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Chapter 121 – ResidentialAlex pulled out an energy bar and ate the whole thing before she dropped back down. She had a feeling she was going to be burning a lot more energy over the next several hours. Especially if human-level zaps weren’t enough on these zombies.
Jill was waiting at the front doors. She had one door open, and she was halfway out the door.
Alex landed just as Jill checked the outside once more and then turned to check the inside again. Jill looked over at her and said, “Still clear, inside and outside. That was pretty fast.”
Alex said, “Let’s walk.” Not that she was walking. She was about eight feet above the ground.
She led Jill a hundred feet from the doors and said, “We’ll have reinforcements meeting us in the entry hall in a little under thirty minutes. That should give us enough time to search the whole ground floor and the balcony above the entry hall. My people think there may be underground areas, too, and they’ve come up with a few names. The Umbrella Corporation and virologist William Birkin.”
Jill said, “Everyone around here knows Umbrella. They’re huge, at least for the Midwest. They’re employing thousands of people. They’re in pharmaceuticals, construction, and a bunch of other stuff, a pretty diverse package, and they’ve got some powerful families backing them. The whole Spencer family’s big into Umbrella. I mean, I think Old Man Spencer — like the Spencer Mansion we’re outside of — is the chairman of the board. Birkin though … Never heard of him.”
Alex told her, “The important part for him may be his job. If he’s a virologist and he’s in on this, too, then this may be a virus that does this to people. And dogs. And spiders. Although the spiders may be the fault of Maggie Walsh, because I’ve run into that with her before.”
Jill shuddered. “Maggie Walsh plus insane virus manufacturers? No, thanks. So what do you think they’re up to? Creating a plague only they have the anti-virus for, so they can make billions of bucks selling antivirals?”
Alex frowned. “No, I think they’re trying to create something that would wipe out pretty much every person on this continent.”
Jill gaped. “That would be crazy! They’d die, too.”
Alex disagreed, “Maybe not. You Orphans have altered DNA. This may be something that will kill every person who gets exposed — or worse — but you and Wesker are probably immune to it.”
Jill pointed at her. “And you.”
Alex said, “Not me. I’m not an Orphan. I’m probably not safe from this stuff. But I’m harder to injure than most people.”
Jill snorted. “Well, yeah. Anyone who can fly and shoot lightning bolts is not ‘most people’. And we saw a report on that giant spider. If you could take that, you can stop these things.”
Alex didn’t tell her that Terawatt hadn’t ‘taken’ the giant spider, and that there were plenty of things she couldn’t stop, and that Wesker was probably going to unleash some really horrible things to try to kill her.
Alex didn’t like the idea of hurting people, and she really didn’t want to kill anyone, but if these people had been turned into flesh-eating monsters by a deadly virus, there probably wasn’t any hope for them. Not without Willow-level magic, which totally didn’t exist here.
She needed to talk to Lieutenant Marshall or Dr. Lee. If she killed a monster and then it turned out that there was an antidote and someone could have turned the monster back into a normal guy again, she’d never forgive herself. She didn’t think the Alex she liked being could survive if Terawatt turned into a murderer.
Okay, the things that were lumbering around didn’t look like anything that could ever be human again. Things that were missing chunks of skin and parts of their faces and didn’t seem to have human brains anymore? She’d rather be dead than be like that.
Alex said, “I’d like for you to be safe. If you go with me, you might have to face more zombie-dogs or more zombies or maybe even more of those spiders. If you stay here, you might have to deal with stuff coming this way.”
Jill frowned in thought. “I think I’d just slow you down. You can fly around those things faster than they can move. I’ll hold the entry hall against anything that comes this way.”
Alex thought that was a good idea, because if Jill was along Alex would have to defend her. Or Jill would have to shoot everything, even if it was a person who could be saved with a cure someday.
Alex grabbed the map and went back into the art room, locking the door behind her to give Jill a little protection. She flew down the L-shaped hall, trying to ignore more spiders crawling on the floor. Then she opened the door into the hall with all the turns.
