Resident Evil: ReIncarnation
Chapter One -Piers Nivans.
That was the name his mother had given him, back in those quiet, peaceful times before the horror Racoon City, before the BSAA. Even the thing that was tracking him through mixed coniferous broad-leaved forest of Changbai Mountain, of Northeast China, Heilongjiang prefecture called him Piers.
The thing wanted to kill him.
"Piers?" the gruff voice called through the fading light of evening. "Piers? Come on, friend this is ridiculous. I'm not going to kill you- I promise. All I want is to talk and bring you home."
"You're not my friend!" Piers wanted to shout back. But he knew better. Making any noise, giving any hint of where he was, would be suicide. Besides, his throat still hurt from that friend's team he had run into two days ago, in an ambush, pressing his back a little harder into the branches of the Korean pine behind him, he tried to think.
There really wasn't much thinking left for him to do. There was only the two of them out here in the jungle. He had already taken out four of his "friends" team the time for talking had already passed. The odd thing was they were wearing BSAA uniforms with SOU patches. That thing out there wanted Piers dead. Piers didn't want to die. All very simple, all very cut and dry.
Piers swallowed hard around his sore throat as he resettled his grip around the big handgun that was all that stood between him and death. This particular section of the jungle mountains hadn't suffered much from the C-Virus infection that had been released in Lanshiang. Which he found to be one thing to be happy about in such a fucked-up situation. The dense life of the jungle gave plenty of camouflage to conceal himself.
Unfortunately, the jungle also gave his tracker plenty of cover also.
"Piers?"
Piers hunched his shoulders, wondering for the thousandth-time what type of neo-umbrella BOW (Bio-Organic Weaponry) it was. It wasn't what Ada Wong had infected his team with on the ship, this guy looks human. His team had turned into those hulking Napads that absolutely wasn't stalking him. It could be an advanced form of J'avo Ruka-Srp those seemed the most intelligent of the neo-umbrella's twisted bio mutated monsters.
"Piers?"
Piers peered up through the canopy of matted tree branches above him. The cloud cover was a mottled gray-white, and had gotten visibly darker over the past half-hour as the sun continued its slide behind the mountains toward the horizon. In other circumstances, darkness would be a friend, giving him a chance to slip away.
But darkness wouldn't help against a BOW. Darkness would just be one more enemy.
Which meant Piers had to have this out right now.
He lowered his eyes, focusing once more on the gun pointed toward the sky in front of him. It was a Smith & Wesson Model 29, and eight-inch barrel wrapped around a .44 magnum cartridge. More like a small cannon than a regular gun, really, a copy of the weapon Clint Eastwood had carried in Dirty Harry and which had been the pride of his father's collection. A single round could probably take down a small Asian buffalo, if there were any buffalo nearby that needed taking down. Hopefully, a single round could also take down a BOW.
If it couldn't, he was in trouble, because he only had three rounds left.
"Piers?"
Piers grimaced. From the direction of the voice, it sounded like the monster had moved to the base of the small defile that Piers himself had climbed earlier, a deep crease in the earth's surface that led up to the tree Piers was currently hiding behind. On both sides of the gap were trees and thick stands of bushes, impossible to get through without making a lot of noise. If the BOW back there was smart-and so far it definitely seemed smarter than the ones he had tangled with back in Lanshiang- it would probably move up the pass instead of trying to climb the bank.
But not until it was sure Piers was up there.
"Piers?"
Taking a deep breath, keeping as quiet as he could, Piers worked his way back up from his crouch into a standing position. Getting to the next large tree should make enough noise to attract the BOW's attention. While still leaving Piers able to cover the top of the defile. He stepped away from the tree.
And suddenly a figure burst into view, charging up the defile toward him, its feet scattering dirt and rock. Spinning around, Piers squeezed the trigger.
The blast hammered across his ears, the recoil of the gun jamming his arm back into his shoulder. The BOW charge stopped in mid step with the impact as the big bullet slammed into its chest.
It was as Piers fired his second round that his eyes caught up with his brain, and he saw that his pursuer wasn't a BOW at all.
It was just a simple, normal man.
But the horrifying realization had come an eternity too late. The slug slammed into the wide-eyed human, boring through the hole the first round had blown in his chest and pitching him backward down the defile. He slid halfway down and then ground to a halt, the tips of his scuffed shoes still visible.
Piers stared at the man's unmoving feet, his breath coming in little gasps of relief and bitter shame. His knees fluttered and gave way, and he dropped into a crouch amid the soft matting of dirt and pine needles, his stomach churning and wanting to be sick.
