Another Time, Another Story
Morning
Jill wakes up in her bed, feeling ill from the night before. The sunlight is coming in through the white curtains next to her cot, and she isn't sure whether she's grateful or not. The sunny morning isn't doing any favours for her hangover, which she isn't supposed to have, but after a month of grayness, the sun comes as a good omen. She clenches her teeth as something starts pounding behind her left eye. The thump-thump-thump of her heartbeat comes together and forms a memory of yesterday's training, of Sergeant Messier's screaming at her to fire on sight. The new training tech lets them composite almost-real images of zombies and send them across large squares, where STARS recruits have to hit the head or the heart, each time, squarely.
"Valentine, I want you to listen to me," Messier had said, her blonde hair swinging over in front of her eyes. "Are you listening to me?"
This is a daily occurence. Jill looks at her feet, just as she did during Messier's lecture.
"Zombies may not move very quickly," Messier had continued, "but they only need one shot at you. Are you listening to me? Listen, because this is important. They only get one shot, and so do you. If you don't get them in the heart or head, you won't matter to STARS any more. You can go back out with the civvies and wake for the day when they feed on you. Do you understand me?"
"I understand you," Jill had replied.
Jill dresses quickly, and pads out onto the outdoor track, ignoring her headache and general malaise, trying to take advantage of the sunny day. A few other recruits are outside, but on the track, she is alone. I'm grateful for THAT, she thinks; it s so hard to get privacy in this damn place.
Training with Messier during the day is vicious, as usual. The composites of zombies appear harder and faster. Jill fails when one of them gets close enough to spatter blood onto her.
"I don't care what you say," Messier says, from her place on the sidelines, "that blood is infection manifest. You have even a sliver or a papercut and you're fodder for the incinerators."
This is a favourite threat of hers. All of the STARS recruits can see the smoke of the incinerators, pouring up over the rooftops, working daily as the infection spread across the town.
I can deal with the zombie threat, Jill thinks; I'm trained. I'm STARS.
"Take a break, Valentine," Messiers says, looking away.
Jill knows Messiers is sick of her job, sick of the zombie threat. The zombie threat makes the world a bleak place, Jill knew, and some people simply aren't cut out for a life in it. Messiers is, perhaps, (Jill likes to think) too soft for the job.
Active duty comes too fast for Jill's comfort. It seems like one moment Jill is failing her tests, the next she's trying to breathe underneath the hot smothering interior of a gasmask and insertion armour, watching Chess plunge an axe into a ratty wooden door.
Jill can't smell anything in the hot, filtered, confines of the gas mask, but she knows the tenement apartment would smell filthy to anyone else. The building is condemned, but people still live there, nicer properties becoming harder to find in this area of the country. It's dark, the sunlight hardly getting in through the grimy windows, and most of the lights in the ceiling are out. Jill wishes they had night vision, or at least something better than the little flashlights on their C-5s.
The thing must have been waiting for them. Three tentacles lash out into the darkness and wrap around Chess, cracking his gas mask. No time to get to his rifle;he sweeps up the axe in a circular motion, severing the tentacles, spraying his injection armour with dark thick acid.
"Get him back!" someone crackles in Jill's ear radio. Someone does, pulling Chess back, as Jill levies a burst of gunfire into the door. The door vanishes in smoke and timber, but whatever it is on the other side has retreated back into the apartment.
"Infection level on One?" HQ says into Jill's ear radio.
Jill looks at Chess, and HQ filters in bio info into a small window on the side of her vision. "He looks all right," she says.
Four, a woman named Rain, kneels down next to Chess. "Fucker laid some barbs."
"Infection level?" HQ repeats.
"No infection," Chess manages to get out, grabbing at his neck, where Jill can now see little purple barbs sticking out. "Didn't get through the neckguard."
"Going ahead, then," Two says, moving against the doorframe. He signals Jill to move ahead, and Jill swallows her fear, rushing into the darkened apartment. To help her courage, she quips, "Bet you got a scare there, huh, One?"
