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saintsofwarding · 10 months

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WE SHALL BE MONSTERS

Header by @trout-scout

Chapter 25: A Family Feud

Chris Redfield woke with a start and a headache like the mother of all hangovers. For a moment he lay there, blinking, staring up at a shadowy wooden ceiling, a single brass lantern swinging from a hook above. Why was it swinging? Why was he lurching? With effort, he turned his head, the light sending shards of glass down his optic nerve. He made out the patchwork quilt tucked around him, the too-narrow bunk he lay in, a clutter of canvas rucksacks, crates, and wooden chests stacked around the confines of the small room.

And the woman sitting by his bedside, watching him with eyes that glimmered lycan-green when the light struck them.

Chris's heart-rate slowed as he breathed, in and out, the fog in his brain clearing by the moment. A wet pain throbbed on the back of his head.

He took a deep breath.

"You," he said, "hit me."

Teodora gave a low laugh. "Sorry about that. I would have chosen a nicer way to incapacitate you, but...my options were limited."

He remembered coming to, watching Rose call in the Hound Wolf Squad, watching her climb aboard the BOW- Dimitrescu's- back and take to the skies. He had a pretty damn good idea where she was headed, too.

His heart clenched inside him, a knot of real, aching pain in the pit of his chest. It was that old familiar feeling, that inexorable slip deeper into darkness. Another loss, another death. Another failure. Yeah, he'd always keep fighting- at this point, he didn't think he was capable of anything else- but he'd be deluding himself if he said it didn't take a toll on him. Every single time.

Once Rose and the bioweapons had gone, Teodora had fed him a sedative, conking him out for good. He still tasted its bitter tang on the backs of his teeth.

"And you drugged me," he went on.

"I'm afraid so. I couldn't have you slipping your bonds while we were mid-evacuation. No offense, but I didn't have the time to deal with you if you got...difficult."

With a nod, Chris glanced at his surroundings again. Now, he heard the rumble of wheels, the clop of horses' hooves. The air smelled of mud and medicine and polished wood. "This some kind of wagon?"

"Indeed."

"Where are we?"

"About five kilometers outside my town, into the deep, dark Romanian forest. I can get you the coordinates from your team, if you'd like. They're right outside."

So the Hound Wolf Squad was okay. Thank God for that, at least. "I guess Rose put you up to this, huh? Knocking me out?"

"It was a joint effort."

He let out his breath. "Don't screw around with me-"

"Listen, Redfield," Teodora said, cutting him off. "I know you see her as a child, as some kind of burden of responsibility for you to wear a hair shirt over, but she's more than that. She's far less human than I am."

Chris heaved upright, suddenly. "She's still a child. My friends' child. And I-" Agony flared through his skull and he clenched his teeth, dropping to one elbow on the narrow cot. His vision pulsed white and red.

After a beat, there came the sound of dripping water. A cool cloth pressed to his forehead, its scent bittersweet with some kind of herbal tincture. Teodora daubed his face, gently, her lashes lowered, her brow furrowed. This close, Chris could get a better look at her as he waited for the pain and nausea to fade.

Get up, soldier, he urged himself. You have a job to do. He didn't. The movement of the wagon was lulling.

The veins of crystal on Teodora's face looked like they split her skin open, looked like they ran straight down to the bone. The skin around them looked ashen, almost dead, her curls brittle and gray. Shit, the parasite had done a number on her.

He thought of Jill and shuddered. The world was full of so many horrors, and far too many of them had been wrought on his friends. And on him. All his years of fighting biohazards, of fighting good men made into monsters, bad ones who sought to become them. All those who had died under his watch, or been turned, or been irreparably transformed. All the way back to the first, to him so young, so sure of himself. The Spencer mansion, and that night of fear, and of betrayal.

The world had changed, that night. It had changed him. And it lived on, and would live forever, if only in his nightmares, if only in the faces of those who had been forced to endure far more than was fair.

"You what?" Teodora prompted, after a few minutes of silence. "Lost her? Maybe the mission wasn't yours to lose."

"Fuck you. You don't understand a damn thing about it."

"Don't I? This place is my home, Redfield. I grew up here, on the same earth as my ancestors before me. I died here. And now Rose wants to save it." The corner of her mouth hitched up in a fanged smile. "The Black God's heir herself. Who am I to deny a god?"

"To save it by dealing with monsters."

"And that's it, then? Like a story cooked up to comfort children at night? The brave hero, with sword ablaze, slicing away shadows to slay the terrible monsters. I'm afraid we don't have many tales so cut and dry out here."

"Is that what your townspeople think, too? Is that what you tell them? I saw your shrine in the catacombs. The warding saint, gilded and worshipped. Do you tell them what you really are?"

"I told them the truth," Teodora said. "What Lord Heisenberg did for me. What he did for Rosemary. And they all saw the rest. We're not all like Miranda."

"So why aren't you?"

"You think I'm capable of what Miranda did?"

"You tell me."

She traced the antler grip of a worn silver pistol at her belt. It was a moment before she spoke. When she did, her voice was hard, and sounded far older than even her mutated and mortal lives together would account for.

"I made a promise, when I was very young," she said. "That I would never let those I love come to harm. That I would destroy myself for that love. That I meant nothing, in the grand scheme of god and nature, and was thus removed from it. But I was wrong. Ever since Lord Heisenberg saved my life, I've had a...a lot of time to think about the conditions of my own immortality."

She paused again, her gaze faraway.

"I believe the Cadou enhances what is already inside us," she said. "It binds us monsters together. And while such a connection can prove disastrous in the hands of someone so tortured with grief and pain, they can only ever search for a way to free themselves from that pain...it can be...miraculous, too. A drive to live. A drive toward the divine. The true divine. That which is in each other. To reach out in the dark, and find a hand reaching back."

"And that's Heisenberg to you?"

A faint smile touched her face. "If I could love anyone, it would be him," she said, softly. "He gave me a piece of God. He made me into a piece of God."

Teodora looked back to him.

"All I want is to keep my people safe," she told him. "You shouldn't insult their faith, Redfield. Miranda's cult may have ended badly for her, but the Black God was around long, long before she was even a flutter in the depths of its dreams."

Chris let out a grim laugh. "I still think you're all delusional."

"Maybe you're right. But you should be glad now we were here at all."

"Guess I should." He lifted one hand from the blankets. "And I guess we were never properly introduced."

"Teodora Balan," she said, taking his hand.

He shook it. "Chris Redfield." He let her hand go. "Am I a prisoner here?"

"No. Of course not."

"Then I need to go."

"Go?"

"Help Rose. Even if you're right, and she can get the Four Lords under control, there's still Ouroboros to contend with. And they'll riddle her with bullets first chance they get. They're not after her anymore."

He levered himself upright; stars went off in his head, but whatever herb was in that poultice had worked some real magic, because he could move now without too much pain or nausea. Teodora helped him, her hands on his shoulders, supporting him as if he might fall again.

"And if you find her?" she said.

"What do you mean?"

"Are you gonna stop her? Stop all of them?"

He looked at her. She looked, steadily, back. "I have to," he said at last. "It's my job. My duty."

"Then saints help you, Redfield," Teodora told him. "You're gonna need it."

"Is that a threat?"

Teodora looked at him. Really looked.

She said, "No. I grew up with stories of the monsters of the Black God's valley, remember, and I like to think I know a thing or two about them. The Four Lords are at their full power now, Redfield. Four mutants of unparalleled strength, working as one. What makes you think you'll be able to stop them?"

"Experience," Chris told her.

"Experience," Teodora echoed. She laughed in disbelief. "Do you have any idea of what they're really capable of?"

***

The village reservoir spread beyond the snow-clouds, mist whipped to a froth by the V-22's twin rotors.

The aircraft's searchlights speared down, illuminating the remnants of water, the old fishing village clinging to the dry lake's shore, the once-sunken houses thick with decay and choked with mud. The soldiers aboard monitored their equipment,monitored the scanners, waiting for any sign of stumbling, limping movement.

The bioweapon known as Lord Moreau was supposed to be here, in its once-time territory; he'd be little effort to subdue, if Heisenberg was right and he was as pathetic as claimed. He didn't sound like much of a threat, and the photos provided by Winters years back confirmed this: a ruin of tumorous flesh and oozing orifii, better suited to weeping than combat.

Still, the men mumbled, trading weary looks, Regan seemed to think the creature's acidic discharge had potential merit, and, as such, their orders were to locate and subdue by any means necessary. They even had a tank lined with a base solution for the purpose, and stun batons.

And missiles.

And anti-mutant bullets.

Just in case.

"Ugly bastard won't know what's hit him," one of the commandos told the other, and chuckled, watching the glitter of red moonlight off the surface of the lake.

"Approaching target zone." The pilot's voice crackled over the intercom, and the men stood at attention, rifles in hand. So far, this place looked dismal- the ruins of several large windmills reared from the muck, scaffolding exposed thanks to the decade of decay and weather that had ravaged this part of town.

