Legal disclaimers: I do not own or lay claim to anything directly connected with the "Resident Evil" franchise, nor anything connected to the "Alone In The Dark" franchise. These are both owned by big computer game companies who have well-paid Lawyers. I do, however, own anything original created for the purpose of writing this story.
Disclaimers: Certain people may recognise the character Raven Ferris/Midnight from the "Original Characters" RE Forum. To those who do, this is my attempt to show you just who and what Raven is really all about. To those who don't, I hope that you enjoy my introduction of a new character to the RE world. As for the "Alone In The Dark" angle of this story? Well, everyone has secrets...
Dark Life
Undisclosed location, China, 1996
"Oops" she said, even as her finger tightened on the trigger. So sad, such a loss to humanity and all that...
She pulled the trigger, point-blank, the gun in the mans face. An explosion of hot steel erupted out of the barrel of the small automatic pistol, tore through the mans face and skull and blasted his teeth out of the back of his head. The man standing on tip-toe at the end of her upturned blade promptly wet and soiled himself, gibbering in fear with his mouth open in such a way she could see as much as hear his teeth chattering.
It was very much official. She was angry, Bad things happened when she was angry. Very bad things.
"Did you know that I liked killing before now? That I'm good at it? It's fun, that's why" she said, without even bothering to turn around and look her next victim in the eyes.
"In fact, that's why I kill so much. With practise, you just get better and better. I suspect that I could be a Serial Killer if I wanted, but why bother? I have a job" she continued, slowly turning the blade of her sword in such a way that the tip sliced an inch-long line into the terrified mans jaw. Blood instantly began to flow, the mans annoying squeaks of fear rising even further in volume and pitch.
In one smooth movement she swung completely around, using her momentum and muscle to aid the edge of the sword, not that she needed it-but she was a professional and practise did make perfect. Besides, the petrified mask of fear the mans face still wore even after her sword cut right through his neck and his head fell slowly and cleanly to the ground, the light of life still in his eyes, made it all worthwhile. For one thing, she'd discovered that it could take up to a minute for a severed head to truly die under the right circumstances...
Even as blood began to gout from the stump of the neck, she snapped a perfect high kick into the chest and catapulted the body into the deep gorge behind it before kicking the head after the body like a football, even as the eyes in the head still moved. They'd both fallen into deep, dead darkness long before she stopped watching.
Her hair shifted about her shoulders even as she just stood there, jet-black dread-locked hair stirring in the slight wind. She turned to her right and looked in the cracked glass of the dead men's battered jeep-courtesy of the Chinese Military, of course-reflecting, even as she did, that the spiralling cracks created by gunfire puncturing the glass in several places left no discernible pattern, but created the begins of several regardless. The appearance, the description suited her perfectly.
Dread-locked jet black hair fell to just above her shoulders in thick braids, well matched to dusky skin with traces of a paler tone around her eyes, collarbone and fingers giving the lie as to her origins. Sharp features and slightly slanted eyes did the rest where drawing the eyes of many were concerned, although wintry blue eyes set amidst such looks drew stares. Hard muscle developed through use not training and a dancers physique, all long, elegant lines with firm curves in the right places, completed her.
Jet-black leggings, boots and a sleeveless shirt covered her somewhat, being made of a strange material that reflected light and repelled punches and kicks in a strange way. On the front of her shirt a Pentagram was seemingly drawn in blood, overlaid by the Star of David. The importance, let alone meaning, of this was not something she discussed.
The silvery blade-its actual composition was considerably more complicated-she carried in her right hand was her Katana, Dragon Lines carved into it in acid. She would never loose it, never could. In her right hand she carried her pistol-which served a purpose, she supposed. Often, though, she knew that such weapons were overrated. She sheathed her Katana in a sheath across her back, left shoulder to right hip, without even having to think about it. It was, literally, an extension of her own body in every way that mattered now.
She turned to her left and stared out at the gorge again, a hole in the otherwise broad and flat landscape of green fields, small clumps of forest and far-away mountains. There was a small valley ten miles to the east, but that had nothing to do with why she was here. Why they were here. Her, Raven Ferris, otherwise and normally just known as "Midnight". Him? Well...
She turned completely around and stared at the big structure there once more. Made of heavily-weathered concrete and stone, with metal roofs sagging inwards around battered walls, small windows with no glass in them but with bars for security and a smashed-open heavy wooden door reinforced with steel backing, the old building was two storeys tall. More importantly, it also had a basement level-the most important part of the structure.