He'd just killed a man.
Minutes passed. Piers never knew afterward how many. Enough that his knees hurt when he finally straightened up again.
He'd killed a man. Not deliberately, really. Certainly, in the belief that he was acting in self-defense. But the fact was that a human being was now dead, and Piers had done it, and there was nothing he could do to change that.
All he could do now was give the man a decent burial. Neo-umbrella would have just left this man out for the wild animals to consume. That was what he was fighting against, humanity over inhumanity.
Sliding the .44 back into its holster, he walked tiredly over to the dead man. The human had landed flat on his back, his arms flung over his head as if he was trying to surrender. His chest was soaked with blood, and Piers could see the ends of a couple of broken ribs sticking out.
If the man's chest was a nightmare, his face was even more so. There was a long-jagged scar trailing out from beneath his right eye, and the entire left side of his face was a splotchy, sickly white, as if he'd been burned by acid.
Maybe he'd been infected by the C-virus after all, though how he could be walking around after a jolt like that was a mystery. Still an infection poisoning might explain the insanity of his trying to chase down and kill a perfect stranger.
And then, Piers spotted a glint of metal protruding from the gaping wound.
He leaned closer, his heart suddenly starting to pound again. He hadn't imagined it: the broken rib ends weren't made of bone. They were made of crystals casing a tell of the T-virus repair mechanisms.
What the hell?
He snatched out the Smith & Wesson again, pointing it at the body as he knelt beside it. Gingerly, he pulled back the layer of skin and peered into the wound.
There was a heart in there, all right, or at least there had been before the .44 slug torn through it. He could see a pair of lungs, part of a stomach, and what seemed to be a somewhat truncated circulatory system. There were blood vessels going upward from the heart, which implied there was a human brain tucked into the skull behind those staring eyes.
Or maybe not. The zombie BOW's got along just fine without anything for a brain, and there was no reason he knew of why this thing couldn't do so as well. This things skin seemed real, too.
But between the skin and the organs, everything else was infected tissue. C-virus ribs, c-virus spine, c-virus shoulder blades.
Piers had been right the first time. The thing chasing him through the mountains had indeed been an Neo-Umbrella BOW. Some chilling hybrid of man and monster, straight from the back porch of hell.
He looked up at the darkening sky. He was still a couple of days out from the little mountainside village of Wangtian'e that was his goal, the town where these BOW's had come. They had maps and gear that he could use to find out what was going on and why he couldn't remember anything after meeting Ada Wong.
Taking the watch of the BOW and then sliding off its backpack he pulled out a radio, and his luck held out it was still tuned to neo-umbrellas' com-station.
"Tracking group one – give me a sit-rep?. Tracking group one – this is Wangtian'e base we need a report on BOW Piers Nivans? Have you detained him." There was static for a few moment as the voice waited for a reply, then the voice returned this time of a women.
"Hello, Piers. You're proving to be exactly what we thought you'd become once we acquired your bio-signal on sat-com." The women's voice continued. "You don't know what you are, do you? Well come here and I'll show you. When you get here ask for Ada Wong." The static returned and nothing more was broadcast.
Piers waited a moment, then shut off the radio and stowed it away in the pack, his eyes drifting once again to the abomination lying in the leaves and twigs beside him. The difference between humanity and umbrella, the words whispered through is mind, is we burry our dead.
Ten minutes later he was on the move again, picking his way through the growing darkness, hoping to find someplace hidden or at least a little more defensible where he could spend the night. The body he left covered by a thin layer of dirt, stones, and leaves.
Maybe the saying was right. But the dead man back there wasn't neo-umbrellas anymore or BSAA. It at deserved some type of burial, it was human once.
Chapter Two –The Napad was in bad shape.
Really- bad shape. One leg was completely gone, the other had been twisted and then mashed flat, and the mouth still tried gnashing its bleeding jaw that barely was connected to its head. Its eye still glowed their malevolent gaze, but there was nothing to speak of behind them, not since his grenade reduced what brain it had to slime.
Chris shot it anyways.
He watched with grim satisfaction as the manic movement in the Napad's eyes slowly receded.
"For Piers." He muttered barely audible.
Not that the Napad cared. Or would have even if it had still been alive.
There was a burst of gunfire to his left, and Chris looked up from the empty monsters eyes. Morgan Tanner was over there, and even at this distance Chris could see the grim set to the kid's jaw as he blew away another of the crippled Napads. As Chris watched, Morgan stepped over to another twitching monster and fired a half-dozen rounds into it.
