Resident Evil: The Third World War.
The Third World War: Chronicling The War of Bio-Weaponry
Aaban Farah
The Third World War was a war like none other.
No war even comes close to the number of civilians killed and countries completely ravaged. No war before it can claim that the brave soldiers involved faced an enemy as cruel or as utterly unbiased as the enemies the Allies faced between 2014 and 2019. No war can claim the amount of soldiers thrown into helpless meat grinders, not even the First World War when war was defined by stalemate and heavy losses in a single day. Even the wildlife all along Europe and Northern Africa suffered greatly during this horrific conflict, being thrown into the mix as mutated beasts against their will. No war can boast about all the lives, land, and property lost, nor the sheer number of governments and entire countries eradicated.
The reason for this, however, is not that previous wars did not have the capacity to destroy entire worlds. Had the stalemate continued on the Western Front during WWI, it is possible that each power involved, in desperation, could have resorted to much more drastic measures of ending the war. Each nation could have drafted every man (or even woman) into the service and participate in the war effort. During WWII, once again the world witnessed a global conflict, one much worse than the first. The parties responsible for the start of the war, Nazi Germany led by Adolf Hitler, and the Empire of Japan led by Emperor Hirohito, had every intention of continuing the war until they had either forced surrender from their enemies or until every German or Japanese citizen gave his last breath in battle. Nazi Germany was less resilient to the idea of surrender, for when the Allies drew in on Germany in 1945, with America and Britain on the western front, chasing after the Germans after the Battle of the Bulge, and the U.S.S.R on the eastern front, who had been chasing the Germans out of Russia ever since 1942, many Nazi leaders and officers urged Hitler to surrender. It is only because of the Furher's mad ambition and delusion of invincibility that Germany didn't surrender until the Russians attacked Berlin, Germany's capitol. The Empire of Japan, however, had more resolve. Every last man, woman, and child would be sacrificed to repel an invasion by the United States, should one happen during the close of the war. It wasn't until in August 1945 when the United States dropped two atom bombs, one of Hiroshima and the other on Nagasaki, that Japan surrendered. Not even the Empire of the Sun could forever endure their country and people being killed because of their fierce adherence to the code of honor. If neither of the Axis had surrendered when they did, had Germany listened to Hitler and fought to the last German, and had the United States not dropped the A bombs on Japan, it is possible that the world would have seen years more worth of total war, and perhaps Japan and Germany would no longer be on the map today.
However, while warring against an enemy that is human, with human qualities, and an all too universal need to survive, it was inevitable that the Second World War would lose momentum and end before the entire world was destroyed. Human beings are not mentally ill enough to continue a war that will eventually lead to human extinction, no matter how many wars we've fought against each other, or how fierce.
Only one war had the potential to surpass the sheer amount of carnage generated by World War III, a war which never became heated enough to explode into a full blown global conflict. The Cold War, an infamous nuclear showdown between the United States and the U.S.S.R that lasted over forty years, had the possibility to completely annihilate the entire world over and over again. The amount of nukes made by both super powers numbered in the thousands to millions, well over what was needed to obliterate all the earth. Luckily, this cold war did not become a hot war, sparing the world from nuclear destruction.
The Cold War is once again a testimony of humanity's frailty. Who wants to destroy the world? Who wants to doom billions to death by fire and radioactive fall out? Who wants to live in fear that any day humanity may be wiped off the surface of the earth? Neither government, despite the showdown, was willing to bear the responsibility of a dead planet on their heads, and haunting their people's consciences for generations to come. When the Cuban Missile Crisis happened in the 1960s, it was the closest that the world came to death by nuclear war. Yet the world was saved as Khrushchev decided that having missiles in Cuba wasn't worth a manifestation of nuclear war.
