A/N: The story is based on my dream about the Nemesis monster of Resident Evil 3. I hope you like it :)
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Monday. Today is the first day of practice for students from computer technics and electric engineering faculties. A travel to an office building awaited us. I was rather interested in this. As one of the most hard working students, I was happy to do some work out of University. Me and a group of other students of six people were heading to the bus station where the arranged vehicle was waiting for us.
"Oh wow, I'm so excited! The first time we're going to something outside our University!" Julia exclaimed. She was the daughter of my godmother and my best friend. She was a nice person generally but was too fond of parties and things like that which didn't satisfy me.
"Yes, and I wonder what kind of tasks they prepared for us to do," I replied.
"I'm sure there's nothing so terribly difficult. We are on our fourth grade, and there's not much left till graduation. So we are intelligent enough to do any task. Aren't we?" she smirked.
"We are, no doubt," I grinned back, "I only hope it will be interesting thing to do. Otherwise it's useless when it sparks no interest in you. But... a task is a task, and we have to complete it, no matter if we like it or not."
"That's right. So here we are, there's our bus. Hop in and way we go!"
The students boarded the bus, and it went its way to our place where work awaited. It wasn't a long drive, half an hour was the maximum. While going to our today's workplace, Julia spoke again:
"Hey, did you hear about what's going on in Raccoon city?"
"No. And what is it?"
"Wow, it's such a thing that couldn't be missed! I heard they worked on some kind of virus or something, and as result of an accident the virus has spread and the infected ones turned into blood-thirsty walking dead!"
"Hey, come on, walking dead!" Spencer replied. He was one of the biggest sceptics among us. "This already sounds like a banal horror film. Zombies are fictional!"
"I know, but it's what I heard in the news!" Julia exclaimed in response. "It's not my fault that you don't watch the news!"
"Calm down guys!" Annie decided to join the talk. "Fiction or not, but thanks god it's not happening here. So stay calm."
Annie was a person with a rather soft character. It was always easy to make a deal with her. And for that I liked her a lot. Next to Spencer was Mike. He was the one I could chat with for hours due to interests in common. He was one big fan of beasts of different kinds and just adored horror and science fiction genre.
"But I'm rather interested in this story," Mike said finally, "what else did they say?"
"That's not all," Julia continued, "beside the zombies I've seen one really horrible creature. That one seemed very strong and indestructible. At least two metres tall, dressed in black coat and armed with a rocket launcher. He caused the most destruction in town. They were filming everything from helicopter, otherwise there would be no broadcast if they were on the ground. As much as it was visible from the height, that beast had brownish skin, hairless head and mouth with teeth visible. Horrible face, indeed."
"Oh wow, cool!" Mike exclaimed. "That's really worth attention! And did they say anything about the origin of this monster? He also might be the result of this mysterious virus?"
"Well, not much," Julia replied, "as far as I heard, he was created artificially in a laboratory and programmed to destroy the members of so-called S.T.A.R.S. troop."
"Why's that?"
"It seems that those people know too much about the experiments. So it's decided to destroy them to prevent the secret information from spreading."
"Yeah yeah..." Spencer added in an unsatisfied voice, "nice try. Worth making a horror film, heh."
"Come on, Spence!" Annie interrupted him, "don't be like that. Even I became interested, although I'm not a fan of such things."
"I say, if it was just a horror film, I wouldn't tell you that," Julia said. "Hey, what do you think of that?" she turned to me.
"It sure sounds pretty interesting and damn exciting. But really, as Annie mentioned, lucky we are far from all those events. Who knows what could have happened to us if it all took place here".
"Right. Zombies at least can be killed. But that monster really seemed invulnerable. Scary dude, indeed," Julia said.
"Yeah. But we're safe," I smiled, "I hope neither the zombies, not that monster will ever get here. It's far away from our place anyway. By the way, here we are already."
Finally we arrived to a high office building with many floors. It looked very modern, much of it was made of glass. The whole picture was really impressive.
As our group approached the main entrance, a middle-aged woman was waiting at the doors. Seeing us, she greeted us with a friendly smile.
"Ah, so there you are, guys!" she smiled warmly, "Good afternoon, Mr. Jones. You're just in time. There seems to be a little problem in our computer system, so your students could try to fix it. That could be their first task in praxis programme."
"Of course, Ms. Konnerth. They are here to do their job. I'm sure they're not going to disappoint you. Right?" he said, looking at his wards.
"Right, professor," the students replied.
Ms. Konnerth lead the students to the third floor, to the cabinet with many computers inside. First of all, we listened to the instructions on how to work correctly with the local computer system, and then each student sat at his own computer and began working, trying to figure out what the problem was and how to fix it. When it seemed that it was nothing serious, and the problem could be easily fixed, something totally unexpected happened. All of a sudden the lights in the whole building went out, and with it the computers stopped working. To say that all of us were surprised, including Ms. Konnerth and Professor Jones, was like saying nothing. All stayed silent for a minute or something, until I finally spoke:
"What is that? What happened?"
"I don't know," Ms. Konnerth answered, "we've never experienced such things before. Something must have happened to the main power system. Maybe the knife switch went out or something. All those electricity switches are in the neighbour building, some metres away from here. So right now we have to go there and see what happened.
"I think we can fix that," Richie, one of our students, said, "I'm somehow more than sure it's nothing serious."
"I hope you're right," Ms. Konnerth said, "if we can get the electricity back to normal, we will continue with the task."
"All right, you guys, let's go," Professor Jones spoke, "we've had spoken much about how to face such problems theoretically and went through some practice in the University, so now it's time for you to use your knowledge."
The other building was not far away from the offices, so we went there on foot. The weather outside was nice but we had no time to enjoy it, we had things to do. And when we reached our destination, it turned out to be a three floor concrete building with many wires around it, which reminded me a power station. In the end my guess was correct -- it indeed was a power station, and looks like something went wrong there. I only hoped it was nothing serious. To be honest, I never liked to work with electric stuff. Although I own much knowledge on how to treat such things, I was always afraid of an electric shock. So everything I could now wish for, was to finish this thing as fast as possible.
After we entered the station, we went upstairs to the last floor where an older lady, a duty one, was waiting for us. She looked very stressed.
"Oh, Ashley, thanks god you arrived! I was so worried! The power went out so suddenly! I can assure you that everything was absolutely fine with all the devices. I don't want to sound insane, but... I have a bad feeling about this. It feels like someone did this on purpose... But ok, I don't want to scare anyone. These are just my own thoughts...
"No need to worry, Ms. Frankfeldt," Ms. Konnerth said, "I came here with a group of students from computer-electricity faculty and their professor, they have to work out their practice. And this is just the case for them.