Shaking his head, Chris swung the barrel of his SIG 542 assault rifle up onto his shoulder. Glancing around at the rest of the clean-up team scattered across the half-slagged debris field, he headed toward Morgan.
The kid had just unloaded another third of a magazine when Chris had reached him.
Morgan paused in his work. "Yes?"
Chris gestured down at the twisted mass at the kid's feet.
"You think that's the one who got Michael?" he asked.
"What?"
"Or that one?" Chris asked, pointing back at the last napad Morgan had blown apart. "Or that one over there?"
"No, of course not," Michael said, a wave of anger and pain flickering across his face.
"Then stop taking this personally," Chris said firmly. "Stop taking them personally. They're bio-organic weapons, nothing more. Neo-Umbrella's your enemy the way a thunderstorm or earthquake is your enemy. It isn't taking this personally. You can't either."
For a moment Michael just glared up at him. Then, reluctantly, he lowered his eyes.
"I know," he said.
"Then act like a soldier," Chris growled. He pointed again at the napad at Michael feet. "One or two rounds into the skull is all you need. More than that and you're just wasting ammo."
Michael nodded. "Yeah," he said. "Sorry."
"It's okay," Chris said, feeling a small tugging at his heart as he gazed at the kid's solemn face. How many times, he wondered, had he had to hear that same speech. Enough times, obviously, that he now had the whole thing memorized.
Distantly, he wondered how many times Michael was going to have to hear it until he understood it.
"Just go easy," he told Michael. "You'll get the hang of it." He pointed to the gun in the fresh recruits hands. "Just remember that if it takes three or four rounds to do the job, go ahead and spend those three or four rounds. Saving ammo is just as stupid as wasting it if saving it gets someone killed. Especially if that someone is you."
For a second he saw something else flick across Michael face, and waited for the obvious retort: that maybe Michael's own life wasn't worth saving anymore. That maybe it would be better for everyone if he did just let himself get killed. God knew Chris felt that way himself a couple of times a month.
But to his surprise the recruit didn't go that direction.
"Okay," he said instead. "Sorry. This whole thing is still…" He trailed off.
"Kind of new," Chris finished for him., impressed despite himself. Maybe Michael was actually smart enough not to base his ideas and future plans on how his emotions were churning now. Chris had known plenty of people who'd never learned that lesson.
Or maybe it was just that the kid didn't have the guts to say something that self-pitying to someone who'd lived through more of Umbrella's indifferent savagery than he had.
"But you've got lots of good teachers here," Chris went on, waving around at the other men and women moving across the field and blowing away the remaining zombies. "Listen and learn."
Behind them a high-pitched whistle sounded, the noise cutting cleanly through the scattered gunfire. Chris turned to see a Chinook transport chopper settling to the ground.
"Shift change," he grumbled to Michael, promising himself once again that he was going to find whoever had come up with this stupid whistle code and kick his ass. "Come on-a little food and sleep and you'll feel better."
"Okay," the kid said, his voice neutral.
Chris grimaced as he headed toward the chopper and the squad spreading of from it, come to continue the clean-up work. That last had been a lie, and he knew it. All the food and sleep in the world wouldn't ease his pain. Not yet. Only time would soften the loss Piers, and the memories of him becoming an hybrid infected monster who had risked his life, then sacrificed himself to have him in the end. As he climbed aboard the chopper with the squad. The memories flooded back of the escape pod and the massive lighting stick that hit that monster.
But maybe there was a way to help that process along a little.
The main camp was a fifteen-minute chopper ride a way. Chris waited until his team had turned over their heavy weapons to the armorers for inspection and cleaning, then sent them over to the mess tent for a meal.
And once they were settled, he headed to the medical recovery tent to head of operations, Phillip Varley.
"Chris," Varley said in greeting when Chris was finally allowed through by the door guards and entered the intensive-care recovery room. As usual, Phillip's assistant was sitting at his side, a clipboard full of reports and logistics requests propped up on the edge of the desk between them and is recovery bed. "How's the clean-up going?"
"It's going okay," Chris said, wincing a little as he eyed the bewildering collection of tubes and monitor wires sprouting from Varley's arms and chest. Chris had seen plenty of people die, most of them violently, but there was something about medical equipment that still made him a little squeamish. Probably the feeling that all patients who looked like this were dying by degrees, like the way it had happened to his own mother.
"Don't worry, it's not as bad as it looks," His assistant soothed.