And the smell. What the hell was that? It rose even to these heights, twining into the V-22 and threatening to stay there forever. Rotten fish, and bile, and something else, something that might have been just the essence of pure sickness.

Well. Whatever it was, at least they wouldn't have to endure it for long.

"Where the fuck is he?" another commando muttered, scanning the lakebed through the HUD of his high-tech combat helmet.

"Probably off crying somewhere," another said.

"What would a BOW have to cry about?"

"Dunno, didn't Winters say he was a sensitive sort?"

A tremor cut through their conversations, juddering the V-22 on its flight path. The rotors whined, and all eyes faced south- not toward any sign of a shambling BOW, but toward the vast brick sluice-gate that fenced off the reservoir from the lake beyond.

"What the hell?" muttered the pilot, in the cockpit.

The gate was- it was opening. With a rumbling, grinding roar, it lifted, vast gears ratcheting in their sockets- perfectly-made, as if by a master of metal- and through it, leaping, churning, rushing in swirls of foam, came water. All the water that had once filled the reservoir. It gushed back into place, countless tons of dark water lashing to the far shore, rising, slopping up the shoreline, then settling, once more, at home.

It covered their view of the once-again-drowned village below, the houses once more sunken, the reservoir returned to its original state. With a creak, one of the windmills began to turn again- a broken, stilted movement, half its sails missing. Still, it struck an eerie chord in the soldiers, battle-hardened though they were.

"I thought this place was supposed to be abandoned," the copilot muttered.

"It is. Except for the freak. Now it's gonna be a real fucking trip trying to find him." The pilot shook her head, chewed her lip, then made an executive decision. "We're gonna have to descend. It'll be a needle in a haystack locating a fish-man in a lake at this altitude."

"What do you think raised the gate?" The copilot's hushed tones pricked at the pilot's nerves. This wasn't a freaking girl scout camp.

"Jesus, how much of a pussy are you?" she snapped. "Probably just an electrical malfunction. Maybe the freak thought it would fend us off." She snorted. "Let's hurry this up, okay? I got a bunk with my name on it back at camp."

"I got a bunk with your name on it, too, sweet cheeks," called one of the other soldiers.

The pilot, with practiced speed, flipped him off.

She eased the joystick forward. The rotors increased in speed as the V-22 cruised lower, breaking fully through the clouds and into the haze of noxious mist that swirled, thick and greenish, from the surface of the reinstated lake. Even through their helmets, it stung the eyes, thickened the throat, brought acid to the tongue.

The pilot checked the chopper's air filtration system, but the readouts didn't indicate anything so toxic they'd have to leave.

"That's better," the pilot said as she evened out the chopper. "Isn't it?"

They now flew some thirty feet above the water. The searchlight illuminated the dark water, murky enough that past a couple yards visibility dissolved once more into straight-up pea soup. Hands tightened on rifles; the radar beeped, constantly scanning the area for the first sign of movement. So far there was nothing. Fish, a couple lycans near the shoreline. No sign of anything big enough to be Moreau.

"Come on," a commando whispered. "Come on. Where is it?"

"This is bullshit," the pilot sang.

The scanner bleeped.

"Shit," the copilot said. "Look at that."

"Look at what?"

"Something big. It's sitting down near the bottom." His eyes danced as he adjusted the scanner, trying to clear the picture. The pilot's pulse thudded in her throat. "It's fucking gigantic. What the hell is that-"

"Is it Moreau?" Regan had said the BOW was supposed to be relatively small, right? Six foot tall or thereabouts? She hazarded a glance at the scanner. The shape rippling on the dark screen, eerie as a distorted reflection, was a lot bigger than six feet. The shape was roughly the length of the V-22.

Despite herself, a chill arced down her spine.

Fuck, she hated this place.

"I...I think-" He let out a sudden laugh. The pilot's hands flexed on the controls. "Shit. False alarm. Look, it's a boat."

"A boat. Are you shitting me."

"No, no- must have been sitting in the town and we just missed it when the reservoir was dry. Hah, wouldn't that be crazy if-"

"Shit!" the pilot screamed.

The shape bloomed on the scanner, sudden as a heart attack. In a flash and a throb of pure, gutting dread, the pilot understood. It had been sitting atop the boat, hovering over it, using its radar shadow to hide, but now it was moving.

Fast.

Movement detected, the scanner said, in its flat mechanical voice. Movement detected.

It blossomed on the screen, bigger than the boat, bigger than the V-22, and getting bigger by the second.

In the main bay, all eyes were on the water, on the vast dark shape rocketing toward the surface- the water glassed, surface tension stretching tight as a drumhead over-

"Mother of God," whispered a soldier.

"I don't think that's what God's mother looks like," said another, nervously.

"We're going up!" shouted the pilot. "Hold onto your-"

The water exploded.

An eruption of white, of mud, of black water. The sound was cataclysmic, a roar of waves and booming pressure as the thing threw itself in a full-body lunge toward the V-22.

A horror. A monster. A fisherman's nightmare, manifest. A machine of diseased flesh and pulpy, swollen pustules, of countless rolling eyes and clawed fins flaring, it rocketed from the water and toward the helicopter hovering overhead. A roar thundered through the wind, and as its foreparts split wide into a tooth-lined, four-lobed flower roped with acid and saliva, its hungry throat pulsating in anticipation, some of the commandos on the V-22 thought they heard gibbering laughter, wild as a madman's, gleeful as a child's.

Bullets sprayed down. The rotors screamed as the pilot fired the V-22's engines, trying to heave the aircraft out of the reach of the lunging monster. All too late. Lord Moreau's jaws closed around the helicopter, enfolding it almost lovingly. Metal screamed, and buckled, and crumpled like a tin can; the rotors caught fire in a flare of sparks and white flames, the entire aircraft crunched and folded into the monster's maw.

Three snaps; a gulping flexion of the muscles at his throat. His scaly, piscine hide glistened in the moonlight; his eyes rolled in pleasure.

Did you ever think I could do something so amazing, Miranda? he thought. I love you, but you never would have let me be as cool as this while you were still alive.

He arced down, crashing back to the black water, and in a final gout of spray and crumpling metal, both Lord Salvatore Moreau and the V-22 alike were gone.

Nothing was left but the glimmer of moonlight on the water, and, after a few seconds, bobbing to the surface with a bloop: a single, gnawed combat helmet, the cracked remnants of its HUD still blinking out a final warning.

***

It had been ever so long since House Beneviento received visitors.

Donna moved from room to ruined room, her step a light tap against splintered floorboards and crumbled walls, making certain all was ready. Making certain all was right. The air was full of haze- the snowfall, yes, the mist, but ash, too. Karl's factory was burning, and it filled the air with ash like gray snow, leaving a bitter taste on her tongue, a rime like tears against her pale skin.

Angie scampered after her, giggle trailing through the rooms.

"We'll never get this cleaned up," she said, sing-song, kicking aside a broken piece of crockery. Her mother's favorite tea set, smashed to pieces. "We'll have to work a million zillion years to get this all put back together again."

Donna paused by a shattered window, watching the devastation in the village below. The Rose-monster, the flare of its vast black wings shadowing flashes of gunfire.

Rose, she thought. Her niece. Her family. Her friend.

She thought of Claudia, then. It was impossible not to. Rose was a little like her, she thought. Or perhaps it had been so long since Claudia had died that any quality she loved retroactively became her sister's.

Donna tried to remember Claudia's face. The abstractions were still there. The black hair, so often tied in twin braids, as was the style in the village. The blunt fringe. The dear, sweet eyes, dark and wide-set. Her laugh. The years had not stolen that, and it echoed, clear and vivid as ever, through the wending halls of her memory. But the details were...blurred. A photograph left in the rain. An old record, music scratched on the edges, winding down and down into silence.

A grave, its epitaph worn away by snow, by time, until it could no longer be read.

The sound of her voice, the precise shape of her face, the feeling of her small hands in Donna's own as she bent her head to Claudia's to hear her sister's whisper- they were all gone, now, all taken away. Claudia was dead. She had died so long ago. Perhaps the Black God remembered her, dreamed of her. Perhaps not.

Whatever it dreamed of would not be the same as her beloved little sister. And it would not come back, either. Her Cadou had not taken to her. Her bones had not turned to crystal. She did not sleep as Donna had slept.

She was gone.

"Gone, gone, gone," Angie gabbled, an echo of her thoughts.

The word, and its reality, settled into her. The grief rose, fresh as ever, and seized her so hard her lips parted and she gasped, the sound a raw, wet rasp, like a knife in flesh. For a moment, held in its grip, she felt alive. She felt her hands, her nerves. Her bones, the echo of her heartbeat through them. The dreaming-murmur of her Cadou, sweet parasite, her sole companion besides the shattered pieces of herself she'd gathered close and called her own, enclosing them within dolls so she might have something to hold in the dark that was not her own lonely body.

Now, that body held her in turn. She was in it, in it only. In this moment, not in the past. In this moment, whole.