"Ha ha," Chess replies.
Jill turns, and a maw filled with spiny teeth coils open, seven tiny manibles centered inside, constantly moving. Jill's heart stops.
Of course her rifle is up, and she's already moving to pull the trigger, but something sweeps up from the shadws and clubs her into the wall. She hears the strap of her C-5 snap, the gun scattering away. In her mind, she can hear Messier start to berate her.
Psychology Test
The man is sitting in a chair behind a desk, looking very symmetrical. Jill is seated in front of the desk, in the usual power dynamics that come with an office and a desk, and who is sitting on which side. She smokes a cigarette, and tries to make herself feel empty, so as not to get too frightened and spill her guts to this asshole.
She wonders if the guy across from her was genetically produced. He seems inhumanly non-descript, a smiling, blandly handsome white guy with a straight-laced business man haircut. He is the face of a corporation, she thinks; not a person.
"We at Umbrella Corporation are very disappointed in you, Miss Valentine. You seemed to be on your way to quite an impressive career with us."
"I bet," Jill says.
There is a folder sitting on the desk. He glances at her, then at it, then idly flips it open. It is a practiced movement, something Jill has seen in a million films where similar corporate intimidators flip open folders.
He says, "I'd like to talk about the incident in Jacob Rock. Your team had been sent to deal with a new strain, is that right?"
A bullshit tactic, Jill thinks. "You have all that info in that file, don't you?"
"How much information do you think Umbrella collects on its STARS projects, Miss Valentine?"
"The 'incident at Jacob Rock'. Makes it into such a footnote, doesn't it?"
"What does, Miss Valentine?"
"Calling it that."
"It was an incident, Miss Valentine, and Umbrella, STARS, and its associates will do everything it can to assure that such an incident does not happen again."
"I'm sure."
"But it is directly after this incident that you met up with the woman you called Alice. I think we should start there."
Uh huh?
Start there, Miss Valentine. What happened?
Separated
It is definitely a new strain of mutant zombie, Jill can see that. Muscles in the shadow tighten, slick fluid spraying against the ground, and something shivering up through the slats of light, throwing Two into the wall hard enough to crack it. Something with tusks and spikes slams into Jill s stomach, pressing her against the floor. The little window in her mask s vision flips up with a diagram of her armour, showing off points of damage. She drops her C-5; there s no way I can get it aimed with this weight on me, she thinks.
Grabbing for her Poly-Knife, she sees a tentacle whip across her vision, snagging Chess s leg and dragging him out of her vision. The knife goes through whatever s pressing against her like butter, and black viscous fluid slaps against her shoulders.
No one is screaming. That s one thing all the old films got wrong; when you train as hard as STARS did for situations like this, nothing really shook you so hard to get you screaming. There are no breaches in her armour yet, so she keeps herself calm, sawing through the thing on her chest enough to push herself up to her knees.
Two starts screaming. HQ cuts off his scream two seconds in, and Jill thinks that maybe no one screams on active missions because HQ doesn t let them. But he s screaming hard enough for her to hear it through her mask. She twists, trying to see what s happening to him.
She sees Rain crash against the creature, in and out of the shadows, her Poly-Knife stabbing against its pale, slick bulk. Tentacles whip into a circle, and Rain vanishes through one of the boarded-up windows with a crashing noise. The sudden sunlight lets Jill see the room for the first time fully.
It is a huge round bulk, filled with vestigial human limbs, whippery tentacles emerging from a node on its top, and a long stalk moving about like a snake, a huge tooty mouth on its end. It had been the mouth on top of her, because she can see pieces of it missing.
Chess has made it to his feet, and he is firing his C-5 in short controlled bursts. Black fluid sprays the floor, mixing with the bright flash of the gunfire. Jill can t see Four anywhere.
Three, what s your status? HQ barks into her ear.
