Story by: MilkMoth and Captain Tots; Cover image by: CarlaRadames
Apoptosis (n): A type of cell death in which the cell uses specialized cellular machinery to kill itself; a cell suicide mechanism that enables metazoans to control cell number and eliminate cells that threaten the animal's survival.
September 30, 1998
Annette Birkin guessed that she had about five minutes left to live, considering the depth of the wounds to her abdomen. She was still alive, which meant her heart hadn't been punctured, but there was definite trauma to multiple arteries and veins. If she was really set on living, she could have formed a compress with her lab coat, tied herself together tight as a straightjacket, and hope that it would hold her insides together—but for what? She wasn't getting out of this lab alive. No one from Umbrella would live to see another day.
Except for Carla Radames.
The woman's name came to her like a bitter poison on her tongue, the waifish girl hiding a demon underneath sallow skin and dull blonde hair.
She was going to die. Her husband was already dead, and her baby girl was being looked after by two strangers with motives she couldn't begin to guess.
And Carla Radames was going to live.
Annette squeezed her eyes shut from the pain of it all. Her body no longer hurt, but her mind overwhelmed her with an agony that felt like fire burning in her nerves. She tried to imagine something calming in her final moments, something to stop the burning, as if Hell's flames were already licking at her.
She thought about sneaking off to a hidden corner of the old Arklay Laboratory with William, fumbling with half worn clothes and awkward kisses, trying to see how long they could disappear together before someone said something. She thought about holding Sherry for the first time, half conscious from medication, amazed at the very idea that they could have created something with soft freckles and big blue eyes like her father's; that they created something with a heart and a mind and a soul; Sherry had a beautiful soul, she always thought, despite the lack of empirical evidence for such a thing existing.
Annette felt at peace. The pain faded into a dull numbness centering around her punctured stomach and ribs. She let herself go limp, and sunk into the pool of her own lifeblood surrounding her.
As her mind slipped away from her, it wandered across many things, images and pieces of conversation, faces and names, numbers and scientific formulas.
Her eyes flew open with a sudden shock, a realization that had just came to her as her oxygen starved brain clamored to make sense of her surroundings.
"You did this!" Annette shrieked into the emptiness swallowing her up. "The outbreak—it's all you—"
Annette Birkin died in Raccoon City, on September 30, at three in the morning from massive blood loss. Her mouth was slightly agape, and her hands were curled into angry fists.
At this very same time, Carla Radames was some three hundred miles north of Annette's final resting place. As she rose to go take a shower, a chill ran down her spine. She had the unmistakable feeling that someone was watching her.
Chapter One: Allocosa
December 5, 1992
Despite the fact that many of the scientists who worked in the Raccoon City Underground Laboratory had not attended high school, having been whisked off to some sort of child-genius preparatory academy by the time they were twelve, the seating layout of the cafeteria strongly resembled that of a stereotypical suburban high school, grouped by respective social class. Lab technicians sat at one table, mid-ranking scientists at another, students were grouped together by specialty, and the government contract researchers were shoved off in a corner, representing the lowest rung of Umbrella's social totem pole. There wasn't any official regulation of where to sit, but knowing one's place, in every aspect of their jobs, was so thoroughly ingrained into the culture of Umbrella, there might as well have been name cards.
The room was constructed of shiny stainless steel, which gave the impression that you were eating inside of a kitchen appliance. The tables appeared to sprout out of the floor, like metal buddings off a plant, and the lights were mercilessly bright, gleaming off every polished surface, giving the room's occupants an illuminated view of each sickly face surrounding them. The food sat in rigid sterile buffet fixtures, all enclosed with plastic lids, temperature gauges and timers affixed in front of every compartment, reading off times and temperatures to reassure the paranoid among them. The Umbrella Corporation logo hung above both main exits, and every day as they exited, the scientists reflexively whispered soft as a prayer power is life, so quick, that an outsider wouldn't even understand the words.
Annette Birkin, along with her husband, William, presided over the facility's elite, the two of them unhappily picking away at styrofoam bowls of fruit salad in unison, sitting so close to each other that their arms rubbed every time they raised their forks.