She'd been inside once already. The interior was a mass of rusted metal pipes, big copper tubs, torn-up and long-rotted wiring, steel walkways and concrete floors. Shattered remains of old chimney stacks dominated the centre of the structure, while on the basement level-only reachable via an effectively destroyed elevator shaft with the wrecked elevator itself almost jamming up the only way through-there had been...rooms...with very particular forms of "equipment" in them-and bloodstains around cuffs hanging from walls, ceilings and even dug into the floor. What had been on top of some of the dented old steel tables...
It was sometimes a good thing she never had nightmares-that, according to several Psychologists, she had no Conscience, was a Sociopath, possibly an outright Psychotic, maybe simply "Evil". Otherwise, she would have found the remnants of human's beings bodies left on those tables...disturbing. As it was, she just wanted to track down whoever was responsible for what had happened here and see if she could truly inflict everything that had been inflicted on the dead here on the living before they actually died. Justice had nothing to do with it, the idea simply appealed to the sadist in her-and because it was her job to remove people and things like this from the Earth forever.
It was what had been known, during the Second World War, as an "Experiment Factory" run by Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army. They had used live human beings as experiments in...Atrocities...designed to teach them more about the human body and its functions-mainly, how to disrupt and destroy them, for future reference. Thankfully, with the end of WWII before what they had learned could be turned into practice, the abominations that had occurred in this place had passed on into history and later, incredibly, lent a great deal to an understanding of the human body that had allowed the creation of new medicines, forms of surgery and treatments that likely could never even have been imagined before.
That was why people thought that she was evil, not that she cared because they were ultimately right. It was because she knew great evil was always countered by great good, even if nobody could see that at the time. A bit player like her could make no real difference, no matter what she knew and did. She'd made her choices based on the fact that evil meant you could really indulge yourself and every one of your desires. His path...was more complicated.
However, when she'd asked him when he'd last been here since he'd clearly known the location by heart, he'd just replied "1945"-and that had made even her shut up. The arrival of a Chinese army patrol looking for their missing helicopter had been the only reason she'd needed to leave him alone in his search for...whatever he was searching for. Now that she'd dealt with that, it was time to go and see if he'd made any progress yet. She wasn't sure what she thought about what she was doing here yet, let alone why she was here with him, but she'd never been able to turn him down yet...
Maybe that was it? Well...maybe not?
After all, she could smell the sickly-sweet stench of shallow-buried rotting flesh from miles away, taste the thick taint of acid that had been hastily poured over the bodies in an attempt to destroy the evidence just by breathing in. She could still hear the dread in screams and howls of pain, agony and simple loss that haunted the place even half a century later. She could pick out mass burial areas just by glancing around, taking in the oddly shaped mounds in scattered areas near the old building. She could even physically feel the cold, dead and long-lost remnants of the victims forgotten here for so long as whatever was left of them touched her skin and raised fine hairs all over her body.
Maybe she'd been drawn here by another fact entirely, the simple sense of a terrible wrong committed against humanity and the planet that would never end until it was put to rest. It wasn't that she was some dark avenger, no, it was simply that this was what she did. Sometimes, certain actions simply had to be answered for...
She strode inside on long legs, almost daring the top brace of the doorway to strike her-even at just 5,8, she was tall for the creators of this place. She stepped carefully across battered floors, moving around holes in the floor, making short jumps to get past jagged-edged metal sections that had fallen in the way at some point, easily settling back to the balls of her feet with flawless landings which evidenced a liquid animal grace.
Casually, she kicked over a rotting old tabletop with such force it snapped in two and felt the crunch of powdered old circuitry beneath her feet as she walked. The table sections flew six feet in both directions easily, before landing with a crash and clatter that seemed to threaten the entire structure of the old building as great clouds of dust spiralled briefly upwards. She almost chuckled, she'd been to places where such clouds being made up of bone dust would have been a blessed relief...
She came to the elevator shaft and paused, eyeing the remnants of the structure with distaste. Halfway down the battered remains of the old shaft the elevator itself still hung, wedged in place somehow so that one corner had dug into the steel frame of the shaft with such force that it had punched right through and dug into stone and concrete, the opposite corner having carved its way into the old steel in such a way the huge tear was still supporting the weight.
It was still relatively stable after fifty years, which was remarkable in itself, but she didn't need a better look to know that weathering and rust were taking their toll harder and harder as time went on. Two people jumping directly on top of it from twenty feet above, the distance from her to it directly now, would have catapulted it clear and finally sealed the entrance to the basement with hundreds of pounds of metal and some forms of plastic-short of explosives, almost suicidally dangerous to try in a place this ancient and decript. Just because a structure still looked solid never, ever meant it was.