This is what makes the Third World War different. There was no fear in the enemies we were up against during the long five years of total war. There was no way a nuclear bomb could force surrender out of the ghoul that had raped most of Europe to Russia and half of the entire continent of Africa, well into the sub-Saharan, the place of my birth. No loss was too great to make them surrender. There was no sanity to keep our enemy from destroying the world, no deep-rooted sense of morality when it came to maintaining a green earth full of life. Our enemies, while some were intelligent (though pugnacious and murderous in nature), were mostly feral killing machines, restless in their pursuit to take lives and reproduce. Our enemies were monsters. Literal monsters. Not the bed time monsters my family would tell me about back when I was a young hunter. Not the American and Japanese monsters created by Hollywood or Japanese artists. Monsters. Beasts that fed and lived on man.
World War III was a war of monsters and men.
Of course, women and children were involved as well. The official and national armies consisted mostly of men, but in WWIII, everyone, without exception, had no choice but to join the fray. It was fight or die. The monsters that stalked every city, invaded every country side, massacred every ecosystem, made sure that the term "total war" evolved into something much worse.
Total war was coined during the American Civil War in 1861-1865 when Yankee and Confederate soldiers not only waged war on each other, but on the civilian populace as well. The civilians manufacturing arms and goods for their side of the war effort found themselves subject to enemy attack. This was a necessity to the war effort on the Northern side: if you cut off the South's source of supply, you win the war. This term was used later in a number of other wars, including the First and Second World Wars, Vietnam, and the Gulf Wars.
A distinction was made between soldiers and civilians, however. Though civilians were targets, soldiers were the ones to be fought. No army went out of their way to destroy civilians unless the civilians were somehow contributing to the war, or unless the civilians were in the way of the enemy. That is, unless the commanders of an army had a low sense of morality and massacred entire cities, like the Rape of Nanking in 1937 or the war in Darfur in the 2000s. This kind of behavior is not a guarantee, however. Total war in WWIII was different in one key concept. There was no difference between civilian and soldier. All were targets at all times and without mercy. Everyone had to fight, or at best, hide in a well fortified or hidden location.
WWIII was also marked by a practice long outlawed by the BWC: Biological warfare. In wars passed, biological warfare was often used. Kings would poison water wells. During sieges on castles, armies would sometimes fling Plague-ridden corpses over the walls in order to make their enemies die with disease. Anthrax was used as a terror weapon in the United States by Al Quada during the early 2000s. Disease was used to bring down the enemy's numbers so that they would surrender, or to simple frighten them to the point of surrender. Nobody wants to fight a war while their body is bleeding puss or insides flooding with bodily fluid. During the Third World War, disease was the primary weapon use by the monsters and beasts we fought. But in reality, these diseases, most manufactured, one found naturally in the mountains of rural Spain, were the creators and cause of these creatures.
The first "disease" that was
used during this war was also the reason for it. "Las Plagas",
translated from Spanish to "The Plagues" was the key for the war
effort of WWIII's instigator, Los Illuminados, led by the crazed
Machiko Naguchi, a Japanese woman with homicidal tendencies (See "The
Leaders"). Translated again from Spanish, Los Illuminados means
"the Lights" or "the Illuminated Ones". Their primary weapon
was Las Plagas. Las Plagas are mutagenic parasites found in Spain,
one that enables someone carrying the "queen" or "alpha" Las
Plaga to control all other "drone" Las Plaga, and by proxy, all
those infected with Las Plagas. It is now known that Los Illuminados
had a long-standing hold in the region of Spain during the 19th
century, due to the nature of their religion. Their religion made
infecting country folk in Spain easy. The religion, which will again
be a tool in infecting much of the European population before and
during the Third World War, holds to the belief that the Las Plagas,
with their mutagenic and mind-controlling properties, will rid the
world of sin and evil. This concept will be covered in more detail in
the section "Religion as a Weapon" later in this book. Los
Illuminados' cult also led to a consistent battle of religions
during the war, involving Christians, who were more passive and
resolved to save civilians rather than fight, Muslims, who declared
Jihad on Los Illuminados and their leader, and other faiths. This
aspect of the war will be covered later in the section "The War of
the Religions."