It was a whisper around the lab that there was something slightly unnatural about Annette and William, with their dull synchronistic mannerisms and identically cadenced voices. There were two permutations of the myth, the first being that they had spent so much time around each other, that they had begun to form a single consciousness like a patch of fungus, with all their nerve endings invisibly linked through static electricity.
The second and more obscene variation was that William had engineered a female clone of himself to have sex with, narcissist that he was, and that if someone swabbed their daughter's cheek, the three of them would all be genetically identical. This particular rumor lived on through the lower rungs of the laboratory staff, whispered by technicians on their smoke breaks, especially after one incident where an unfortunate postgrad had broken a petri dish, and was set upon by the both of them like the wrath of an angry God.
The boring truth was that Annette and William were in fact separate entities with similar personalities and appearances, both soft spoken until they were roaring loud, egotistical, constantly anxious, and obsessively focused. William's hair was a shade darker than his wife's cornsilk blonde, and her eyes were more green than his were blue, but they shared the same sallow pallor, the bruise colored half moons under their eyes, the dry lips and twitchy fingers.
Neither of them enjoyed the daily ritual of packing up their work, locking down the lab from potential prying eyes, and trudging up to get lunch, but Annette had successfully argued that they needed to keep their fingers on the pulse of the lab. Two completely absentee bosses would encourage misbehavior - anything from disobedience to mutiny. There was ample security, but Annette knew the best way to hold control was through personal relations. She hadn't risen to her position on intellect alone.
So, every day at one in the afternoon, Annette and William awkwardly sat in front of identical bowls of syrupy fruit salad, eating it one piece at a time, blankly staring at their coworkers, most of whom were too terrified of the pair to start up a conversation, and too awkward to stop one if it began. The head scientists at Umbrella seemed to blend into each other into a blur of lab coats and stilted voices; all of them had coarse hair and sickly skin, beady little eyes and pursed mouths.
Annette made brief eye contact with the small frumpy woman who managed the MA-121 nutrition and growth program and snapped a grape in half between her incisors. The woman looked away with a violent jerk of her neck, as if she had seen someone shot. Annette sighed, inaudible to the eight silent researchers she was surrounded by. Everyone was so dull.
Across the room, Annette saw a wiry young girl who couldn't have been much older than sixteen, marching stiffly behind Derek Simmons, the supervisor for the government contractors, and the cause of most of her husband's ever-present irritation. He presented an opportunity for amusement, if only for a few minutes.
"So, dear," Annette began, leaning into her husband's shoulder. "What do you think about the National Security Council's proposal for the use of an additional facility, with access to flow cytometers and more incubators?"
Annette could have sworn that she heard someone across the table groan. Good. That's what they got for refusing to engage her in conversation.
"They're a bunch of bastards," William said, eyes narrowed. The fruit salad was easily forgotten, as he dropped the fork down, his thin fingers beating a rapport against the table. "Blackmail, that's all it is. Goddamn blackmail. If we don't give them the facilities then they'll... they'll..."
"Audit our finances," a voice from down the table answered.
"Yes!" William agreed, as though it was a sudden revelation. He was high as anyone had ever been, on some unholy cocktail of pharmaceutical amphetamines for unruly children and crushed caffeine pills.
"Investigate our laboratories," the lead scientist on botanical modification chimed in.
"Well," Annette said, her devil's advocate smile on full display, "I suppose we should just be grateful that they've agreed to not investigate any claims of unethical business practices, hm?"
Voices around the table began to chatter.
"I think we should find out what they're doing with our money. Their researchers probably can't tell a nucleus from their own asshole."
"Dumping it down a hole in the ground, I bet!"
"Fuckers," William muttered. He was rather profane when he was using.
"Yes," Annette said, a false moroseness to her voice. "But, what can we do?"
Satisfied with the mild degree of chaos she had caused, Annette leaned back and listened without comment, as suggestions ranging from "send in a spy," to "burn their lab down," trickled in. No one really cared what the government contractors were doing - as long as the Feds remained in the dark about less than ethical Umbrella research- but they knew that it was wise to treat Dr. William Birkin's paranoia with the utmost concern and feigned sincerity. Annette sucked the sugar off a grainy piece of unidentifiable fruit and smiled to herself. Power was fun, even in small doses.
