Legal disclaimers: see first part.

Disclaimers: As I stated in the first part of this story, the character of Raven Ferris/ "Midnight" is a character some people who visit the Original Character Forum relating to RE will recognise. I know that the first part of the story had nothing to do with RE, but the character has a very complicated back-story that is best explained in parts. The fact that she knows Edward Carnaby from "Alone In The Dark" is only a small part of that. Rest assured, however, this part will focus on RE-among other things...

Dark Life

Unknown location, 1988

...Voices... She could hear voices, but she couldn't see. Why was that? Was she blind? Asleep? No...

...She could feel cold steel against her bare back, legs, arms and backside. Her head seemed...cushioned, by her hair? Yes, that was right, it hadn't been cut in such a long time it had reached her waist in a long, sweaty tendril all tied up in rough knots and tangles...

...She could feel tingles in the extremities of her body, fingers, toes, as though she'd been lying down in one position for a long time and just woken up, as though her blood hadn't been flowing around her body properly. Why weren't her eyes open? Why did her muscles feel like rotten rope? She still didn't know, couldn't seem to tell anything in particular either...

Her eyes suddenly snapped open as her heart abruptly began to accelerate, as though throwing off some kind of lethargy, pins and needles flaring throughout her body before raw, animal strength surged through her muscles. She heard an echoing growl rumble through wherever she was-and a moment later realised that it was coming from her. That felt good-but she didn't know why?

She felt a strange, sharp pain in her upper left arm, as though something was stuck in her flesh. She felt strong, tight steel and leather bonds running up and down her body left to right, pinning her at ankles, knees, waist, wrists, elbows, shoulders and forehead. Inconveniences, irritations, she needed-no, wanted to move. So she would!

Even as she took in the sound of running feet and desperate, shouted words she couldn't yet understand her long body flexed with all of the considerable strength at her disposal, muscles contorting with effort. The bonds securing her arms simply snapped and fell away, her shoulders twisted and with a savage wrench of physical power she almost sat up, the bond on her head taking some hair and skin off but not slowing her down. The bond across her lower chest contorted weirdly, but didn't give way altogether-so she reached down and snapped it in two. Her knees had snapped free, so had her left foot, but she was still caught.

Unthinking instinct made her reach up and rip free the sharp thing in her arm-a Drip, some part of her mind informed her. All of a sudden, as she did so, her vision cleared to needle point-and more. She barely even stopped to take in what she saw, though, as she ripped her still-trapped leg loose and shredded the remaining bonds.

Small room, lots of medical equipment, monitors of all shapes, sizes and descriptions-all attached to her skin by flat steel disks. Room maybe twenty feet long by thirty wide, no windows, only one door, big, solid and steel-correction, one window, an Observation Port directly behind her position in the exact centre of the room. She was sitting up on a steel stretcher, illuminated by lights of the kind which were so bright they left no shadows, highlighting the totally pale white paint colouring everything.

Half a dozen people in the room with her, all of them in full surgical scrubs, dark green, including masks and hair nets-now trying to run for the door in what was clearly outright panic. Her brain finally caught up with what they were shouting, or at least one big one who seemed older than the others was.

"-SEDATION IS NO LONGER EFFECTIVE! CALL SECURITY AND DECLARE A CODE SIX CRASH! AUTHORISED CODE JERICHO ONE!" bellowed the old man, even as he reached the door and rapidly tapped in a Code on the keypad by the door. They couldn't just leave her like this-!? What was she thinking-?!

All of a sudden her conscious mind seemed to get shoved to one side and something very odd happened to her eyes. What almost seemed like a mist developed, before resolving itself into what she could dimly recognise were the kind of heat signatures animals who couldn't see the way humans could used to hunt and track their prey. Everyone in the room, including her, abruptly lost all humanity even as she felt her teeth slice her lips. These weren't "people", they were prey.

In one smooth motion she leapt on top of the stretcher and sprang onto the back of the closest figure, her fangs tearing into the back of its neck. An awful howl of mortal pain echoed before it fell, its head half-severed from behind, even as she ripped free and went for the next.

She used her claws to gut this time, shredding the belly of her prey, long, soft tangles of flesh coming completely clear of the things inside stuck to her claws even as it collapsed without a sound of pain. She had to pause to bite the tangles free because her claws were hopelessly entangled, which gave the prey a second to run on.

Even as a hole opened in the wall in front of her, she tore loose at last and went for the next. She caught its leg as it tried to run and wrenched backwards, the limb snapping in several places and suddenly jetting blood into the air-all over her, which made her lick her lips. The sound this one made defied description as it fell, the tattered remains of its leg still in the room she was in. She considered biting into it and ripping loose some meat-for the moment before the big old man came back through the door and collided with her in mid-air like a flying Elephant.

He was considerably bigger and heavier than she was so she was catapulted from her feet even as she was thrown backwards completely out of her own physical control. Agile as she was, the weight on top of her was too much for her to overcome-and she felt her bones creak as he landed atop her. He grabbed her head with both hands and slammed it into the floor, hard, then again-and again. The sheer force of the blows made her entire head ring, his words forcing their way past whatever had suppressed her human consciousness somehow. She could understand him again.

