Sunlight shone into the building through the aqua blue glass of the windows, giving the stairways a blueish sheen. Ravens infected with the T-Virus circled in the air outside, cawing, on the lookout for something they could eat.
The entire city was dead silent. Humans were nowhere to be found. They'd been gone for many, many years. All the zombies hibernating out there were waiting for the day when some out-of-luck human happened to wander onto their turf.
Zhang Heng's eyes were heavy with exhaustion. Eight hours. He had been in this strung-up, high-energy state for eight whole hours, moving silently without making a sound. He was exhausted in both body and mind.
He had reached the 30th floor by then and was less than 30 floors away from the 53rd floor, where the data room was located. He left a trail of bodies behind him—all belonging to the zombies he killed with one thrust each while they were still sleeping.
He had no idea just how many zombies he had gotten rid of along his way. He counted the zombies he killed at the very start, but as the number of zombies killed climbed over a hundred, he eventually found it too tiring to keep counting.
Furthermore, that was just the number of zombies he killed along the stairways of the building. If he were to go out of his way and clear even those in the offices, he could have cleaned the whole place for a week and still not be done.
"I guess I'll just call it a day."
Zhang Heng shook his dizzy head and rubbed some more black blood from the zombies on his body, as he made his way downstairs slowly, the putrid stench following him down the stairs.
He had yet to run into a licker so far, making him think that maybe they had all left the building. Their movement capabilities far exceeded that of the usual zombies, after all, which meant that they could go out to hunt elsewhere and there was no need to hole up in that building, waiting for humans to fall into their lap.
He crawled back into the steel cabinet as soon as he made it back to the security room safely. Then he took out his cup of noodles and bottle of mineral water, which he had refrained from eating so far, and wolfed them both down. He ate the noodles raw, washing them down with the mineral water. He finished eating the last piece of dried noodles in a matter of minutes.
He looked at the half-full bottle of mineral water and an empty cup and swore to himself that he would definitely bring more food on his next mission, before closing his eyes wearily.
He slept through the night without dreaming.
He woke up at eight in the morning the next day. Technically speaking, he was woken by his own hunger, as his stomach kept growling. He had no choice but to light a cigarette and began smoking. Although he claimed that he could do without food but not without cigarettes, he nonetheless found that when he was truly starving, cigarettes really did little to ease his hunger all the same.
Zhang Heng snuffed the cigarette butt out hard when he finished smoking and then went back to cleaning the stairways of the Umbrella building.
Lucky for him, he found fewer and fewer zombies as he went higher and higher. It only took him until noon to reach the data room on the 53rd floor.
Being a massive business empire, he knew well that the data rooms of Umbrella buildings would be anything but small, but he never expected the data room to take up the entire floor. The door on the 53rd floor had a threefold lock consisting of password input, fingerprint sensor, and retina scanner. There was also a line written in English at the top of the door, "Keep Out. Authorized Personnel Only."
"Oh sh**. What do I do now?"
He was completely stumped; he had overlooked the possibility of the data room still being locked in all his plans. Furthermore, the metal door of the data room looked like something from a bank vault, and he knew right away that the door wasn't something he could just break open through sheer violence.
"Yurianne, get you're a** out here right now!" Zhang Heng was flustered and contacted the AI support system of the Dimensional Star right away.
"Gosh, how rude. I'm taking my nap back there, you know." A 2D animated little girl in flowery pajamas appeared on his cornea, rubbing her eyes.
"To hell with your nap! Explain right now what the hell this is!" He berated her in a very worked-up tone. There was no way he could go in and take the data regarding the T-Virus from the data room if he couldn't even open the door, after all.
Yurianne shot him a condescending look—the kind one would use to look at idiots—and said slowly, "Did Yurianne ever say anything about the mission objective being in the data room?"
"You b**ch!" Zhang Heng almost passed out from what he just heard, wondering if he had wasted two days doing nothing of use.
"Okay, calm down. Calm down now!"
He took a deep breath and pulled himself away from the verge of utter despair and began thinking. He realized that not all his work had gone to waste, as the T-Virus sample would be found in the laboratory on the 54th floor, which meant that he would have needed to clear the zombies along the stairways all the same. That thought made him feel a little better. But, then again, he quickly began to wonder just where he would get the data regarding the T-Virus if he still couldn't open the door to the data room.
"Wait, that's it!"
A thought came to mind all of a sudden. If a viral outbreak were to take place all of a sudden in this city, what would the researchers do first thing?
He knew that none of them would have fled right away. Being members of the upper echelon of the Umbrella Corporation, ditching the company right away would be tantamount to a general fleeing a battlefield. They would have to face the wrath of their superiors if they were to do that. As such, the first thought that went to the minds of those people at the outbreak of the crisis would definitely be salvaging all valuable data from the place before fleeing.
That meant that the possibility of all that data not being in the data room was extremely high.
He turned his gaze to the ceiling right away after figuring that much out and made his way at once to the 54th floor.
