Funeral Games – Chapter 1

Nothing beat waking up in the hospital for crushing a man's budding delusions of grandeur. Jake learned that the hard way in Minsk, six months after the first time he saved the world.

It happened after they'd finished clearing out the last nest of Plagas in one of the crumbling apartment blocks below the river. The technology behind the Plagas was so out of date at this point that it was practically retro, like bringing an eight track player to a gun fight. Even the locals who had hired them had seemed apologetic about it.

The whole thing was a pretty pathetic skirmish, not even worth getting all dressed up for. Jake cut the locals a decent discount for his services, and he set most of the cash aside for getting good and drunk.

He remembered feeling competent, cocky, immortal. Other people could die, he figured, and indeed they might do so all the time, but not him. Nothing could even touch him.

That was what he was thinking right up until the moment that his motorcycle skidded on a patch of ice, and he went over the handlebars. And then nothing until he woke up in the hospital with a crude horseshoe shaved out of his hair and a row of stitches running from his eyebrow to his crown.

He was fine, more or less – it was just a concussion – but there was nothing like taking out a dozen Plagas bare-knuckled only to wipe out on a patch of ice no bigger than a sheet of notebook paper to make you realize what a crapshoot life and death was. Laid up in a Belorussian clinic, the left side of his head throbbing like it was going to push his eye right out of his skull, Jake began to wonder how it could be that his father alone had managed to miss that simple, inescapable fact.

Since he'd found out the truth, Jake had caught himself thinking about his old man more and more. It had been like that when he was younger, when he had first realized that there was something in his mother's past, something she never talked about, something that had trickled down into him. When they were on good terms, which they usually were, Jake assumed that his father had skipped out on them, or, at best, that he was dead. When they fought, his internal narrative revised itself and it was his mother who had callously driven a good and decent man away.

She never knew that he had thought this; at least, he hoped she hadn't. Jake never asked her anything, not even a name. Because he had learned how to walk before he could crawl, and how to throw a punch before he could read, and how to take a fucking hint before he could give one.

It wasn't until she was dead and gone that he had finally realized he even had the words to say that he hated his father. Running with mercenaries was kind of like being at ground zero for daddy issues, and the first time he heard one of the older guys shooting his mouth off about what a sack of shit his own father had been, Jake had actually laughed. That small pitiful sound, rusty from years of disuse, was like a revelation. It was all it took for the little Dutch boy to pop his finger out of the dam and release a whole torrent of toxic pent-up hate.

Hate was good, it was progress. But hate had appetites. For five years, Jake had soothed himself with sex, alcohol, food, drugs, cards, dice, and fights. Any vice or poison he came across, down the pipe it went.

Things had been going pretty well, at least in the sense that they could have been going much worse. And then Albert Wesker had to go and ruin it.

The name hadn't meant anything to Jake the first time he'd heard it. Most of Wesker's movements and dealings, he found out later, were classified during his life. The name was just a collection of syllables back then, sounds drifting in a void, occasionally knocking into one another with dull clunks. It was the fact that his father had a name at all, an identity outside of his utter lack of identity, that had pulled Jake up short.

He felt that he had been adrift for years on a vast and featureless sea, and when that name had appeared it had been like a barren rock rising out of the waves. Dry land at last for him to throw himself upon.

Jake had never intended to find out more than just that name. The things Carla had hinted at, the little scraps of information that she had dangled before him, he didn't want to hear anything else like that. He didn't want to know if knowing was just going to be embarrassing for him, or difficult. But after five years of indulging every whim that popped into his head, one thing that Jake didn't have in abundance was self-control.

At first, he'd been satisfied with just pictures. There weren't a lot of photographs of his father still floating around unclassified, but he did come across a few. One very old one from when Wesker had first joined Umbrella as a researcher showed a thin, awkward teenager with sunglasses perched on top of his head, younger then than Jake was now, somewhat ferret-faced as if he was still growing into his features.

Wesker had been facing the camera but not looking into it. His eyes were fixed on a spot somewhere beyond.

Jake was annoyed at the implication that he had anything in common, even on the genetic level, with this twerpy little nerd, this poindexter who looked like he jerked off to Pokemon or something in his spare time. His hands would have been soft, Jake remembered thinking with a shudder that was half of revulsion and half of anger, because he had never had to put them to any kind of serious work. He'd just coasted along: nursery to prep school to science camp to a cushy job at daddy's company.

What an asshole. He probably thought he'd actually earned it.