"I am alive," she whispered.

"You're cracking up, Donna," Angie said.

"Yes. I know."

"I love you. You know that too, right?"

She had said the same to Donna as Ethan Winters had stumbled through the basement, as he'd dragged himself, shaking and sweating and out of his mind, up the elevator and into the main house. He was coming, Donna knew.

And when he did, he would kill her.

And even if Miranda's control had lapsed and given Donna the chance to escape, she didn't think she would have tried. He'd caught up to her a couple times as he rampaged through the house; the scissors had sliced out, gashing into her side, into the palm she'd raised on reflex as if to fend him off. She'd run away, her body battling to survive even though her mind didn't desire the same, leaving smears of blood on wall and banister in her stumbling haste.

At last, exhausted, in shock, bleeding out, she'd collapsed near the front doors. As Ethan crashed closer, closer, fighting off wave after wave of her hallucinations, scissors in his hand, their rusty blades singing against the air, Donna had gathered Angie in her arms and held her to her heart as tight as she could.

"I love you," Angie told her, then. "I always will."

"I love you, too," Donna had said, and then Ethan was on her, and then-

The cold air stung her face. She blinked as an explosion lit the skies, painting the house's rubble in shades of flame-orange and sunset-red. Artillery fire. They were trying to shoot Rose down. They were trying to kill her.

Donna drew a deep breath of the cold, ashy air, holding Claudia in her heart, bidding her, for the moment, goodbye. The grief lay back down again. Sleeping again. It would wake, she knew, sometime, some way.

But it could not wake again now. For Rose's sake.

For all of their sakes.

Years she'd spent in this house. Wretched, beloved. A cage, a womb. Years she'd drifted, not alive, not dead, as ever walking between. Hovering on the edge of life and death, on the edge of the cliff with the waterfall raging around her, seconds from going over. Balanced there, split between dolls' eyes and her single own.

Now, she drifted again.

A flutter of consciousness, divided.

Her vision became prismatic, became fractured, like a broken mirror, each shard reflecting a different view. Dolls in the trees, dolls hidden between the rocks. Each with a fetal presence curled in their hollow heads, or in their horsehair-stuffed chests. Some were stuffed with her own hair, trimmed away by Angie with the very scissors that would later slip through the seams of her skull and enter, cold as a corpse's kiss, into her frontal lobe.

Now, the dolls rustled. They whispered. Each with her voice.

Coming...coming...coming...

They watched.

The crackle of branches and boots through snow echoed up the winding mountain path that led to the Beneviento estate. A strike team of a half-dozen soldiers, led by a lean woman in black combat gear with a rifle at the ready. Each member of the team wore a full-face gas mask, an advanced-looking thing made of clear polymer and carbon fiber gleaming dully in the red moonlight. A few lycans snarled and lunged, but with a hammer of gunfire and a muzzle flash like lightning, they were dealt with quick enough.

Flashlight beams, mounted on the team's rifles, swept the path. It was less a road and more a thin, twisted trail leading between two sheer cliff faces, a ravine blanketed in deep, unbroken snow; only a trace of moonlight made it down to the path's depths, touching the dense canopy of bare-limbed trees growing above, branch entwined with branch as if holding hands.

"Spooky," muttered one of the soldiers.

Cal, leading the group, rolled her eyes. "Can't handle a little darkness?"

This mountain ravine, according to the local history they'd all swotted up on, had been the site of a ghost story or two in its time- a great, swollen graveyard filling every spare inch of soil with bones. Some kind of flu epidemic, back in the day, with so many dead the churchyard in town could not support their weight.

Now, it was overgrown, the path so thickly knotted with roots and briars and thorny, mutant vines that as they pushed on, the commandos had to shoulder their rifles and resort to combat knives and machetes to hack their way through.

Still, Cal could see the graves.

They were everywhere she looked: rising from the undergrowth, from the snow, some broken like old teeth, weathered and cracked and glistening with ice. A labyrinth of gravestones, leading on and on and on through the dark old forest.

They weren't the weird part. The weird part was the dolls.

Standing atop graves. Sprawled in niches between tangled root-masses. Perched on rock shelves, staring down as the advancing group. Hanging from the trees themselves, tiny nooses for tiny necks. Their eyes gleamed, dull and glassy, each gaze identical. Dark eyes, doll eyes, doll faces, porcelain scabbed with lichen and grime.

"Beneviento's dolls," Cal said, with a pout. "I hate dolls."

"I can clear 'em out for you," said one of her men.

In one fluid movement, Cal drew her sidearm and fired. One of the dolls exploded in a burst of porcelain shards.

"I think I can handle a few dolls, thanks," she said, holstering the pistol again.

The wind picked up. It rushed through the trees; they creaked and groaned, the sound echoing from the forest, from the oncoming mist, twining insidious through dead brush and dark trunks. Chasing the groan-

Was that a scream? Maybe the echo of one.

Deep down, Cal felt the thud of her heartbeat, liquid in her ears. The shadows seemed darker than before, their depths unfathomable. Nothing moved as the wind settled, as the mist rose higher, swirling through their flashlight beams opaque as milk.

"Get a move on," Cal said. Her voice sounded thin in the silence, muffled through her helmet. She checked her wrist monitor. No sign of particulates; no breaches in the mask. This was so stupid. "Come on!"

They pushed upwards, winding higher, higher, passing through the great graveyard and over a suspension bridge that clung to life by a few rotting wood-scraps and nails. Beyond, the mist had thickened, obscuring their view of the village and the castle; even the flames from the burning factory were hidden, nothing more than a vague glow, then lost altogether. The world became darkness, became the thin spears of their flashlight beams, became the echoes of the team's breathing mirrored and amplified on an endless feedback loop through the comms.

Snow crumbled from a rock-shelf.

Flashlights whipped toward it. Bullets cratered the rock.

"What the hell?" Cal snapped.

"Sorry-" The soldier's eyes were wide behind his gas mask. "I saw something move, ma'am-"

"What?"

"I...I don't know- something small-"

"If you just fired on a fucking raccoon-"

Another rattle of bullets; Cal whirled in a haze of snow. Something- skittered. That was the only word for it. A flashing, jerking movement. A rasping sound- laughter? Or just crumbling rocks? She searched the darkness.

"That wasn't a raccoon," said the first soldier.

"Whatever it was, it's dead now." Cal eyed the spatter of dark liquid on the snow, then checked her monitor again, tapping the map function, the green pips that marked each of her team members blinking on the illuminated grid. "We're almost there."

Through an ornate wrought-iron gate that led to a tangled, overgrown garden. The elevator in the gatehouse in a clearing beyond- dominated by a single massive grave also infested with more dolls- flickered its lights, then went dead. They ended up rappelling up the cliff and over, and at last the Beneviento house rose before them.

A wreck. A ruin. It looked like a dollhouse subjected to a shotgun blast; a massive crater gaped in its front, the yard a swath of shattered wood and glass and insulation. Cal's boots crunched on porcelain, on the twisted frames of torn-apart paintings, on a spray of silver buttons spilled from a jar, winking like the dolls' eyes in their flashlight beams. The waterfall thundered beyond, a constant rush in her blood, a pressure in her nerves.

"Lady Beneviento!" she called, signaling for her team to fan out, train their rifles on as much ground as they could. "We can do this one of two ways. Either you surrender yourself quietly, or we hunt you down. It's your choice-"

Scuttling footsteps.

A wicked shriek of scratchy laughter, echoing around them, grating as a knife against bone, as a skipping record.

Movement slashed from nowhere; Cal stumbled back as metal sheared through her flashlight beam. It was- fuck, it was a doll, its face dripping with black liquid, its porcelain mouth wide as if in glee. Blades unfurled from beneath its ruffled skirts, spiders' legs of rusted metal and nicked, gore-clotted knives.

One lashed out, screeching over her gas mask's face plate; she jerked away, but the gash appeared anyway, a single deep scar in the clear polymer.

Breach detected, her wrist monitor said. Breach detected. Seal immediately to prevent particulate contamination. Breach detected-

She backhanded the doll away with the barrel of her gun; it hit the snow and scuttled off on those nightmarish metal legs. Around her: more screams, more demented laughter from many small, porcelain throats, endless and awful, looping around and around and around. Gunfire lit the night, but in the mist, in the crossing, askew flashlight beams, Cal couldn't get a fix on what was happening. It was chaos, it was madness, the darkness a whirl of light and shadow and thrashing movement. She flinched as blood spurted, as it splattered her gas mask in glistening red-

"Fall back!" she shouted. "Fall back! That's an..."

Her voice trailed away.

The house loomed before her, the red moon full and bright, cutting out in sharp relief the house's many gabled roofs, its spires and weathervanes. Cal blinked as her gun barrel dipped. It was...it was whole again. That was...impossible. Right? It was a smashed ruin, not an intact manor. But...then again...the night was dark, the mist thick. Maybe she'd gotten it wrong.