In any case, someone had clearly tried something similar a long, long time ago now. The elevator cable and brake were long gone, the elevator roof itself dented and damaged in such a way that it was clear they'd been literally blasted loose by an explosive charge which had been intended to make the elevator a permanent plug against any access to the basement level. Fortunately, or unfortunately, the bomber had been careless and the resulting blast had created such momentum the elevator had spun around on its way down and wedged itself against the walls rather than in the basement doorway. Regardless, she never carried explosives with her. Who needed them?
The old doors leading to the shaft itself had been welded shut, but a couple of good kicks had torn the right-hand one clean out of its runners and left it spiralling clear, all the way down to the elevator, where it had collided metal-one-metal with an echoing scream of tearing steel which had sounded as though the building itself was screaming in pain. She'd taken a moment to enjoy the echoes of torment, then helped him find a suitably heavy and stable piece of battered piping to tie the rope he'd brought with him to so they could go on down. He'd done just that, while she'd first followed then returned upstairs to deal with any unexpected guests just in case-after all, supposedly the Chinese authorities knew nothing about this place. But then, Politics and the Truth were never close Cousins...
Without thinking any more about it, she grabbed the rope and let herself fall down it, before expertly stopping herself six inches above the wrecked elevator itself. He'd used the Escape Hatch on the roof to get in-why the Japanese engineers had built one for a building constructed in 1941 was a question she had no interest in answering-then the rope led back out forced, warped front doors and on down into the darkness.
She let go of the rope, passed through the foot square hatch with her casual impossible agility, landed on hands and feet with her weight so perfectly distributed that the elevator didn't even rock, almost dived forwards to grasp the rope again and went out the doors head-first without slowing down. Six feet down she was back upright, as she hit the bottom of the shaft and the last of the daylight disappeared.
Reaching into a concealed pouch under her uniform at the base of her back, she drew out a ruby-red glow stick and shook it awake. A bloody glow quickly illuminated everything within twenty feet of her. This included the disintegrating skeleton of a man still wearing the shredded remains of a uniform identifying a Colonel of the Japanese army, his legs severed at the knee where the elevator shaft doors had once shut-now, forced open again by leverage and brute strength, they were just an obstruction, as was he.
The remains were contorted backwards, but the mans hands hadn't been reaching for his ruined legs. He'd been reaching back along the corridor, almost been trying to shield his head from something there was no remaining evidence of. By the way his mouth was still held open, by gravity as much as anything else given his state of decay, he'd been screaming when he'd died-and, judging by the scratch marks around his eye sockets, he'd clawed out his own eyes before his death...
She stepped over the remains and headed on to where she knew he'd be. It was a maze of small, interconnected rooms, labs and even small prison cells in the basement levels, but he'd strode on through it all as though he had a map in his head. He'd stopped in front of a heavy steel door with a symbol she didn't know atop it, then told her to keep watch since it would take him a little while to get past the door. She had no doubt he'd have gotten inside by now, he'd proved a real knack at beating mystical wards and just simple locks made by human hands in the two years she'd known him for, on and off.
Various doors had scratches and deep gouges in them that could only have been made by fingernails or claws. Walls had suffered impact damage in the form of craters, long, deep gouges and even slashes so fine and deep no knife or blade with any edge forged by human hands she'd ever seen or heard of could have driven so deep and still come free again. Areas of the walls, floors and ceilings were even discoloured by what could only be explosions of fire erupting at close quarters-yet some of the most obviously fire-damaged areas were the impact craters, as though something wielding fire as a weapon, or on fire itself perhaps, had been fighting in this place? A strange smell was evident, too, the distinctive stink of recent-made ash, the sickening stench of melting stone and burning sulphur. In old times, people would have called this Daemons work...
She finally reached the door and, not at all to her surprise, it was open. She went inside-and got her first look at the inside of the only secured room she'd seen or found in the whole rotting complex. That was her first surprise.
The room was twenty by twenty long and wide, eight feet tall-and constructed entirely of steel with more runes, mystical symbols and forms of arcane protection drawn into and overlapping one another on every surface than she'd have imagined even a madman might attempt. She could make out and understand some of it-which was enough to let her know that at least three different forms of protection had been written into the structure of this place, with a certainty of there being more she couldn't understand. Placed there by the Japanese, during the Second World War, for purposes that had to have died with the people who had once run this place.
