Title: Life Amongst the Dead
Disclaimer: I only own this story.
Summary: It's after the Racoon City 'accident' and the virus is slowly spreading from the infected survivors of the disaster. The police force is struggling to contain a sudden surge of disgusting murders, and after their own people begin joining the ranks of the mindless undead, the army and the armed agencies are called upon to help clear the streets.
Rating: T for descriptions of nasty deaths, zombies and some language. Maybe some romance too.
A.N.: This is AU, obviously, and Jenny is alive in this which means Mike is too, and that this is pre Somalia. Also Tim looks a healthy weight rather than the sickly stick insect look he has going on right now. I don't want to kill off any main characters, but if it seems unavoidable then you have my most sincere apologies if the one to die is your favourite. I know that sucks. This is a crossover with the Resident Evil movie-verse as my only play through the games (RE Outbreak I think) ended in my characters death after five horrible minutes. (She was infected the moment she left the pub bathroom). Too terrifying to try again.
Although the picture painted in Extinction is a nice, grim, realistic post apocalyptic life for if zombies took over the world, something doesn't sit right with me. I mean, doesn't practically everyone in America own a gun? Perhaps that is a stereotype, but still, how did that many well armed people die? I can see us over in England becoming endangered because all we have to defend ourselves with is sport equipment and any other heavy objects we can get our hands on. Not a good outlook for the hundreds, perhaps thousands of people whose favourite sport is football.
Geography: Well obviously Racoon City is not a real place but the city is supposed to be in the American Midwest, however I only have the films to go off since the games wiki is incredibly unhelpful so I decided that since Apocalypse was filmed in Toronto, Canada, I would compromise between the two and stick it on the other side of the border in Ohio. The Appalachian Mountains can sub for Arklay, despite not being in the Midwest, because the southeast part of Ohio is apparently quite hilly and close enough for the purposes of this story. (Sorry if you live there and don't agree with my admittedly pithy research into where it should go, and the fact you guys get eaten first.)
The motel room was shabby, the furniture was old and worn, the 80's patterns faded and barely discernable. The paper was curling off of the walls and the curtains were yellow with age, or possibly cigarette residue. You certainly get what you pay for, Angela Ashford thought grimly, staring at nothing in particular as she sat stiffly on the bed while the adults spoke quietly in the other room. She wasn't allowed to participate in their discussions because she wasn't old enough, or maybe they thought they were sparing her childish innocence by keeping her away from the horrible topic. How could they though? She was deeply involved in it, more so than anyone, except maybe Alice and she had lost her soft and fluffy outlook on life in Racoon City.
As soon as those men in suits had come to get her from school she had known that something terrible had happened. She had taken a last look at the familiar faces of her classmates, her friends, hoping that it would be the last image she had of them if the worst happened, but life was cruel to her. Her car had been hit and she had been rendered unconscious. When she had awoken she had been upside-down in the wreck with her two escorts dead, and like anyone in an uncertain and frightening situation she had panicked and decided to return to somewhere safe, somewhere familiar; her school.
When she had arrived however, she had realised that she was not safe there. Her friends had turned and the screams of the last survivors had echoed down the corridors. She had been terrified, but she had the advantage of being saturated with the virus that was killing them. The dead would pass right by her and not realise she was alive. Her daddy would never leave her, she had reasoned, he would send someone else to get her, so it would be best to stay somewhere he knew she would be.
Angela closed her eyes against the anguish that threatened to overwhelm her. Her daddy was gone now; he had died right in front of her, had been murdered right in front of her. Angela felt the tears escape and angrily wiped them away. She didn't see why her daddy had had to die; he had done what any loving parent would do for their child. She knew that he would have been evacuated long before the infection had taken over the city if she had been extracted successfully the first time, which meant he had stayed for her. He had died because of her. She hadn't really had time to grieve because there was always someone with her and she had tried to show how mature she was by not crying around them, except in stolen moments like this. With the others all in the other room she had no need to pretend to be strong so she let her guard down, and unfortunately that brought other feelings to the surface too.
The man who had killed her daddy, the Umbrella man called Cain, had only done so when Alice had refused to engage in a pointless fight. It was to show Alice that her stubbornness would only get everyone killed, it had had nothing to do with her daddy; it was all about Alice. Angela shook her head and pressed a hand to her mouth to stifle her sobs. She resented Alice for her part in her daddy's death; even though she knew that Alice hadn't meant for it to happen a small part of her blamed her. She couldn't help it, and that made her feel guilty, especially after Alice had sacrificed herself for her in the helicopter.
Angela felt like she was alone in this madness. Carlos and LJ, although caring and patient, didn't really interact with her often and Alice was distant since being rescued from Umbrella. Jill was the only one who spoke with her and seemed to have the most time for her. They had both lost someone dear to them in Racoon City, which had helped to bring them together, but Angela was still a child to them, a burden that was forced on them. They felt responsible for her since her daddy was dead so they kept her around, but she felt useless. She wanted to be like Jill; strong, determined, a survivor, rather than the frightened little girl the others saw her as. She focussed on that thought and gradually calmed down and wiped away the evidence of her breakdown. Jill would be finding a way to help with their situation, not crying in another room while someone else decided what was going on.
