Author's Introduction:
*puts on her little black-framed glasses and her guest-speaker expression.* Who here likes movies? I love movies, all kinds of movies, even the ones that are cheesy or aren't that creative, like the Saw franchise. Tiny spoiler alert: there's a scene in the final Saw movie, Saw 3D (the lamest of the lot—they should have stopped at one when they still had a chance), in which Costas Mandylor's evil Detective Hoffman announces to the captive Jill Tuck, "You want to know the only thing that's wrong with killing you, Jill? I can only do it once."
Normally Hoffman would be correct, but sometimes the fates are benevolent, and you can kill a man who deserves it more than once.
Just watch—we'll show you.
Lucky Penny
A Resident Evil fanfic by Firestar9mm
Let him come into the city
Let him find his lucky penny
Let him put it in his pocket and shake it all around
I've been to pretty buildings, all in search of you...
(The Distance, Live)
She was, he decided, a very strange angel.
Not that he was complaining or anything. It was incredibly rare to see a physical manifestation of an answered prayer, and he wasn't about to speak ill of one, especially when the physical manifestation had a pretty smile and looked just as good from behind.
Besides, she was here. She was someone. And there was no one but her.
In Leon Kennedy's opinion, prayer was at best vague and at worst useless. He'd grown up in the days when the boys still wore white suits to their First Holy Communion, before the downward slide through the realization that no one would know if you omitted impure thoughts from the weekly parochial-school confession to save yourself a few Hail Marys, to the final, inevitable chill that came when you accepted the facts that they always seemed to gloss over from the pulpit—sometimes the good guys don't always win. Sometimes bad things happen to good people, to innocents, to children. Beloved pets, mothers, fathers, siblings and partners die, and so do we. And sometimes as hard as you pray, the best comfort you'll get is to learn how to live through the loss.
He'd been raised Catholic but it had been years since he'd set foot in a church, a fact he regretted almost reflexively when he got to Raccoon City and realized that the apocalypse had apparently started without him. There weren't enough Hail Marys in the world that could be penance enough for whatever he'd done to deserve this, he thought almost whimsically as he whipped his pistol up between his face and the leering corpse that was currently scratching at him with sticklike fingers. One shot was enough to stop its advance as half its head shattered and crumbled away, its trauma more due to the shock of the impact than from the damage incurred by the metal slug.
With a strangled groan, the zombie pitched to the street and mercifully stayed there. This one was apparently in dry rot, something he was grateful for as he ground the rest of its head to dust under one gore-splattered size thirteen military-issue combat boot. Most of the other zombies he'd encountered were decidedly...juicier, and the smell of decay had crawled down his throat and stayed there; he was sure he'd never erase it from his sensory memory, and there was no fresh air to be had with half the city on fire and the other in the grave. His uniform was also a total loss, having been splashed with congealing blood and other noisome effluvia as he'd made his way from his car (god damn it, he had loved that Jeep, had had a lot of good times with tha...) towards the police station. That is, he hoped he was on his way to the police station. For all he knew he was running in circles at this point, and every route was blocked by a shambling, shuffling, crawling or slithering pack of the undead.
Something in him still held out hope that he had made this entire thing up. Maybe he'd had too much to drink last night at his going-away party—okay, he'd definitely had too much to drink last night at his going-away party—and all of this was a fevered dream brought on by funneling one too many and passing out on the torn sofa in his buddy's rec room. Indeed, he'd initially blended right in with the recently-deceased citizens of Raccoon City, his gait as choppy and awkward as theirs, and he'd just assumed that he was the one moving and seeing in half-speed rather than everyone else. Before he'd caught on to what was really happening—before he'd seen the rotting sores on their faces and bodies, before he'd seen the property damage, before one of them had lunged for him and tried to take a bite out of his shoulder—his only thought had been, This is the worst hangover.
It occurred to him now that waking up hung over and realizing that he was late for his first day on the job would have been infinitely preferable to what he was currently dealing with, and that included having been unceremoniously dumped at his own party the night before. Incredibly, he felt a ghoulish smile begin to tug at his lips as he imagined his now-ex-girlfriend's reaction to the news that he'd been killed and eaten by horror-movie monsters before he'd even made it to work. He bet she'd put on a big show for the papers, wearing cheap drugstore mascara on purpose so it'd be sure to run.
It actually helped a little, imagining Christina looking like a scrawny raccoon every hour, on the hour as she bawled on camera for the local news stations. Leon and I were soul mates! No one could have loved him more! This is a senseless tragedy!