All of a sudden she suspected she knew what had happened to the dead officer by the elevator shaft. Something had gone wrong in this room, spread on out into the complex-and he and those down here had killed themselves sealing the room once more to put an end to it. The officer, possibly the only survivor of the initial disaster, had tried to escape upon discovering that sealing the room hadn't shut everything down once and for all-but somebody upstairs had wanted the place shut down and buried forever, somebody who didn't even consider the possibility of survivors. The officer had been too late and, crippled, had blinded himself rather than see what was coming-which led to an explanation for the reason no bodies but those of the long dead had been found down here that she refused to follow through to its logical conclusion. Some things had to be forgotten.
Her second surprise was something she wished she had never had to witness. Mainly because of just what he was doing, kneeling over the only ornament in the room, a three feet wide bronze bowl set atop four lions feet. Three slim lines of bronze led up from it to a centre a foot above the bowls centre, an inch square inverted bell all of the lines led into.
Edward Carnaby. Former Private Investigator of any and all Paranormal, related or associated Cases-in the 1920's and 30's. Since then...what he did had become somewhat more interesting, to her at least. For one thing, he was the only man she'd ever met who could not only match but exceed her in terms of kink and pain, areas in which she truly excelled. For another, he was a man of real and true mystery, something which never failed to turn her on-the fact he was truly fabulous in bed was just an added bonus, of course.
His hair was black streaked with traces of grey, even though he was physically only in his mid-thirties. Deep-set dark brown eyes that led straight into Hell cut with a sharp mind and terrible intelligence whenever one just looked at him. An easy six-one tall and big-boned, Carnaby was no weightlifter but carried plenty of muscle and only a little fat on a solid frame. A massive scar that ran from his hairline across his left eye and over the whole left side of his face to his jaw line made his sharp-featured face stand out in any crowd, while his big hands could be seen carrying a gun as often as carrying out any necessary task, with the same level of dextrous skill and physical strength he did everything with apparent.
He'd been wearing battered dark blue jeans, brown climbing boots, a worn light-blue shirt and dark-brown bomber jacket the last time she'd seen him. Now, kneeling in front of the bowl, he was wearing nothing above the waist-and that reminded her that his body was a mass of old, long-healed scars, scars that stood out even in the dim light supplied by her glow stick. He was well tanned, so the lighter patches of scar tissue stood out hard, around the butt of then gun he'd shoved in the back of his trousers...
His hands were clasped around the inverted bell, though, she could see and smell blood leaking from cuts in his palms into the bell. He was repeating some kind of invocation under his breath over and over again, as though to forcibly draw out something hidden inside the bell-then all of a sudden the bell flipped over and the blood gathered inside it fell into the bowl beneath it, gathering in the centre in a pattern nature had nothing to do with. Carnaby didn't so much as try to stand up or back away even as the air shimmered for a moment, then he spoke aloud what seemed like nonsense words and syllables she knew were actually part of an evocation he was performing. That she didn't have any idea what he was doing was only part of the reason she felt so disturbed. She could feel something, right on the very edges of her awareness...
The entire room seemed to shift as her centre of gravity fell away from her and she only stayed upright because she landed on hands and knees. A jet-black cloud full of faces, screaming all, suddenly occupied the entire ceiling area. A head that resembled a dragons with slanted, almost-human eyes, something like a beak for a mouth and what appeared to be feathers for skin appeared in the middle of the smoke and hissed something in Japanese-which she didn't speak-at Carnaby. He replied in the same language, his voice the same deep growl it always was, the same one she always loved and wondered about in equal measure.
Then he lifted a hand to the gleaming stone necklace around his neck that he always wore-why hadn't she thought about that before? Or seen it?-stood up and stepped forwards into the space the head seemed to occupy. It seemed to twitch, jerk-then it span around at terrible speeds so fast that her eyes couldn't follow it even as Carnaby's eyes closed and stayed that way until it finally vanished, with a flicker of dull red flame and a howl she felt more than heard.
She barely noticed that her glow stick had gone out at this, although it did register that she couldn't move under her own strength no matter how hard she tried. She could only just take in the brief, strange shimmer that passed over Carnaby's face and through his eyes even as she felt some impossible lethargy start to drag her down into a slumber she wanted no part of.
"Edward...what...?" she managed, briefly, even as he started to get dressed again and displayed no side effects at all related to whatever it was he had just done. She couldn't even tell if he'd heard her, but he stopped for a moment and turned to look at her, meeting her eyes one last time.
"The Path of Light" he said simply, then he finished getting dressed, turned and walked out as though three words told her everything she needed to know. The last she saw of him was his back as he walked out the door...
/End of Part One. Reviews welcomed/.