Resident Evil Legends Part Two - The Arklay Outbreak

by Andreas Leachim

  Chapter 42

  Enrico was in water up to his knees. It was crystal clear and surprisingly warm, and if Enrico decided to walk down the small set of stairs off the elevated platform he was standing on, it would be up to his chest. The room was at least fifty feet square, with a ceiling almost that high. The center of the huge room was dominated by a gigantic water tank with glass walls and a twenty-foot wide hole in the side. Enrico didn’t know what caused it, but something ruptured the tank and filled the huge room with over four feet of water.

  He had discovered an elevator in a back room of the guard house and made his way underground, unsure of what he would find. He supposed he could have barricaded himself in one of the rooms and tried to wait out the storm, but he was not the kind of person to stand around and wait when there was investigating to be done. And so he used the elevator, and found himself in an extensive underground laboratory.

  The platform ran around one side of the room to a separate room at the other end. Some kind of control room or observation room, Enrico guessed. He walked along the platform and looked out into the deeper water in the center of the room. And that’s when he noticed the fins emerging from the water.

  Sharks. Enrico was no expert on ocean life, but he had seen enough movies to know what sharks were. At least three of them swam around the room, now free from the water tank. One of them swam close by, but it sensed the railing between it and Enrico, and left him alone.

  He was so preoccupied with the sharks that he didn’t realize there was a zombie coming toward him until it moaned hungrily. He flinched and had his pistol out in a heartbeat. The zombie wore a white lab coat and gray slacks, sloshing in the knee-deep water, and shuffled spastically toward him. Enrico put a bullet in its head and it fell over backward, splashing into the water.

  As he walked over the floating body, he saw the Umbrella identification badge clipped to the front of its lab coat. Like all the other zombies, this one was an Umbrella employee. Enrico wondered if any of them had ever suspected that one day, they would become victims of their own experiments. He felt sorry for them because of the bad choices they made. But he felt no sympathy now. The people who worked here were all dead.

  He made his way to the control room and saw two computer banks with six screens apiece, showing views that at one time would have been of the inside of the tanks. There were dials and knobs for adjusting things like temperature and chemical content of the tanks, and a whole row of other levers and switches that Enrico could not even guess the function of.

  A clipboard hanging above one of the consoles was stuffed full of papers. Enrico took it and flipped through them. Status reports and related documents, all emblazoned with the Umbrella logo. They listed dates and times, project and experiment numbers, and other notations and abbreviations that Enrico didn’t know. He was about to set it down when something at the bottom of one of the sheets caught his eye. He flipped back to it and saw the signature on the bottom, on the line labeled “Supervisor.”

  It was one he recognized immediately, because it was written on the bottom of many reports and documents Enrico had filled out himself.

  It was Wesker’s signature. There could be no mistake.

  Enrico was so confused by what he saw that he just stood there staring at it for what felt like half an hour. What in the world was Wesker’s name doing at the bottom of these papers? It was so incredible that Enrico was completely clueless. If Wesker signed them, it meant that he was the supervisor in charge of the experiment. But that made no sense. It made less sense than anything Enrico had ever heard of.

  Wesker wasn’t a scientist, he was a police officer. Enrico had known him for years. The thought of him being somehow involved in Umbrella was simply unbelievable. But it was his signature on papers, Enrico was sure of it.

  He set the clipboard down and leaned against the computer console, finding that his heart was racing and he had to catch his breath. He thought about everything he knew about Wesker, and gradually accepted that it wasn’t much. He had known him for close to a decade, it was true, but Wesker was not the sort of person to volunteer information about his private life. Enrico knew that Wesker was a solitary person and left it at that. Wesker never told, so Enrico never asked.

  But was it possible? Could Wesker possibly be involved in this? If he worked for Umbrella, that meant he had been living a double life all these years. As insane as it sounded, Enrico found that there was nothing about Wesker that discounted the possibility. Wesker was single and very secretive about his private life. It resulted in several rumors over the years, dealing with everything from his family background to his sexual orientation. But if there was anyone who could have pulled off a double life, it was Wesker.

  No one really knew what Wesker did outside of work. No one had ever seen where he lived. No one really knew anything about him, and Enrico knew he worked hard to keep it that way. Chief Irons always defended him and backed him up, which usually was fine as far as Enrico was concerned, since Wesker had proved himself a skilled and valuable police officer many times over the years. But every once and awhile, it seemed as if something was up. And no one could really forget just how fast Wesker had climbed the ranks within the department. Gradually, Enrico began to see a pattern.

  Despite all of Wesker’s personality flaws, Enrico always respected him as a fellow officer, and as a person as well. But know, he began to wonder just what Wesker had been involved in.

  And if Wesker had gotten them all involved in it as well.