She took a step toward the house. Behind her echoed shouts, screams for help. A hand reached from the mist, smeared in blood, missing a finger as if it had been bitten clean off at the root; a rusty blade arced from the mist and impaled it straight through the wrist, dragging it back into the dark with one neat flick and a peal of childish laughter.

Cal didn't see it. She didn't hear it. Her rifle dangled loosely from her hand as she mounted the house's steps, as she pushed her way through the carved double doors, as she stood in the warmth of the hall beyond.

The lamps were dim, stoking the burnished wood panels of the walls to a ruddy glow. Everywhere was comfort- worn leather, brocade and velvet cushions, doll-making supplies in baskets tied with ribbons. A clock ticked, and a fire crackled in its grate, visible through an open door to a homey kitchen. Cal smelled flowers, and wood polish, and warm, unfamiliar spices. Something bitter, too, in the back of her throat, but then again it might have been the age of the house, and all old places had their eccentricities.

A slow smile spread over her face as gentle heat flowed through her chest, easing away all her fears, all her lingering worries. There was nothing to be afraid of here. Nothing at all.

She took another step forward, boots silent on the carpets. A slim, black-clad figure sat in an old-fashioned rocking chair, her back to Cal. She rocked, slowly, back and forth, humming a low tune as she sipped from her teacup.

On a small table at her side:

A bud vase held a single sprig of bright yellow flowers.

A floorboard creaked under Cal's next step. The woman in black stopped rocking. A beat- and then she turned. Pale face, hair in an elegant knot. A single dark eye.

The other eye was swollen with writhing, tumorous flesh. In her lap sat a doll in a wedding dress, slumped like a small corpse.

The woman in black smiled gently at Cal.

"Welcome to House Beneviento," she said. Behind Cal, in the entryway, in the shadows, scratching, scratching in the pit of her skull- rusty blades, rusty laughter, the click and scrape of porcelain limbs and hands and snapping teeth, coming, coming, coming for her.

"We hope you'll stay forever," Donna said, and lifted her cup. Angie giggled, wickedest of them all. "Tea?"

***

"What a nightmare," Regan muttered.

He stood before the gates to Castle Dimitrescu. Flames flickered in heavy stone sconces, illuminating the carvings on the massive, overblown thing.

It rose in Gothic spires toward the dark mass of the castle beyond, while souls screamed as they plummeted toward perdition. On the gates themselves, open wide, like a mouth, a relief of a snarling demon battled a much smaller girl with a sword.

Like the warrior maiden in the town square, probably some kind of figure from local legend, a warden against the 'endless dark' of the valley's religion.

Obvious. Tacky. And in the light from the recently-kindled flames, ghoulish.

Regan did his best to not get sentimental about the bioweapons he dealt with on the daily. It was impossible, in his line of work. The scientists that developed the various horrors Ouroboros sold to their various clients were wont to...well, maybe 'romanticize' wasn't the right word when discussing musclebound monstrosities of mutant flesh, but they definitely tended to wax poetical about their power and majesty, that they were the next step on evolution's path, that they had broken through the bonds of mere flesh and into some kind of bullshit realm of the divine.

Whatever. Where Regan was concerned, all he cared about was how much the BOW would sell for, how big a hassle it would be to deal with, and, if push came to shove, how many bullets it would take to kill it.

Now, as he stared up at Castle Dimitrescu, a moldering heap of rock and overwrought fifteenth-century decor, he at least had to marvel at the novelty. In all his years of executing bioweapons, he'd never had to slay a vampire before.

"She's damn near impossible to kill," Heisenberg had explained. "Regenerates like a bitch and will claw you up something fierce, too. So don't look too tasty."

Now, surrounded by his strike team, Regan heaved a sigh.

"Let's just get this over with," he announced. "Don't let the Halloween trappings get to your heads. This creature, this so-called 'Lady Dimitrescu', is a bioweapon. Nothing more. And each and every one of you have dealt with bioweapons. So we do what we trained to, and bring the creature down."

A roar from the flying monster echoed up the path, filling the air with its tremor. An answering explosion came moments later, like aftershock. An artillery shot. He didn't expect Heisenberg to return with Winters' remains, nor Mia, either, but he'd keep up the bargain as long as it was necessary, and practical.

And if-miracle of miracles- the BOW came back with the remains?

Well, that was fine with Regan. This whole operation was a shitshow from day one. Babysitting Mia, babysitting Heisenberg in its stupid little jar onboard the ship, dealing with the fallout of the failed Embryo project. After this, he was demanding a pay raise, and smashing in the teeth of anyone who pushed back.

"Move out," he ordered, and together, he and his men trooped through the demon's gates and toward the castle itself.

Had he still been a child and in public school, he likely would have been forced to go on a field trip to some dismal wreck like this. The long, curving path to the main doors was clotted by some kind of organic matter, frogspawn slime coating the curtain walls and old vineyards in a layer of greenish muck. Lord Moreau's work, Regan guessed; it melted readily enough under the application of one of his soldiers' flamethrowers.

The great front doors, studded with bolts in the shapes of crosses, came open with a crack and a heave, and shuddered wide onto a dark entryway, dust drifting in the air. Flashlights clicked on. The beams glanced off a portrait of three women in antique gowns, dust drifting in midair, Baroque gilt swirling in intricate floral patterns on every visible surface.

The blizzard howled against the windows, rattling the glass in its frames.

"Not exactly Brides of Dracula material, are they?" one of his men said, examining the girls' rosy-cheeked faces.

"Daughters of Dracula," Regan said absently.

"Huh?"

"The BOW created daughters for itself, way back when." The idea was a tantalizing one. A self-proliferating bioweapon. There were plenty of BOWs that implanted others with parasites, not to mention the classic T-virus infection spreading via fluid transfer, but it took a smart monster to make smart mutants.

As they moved deeper into the castle, Regan imagined the possibilities. Mia had spilled the details on the three Dimitrescu 'daughters' when she'd first come into their employ with plenty of stolen BSAA files in tow, and he'd listened with rapt fascination. He'd never heard of sentient fly-swarms before, and the potential applications for such a unique phenomenon on the bioterrorism circuit were endless. Most of Ouroboros' bioweapons were the typical smash smash, kill kill type- tyrants, the Embryo, big mouths with lots of teeth, et cetera. But a creature like the daughters could be used for espionage, for assassinations, especially in warmer climates where they would be virtually unkillable.

And Dimitrescu herself would know all the details on how to make them. Sure, she'd resist. But once a technician cracked open her skull and put a restraining bolt on her brain? She would crumble like a sandcastle under a tidal wave.

As if on cue-

Footsteps echoed through the castle. Heavy as a tolling bell. The silence between each footstep was long, to say the least. The stride of a massive woman, somewhere in the maze of rooms and halls and vaults.

His pulse quickened. He always craved the beginning of each hunt, the moment when his vision narrowed and the cold bloodlust set in. And when his quarry was as powerful as the one he hunted now? All the better.

"She's in here," he said. "I can feel it."

He ran his hand over his rifle, the anti-mutant bullets chambered within, and the special bullets, too. Filled to the brim with the same suppressant they'd shot Heisenberg with.

"You want to take this one, boss?" another of his men said with a laugh.

Regan grinned. "Always."

He had to admit this place had presence. Antique wood, and austere stone, walls rising to distant vaulted ceilings glimmering with gilt and pagan iconography. Everywhere, even through the remnants of slime coating them, artworks gleamed or shone or glittered- priceless pottery, silver statuettes, portraits and landscapes painted by old masters.

He even recognized the work of the famed, reviled, heretic craftsman Norshteyn, a Russian madman who'd vanished sometime in the nineteenth century only to, according to a small book on a dais nearby, end up dying in this very village.

Imagine, Regan thought, with a droll shudder.

Castle Dimitrescu played host to them all, a place of stately decadence swathed in burgundy velvet and old-testament imagery. Shame it would all rot and fall to ruin after Ouroboros cleared its mistress out.

At last, his team entered a main hall, a grand staircase winding up, and up, and up toward a mezzanine high above.

Like a throat, he thought unbidden, eyeing the staircase. The gullet of some enormous beast. Echoes played off the parquet floor, up to the rafters that soared to cathedral heights far overhead. A beslimed, once-ornate chandelier floated in the darkness, long strings of calcified muck drifting in the keening draught.

There was no sign of Dimitrescu.

"Where is she?" one of his soldiers muttered.

"Quiet." Regan stood, and listened. Somewhere, echoing from the dark depths of the castle, he heard-

Was that music?

It was. A classical piece, devilish, sinister, and lush, played with abandon on a tinny old turntable. He recognized it after a few seconds. Saint-Saens. Danse Macabre.

Despite himself, a trickle of annoyance coursed through Regan's nerves. Did this creature think it could play with them?

He didn't have time for this.

"Lady Dimitrescu," he announced. "I know you can hear me. Just as I know you realize the gravity of the situation at hand. There's no need for further bloodshed, as I'm sure you'll agree. Your family is divided. Your siblings, if one can call them that, are already apprehended, or dead. You will be next, whether you resist or not."

