Resident Evil:
The Untold Story
-- by Rain Child and Okuichan
Disclaimers: Rain Child and Okuichan do not own Resident Evil or any other copyrighted materials mentioned within.
Authors' Notes: Hey all! Rain Child here. I co-wrote this one with Okuichan, my best friend. Please read and review, and feel free to flame as well—criticism is a means of improvement.
We've decided to completely re-work this fic. We were not happy with our original work. (Okay, okay, so we just want a new excuse not to update often.) For those of you who've read this before—the plot is rather similar, but the beginning seven chapters are almost completely altered, as well as the characterization, events, and dialogue, especially after chapter three or so. You might want to re-read this story in order to avoid confusion. The story will definitely be better this time around, anyway.
This story is about a group of S.T.A.R.S. members, an unofficial team led by a friend of Barry Burton. The team sets out towards Raccoon, to find Barry and uncover the truth about the Raccoon murders and Umbrella—and arrive just in time for the outbreak of the virus in Raccoon City. Though most of the characters are originals, there will be a few run-ins with some familiar faces.
We humbly request (and threaten violence if our request is denied) that this story not be altered, tampered with, or posted somewhere without our knowledge. Though Resident Evil wasn't our idea, this story is entirely original. If you want it, ask.
If
you get a chance, please e-mail us in regards to this story:
Léa (Rain Child):
raingoddess_47@hotmail.com
Cara (Okuichan): anthy-chan@wildmail.com
Prologue
September 1998
Captain Eric Anderson shifted his weight in the driver's seat of the van. Though he was well aware this outing to Raccoon City SHOULD'T be more than an investigative venture, the familiar anticipation he felt before a combat situation was building anyway, forming a tight ball of adrenaline in the pit of his stomach. However, after more than twenty years with the S.T.A.R.S., he'd learned to welcome the emotions felt before a potential fight, and had long since given up any notion of suppressing them.
"Raccoon City, twelve miles," he heard Luke Santiago announce. Sure enough, a green road sign blew past them. Finally, they were almost there.
Eric sighed, relieved. He'd endured over two months of restless
nights, sleeping little and eating less, since the day his old friend, Barry
Burton, had called…
****Flashback****
"Zombies, Eric," Barry said. "The walking dead, humans exposed to a virus meant to create bio-weapons. I've seen them, buddy. Umbrella has been building organic weapons, and managed to turn men into corpses, cannibals!"
"That's what these cannibals killers are? Zombies?"
"For lack of a better term, yeah. Decaying flesh-eaters, victims of a disease Umbrella designed and cultivated out in that mansion."
"Barry…" Eric sighed. "This is a little…"
"Listen," Barry interrupted, "I know it sounds crazy. But I know what I'm talking about! Umbrella is involved in bio-weapons research, and they have to be stopped. This virus… Eric, complete cellular decay. Think about it. Any human exposed turns into an animated corpse in forty-eight hours."
****End Flashback****
Eric swallowed, remembering the insistent, desperate tone in Barry's voice. It had sounded so incredulous at the time: Umbrella, Inc., one of the world's most successful pharmaceutical companies, had been engineering bioorganic creatures in Raccoon City. They'd been using something called the "T-virus" in their research, and the air-born virus had been accidentally released. All those people working at the hidden lab…
Barry had been investigating the cannibal murders in Raccoon, and had lost six of the eleven members of his team during an inspection of a boarded-up mansion in the Raccoon Forest. Barry and the others who'd survived were on thin ice as far as keeping their jobs, and any sane person would heard the explanation the Raccoon S.T.A.R.S. team had to give thought the whole group of surviving S.T.A.R.S. was either incompetent or in desperate need of a trip to for the mental ward and bottles of anti-psychotics… but the murders had stopped, and no one had died or disappeared since the day the S.T.A.R.S. went into that forest.
The story had died down since July;
most of the citizens of Raccoon City simply believed the S.T.A.R.S. had lost it
and went on with their lives. Eric knew
better. Barry had lost team members
before. Once, when he and Barry had
been working together, their entire unit of over twenty people had been wiped
out, save Barry, one other teammate, and Eric himself… it took a lot to shake
Barry Burton, and the man knew how to deal with tragedy. Barry wasn't the type to snap and babble
some freaky conspiracy theory, especially not after years of service in
dangerous situations. Nor was Barry
incompetent; he was as skilled for the job as any S.T.A.R.S. captain. No, there was something more to that story,
as wild as it had seemed...
It had been too crazy to
accept; yet Barry was a terrible liar, and why would he invent something so
insane? It didn't make sense...