The only senseless tragedy would be that his death would be one more thing Christina would make all about her. It would serve her right if he actually lived through this, Leon thought, wisely not considering his own savagery as he shot a rotting dog out of the air as it was leaping towards him, ensuring it was dead with a merciless stomp to its spine as it landed with a sickening wet thud.
As he lifted his boot from the animal, its head lolled bonelessly to one side. Its eyes had been glazed over long before the signals to its brain were interrupted by Leon's bullet, but the spark of insanity that had kept it moving flickered and died, and as the rookie watched, its tongue poked out from beneath blood-speckled fangs, a chunk of the wet muscle missing near the tip.
Now it was dead, and so were any lunatic ideas he'd had about this being some drunken anxiety nightmare.
Adrenaline chased the last few cobwebs from his brain as he skirted the burning wreckage of a three-vehicle pileup, the centerpiece of which appeared to have lately been an eighteen-wheeler. The smell of burning rubber did little to mask the stench of rotting flesh that had settled over the entire city, and the heat from the flame seemed only to carve all his bumps and bruises into high relief against his suffering central nervous system.
The childish thought came unbidden as his feet shuffled exhaustively around the wreck—I want to go home—and he shook it away because there was just no way.
There was another zombie standing dangerously close to the burning truck, its back to him, and Leon automatically raised his gun to sight on it—her; a girl, if the long red ponytail was any indication, her bright pink vest providing a perfect target. The garment was emblazoned with a curvaceously gorgeous angel, the sort that normally posed on the nosecones of World War II fighter jets. The picture's sweet, secretive smile seemed to promise him that everything would be all right, and he somehow didn't have the heart to shoot at the image.
Which was lucky, because that gave him time to notice other things about the girl—firstly, that she looked rather normal aside from a few smudges of dust on her clothes. She was steady on her long, bare legs, and what exposed fair skin he could see wasn't broken with gaping, rotting sores. The red ponytail was clean and shiny, not matted and tangled with sweat and blood.
A word he felt he'd already forgotten whispered through his brain. Human?
One way to find out, and a second zombie helped him make up his mind-it seemed to erupt from the burning truck, uncaring about the fact that it was on fire, its entire world shrunken to a predator's target blindness when there was prey to be had. It started for the girl—Leon had decided that yes, it was a girl and not a monster, his heart rate picking up with hope that he might not be alone in a mad world after all—picking up frightening speed as it shambled towards her, gravity and hunger giving it lethal velocity as it raised its rotting, roasting arms to seize her.
Training overtook Leon, forced him to ignore the stink of decaying, burning flesh and hair, to rise above his own panic and do his job. Squeezing down on the trigger once more, he barked, "Get down!" and the girl gave a half turn, tail of hair lashing with the movement. Leon caught a glimpse of a determined face, blue eyes sparkling with intelligence, before she obeyed him and took a knee, leaving him a clear shot at the charging zombie. The gun spoke, and the zombie staggered backward, blood exploding from its shoulder. It halted for barely a second before resuming its charge.
Leon immediately cursed the same training that had helped him focus a moment earlier—police officers were trained to aim for the center of mass; it was the biggest target, and a shot to the torso would certainly have slowed down a human being. But these things weren't human, and he was quickly learning that the best place to put a bullet on the monsters was right in their misfiring brains.
Luckily, the girl hadn't been idle while he'd been playing the big damn hero. As he watched, she tilted a frown up at the advancing zombie from her kneeling position on the ground, as if the monster were simply an annoying inconvenience. Rising halfway, she seized its wrist as though it were nothing, as though the arm she grasped were not in fact on fire, and in a textbook self-defense move hurled the beast over her shoulder, where its deteriorating body landed with an almost comical...splat. He was grateful that it stayed down-one more problem in the next few minutes and he'd be all out of solutions.
Leon started to walk towards the girl, thinking that she must have been terrified and would need calming before they could discuss any further plans to deal with the nightmare around him, but he saw those wild, wild eyes focus on him like a targeting scope and stopped in his tracks. With a speed that would have frightened small children, she pivoted on her feet and drew a weapon he hadn't seen when she'd had her back to him-a combat knife, something wicked-looking with a toothed blade and a sheen that spoke to the care its owner took of it.
Leon's eyes shot wide in alarm. Had he made a mistake? Were some of the monsters in this city smart enough to use weapons?
No, that didn't make any sense. She was alive, alert—she wasn't one of those shambling things. Still, she had the knife in her hand and her intense gaze was still locked on him. Her long legs were bent slightly beneath her, ready to launch her at the nearest threat, and she was looking at him as though she found him pretty threatening. Why? He'd just saved her life—hadn't she seen that?
