Run Like Hell

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22

From where she stood in the driveway, she saw Leon walk back towards her, arms loose, the Eagle spent. Wesker was long gone with the girl - his precious G-Virus sample - and her vaccine too, probably; and it was all her fault. Hoping to outrun him, she'd led him here after all, like a goddamn amateur, straight to the money. She could have kicked herself, but it was too late for that now.

Much too late.

Leon's face was expressionless as he approached her, gripped her by the shoulders and shook her hard.

"Did you set this up?" he demanded, anger clouding his youthful face.

Ada barely flinched, staring through him, into nothing. "He must have followed me," she confessed steadily, "I'm... sorry."

"What's gonna happen to her? What do they want with her?"

"I don't know."

"That's bullshit, Ada! Don't lie to me!"

She could feel the vehemence in his voice, and the gravity of loss be the the words. Had she been herself, she might have laughed, or cried, perhaps...

"I just know that she's a virus carrier. They probably want her for research..."

"Research!" he snarled. "What, so they can kill more people? And you were helping them, weren't you? You were gonna get the virus back for them! Didn't you care that thousands of people had died?"

She said nothing.

He turned his face away in disgust. The damage was done. Sherry was out of his hands, just another plaything for Umbrella, another lost soul in the gruesome charade...

And after he'd promised Claire to protect her!

"There's still time," Ada said faintly. "He'll go back to Chicago... to Umbrella first. I'm sure of it."

"Then what?" he snapped. "Take on Umbrella myself to get her back?"

"I was going to try and stop him."

"Whatever," he growled, with contempt. "He's got what he came for."

"Leon, there's something I have to tell you," she sighed. She looked up into his restless eyes, and knew that hers were again filled with hot tears, too many to hide.

"I'm... I'm a -"

Suddenly her eyes opened wide as if with pain. She went limp in his grasp, reeling back so that he had to catch her. Bewildered, he crouched to support her neck, feeling automatically for a pulse, and noticed a strange purple mark on one of her wrists... the veins around it darker and more apparent -

"What'd you do, shoot yourself up or something?" he mumbled, confused. She was totally inert, her limbs like dead weight...

But there was still a pulse - weak, yet steady - and though barely perceptible, her chest was still rising and falling. He checked her eyes; despite the pupils being precariously dilated, she seemed only to have blacked out.

Great. Just great -

What now? he wondered. Slap her? Pour water on her face? Get her to a hospital?

But what about Sherry? Wesker couldn't have gotten far yet...

In his mind, there was only one option left. He couldn't just leave Ada there, not now, whether she wanted it or not; and he couldn't bear the thought of abandoning a child to the mercy of her kidnappers. No - that idea didn't even bear thinking about.

What, then?

Bracing himself, he lifted Ada in his arms - a surprisingly substantial weight, he noticed, considering her slight frame. Laying her in the black car's passenger seat with as much haste and consideration as he could, Leon found himself startled at how pale and mannequin-like she looked, arms crossed lifelessly on her lap, head lolling awkwardly to one side. She almost looked...

Dead. Like a zombie.

Then, with a stab of shock, he saw that her wounds had gone. The cuts and grazes on her arms and face, the deep gouge in her right shoulder - all healed... leaving a thin tracery of white marks where before there'd been deep, clotted lesions. Swallowing heavily, he reached out and gently touched the bullet-wound, the wound he'd sewn up himself, and the cold flesh was smooth and slightly raised, an unmistakeable scar tissue where the bloody hole had once been...

Impossible.

Wounds like that can take years to heal, months at the very least. How then could it have closed in less than a week...?

Jesus, he thought wildly - was she infected too? Not with the zombie virus - that seemed to cause spontaneous decay rather than regeneration - but some other kind? One that worked in reverse, maybe? As crazy as it sounded, gunshot wounds didn't heal overnight...

Although the thought was ludicrous, he felt an unexpected urge to jerk his hand back, as if he feared she might suddenly bite.

Thankfully, there wasn't time to think on it further. He slammed the passenger side door and jogged to the hire car for the remaining gas and water, jamming the Desert Eagle into his pocket. He didn't know how much gas was in Ada's car, and had no idea in which direction Wesker had gone, though the tyre-marks he'd found further down the road would be easy enough to follow on the dirt track...

Leon worked fast, gathering up the canisters and trying to keep his doubts at bay. He had to do something, somehow, to save Sherry; even if she was a virus carrier, she was still a little girl. A human being.

When at last he climbed into the unfamiliar driver's seat and stared at Ada's motionless, ashen face, he felt, for the first time since tasting Raccoon's horror, a very real and bleak sense of impending doom.

23

When Sherry woke, the first thing she noticed was the headache. She was still in the car, curled up on the back seat, and something sharp had been digging into her head. She felt groggy and ill, and the world seemed fuzzy and dim. Twisting round to see what it was that was hurting her, she was suddenly aware of the tape over her mouth and that her hands and feet were tied, wrapped with those little plastic things that people used to keep wires and things from getting untidy. The car was moving, and it was almost daylight outside, but otherwise, she could see little else.

"Awake?" said a hazy voice from somewhere nearby. She couldn't see who it belonged to, but it sounded vaguely familiar, like a voice from a bad memory or a nightmare.

"Nice sleep? Fifteen milligrams of hexobarbitone; the wonders of modern science, eh?"

She moved, slowly, inching forward to get her head away from the sharp thing behind her. Then it fell forward, heavy across her face, and slid to the floor behind the driver's seat. It was black and shiny, like metal. She stared at it for a while, its shape seeming alien and unrecognisable in her sluggish thoughts, and it was several minutes before she realised what it was.

"You're a smart kid, I hear," said the voice again, "so you'll know this game. It's called 'shut up and keep still'. Got it?"

Sherry felt sick. She was too weak to move, and it was hard to think. She wasn't afraid yet, fear hovering just beyond the brink of consciousness; but she soon would be. She gazed unblinking at the dark metallic thing, for a long, long time, watching its angles and edges come slowly together, taking form, and finally identity.

Staring at the gun, she tried hard to remember Claire's face.