The higher the floors, the fewer zombies. The first thought that came to the common folks during the outbreak would have been to run downstairs, which was why the number of zombies grew increasingly thin as he made his way to higher floors. That theory of his proved true, as he was unable to find even a single zombie on the last several floors at the top after all.
The pathway between the 53rd and 54th, as such, should be clean, following that logic.
However, he was utterly startled when he made it to a turning point at the stairs. He saw a pile of ragged, torn pieces of dead bodies before him in the center of the stairway.
Those bodies were all dried and shriveled up, with flesh and bones all mixed up and exposed to the air for over a decade, and eventually reduced to a pile of blackened dried meat cakes. But his heart began pounding hard against his chest as soon as he saw that pile of dried flesh.
Common zombies would have eaten their quarry down to the bones. They definitely didn't have what it took to squash a person down and reduce them to a pile of goo. Not even an army of zombies could have done something like this.
As such, he knew very well who or what the culprit that caused this grisly scene must have been.
He took a deep breath and slowed his footsteps down, making his way to the topmost floor as cautiously as he could.
The stairways had a winding design to them. One could see what the next floor would look like once they made it past the halfway mark of the stairway. His tension eased a little bit after seeing the door to the laboratory wide open.
It was fortunate for him that the laboratory on the 54th floor remained unlocked. He wouldn't have known what else to do otherwise.
However, he held his breath after taking two or three more steps on the stairs. Something straight out of his nightmares was lying not far away from the door to the laboratory, blocking his path.
He could see through the half-closed door that the thing was about three meters long with claws about a meter long each extending from its forelimbs. The creature was a crimson red color all over, making it look like some flayed monster without any skin on it at all.
All that was exposed to the air was its very well-developed muscles, which pulsed as it breathed.
There was nothing like eyes or ears on the creature's head. There was only a mouth taking up almost all of the area of its face. Its ferocious appearance made it seem like something that would have only appeared in nightmares.
It was a licker.
Zhang Heng's heart beat as furiously as it was able to. That building indeed had monsters that had been completely out of his sight.
If zombies were like animals that moved only according to instinct, then a licker would be a king among such animals. While both the lickers and the zombies were humans before they mutated, their combat prowess was worlds apart. Zombies were humans infected by the virus and defective products left over when said humans died. The lickers, on the other hand, had been people who were injected with the T-Virus solution directly when they were still alive and then nurtured in specialized incubators to be made into biological weapons.
Compared to the disgusting-looking zombies, which couldn't actually fight all that well, the lickers were no doubt dozens, even hundreds of times more hazardous.
That licker was sleeping at the moment, lying on its belly before the door of the messed-up laboratory, with its head resting on its forelimbs. It chose to go into sleep mode like all the other zombies just to conserve energy when it couldn't find any other humans to eat. There was something that looked like an incubator behind it, as well as a window that had been completely destroyed.
That boxy instrument was probably the place where the licker had been nurtured, while that hole where the window had been was the entrance and exit that it used for hunting outside.
"Goddamn you, Umbrella! You people actually nurtured lickers in the middle of a city? No wonder humans almost went extinct in this world then."
He stood before the door of the laboratory, terrified. He was at a loss of what to do with that licker, which was over a dozen meters long, right before him. He looked at the dagger in his hand and then back at that monster from nightmares, unable to bring himself to believe that he could kill that monster with a cheap dagger that only cost him dozens of yuan.
His eyes widened at that thought. "Wait a minute. It's impossible to kill the licker, sure. But do I actually have to fight and kill that thing in the first place? Couldn't I just distract it and lure it away?"
A plan started to form in his mind at the thought. He slowly moved out of the 54th floor and went back to the 52nd. He didn't stay in the lobby of the 52nd floor and instead picked an office randomly, carefully making his way inside.
The office was in utter shambles. Huge stacks of papers were piled on the desks, but there were no zombies inside. He looked at the hardware on the table and found four desktop computers.
That should do it.
Zhang Heng narrowed his eyes and began making plans. He opened the window without hesitation and threw all four desktop computers outside as quickly as he was able to.
Bang, bang, bang, bang!
The noise of the four impacts, not that loud on their own but definitely not stifled, was heard almost immediately. The noise traveled far and wide in that dead, silent city. He then closed the window right away and hid himself behind the wall, before peering out the window cautiously.
It took only about half a minute for him to see four or five zombies scurrying out of the dark corners, making their way to the four shattered computers, limping. More zombies appeared from even farther places, yet there was still no sight of that licker.
Just when he was wondering if the licker had actually heard anything, a dark silhouette of a huge creature dashed right outside the window, moving so fast it was a complete blur.
Zhang Heng almost shouted out loud at the sight of that creature. Furthermore, that licker actually made his way down past the very window he was standing behind moments ago. It was fortunate that he remembered that lickers were capable of scaling walls, so he shut the window as soon as he caused the commotion. He would have completely exposed himself in an instant otherwise.
With the licker gone from the laboratory, he bolted all the way to the topmost floor without any hesitation. That licker in the laboratory was indeed gone, and he went into the laboratory of about three to four hundred square meters in size without a moment's hesitation, rummaging through whatever was in the place.