In that instant, Leon was ready to give up. His feet braced wide to meet her assault and he threw an arm up to protect his face as desperately as he flung a prayer heavenward. Send me an angel—
And she said, "Move."
He obeyed, and as he sidestepped he saw what she'd really been aiming at—another zombie, so close behind him it was nearly upon him, and he'd never have heard it coming between the flaming wreck and his own distraction by the sight of another living, breathing human in this Boschian hellhole. She'd held the knife not by its hilt to stab or slash, but by its blade—to throw.
For the rest of his life he would swear time slowed so that he could follow the shining blade as it spun past his face, before he saw it bury itself in the chest of the zombie, the force of the blow toppling the monster. It lay on the ground, twitching and shuddering, and Leon turned to look at the one who'd thrown the knife that had saved his life.
To look at the one he'd prayed for, the one who'd come just when he'd needed her most.
To look at the angel.
He wasn't sure what to say to her; "thank you" wasn't even forming on his lips yet, so shocked was he at her very presence, but she saved him the trouble by breaking the silence first with a grin like starlight and a little laugh.
"Whoa. I didn't think that would even work!"
Reflexively, Leon glanced down at the twitching zombie. He'd been about three seconds away from being eaten by that thing, and she'd tried something she hadn't thought would work?
But machismo demanded he answer her. "Not bad," he agreed, relieved that he sounded as matter-of-fact as she did.
She smiled at him, her eyes twinkling. "Not bad for a girl?"
He was about ready to admit that he'd thought it was pretty good for goddamn Hawkeye, but he was the one wearing the uniform and he decided he'd better start acting like it. Turning slightly so as not to give her his back—she'd drawn that knife so quickly, and she'd certainly lookedas though she'd been ready to spring at him—Leon knelt by the corpse's side and yanked the knife out of its chest, wiping it on what appeared to be the only clean corner of its shirttail. Yes, it was real, and heavy in his hand, the toothed blade seeming to smile at him as he tilted it, the better to see what was engraved on the steel.
"S.T.A.R.S.," he read, turning to hand it back to the girl, who was waiting patiently as though they were in absolutely no danger. "Special Forces?"
Leon could hardly be blamed for sounding dubious—the girl before him couldn't have weighed more than a buck-twenty soaking wet. She was wearing a mock-necked, short-sleeved shirt beneath the bright pink vest, and black Lycra shorts beneath denim cutoffs. Heavy knee boots and fingerless driving gloves completed the outfit. She didn't exactly look military.
But her smile was unoffended as she took the knife back from him and explained with a laugh fore and aft. "My brother taught me that trick. It's his knife." Her expression sobered as she glanced around as though expecting the man in question to come out from behind one of the buildings, or open the door of one of the burning cars and step into the street. "That's why I'm here. To find him."
Leon realized that he was staring at her, but he couldn't help himself. Their surroundings didn't seem to be bothering her in the slightest. Rotting, predatory zombies didn't upset her, but a shadow had flitted over her face when she had acknowledged that her brother was missing and she did not know where to find him. Who was this girl—who was the brother of a girl who didn't think anything of appearing randomly in an urban war zone and spiking hellish monstrosities with knives from twenty paces?
It wasn't the first time he'd asked himself the question tonight. What the hell is going on here?
He realized his thoughts were plain on his face when hers crinkled cutely into a look of concern. "We should probably go now."
The sound of the fire eating at the truck reregistered in Leon's ears at the simplicity of her statement—we should go—and his head spun. He'd very nearly forgotten about the fire—forgotten everything that was happening—as soon as he'd seen her laughing and smiling incongruously in the war zone.
She offered her hand, still smiling sweetly. "My name's Claire," she said. "Claire Redfield."
He blinked. The knife had been solid in his hand, real; he could smell the remains of perfume on her and she had a white weal of a scar on her upper arm that effectively negated his "angel" theory, but he'd still somehow expected her to say "Ariel" or something.
"Hey," he said, taking the offered hand and shaking. She had a good grip, the grip of a woman who'd grown up around enough tough guys that she knew how to shake hands without overcompensating for anything. "Leon Kennedy."
I'm normal, he told himself, trying to blot out the roar of the burning vehicles and the distant groans of monsters on nearby streets. A normal guy meeting a girl.
"So," she said airily as they put distance between themselves and the fire, "what exactly is going on around here?"
Years later, he would credit the concentration he'd had to employ to follow the mercurial gyrations of her breezy conversation as being the main thing that had kept him from losing it entirely as they navigated the city streets, but now he frowned at the question, as if he hadn't been asking it himself ever since he'd stepped foot in this damned city. "Hell if I know. I just got here."