"RAVEN! Remember who you are, soldier! You are not a wild animal, a monster or simply some mad killing machine! You are JERICHO! REMEMBER, damn you, Raven! I KNOW YOU'RE IN THERE!!!" roared the old man in her face. It almost worked-almost.

Her claws suddenly raked his face with such force they scraped bone and just missed his eyes, as a sudden surge of strength from somewhere let her wrench loose of his restraining grip. He roared in pain-and head butted her so hard a sudden flash of white told her he'd almost knocked her out. She used her arms and body for leverage, wrapped her legs around him and rolled them both with all the strength she could strain to gather in-it worked, he swore and unsuccessfully fought to stop her even as they both rolled over to leave her atop him.

Her claws cut deep into his upper chest as she tore away his upper clothing, then she punched downwards once, twice, three times, four-and she was in, as his increasingly desperate strikes at her face and throat fell away to nothing. Her claws tore through skin, muscle and flesh, worked around shattered ribs-and tore out the old mans still-beating heart even as he watched, before she bit deeply into it...

For some reason, her eyesight briefly returned to human norm with this act-and she saw something hanging around the dying old mans throat like a medallion. An eight-sided symbol shaped like an Umbrella, the parts alternately coloured bloody red and white, hanging next to a pure silver cross with what was clearly a representation of a Crucified Christ on it. As a sudden, massive and paralysing electrical shock hit her in the chest, dead centre, ripping reality away from her again for a long time, some part of her understood what that had to mean...

Racoon City, 1998

She slowly became aware of herself again as though from a great distance, feeling, inside and out, as though she was not quite connected to her own body. She could glimpse a dark, cloudy sky-darkened by the many fires burning over the awkward rooftops of Racoon City-the slightest hint of silver moonlight trying to cut through them to reach down to the Hell beneath.

She could almost "roll" her perspective and look down onto streets thickly overrun with the staggering remains of the dead-or Undead, depending on which culture one came from, which religion one believed in. She just called them Zombies, herself, because that was what they were. Walking corpses, the dead, with evident fatal wounds on display on and in every body. Some of them were even missing body parts, arms, legs, other bits and pieces, part of a head-one was physically gone below the waist but dragged itself along with its hands and arms alone, once-vital internal organs trailing along behind it like so much meat, the base of its spine evident amidst ruined flesh and muscle.

Some instinct she couldn't identify told her that the three-storey building she was atop, a former small hotel long since made part of the Necropolis Racoon had become, was infested with the Undead. A strange scent suddenly came to her, the sickly-sweet stench of gone-off rotting meat and the awful tang of freshly spilled blood... That fact suddenly reminded her that she was, herself, still alive-but why had this happened? How? What had happened to her, another blackout-?! No, that wasn't right...

As if in answer, her view of what was occurring rolled again and she found herself staring at a particular window in the ten-storey office building right next door to the one she was on. The window was shattered and, even at a distance, she could see it had shattered outwards as though-

That had been her, she'd done that. It was coming back to her now. Inside the room, even from her limited perspective, she could see signs of a fight. There was blood on the walls and around the shattered window, the furniture in the room was upended and had clearly been thrown around with considerable force-scattered recollections of a vicious fight flickered past her minds eye.

She'd been trying to get to her own apartment in the building when she'd had to break into another to escape attacking Zombies she could no longer dodge, due to sheer weight of numbers. She'd barricaded the door but the Zombies had simply piled against it until it had collapsed in-almost on top of her. She'd fought so hard she'd destroyed the empty apartment-but she'd known it wouldn't be enough, so she'd looked for an exit. She glimpsed herself spotting the far below roof...

Her breath almost caught. That sort of jump was crazy, even for her. It had to be almost forty feet at close to a ninety-degree angle, practically a vertical drop...

Suddenly she was looking down at her own inert body on the rooftop, sprawled unconscious at best on a gravel-covered flat area of the otherwise sloping roof. Her aim had been flawless, of course, but had she survived it intact? Even she didn't know, yet. She knew how inhumanly resilient her physical body was, but she had very real limits despite that...

She paused to study herself. Her long, dark hair was spread out around her head and shoulders, scattered around the rooftop beside her head. There were traces of blood in it-but none of it was hers, she could tell. Her eyes were closed but she was breathing slowly and easily, her chest rising and falling with the working of her lungs. Her heart was beating slowly and steadily, she didn't have any significant head trauma beyond evident cuts and bruises that she could see.

The rest of her long, lean body was intact, no broken bones or evident serious injuries. Her pale cream office shirt and black dress were torn and bloodied, her jet-black running shoes covered in nine different kinds of muck-but that was no surprise, given that she'd literally been stuck in them since the Zombies had breached the last line of defence at Umbrella's Racoon headquarters. That had been when the survivors clustered on the rooftop helipad waiting for evacuation had been left to fend for themselves all of a sudden. The nightmare ride through the guts of atrocity the escape from that had been wasn't something she wanted to remember now, if ever. Even she couldn't cope with anything and everything, especially not that kind of "anything", no matter what some people thought of her. She wasn't a Sociopath, she was...well, complicated was one way of putting it.

