The Widow's Web 03 (Patreon)

Begging, it turned out, was a lot less dignified in person than it was in the movies.

“Please.” The scientist’s hands came up, palms out, fingers trembling hard enough that the plastic ID badge clipped to his lab coat rattled against the buttons. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the evil scientist was falling apart at the prospect of punishment. “Please, wait. Wait. You don’t understand what you’re dealing with, where you are! You don’t know what I can give you!”

“Enlighten me, by all means.” I kept the barrel level with the bridge of his nose, voice somewhere between flat and darkly, sardonically amused. Not quite sarcastic, but certainly nothing like the eager agreement he was probably hoping for.

“Everything. Anything.” The words tumbled over each other in his haste to save himself, his accent thickening as his composure continued crumbling. “I know this facility. I know the access routes, the security features. I can get you out of here, past the checkpoints, out of the city! And…and I can tell you anything you might want to know! About Umbrella, about yourself!”

“‘Everything, anything,’ huh?” I mulled over his words, bringing up my free hand to scratch just beneath my left breast at a bit of itching, still-drying skin. “That’s a lot of promises for a man who was ranting about his reputation and the treachery of his coworkers thirty seconds ago. Having a change of mind, are we?”

“I mean it! I swear to you, I swear on...” He swallowed and visibly tried to think of something to use as his ‘oathstone’, his throat working, sweat standing out along his receding hairline. It was almost funny, really, how he literally couldn’t think of a single damn thing, and he abandoned the attempt a few moments later. “You’re the most valuable thing in this building. I know that. I can protect you from the rest of them. I can make sure you’re looked after, taken care of!”

Looked after. Taken care of. The phrases sat heavily somewhere underneath my ribs, and it was all I could do to keep my finger off the trigger just to listen to the rest of his spiel. Not because I was terribly tempted, but because I was thinking about the implications.

It was a tempting offer, on the face of it. Having a Project Director in my pocket could be useful in a thousand different ways, most of which would help me accomplish my various goals. It would only be sensible to make use of a resource that was essentially throwing itself at my feet, especially under the circumstances I was now in, but…I didn’t trust it. Didn’t trust him. His word choice alone had my hackles raised, the sort of phrasing someone would use to be ‘technically truthful’ while planning to plant a knife in the small of your back.

Especially since I’d overheard the conversation in regards to my ‘creation’, and I had a distinct feeling that ‘looked after’ and ‘taken care of’ would be fulfilled in this situation by ensuring I got delivered straight to whoever it was that had paid for me. That alone would be enough of a turn-off, but the idea that I would have to get him safely out of the complex, out of a rapidly-collapsing Raccoon City, and successfully fending off his inevitable attempted betrayals while I was at it was distinctly unappealing. And the final nail in that particular coffin was the simple fact that he’d already shown me, quite clearly, what he thought of me. He hadn’t called me ‘she’ or ‘her’ when he was ranting. ‘One-hundred-and-thirty pounds of asset’. A thing, a product, that had gone missing under his supervision. Whatever he was offering now, it was being offered to the asset, and assets got retrieved, not rescued. God, even now, he'd just called me 'the most valuable thing in the building', hadn't he?

“I appreciate the offer.” I said, and watched hope flicker across his sweating face at my seeming agreement. “I really do. But I think we both know you’d sell me out the second we hit a checkpoint with a convenient lie ready. Or the second you saw a way to get your reputation back.”

“No. No, no, I wouldn’t, I’d never...”

He didn’t get the chance to finish his final plea, the pistol bucking in my hand as I put a bullet through his forehead, killing him instantly. His body crumpled to the floor, an expression of mingled shock, fear, and pleading forever frozen on his face, and I stepped forward to stoop low, laying claim to the bracelet that would give me access to damn near everything I could hope to collect here.

Starting with information on me, and I chanced a glance at his ID badge to see who he was, why I remembered him. Alexander Isaacs, was it? Well, I recognized that name, but I couldn’t remember why. He was in the movies, I thought, but…I didn’t remember anyone in the movies who looked quite like this. Hmm. Well, whatever the case, I’d probably figure out the details once I started rooting through his computer. Setting my pistol down within easy reach, I settled into his seat -hissing softly in mingled discomfort and pleasure at the feeling of contoured leather pressing against my pussy- and turned my attention to the screen. Flexing my fingers, I reached for the keyboard and grinned to myself. Time to see what I could find.

