By: Vharala
“You got my back?”
Claire nodded, cocking her 9mm handgun and taking aim down the long, barely lit hallway as Jill, her fellow survivor, advanced with shotgun in hand. They were taking no chances.
It had been a long, perilous night for the duo of Claire Redfield and Jill Valentine. Both of them had endured the living hell that was Raccoon City; fighting through swathes of the living dead to final one another and come together now in the heart of the city’s resident evil – the secret Umbrella Corporation facility buried deep underground. Their ordeals left them covered in blood, sweat, and grime. They were tired. Exhaustion was setting in, but they couldn’t give up just yet. They were close. A cure for the zombie outbreak had to be around here somewhere.
Ahead, Jill waved for Claire to move up. A sealed door blocked the path forward. Jill busied herself with a terminal and got it open, unveiling the devastation within.
Jill, with her STARS experience backing her up, recognized the room immediately as a decontamination chamber. It was intended to sterilize anyone passing through, but a few germs should be the least of its concerns at present when, piled around the sides of the chamber, were the bodies of at least a dozen lab personnel; ragged, bloody, and abandoned to rot. Claire trained her gun on them.
“What the hell happened here?”
Until now, Jill had imagined that Umbrella was locked up nice and safe as Raccoon City burned around them. But no. However the T-virus got out, the people here obviously weren’t able to control it. Jill kicked one of the corpses to ensure that it stayed dead.
“It doesn’t matter.” She answered. “Let’s keep moving. If we’re in decontamination, the main lab must be just ahead.”
Jill’s instincts were right. The next room was exactly what they’d expect from a lab owned by a corporation responsible for unleashing the worst biohazard incident in history. Emergency lighting gave view to an environment filled with monstrous specimens floating in glass chambers. They were a mess of corrupted limbs, massive eyes, and exposed musculature. Some were even more horrifying than the nightmares the girls had already faced. Claire kept her eye on them as Jill scanned the surroundings. Microscopes, petri dishes, and.... Yes! Cold storage! Jill hurried over to another terminal to review their inventory.
The index of Umbrella’s resources was vast. Jill tried to make sense of it, parsing through the many technical terms, searching for anything related to the T-virus.
“Uh, Jill?” Claire sounded worried. “Can we hurry this up? I’m pretty sure this one looked at me.”
Claire’s words brought a prickling sensation to the back of Jill’s neck. She sped up, scrolling through the results until, at last, she found what she was looking for: the T-virus anti-serum. If she was reading things correctly, it was stored just to her left in a refrigerated drawer. Jill wasted no time in locating it. The drawer pulled out without any further security requirement, but where Jill expected one vial, there were instead two. Which one was it?
Just as Jill reached out, a cry came from behind her that was followed by the crash of glass, the spilling of water, and the sound of hulking flesh slapping against the floor. Gunshots rang out. Jill was out of time. She grabbed one of the vials at random, but before she could secure the second one, the monstrosity was upon her. She rolled out of the way just in time, but the drawer and its contents were crushed beneath the weight of the enormous clawed arm that came slamming down upon it.
Jill sincerely hoped that whatever was in that vial, she wouldn’t need it. A purple gas rose from its shattered remains, but even amidst her choking on its fumes, Jill was more concerned with the mutated beast bearing down on her, growling with confused rage. Claire, trying to get its attention, fired off a few 9mm rounds that were about as effective as tapping it on the shoulder. It’s roar rained spittle across the floor.
“Claire!” Jill yelled, backing up as fast as she could. “We need to go. Now!”
There was no argument, only the sound of coughing and continued gunfire as the two bid the lab a hasty retreat. The creature was between them and the way they’d came, so their only option was to head deeper into the facility and hope to find another way out further in.
A silver lining in delving deeper was that the Umbrella architects had not taken giant abominations into account when designing the place. The creature’s angered pounding upon the lab door went on long into the distance. Jill didn’t stop running until she’d put a safe distance between them. Only then did she stop Claire and check the vial she was holding.
“Is that it?” Claire sounded worried. “The cure?”
Jill rolled the vial over in her hand. On the back was the serial code AT1521-TAS. TAS? T-virus anti-serum? Yes! That matched what she saw in the index.
“We got it.” Jill let out a deep sigh.
The STARS agent, awake for almost thirty hours by this point, allowed herself a moment to sink against the wall, vial clutched to her chest. Her relief was short lived.
A cramp, sharp and stabbing, waylaid her gut with a sudden, unprovoked intensity. She doubled over. Claire was about to ask what was wrong when she too felt it; the feeling of a clenched fist squeezing her guts. Both women, survivors of an unspeakable horror, fell prey to this new, invisible enemy, clutching at their stomachs with strained looks upon their faces.