She smirked. "Well, then I guess I can't count on you to know where the best diner is."
Leon blinked, but her smile was as infectious as whateverhad made the citizens of Raccoon City undead, gangrenous monsters. "No," he said, "but you can count on me to shoot things that are about to eat you. How's that sound?"
She beamed, as if she were thrilled to discover that he had a sense of humor after all. "Like the best date I've had in months," she declared.
And for the first time since he'd entered the city limits, Leon Kennedy laughed.
In a moment peace came over me and the one who was beating my heart appeared.
(The Distance, Live)
Right from the beginning, it was very bad. Leon was unable to get a signal on his radio—unsurprising when the city was in ruins around them, but that bothered him less than the idea that no one was even out there to answer his calls. Claire waited patiently while he jabbed buttons and swore, finally clipping the useless object back onto his belt and kneeling to remove his backup piece—a Browning Hi-Power nine millimeter—from the ankle holster he wore. Carefully holding the gun out to Claire, he said, "Here, you should take this." He didn't ask her if she knew how to shoot it—she knew how to throw knives, and her brother clearly was or had been enlisted at some point; he was sure she'd learned how to use a gun somewhere in the middle of all that. Sure enough, she took the weapon and looked it over with a bright-eyed look of approval, disengaging the safety with the ease of practice.
"We should head to the police station," Leon told her. "We may be able to get more information there."
Claire liked that idea; she brightened immediately. "Maybe my brother is there."
"Maybe," Leon agreed, unwilling to puncture that sweet smile with his thoughts, which were that the chances of Claire finding her brother alive in this war zone were looking rather anemic at this point. "If he is, let's hope he's kicking ass."
Claire treated him to a rather amused frown, as though he had said something incredibly naïve. "Are you kidding? My brother thought Desert Storm was practice maneuvers."
As they began moving hesitantly down the street and away from the still-burning truck, which was poised to ruin their night further should it explode, Leon kept talking, unsure of whether he was trying to distract Claire or himself from the mess around him. "What's your brother's name?"
"Chris," she responded. "Chris Redfield." Glancing at his uniform, she asked with sudden, happy inspiration, "Do you know him? You're a cop, right?"
Leon gave her a rueful smile. "First day."
Claire's hopeful gaze dimmed, the light in her eyes replaced by an almost tender pity. Her head tilted, a gesture that he would come to learn meant she was giving something her full attention, and one hand reached out, as though she would touch his face. She thought better of it almost immediately, her hand fluttering high for a moment before clapping down on his shoulder, as though she'd suddenly remembered she was supposed to be one of the boys. Leon guessed (correctly, although he wouldn't have confirmation of that until much later) that her tendency to suppress any overtly feminine gestures or responses was a behavior that had been conditioned over many years of hanging out with very tough guys. But the affection in her face was clear as she smiled at him.
"Well, you've already saved one person's life tonight, rookie," she said, her voice warm with congratulations as she cartoonishly brought a thumb to her own chest to indicate herself. "Let's see if you can keep it up."
Leon almost stopped walking, stunned at how she made something fraught with consequence sound like a trip to the convenience store. "Well, no pressure there," he muttered.
The exchange was interrupted by the arrival of more zombies, and Leon quickly directed Claire through a clear space in the rapidly growing horde of former Raccoon City citizens. "This way!"
"Are you sure?" Claire asked breathlessly behind him.
"No. Come on," he joked with a confidence he didn't feel.
Years later, when asked how he and Claire had met, Leon would simply make a joke about how they'd run into each other in Raccoon City and hit it off. This was not actually a lie—even he was impressed with how well they worked together almost immediately. He took point, making sure whichever area they were currently heading into was clear or at least reasonably clear enough for them to advance, while Claire covered his six, something that came in handy almost immediately when he accidentally led them down an alley that dead-ended at a locked metal door.
"Shit," he hissed. "Shit, shit, shit—"
A report from behind him told him Claire already had an exit strategy. "Come on, come back," she called over her shoulder, and he turned to see her attempting to clear them a path to safety, the smile on the face of the angel on the back of her vest seeming to promise her success. His adrenaline-addled imagination tried to convince him the image winked at him, but he shook the thought away. Way to go, genius, he scolded himself as they backtracked, Claire taking point until they reached the street again with Leon reassuming the lead with a frustrated, exaggeratedly macho stride as soon as he was able to. She's going to think you're such a moron, he told himself, then shook the ridiculous thought away. They were running for their lives, not out on a date.