It was a fleeting thrill though, to rile up the staff for a few minutes. She longed for an actual conversation with someone who wasn't too afraid of her to refuse to offer up anything in the way of an opinion. Until the day her daughter was old enough to debate theories of ethics, or Will sobered up and took his eyes off his cell cultures long enough for the two of them to have a decent conversation - whichever came first - Annette expected to be bored. She loved her work, of course, with the same life-eating passion that her husband did, but she wasn't content carrying on all her conversations with microscopes and lab notepads for the next fifteen years or so.
Will was the first and last person she had felt a connection with, young and jaded, increasingly aware of her inability to interact with others on the most basic, conversational level. She smothered him in words until her mouth was sore, told him every single secret she'd kept, all the stories and moments she'd been saving up over twenty years of isolation, and then when they ran out of things to talk about, they had a baby.
Annette picked up her emptied bowl and tipped it back to drink the syrup. Her eyes wandered around the room aimlessly for a moment, and then locked stares with the young girl sitting among the contractors. She had been watching Annette since she sat down, this girl. She resembled the younger Annette a little, with her long blonde hair and a lab coat that must have been two sizes too big, which made her look like a beggar of some sort. Annette felt a pang of recognition, thinking back to her first years of college and the cruel lab partners who had set her straight about cutting her hair and wearing clothes that fit right. Was this girl a sisterless, motherless wretch, like herself, or a child prodigy thrown into the subterranean depths of Umbrella before she had a chance to learn how to get by?
"Annette?"
"Hm? What?" She was brought back to reality by her husband, who gave her a sharp nudge in the side. The fruit bowl was sticking to her top lip.
"Are we done here? My cultures need to be checked."
"Mhm; I'm done. Yes."
The Birkins' section of the facility was teaming with guards, suited up with machine guns and body armor. They had been omnipresent from the day the lab opened, and the staff was so familiar with them that they blended in with the machinery and equipment, as just another part of the facility. The door to the laboratory was six inches of steel that bore the name "W. Birkin." Annette was supposedly only a laboratory technician, having abandoned her formal education upon being hired straight out of her graduate degree program. She had no need for any titles or honorifics; she could have taught her own doctoral program if she wanted to. It was more convenient to only have one Dr. Birkin running around.
Annette also was in charge staff and hirings, anything involving people which William considered a waste of his time. While he managed the lab on paper, it was well known that Annette handled the actual day to day running of things. As a result, she had access to all of the personnel files of everyone in the building: background checks, psychiatric evaluations, medical records, the works. While William was fawning over his cell cultures under a microscope, she got on her computer and logged into Umbrella's network as William. They kept their own notes on an early model desktop which took up it's own lab table, but wasn't hooked into the internet. Neither of them trusted Umbrella computer security procedures.
Once online, Annette pulled up personnel files for the Raccoon City Underground Facility, subfolder: Government Contractors. There were six names in the file, and four were male. Going alphabetically, she clicked on Carla Radames.
DOB: 11/11/1977
Yup, that was her girl. Fifteen years old. She looked even younger, skinny and pale from fluorescent lights. She was a year older than her husband had been when he had started out with Umbrella. She'd probably been kept like a lab rat for the past eight years, at least.
Hair: Blonde
Eyes: Brown
Height: 162 cm
Weight: 45 kg
Carla was the same height as Annette, but appeared smaller. She walked with a slouch, Annette figured. Trying to make herself take up less space? Annette scrolled down through the page. Her schooling record indicated she had started college level courses when she was eight, and had completed a PhD program by the age of fifteen. Her education was all federal, conducted in military facilities around the world: everywhere from Okinawa to Knoxville. Her doctorate in Biology was through the Naval Postgraduate School, despite the fact that she was not in anyway connected to the military. Annette bit down on her lip, perplexed. Onto her personal information.
Dr. Carla Radames was a ward of the state for several years. She has no identified parents. After experiencing repeated difficulties with foster home placements, an examining social worker conducted an IQ test on Radames. Her results were immeasurably high. Radames was admitted to a federal research program under the guidance of Derek Simmons, chair of the Counterterrorism Biological Research Committee through the National Security Council, where she completed her education.
