Compared to the East Office, the Guard Room was relatively small.
Inside, there was a weapons rack, a long table, and a chair.
The firearms on the rack were already gone, and not a single bullet had been left behind for Luo Guang.
Even though there were no weapons or ammunition, Luo Guang did find a waist pouch attachment with the R.P.D.
logo printed on it at the bottom of the rack.
It could be clipped onto a police duty belt, but it was completely empty, which made Luo Guang sigh at how “stingy” the police station was.
In the end, Luo Guang stuffed some loose 9mm rounds into it.
That way, he would not have to drag his backpack around to the front every time he wanted to reload a magazine.
Later, if he found a shotgun, he could also stuff different kinds of shells into it, so he would not have to keep shotgun rounds in his pants pockets.
After tidying up his backpack and the waist pouch, Luo Guang found a rectangular riot shield as well.
It was transparent and bore the letters R.P.D.
on it.
In the dark, if it had not reflected the beam from Luo Guang’s flashlight, he might have overlooked it entirely.
Still, this riot shield was not suited to him.
Zombies had almost inexhaustible stamina.
If he only focused on defending, he would eventually just exhaust himself to death.
This riot shield had been designed to protect the user’s whole body, so it was made very large.
For Luo Guang, who valued mobility, it would only be a burden.
That kind of shield was really only suitable for group use, with multiple people carrying shields together.
If it had been one of those small round shields that strapped to the forearm, Luo Guang might actually have considered taking it.
He carefully set the riot shield back down, then quickly flipped through the documents on the table.
There was nothing useful there—just registration forms and the like, and no one had left behind any special message.
Well, this isn’t a game.
There aren’t going to be hint files and lore documents lying around everywhere.
That was what Luo Guang thought, and he did not feel disappointed.
Come to think of it, there was supposed to be a journalist locked up in the R.P.D.
holding cells around this time, one who knew quite a lot.
Luo Guang suddenly remembered that there seemed to be such a character in the games.
He had a lot of information, but because he liked talking in riddles, he ended up getting crushed by an angry Tyrant.
Just kidding.
That journalist had been silenced by Umbrella on purpose.
It was only that his death was so dramatic, yet he had so little screen time, that it left that impression.
After adjusting his mood, Luo Guang chuckled to himself and left the Guard Room.
Passing the restroom on the way, he took care of a zombie that had dropped its pants to use the toilet, then conveniently used the restroom himself as well.
After that, he made it safely all the way to the second floor of the eastern side of the station.
On the east side of the second floor were the Chief’s Office, the Chief’s Private Collection Room, the Waiting Room, and the Art Room.
Beyond those was a large rooftop platform suitable for helicopter landing.
That had to be arranged deliberately by the chief.
Truly worthy of a greedy man.
Back when he played the games as a kid, Luo Guang had really hated the chief of the Raccoon Police Department.
Judging from how the second-floor eastern rooms were laid out, this place was basically the chief’s private treasure vault.
There was barely any space actually used for police work.
It really did suit the greedy nature of the chief perfectly.
The Waiting Room was probably just for the chief’s “distinguished guests” to queue up before meeting him, so there was probably nothing useful there.
Luo Guang did not bother with it.
As for the Private Collection Room, it had to be entered through the Chief’s Office.
And Luo Guang did not think the Art Room would contain anything he needed either.
After all, he had no plans to solve the R.P.D.’s puzzle mechanisms right now and find the hidden escape route out of downtown Raccoon City.
So the only place he intended to check on the way was the Chief’s Office.
And then Officer Marvin watched the monitor in total bewilderment as Luo Guang kicked open the police chief’s office door.
There were no surveillance cameras inside the Chief’s Office or the Private Collection Room, so Marvin had no idea whether there were zombies inside.
Naturally, that also meant he could not radio Luo Guang and ask what he thought he was doing.
He would have to wait until Luo Guang returned safely before asking.
Marvin had no fondness for Chief Brian Irons either, so it was not that he wanted to arrest Luo Guang for vandalizing police property.
He was just curious why Luo Guang had chosen to do that.
Luo Guang had already confirmed there were no zombies in the second-floor corridor before deciding to kick the door in.
Against evil men, thunderous methods were the proper way to go.
If it had not been inappropriate, Luo Guang would even have wanted to yell, “R.P.D.!
Open the door!”
As befitted the police chief, the office’s electrical supply was independent and separate from the rest of the east wing, so the place was still brightly lit.
Gun raised, Luo Guang entered the Chief’s Office, only to be greeted by disappointment.
The chief was not there.
In the wall behind the chief’s desk was an opening where some hidden mechanism had been activated.
Luo Guang did not rush to search the office itself.