Still, it made him braver to see Claire look to him when they reached a fork in their path, or when she flanked him as they advanced into the more narrow spaces. When they were lucky enough to stumble into the local gun shop—and unlucky enough to be attacked once they were inside—she obeyed his instructions to take as much firepower as they could carry without so much as blinking, and generously let him have the bigger gun without him having to ask for it as they shot their way out. She was a crack shot, too, and the same levelheadedness that had so baffled him earlier in the evening made him worry less about her when the ever-multiplying zombies tried to back them into corners. Every so often he would catch himself looking at her with something close to awe; he was barely hanging on to his own training at this point and couldn't fathom how she wasn't a gibbering, screaming mess by now. He decided to just be grateful that he didn't have to worry about her falling apart on him as their chances of surviving the night declined more and more rapidly.
Which is why when she did fall apart, it surprised him far more than it would have if she'd done it immediately.
It happened on the one-yard line—when they had finally reached the police station. Leon allowed himself to breathe a small sigh of relief when he saw the lights on inside the large building. He was hopeful that there might be other survivors inside, and even if there weren't, there would be more weapons, more ammunition, the possibility of calling for help, more places for himself and Claire to take cover until they could make sense of this horrific night.
However, multiple-car pileups and throngs of zombies were strewn between Leon and Claire and the station's entrance. It seemed that the best method of accessing the building would be to cut through a nearby alley that actually ran beneath the building rather than alongside it—a stone staircase would bring them back to street level on the opposite side, and they would be close enough to the front doors to sprint for it and hope they weren't caught before they reached it. Indicating that direction to Claire, Leon descended the closest set of concrete steps, almost smiling when he got to the bottom and realized their luck was still holding—there was only one zombie shuffling around in the cool dark of the alley, looking almost forlorn in the dirty, bloodstained remains of tactical fatigues and a vest that had likely once been bright enough to direct traffic in. One well-placed bullet would be enough to down the monster, and then he and Claire would be home free—at least until they ran into whatever might be inside the precinct. Leon raised his gun, wanting to make the shot count.
And behind him, for the first time since they'd met, Claire screamed.
Leon would never be able to clearly remember what exactly happened in the alley that night. Some portions of the evening would be carved into high relief in his memory for the rest of his life; others would be lost in a jumble of panic and suffering, but he could at least attribute their loss to the pain and the fear he was battling all night. The alley was a different story, and would resurface through the years as one of the points during the ordeal at which he was the most terrified—not of the monster in the dark, but of the inexplicable, instantaneous rage that propelled his angel past him, through the arm he held out to block her, back into the line of fire with a shriek of fury.
The most accurate description he could ever place on the events that followed would be that for five minutes or so, she simply went mad.
She actually pushed him, sending him stumbling off-balance in her eager haste to attack the zombie currently menacing them. She hadn't done that before; she'd been perfectly content to dodge, run and hide as strategy permitted, only killing the monsters they couldn't safely elude. This was a different story; the narrow alley had no escape route, but Claire seemed completely ignorant of that fact and charged past Leon with murder in her eyes. Escape was not the goal here; she wanted this one dead, and watching her move, Leon had no doubt she'd make it happen.
The knife simply appeared in her hand; he never saw her unsheath it. She'd put it away as soon as he'd given her the Browning Hi-Power he'd been carrying as backup, and her eyes had lit up as though he'd presented her flowers instead, but now she didn't even reach for the gun as she leapt for the zombie, the knife a shining, blood-spattered extension of her arm. Dazedly, Leon imagined he could hear the blade singing in anticipation of violence, as though it had been waiting just beyond reach, biding its time until she called it back to her hand, like Wolverine's claws.
The zombie swiped at Claire, clumsily, but the rotting arm was still muscular enough that she'd have been against the wall with her breath knocked out had it connected. But it never came close—Claire seemed to stop in midair, dropping straight back to the ground like a movie special-effect, a quick pivot of her feet and a liquid twist of her shoulder taking her safely beneath the awkward swing of the monster's arm. Dodging to the side, she shifted her weight back to center and the angle combined with the stingy light allowed Leon the barest glimpse of the bloodthirsty victory on her face as she slammed the knife into the zombie's chest.
There was a low pop as the zombie's gas-swelled chest cavity punctured; its head flew back with the force of the blow, but Claire wasn't finished—shifting her grip on the hilt with a flick of her wrist, she dragged the blade diagonally down the monster's torso, effectively unzipping its chest and stepping neatly out of the way of the spill of its putrid guts. Down feathers from the zombie's shredded tactical vest looked hideously silly as they drifted down to the widening pool of dark blood.