Well, that was short and simple enough. Nothing like the rambling collection of every defining incident of Annette's miserable childhood that she knew was sitting on Umbrella's network, if she ever felt like cracking open a bottle of wine and wallowing in adolescent trauma. Troubled foster child with a genius IQ was pretty standard for Umbrella. The Simmons connection was interesting. He handpicked her from the dredges of the foster system, pulled strings to get her a military education, and then brought her to Umbrella with him. Annette shook the immediate vulgar thoughts she had. Clearly, Simmons had seen her potential and was using her intellect where it was needed most.
The last tab was the infamous psychiatric evaluation Umbrella subjected all of the staff in the bioweapons laboratories to. Her own was likely not very flattering, but William's username didn't have access to it. He did, however, have access to the profiles of all the other employees in the facility, which was why Annette was surprised when clicking the tab resulted in the message: FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. ACCESS DENIED. Her nose wrinkled up with frustration. Why did she not have access to profiles from her own lab?
Annette pulled back out into the index, and clicked on the name after Carla's. Adelia Rodriguez. Psychiatric Evaluation.
Dr. Rodriguez exhibits an almost paralyzing fear of failure, which...
Annette closed out of the entire window. She propped her head up against her left hand and stared into the neon blue of her computer screen.
"So, what's such a big secret about you, Dr. Radames?"
"Al is coming back home next month," William said, breaking the silence that had fallen over their lab.
"Hmm? What?"
Annette looked up from the cells she was staining under a digital microscope, and spun around to face William so fast that she knocked over a jar of fixative onto the floor.
"Shit..."
"Do you think he's going to be a problem?"
"Huh? No! No, I dropped the formaldehyde..." Annette sprung up from her seat to find the container, which had rolled off across the floor.
"He's not coming back to lab work, if that's what you're worried about."
"I'm not worried about anything," Annette insisted. She had spotted the errant jar, and had to get down on her hands and knees to pry it out from underneath the specimen refrigerator.
"He told me when he left that he would rather be dead then work in a lab again."
"And he didn't even marry you!"
"Very funny."
Annette grabbed the jar and wrenched it out from the space between the floor and the refrigerator.
"Gotcha, you little bastard!"
"What?"
"Not you, darling."
Putting the jar back down on her lab station, Annette walked over to her husband, who had been holding the entire conversation with her thus far while staring at one of her newly stained slides, counting something with a needle, from what she could see on the computer screen.
"Why is Albert coming home? I thought he had some woman over there?"
"I suppose he wasn't that attached."
"Are the child support laws in Russia really that strict?" Annette said, smirking.
"I really don't think that Al would..."
"Uh huh. Sure he wouldn't. Just fleeing the country for no reason."
"He's not fleeing, he's been reassigned."
"So, when is he coming back?"
"January. Right after the holidays die down."
"I haven't gone Christmas shopping yet."
"Do it tonight. I won't be able to make it home, if these cells keep it up like this," William said, shaking his head. Annette was disappointed, but tried to not show it. No use in upsetting him further.
"So, how are Miss Trevor's cells today?" she asked, changing the subject.
Annette thought back to the first and last time she had seen the girl that used to be Lisa Trevor; the poor wretch they kept in a cage in the basement of Arklay. She didn't really resemble a human being anymore, but a mass of tissue atop a the bony frame of an adolescent girl. It had taken ten minutes of gas to knock her out long enough for Annette and William to take a tissue sample. Five minutes in, just as Annette had stuck a syringe into the creature's carotid artery, she opened one of her massive eyes, engulfed by a great amount of fibrous tissue, and stared right into Annette's own.
"Muu-muu-ther?" it said.
William screamed, more afraid than she had ever seen him in his life, and grabbed Annette by the waist with both arms, literally throwing her out of the enclosure. She kept her grip on the syringe the whole time.
The next week, after cloning a sufficient amount of tissue from Lisa, William had called Annette over to his desk, hysterical with excitement.
"Look at this! Her tissue doesn't die - no matter what you throw at it. Cyanide, botulism, complete saturation in alcohol... they just mutate."
That was five years ago, and it felt like they'd barely progressed since. Certainly, they'd gotten a whole new lab built around the project, and William had been promoted to superstar scientist status within Umbrella, but all they had managed to really do was prove again and again that nothing could kill what they had dubbed "G-Virus," aside from complete immolation.