Eric frowned, remembering the events that had followed the conversation. He'd gotten a call from a friend saying that Barry's home had been ransacked, and Barry—as well as the other four surviving Raccoon S.T.A.R.S.—had apparently disappeared. Eric had decided to tell his superior of Barry's tale of the T-virus. The man hadn't bought it, though, so Eric had talked to a few other people in S.T.A.R.S., mostly people who had known Barry or were believed to be some of the best law enforcement officials. No one had listened, or even shown a spark of interest. For some reason, Eric had become suspicious, uneasy. If one of the S.T.A.R.S. were in trouble, the organization had always jumped up to help, especially when it could be just the thing to salvage the taint placed on the S.T.A.R.S. name. The disaster in Raccoon was making S.T.A.R.S. teams around the country look foolish; surely, he'd thought, someone would want to put an end to the rumors and bad press, even if they weren't interested in helping fellow members or old friends. His superior had known Barry, and yet… there had been that theory of Barry's, about Captain Wesker, who'd betrayed the Raccoon group. Chris Redfield, Barry's close friend, had believed that there were other traitors within the S.T.A.R.S. organization, others who'd been as taken in with the money Umbrella could offer. Barry had agreed; after all, Umbrella had close ties with the S.T.A.R.S. founders, and contributed a lot of funding…
Eric had been ready to go insane. The thought of traitors in the S.T.A.R.S., that Wesker's treachery wasn't an isolated incident… it was shocking, and terrifying, but—worst of all—it made sense. The Raccoon City S.T.A.R.S. members' new reputation could ruin the credibility of all branches of the Special Tactics and Rescue Squad, but when his superior and several other high-up S.T.A.R.S. officers had listened to Eric's story, had been faced with another angle, one that could shed light on the Raccoon case, not one person was even thinking of taking action—not for an old friend like Barry, or for the reputation of the entire organization... Was it possible there WERE traitors in the S.T.A.R.S.?
He'd eventually decided it didn't matter; he owed it to his old buddy Barry to figure things out, on his own if necessary. That's when he'd gathered the small group of S.T.A.R.S. he was driving toward Raccoon City. Four S.T.A.R.S. members he felt he could trust: Marcus Richards, Callie Jensen, Luke Santiago, and Angel Monroe.
He'd worked with Marcus Richards before on several occasions, before Marcus had been transferred out of Fairview, Oregon, where Eric's S.T.A.R.S. team was located. Marcus, twenty-seven, was a weapons specialists with the professionalism of men twice his age. A glance in the review mirror showed Marcus sitting in the back of the van, checking their various firearms and ammunitions with expertise shining in his midnight-blue eyes. The expression seemed out of place on his boyish face, like a teenager trying to figure out calculus when you didn't expect him to be able to do much past tell you the plot of a cartoon. Indeed, Marcus's sandy-blond, spiky hair and small, skull-shaped earring made him look like he was barely out of high school; he certainly didn't appear the part of a highly trained firearm expert. Marcus had always been serious though; too serious, really. His father had been an FBI agent, and Marcus had grown up wanting to follow in his footsteps. He'd almost given up on law enforcement altogether, however, when his father was struck with Alzheimer's disease; making his father proud didn't work too well after awhile, once his father got so bad he couldn't recognize Marcus. The idea of joining the FBI became upsetting rather than uplifting. A friend, however, had persuaded Marcus to join S.T.A.R.S. instead of give up on the criminal justice field all together, and Marcus had been with the organization for nearly six years, making him the oldest and most experienced of the group, after Eric himself.
Behind Marcus, in the farthest seat (they'd folded down the front one for extra storage space), sat the other three, who were chatting calmly. Luke Santiago had worked with Eric also; while Eric wasn't too well acquainted with Callie and had only ever met Angel twice, Luke was quite a close friend. Luke was twenty-four and half-Hispanic, with a deep-tan skin tone, long black hair that brushed the tops of his ears, and dark eyes. He was the total opposite of Marcus; Eric had yet to see Luke handle any situation—including dangerous and deadly ones—without cracking a joke. He was a damned good shot, though—hadn't missed the target since he'd first picked up a gun—and was also trained as a field medic. Luke's parents had been murdered when he was six, and his uncle had raised him, pressuring him to be a doctor until Luke had gone to college and specialized in medicine. He'd quit after his second year, though, wanting to dedicate himself to law enforcement… probably because his parents' death had remained unsolved, though Luke never talked much about it. Luke had started working with the Miami police, but he got tired of the corrupted legalities and joined S.T.A.R.S. It was Luke who'd recommended Angel.
Angel Monroe looked the calmest of the four members of his team. In fact, she was actually fixing her long hair into two buns on the side of her head. Luke was teasing her, "Only a woman would fix her hair on the way to an investigation."
"Bite me, babe," Angel said sweetly, twisting a lock of her golden tresses. She looked across him to Callie, the least experienced of the group. "It prevents an enemy from using your hair as a handhold," she explained. "It's much harder to grab someone by the hair if it's closer to their head, or at least out of the way. I wear my hair like this whenever I've got a gun within ten feet of me."
Callie raised an eyebrow and reached into her shoulder bag, pulling out a hair clip for her own shoulder-length brown hair. "Good idea," she commented, looking a little nervous, her large hazel eyes wide. "But, um, what if someone were to grab your hair anyway?"