A hideous thing came around a corner and spotted her. It was some kind of massive half-man half-reptile thing that looked like Maggie Walsh had spliced a human with a velociraptor and a frog. It leapt right at her.
She went silvery and hit it right in the face with a big burst of lightning. It dropped and didn’t get back up.
She wondered if Maggie really had done something like splicing frog and dinosaur DNA into a person. Maggie could have done it. She had the skills, and the DNA sources, and the total lack of conscience.
Alex checked the boiler room, which had a few more of the muto-dogs, and a bathroom, which was gross, and she skipped the trap room, even though she used her TK to yank the hinge pins out of the door and push the door out of its frame, just in case someone else stumbled into the trap. She hastily searched the back rooms, finding nothing useful. Just some more zombies, who she decided were too slow to bother with, and some more of the jumping frog-things, and some more muto-dogs. She shocked the frog-things and stayed up near the ceiling to avoid everything else.
She cut back by way of the gallery and the dressing room. There were almost a dozen huge crow-things that she fried when they came after her, because there was no way she wanted flying contaminated things spreading this stuff around Iowa.
When she came back into the entry hall through the dressing room, she locked the door behind her, just to protect anyone in the entry hall from more monsters.
Jill was walking around with her gun in her hand, trying to get looks up onto the second floor. “All clear, but I thought I heard something up there.”
Alex jetted straight up and glanced around at the open balconies overlooking the entry hall, but didn’t see anything creepy. She dropped back down and said, “There are worse things. And more zombies and dogs and stuff. If you see something that looks like it’s part frog and part human and part T-rex, shoot it before it can leap at you.”
“Great,” Jill groaned sardonically. “I’ll keep an eye out for that. And other fun.”
Alex checked the map again, and went to the other half of the ground level. She flew over or around the slow zombies, but she had to fry the leaping frog-things. She found a diary in a bedroom. That diary was totally disturbing. They were experimenting on people and animals, and doing deranged stuff with viruses. And Alex totally didn’t believe the virus release was accidental, like the diary writer thought.
Then she searched the rest of the main level. She found a magneto-optical disk she couldn’t read without a computer. And too many zombies, frog-things, and big spiders. Plus, in the greenhouse room, a huge, creepy plant-thing with tentacles that would have been a real threat if she couldn’t fly and go silvery. She also took a few minutes to fly down the elevator shaft and look through the basement, which wasn’t that big. She figured the secret underground lab stuff was more likely to be under the new building or under the heliport or maybe under the garden area.
She flew back to the entry hall. Jill was still on duty and okay. Alex handed her the diary and lied, “I haven’t read it yet. Hang onto it and I’m going to check the upstairs quick before … our time limit.”
“Got it,” Jill nodded.
Alex flew up to the balconies around the entry hall. Right or left? There didn’t seem to be any way to choose. She went to the right. There were two doors, so she started with the right-hand one. The one with the weird-shaped box sitting on the floor next to it. The door opened out onto a small second-floor terrace with a S.T.A.R.S. officer and some of those creepy crows. She leapt into the air and zapped every one of the crows so they couldn’t get away and do bad stuff. Then she flew back to the terrace.
Ick. It looked like the S.T.A.R.S. guy had been horribly injured, and then had died while being pecked to death by the crows. She reached out with her TK and felt his chest. His heart was beating, but not in anything like a normal heartbeat. Maybe he was still alive. There was a hefty rifle there that Alex figured would be good for Jill to have. She drifted closer and used her TK to pull the rifle toward her.
Holy crud, it was a bazooka! What were these guys doing with a bazooka? And why didn’t they have a better grenade launcher, like an M203?
“Uuhhrr!”
“Crud!” He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t a ‘he’ anymore. He was one of the virus-infected things now.
She darted off the terrace and hovered well out of his reach.
“Uuhhrr!”
“Can you understand me? Are you still conscious? If you can’t speak anymore, lift your arms over your head.”