“Still alive, I see. I would have warned you that they were coming, but this isn’t exactly the subtlest form of communication.” Ada’s voice reappeared, sounding mildly impressed, though also a touch urgent. “I would suggest you not waste any more time. I’m not going to be able to help you for much longer, they’re locking down their systems and the part of the city I’m in is getting dangerous. You need to get out.”

“Maybe, but that guy was talking about how someone outside of Umbrella paid for me to have…whatever they did to be me done. I’m going to find out who and why and what. If you need to make a run for it, do it. Maybe we’ll meet again.” I responded absently, fingers dancing as I worked my way through the files, eyes flicking back and forth as I read much faster than I should have been able to. Another part of the enhancements, I assumed. “And I’m grateful for the help, but I’m not going to keep myself in the dark any longer. Besides, there are a few things I need here, according to these files.”

“You’re making a mistake, but I’ll do what I can to help. What are you looking for?” she sighed, sounding thoroughly aggrieved, and I smirked slightly.

“I need to get to their server room and grab their backups. I need biohazard gear. And, most importantly, I need to get to the lab where they’re trying to make a vaccine to this ‘T-Virus’ that they were talking about. This whole city, maybe more, will die if I don’t get that stuff out of here. So if you want to help, find me that server and a Doctor…Nathanial Bard.” I told her, and she was silent for a long moment before giving a scoffing sort of laugh.

“You’ve got guts and think big, I’ll give you that. I’ll see what I can do.”

With that, she was gone again -or as gone as she could be, I supposed, given she was doubtlessly still monitoring me somehow. How deep into the systems she was, I didn’t care to guess, but certainly not deep enough to get the data I wanted for herself. Of course, that data was probably in air-gapped servers, so I could hardly hold that against her.

I brushed the thought aside as I finally found what I was looking for.

PROJECT: WIDOW the heading declared, and I took a deep breath before opening it.

There were a series of files, and at first glance they all covered different subjects. [Enhancements], [Client Requirements], and [Asset Acquisition] were definitely the most promising out of the pile, and I waffled back and forth a bit on which to pick first before deciding that chronological order was probably the best way to handle things, which meant the last of those three files would be going first.

PROJECT WIDOW

Reference: WIDOW / ACQ / 001

Classification: CONFIDENTIAL — EXECUTIVE ACCESS

From: Raccoon City Special Projects Liaison

To: Director of Special Projects: Alexander Isaacs

Status: Receipt confirmed; assessment pending

My eyes skimmed through the text that followed, memorizing what was valuable and discarding what wasn’t. So far as I could see, I was in fact a former Soviet operative, I was the Black Widow, and Umbrella had no idea how the client -a she, who went completely unnamed, without even initials to identify her by- had gotten their hands on me. And I hadn’t been transferred in any sort of significant way, either, just packed up into a nondescript commercial vehicle and delivered to the facility like any other piece of everyday goods. What was most interesting, however, was the other slim information about the client. She was, apparently, willing to spend a colossal amount of money for Umbrella’s work on me, alongside the promise of a ‘significant bonus for satisfactory completion’ and that she had, apparently, a significant number of subordinates already. The document went so far as to wonder why someone in her position would spend the time and money on me when they had the resources that they already possessed close at hand.

That meant a few things, not least of which that I would have to be very careful about just who might be stalking me once I got out of Raccoon City, because if they had as much power and as many subordinates as this file seemed to imply, I might have to John Wick alot people to get a bit of peace in my life. Unless I could make it look like I died here, I supposed, but somehow I doubt it would be nearly that easy.

Next, [Client Requirements], and that provided even more information to me. Much of it expected, some of it disturbing, and one particular piece leaving me proverbially sweating. Naturally, the people who’d gotten their hands on me had wanted me to be as physically flawless and lethal as humanely possible, with every apparent expectation of making me their bodyguard, PA, fixer, and personal sex-pet all rolled into one. Likewise, my memory was to be wiped -which is why I couldn’t remember anything of ‘my’ life before I had woken up in this body- and I was to be ‘adjusted’ to better suit my new roles. And, of course, they’d had some particular demands when it came to specific desires they wished to see fulfilled.

One of the words involved there was ‘bioware’, and I had the distinct impression that they weren’t talking about the gaming company. Having but one question in mind, and having the dreadful feeling that I already knew the answer, I opened the final document and took in the long list of changes that had been performed to my unconscious, helpless self over the course of what seemed to have been months.

