Donde Haya Injuria:

A Story of Love in a World of Death

This Fanfiction is rated R for sexual content (but this is no lemon here, folks), heavy language, some possible drug references, random offensive stuff, and explicit gore and violence, like when the heroes bust open that zombie's head like a fuckin' grape, and the brains splat all over, and it's so SWEET! AHAHAHAH! Also, small children and the emotionally sensitive should not be exposed to what I am currently calling 'my sense of humor', at least until the experts find a more appropriate word. (Save a Life: Wear a Helmet when you die.)

Oh, also, I do not own anything Resident Evil-related, nor am I making money from this. I also do not own any other copyrights or registered trademarks included in the 'fic for realism's sake. The only money I may receive in connection with this fanfic is from a personal injury lawsuit, when somebody decides I "didn't get that one detail right, which is clearly stated in Code Veronica: X, you damn RE n00b" and busts my head in with a pipe. I did my best, friends. Enjoy.

The bell rang, a lonely and distant sound that finally managed to drag me roughly up from the warm happy place I used to call sleep. My forehead had stuck to my arm where I had nestled it into the crook of my elbow for optimum darkness/comfort, and I peeled it off with a distasteful little 'scritch' sound and a grimace. The drab, dirty-looking walls and the mental-institution-resembling metal-on-metal desks brought me back to a fuzzy semblance of reality. Right. School, piss on walls between classes, detention. And then…apparently, teacher and rest of detention class deserts me, probably for ice cream and board games. Anyway, nobody else was there, and the desks were all lying at crazy angles like everyone had panicked and ran and nobody had bothered to clean up or wake me.

It was dark outside, too, and I got up and went to the line of windows to see whatever it was that I could see, which wasn't much. The sky was a mess of roiling clouds, and the streets beneath me, the ones I could see, were deserted. As I watched, an advertising insert, or at least a fistful of colored paper, blew along Conrad Avenue and smacked into an abandoned shopping cart sitting in the intersection of Conrad and Main. That was weird, and I know from experience. Most days in Raccoon City (yes, everyone laugh at the name now, har har, get them chuckles out), Conrad and Main are choked with cars rushing off to and from the Umbrella plant down on Harvill Street, or to restaurants and malls and arcades. Conrad and Main are, conveniently, not only the streets on which Raccoon City North High School (home of the Hobgoblins, rah!) sits, but also the two most congested avenues in town. Go figure, kids like me have a hell of a time getting home.

But that day, Conrad and Main were deserted. And that I could believe, except that a cart from the K-Mart is sitting the intersection under a green right-of-way arrow, and the guy who runs that K-Mart, Joe Yin, is a fucking Nazi for professionalism. And more power to the guy, Nazi references notwithstanding. But suffice it to say that an abandoned cart, blocking the hypothetical but nonexistent traffic, would be grounds for execution. I would not want to be the poor grunt caught napping when it was his turn to clean up the Cart Corrals. These were my first thoughts in what the world would later call the Great Plague, or The Second Black Death. Or, sometimes with tongue firmly in cheek, the Black Undeath. The only people with wise enough asses to call it that, though, are people who haven't seen firsthand what the T-Virus can do. Manufactured by (all-hail!) the Umbrella Corporation, makers of fine tools, construction supplies, medicines, and biological weapons since 1992.

With confusion now firmly entrenched and quite at home in my mind, I decided to take a look around the school, with the vague hope that someone would explain why traffic had vaporized down on Conrad and why no janitor or teacher had bothered to set the desks in the detention rooms back on their spindly steel legs. Oh, the irony of that.

I headed out the door and into the twilight halls. For some reason the fluorescent bulbs overhead were dead, and the only light in that hall, squeezed between the lockers on one side and those on the other, came through the single window at each end. Other than that, nothing. A pile of junk sitting beside a forgotten broom and a sweater sleeve sticking out of some kid's open locker (looked for all the world like a human arm then, and I wonder to this day if it wasn't) were the only things I could see.

"Hello?" I called. My ill-advised greeting echoed metallically off the lockers and down around the corner. "Anybody home?"

I started off toward the corner- the school was built like a big 'U', and I was in one of the trailing arms- and called out again.

"Hell-oooooo?"

I waited for a second before turning the corner at the end of the hall. I was starting to get a hairy kind of feeling, like in the movies, right before the unsuspecting teen walks into his untimely demise. I felt a lot like that right then. Something moved, slowly and distinctly. It sounded like the movement was coming from underneath me, and I was right there at the stairs.

"Hey, if you're there, call back!" I shouted. "Um…shout back! Whatever!"

Down those stairs, I heard the answer. It was a low groan, guttural, like the noise a large animal or a very severely injured person might make.

"Hey man, you okay? If you're hurt…hey, I'll be down in a second!"

I busted down the stairs, skipping one or two with every step, thinking with blind naiveté that I was gonna be a hero. Nevermind that just seconds ago, I had been wondering where every fucking human being in the facility had gone. I never put a whole lot of thought into my actions at that time. No, I rushed down the stairs and into the hallway, looking every which way for the hurt guy that I was planning to save. Instead, there was a limping figure in the hall, holding the wall for support and facing toward the "5" door.

"You all right, mister? You sound pretty sick."

The hallway guy lurched around at the sound of my voice, shoving himself off the wall and turning toward me. When I saw him for what he really was, all limp muscles and mindless hunger, with runny tendrils of someone else's blood sticking to his lips, I screamed. And then I saw the patch on his jacket…

Jerry. This was Jerry, the guy who cleaned the detention room and cracked jokes with me when the moderator was away. Hell, this was the man who brought me Snickers from the vending machines if he thought he could get away with it, and now Jerry was standing in front of me with a ragged O of gore around his mouth, bellowing at his throatiest, most bestial, and least intelligent. His hair, like his limbs, had gone all limp and was clumping together where the blood had matted it down. Jerry opened his mouth- perhaps forced open his mouth is better, it seemed to take visual effort- and roared again.

"Jerry, man what the fuck-"

I didn't quite finish what I was going to say (-happened to you?), because as Jerry threw himself toward me with that terrible, unsatisfiable hunger, there was an intense roaring and the zombie's (I still find it tough to use that word) head exploded. Most of the head-goo landed on my shoes, and I about puked. It wasn't just blood, but blood and little chunks of solid gray stuff, surrounded by a thin fluid, and then, oh dear sweet Jesus, there were living things there. They were maggots, and whether they were mutants or virus-laden, I'll never know, but there they were, and then I felt it, movement in my hair, and it was then that I did puke. I vomited all over the shit that had come out of Jerry's head and all over my shoes, and in the back of my rational mind I swore that I would go buy new shoes at the soonest opportunity. When I was finished yarking all over my old buddy's remains, I looked up into the huge, beautiful green eyes of who would be my sole companion for the next six or so weeks.

She was short, 5'5" tops, and she had the biggest eyes, which made the strange and oddly attractive illusion that she was stuck in a perpetual sensation of wonder. She had tied her shoulder-length hair into a spunky little palm tree that spouted out of the top of her head, and she was toting a BFG. Which is to say, a big, fuckin' gun.

"Oh good," she said. "A survivor."