A green nightmare

Bursting into the office was a humanoid creature with green vines all over its body. A blood red tentacle came out from its mouth, and two more from the palms of its hands. With three tentacles it was holding the lower half of a corpse, sucking the fluids from it. The moment it noticed Claire, it threw away the half corpse and retracted all of its tentacles, and screamed at her.

“Ahhhhhh!”

It was such a high pitched scream that Claire couldn’t help but cover her ears. Shortly after, all three tentacles came out again. This time Claire could see that the end of the three tentacles looked like human mouths and when they opened, each of them revealed a pair of ivory fangs, still dripping blood.

“Jesus...What are you?” Claire uncomfortably shivered when she saw the tentacles and fangs.

With another scream, it shot all its tentacles at Claire, however all missed due to her backing up in time. Survival instinct warned her that this thing was also some creature infected with this vampire virus. If she was not careful enough and was bitten by those tentacles, she would be infected, too. Thinking of this, she tried to keep distance while firing when the creature was relentlessly approaching.

However, bullets were barely effective as piercing its head wasn’t fatal to it, and even large-caliber bullets were not enough to cut its tentacles. Just when she was thinking about firing the flame round at the creature with the grenade launcher, she did not realize that the police officer vampire has resurrected and attacked her from the side. She was caught off balance and fell to the ground.

“Get the hell off me!” She tried her best to hold the vampire back and, when there was enough space, blasted his head again. However, the vampire collapsed on top of her, making her difficult to escape the creature’s attack range this time.

The creature struck again with all its tentacles, but hit the officer instead of Claire, as she deliberately hid beneath him. The creature retracted the tentacles along with the vampire to feed on its body fluids, which actually gave her a chance to get up and escape. After it threw away the drained officer, Claire has already aimed at it with the grenade launcher.

“Taste this!” She pulled the trigger and, with a shrill sound, the flame round landed on the creature and set it on fire.

It screamed in horrible pain as all of its tentacles were burnt to ashes and the green vines covering its body were suffering from the same fate. In a few seconds it basically turned into a pile of cinders and fell to the ground. Claire breathed heavily and wiped the sweat on her forehead cause by the heat. Whatever that creature was, she hoped that this was the end of it here.

Not only the fire igniting all the documents on the desks and slowly burning the office down was bad, but the noise of the explosive attracting all the monsters in the courtyard was even worse. One of them punched on the window and successfully broke it. Vampires were climbing through the window into the fire scene, but she didn’t want to stay and see the outcome.

She left the office from the east side and circled all the way back to the west side. There she noticed that something was slipping out of the trouser pocket of the lower half corpse the creature dumped. With curiosity, she carefully took it out and found out it was a photo of a padlock, of which the unlock code was “CAP”, hanging on a wardrobe somewhere. This could be useful, she thought, and put it in her own pocket.

The vampires that broke in the office started to search for prey and, despite seeing Claire just outside the room, none of them even tried to get past the fire to get her, which made her suspect that they were actually afraid of fire as they couldn’t resurrected from a pile of ash. If she could find more flame rounds for the grenade launcher, perhaps she could destroy them once and for all.

That said, now she must leave before they circled around. She ran to the end of the hallway, put the fuse into the panel and pressed the button. The shutter was slowly opening and, when she saw the warm light coming from the gap below, for the first time tonight she felt that she could finally be safe. When there was enough space, she couldn’t wait but bend over and walk through.

But there was no one in the main hall. No police officers, no survivors, only the light. The smile on her face froze, and it was at this moment that she feared all hope was lost. After closing the shutter behind her, she walked to the chair behind the reception desk to take a rest and blankly stared at the typewriter in front of her.

So the police station has really fallen, right? Chris...where are you? Claire wondered. If he were still here - if he were still alive, this would be a good time for him to show up and give her a hug. With their parents tragically gone, the sibling always supported each other through the difficult times. She remembered every time when she failed in her training and wanted to give up, Chris would always come by her side, encourage her to try again and never give up. You’re right, Chris, she sighed with a helpless smile.

Yeah, this isn’t the time to give up. She promised to Leon that they would both make it out alive. She would not like to be the one to break the promise, so she took a deep breath and stood up again.

Thoughts ran through her mind but there was still one lead left - the S.T.A.R.S. office. Chris might have left some clues about this incident or where he went there. She used the terminal computer to check the map of the police station and located the office. It was on the second floor, west wing.

She collected herself and, once again, marched in the dead space.