I was disappointed by the ending to Resident Evil Afterlife and so I decided to change a few things, starting midway through Extinction. I don't really know why I'm posting it because it's sort of just a random mess of events within my favorite movie series but if you're bored enough to read this, I hope you like it. Rated M for language. How would you talk if the world was ending?
Enjoy.
Sleep was to be treasured like gold, Claire told herself. Well, maybe not gold any longer. More like food and ammo. And gas. Sleep was to be treasured like all food and ammo and gas and all the other invaluable supplies that had suddenly become such rarities. Sleep might have been the easiest to come by for other members of the convoy but not for Claire. This was, after all, Claire Redfield's convoy. She'd heard her little tech-boy Mikey say it a million times.
"This is Claire's Redfield's convoy," he'd say, "broadcasting for any survivors." He'd grip the CB radio with hope, pausing before he spoke into it again. "Broadcasting for any survivors." No response came. "Is anyone out there?" Days went by. Then weeks. Months. "Is anyone out there?" While hope diminished, Mikey's attempts did not. And every day, two or three times a day, he would broadcast, praying that there was someone, anyone, still alive.
The convoy had started with over seventy-five members. Seventy-five healthy, able-bodied, hopeful survivors who were ready to risk anything for a chance at salvation. Eight months had passed. The number was down to thirty. Sickness and starvation were responsible for a few fatalities but for the most part it was them. The infected, the undead, them sons-of-bitches, as known-cowboy Chase would say. The convoy had been ambushed more than once and good people had died as a result. Claire felt inevitably responsible. This was her convoy. It was her job to keep these people safe. Forty-five people had been lost in just eight months. That was too damn much. She couldn't break composure, however. People looked up to her. She was still in charge of the thirty remaining survivors and therefore she had to save face. She had to remain calm and collected whenever possible. But that was hard. She was starved, both for food and for sleep. The stress of leadership was taking its toll, not that Claire would ever admit that to anyone.
Somehow, Claire had managed to find the time to sleep late one evening. Really late. According to Chase's watch, the one he'd left in her yellow Hummer, it was well after three in the morning when she caught some shuteye. Everyone else was resting. Why shouldn't she? She figured it worked the same way as a new mom. You need to sleep when the baby sleeps. So she fell asleep, uncomfortably slumped against the passenger's side window of that very same yellow Hummer. K-Mart, an unfortunately named fourteen-year-old who remained Claire's main responsibility, was asleep in the backseat. Or at least Claire thought she was.
The brave convoy leader had characteristically dozed off with her worn green hat pulled protectively over her face, keeping the bright sun of the Nevada desert out of her light eyes. She didn't notice K-Mart casually slip out the side door and look around. Apparently a noise had provoked her, a loud enough disruption to wake her from a dead sleep. K-Mart knew better than to go exploring. Even if she was simply opening the door to investigate a noise. If no one else was with her, or conscious for that matter, she was to stay in the car with Claire. For whatever reason, she decided to break the rules and take a look. This mistake would prove to be fatal. Not for her, of course. Claire would never let anything happen to K-Mart and that was probably why K-Mart had become so dependent on her.
Issues of dependency aside, the urge to take a look outside appealed to K-Mart too much to ignore and she went against what she'd been taught and pushed open the door. Slowly, as though not to attract attention, she poked her head out of the brightly-colored war vehicle. She looked around, her heavily made-up eyes seeking out anything that could have thudded against the roof of the Hummer. She turned suddenly, just in time to come face-to-face with the cause of the disruption; an almost impossibly large crow that emits an awful screech, alerting what must be thousands of other infected birds.
"Claire!" screamed a terrified K-Mart, as if the noises made by the flying hordes weren't enough to alert the sleeping leader of imminent danger. Claire entered consciousness with a violent jerk forward, fixing her hat so she could see what the hell was going on outside. She shifted to the driver's seat, K-Mart following her lead and dropping into the seat beside her. Claire was quick to grab the walkie-talkie she kept on the dashboard.
"Carlos," she addressed him, loudly and sternly. "We have to get the fuck out here."
"Way ahead of you," he answered back, putting his truck into gear and attempting to haul ass out of the campsite. The sudden and hasty rotation of tires against the sand thwarted any hopes he had of making a quick escape.
Otto, the driver of the old yellow school bus in which the children were kept, didn't hesitate to grab his own radio and contact the brave leader.
"We're in some trouble, Claire," he told her, attempting to stay calm for the sake of the children.
"Get the windows closed!" The kids all rushed to either side of the bus, pulling the thick glass up to protect the otherwise flimsy window covering. Otto tried to floor it, hoping he could blindly maneuver the bus full of innocent children to safety.
"What's wrong with them?" asked K-Mart as she watched the birds attack the sides of the Hummer.
"They're infected," she answered, putting her arm on the back of the passenger's seat and trying to back up to somewhere more secure. She was successful in her attempts to escape the initial swarm of avian-monsters but a message on her radio prevented her from moving anymore.
"We're stuck!" called Otto helplessly. She could hear the fearful cries of the children in the background.
"Shit," she said. She grabbed her gun and looked to K-Mart. "Stay here." She pulled her radio to her mouth. "Carlos, you ready?"
"Whenever you are."
"Go in three. Stay to the West. We have to get the kids off that bus and get them out of here. One…" She cracked her neck. "Two…" She cocked her gun. "Three." She kicked the Hummer door open and slammed it shut just as quickly, staying low as she pumped the flying fiends full of lead.