He fell silent. The music played on. The dance of death. No matter who we are, the dance unites us all.

Dimitrescu did not appear.

Regan lifted his eyebrows, then unsheathed his combat knife and stabbed it deep into the white and gold porcelain of a large Art Nouveau urn standing nearby, decorated with a motif of dancing maidens.

The blade slid in to the hilt, right over one of the maidens' eyes. With a twist of his wrist, a wrenching crack, the urn shattered, the peal of its fragments against the stone parquet tiles clashing loud as gunfire through the castle. Echoes resounded, lapping on, and on, and on, until, at last, they trickled into silence.

Regan sheathed his knife, lifting his rifle once more, waiting for the first sign of movement, the first gleam of pallid flesh.

Silence. It really was silent, he realized.

The music was gone.

"Not long now," he whispered. Two of his men exchanged looks, rifles aimed outward, trained on all the exits and entrances.

From deep in the castle-

Footsteps.

Boom. Boom. Boom. They circled the hall, vibrating through the walls. They circled the team. The soldiers tightened up, closing ranks. The footsteps grew louder, louder, until it was impossible to tell from which direction they approached, until it sounded like their source should be right on top of them-

The footsteps stopped.

The sound faded.

The noise of the team's breathing filled the air, tight and raspy. Sweat glittered on brows. Even Regan felt the twitch of his tensed muscles; he gave himself a little shake.

Snap out of it. This was no different than any other hunt. No different than the other clever monsters he'd gibbed over the years.

"Hey," said one of the commandos, suddenly. "Where's Wilson?"

"Well, well, well."

The voice soared into the air. Rich, and low, and husky, it surrounded them like a snare, pooling in the corners, filling the great hall with its sultry lap and echo. Rifles cocked, swerving upward.

Regan's eyes snapped wide as he took in the thing at the top of the grand staircase.

Huge. Nine feet was putting it mildly. The gigantic woman overlooking his team had to stand closer to ten, a wonder of elegant poise and carnal muscle. She wore plate armor, ivory in the glow of their flashlights, her skin dead-white and spanned with delicate craquelure, the long waves of her black hair framing a face that should have been beautiful.

If not for her eyes, bright-gold and burning with hunger.

If not for her teeth, too large, too white, too exposed as she pulled back her crimson lips in a rictus grin.

"I thought I heard rats gnawing at my castle," Dimitrescu said, in that rich, intoxicating voice. Her eyes fell to the broken urn; she arched one fine black brow. "And what a rude passel of rats you are, too. You come here, into my home. Guests in my castle, under my welcoming hospitality. And you destroy my property. That. Cannot. Do."

She lifted one hand, black claws extending several feet from her fingertips, and licked dripping blood from their curve. Her entire arm glistened ruby, matted with fresh, thicker gore around the hand and claws.

Gore, and hair. Regan thought he had a good idea where Wilson had gone off to.

"You know how this ends, Dimitrescu," he called up to her.

Her tongue slid back between the trap of those too-white teeth, blood trickling down her chin. "I enjoyed your little speech," she went on, as if he hadn't spoken. "I do so love a wasted effort. So delectably melodramatic. I have but one critique of your performance, if you'll indulge me."

Her hand flicked down. With a slither like swords drawn, those claws arced free to their full length.

"There's always need for further bloodshed," she snarled.

The first bullet caught her in the shoulder; it deflected off her armor with a twang. The next sheared past her cheek, and for a moment, eyeing the wet black furrow it left in her flesh, Regan thought they had her.

But with a ripple, her skin flowed back together, and within seconds there was no mark on her face at all.

Dimitrescu began to laugh. Wild, shrieking laughter, still rich, still gorgeous. She climbed atop the balustrade and leapt off, hair trailing behind her, claws unsheathed. All of them. Regan threw himself to the side as she plummeted; stone split on impact, a choking cloud of dust erupting from the broken parquet floor.

In it, Regan made out Dimitrescu's form rising, lit stark by the flashlight beams, by the muzzle flash, by the spark of bullets off her armor.

"Fill her with lead!" Regan commanded, taking aim. "Don't let her regeneration kick in!"

Dimitrescu threw back her head with a fresh wave of laughter. "Oh, poor, naive little man-thing," she purred. "You almost make me feel bad for doing this."

She lunged. Her hand snapped around the arm and shoulder of one of Regan's soldiers; he let out a yell, trying to twist around, get a good angle to shoot her in the face, but with a mocking shake of her head, Dimitrescu's hand crunched down.

"Bad boy," she said, with a tsk. "I won't play nice anymore."

She heaved the soldier into the air, his legs pedaling at nothing, and grabbed his ankle. With a single wrenching, crackling, snarling movement, a twist of her muscular shoulders, her biceps straining against her armor, she ripped him in half.

Bone popped; flesh and pink-gray viscera trailed like ribbons as blood gouted over the floor. It caught Regan full in the face. He stood there, staring, his finger on the trigger as Dimitrescu flung the two halves of his commando aside.

Her claws slashed. Sparks burst into the air. Parts of guns, sliced like deli meat, rained to the cracked floor. Parts of soldiers followed them. Hands, heads, limbs like doll parts. She was a whirlwind of scything blades and red mist. The room became a rain of blood, Dimitrescu bathed in it.

She began to laugh again, glorious, magnificent, a nightmare in bone-white and wet crimson, her claws spread to either side like wings.

"Go on!" she cried. "Run! Run!"

Regan brought up his rifle and fired. Craters appeared in her exposed flesh, in her armor, but he might have used his bare hands for all the good it did.

The blood, he thought, somewhere past the high, numb whine his thoughts had become. The more blood she consumes...the more she stimulates her regeneration.

He'd walked in here with fuel on legs, each man a new source of strength for Lady Dimitrescu to gorge herself upon.

A new snack.

And he was next.

Oh, god.

His trigger clicked. Empty. He flung it aside and drew his combat knife, breathing hard as he rounded on Dimitrescu. Her claws had just slashed down. The last of his soldiers peeled apart, head smacking the bloody floor with a thunk seconds before the rest of him.

Languorously, with a mesmerizing shift of her hips, Lady Dimitrescu turned. She stood over Regan, lashes lowered as she looked him up and down.

"Don't suppose..." Regan panted. "You and I...can make a deal?"

Dimitrescu's lips formed a moue.

"So disappointing," she muttered. "Then again, aren't men always."

Regan heard the slice of blades in flesh a split-second before the pressure hit him. He blinked; he opened his mouth to choke a retort, something with a modicum of dignity. Blood bubbled over his chin, thick and dark. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't move.

He looked down at the four-foot blades impaling him, at Dimitrescu's hand sunk to the wrist in his chest cavity.

She ripped her hand free. In it, clutched in her claws, pulsed Regan's heart, steaming in the humid air. Claws retracting, she brought it to her face; her eyes fluttered shut, and she inhaled, deeply, with an expression of pure ecstasy.

Her lips parted. Her teeth sliced into Regan's heart, and with a twist of her head and three ravenous bites, she devoured it.

Sucking the remnants of his blood off her fingers, she smiled.

"Take comfort in this, man-thing," she said, as darkness rushed to enfold him, as Regan crumpled to the bloody floor. "You taste delicious."

***

Chris held Teodora's gaze.

Do you have any idea what they're really capable of? she'd said, and the words hung in the air, begging an answer.

"I guess I'll find out," Chris said.

He swung his legs over the side of the cot and heaved upright. His head spun, but he shook it off. Teodora sat, watching him, as he found his boots, his gear, and suited up again. He found his weapons in a chest by the cot, his semiautomatic and pistol, his karambit knife like a hooked claw. Teodora didn't stop him, not even when he opened the small wagon door and dropped to the mud and snow beyond.

The night gusted, the trees alongside the deeply-rutted forest track creaking under the weight of the blizzard. Around him trundled the procession of evacuating townsfolk. Walkers, trudging through the snow with heads bent and hands clasping their silver medals and bone charms. A few wagons, some like small houses same as the one he'd just exited, some loaded with supplies, children and the elderly perched on their backs with legs dangling.

Riders, too, mounted on shaggy horses, armed with old hunting rifles and War-era sidearms, knives and swords and short axes. They barely gave him a second look as he strode forward, searching the crowd for Hound Wolf Squad.

"Alpha!"

He looked round as Lobo and Tundra jogged up to him.

"Em," Chris said. "Charlie. All good?"

"Been worse." Tundra gave him the once-over. "Ice Queen in there let you out in one piece?"

"Yeah. Where's everyone else?"

Lobo nodded toward the front of the procession. "Keeping an eye on the lycans. They seem pretty occupied with the village, though. Guess they found enough to chew on."

"Right." Chris glanced around, saw an old man in a wagon, a few horses tied to the back. "Excuse me."

"Why do I get the feeling you're about to do something dumb?" Tundra called after him.

"'Scuse me. May I borrow one of them?" Chris pointed to the horses. The old man glanced at him, then muttered something in the local dialect and waved a hand.