William looked down from the screen of the microscope and rubbed his eyes.
"Nothing we throw at it controls the mutations. I don't understand it. There's desmoplasia all over this sample; whenever you introduce trauma, the scar tissue just grows everywhere. It's like there's no organization or pattern to it."
"There's got to be a pattern. Things in nature don't occur just at random. And once you find it, then you can figure out how to stop it."
"Lisa Trevor didn't occur in nature," William said, his voice flat.
"She's not supernatural - not like she's a demon."
"Sometimes I think otherwise... that maybe she's trying to punish us for what we did to her."
"You didn't do anything to her," Annette insisted.
"If we didn't have a little girl, I wouldn't have even thought about it..." William trailed off mid sentence, looking out into space, obviously pondering something. "Oh, that's right. Honey, could you get Sherry's picture with Santa tonight? My parents, you know..."
Annette was so startled by the change in mood, she started laughing. Once she began, it was impossible to stop, and she found herself almost bent over at the waist, trying to control herself.
"What the fuck is so funny, Annie?"
"Nothing is funny. I'm just tired; I'm sorry." She didn't feel like explaining herself.
"Are you pissed about Al?"
"Why would I be upset about Albert coming home? I have nothing against him," Annette lied. She and Albert Wesker had gone at it right before he left the country to be loaned to Umbrella Russia's Information Services. Well, she had gone at it with Wesker; he had just stared at her like she was made of stone, and then proceeded to tell her every reason the G-Virus lab was going to be a resounding failure, how hopelessly stupid she and William were for getting married and having a child, and that she was going to fail at trying to be a scientist and a mother. All the while, William had stood there like he was deaf and dumb, not bothering to stand up for his wife, never mind his own self.
"I don't remember you two ever getting along very well," William said.
"And I remember him calling you an addict who'd ran out of ideas and was grasping at straws to remain relevant in this company. You're still friends with him."
"Everything is going to be fine, Annie, I promise..."
"I know it's going to be fine," Annette cut him off. "I'm not worried. Really. I'm not."
The Birkin residence was a modest "starter home" sort of residence, not because they couldn't afford anything better, but because they didn't have the time to buy a new house. The kitchen tile was an offensively ugly shade of green that they had sworn they would replace when they moved in six years ago; the wallpaper was peeling in places; the sink in the first floor bathroom could only be turned on through a mixture of brute strength and black magic, but the lawn was trimmed and the bricks weren't crumbling, so the Birkins didn't have any need to fix things up just yet. They were barely ever home anyway. Sherry's nanny made the most use of the house compared to it's actual occupants.
Annette got home a few minutes after five to relieve the nanny. She was the eighth one they'd hired in the six years since Sherry was born, and Annette was determined to not lose another one, mostly because the hiring process was so tedious. She'd found this one through Umbrella; the step-sister of a laboratory technician who understood that being punctual was not always possible when you worked for Umbrella.
"Hi," Annette said, slightly out of breath from running to the front door. "Sarah, hi... you're free to go home then."
"Heya Dr. B," Sarah said, despite having been corrected numerous times. "Sherry's asleep. She was a doll, like always. I'll see you tomorrow!"
Sarah was exhaustively perky, and talking to her made Annette want to go lay down. She all but skipped out the door, letting it slam behind her. Annette winced and rubbed her temples. Her head was pounding. She half considered dipping into her husband's pharmacy in the bathroom closet - some percocet would clear that tension headache right up, and then some. But, without William home, someone had to keep a sober eye on their daughter.
With that in mind, Annette shuffled up the stairs to her daughter's room. The walls were a genderless pastel yellow, painted before Sherry was born. William was wary of gender predictions; he had supposedly been dressed in pink clothes until he was six months old because of an overworked ultrasound technician.
Sherry's toys were sprawled out over the floor, some fashion dolls, an incomplete puzzle, coloring books and crayons in a pile, and an overflowing bin of legos. Annette sighed. Sarah hadn't picked up after Sherry, again. She threw her lab coat off on top of Sherry's dresser, and sat down in front of the lego box. Six year old Sherry was taking a nap, curled up with her knees pulled up toward her chin. She looked more like her father than Annette, with her Birkin nose and subtle freckles.
