was coming at him again, and he was firing, bullets thudding into its nose, tearing through the inside of its mouth as it yawned towards him.

[Queen of Cunts]

There had been a time, in her youth, when Penny had fancied herself as an athlete. Real life had caught up to her - the pressures of her job, the late hours, the fatigue. There had barely been enough time in the day to do what she had to do at the sanctuary, let alone for hobbies. But she remembered the motion of the sprint, the feel of air passing through her, the efficiency and determination of mind and body that had given her that competitive edge.

But the edge had dulled over the years. She wasn't as trim and streamlined as she had once been. Physically demanding as her job sometimes was, it required an entirely different kind of strength and stamina than this. Her movement was clumsy now, her breathing like sucking air through a strip of wet gauze. She began to sorely regret ever giving up on her ambitions.

To make matters worse, this wasn't the track that she was used to. The carpet was uneven and the floorboards were poorly fitting, a fact that she only realised when she was trying to run on it. Her shoes weren't exactly suited for running either. But she was running for her life, so the motivation was potent, even if the ability was now lacking.

She held the book that her rescuer had given her clasped to her chest as she ran. All thought left her as she scrambled out of the library, but the moment she was out, and the sounds of the man's gunfire was to her back, she began to wonder where she would go - where they would go - to escape the rampaging snake.

Her eyes settled on the open elevator door as she drew level with it and she darted inside, collapsing against the corner and sliding to the floor where she had woken up. From the moment she had first awakened, things had been getting gradually worse and worse.

And they didn't show any signs of improving as she curled into a ball and hoped she wasn't about to die.

[King of Cunts]

The snake had missed him by inches and chewed clean through one of the support stanchions for the upper level. The whole gallery had leaned with a squeal of tortured metal as it started to collapse under its own weight, but then it had stopped, hanging lopsided above him. He pushed himself up from the floor and scanned for the snake's head. He could see a lot of body, but not the thing's head. That was the deadly part.

Somehow, it must have curled around behind him. It slammed into his back and sent him skidding across the floor on his face. He swore and slammed a fist against the ground as he stood, then kicked into a roll as he made it coming in from his left. He vaulted over a coil of its tail, feeling the impossibly thick and powerful cords of muscle running the length of its body tighten at his touch.

He pulled a grenade from his webbing and jerked the pin, letting it drop behind him as he dove through the open doorway. He jammed his boot into the door, kicking it back into the chasing maw of the snake, the wood ricocheting hard off its snout. The door splintered under its weight, and it crashed into the wall, facing away from him and curled neatly around the incendiary he'd dropped. It went off with a flat thump that shook the entire building around them and probably caused some structural damage to the room below.

He didn't stop to do a survey. The snake wasn't down and out. He could tell that right off the bat. If anything, he was pretty sure all he'd managed to do was piss it off. He followed the woman, assuming she'd already cleared the corner. Instead, he found her cowering in an elevator car halfway down the hall.

"Bad move," he grunted. His initial reaction was to leave her, but then it occured to him that it may not have been such a bad move after all.

He leapt into the box, grabbing at the metal grille and jerking it across the doorway. The snake powered past on its belly. Its eye rotated in its socket as it realised that its prey weren't ahead of it anymore. He knew the damn thing couldn't see for shit, but it looked for all the world like it was staring right at him.

He grabbed the door and pulled it across too, hiding the snake from view completely. Then, he punched the button for every floor save the one they were on. With a whirr of ancient pullies, the elevator started to descend. He leaned against the wall and changed clips for a fresh one.

"Good call," he told the woman, hoping she wouldn't be useless when they reached wherever the elevator was taking them.

[Queen of Cunts]

Huddled in a ball at the corner of the elevator, she couldn’t seem to stop shaking. She was wondering if this was how soldiers in a battlefield felt, if their hearts beat as fast and their bodies felt so cold when they were at war. She’d always felt bad for them, for the people who didn’t really have any other options the way she had. She couldn’t think how different her life would have been if it hadn’t been for her parents. Both pairs.

She wondered where they were now, if they were safe.

She buried her head in her arms, knowing that the elevator would stop, that it would deposit them somewhere. She really didn’t want it to stop. She didn’t want to be lost again in another part of this mansion, where unknown horrors lurked around every corner. And she knew that her guardian would insist they move on. He wouldn’t just hide the way she wished they would. She was too afraid of him to tell him no. In fact, she was afraid of him in general.

She looked at the book he had given her, but couldn’t see anything of much interest about it.

“Did you want me to hold onto this for you?” she asked, catching his attention as they continued their descent.

She sniffed and rubbed at her eyes, turning her head away from him so that he couldn’t see what she was doing. When she looked back, she hoped she seemed more in control of her faculties.

“You really think it was a good call?”

[King of Cunts]

“Yeah, you did good,” he assured her.

But then, what did he know about motivating people? He wasn’t used to working with a team. For all he knew, he was just making things worse. She probably wouldn’t have reacted too well if he told her to keep quiet and stay behind him. Then again, maybe that was what she was waiting for. Him to take the reins. He’d have to play her carefully, make sure he didn’t wind up alienating her, especially if he intended to use her later.

“Keep hold of the book. It might come in handy later. For now, we need to be thinking about keeping ourselves alive.”

He checked his sidearm and sub-machinegun, reloaded, and consolidated his remaining ammunition. He’d need to keep his arsenal streamlined in this place. The last thing he wanted was to count his clips wrong in a battle where every heartbeat was the difference between completing his mission and winding up K.I.A.

The elevator ground to a halt and he jerked back the grille barring their exit. He stepped out to check their surroundings. He’d stepped out into a short corridor that turned into a blind corner less than five metres away. The floor was bare concrete lined with tiled walls. At a guess, it looked like they were in some kind of kitchen.

He took the corner and scanned the room beyond. His guess had been on the money. Stainless steel worktops, some refrigeration units and a cooker. The place could probably have still been used to entertain, if there hadn’t been a zombie in a blood-stained apron staggering around it. He made the surroundings that little bit more unsanitary by putting the thing’s brain all over the wall.

He called back to the woman. “This area’s clear. Let’s move.”