Chris took that for a yes. Maybe Teodora had tipped her people off. He unhitched one of the horses, checked over the animal's tack, and led it to the roadside, just under one of the warding saint statues mounted atop a stone cairn.

He lifted his face to the mountains. Past the peaks, jagged against the clouds, he made out the faint firelit glow in the direction of the village. Rosemary was there. Ethan's remains. The Four Lords. And Ouroboros.

I can't stop now.

I can't.

"Boss," Tundra called. "You need backup?"

"No. Stay with these people. Make sure they get to safety."

"What about making sure you get to safety?"

He couldn't help but smile. "You worry too much, Em."

"Hey, it's what I do. We've got your back, Alpha. Always."

The horse nickered, nudging him with its nose. He stroked its braided mane, then swung up into the saddle, reining the horse around so they both faced the way back down the road.

Teodora blocked his path. She stood in her lycan-fur parka, rifle slung at her back, hands at her sides.

"You gonna stop me after all?" Chris called down.

"No," Teodora said. "You're a good man, Redfield. I know you are. And Rose respects you. Even I could see that."

Chris nodded, slowly, watching her with brow furrowed.

"Then what kind of good man are you gonna be?" Teodora asked.

Chris paused-

Then shook his head.

"I'll see you on the far side of the mountains, Balan," he said.

A hint of fanged smile. "I hope so. Saints walk with you, Redfield. Every long, dark step of the path."

She stepped out of the way. Chris set his heels to the horse's flanks, and with a jangle of harness they were off, headed back toward the village, toward the firelight reaching into the sky as if to devour the moon.

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saintsofwarding · 11 months

Text

WE SHALL BE MONSTERS

Header by @keltii-tea

Chapter 7: An Escape starts with E

They were on a fucking boat. Heisenberg figured it out eventually. It wasn't like he had an excess of experience with boats. He'd made a few prototypes to navigate the waterways and rivers that twined through and around the valley, of course, and during a long, cold winter of famine in the village he'd been driven to retrofit an old motorboat into a automatic fishing machine to strip the reservoir of any scabby old trout Moreau had left swimming.

It was that, or starve. He couldn't exactly eat metal.

And, of course, he'd spent a miserable couple weeks crossing the Atlantic onboard a cargo ship with Rose, smuggling them both from Europe to the sunny shores of the USA. That had been the second time they'd gone on the run from the BSAA, after Chris and company had tracked them down in Glasgow.

Whatever kind of ship he was on was significantly more high-tech than anything he'd been on before, but the slight, queasy pitch and sway of the room around him was the same, and that, plus a certain industrial quality to the architecture of the room, the handwheels that opened and closed the doors, the rumble that emanated from somewhere deep underfoot, told him everything he needed to know.

Mia came in a couple more times to grill him about the village. She would drag up a chair and sit down by the glass, picking away at that stupid tablet. Always, always, Regan and Cal accompanied her, rarely saying more than a few words at a time to Mia, like she wasn't even there.

"Best route of entry?" she asked him.

"Through the northeast pass. Doesn't get so snowed-in and all that."

"Will the lycans congregate there?"

"Lycans congregate wherever there's prey, buttercup. When they catch a whiff of us coming in they'll congregate wherever we are, too."

"Anything in particular that kills them quickly?"

"Lots and lots of bullets."

She'd lifted an eyebrow. "Anything else?"

"Slice off the head, blow a hole through the Cadou in the torso-" He'd awkwardly lifted a harnessed hand to tap the old suture scar running down his sternum, where his own Cadou had been implanted. "-Or the stomach."

He slid his fingers down. Mia followed the movement with her eyes, a slight crease between her dark brows.

"Or you could set 'em on fire," Heisenberg went on, with a shrug. "Or throw some acid on 'em. Or rip 'em to pieces. Whatever cranks your lever."

"You became something of an expert in Cadou implantation. You saw first-hand how a human body reacts to the parasite, didn't you? Studied it during your experiments with mechanizing those corpses?"

"That's right. Glad I have someone who'll acknowledge my fine and scholarly work."

"Do you anticipate the lycans will have developed mutations beyond those which have already been observed?"

"Fuck, Mia, you have all that written down or something?"

"Answer the question."

"Will the lycans have gotten scarier in the past fifteen years, grown more claws and fangs?" Heisenberg translated. "Probably."

Once, when he was a teenager- sort of, anyway; his growth had slowed and sped up in strange, unpredictable spurts- he thought he'd been about thirty at the time- Miranda had taken him down a long, torchlit corkscrew of stairs within the ancient stronghold to the southwest of the village, a Medieval ruin that had been the site of the last stand of a group of boyars against the local 'heretic' population.

He was still her favorite then. He hadn't yet outed himself as a disappointment like pitiful, power-tortured Moreau, or Alcina, with her constant hunger for human flesh. Miranda had realized how interested Heisenberg was in the way things worked, and liked to show off her various experiments to him, hoping, maybe, he might be cowed by her godlike command over the world around her.

At the bottom of the steps, ringed by their leaping shadows, Miranda showed him the pit full of lycans. They were different, though, to the ones she loosed in the woods, that kept the more intrepid villagers from wandering too far from the valley. These were a lot bigger. They'd begun to grow spikes of crystalline armor, extra toes, extra limbs, in some cases. Twisted and misshapen and deadly.

Heisenberg had lifted his eyebrows, impressed, when two began to fight, grappling and snarling until the larger of the two grabbed the other's head and shoulder and simply tore it in half like a wet paper towel. The rest of the pack had descended, ripping hungrily into the dead lycan, eating their fill before the meat began to crystallize.

"Miranda liked to control her monsters," he went on. "Liked to know what she was getting. She suppressed the lycans' mutation so her army wouldn't do anything too...unexpected."

There were exceptions, like Urias, like the varcolac, but they had a part to play in Miranda's army. "Left to their own devices..." He couldn't resist a feral smile. "Who knows what they'll have gotten up to."

Mia had nodded. Heisenberg sensed she wanted to ask more, but she didn't. He guessed she'd gotten to the end of her Ouroboros-sanctioned list.

"Very well," she said at last, finishing her notes. She rose from her chair.

"Mia," Heisenberg had said.

She paused.

"How much longer on the boat?"

"Not long," she'd told him, and then she was gone again.

So they were shipping him to the village. Romania was landlocked except for a pinky finger stuck out into the Black Sea, so they'd have to transfer him to something else to get them all into town. He supposed putting him onboard a ship was lower-risk than transporting him by plane. If he regained even a slight amount of control of his powers while in flight-

Well. Depressurization for everyone, and he'd be sitting pretty in the cockpit, levitating the whole thing down to wherever he wanted. A ship was less easy to take total control over, and if it sank, he drowned just as easy as anyone else.

Heisenberg had had a long time to think about the possibilities. Would he rather drown than lead Ouroboros to the village? To Ethan's remains? To strip-mine the place and the dead man and unleash horrors, all to make a fistful of lei?

At one time or another, he'd have said yes without hesitation. Fuck these fuckers; killing them and himself in a go would be a perfect middle finger to anyone who thought they could meddle with monsters and come out on top.

Now?

He thought of Rose. Her eyes blue-white, reflecting his lightning. The tears streaking silver down her face as she made herself be brave. He remembered her last embrace, monster smashing up everything around them, her hugging him so tight he couldn't breathe and all he could think, over his ingrained bloodlust, over his need to go murder that monster bitch so hard it turned to soup, was that he didn't want her to let go.

Damn you, Karl, he told himself. You're going softer than a corpse in a well.

Guess he was gonna have to get out of this alive or something.

***

The downside, of course, to not flying him to Romania, to keeping him awake so that Mia could interrogate him about the village, was that he could do a lot of thinking. Ouroboros was confident, and for good reason; this harness he was trapped in was a nightmare, a masochist's dream of needles and aching spine, his body forced to stand for days on end.

But he'd spent most of his life in mental captivity. Compared to Miranda controlling his mind, Ouroboros controlling his body was nothing.

He just needed an opportunity.

Now, Mia had been gone for a couple days- by his estimate, anyway. He counted the shift rotations of researchers in the room, counted his own heartbeats. Every so often the twins, Regan and Cal, entered the room. They never spoke to him, never did more than stand before the enclosure, whispering to one another as they looked him over.

And, of course, there was dinnertime.

He needed his mouth and throat unobscured so he could do his talking. That precluded a feeding tube or some shit. A silent scientist came in twice a day to shove protein supplement, tasteless and textured like spam, down his throat. He'd had worse, and the whole maneuver meant that the enclosure had to unseal. It meant it had to open fairly easily, a panel in the glass sliding down into the dais to allow access.

Don't want to make things too complicated, after all. That wasn't good business.

He'd already had his breakfast spam, so when the unlucky bitch assigned to feed him tonight unlocked the cage with a palm pressed to a scanner on the glass and stepped into the flooding brightness of the enclosure, Heisenberg grinned.