Guiltily, angrily, Chris wrenched his attention away from the tubes and bottles. He'd sort of gotten used to Varley reading his mind that way, but he hated it when his assistant did, too.
"Yeah," he said. "I have a request."
Phillip nodded. "Go ahead."
"You told me that Piers wasn't found in the base when it was flooded after my escape." Chris said "That means his body must have floated to shore and could be on one of the beaches." He braced himself. "I want to go see if I can find him."
Phillip's Assistant stirred but didn't speak. "Are you sure?" Varley asked. "It's been a couple of weeks, you know."
"He was transforming," Chris growled. "He'll still be… You know I own him my life, and if I can bring something of him home."
"You'll feel your debt honored?" Phillip finished, a flicker of something crossing his face. Maybe he was thinking at all the others, too.
"The clean-up's going fine," Chris said. "It looks like the outer quarantine line were the only BOW's that survived the blast, and most of them are pretty torn up. You've got more than enough people to clear them out- "
"All right," Phillip said "You can go."
Chris stopped, the other four points he'd been planning to make fading away unsaid. He hadn't expected talking Varley into this would be that easy.
"You'll need a pilot," Phillip continued. "Leon Kennedy, is scheduled to fly out this afternoon. You can hitch a ride with him."
A knife seemed to twist in Chris's gut. Kennedy?"
"Can I have someone else instead?" he asked.
Varley just shook his head. "You two have been avoiding each other ever since this operation ended," he said "It's time you cleared the air."
"All due respect, this isn't the right time to do that," he said.
"Let me put it another way," Varley said. "You go with Leon, or you don't go at all."
If the man hadn't been hooked up to a hundred tubes and wires, Chris reflected blackly, he would have considered hitting him. Not that he actually would have hit him, but he would definitely have considered it. As it was, he couldn't even have that minor satisfaction.
There was no point in stalling. Varley was in command and had him, and they both knew it.
"Fine," he bit out. "If he's willing. Otherwise, I get another chopper."
"Leon will be," Varley promised. "I'll make sure of that. Go eat and then get some sleep. You can leave in the morning."
Chris nodded, not trusting himself to say anything else, and stomped out of the room.
He should have known it wouldn't be that easy.
Chapter 3 –The wild boar was rooting on the ends of some roots that it had dig up with it's large tusks when it suddenly froze.
Bao-Yu felt her cheek twitch. So the animal had heard them. She'd been afraid it would. Bao-Yu herself was more than capable of silent stalking, but this was the first time out for Bao-Yu's new hunting partner Lei Chow, and the older woman simply wasn't experienced at moving through the twigs and dead leaves that matted the forest floor beneath their feet.
But it was too late now. The boar had been alerted to their presence. One more suspicious sound or movement and it would be out of here, escaping from the clearing into the deeply forested mountain slopes behind it.
Keeping her head motionless, Bao-Yu looked at Lei out the corner of her eye. There was an intent, grimly earnest expression on the woman's face, and Bao-Yu had no doubt she was going to try her hardest.
But willpower alone wasn't enough to send an arrow to its target. Lei's bow was less than rock-steady in her left hand, and the taut bowstring was wavering visibly as she held the fletching close beside her right cheek. Already she'd help position longer than should have been necessary to aim, and there was no indication even now that she was preparing to release.
It wasn't hard to guess why. That wasn't a simple softwood target out there, like the ones Bao-Yu had spent all those hours training Lei to shoot at. It was a living, feeling creature, something that would gush blood, go limo, and die. Some people simply couldn't handle that.
Bao-Yu, born and bred out here in the mountains, had a different take on the ethics of the situation. That boar out there was dinner. For the whole town.
And she was not going to let it get away.
Her own arrow was already fastened into her bowstring, pointed at the ground in front of her eyes, keeping her arrow pointed at the ground in front of her, she drew back the string as far as she could without being obvious about it. If Lei was going to stay in Wangtian'e, she was going to have to learn how to do this. Bai-Yu could take the shot, and she would if she had to. But she would rather give Lei every reasonable chance to do it herself.
Maybe Lei sensed that. Maybe she'd come to the same conclusion about this being her make-or-break moment. A small whimper escaped her lips, and with an odd sort of abruptness she released her arrow. It flashed between the small branches of the their blind and buried itself in the animal's side.
Too far back. The boar jerked with the impact, but instead of falling dead it twisted around and leaped for the pathway that led out of the clearing.
It was crouching into its second leap when Bao-Yu's arrow drove into its side, dropping it with a thud onto the ground.
Lei's bow arm sagged. "Sorry," she said.
