Lucky
Jeremy Urbano Rosete (Bad Ronald)
"What kinda sick fuck…"
Chris Redfield ripped his eyes away from the hallway with a sickened grunt. He didn't want to look at the dead bodies splayed on the floor, let alone the carcasses nailed to the wall. His hand inevitably drifted to his pocket, where his pack of smokes awaited.
Lucky, Lucky Strikes. Lucky Strikes. Chris noticed, much to his disturbance — Lucky Strikes— that the tip of his fingers actually seemed to tingle when it touched the surface of the pocket.
And he was really trying to quit too.
"Ahh, screw it," he muttered under his breath, "Life's for the birds."
Claire's favorite saying, but Claire would be driven mad if she saw him reaching for his cigs. Even the sight of desecrated corpses didn't merit an excuse for his beloved cancer sticks, not to little sis.
"You know…"
His pistol was halfway out of the holster before he turned around. Jill Valentine gave him a pointed stare.
"I'd tell you to quit, but…"
She looked past his shoulder and her stare melted to a horrified gaze.
"What in the…?"
Chris stuck a cig in his mouth and pursed his lips over the paper and oh God that felt so good and offered his pack to her. Jill took it, opened the pack, looked at the thing in her hands and then threw it back at Chris with a sharp, "Hey!"
He shrugged. Worth a try. Jill kept staring at the hallway before looking away just as he did.
She said, "What kind of sick—"
"Yes, I said that already," Chris interrupted. "Barry's already radioed his location, he's headed down here."
"Oh," Jill said, rubbing her eyes. "Barry. That's good, I guess. And the others?"
Chris shrugged. "Nah. They're all good up at the evac point. They're waiting for us. Irons wants us out, he says it's taken care of, backup's coming, the same sort of bullshit he told us at that mission on Bluecreek."
Jill gave him a long look and said, "Backup?"
Chris nodded.
"We are the backup, Chris."
He rolled his eyes. Like he didn't think of that? Chris was thickheaded but not stupid.
He leaned on one side of the hallway and said, "I know, but Wesker's insisting that we head back to base and let 'backup,' whoever the hell they are, handle this. You go on to evac, I'll wait 'till Barry… what are you looking at?"
Jill straightened her beret, an action that never failed to irritate Chris. She always did that to be dramatic, but it made her look like a little girl playing with mom's bra instead.
"Chris, I know you're not the smartest tool in the shed, but if you didn't notice, the hallway has blood splashed all over. Like a Manson Family vacation, right?"
He groaned at her 'joke,' motioning for her to get on with it.
"There is some on that wall you're leaning on."
Chris leaped off the wall with a start, and looked at his back, seeing that there was indeed some on the wall he leaned on and oh for Jesus, eww.
"Aww… shiiiiiit," he said, trying to reach back to wipe it off. She stopped him by grabbing his wrist, pulled out a handkerchief, and Chris couldn't help but wonder when she started carrying a handkerchief in the first place.
"Poor Chris," she said, wiping at his back and not even bothering to turn him around, so she looked straight up to his eyes while he tried not to look at other parts of her, honestly, this wasn't the time for that sort of thing, "It's really not your day, is it, Redfield? First a bird lands a direct hit on you on the way to the chopper…"
He groaned. Did she have to remind him of that particular incident? The thing had blinded him, and yes, it wasn't his day at all. The hallway itself seemed to gleefully lend itself as a sort of reaffirming punctuation.
Jill continued humiliating him, "And now you've got blood— okay, it's soaked, you need a towel." She stepped away, dropping the thing, and even though he was grateful for the wide berth, he couldn't help but want to be close to her again. Not for any particular reason, really, nothing that would jeopardize the mission, especially not because he happened to be thinking this way in a hallway full of blood, he wasn't going to start thinking like a high school freshman now.
Jill stepped in further in the hallway, her face creased with disgust as she stared at one particular corpse shredded to pieces.
"I know it sounds incredibly cliché," she said. "But who could do this?"