Mobile, Jill says, snatching up her C-5 and shouldering it.
As that hideous mouth swings back around to her, she blows the neck apart. As the mouth slaps against the ground, it begins to balloon upwards in thick bloody bubbles.
No, she thinks; oh no.
The explosion is loud enough that her radio immediately cuts out all channels and begins blasting ear-drum-sheltering static. The flash is bright enough that the vision on her mask closes out, to protect her from blindness. The heat, however, is enough to turn her armour to slag, and the shockwave is enough to take out the walls and the ceiling. Jill falls into an onslaught of rubble. This is it, she thinks. She pictures herself crushed by a giant boulder, but instead her mask snaps back on, all channels and vision coming online, and she sees herself flying out into sunlight, towards what is left of a fire escape.
She flails out, catches a rung. Behind her, half of the tenement building has come down, and she has only a moment before she is engulfed in smoke.
First thing s first; she uses her knife to slice through what is left of her armour. The gas masks she keeps, in order to filter through the smoke, but a lack of armour means she is vulnerable to any of the zombies moving about the remains of the fallen town of Jacob Rock.
HQ, she says.
Three, we want you to-- and then static, loud enough to hurt her ears.
A flash of light blasts across her vision, and then the sight on her mask goes jagged and frozen. Crap, she thinks.
She lets herself down into the alley next to the tenement apartment, and takes off the gas mask. She can t see any zombies here, but she knows they will be attracted by the explosion. She can t see or hear any of her friends.
This isn t how it was supposed to go down, she thinks.
Jacob Rock s main street resembles most of America s small towns these days: burnt out buildings, some of them still occupied, broken up roads, chain-linked fences, weeds, feral dogs, the occassional shambling silhouette in the distance.
I m fucked, is her first thought; I have no armour, no mask, and my gun and my knife is still up in the apartment, or somewhere in the rubble.
But that was how it had been in the early days, hadn t it? When the first plague had swept through the cities, and the dead began to walk, she hadn t had any Poly-Knives when she had been trapped in that car, screaming at the pale figures swarming the windows.
Anyone! she shouted. Chess? Rain?
A horrible sound from behind her, like a great blimp filled with water had been dropped by God onto a pile of rubble. Of course it can still move without its mouth, she thinks. Of course it can survive an explosion.
Those human limbs aren t as vestigial as she had originally thought. The pale bulk of the creature rears back on little hands and scrambles towards her, tentacles whipping out. There is an abandoned car nearby and she hurls herself across its rusty roof, landing on the cement behind it.
The creature crashes against the car, shoving it into Jill, almost crushing her between the car door and the fence behind it. In the distance she can hear the mournful howl of the undead. They heard the explosion, she thought.
There is just enough room beneath the car to push herself under. She crawls to the side, and manages to somehow get five feet out onto the street before the creature loses interest in the car and comes running at her.
Alice
Jill s hands are folded in her lap. This time she couldn t keep the fear out of her voice. The man across the desk is looking at her curiously.
That must have been awful, he thinks.
It had been, she thinks; but if it hadn t happened, I wouldn t have met Alice.
And there it is: the memory of her, seeing her there, sitting in that old convertible, those huge sunglasses on her face, smiling that weird smile. The way she had so calmly driven that car across the road, past the terrified Jill, and ramming the creature into a brick wall.
Things rarely ruffle Alice, Jill thinks.
Is that when you met the woman you call Alice? the man asks her.
Is that where I MET her? Jill thinks; you better fucking believe it, buster.
The creature s arms and tentacles had twisted about curiously in the sunlight. Alice had kept her foot down on the gas, all the while looking over at Jill.
Finally, when the creature had collapsed across the hood, unmoving, Alice had reached over, and opened the door for Jill. As Jill, terrified and exhausted, made her way over to the door, she could hear the Beach Boys playing on the car radio.
Alice had taken off her sunglasses, looked Jill in the eye, and smiled.
Get in, she said.