"First of all, the target is smaller and it's going to be harder to yank me around by the head; second, these usually unravel, and that tends to catch an attacker off guard, makes them stumble or at least alerts me of the action—"
"Ah, I doubt we'll run into anything like that, though," Luke told Callie, slinging an arm companionably around her shoulders for a moment, knowing she was more or less a rookie compared to the others. Her eyes had been growing wider and wider at Angel's words. "Mostly just a look around Raccoon, evidence digging, right, Eric?"
"I hope so," Eric called back, not meaning to sound as grim as he did.
"Angel's just paranoid," Luke went on. His dark eyes gleamed mischievously. "She's a certified ghetto bitch, after all."
"Luke, don't make me shoot you," Angel replied calmly. "Any good ghetto bitch wouldn't hesitate."
"After a night with me, they would," he joked. "That's why Angel hasn't shot me yet," he added in a stage whisper to Callie.
"No, I haven't shot you because you haven't gotten me in bed."
"Ghetto bitch…?" Callie interrupted.
Angel laughed. "I'm from Detroit. World's most dangerous city, home sweet home."
"Is it really?" Marcus asked mildly, not looking up from the shotgun he was sighting. "I'd've thought Los Angeles."
"Nope. Doesn't hold a candle, according to several experts."
Luke put his arm around Angel. "I love a woman who can kick ass."
She dug her fingernails into his arm until he yelped and let go. "I can certainly kick yours."
Luke sulked, Marcus and Callie chuckling at their antics. Apparently, Angel and Luke had an interesting relationship. Eric suspected the two were close friends, though, despite the theatrics.
Angel finished with her hairstyle and stared out the window, her blue-green eyes clouding over with thought. Enrico Marini, one of the dead S.T.A.R.S. members from Raccoon, had recruited Angel for the S.T.A.R.S. He had been something of a father to her, so Eric had been told. Angel was an orphan, and had grown up living by her wits in the streets of Detroit. She was an expert with a knife—both fighting with them and throwing them—and was also skilled at the finer aspects of breaking and entering: lock picking, disarming alarms, cracking safes, and so on. She'd been ripping off mansions in the suburbs of the city for a while, but didn't have the heart for criminal activity. Angel had met Enrico when she'd been at a bank in Michigan and a man had entered with a gun. Enrico's team had been brought in to do hostage negotiation when the robbery had gone sour. Angel, then sixteen, had taken out the criminal and saved close to twenty people, and all she'd had on her was a pocket knife. The cops had been pissed—they'd been one-upped by a girl with a three-inch knife instead of a gun and a badge—and had tried to put her in state custody when they figured out she was an under aged street kid, but Enrico had stopped them from shipping her off to a group home. He had taken her under his wing, had seen her potential, and now, the twenty-one-year-old woman was on her way to being one of the best S.T.A.R.S. members in America.
Callie seemed a little unnerved by her. Anyone who looked twice at Angel could see the rough edges, and Callie had lived a bit of a pampered life, though she was starting to warm up to and befriend Angel. Callie was a relative of Eric's brother-in-law, a rich girl from Seattle. Her parents had encouraged her to be a musician or some such, or else to marry another white-collar. They'd nearly disowned her when she had taken Eric's brother-in-law's advice about the S.T.A.R.S.; apparently, they were pissed she'd decided to become a "glorified cop," as they put it. She'd been treading on thin ice since becoming a biochemical major; Mommy and Daddy didn't want her to be some career woman, and a scientist was beyond them. Callie's parents had only just gotten used to the idea when she'd announced her plans to join the S.T.A.R.S.
Callie's main use was her knowledge of the scientific aspects of viruses and other diseases, and she was probably going to end up pursuing forensics as a S.T.A.R.S. specialization one day. She'd only been involved in one or two field excursions, but she already had a doctorate at age twenty-four, and was pretty capable as far as combat.
The four younger S.T.A.R.S. members had now taken to discussing Raccoon City, and the coming tasks ahead. While Angel had been to the city dozens of times, and Luke had been skiing in the nearby Arklay Mountains once or twice, Marcus had never been to Raccoon and Callie had never even heard of it.
"Angel, how well do you know the city, anyway?" Marcus was saying.
Angel shrugged, cracking the window and lighting a cigarette. "About as well as you know how many toes you have," she said. "I haven't been there in a while, but I can show you around better than Walt could show you Disney World. I don't forget a place."
"You know, you should quit smoking, Angel," Luke told her, making idle conversation. "Decreases your ability to think clearly."
"I know, Luke, I know," she replied. "Decreases the flow of oxygen to the brain. It's called addiction. Nasty habit, but, hey, maybe if you could find a girl who smokes, like, twenty-seven packs a day, she'll have stopped thinking clearly enough for you to finally get a date."
"Hey!"
Eric laughed with the others. They were a good group, Eric decided, and if Barry had been telling the truth, he'd need them.
The Raccoon exit loomed ahead of them. With a silent promise to Barry, Eric pulled off the highway.