After confirming there was no one hiding behind the oversized desk, he instead kept his gun raised and went straight into the opening to see what was beyond it.
After turning two corners and crossing a short open-air passage, he saw an elevator at the far end in motion.
Judging from the indicator, it was descending.
A secret passage and an elevator hidden behind the office.
There was no need to think very hard to know this was the police chief’s private escape route.
Not much time had passed between Luo Guang entering through the opening and seeing the elevator still moving downward.
Considering this was only the second floor, it was very likely the chief had been startled by the noise of Luo Guang violently kicking in the office door and had hurried to escape.
That was what Luo Guang guessed.
He watched until the elevator stopped moving.
After that, there was no further sound.
He did not leave immediately.
Instead, he waited a little longer.
Only after confirming the chief was not coming back to ambush him from behind did he return to the office and begin searching it.
There were quite a few animal specimens in the Chief’s Office, each with handwritten tags.
Deer, wolves, smaller animals like squirrels, dogs, and more.
Luo Guang noticed that the tags also recorded the dates the animals had been hunted and mounted.
Did the chief make these taxidermy specimens himself after hunting them?
The thought struck him, followed immediately by another.
I got careless.
I’d better be careful.
He’s not some soft target.
He’s a hunter.
So earlier, he wasn’t running away—he was trying to lure me in.
The reason the chief had not lain in wait inside the office was probably because there was nowhere good to hide except behind the desk.
The fact that Luo Guang had kicked the door in so openly likely made the chief assume Luo Guang already knew he was inside, which meant an ambush there would lose both surprise and uncertainty.
But if Luo Guang pursued him stubbornly, then that elevator with nowhere to run would instead become the ideal place for an ambush.
Although he had missed the chance to put a bullet in the chief, Luo Guang still found it a little regrettable.
Still, he had picked up something unexpectedly good.
Perhaps Brian Irons had been too confident that no one would dare invade his office.
Too confident in his own authority.
Whatever the reason, Luo Guang found an already opened letter sitting right there on the chief’s heavy wooden desk.
The contents plainly recorded the fact that the chief had accepted bribes, and outright described how he had taken money to cover up the Mansion Incident and disband S.T.A.R.S.
The signature on the letter was W.B.
That was probably William Birkin, chief researcher of Umbrella’s Raccoon City laboratory.
William Birkin was one of the more important characters in the Resident Evil series, so the moment Luo Guang saw the initials W.B., he knew who they referred to.
That was without even mentioning that the letter explicitly discussed requesting Brian Irons to find men who could protect him from attack by Umbrella and a host of other matters.
Looking at it that way, what Luo Guang had found was the printed hard copy of an e-mail exchange between William Birkin and Police Chief Brian Irons.
These documents had been stuffed into an envelope and simply left on the desk.
It was from the contents of that same exchange that Luo Guang learned the chief’s full name was Brian Irons.
From the correspondence between William Birkin and Brian Irons, it was clear that William had been bribing the chief out of his own private funds, asking Brian Irons to help cover up the truth published by the Mansion Incident survivors, and also demanding that Brian Irons hire mercenaries to stop Umbrella headquarters from seizing William’s beloved and much-prized “GOD” virus.
But obviously, the two of them had never been true partners.
It was nothing more than a simple exchange of interests—interests, plain and simple.
To Chief Brian Irons, only profit and his own hobbies truly mattered.
Faced with an Umbrella Corporation that had more money and that also held evidence against him, Brian Irons naturally had no intention of smashing an egg against a rock.
Covering up the Mansion Incident served Umbrella’s interests, yes.
But he was never going to raise mercenaries for William Birkin and help him fight Umbrella itself.
That was why William Birkin had resorted to sending the printed copy of their e-mail correspondence as leverage against Chief Brian Irons.
Even if this is only W.B.’s side of the story, it’s still enough to shut Officer Marvin up.
And with the chief’s behavior during the Raccoon City incident, it should also be enough to make Marvin overlook the fact that I kicked the door in.
Luo Guang knew exactly who this W.B.
was, but he had no proof that W.B.
truly meant William Birkin.
Since he had no ability to forge documents right now, this was still good enough to use as something to persuade Officer Marvin.
Thinking that, Luo Guang searched through the drawers and other places in the room, but he did not find any more useful documents. Find the original chapter at g.com.
Well—there was a notebook on a short side table.
It was Brian Irons’s personal journal of hunting and taxidermy.
But the contents were…
wrong.
In Luo Guang’s eyes, very wrong.
There were lines about how gutting a Siberian tiger and pulling out its intestines let one “feel its life.” There was also one page about how a “twenty-two-year-old pig” made for a soft, fragrant specimen.