"What's for dinner, sweetheart?" he asked her.

She gave him a flat look from under the visor of her protective headgear, a rebreather situation with the Ouroboros serpent emblazoned on the big, cylindrical filters. A tray in her hands held cakes of the pinkish stuff.

"What do you say you sit down with me, have a nice candlelit chat? Make for a good change of pace. Then I can string you up and gut you and turn you into a soldat. You know what a soldat is, right, sweetheart? Surely you've heard of my little home ec projects from once upon a time..."

"This will all be over a lot faster if you stop talking," the scientist said.

"Yeah, but I'm enjoying getting to know you."

"Do not-"

"Come to think of it, I have a lot I want to say."

"What?" She paused with a spongy little cake of protein supplement in hand, eyes narrowed in suspicion.

"Where's Mia Winters, anyway? I want to talk to her."

"...Why?"

"I have some information about the village. It's important." He grinned. "Very important."

"And why didn't you relay this before?"

"It's been fifteen years. Mind like a steel trap, but..." He shrugged. "Some of the finer details slip through the teeth."

The researcher dropped the protein supplement back to the tray with a meaty smack. She turned and left the enclosure, sealing the panel back up on her way out.

"Tell her to hurry it up!" Heisenberg yelled after her. "I might forget again!" He half-expected she would never show up. He closed his eyes, trying to slip into a half-doze, trying to get away, for a second, from the ache of the lights in his unprotected eyes.

But then there came the tap of footsteps, and Heisenberg jerked his head up and opened his eyes in time to see Mia hurry up the steps, onto the dais.

"Aw, I didn't wake you up, did I?" he said.

"Cut the bullshit, Heisenberg." Her usually-sleek hair was mussed, her face clean of makeup, exposing the bruised circles under her eyes. Little chance he'd actually woken her. She looked like she hadn't gotten any proper sleep for years. "What is it?"

"I have information. About the village? You're gonna want to know this."

She edged closer to the glass. "So tell me."

Heisenberg lowered his voice, tilting his head toward her. "It's about Ethan."

Her mouth trembled. Her fingers curled to her palms.

"So tell me," she said again.

"Do you ever wonder, late at night, exactly how he died?"

Her eyes went cold. She pushed back from the glass. "I climbed all the way up here from ops for this?" she muttered.

"No, no, you'll want to hear what I have to say." He leaned in. "Listen, Mia. I was there. I saw it. The moment the light left...well, it didn't really leave his eyes, did it, if they turned to crystal- look, you get what I mean."

She did. She'd stopped, and now stood rigid, unblinking.

"Looked like it hurt," Heisenberg went on. "Guess you know that, though, don't you? Why you cracked after I took Rose right from under your nose and you couldn't do a thing to stop me? I could've eaten that kid for all you could do. They sang that about me back in the village, y'know. Hunter, flesh-eater, blood in the snow. Real gory stuff. When Ethan died- ooh, that wasn't pretty, either. He was already beat-up by Miranda. Soon got worse."

"Wait." She faced the glass again. "Already beat-up by...you mean...he survived fighting against Miranda? He was...he was alive after..."

"Sure." He lowered his voice so it was just him and Mia. "But not for long."

"You killed him," Mia whispered.

She rounded on him, rounded on the glass. Her whole body shook. "You killed him," she repeated. "Didn't you?"

"I don't like loose ends." All he needed was to get her inside the glass. Come on, Winters. Work with me, here. "And Ethan...well. Freak like him, figured it would be best to put him out of his misery-"

Her fist cracked onto the glass. Now the mask was gone, crumbled away. Her face was radiant with rage. The others in the room had stopped; Heisenberg saw a few of them whispering worriedly to one another. One of the doctors hurried from the room, speaking into one of those wrist-mounted control devices.

Shit. He didn't have long.

"You say another word and I'll fry what's left of your brain with necrotoxin," Mia snarled.

"Ah-ah, sweetheart, you do that and those two babysitters of yours won't be happy."

"You're...you're lying about-" Her words got all tangled. He saw her take a breath, try again. "Ethan- he would see right through someone like you- he was good, he was truly good, he would never- he was too smart, too-"

"He was stupid enough to trust me and my bargain. Stupid enough to trust I didn't want little Rose's power all to myself. In the end, he couldn't protect her. And if he couldn't, what makes you think you possibly could?"

He saw her snap. Saw the moment her eyes went blank. She slid her hand over the scanner and shouldered her way through the doorway before it was fully open. An alarm went off; "Winters!" yelled a voice from somewhere in the observation room.

Mia didn't slow; she marched up to Heisenberg, pulling a sleek black pistol from her waistband and jamming it hard into his eye.

Heisenberg laughed. Mia's breath hissed through her teeth; damn, she really did smell amazing. She grabbed a fistful of his hair and wrenched his head back, his spine crackling painfully at his head's special new angle.

"I don't care what they do," Mia snarled. "I don't care- I'll find him myself if it means I can watch the back of your head burst open-"

"Sorry, sweetheart," Heisenberg said. "That'll have to wait."

With a sickening pop, he cracked his thumb free of the joint. Mia's head jerked down at the sound. Too slow. Heisenberg grabbed the necrotoxin injector at his neck and ripped it free, the three-inch needle glistening in the fluorescent light as it exited his jugular vein.

In the same movement he flipped Mia, crushing her back against him and slipping the needle up to her neck. Her gun scraped off his eyeball and went wide before she could so much as fire, leaving what felt like a big 'ol gash in his eye socket on its way out.

With his power, he pulled the weapon from her hand and into his back pocket. Just in case. Could always use some scrap metal in a pinch.

Blood pulsed from the puncture wound on his throat, but the necrotoxin injector was gone, it was fucking gone; his power surged back, wild and heady, crackling through his nerves like it had missed him.

"Nobody fucking move!" he roared at the room, the chaos that had erupted beyond. "Who wants to see what happens when I inject a shitload of necrotoxin into a non-mutated body? I sure as fuck do!"

Mia gave a violent twitch in his arms at the words non-mutated body. Interesting. Heisenberg tightened his grip on her.

"I wouldn't, sweetheart," he told her. With his other hand he tore loose the rest of the harness, ripping the sensors that led under his skin and to his electric organs out with a grimace. "Ugh...my hand might slip, and...oops."

He pushed her from the cell. The darkness of the room beyond fell over him, thick and welcoming as a blanket. The ache in his eyes eased as he strode through the room, researchers scrambling out of the way.

"We have a breach, I repeat, we have a breach," a woman in a lab coat was stammering into a radio. "Iron Horse is out of containment-"

"Iron Horse?" Heisenberg scoffed. "Really?" The radio burst in a spray of plastic and metal. He shoved Mia on.

Outside, the shipboard corridor was alive with the blare of alarms, the white walls floodlit red. The usual. From down one corridor, Heisenberg heard the tromp of heavy boots. With a slash of his hand, pipes tore themselves free from the walls and snaked into a tangle over the corridor, forming a barrier against the oncoming meatheads.

"This place have a helipad?" he asked Mia.

"Fuck- you-"

"Later, sweetheart! That's why we need a helicopter." He yanked her on as bullets rattled against the pipe barrier. The sound they made, the echo of it in the backs of his teeth, the song of metal that was the rhythm of his entire being- it was different, somehow, strange.

Huh.

His inquisitive mind longed to stick around, see what Ouroboros had cooked up for its soldiers, but his rational mind won out.

"Up it is!" he yelled. He scrambled up a narrow ladder toward a hatch-like door above as orders rang down the oncoming hallway. The hatch burst open, its locking mechanism breaking with a twang and spray of lightning; electricity crackled as wind blasted through the narrow doorway, icy and flecked with snow, stinging against Heisenberg's face.

He muscled him and Mia through the door and onto the deck of a ship beyond.

He was right. It was a weighty science vessel, like something polar researchers might bust out to go look at bears in the Arctic or some shit. Rain and snow coursed down in frigid gusts, soaking Heisenberg and Mia; the deck rolled beneath Heisenberg's feet, the entire ship thrown on massive swells, the entire sea storm-gray and seamed with whitecaps. He couldn't even make out the sky; the mist swirled, low and opaque.

Bullets rattled. Mia gave a short scream as Heisenberg ducked and twisted, sheltering her with his body, bringing an arm up to slash the bullets from the air. White slashed across his calf; shit, he'd missed one. He searched the deck amidst the shouts of the approaching Ouroboros commandos. There.

Beautiful.

A small, sleek helicopter was lashed to the upper deck, its blades shedding streams of rain.

You're mine, baby.

Mia gave a sudden, violent twist in his arms, a move he thought for a moment was a desperate, last-ditch hail-Mary effort to get free. Then her leg hooked around his calf, and she threw all her weight down. His boot skidded from the deck; he was off-balance even before she brought her knee up and slammed it hard below the belt.

Heisenberg's vision went white. He doubled over, coughing, eyes streaming. Mia stood over him, her hands in fists.