Fighting the horror of seeing the pretty girl he already liked so much dismembering the corpse of a human being with an intense look of violent satisfaction on her face, Leon raised his weapon to give her a hand—so focused was she on killing the zombie, as painfully as possible, it seemed, that she appeared to be forgetting that injuring it wouldn't stop its advance. But she wouldn't stand still, and he couldn't risk shooting when she was so close to the monster; he didn't trust his shaking hands and if he hit her he'd be making her a sitting duck for whatever came their way next.
The zombie, put off-balance by the vicious assault, staggered but did not go down; it flailed its arms briefly but Leon could see what its intent was—Claire was so close to it that all it would have to do would be to wrap its arms around her and crush her to its ruined chest to bite. Leon closed one eye and sighted, intending to just risk a shot to the center of mass in order to knock the zombie away from her, but he never had time to fire. Claire stepped almost languidly out of its reach as though she had all the time in the world, turning the movement into a tight spin with her knife extended. As she came full circle, the blade bit into the brittle bones of the rotting corpse, severing the hand that would have grabbed her.
The hand dropped to the pavement in a gout of blood and thicker things, and the dead man raised the stump to his face as though he himself didn't understand what had happened—Leon was surprised that he thought of the zombie as "him" for the first time, so human was the gesture. Coming out of the stupor, the monster extended the stump and its remaining hand towards her, just like in the old movies. Claire took advantage of its apparent confusion to flip her knife once more, and displaying the same effortless grace she had when she'd thrown the knife to save him earlier—it already seemed so long ago—she hurled it with the full force of that inexplicable anger at its ruined chest, where it buried itself to the hilt.
Bullseye—the zombie stopped reaching for her as though a switch had been turned off inside it. Dropping its arms, it staggered back a few steps. Slowly, Claire walked up to it and seized the knife hilt.
She stared it in the eye for barely a second.
It was almost as if a switch had been turned off in her as well-her final move was almost dismissive, if no less forceful, a kick of one long leg up to push the zombie away from her with a combat-booted-foot. With a rattling groan, the monster fell backwards and lay on the ground, the knife still in Claire's hand with a souvenir spiked on the blade—its rotting, purple, gangrenous-looking heart.
Her eyes were wide and empty as she considered the heart. Letting her arm drop, gravity took over and the oozing muscle slid from the blade to splat wetly on the ground. That look of bestial fury flitted across her face again as she ground it into oblivion with the heel of one combat boot, and then she advanced to the twitching, shuddering zombie.
Leon had given up trying to intervene; this was clearly between her and the zombie, for whatever outlandish reason. Now he watched as she finally drew the Browning, aiming between the downed monster's eyes with the lethal cool of an assassin. When she spoke, her voice was clear, and as far away from reality as the cold stars that burned above the dead city.
"You almost killed us both, you son of a bitch."
The shot was loud as an explosion in the small alley, leaving hissing echoes as the report bounced off the walls.
Leon wasn't sure how he knew it was over; maybe it was the heaviness with which her arm fell to dangle at her side, maybe it was the way he could see the sanity flood her eyes as they filled with tears. She let out a sobbing breath, staring down at the dead zombie, still and silent now in a pool of its own blood.
Slowly, Leon came out of his paralysis and walked closer to her. He worried briefly that he might startle her and then he'd be the one with a knife in his chest, but she gave no sign that she noticed his advance, even when he was standing beside her, looking at her handiwork.
The zombie was well and truly dead now. Its milky eyes were filmed over and staring sightlessly up at them, earthworm lips parted to reveal bloodstained teeth. A bit of bone shone dimly through a hole in its cheek, but that had been there long before they'd arrived. Claire's contributions were all below the neck—the zombie's chest was a red ruin, the ragged edges of the seam she'd carved into it already stained the darker red of heart's blood. A tip of bone—a rib, likely—poked up at an unnatural angle, as if pointing accusingly up at them.
The zombie's screamingly yellow tactical vest was almost comically bright beneath the gore. The longer he looked, the more details Leon could pick out. The man had worn a white shirt beneath his vest, but it was dingy now with blood spatter and the sweat of fear; that, more than anything else, made Leon wonder just who this man had been before the virus had taken him. The only clues to his identity were a tattered, barely readable name tag on the ruined vest and a torn patch on the sleeve of the once-white shirt-a blue shield that Leon remembered from earlier in the evening. He'd seen the same design engraved on the blade of Claire's knife, had even asked her about it, but only just now recognized it as the insignia of Raccoon City's elite special forces unit, the S.T.A.R.S.
Shit, this guy had been a cop.