Using the Plagas, Los Illuminados were able to
mutate human beings and various animals into either a near mindless
slave of the Master Plaga carriers, primarily Machiko Naguchi
herself, or into hideous beasts, also controlled by Master Plaga
carriers. We now know that over a period of about ten years, Los
Illuminados were able to infect millions of civilians, government
officials, and military personnel in Spain, Portugal, France Ireland,
Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany with Las Plagas parasite in
order to begin the war in 2014. From 2004, which was when former
President Graham's daughter, Ashley Graham, was saved by Leon S.
Kennedy from Los Illuminados during a smaller skirmish, all the way
to 2014, Los Illuminados were preparing for this war. It was a
combination of their religion and a government sponsored vaccine for
swine flu (H1N1) that made their widespread infection possible. Every
shot of the vaccine contained a little extra something, something
unequivocally mind altering. Microscopic eggs of Las Plagas were
injected into the patient as well, allowing Los Illuminados to gain
control of citizens from all spectrums of society. How they pulled
this off is covered in the section "Pre-War" in chapter 1.
The Illuminados and Las Plagas were not the only enemy and biological agent the Allies encountered. Another, more infamous enemy joined in the war in 2015, four years before the war ended. Their contribution to this insidious war was monumental in many ways, mainly their negative effects on entire ecosystems. Humanity as a whole had known this group as the "Umbrella Corporation" since its creation in 1968, but during the war, it was known as "GoodHealth's Umbrella Corporation" led by Thomas Manhattan, an individual driven by lust for power. Soldiers during the war referred to GoodHeath's Umbrella as "Liars", a fitting name comparable to Umbrella's deceptive nature. Umbrella has been hated by the world over for directly causing a series of biological accidents in the late 90s, which involved viruses manufactured illegally in labs hidden from the general public. Why did they create these viruses? It is not fully known, though it seems likely for military application. In 2003, the Company completely dissolved, a product of their direct responsibility in the largest viral outbreak until the war, Raccoon City, in 1998. However, in 2011, the Australian pharmaceutical company, GoodHealth Inc., resurrected the evil corporation in order to recreate their viruses. These biological agents, a few series of viruses with horrendous mutagenic properties, were subversively volatile and had irrevocably long-term effects. One of these viruses, the T-Virus, also the most used virus during the war, even had a property that brought the dead back to life, changing them to rotting and shuffling creatures that fed on the living.
Tyrant-Virus, dubbed "T"-Virus, Gene-Virus, dubbed "G"-Virus, a variant of the T-Virus called NE-T Virus, and finally, the T-Veronica Virus were the viral players, and the effects of the application of these viruses are still being combated today, although the seriousness of their presence and their death toll have been heavily diluted and reduced. Using these viruses, Umbrella was able to create several creatures of incredibly lethal nature, called Bio-Organic Weapons, or BOWs. Feral in almost all ways (with some BOWs exhibiting higher levels of intelligence like the Nemesis, G-Virus carriers or Gs, and Thomas Manhattan, the main carrier of the T-Veronica Virus), BOWs stalked and killed any human they came in contact with, without exception. This included Los Illuminados, civilians, and Allies alike. Nothing, besides each other (though carriers of each virus often rivaled, but never hunted one another), was left out of their menu. One of the most noticeable differences between those infected with Las Plagas and the BOWs was that when most BOWs killed someone, they spread their virus, contributing to the BOW population. Allies feared BOWs like none other. At least many of Las Plagas carriers, with the exception of the creatures made by Las Plagas, retained some humanity. This could not be said for any BOW except one, Thomas Manhattan, the T-Veronica carrier. These viruses also spread like wildfire, creating multiple zombies in all areas of the war.
Why was GoodHealth's Umbrella involved in the war? One can only theorize, yet one motive is sure (proven by documents found in GoodHealth Umbrella's headquarters in Australia): Umbrella needed Las Plagas in order to create a BOW that would be fully tamed and retain a certain level of intelligence. As stated before, many BOWs were feral, uncontrollable, and many weren't very bright. Yet with the addition of Las Plagas, it would come within Umbrella's grasp the power to control, and in addition, allow several BOWs to retain their intelligence, a much needed attribute. By using their own viral agents, GoodHealth's Umbrella could weaken Los Illuminados and take the Plaga from them.