“Uuhhrr!” It just reached out for her and took another step, even though it was walking right into the railing of the terrace. It didn’t seem to have any intelligence anymore. Even something as dumb as a snake would have enough sense not to walk off the edge of a cliff.
She tried again. “I can’t help you if you can’t try to communicate. Just do something to let me know you’re not a mindless monster. Please!”
“Uuhhrr!”
It was hopeless. She flew around to the far end of the terrace and let the thing move toward her. Then she darted back around to the terrace door and locked the thing out on the terrace. That was when she noticed the case sitting right there on the floor was actually ammo for the bazooka she was now toting around. What kind of dimwit leaves dangerous ammo just lying around? This made like no sense at all to her.
She dropped back down to the entry hall and handed Jill the bazooka and the case of ammo. Then she went back to the other upstairs door on the right.
It opened onto a narrow hall. She flew over a zombie and zapped a frog-thing. The hall was C-shaped and had a bunch of doors. She started with the first one. That led through a passageway into what looked like a creepy old wooden attic.
She heard a massive slithering sound and an enormous hiss.
She went silvery and darted up to the ceiling, where she ducked around a big beam.
And the biggest snake in the world came out of a hole in the wall and made for her.
Holy crud, it was enormous. It had to be fifty feet long and seven feet thick. It was freakily multi-colored, like it had been painted by schoolchildren for a carnival. It had fangs that made the giant spider babies look like sissies. And it probably could go into other parts of the mansion through those holes in the walls, so she couldn’t leave it loose.
It hissed nastily and lifted its massive head. The head turned from side to side, seeking prey … and it locked onto her.
Crud. She hadn’t thought about being warm, but lots of snakes could ‘see’ in infrared, so she was easy to spot in a cold attic. She totally needed to use her science lessons more.
It came after her, even though she was up near the ceiling. She waited, telling herself she was calm and she had things under control.
It lunged at her. She nearly yelped in terror and surprise. It was fast. Really fast. And it had huge fangs. If she hadn’t been waiting for it to attack her, she would have been in heaps of trouble. She darted straight up and flattened herself against the ceiling behind the beam, and it missed her by a good six feet.
She dropped onto the back of its head and molded her silvery form over its crown until she covered its eyes, too. It smashed head-first into a wall, hurting itself and nearly knocking her loose.
She gave it a massive shock from one eyeball to the other. It writhed twice and then went limp. She checked with her TK, and she could feel its heart wasn’t beating anymore.
Now she just had to hope the virus these whackos had created didn’t turn this thing into a fifty-foot zombie super-snake. Ugh.
Okay, she didn’t really believe in the dead-bodies-magically-brought-back-to-life-by-evil-stuff kind of zombies, like in other-Willow’s universe. She was figuring these things were something worse. She was figuring these things were real, still-live humans who got turned into carnivorous, sub-human things because of a creepy virus that only insano badguys would even think about creating.
Every door on the floor was either unlocked, or else she could unlock it with her TK. Every zombie she just flew around. Every frog-thing she zapped. Every bucket-sized spider or muto-dog she just flew past. So it only took a few minutes to explore the whole upstairs. She needed longer to eat three of her energy bars than it took to fly through the rest of the upstairs. She searched the place pretty quickly, unlocking everything with her TK, yanking open drawers with her TK just in case there was anything nasty in them, and looking down from the ceiling for stuff on top of things, plus puddling across the floors to peek underneath furniture just in case there was something taped under a desk or a couch.
She found a corpse, a will, a scrapbook, and secret orders. The corpse was obviously another Bravo Team guy, because he was still in his uniform. The will made her feel sick, because a guy was writing it while he knew he was slowly turning into one of the zombie-things. The scrapbook made her feel even sicker, because someone had known about the dogs and the zombies, and had been collecting news articles about the havoc they were wreaking instead of telling the police what was going on! The orders made her want to punch someone right in his sunglasses, because they were telling the ‘head of the security department’ to set this whole thing up to let Alpha Team and Bravo Team have to fight these things to the death for somebody’s research. And the only person who could have gotten the S.T.A.R.S. teams here like this was Albert Wesker. And whoever sent the message had obviously gone to the Maggie Walsh University Of Evil Science.