“What is this...?” Claire groaned through gritted teeth. “Hhph! I feel like I’ve gotta-”
BBBBBBBBLLLLRRRRBBBBBTTTTT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Claire looked mortified. A ripper, loud and bubbly, blew out of her jeans with an explosive, almost worrying crackle of flatulence. Her hands shot to her backside. She wasn’t wet, thankfully, but that smell.... Ugh! Jill would have said something if not for the fact that her dignity was about to be just as soiled.
PPLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLUUUUUUURRRRRPPPHHHHTTTT!!!!!!!!!
Being backed up against the wall was a mistake. Jill’s fart reverberated off it, making it sound louder, wetter, and just as embarrassing as it felt. All exhaustion in her eyes vanished as they widened in surprise at her own gaseous release. The smell was awful. Worse than Claire’s, even. It was that, more so than any virus, that turned her into a real crimson head. Her face burned with shame. Jill was a member of STARS. Moreover, she was a girl. She didn’t fart. What the hell was going on?
“Guess we get a little worked up?” Claire offered with a weak, self-depreciating smile. That smile turned to an expression of further strain as from her pants came another whirring –PHHLBBT!!- that reeked of the sewers she’d passed through only hours ago.
Jill tried not to pass judgement. She could feel a building bubble in her own gut. It pained her, writhing for release, but she denied it. Jill Valentine was not going to lose to a fart.
The damage was done, however. As the girls struggled to regain their posture, an ominous groan rang down from the hall they’d walked down. The emergency lighting wasn’t showing much. Jill clicked on her flashlight and aimed it into the shadow where, shuffling slowly, arms outstretched and jaws dangling from their hinges, a horde of dead scientists advanced towards them.
“Shit!” Jill cursed. “Our farts must have got their attention.”
Saying something that absurd immediately brought the urge to laugh, but this was not the time or place for that. Jill checked in with Claire. Neither had the ammo to take down a swarm of this size. They’d have to keep running.
Claire took off first. It was a move that Jill regretted immensely, since traveling in Redfield’s wake meant being in the path of some of the worst girl gas imaginable. Claire couldn’t stop farting. The stench of her many –PRRLLPPTTS!- and –BLLOORRBPTS!- ruffled Jill’s nose with the ferocity of a severe allergy. This wasn’t right. What could have caused this? Was it that toxic gas they’d inhaled back in the lab? If it was, Jill hoped that some bad gas was the end of it. She could already feel her guts begging her to just let go.
Jill was so lost in the effort of subduing her gas that she almost ran right into Claire. The younger woman had stopped, frozen in place. Jill didn’t need to ask why.
Lickers.
Three of them.
These brain-exposed leaping monstrosities were a pain to deal with alone, but together? Taking on three was a death sentence. Jill looked behind her. The zombies were approaching slowly, but surely. They’d be on them soon enough, and worse, there was no other way around.
Jill made the decision silently, taking point and guiding Claire around the clawed threats in front of them. They held their breath. Lickers were blind, but they had an acute sense of hearing. One tiny noise and the girls would have been torn to shreds. Claire, luckily, finally found the strength to clench her butthole as they shimmied by. Jill, however, was massively regretting her earlier restraint. The gas was knocking at her backdoor something fierce. They were almost clear when, with a strangled hiss that cut through the air like a knife, she found that she couldn’t hold back anymore.
PPPPPPPPPPPHHHHLLLLLLLPPPPPTTTTT!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The lickers raised their fleshy heads in the direction of Jill’s ill-timed flatulence and bore their spittle-drenched teeth.
“Run!” Jill yelled, firing off two shotgun blasts to cover their retreat.
Claire and Jill’s hasty escape was a loud one. Gunshots and rampant flatulence left a trail for the lickers to follow. Running alone wasn’t going to end well. Claire must have thought this too, as up ahead she’d stopped to pull aside a vent cover, waving Jill inside as she emptied her pistol to buy them some time. The vent itself was small and cramped. The girls were forced to crawl through them. One on hand, that meant that the lickers couldn’t follow them. But on the other, it put Claire right in the blast zone of Jill’s unrelentingly eggy farts.
Having her face in such close proximity to Jill’s farting ass was its own special kind of nightmare for Claire, Jill would later to find out. The vent seemed to go on for miles, and both of them were tooting their horns for most of it before eventually emerging in the generator room of the Raccoon City general hospital. They were safe for now, and though their gas would finally peter out by the time they reached the city limits with cure in hand, they both vowed to never, ever bring this embarrassing ordeal up again.