This presents another question, however. Why did they use their viruses on such a wide scale, infecting millions, and why did they air drop millions of BOWs in Europe, Africa, and Australia? If they only wanted Las Plagas, they could have used a small force of BOWs to infiltrate Los Illuminados strong holds and take the parasite. It is my theory and the theory of countless others that GoodHealth's Umbrella was exploiting the war to weaken the world's nations in hopes of gaining power. Though only a few countries outside the war with Los Illuminados were infected by Umbrella's viruses, what would stop them from using more of their viruses on the rest of the world? If the entire world were to be affected by these diseases, governments would weaken or collapse, and as a result, Umbrella could ransom the world, offering to use anti-viruses or specially trained Umbrella cleaning crews to remove the menace they created. Or they could leave the world clutched within their viruses' grips, and become the world's most powerful organization economically and influentially once all nations were weakened or destroyed. Whatever their motivations were, however, what is known is that Umbrella was heavily involved in this war and is responsible for the deaths of millions (including whole populations of animals and entire bioregions).
When Los Illuminados began the war in 2014, several of the world's powers went to war against them. The primary forces in Europe included England, which was protected from initial infection due to its island location, the United States, who were the first to encounter Los Illuminados in 2004, China, who feared infection of their own land and all over Asia, Israel, which had a protection pact with the United States, Russia, who later entered the war once signs of the T-virus were popping up on Russia's European boarder in 2017, India, Iran and even the IRA in Ireland. On the African front, the war was fought by an alliance of several African nations and factions that called themselves Defenders of Africa, or DA. This alliance was a surprise to the world, as many of DA's members were also mortal enemies before the war. However, today the members of DA have looked past their rivalry and remain united. All of the countries that were involved in the war against Los Illuminados and GoodHealth's Umbrella were known as the Allies, a name used during the first two World Wars.
With the theater set, World War III exploded, setting into motion humanity's darkest nightmare to date. Over 400,000,000 people perished over five years. Much of Europe is now uninhabited, with the exception of a few large human settlements and a small populace of animals, some of which still carry the viruses used during wartime. Africa, all the way to the Republic of Congo, is also ravaged, though many of its native people still inhabit the region. In India, 100,000,000 people were killed thanks to T-Virus air drops. The United States is now without New York City and Washington D.C after Umbrella launched a large volley of rockets containing T-Virus. Australia is also in bad condition, with only 13,000,000 inhabitants after GoodHealth's Umbrella used their BOWs to force capitulation out of Australian people. Much of the world has stepped up to the plate to take care for these wounded nations, sacrificing millions of dollars in rebuilding projects, repopulation programs, tending to refugees and those hurt most by the war, and clearing out (as many BOWs and Las Plaga creatures and carriers still lurk in non-populated and hidden areas, mostly areas that have not yet been reached by military forces) all hostiles remaining.
WWIII will never be forgotten, not in this age or the next. The world can never forget such a devastating conflict, one that had the certain potential of seeing humanity to extinction or our continuing existence in utter suffering and struggle to survive. It is my desire and duty that with this contemporary and thoroughly researched history book, containing eye witness accounts (including my own), documents, and completed research, the world will immortalize this virus war. In remembrance comes resolve. Resolve to never see such a tragedy happen again. After WWI, the world fought bravely to prevent WWII from taking place, even though this effort failed. After WWII, the world saw to it that the conditions that led to that war were never again met. And after WWIII, the entire world learned to band together, forget their long standing feuds and unite.
Never again will cults like Los Illuminados gain such control over entire states, never again will corrupted corporations like Umbrella and GoodHealth be allowed to continue their illegal and ubiquitous research of terror. Never again.
This is the story of WWIII.