Annette grabbed stray crayons off the floor and threw them into the toy bin with a clatter. Sherry didn't wake up. She got that from her father too.
"You still asleep, Sherry Berry?"
She was answered by soft sleepy breathing. Another block in the bin.
"Daddy and I heard back from the child psychiatrist, Dr. Bricker. You don't like Dr. Bricker, do you?"
Annette scooched across the floor using her hands and scooped up the puzzle pieces, along with the puzzle itself. She studied the box for a minute, and saw a parade of cartoon bears, which was half complete on the board. Annette started filling in the corner pieces.
"Dr. Bricker says that your cognitive development is 'normal' for your age. What do you think?"
Four corners filled in, Annette found the remaining edge pieces and began placing them on the board. Sherry was still asleep.
"Daddy thinks he's a fucking quack, yes he doesss, yes he does. Thinks he doesn't know Piaget from pizza."
With the puzzle complete and in the box, Annette pushed herself back standing with a moderate amount of effort.
"Daddy thinks he should have his license to practice revoked."
Sherry, of course, didn't respond. Annette bent over and picked up a blonde Barbie doll wearing a blue sparkly bikini.
"Skank," Annette mumbled. She threw it across the room, aiming for the toy bin. It slammed into the wall, and the cheap plastic head popped off.
"Oh, shit."
"Mommy!?"
Annette spun around to see her tiny daughter sitting straight up in bed.
"Hi sweetie!" Annette exclaimed, forcing herself to sound energetic.
Sherry crawled out of bed and ran over to Annette, wrapping herself around one of her mother's legs.
"Is Daddy home too?"
Annette involuntarily bit down on her lower lip, hard enough that she almost drew blood.
"No, daddy can't come home tonight. He has a project to do."
Sherry stared up at her mother, her little face crinkled like she was about to burst into tears.
"Where's Daddy going to sleep then?"
"He's got a bed at work, honey."
"What about breakfast?" Sherry asked, incredulous, as if this was the first time William hadn't come home from work.
"They have breakfast at work too."
"Not as good as your breakfast," Sherry insisted.
Annette almost laughed. Breakfast at the Birkin house was usually neon colored cartoon branded yogurt and sugary cereal for Sherry, some kind of cardboard dry granola bar for Annette, and coffee for William.
"Well, Daddy will just have to survive then, won't he?"
Sherry frowned.
"Stop making a sour face," Annette scolded. "We need to get Christmas presents tonight. You could see Santa? Do you like Santa?"
"Santa isn't even real," Sherry moaned, her little head buried in her hands. Annette felt her head begin to throb again.
"Who told you that?" Annette asked, trying to sound shocked.
"Daddy!"
Fuck. There was no going back from that. Annette silently cursed her husband for a number of sins, before shaking her head and getting back to reality.
"Well, daddy's parents still think Santa is real, and they want to see your picture with him..."
"What about your parents?"
"My parents don't get pictures."
"I don't want to see Santa," Sherry asserted. "Santa is a... lie to palcake the uneducated..."
"Placate," Annette corrected. She could hear William saying it. "Why don't you want to..."
Sherry took the opportunity to begin whimpering pitifully.
"Why isn't daddy home?!"
Annette felt her legs give out from under her, and she was suddenly sitting on the floor.
"We're not going to see Santa tonight," Annette mumbled. "Go watch TV."
Sherry, her face still red with tears, stared curiously at her mother.
"Go away, Sherry!" Annette snapped. "Go away. Please!"
Sherry wiped her face off and ran out of the room and down the stairs. Once she heard her daughter make it down the last step, Annette leaned back and let herself fall down onto the floor completely, staring up at the ceiling. When she closed her eyes, she saw a young face staring back at her. Messy blonde hair, dark eyes, thin cheekbones...
"Carla Radames," Annette said into the empty space. "We should talk."
She pulled herself off the floor of her daughter's room and stared off into the hallway of her sad little house, thought about the refrigerator full of frozen food and shitty alcohol, her bedroom with fifteen lab coats in the closet and an empty space on the mattress where her husband should have slept, the medicine cabinet full of illicit prescription amphetamines and birth control for the sex she wasn't having.
"Maybe tomorrow," she added, to no one in particular. "We can talk tomorrow."