"Should you be asking who?" Chris said, slowly arching an eyebrow for dramatic effect. "Shouldn't you be asking instead… what?"
Jill shot him a glance that oozed impatience.
He explained, "As in, what could do this?"
She scoffed, taking her pistol out of her holster and absentmindedly tapping it on her hip. "Spare me, Redfield. This isn't a movie, or some game. I don't even want to go down that path, thinking like there can't possibly be a human being that can do this, and so it has to be this thing. I'd rather a human being did this. A lot easier to take down."
Chris shot her a grin. "So philosophical!"
Jill sighed. "Trust me, this has nothing to do with philosophy, just good old common thinking. Would you rather take down a human or a…" She motioned back to the hallway. "…monster?"
He mulled over what she said. Woman had a point.
Jill looked back to the hallway and shook her head slowly, like a parent admonishing a child. "Kinda depressing, isn't it?"
"What's that?"
"This. I don't even think these guys knew what was going on. They must've been confused, being mauled up like this. They didn't even know why they died, I'd bet."
He moved to put his hand on her shoulder before realizing that his hand dripped with the blood from the hallway. He let his hand drift back down before taking out his half-forgotten cigarette and stubbing it out. Thank God he hadn't opted to wear the fingerless gloves today.
"You remember what they teached us back in Basic?"
"Taught, Chris. What have they taught us?"
He had to scoff at that. "What, are you a grammar Nazi now, Valentine? Anyway, one of the DIs said to never put a name to the bad guy. The bad guy's the bad guy. Don't give them a history when you're fighting them. Don't write their story for them, you know. It just messes you up, especially at this point of time where you don't really need to be messed up. This is already messed up as it is."
"Easy for them to say. They get to yell at people all the time, keeps them from discovering their gentle human side. Look, I can't help it. Look at these guys. Look at their faces. You just naturally want to end their story. They never got the chance to do it themselves."
"You sound like a writer," he noted.
Jill shrugged, "I've always wanted to be one."
Chris looked at her. This time, he really looked at her.
"What happened?"
"I grew up."
His eyebrow cocked, and he said, "Really? You can grow up from that?"
She shook her head "no," and before Chris could ask why, they both watched the door entrance to the hallway swing open fast enough to snap the hinges. Barry barreled through, the big man looking like he ran from the evac point all the way here… he even had his Colt out at the ready.
Chris and Jill stared at him for an awkward moment before she turned back to Chris and said:
"I just didn't feel like writing anymore. Decided to kick the asses of all the men in the world. Any woman can write."
Chris wanted to say, "You're not any woman, Jill," but Barry was there, and that sounded incredibly sap-shit sappy anyway.
Barry said the first thing that came to his mind, which was, "Huh?"
Jill smiled at him, gently punched the big man in the shoulder, and said, "Never mind. You missed it."
Barry didn't catch that because he just noticed the hallway. "What the hell kinda sick—" he started, and Chris interrupted and said, "Some human being."
Jill gave him a sharp look, one that said, "That's not funny." Chris gave her back a nonchalant look of his own. If she wanted to spout her spiel at him, so be it, but damned if he listen to her say that crap to Barry too. She could harp at the poor guy all she wanted, but it was depressing shit for Chris and he didn't want to hear it again.
Chris left Jill alone to explain the situation to Barry and headed back to evac, he didn't feel like looking her in the face, not now. What he thought about her remained true, she wasn't just any woman, she was a thinker, too smart for the likes like him, and that disturbed him more than the blood caked on his back. Not that he wanted her to be dumb, not at all, he actually found her clever wit and deep dissecting way of thinking particularly attractive… but there was something about the way she said her piece that made him want to hold her, to hug her, to say, "it'll be alright" and laugh off whatever reaction she had, and he couldn't do that.
Not now. Probably not ever. He had a job to do, to look over the crime scene, to write endless report and maybe take down a few criminals if Irons would ever fucking let them. Sure, he could consider something with her, but there was never a time for that stuff for a job like this.
Stuff like that only worked in the movies, anyway.
FIN