Oh, crud, it might even have come from Maggie herself.
Okay, it wasn’t pompous and wordy enough to be from Maggie, because Alex had waded through some of Maggie’s papers, and that woman had an enormous ego, and the vocabulary to match. The word ‘sesquipedalian’ came to mind. Yay, SAT words!
She checked her tPhone and she still had a few minutes. That was good. She didn’t want to be late. She flew back to where Jill was guarding the entry hall with that bazooka. She left the scrapbook and the will with Jill, but she kept the orders folded up in her fanny-pack along with that M-O disk, just in case it turned out Jill wasn’t really trustworthy.
There was a knock on the front doors. “Ding dong, Avon calling!” She’d recognize that particular snarky voice anywhere.
Jill looked over at Alex and gave her a raised eyebrow. Alex nodded. “Yeah, it’s my group. Expect excessive snark from the colonel.”
“The colonel?” Jill asked in surprise.
Alex used her TK to pull open the front doors, and Team One moved in, using really good teamwork to check the area for threats while still covering their six and also keeping an eye on the possible Orphan who was standing there holding a bazooka.
Alex pointed them all out. “Colonel O’Neill, Major Finn, Sergeant Scott, Sergeant Walters, Action Girl, Klar. This is Officer Jill Valentine, S.T.A.R.S.”
Jill glanced at each of them, although she stopped and stared longer at Riley. Okay, he was way too handsome, so maybe Jill was doing the ‘ooh he is so hot’ thing, or maybe she was spotting him as a probable Orphan. But Jill definitely stared at Action Girl, and she sort of freaked at Klar, who was totally invisible except for an earjack and a shoulder bag floating in mid-air.
Alex looked over at Klar and said, “I hope you’re armed, because I have no idea how many of these things hunt by scent instead of sight.”
Klar said, “Colonel O’Neill and Major Finn already thought about that.”
And a huge Ruger Blackhawk floated up out of his bag. Yikes.
Alex just warned him, “Well, be ready with it, because some of these things are fast. Especially the man-frog-raptor things that look like Walsh designed ’em.”
Jack gave it a ‘sitcom’ voice. “Oh, that Wacky Maggie!”
Jill snarked, “I take it you’re not her biggest fans.”
“She is my arch-enemy,” Hanna said in an icy voice. “I would very much like to have the chance to tell her what I think of her … work.”
“Whoa.” Jill just about took a step backward. “I didn’t mean to press any hot buttons.”
Jack cheerfully announced, “Well, this time we have virologists doing creepy stuff instead of geneticists and biochemists, so we have a whole new set of fun problems.” He looked over at Alex and added, “And we have exciting crises going on around us.”
Riley explained, “The National Guard troops we requested have a large square of the forest surrounded, only one brigade sent a scout team into the cordoned area against orders, and they ran into half a dozen of your zombie Dobermans and … over-reacted.”
Jack cut in, “On the bright side, none of them got bitten or exposed to anything.”
Riley continued, “On the down side, one of the Guardsmen dealt with the threat with a flamethrower, and things got out of hand. Now we have a forest fire moving this way.”
Alex tried not to sound nervous as she asked, “How big a fire, and how fast?”
Jack scowled. “Too big to stop, except with firebreaks on the back side that they cut using several Vipers to blast the trees over. And fast enough that we only have a few hours before it sweeps through here. But that means we would have to worry about the fire driving infected critters out of the area and across several states.”
Alex looked at the unhappy expression on his face, and she asked, “Jack, what did you do?”
He admitted, “I ordered the other Guard units to do the same thing all around the perimeter. Nothing’s going to get driven away to infect other areas, because the whole perimeter is one big fireline by now, with firebreaks on the back sides, and a big fiery square closing in on us So we have Captain Eddings in the chopper on this helipad, and he’ll stay until the fire closes in enough that he loses visibility, at which point he leaves. With or without us. Unless there are large underground lab areas with sealed HVAC, the only survivor would be you.”