Angela got up from the bed and crept as silently as she could to the door, pressing her ear against it to listen to what the others were saying. They were mostly just talking about how neither Jill nor Carlos could use their money to fund them because they were wanted by the police for the 'hoax' video. Angela sighed softly, she had no money to help them either, and even if she could hack her father's accounts, he would be classed dead by now anyway. All of his money would have been taken by the bank or the government or whoever took dead people's money. She couldn't even help in that way either. Was her meagre account gone too? Did anyone know she was alive?
She cast a worried look at the lunchbox she held tightly to her chest. Her life depended upon what she kept hidden in there, but she hadn't worried about that until after leaving Racoon City. She had thought that her daddy would be with her so she had no reason to think about it, but she did now. She had only a few tubes of antivirus left. That would keep her alive for about half a year, maybe less. After that she would either mutate or die and then reanimate, forcing Jill and the others to kill her before she could kill them. She shuddered, hugging her lunchbox to her. She didn't want to die, and she certainly didn't want to become one of those things.
Determined to help somehow she returned to eavesdropping. They were just discussing what they could get away with not paying for when LJ cursed, his way of asking for their attention. He turned up the volume on the TV, apparently having been watching it silently for some reason, and a news reporters voice came over loud and clear talking about unexplained, violent murders that were happening all over Belmont County. The police had had to use deadly force to take out the murderers, and in St. Clairesville the fight was still ongoing, with contact completely lost with Blaine and Maynard. The police from nearby Martins Ferry and Bridgeport were being dispatched to find out what was wrong. So far the murders were being blamed on terrorists that must have put something in the county drinking water supply that made the inhabitants mentally unstable.
"That's close to Racoon City." Jill stated significantly, and Angela heard a round of sighs from the adults.
"So it got out after all." Carlos said his tone somewhere between angry and incredulous.
"Or they started their experiments over in another city and it escaped again." Alice countered.
"Yeah, but my moneys on one of them suits gettin' bit. Ain't no way he's ownin' up to that." LJ declared, sniggering humourlessly.
"If only someone had taken Terri's video seriously, rather than swallowing Umbrella's lies, they would have recognised the signs and eliminated the threat before it could spread." Carlos added wistfully, silence following his words as everyone including Angela thought of the lives that would have been saved if Umbrella's true nature had been uncovered, but no one wanted to believe it was true. Even though they had stated that it was a virus that had done this, people had still scoffed at the idea of zombies running around. They were supernatural creatures after all, and everyone knew that all of that stuff was fantasy, not fact.
"So what do we do?" Alice asked and dead silence followed until Jill broke it.
"What do you mean 'what do we do'? We already tried to help; look what it got us." She raged.
"None of those people deserve to die; we could help them somehow-" Carlos said but was cut off by Jill
"How? We gave them all of the evidence they needed to stop this from happening again and they ignored it. Rereleasing the video will only get the feds onto us, or worse; Umbrella. I'm not putting mine or Angie's ass on the line for a bunch of-."
"We have to try. Even if only one person realises the truth, that's one more person out there to help others." Carlos retorted and his tone brooked no argument.
Angela pulled away from the door thinking quickly. This was her chance to do something, to make a difference. Her daddy had been very good with computers, and since it had been just the two of them he had taught her how to use them in the event they were separated for any reason. She was an intelligent girl so hacking was one of the skills he had taught her 'just in case', but she was only to use it if there was no other legal choice. Now was one of those times she reasoned grimly, hoping her daddy would forgive her if he could.
The President could shut down umbrella if he knew what was going on, if he knew the truth, but how could she get the video to him? She couldn't. There was too much security around him, but maybe she could send it to others and they could convince him to watch it. She could hack into the FBI's email database and send the video to every Agent in the building, but would that be enough? Maybe she needed to expand her view. The FBI wasn't the only Federal Agency in DC, she could probably get it to the Secret Service and that Navy one... she couldn't recall the name. Did the CIA have a base in the Capital? Probably. Okay, she could do that... but surely they had all seen it before, when Jill and Carlos had first released it. What if they recognised it and just deleted it as soon as it started playing? She needed some sort of hook to get them interested in it, but what?
Angela pulled out her father's laptop from her school bag and opened it up. She quickly accessed the internet and then stopped to think. Maybe... if she drew parallels between the video and what was happening in St. Clairesville they would realise that they had told the truth all along. With that thought in mind she hacked her way into the security camera's in . She was a good student and a fast learner, but it still took her an uncomfortable ten minutes to get in. She drew a sharp breath and quickly averted her eyes, linking to another feed. She had to be strong, it didn't matter if her nightmares never went away; this could save lives. She looked up and gazed at the screen. The view was the same as the last one. Cars were overturned, some on fire and there was no one alive, just dead bodies littering the streets. The undead had moved on from this area.
Angela steeled herself and searched every camera she could, finally finding a large group of survivors heading to safety. She recorded them shooting the undead in the head, obviously having learned that anywhere else doesn't work. Then she concentrated on getting some close ups of the obviously dead zombies. Once she decided she had enough footage to prove her point she closed her feed and started pulling bits from the video and putting it before the bits she had just gotten from St. Clairesville. Now she just had to get them to bother watching it.
Angela glanced at the door to the bedroom and prayed that her luck would hold for just a little longer. She dug Terri's video camera out of her bag, which she had been asked to keep because at the time she had been the only one with convenient storage space (though Carlos had considerately carried her bag for her after that). She opened it and made sure it had a memory card in it, and then checked the power. It would last long enough for her to record a short message. Good. Now all she had to figure out was what to say.