Ames, whose MP5 had not left O’Donnell’s back while the poor boy struggled with the creature, trained his weapon on the lifeless corpses hunched along the corridors as he approached the intersection.

“Ahh, boy, ze creature frightened you?” He was grinning. He put his hand on O’Donnell’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. Ze greenhorns always are scared.” He chuckled. “A valuable lesson, zough, iz zat ve can keel zem by shooting zer heads.”

Ames switched his MP5 to semi-automatic and began making his way back towards Grey. At each corpse he passed, he stopped and placed a bullet in their skull, no matter how lifeless they seemed. He wasn’t sure what to do with the ones without heads, though, but he assumed they were already neutralized.

On some level, Ames was disappointed. Had they merely walked into some zombie movie recreation? He sighed. Surely, the American scientists could be more creative than Hollywood when it came to their experiments that went horribly wrong.

He snatched the key-card from quickly from Grey, grunting, and continued “neutralizing” nearby corpses. Eventually, he was forced to aim at their heads from a distance, not daring to venture far from his comrades. Aiming at a particularly distant corpse all the way at the end of the hall, Ames missed, the bullet breaking the glass on a fire-extinguisher box, though luckily missing the tank itself. Ames missed a heartbeat when he realized what he had nearly done. He quickly fell back in with the others, remembering that when he was a squad leader, he didn’t tolerate such carelessness. Ames knew little about Richardson so far, and so he didn’t want to risk alienating someone who might be a competent leader.