One blurred; he barely jerked out of the way before it took his jaw off.

"Shit," he panted. "You've got moves-"

"Want to see more?" She lashed out with one foot, a devastating kick that should have knocked him down and let her pummel him bloody. Heisenberg shoved backward. The strike whipped past him. Mia was on her feet and ready to spring again without a second of lost momentum.

"I said I'd kill you," Heisenberg yelled, before she could strike. "And I'll kill you, sure as I'm Karl M Heisenberg."

Mia's look of rage could have sparked a forest fire. "What the fuck," she yelled, her hand already closing into a fist, "does the M stand for?"

"Misdirection!" Heisenberg said.

He flicked his hand as Mia made a scathing sound and geared up to punch his lights out. The gun intercepted her first, a blur of dark metal. It smashed into the side of her head with such force she snapped backward, going down hard to the soaked deck.

"See ya, Mia," Heisenberg said.

He stepped over her body and hurried toward the helicopter. His pace slowed as he neared it. Those two babysitters of yours won't be happy, he'd said, and meant it.

What would Ouroboros do to Mia if he left her here, with them?

This was her last chance, he understood. She'd fucked up the Embryo project on purpose to give Ouroboros a reason to go after Ethan.

Would they lock her up?

Would they do to her what Miranda had done?

"Fuck," Heisenberg growled.

He turned around and jogged back as a squad of black-suited commandos rushed toward them. Heisenberg glanced up as he ran, then sent a slash of his power skyward.

The radio tower atop the ship's bridge snapped with a screech of breaking metal and came crashing down, felled like a tree.

Shouts filled the air, men scattering like haulers before an explosion. It crashed to the deck with a cataclysmic clangor and broke apart, shards of metal spinning in all directions. Electricity arced over the remains as Heisenberg bent down and heaved Mia over his shoulders in an ungainly fireman's carry. His bullet wound seared; blood spattered the deck, swirling in the rainwater.

"Guess that's not goodbye, after all," he told Mia, then broke out again in a flat-out run toward the helicopter. She jounced against his back. Was she dead? He sort of hoped not, if only to prove his newest hypothesis correct.

He ducked into the helicopter's shadow, flicking the doors open with a jerk of his head. Looked simple enough inside. He'd figure it out on the way.

A gunshot rang through the rain.

Heisenberg stumbled. It had kicked him right in the center back. Right through the Cadou. That meant he had about forty seconds before he started to die.

Well, he thought. Sorry, Rosie.

He blinked; there was no pain.

Ah, fuck, fuck, fuck.

He swung Mia into his arms. A bullet wound gaped in her chest, spurting dark blood. Her eyelids fluttered, her lips parted, her wet hair stuck in mats to her rapidly-paling skin. Heisenberg looked up. Through the rain stood a massive figure, a wisp of smoke curling from his rifle barrel. The light gleamed off his wet blond hair.

Regan.

"Did I get her?" he called. "Sorry about that, Winters. No hard feelings."

He lifted the rifle for another shot.

Heisenberg heaved Mia into the helicopter, then clambered in after her, sliding the doors shut; the rifle shot cratered the door, leaving a massive inverse dent from Heisenberg's perspective. Heisenberg powered up the machine, then sliced his hand down. The cables lashing the chopper onto the deck snapped with a twang as the rotors began to whine.

"Now it's your turn," Heisenberg growled.

The remains of the radio tower rose into the air; he clenched his teeth at the effort, at the pain in his leg blurring his concentration. The helicopter lifted off with a lurch as the metal fragments churned in midair, faster and faster, men diving for cover, Regan a solitary calm figure in the chaos.

The fragments exploded outward, bolts of lightning crackling to meet the surface of the sea. The mist swirled over the ship's deck.

Heisenberg didn't wait around to see what happened. As long as they were all dead, he didn't particularly care.

***

There were some clothes in the back of the helicopter- emergency gear, Heisenberg guessed. Amongst them was a new shirt and, miraculously, a trench coat. Heisenberg pulled it on, then, maintaining a grip on the controls with his power, went to have a look at Mia.

She lay sprawled in the tight seating area at the back of the helicopter. The blood had made a decent-sized pool under her. Regan's bullet hadn't gone all the way through her- no exit wound. Heisenberg crouched by her side and gripped her head by the jaw, lolling it back toward him.

"Are ya dead, Mia?" he made her say, working her jaw like a puppet.

He let her go and straightened.

If she wasn't dead already, she should be soon. That was a lot of blood. Heisenberg sniffed, then got out her gun and ejected the magazine. He gave one of the bullets a little tap. Bigger and heavier than usual, and on each one was engraved a tiny Ouroboros serpent. There seemed to be some kind of liquid inside; he sloshed it next to his ear, listening to the sound.

So Ouroboros had been developing anti-BOW weaponry. Smart, considering where their mission had taken them. Whatever was in these bullets- necrotoxin, silver nitrate, holy water- Heisenberg didn't want them anywhere near him.

He settled back into the pilot's seat, kicking one tanker boot up onto the control panel. Misty clouds whipped at the cockpit window, leaving trails of ice on the thick glass. The temperature in here was glacial; below, Heisenberg glimpsed snowy mountains, great tracts of forest, huge dark lakes.

He was well on his way home. A few War-era charts and maps he'd dug up from the graves of dead soldiers around the junkyard had allowed him to figure out the location of the village, geographically speaking, and he thought he'd managed to steer the helicopter right so far.

Miranda would have punished him if she'd found them, but luckily she didn't seem to have a taste for the War dead, and Heisenberg had been the only ones since their funerals to disturb their graves. He remembered the pre-hauler days when he'd done all his dirty work himself, dowsing for the dead by sending his awareness down into the soil, hunting for fillings or dog tags like a human metal detector.

Like a swine, Alcina had said, languorously exhaling a cloud of blue smoke from her perfect red lips as he trudged back toward the factory. She'd been sitting on her veranda, smoking, sucking on cordials filled not with cherry syrup, but human blood. Rooting in the dirt.

He'd grinned up at her. Looking for truffles. He opened his carrying-sack, showing her the mass of mummified limbs and bones within. Want some?

He ached as much now as he had after long nights of digging, hacking at the frozen earth with shovel and pickax until, like an archaeologist spotting the gleam of gold within the black loam, he'd uncovered the shape of a curled form, sometimes skeletal, sometimes leather-fleshed, preserved by the cold for untold decades.

Such excitement, such a windfall. Until, of course, he'd cottoned on that the more recent dead, enclosed in their village graves, might prove easier pickings and better subjects.

Subjects. Apt. He winced as he prodded at his healing bullet-gash on his leg, then settled back, staring out the windows at the clouds.

Back to the village, huh.

Back to where it all started.

He thought he'd never return. Fuck that place, fuck it into the dirt. And it had gone up in smoke, and in flames, and he'd walked out of there on frozen feet with Rose in tow and now-

Gotta stop 'em, he thought. Get Winters before Ouroboros. Can't let them at him. Maybe murder them all. Yeah, that would show them.

Then-

Go get Rose, and start running again.

It sounded so easy. And it would be easy, he told himself. It was the same thing he'd told himself all the long years of work that ended in Miranda's death. And he'd succeeded then, right? He'd done what he promised. He'd avenged himself, avenged everyone Miranda had hurt. His life had become his own.

But he still couldn't rest.

Rose won't run with you this time, a small voice said. A child's voice, a boy scared of the dark. She'll leave you all alone. Whatever peace you thought you'd buy with Rose, little Karl, died a long, long time ago.

"Fuck that," Heisenberg growled, but nothing answered him.

That is, until a scream split the air, and Mia Winters launched herself from the floor and onto him like a rabid animal.

Metal flashed; something jabbed into Heisenberg's arm. He smacked his elbow into Mia's sternum, flinging her back.

With a groan, Heisenberg rose; an empty needle dangled from his arm.

"What..." he said.

"Misdirection," Mia hissed.

Heisenberg's vision flashed. The world rolled. Necrotoxin? Ah, shit-

"Wha' you do-"

The helicopter lurched under them as his control over it slipped. Mia's eyes sprang wide; she scrambled for the controls as the ground swooped upward.

The last Heisenberg saw before the darkness closed over his vision was her grabbing at the joysticks, her hand slipping off them, torn away by the g-forces of the helicopter beginning its final descent.

***

A small silver helicopter plunged from the clouds, skidded off a mountainside in a spray of gravel and snow, bounced, then plunged again. It hit the treeline hard, rotors screaming through wood and rocks, bent and twisted by the time the helicopter slewed and slowed and came at last to a halt.

A final judder-

Then nothing. The world went still again.

There was a beat.

Then Heisenberg kicked out the windshield. He stared at his surroundings: the snowy mountainside, the trees. Taking a deep breath, he said, with feeling-

"Fuck."

#re8 fanfiction #saints of warding #re8 fic #karl heisenberg #rosemary winters #mia winters #mother miranda #re8 oc #resident evil village #resident evil #ethan winters #chapter 7

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