The infected crows were screeching, biting at the skin of whoever they could get their beaks on. Carlos and Claire raced towards the school bus, trying to work together in their accuracy. It was hard enough to shoot a slow-moving member of the human undead, let alone flesh-starved birds that seemed to fly with more ferocity and speed now that they were contaminated.
"Help!" someone screamed from behind them. Claire was too close to the bus to run to their assistance and prayed that someone, Chase or LJ or Betty, could save them.
"Over here!" Claire screamed to Mikey who was backing one of the trucks up towards the bus's fire exit. She pulled open the door of the bus while Carlos covered her, shooting whatever birds tried to go after the kids. She lifted each child to Mikey who placed them inside the truck and told them to cover their heads. The lack of youthful-flesh available to the birds seemed to exacerbate their rage. They were swooping down to get a bite out of whoever was available. That, it so happened, was just about everyone. Claire stealthily made her way back to the Hummer, emptying her clip in the crows that circled her.
"Claire!" expelled a distraught K-Mart.
"Hold on to something," Claire instructed fiercely, shooting the Hummer forward to slice the gap in the campsite. A younger woman was trying to fend off at least five of the airborne menaces and it seemed as though she could use a hand. "Open that door!" K-Mart reached back and opened the side door, grabbing the woman's hand and pulling her to safety. "Were you bit?" Claire inquired harshly. The woman, now crying, shook her head. "Get in the back with her," she told K-Mart. "Keep your heads down."
And, somewhere not-so-far away, Alice saw this. Overtop what seemed like miles upon miles of sand dunes, Alice noticed the birds. Alice, who had the power to single-handedly wipe out the entire cloud of crows with her own two hands. Alice, who had destroyed her motorcycle in her sleep the night before. Alice, who was dressed for a desert-trek, if not to pilot an aircraft. Alice, who assumed she was seeing an inordinate group of healthy birds crowding over an otherwise empty space.
When she got closer, she heard the screams. She increased her speed, overjoyed by the idea that she may have just found human life but concerned about what it was that was happening. Truth was, she had found human life. It was just on its way to being devoured by birds.
Carlos hadn't been as quick to return to shelter as Claire, though he knew she only did that so could get to K-Mart. He had made a mad dash towards another woman, one he didn't know all that well but knew she didn't deserve to be made into a meal by these horrible creatures. Chase, everyone's favorite cowboy, had taken the initiative to climb atop one of the military vehicles, the one equipped with the flamethrower, and began to do just that. He began to torch those bastards, uttering some Chase-esque remark about fried chicken as he did so. He wasn't paying much attention to what was happening below him due to the high level priority of frying the sons of bitches flying around him so when he aimed the stream of combustion downwards towards a particularly stubborn group of crows, he had no idea that the young woman trying to escape them was literally in the line of fire. Back on the sand, Carlos was the second to notice the flames headed directly towards the young lady, the first being the young lady herself. He dove in front of her, pulling her to his chest and turning so his back was towards the blaze. He braced himself, preparing for the searing pain he knew he'd be experiencing in a matter of seconds. When those seconds passed and he felt nothing but a slight heat to his back, he thought to look up, and damn it all if he wasn't surprised to see Alice standing just fifteen feet from him.
She stood with her head down slightly, an intense look upon her face as if she was using ever ounce of concentration in her body to perform this task. And, in fact, she was. She used those powers, the ones that she had yet to fully identify or understand, she used them to stop the flames from engulfing the unknown young woman and Carlos, the man she had known in what felt like a past life. She stood there, breathing somewhat heavy and grinding her teeth as she stared intensely, mysteriously stopping the fire in its tracks and sparing the lives of two innocent people. Doing so directed the blaze up, creating a massive explosion overhead and setting fire to all of the remaining birds and raining a good deal of ash, debris and flaming feathers down to the barren earth below. The intense heat blew back her short hair, causing her eyes to water and her face to be illuminated by an orange glow.
"Holy shit," said Claire from behind the wheel of the Hummer, inching forward in her seat and looking out the windshield with difficulty. She had a hard time believing what she was seeing; a fireball suddenly stopped by the sheer mind-power of a woman no larger than herself. Her voice lowered as she realized she was really just talking to herself. "How the fuck did she just do that?"
When the flames were gone, so was the young woman, running out of both relief and fear. Alice stood, barely, dizzy from the mental exertion and panting with what sounded like grunts of victory. Carlos rushed to her, able to make it there in time to catch her fatigued body. They stayed there a minute, both of them basking in the feeling of the other's arms despite the ash still falling from the sky above them.
When Carlos felt like she could stand on her own, he released her, reluctantly.
"What are you doing here, Alice?" he asked, his voice raspy with adrenaline.
"I saw the birds," she answered him. God, he missed that voice. That constant whisper. "I heard the screams when I got a little closer." She looked up at him with a familiar half-smile. "It looked like you needed my help so I decided to intervene." He couldn't keep himself from grinning at her words as well as the expression with which she said them. Behind them, quiet conversations could be heard, accusatory and bewildered whispers from the people who had now dared to emerge from the safety of their vehicles. Even Claire had opened the door to the Hummer, standing with her feet on the floor of the driver's seat so she could rest one hand on the open door and one on the car's yellow roof to get a clearer look of the woman of the hour. "They're talking about me," Alice admitted earnestly, looking to the sand beneath her boots. Carlos looked over his shoulder, taking in the same sight as his prevailing companion.
"Let's take a walk," he said, putting a hand on her shoulder.