Jill squawked, “But we have to find the rest of Alpha Team and Bravo Team! Barry and Rebecca and Chris are in here somewhere. We can’t leave ’em!”
Alex told everyone, “I already searched the entire mansion including the basement. No one alive. But there’s a dead Bravo Team guy in the hall over there where he got eaten by one of these zombies, and there’s a Bravo Team guy upstairs on the terrace. He didn’t quite die.”
Jill stared in horror. “He … didn’t quite die?”
Alex explained, “He’s already a zombie-thing. That diary suggests this should take days, but obviously it can be a lot faster. So we really can’t let anything get out of here.”
Jack tried, “And when you mean anything …”
“I mean anything,” Alex insisted. “Guys that are now like zombies. Dogs that are now zombie attack dogs. Infected crows that I zapped every time I saw one. Spiders the size of dogs. A thing that might have started out as a bunch of water plants in a fountain but now it’s a tentacled monstrosity that can reach most of the greenhouse. And a fifty-foot snake.”
Jack muttered, “Oh, that Wacky Maggie.”
Riley asked, “A fifty-foot snake?”
Alex nodded. “A carnival-colored fifty-foot snake that could swallow a polar bear without even trying.”
Jack snarked, “And thank you for that lovely mental image.”
Alex added, “I also found evidence we can use to put most of Umbrella behind bars.”
“Eggggggcellent.” Jack addressed the group. “Okay, boys and girls, let’s get going. With no comms, we’re going to run with two teams: Terawatt plus Action Girl, and everyone else following within visual distance. Tera, you lead. You’ve got the best idea of the layout, the best infiltration capability, and the fastest movement.”
Jill added, “Plus she can check in places no one else can. Like in a vase on top of a life-sized sculpture on a pedestal in the art room.”
Alex said, “Jill’s good with lockpicks and demolitions, so she can get into all kinds of places.”
Jack smiled broadly. “Oh, I think there might be a few people around here who can do that kind of jazz.”
Oh, yeah. Jack was supposed to be a Spec Ops whiz when he was younger. He was probably pretty awesome on lock-picking and explosions and stuff. And some things Alex totally didn’t want to think about that made him into the kind of officer who could say ‘we have to burn the whole forest even if I have people in the middle of it.’
Okay, he was the kind of officer who could say ‘we have to burn the forest even though I have people in there, so I’m going in after them despite the forest fire we can’t stop and unknown numbers of monsters in there.’
For that matter, what was wrong with her that she thought it was a really good idea? There were cute birds and furry woodland creatures and stuff like that, and they were all going to die. Only, if there wasn’t this fire, they’d die way more horribly when they got infected by this mega-creepy virus.
She wasn’t sure she was going to be able to look herself in the face once this op was over. She was thinking about wiping out a forest of cute, furry animals. She was thinking about killing zombie-guys who maybe could be saved by some super-brilliant scientist. She wasn’t thinking like Alex Mack anymore. The thought scared the tar out of her. She didn’t want to become the kind of person who would say ‘why don’t you just shoot him.’
And she was in a creepy old mansion with a secret lair and tons of mega-creepy monsters, all in the middle of a huge forest fire. That hardly even sounded real. It sounded like a really stupid plot for a SciFi Channel Original Movie with a name like ‘Monster Virus-Snake!!’ with extra exclamation marks for dopiness points.
Maybe ‘Venom Versus Virus!’ or ‘Virusnake!’
Jack pointed toward the back of the mansion, where the garden and the new building were. Alex figured the secret stuff was going to have to be under one of the two. Or under the heliport, because who needed a heliport at an old mansion? In Iowa?
But getting to the garden by herself wasn’t the same as getting to the garden with a team of regular people. Even if she was talking about two Orphans, Action Girl, Klar, and Jack O’Neill. Okay, she was taking two highly trained military guys who were the cream of the crop and putting them at the bottom of her list, because she knew Sergeant Scott and Sergeant Walters were pretty darn impressive, too.