And not just any cop—a member of the elite special forces unit that had been mowed down by cannibals or—or something in the Raccoon City woods not more than a few months ago. Sure, the department had tried to cover it up, but everyone had heard the stories. It wasn't easy to cover up the disappearance of not one, but two teams of supercops all in one day. And the S.T.A.R.S. were no joke, either—a lot of them were ex-military and generally not to be fucked with, but they'd suffered heavy losses against whatever was out in the woods that day. The few survivors—and there hadn't been many—had been all but discredited by the department and were considered to have been driven mad by their experiences. The ones lucky enough to return alive had come back injured, blinkered and disoriented, raving about...
Leon almost slapped his forehead. They'd come back raving about exactly what was happening here. The few surviving S.T.A.R.S. had returned from their ordeal with wild tales of monsters—flesh-eating zombies, mutated former humans and gigantic predatory animals—and a spiderwebbed conspiracy of harmful pharmaceuticals, illegal experimentation on humans and other nightmare fuel. They'd blamed the whole thing on their mole of a captain, who'd allegedly thrown them to the undead, rotting wolves—literally—and incidentally hadn't been heard from since.
They were right, Leon realized dazedly. They saw everything, and nobody believed them. Even I didn't believe them—I still agreed to come to this godforsaken town. And don't say there's no way we could have known—they knew. They knew.
And no one believed them.
The monsters had gotten this S.T.A.R., too—killed him long before Claire had come with her shining blade and her furious eyes. Leon glanced first at her, so empty with her bloodlust ebbing, and then back to the downed zombie. He couldn't help but wonder.
Why? Who were you?
Leon's gaze flicked back to the shredded name tag on the torn vest. Claire's knife or monster claws had done a real number on it, and it was dark in places with blood. All he could make out was i...k...rs.
He looked back to Claire, who was staring at the corpse as if waiting for it to leap up again. Like she didn't trust it to stay down like the others had once she'd finished with them, and she hadn't given them half the thrashing she'd treated this one to.
It was strange. Leon had known Claire for less than an evening, and the dead cop not at all, but looking at her stormy face and being unable to reconcile it with the ethereal smile that had kept him going when the world around them had turned apocalyptic, he couldn't help but feel certain the dead man had deserved what he'd gotten, both from the zombies and from Claire. Maybe even worse.
You almost killed us both, you son of a bitch.
Somehow, Leon knew he wasn't the one that Claire meant when she said "us"—he imagined she was talking about herself and her brother; the insignia on the knife meant Chris Redfield had been a member of S.T.A.R.S., and if that was the case, he and the dead man had known each other. Claire had clearly recognized the unfortunate corpse as well, and now as she hissed her accusations Leon knew she didn't just mean tonight.
Claire was now leaning against the wall of the alley, looking exhausted, and Leon finally felt it safe to ask the question. "What did he do?"
She turned limpid, traumatized eyes to him, and when she spoke her voice was impossibly weary. "It's what he didn't do."
Leon spared one more look at the corpse, sad and defeated in a pool of its own blood, lying in the wreckage of its internal organs. He was only briefly surprised that his pity was all for the girl who'd made the mess, and the comfort he offered now was for her. "You got him," he assured her. "You won."
It didn't seem to cheer her; tears finally spilled in a line down one cheek. "I didn't do anything. He's a zombie. I can't even hurt him."
Remembering the way the zombie had raised its bloody wrist, searching for its missing hand, Leon was inclined to disagree with her. "He's been hurting all night. He came back to life just to keep on hurting, Claire." Hurting and waiting, he realized with a quick cold chill. Maybe the fallen S.T.A.R. with the torn name tag had prayed for an angel, too—the angel of death.
And Claire had been this dead man's angel, the same way she'd been Leon's—he'd prayed and she'd come. All shining speed and lethal force, she'd saved him too.
It occurred to Leon that this horrific thought ought to have bothered him more, but over the course of the evening he'd grown accustomed to the fact that destiny was not always pretty. He elected not to think on it anymore, only to be grateful that he'd been the one chosen to take Claire's hand instead of dying by it.
Claire was crying silently, posture slumping with weariness, shoulders dragged down by the wings in his imagination. Her lament was barely louder than a whisper. "It's not enough."
It would have to be enough, Leon thought idly. The dead man had been killed more times tonight than should have been biologically possible. "It's all there is," he said gently. "He'll never do—or not do—anything again. There isn't any more."
She made an awful sound then, a whine of pain as the tears flowed faster, and when he opened his arms to her she collapsed bonelessly into them. He held her hard, took her shaking as she clung to him and buried her face in his shoulder.
"Claire," he said gently, torn between pity and paranoia—he was starting to get the feeling that if they stayed in the alley much longer, they wouldn't make it out again. "Claire, come on. We've got to get out of here. Your brother's still out there somewhere. He needs you."