Compared to the “stalker diary” Luo Guang had in his possession, this thing was every bit as deranged.
Luo Guang remembered a foreign story about a wealthy hunter who bought himself an island and stocked it with all kinds of wild beasts, amusing himself by hunting them again and again.
Then one day, ordinary beasts could no longer satisfy his hunger for stimulation, so he chose a new kind of quarry to release onto the island—humans.
This Brian Irons…
he wouldn’t have wanted to make a human specimen in the end too, would he?
Luo Guang’s gaze drifted toward the door of the Chief’s Office, the one he had kicked open by force.
He had already shoved a cabinet in front of it.
A human could climb over that easily enough, while it would still serve as some obstruction to zombies.
For the moment, Luo Guang heard no movement besides his own, so he turned back and continued searching.
On the map he had seen with Marvin, Luo Guang remembered noticing that next to the Chief’s Office there was a room labeled the Collection Room.
Supposedly, many of the exhibits left over from the building’s days as a museum had been stored there after the conversion.
Although such a room full of valuable objects had been officially recorded, Chief Brian Irons was obviously not the sort of man who would ever permit surveillance cameras to be installed there either.
The map called it the “Collection Room,” but Marvin had directly referred to it as the “Private Collection Room.”
And naturally, that “private” belonged to Brian Irons.
Luo Guang had no artistic sensibilities to speak of, so he had no desire to heroically rescue some rare masterpiece.
He just wanted to see what good things were in there.
If the chief knew someone had entered his private collection room—if only he had a dimensional pocket, Luo Guang imagined Brian Irons’s furious expression and grinned wickedly to himself.
He pushed open the other door inside the Chief’s Office.
The first thing that greeted him was a huge tiger.
“Damn, is this the Siberian tiger the chief was talking about?”
Looking at the specimen posed like a tiger descending the mountain, Luo Guang thought, “Unexpectedly cool.
Looks like the chief really does have some artistic sense.
If only he’d become head of the Raccoon City tourism bureau instead.
Then he wouldn’t have had to be such a complete bastard.”
After turning one more corner, the door to the Private Collection Room was simply hanging open, as if inviting him in.
Even though Luo Guang wore a thoroughly unapologetic expression, he still entered with caution.
The first thing inside was a large cabinet neatly filled with porcelain plates and pottery jars, decorated with all kinds of patterns.
Luo Guang neither understood them nor cared much, so he only gave them a cursory glance.
What caught his attention instead was on the left side just after entering.
Inside this collection room, there was actually a small chamber partitioned off by iron bars.
Inside that enclosure were an old desk, a coat rack, several oil paintings hung on the wall, a lit desk lamp, an old-fashioned telephone, and more.
Because the enclosure was fenced with iron bars, Luo Guang could see everything inside clearly.
The only especially noteworthy thing was a keycard tucked into a badge holder with a lanyard, hanging from the coat rack not far from the bars.
Luo Guang checked the barred door.
It seemed to require an electronic lock switch, but the light on the control panel was not illuminated.
So he decided to keep exploring deeper into the Private Collection Room first and see what else might be there.
At the next corner, Brian Irons had placed another taxidermy specimen—a huge brown bear standing atop a slanted rock base, imposing and dignified.
Further in, the items displayed in the cabinets of the Private Collection Room were more varied in kind and style than those outside.
There were Egyptian-style busts, wooden model ships, and so on.
At the very back, on a worktable, there was a taxidermied owl perched on a tree stump, so striking that it was impossible to miss.
Next to it, a relief carving caught Luo Guang’s eye.
At the front of the relief was a heart-shaped recess with a hollow circle in the center.
For certain reasons, there were four suit keys in the R.P.D.—Spade, Heart, Club, and Diamond—so Luo Guang had been keeping an eye out for such items the entire time he had been searching.
He might not end up needing them, but it was always better to be prepared just in case.
Luo Guang picked up the relief and turned it over.
Embedded in the back was a Heart Key.
After a few quick motions, he removed the Heart Key and slipped it into his waist pouch.
Having gained something useful, Luo Guang looked around for a longer stick—preferably with a hook on the end.
That way, he could snag the keycard hanging on the coat rack behind the iron bars without opening the door.
In the end, he found a gentleman’s cane from the eighteen-hundreds-something era and successfully hooked the keycard over to himself.
“Parking Garage Key Card.”
Luo Guang had no intention of driving his way out of Raccoon City, so after glancing at both sides of the card, he simply put it into his waist pouch as well.
After checking once more to make sure he had not missed anything, Luo Guang left the Chief’s Office and continued on with the mission to repair the antenna.
It’s not really mandatory—I’ll eventually upload all the chapters here—but it helps a lot in supporting me and allows me to dedicate more time to it.