It would have been better, Jake knew now, if he had just left the whole thing alone. He could have come away with that image of his father affixed firmly in his mind: a young man, wide-eyed, still blinking, as if he had been suddenly and roughly shoved out of the cellar where he had spent the first seventeen years of his life, into the full and unmerciful light of day.

By his third day in the hospital, Jake could tell they were thinking about unceremoniously throwing him out. The gash on his head had pretty well healed up, and lights no longer hovered on the fringes of his sight. He could eat the kasha they brought him at mealtimes and actually keep it down. Still, Jake wasn't in any hurry to leave, and as long as they didn't need the bed for some other poor basketcase, he wasn't going to rush things along if he could help it.

It was nice, he thought, being laid up like this. He had a roommate, but the guy was in for a broken jaw and couldn't have said a word if he had wanted to. When Jake heard him get up and shuffle out from behind the threadbare curtain that split their room in two, he turned on his side and closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep until his roommate had gotten back from taking a piss or stocking up on painkillers or whatever. Jake had never actually laid eyes on the man, and that was the way he preferred it.

There was nothing else to do but lay there and think. He thought about a few different things, but mostly about his father, and how he had definitely never been stuck in a hospital with a crumbling Soviet exterior and bright, clean, brand new interior. How he'd never had a wedge shaved impersonally out of his immaculate hair, and a row of neat, black stitches like a column of marching ants put in its place.

He used to dwell on the idea that Wesker had gotten all the luck. Now he was beginning to think that maybe he had gotten none of it.

Jake couldn't decide if that little revelation was genuine progress or just sour grapes. Or maybe it was just a bit of rhetorical nonsense born out of feeling cooped up and bored with no one to talk to. All at once, with no real build up at all, he realized he missed Sherry awfully.

It had been half a year since he had last seen her, and almost that long since he had really given the time they'd spent together much thought. It had only been a few days cumulatively, and with everything that had been going on it wasn't as if they'd had much time to get to know each other. Still, Jake felt that he understood her on an intimate level, the same way he might flip on the radio and hear a song and feel that the singer knew him perfectly, without ever even knowing his name.

Jake liked to imagine that she was on vacation somewhere warm. Somewhere with a beach, maybe on the Mediterranean, where the girls sunbathed topless. Not that Sherry would do anything like that, but she might think about it. She only wore one-piece bathing suits, Jake decided. Modest, but not too covered up. She always wore sunscreen, putting it on every six hours like clockwork. She spread out a big towel on the sand and read a book by the ocean, totally absorbed in the story, her expression shifting unconsciously with each twist in the narrative.

He got so wrapped up thinking about it that when Sherry actually did show up at his bedside on the gray and dismal morning of his fourth day in the hospital, Jake was momentarily baffled as to how she managed to be in two places at once.

"Long time no see," Sherry said. She smiled shyly, as if to apologize for intruding.

Jake was still trying to get his shit together. He sat up in bed, running his palms over his clothes in a vain attempt to smooth out the wrinkles. The dingy hospital sheets made him feel self-conscious so he pushed them off. Then, feeling exposed, he pulled them back.

"Is something wrong?" It wasn't what he had wanted to say, but it was what came out.

Sherry's mouth contracted into a frown. She looked great, Jake decided, but a little pale. There hadn't been any Mediterranean beach in her recent past. If the shadows under her eyes were any indication, she'd been soaking up the glow from a computer monitor instead of the sun.

"What do you mean?" she said quietly.

"Don't get me wrong," Jake said. "It's nice to see you and everything. But the last time you showed up out of nowhere it was because the world was going to hell."

"No, it's nothing like that." She was blushing, but so far she seemed unaware of that fact. "One of our agents filed a report about what happened to you. I came to see if you need anything?"

Jake dipped his head, trying to catch her eye, but she seemed pretty intent on avoiding his gaze. It was a little unsettling. "In a professional capacity?" he said.

"Not completely." Sherry's blush deepened, and all at once she seemed to realize it was there. Her hand flew up to the bridge of her nose, scrubbing at the pink skin.

"Fine," Jake said. "So it's not Return of the Living Dead. That's good. But something sure has you all worked up."

All at once, she dropped her hand back to her side. Then she lifted her eyes and looked right at him. The blush was still there, but she didn't look timid anymore. "I'm not ready to talk about that yet," she said firmly. "Not here."

"You have somewhere else in mind?"

"Back home," Sherry said. She unclasped her black pocketbook and took out a neat, sealed envelope. "I have your plane ticket here. The visa is taken care of, too. I had to pull a few strings, but it helps if you know the right people."