She led her team through the gallery and out the door into the gardens. She had to use her TK to pop the lock, but it wasn’t that hard. All the crows in the whole room were already fried, so she wasn’t worried about anyone getting pecked and infected.
Jack looked at the dead birds and snarked, “Crow. It’s what’s for dinner.”
Alex thought about telling him that if she tattled on him to Willow about his smarty-pants-ness, he’d be eating crow for sure. She didn’t.
As soon as they stepped outside, more of those creepy dogs were on them. Not that the dogs had much of a chance against Hanna and two Orphans. The three of them blasted both dogs before Alex had the chance to hurl a lightning bolt.
Jack calmly ordered, “Let’s take turns firing, instead of emptying our weapons. Fastest reaction times first, so Action Girl, then Finn, then Valentine, then Scott, me, Walters, and Klar last. Anything Tera blasts, don’t shoot it unless it gets back up. And double taps or three-shot groupings, please.”
“Yes, sir,” Riley said for the group.
They moved through some rusty gates and had to shoot a couple more of the zombie dogs. They got to a pond or swimming pool that had some nasty-looking snakes swimming in it.
Jack muttered, “Cottonmouths. Great.”
Riley suggested, “Sir, they could be infected, too.”
Jack looked over to the side and asked, “Tera, can you move that sluice gate? That oughta drain this thing and let us get to the far walkway.” Another snake dropped to the far path and slithered into the water. “And you may need to sweep those snakes off the path for us.”
Alex nodded. “Can do.” The sluice gate had a big crank part that was missing the crank, but that was no problem for her. She just grabbed the cylinder with her TK and rotated it half a dozen times. The gate moved, and the pond emptied, sucking the swimming snakes out with the water.
While the team leapt down onto a walkway that would have been way underwater, and they rushed across to the far side, Alex used her spare TK to sweep up every snake she saw and toss them all over the brick wall. Then they dashed along the path.
Two snakes dropped down in front of the group and were instantly very sorry, because Hanna had her bat-grapple guns along in thigh-holsters. She used one grapple and thirty feet of line like she was a ninja chain-fighter. She whirled the grapple around and hurled it forward. It sliced one snake in half. Then she snapped the line back, pulled the grapple into a tight circle over her head, and let fly once more. She smacked the second snake off the walkway and maybe forty feet through the air into a wall.
Ouch. Alex had never thought she’d feel sorry for snakes. Especially not after running into that giant super-snake upstairs.
There was an open elevator there that obviously went down a level. Alex flew down under it and zapped the two zombie dogs that were just waiting to surprise anyone coming down in the thing. She swung open another set of rusty gates and zapped another pair of muto-dogs. She called out, “All clear! For now!”
She heard footsteps clanging onto the metal elevator floor, and the elevator buzzed as the motor lowered it. Hanna came swinging down the shaft around the elevator, using her bat-grapple without bothering to fire the gun-part. The rest of the team was crowded onto the small platform.
“Well, what have we here?” Jack grinned. “If it isn’t the ever-popular underground evil lair. I love a badguy who respects the clichés. I’ll bet the air ducts are big enough to crawl through, too.”
They went into what was probably once just a gatehouse or servants’ quarters a long time ago, but now was definitely a lot more than that. There was a hole in the floor, and when Alex flew over it, a massive tentacle-like vine came snaking upward, trying to snag her. And the end of the vine had something like fangs. If she’d just been walking along, she would have been in real trouble.
Hanna put a three-shot grouping into the vine, but that didn’t stop it. So Hanna just darted over to a big statue on a pedestal and shoved the whole thing across the floor until it covered the hole and sliced through the vine-thing.
Jack calmly nodded Hanna’s way. “Sweet. Okay, let’s watch for holes in the floor, walls, and ceilings, because we’ve got something else dangerous in here with us.”