It appeared he'd finally said the right thing; she lifted her face to him, blinking in slow understanding. A single tear slipped from her eye, and Leon swiped his thumb gently over her cheekbone to dry it.
"I need you, too," he confessed softly. "I can't do this without you, Claire. If you tag out now, who's going to cover my six when I lead us down a dead end?"
He could actually see the sanity return to her eyes in waves. Her words came out soft and battered, but he could hear the ring of amusement in them once more, and the ghostly sparkle of the smile that had first lit his night was back. "You're no dead end, rookie," she declared, stepping out of his embrace and straightening up to her full height. "I've got your six, no matter where you lead."
Despite being devoid of zombies, the precinct lobby was not at all comforting. A water fountain was dry and silent in the middle of the room, a statue of a sad-eyed maiden staring out from stone exile at its center. Blood was splattered on the walls and windows, smeared across the marble floor as though something or someone had crawled through it, but there was no sign of anything alive in the immediate vicinity.
Claire set her jaw and looked around, then started walking towards the nearest door. "Let's go to the S.T.A.R.S. office. Maybe my brother is there, and if not, his weapons will be."
"Do you think he'll mind if we borrow them?" Leon joked halfheartedly, their footsteps echoing eerily through the large, empty room.
"He hasn't got a choice," Claire declared airily, and Leon marveled at how speedily she'd gotten control of herself after the episode in the alley. "Our parents raised him to share his toys."
Leon tried not to smile and failed; he let it come, realizing that any opportunity he'd have to smile tonight shouldn't be taken for granted. "Do you know the way?"
"No. Why, do I look like I do?" She smiled back, stopping at the door. "But maybe one of your colleagues will give us some directions." Her face darkened then, and she readied the Browning. "Or, they'll try to eat us, so maybe stay behind me till I clear the room."
Leon watched her adjust her stance in front of the door, as though she were ready to kick it in. Taking point, shielding him, as if she hadn't been sobbing in his arms not half an hour before this. Claire remained still for a moment, and Leon realized she was listening; there were no sounds of shuffling feet or groans in the room beyond. No whimpers or yelps of pain, no cries for help, just...nothing. Stepping up beside her, Leon raised his own Sig Sauer. "No, we go in together."
Over the guns, their stances singing with tension, the two survivors shared a smile.
"Hate to tell you this, ace," Claire quipped, her voice breathless with nerves she was trying bravely to control, "but I think you're the luckiest cop in this whole city."
Despite the possibility that his own death might lay just beyond the door they faced, Leon felt an intense calm come over him just knowing she was there—that no matter what happened, they would be together.
"Trust me," he assured her, "I know I am."
Author's Notes:
I've been wanting to write this story for a very, very long time. I've said it before and I'll say it again—I feel like Resident Evil 2 has so much potential for fic, and we could all sit here with computers and typewriters and notebooks and pens for the rest of our lives and not come close to dredging up all the story possibilities in Resident Evil 2.
On taking liberties: It's never established in canon how well Claire knew the S.T.A.R.S., if she knew them at all. I like to imagine that she and Chris are close and speak often, due to them having no other living family (established in the Japanese novelization of the original Resident Evil). It's also not established in canon how much Claire knew before going to search for Chris in Raccoon City. I like to imagine Chris might have told her a little—not all of it, obviously, because he wrote in his journal that to reveal too much to her would put her in danger—but surely the man had post-battle-trauma, and he might have told her some of it. I can't imagine she'd have too high an opinion of Officer Brad "Chickenheart" Vickers, whose cowardly desertion was the final nail in the Alphas' coffin at the Spencer mansion. As for Leon being dumped the night before his party, I think that was a plot piece in that Japanese novelization as well, but the character of Christina is something I just made up. She's based on…aaaaah, I shouldn't tell you that story. I'll end up getting charged with conspiracy. *winks*
Angels: It's widely believed that biblical angels weren't specifically male or female, but you could do worse than Ariel—roughly translated, Ariel means "Lion of God". Not that Claire isn't a great name for our girl—that translates to "clear, bright".
Easter Egg: It's not out of the question that Claire may have run into the corpse of Brad Vickers in the alley by the police station—all she'd have to do would be to fight her way there with a blade instead of a gun, and he'd be waiting with his key to the wardrobe lockers that contained a denim jacket emblazoned with a firebird and the lyrics that would show up later in CODE: Veronica—"Let Me Live".
I seem to have a much easier time writing these in October—but then again, everything is easy for me in October. If only it could just stay October forever!