Once she'd cleared a firing line, Bella drew her gun without hesitation and put three rounds into the female zombie.
The first shot caught it in the shoulder, the bullet's kinetic force knocking it back a step. The moment the zombie had eased away from the attendant, the next two rounds struck its heart and its skull.
The Glock 17's magazine held 31 rounds, and Bella had two more magazines in her pocket dimension—more than enough for the situation at hand.
She reached out and pulled the round-faced attendant to her feet. Before she could even produce the FBI credentials to 'bring a little glory' to that outfit, a dense crowd of 'people' came surging in from behind Car 13—from Car 14, that is.
They'd all been drawn by the gunfire.
The disaster had begun long before this. The female zombie hadn't been the start of it; she was simply the first zombie to appear in front of Bella, nothing more.
Whipping out the Gatling Bodhisattva right now would be a touch excessive—she couldn't explain how she'd smuggled a weapon like that onto the train. She weighed it over and over, and decided: better to fall back!
Just as she was planning to trade space for time—using the long, narrow train to pick the zombies off one by one—the aberration struck.
The female zombie she'd already shot dead came surging back to life. Its spine went "crack" with an explosive report, and its entire upper body folded backward. A gaping split tore open across its waist and belly; ghastly-white flesh churned outward. The brown blood congealed before it could even flow—the blood fused with muscle and shards of bone, and it was as though they had abruptly gained a will of their own, twisting and deforming, resolving into black-gray tapeworms the length of a finger.
The tapeworm-like matter kept pouring from the female zombie's body, merging and knotting together, then snapping outward like tentacles—lashing out to seize the nearest zombie and drag it in. A round of chewing sounded within the female zombie's body, and its bulk doubled on the spot; the single tentacle became two.
A mass of black-gray tapeworms sheathed the female zombie's skin. In under five seconds, no head, no hands, no legs could be made out—only a blurred humanoid shape, a humanoid thing woven from countless black-gray tapeworms.
"The Uroboros Virus?!" Bella was stunned.
The dreaded t-Virus and the Uroboros Virus were not the same thing. The former was built for evolution and worked on nearly anyone; the latter had been designed from the outset for selection—screening out the finest genes for enhancement.
The Uroboros Virus was a wholly new bio-organic virus that Albert Wesker had developed atop the Progenitor Virus, folding in certain African Voodoo concepts and findings. When Bella and the others had fought TRICELL in West Africa, Wesker hadn't yet finished this research. Now, by the look of things, he'd completed it?
Bella felt a jolt of unease. That female zombie earlier had clearly been no ordinary person! An ordinary person couldn't get anywhere near the Uroboros Virus. According to Weyland's scientists, the thing simply couldn't be mass-produced—the manufacturing cost was steep, the process far too intricate.
Bella had been injected with the anti-t-Virus serum, but the Uroboros Virus was another matter entirely. She didn't dare close in for melee now either, so she fired shot after shot, trying to halt the female zombie's feeding on the surrounding zombies.
But the pistol's power was limited, and there were far too many zombies around. Black-gray tentacles kept bursting from the female zombie's body; in under ten seconds, thirty-some zombies had been devoured clean. By now the thing no longer looked remotely human—more like a heap of rotting sludge, a blackened smear sprawling over nearly half the car.
"Damn it!" For the life of her, Bella couldn't work out how to kill this monster.
Mind Blast was useless. The monster was a collective consciousness assembled from countless cellular minds; unless she wiped out every cell in a single stroke, one or two mental spells wouldn't kill the thing at all.
"Bang, bang, bang!" She kept up her fire. By now the tapeworm monster was shifting from its sludge state into a tentacle beast, masses of fleshy tendrils braiding together—it even burst through the car and reared to a height of eight meters (about 26 feet). From a distance it looked like a great tree of flesh sprouting inside the carriage.
All of this unfolded in under fifteen seconds.
Bella noticed an organ like an eye growing at the flesh tree's core—a pale-red eyelid, a milky-white pupil. But the eye-organ was swaddled in layer upon layer of tentacles. She stopped fretting over how she'd explain any of this afterward, took out a pulse pistol she'd looted from Cobra Command, leveled it at the center, and fired again and again.
Great swaths of flesh were punched through by the electric arcs. Her firing angle was cunning, and the flesh tree had yet to develop any sense of attack or defense—for now it was only instinctively growing itself.
Bella tore apart a huge quantity of the fleshy tentacles. The organ that looked like an eye had barely surfaced when she put two rounds into it. Fluid gushed out in every direction like a fountain. Worried the thing was riddled with virus, she pushed everyone toward the forward car and ran.
Bella hauled up the attendant, driving her forward with an elbow, then swept up the little girl beside her—and only then caught sight of seven or eight high schoolers rooted in place like pillars, blocking the way.
The high schoolers who'd been flaunting their worldliness a moment ago stared at the sci-fi pulse pistol in her hand, and at the flesh tree slowly going still in the distance, and all seven or eight of them stood there frozen.
Bella gave each of them a kick. "Move! Run! Do you understand English? Come on! God—seumnida?! Run!"
She practically single-handedly herded the dozen-odd people left in Car 13 toward Car 12.
At the Car 12 restroom, she handed the little girl off to her young father—the man peddling investment funds, who had by now noticed something wrong at the back and rushed over.
Bella still didn't know the state of things outside. She knew only that the bio-organic virus had already broken out on this Busan-bound train.
That flesh monster looked dormant, but it wasn't actually dead. It was most likely undergoing some kind of cellular-level evolution to counter her pulse pistol.
By her estimate, it would take a missile to kill the thing outright. This train had to shed the monster at once, then stop at the next station for decontamination, and Seoul had to be alerted to run a virus screening as well. Bella reasoned that since the train had set out from Seoul, this couldn't be an isolated incident—that area had surely been hit too. The station and the surrounding districts had to be sealed off, to keep the virus from spreading any further.
Bella passed the little girl to her father, freed up one hand, and only then found a moment to flash her credentials at the attendant she'd rescued—who was, in truth, scared witless.
"FBI! You see this? Notify your train captain—what? Conductor? Crew chief? I don't care about the exact title, as long as it's whoever's in charge—have them report to the control center. This is a bio-organic virus. Virus? Do you understand? Miss, have you ever studied English? Oh my God!... Who was it that told me you Koreans all understand English?"