Alex and Hanna did the room-to-room searches ahead of the rest of the team, with Alex unlocking doors and flying through, while Hanna moved into the doorways and provided heavy weapons support if needed. The door on the right had more bazooka ammo for Jill, even if Alex couldn’t imagine why unless Wesker was playing some sort of sick game. The door on the left had a few zombies that Hanna headshot before Alex could even tell her the things were too slow to bother with. The door straight ahead had a couple of dog-sized spiders that Alex didn’t tell Hanna not to shoot. There was a turn and one more door.
That led into an L-shaped hall and more doors. One door led into a big room with a huge beehive. As soon as the bees started pouring out and Alex saw the bees were like ten times too big for normal bees, she shoved Hanna back through the door and slammed it shut.
She went silvery and began blasting everything in the room with lightning. She set fire to the beehive and electrocuted everything that was flying around. The bees tried to attack her, but she was a silvery blob and she smacked anything that got near her with a TK flyswatter. It took her a good minute or two, but soon there was nothing in there that wasn’t a squashed bee or an electrocuted bee or a roasted shell of a beehive. And a key. Who the heck thought putting a key next to that beehive was a good idea?
She opened the door and announced, “All clear.”
Jack moved in and knelt down over a couple of the crushed giant bees. “Where, O death, is thy sting?”
Riley staunchly said, “1 Corinthians, 15:55.”
Jack smiled. “Finn, why am I not surprised you knew that?”
Alex frowned at him. “It wouldn’t have been funny if you’d walked in here with me.” She checked the other doors off the room. One room full of weird drugs and chemicals that Jack had Riley look through. One room with a zombie-filled bathroom. And …
“Oh, crud.” Alex stared at the writhing plant-thing in the other room. It was huge. It was maybe twenty feet high and as wide as the whole room and covered in those creepy vine-tentacles, and it had some kind of massive root system that went down to a room below.
It lashed out with its tentacles, and Alex could see that each tentacle had a mouth-like part on the end. The ‘mouths’ were full of sharp teeth and looked really hungry. She zapped each of the tentacles that came at them, and those tentacles all dropped dead or retreated. But that left a ton of undamaged vine-tentacles waving around.
Jack calmly said, “Valentine, feel like trying out some of that free ammo for your grenade launcher?”
Jill stood just outside the room and fired at the giant plant monster. The grenade went through the branches and exploded against the back wall. The plant lashed out furiously at the entire room, and Alex slammed the door closed.
Jack just said, “Welp, now we know where that tentacle came from.”
Alex said, “There’s a lot more of it downstairs. If we have to explore the area below us, we might have a problem.”
Smirking, Jack said, “Well, I might have a problem, but I think a flying, blasting, shapeshifting superheroine might not.”
She rolled her eyes at him. They moved out into the L-shaped corridor and Alex used her TK to unlock the last door. There was another room with notes that Jack scooped up, and a bathroom that had yet another zombie-guy. And, since Alex was flying well above the floor, she spotted the hidden door behind the bookcase. Hanna and Riley had no trouble dragging it away from the wall, and everyone could see there was a ladder going down to the floor below.
Jack ordered, “AG, back her up. Finn, take up station at the base of the ladder for support. All of you, feel free to yell for help.”
Alex flew down the shaft, while Hanna grabbed the sides of the ladder and just slid down after her. They moved down a corridor that had a huge gap full of water. Alex flew over it, and Hanna jumped it. Then they got to the door.
The basement was half-flooded with water, and there was no telling how many of that monster plant’s vines might be snaking around under the surface.
Alex insisted, “You stay here.”
Hanna naturally argued. “It is only water. It is not even deep enough that I would have to swim.”
Alex told her, “Hanna, this is what ‘fear’ is for. We know there’s a giant man-eating plant in here. We know it has tentacle-y vines with mouths and teeth and stuff that are all through this place. It would be dumb to assume none of the vines are down here. And … Oh, crud!”
Alex darted up to the ceiling as the massive shape scythed through the water and the huge jaws came up out of the water after her.