"It's okay," Bao-Yu replied, lowering her own bow and pulling out her whistle. "Watch your ears," she warned, and gave her personal signal: one long, four short.
"Come on-let's make sure it's dead." She stepped out from behind the bushes and headed across the clearing. With only a little hesitation, Lei followed.
The boar was indeed dead.
"Good shooting," Bao-Yu said, drawing her knife and starting to dig out the arrows.
"You're very kind," Lei said, and edge of weary bitterness in her voice. "But we both know better. I missed, pure and simple."
"It's not easy to hit the heart," Bao-Yu responded diplomatically. "Especially your first time out."
Lei exhaled a quiet, shuddering sigh.
"This is my last chance, Bao-Yu," she said. "I can't do anything that adds value to the village."
"You'll get the hang of it," Bao-Yu soothed her, barely noticing the oddness of a fifteen-year-old mountain girl comforting a forty-year-old world-class scientist. Maybe because it was wasn't a girl to scientist, or even teacher to student. Maybe because it was now friend to friend. "Or else you'll find something else you're good at," she added. "Maybe something you don't even know about yet."
Lei sighed. "I just hope I can find this mystery talent before your father throws me out of the village."
"He won't do that," Bao-Yu's father was the director of the village that had become semi-independent in Wangtian'e after Umbrella had collapsed. From the very beginning one of his jobs had been to make sure that everyone who ate their food pulled their weight.
And right now, Lei was the only one who wasn't doing that. Douglas Johnson had been a molecular biologist on the original T-virus creation team before being transferred out of Racoon city and with is medical skills was extremely valuable to the village. Ryan Singer was a nano-bio programming expert that could brew a hell of a beer, so he was liked more than Douglas in their off time.
But Lei had nothing. She'd been a insectologist specializing in reproductive hormones. She had been working on a method to track and control the bio-weaponry being created by Umbrella. However since her extraction from her old facility she hasn't show any skill at all.
Bao-Yu father wouldn't want to send Lei away. But he wouldn't have a choice. Ada Wong would insist that she be retired, and Wong had enough clout to get her way on things like that.
Bao-Yu had seen her do it at least once before, five years ago, when that genome sequencer specialist had become infected by something. He was half dead stumbling around the village. Wong had seen to his retirement herself.
Three months was Wong's rule of thumb… and Lei's three months were nearly up.
It wouldn't be just Wong who would insist, either. There was still fair numbers of umbrella sycophants that would drool at the opportunity to either retire her themselves or use her in a study.
Bao-Yu's little hunting party had nearly seven miles to get back to the relative safety of the village before dark, and that was going to translate into a long wearying trek back home. It was becoming increasingly dangerous to be out in the jungle forest after light. Bao-Yu had overheard, some of the scientist were starting to talk about abandoning Wangtian'e and striking out on their own. Their argument was that a group of five or ten experts could make a killing selling their skills on the black weapons market.
Which was undoubtedly true. Unfortunately, while that plan might work fine for them, it would devastate the village. Wangtian'e only had about fifteen good-to-excellent scientists, another ten that her father would call charitably competent. Skimming off ten or even five of the best would leave everyone else in serious trouble. The remaining scientists would have to scramble to meet Ada Wong's project expectations. That type of drain on resources would have to immediately corrected.
One way or another, Lei's time was running out.
Bao-Yu had finished cutting the second arrow out of the boar when she heard footsteps in the undergrowth behind them. Not the quiet and stealthy movements of her fellow village members, but the casual strides of men on their way to collect a kill.
"Bao-Yu?" Chip Feldstein's deep voice called.
"Over here," Bao-Yu called back, standing up and waving her bow.
A minute later the big man stepped through the trees and joint them.
"Nice," he said, looking approvingly at the dead boar.
"How'd she do?"
Bao-Yu suppressed a grimace. Chip was one of the towns expert hunters, as well as chief of security. But if you weren't one of his inner circle he had a bad habit of talking about you as if you weren't there, even if you were standing three feet away. If anyone ever thought about striking out on their own, odds are Chip would be right behind them, tracking them down.
"Lei did fine," she said.
"Um," Chip rumbled, tilting his head and gazing pointedly at the marks of two retrieved arrows in the boar's side. "Good save, anyway. Signal the others again, will you? It's pretty thick there to the west, and Sharie may have drifted off target."
Bao-Yu nodded and reached for her whistle.
Everyone had a talent, her father always said. That meant Lei had one, too. All they had to do was figure out what it was.
Hopefully before she was sent out into retirement to die.