Bioengineered muscles. Bone augmentation. Skinweave. Heightened sensitivity with all the senses, which I somehow hadn’t noticed in the stress of the situation. Modifications to the brain to give me perfect recall and a reduced need to sleep. Modifications to my nervous, endocrine, and circulatory systems. Modifications to my organs. Enhanced sexual characteristics, pheromones, genetically adjusted sexual fluids.

And from Umbrella Europe? A heavily-modified Cadou parasite -modified enough that the parasite didn’t even truly exist any longer, only the changes it had made to me-, spliced into my body, all with the intention of making me the perfect, fetishistic pet…and a predator. Something created to hunt the enemies of the woman who’d paid for my creation, and to bring her exquisite pleasure as she saw fit.

The only upside -if you could call it that, and I wasn’t sure I could- of discovering that I was not in fact in Resident Evil, but a version of the Cyberpunk universe where Umbrella was just one more nightmare corporation in an entire universe full of them…was the fact that I hadn’t had any cyberware modifications done yet, though they had been planned.

On the one hand, they would have helped me survive this new and doubtlessly far more dangerous version of Raccoon City that I had found myself in. On the other, any cyberware that had been installed on the behalf of my ‘owner’ would have been entirely under her control…and I had no interest in this person being able to shut me off at the push of a button. Any modifications I made to my body would be under my control alone.

“Well, you look properly horrified. Not quite what you were hoping for, I assume?”

“Not exactly, but knowing what they did to me is the best way to stay alive. God only knows what kind of upkeep all of this shit is going to require to keep it from falling apart on me.” I responded to Ada’s comment as I instructed the computer to back up all of it’s files to the server. “Any luck finding the other stuff?”

The speakers crackled softly as she sighed, and for a few seconds there was only static and the soft patter of keys under my fingers as the backup bar crawled across the screen.

“Some of it. The server room is two levels up, in the east wing. Getting there is the problem, it’s guarded while the staff try to vacuum the servers for evacuation.” Ada’s voice came back thinner than before, the signal degrading, though the dryness in it hadn’t gone anywhere. “Your Doctor Bard is in a lab just underneath the main hospital complex, though I can’t really see anything in that area. The cameras on that level are dead, and I’d rather not find out why.”

“Dead as in disabled, or dead as in something destroyed the cables?”

“Does it matter?”

“It does to me, yes.”

“Then I’d assume the second for the sake of safety.” A pause. “Biohazard gear is the easy part. It’s stored all over the place. I recommend one of the security armories, the gear there is more likely to keep you alive until we can escape the city than a Level C HAZMAT suit.”

“Not to mention it will have better guns than these pistols.” I mused, getting out of the chair and making my way over to the two guards, starting to strip them of useful equipment. Turning one of their radios over in my hand, I hummed thoughtfully. “If I take one of these radios, will you be able to reach me without relying on the intercom?”

“Maybe, but they’re encrypted and I’m out of time. I have to relocate. I’m going to try and make my way into the hospital proper. Head for the second floor when you get out of that facility, to the hospital’s Records Room. It should be easy to find, and there are plenty of ways for us to leave. Get moving.”

“Records Room, second floor. Got it.” I said, but the speaker had already gone to static, a dead hiss that told me she’d cut the line before I’d finished the sentence. Fair enough. She’d never struck me as a woman who waited around for acknowledgment. At least, not unless you were Leon, and even then it was a coin toss on if she would save him without him even seeing her.

I went back to stripping the bodies, looping gunbelts and pouches around my naked torso like some sort of post-apocalyptic femme fatale. Which, to be fair, wasn’t an entirely inaccurate description. It was a nice look, if I was going to be honest, the sort of look I’d always found terribly attractive in my first life. It also left me grimacing somewhat at the feeling of the rougher material those belts and pouches were made of pressed against my bare skin, but -perhaps unsurprisingly, given what I’d read not minutes ago- the slight discomfort was actually somewhat enjoyable.

Hmm.

I’d have to keep an eye on that.

For now, what I needed to do was get moving, and that’s exactly what I intended to do. Drawing two of my pistols, I held them ready and headed for the door.

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Plus a bonus picture!

No vote at the end of this chapter, since the next one will be her doing the rest of the actions you guys decided on!