It occurred to her that, with her body clearly unconscious and possibly comatose, she shouldn't have been able to see or sense anything, but for some reason this didn't even give her pause. Why, she didn't know. She felt the urge to let loose with a bitter, twisted attempt at a laugh, but didn't. Hell, with her memory problems, for all she knew she'd been a Psychic in earlier life-and she was only twenty-six years old.

Almost her entire past was more of a mystery to her than anyone else. She had huge gaps of missing time that lasted for hours, days, weeks, months-even years, she'd discovered after Umbrella Psychologists had put her in a deep trance state and asked her questions about herself and her personal past that should have passed by any barriers or blocks her mind had erected, consciously or unconsciously. That should have bypassed even "blocks" put in by others, somehow.

An answer would have been a start, she'd discovered later. She'd answered the same way she always did, with fragmentary childhood and teenage memories of her Asylum years, treatments by Doctors whose names and faces she could never see or recall properly. She remembered nothing at all about her family, where she'd been held specifically, what the cause of being held in an Asylum as a child had been in the first. She'd talked about strange things she sometimes half seemed to dream, half seemed to remember, the feel of the wind on her face, wide open grassy plains she had no actual memory of seeing she could run across forever...

One Psychologist had privately confided in her that he thought there might be an extraordinary reason for her apparent partial Amnesia. Which was even more bizarre when her extraordinary resourcefulness, skills and capability to seemingly learn any skill, master in days any task she was set, no matter how insane or impossible, were all taken into account. His theory had, in fact, been so extraordinary that she'd never discussed it with anyone, including him. "Why" was easy-she thought he was right.

His suggestion was that she had been exposed to a very specifically, very specially designed training and skill development program, when she was a child first and again as necessary as she grew up, that had been designed to make her physically and psychologically capable of adapting to anything, anywhere, anyone. The ultimate in "Survivor" training, in a way that suggested she had been bred and raised to survive the Apocalypse if the worst came to the worst.

To prevent her from ever realising the extent of whatever had been done to her mind and body, including the fact that her combat abilities and skills were off of any human chart by at least 100%, she'd been selectively mind wiped and brainwashed, extensively. The aim had been to leave her sane, conscious and capable, but otherwise incapable and unaware of even understanding whatever it truly was she was designed to do. Her body remembered everything in the form of muscle memory, her mind understood it subconsciously, but she had no access to whoever, whatever she truly was. In everyway that mattered, she was a weapon-and there was no way of telling whether or not she had an "on/off" switch in her head somewhere.

Worst of all was how they'd wiped her memory, his best guess at least. Electroshock charge directly into the brain, specifically targeting memory centres containing the relevant memories by means unknown. The memories were still there, those areas were simply so damaged that she couldn't access them-nor could any form of medical science yet developed that even Umbrella itself had access to.

One thing she did recall was how she'd persuaded the man to keep her secret and what he'd suspected to himself. When they'd finally been finished with one another, a full twenty-four hours later, he'd had to call in sick for a week because he'd been unable to walk on legs left so rubbery after what they'd done together that he'd halfway believed the bones had dissolved in the heat of passion. She'd simply worn a smirk which had threatened to split her face in half, it had been worth it-cold fish, was she...?

She abruptly became aware that there was someone else on the roof with her, pointing a gun at the roof door just ten feet away from them, which was clearly not far from giving way under repeated heavy assaults. Blue tube top, short grey dress, knee-length black boots designed as much for kicking as running. Shoulder-length rich brown hair, eyes of the same colour, smooth, tanned skin, in her early twenties?

Jill Valentine.

Even as she remembered the name and the woman, she remembered her own at last, the one thing she could truly call her own-she hoped, at least. Raven Ferris, that was who she was.

All of a sudden she was looking up into cloudy sky. It took her a moment too long to realise that she was back in her body and had just opened her eyes...

Y

Jill Valentine knew she was dead, but she also knew that she was going to Hell with at least fifteen more Zombies along to keep her company on the ride. That was, assuming that she could drop a Zombie with every shot, for good, once they came crashing through the door and spilling onto the rooftop. Expert markswoman she might be, Cat's unofficial tutoring had seen to that over more years than she wanted to casually think about, but she was at best going to get one whole clip fired off before she was overrun and eaten alive. Unless she was smart enough to save one bullet for herself...

She'd seen the atrocities and monsters walking the halls of the Spencer Mansion, watched her friends literally be eaten alive and come back to kill her with empty eyes and silent hearts with their own blood still dripping from any number of fatal injuries, dead flesh rotting even as they moved. She'd seen every bit of the madness the Umbrella Corporation was capable of unleashing as Mutant versions of plants, animals and even people moved around the mansion and did...things...a sane humans eyes should never see. She'd seen what had become of George Trevor's daughter after thirty years of experimentation and needed no feat of the imagination to imagine what had to have happened to his Wife.

She'd read through physical proof that the Umbrella Corporation had not only known about all of these things long beforehand, but had encouraged them-and even gone so far as to expose their own research team at the Mansion to see what happened in an uncontrolled release of the Virus. She'd read about a secret Umbrella lab called "The Hive" where the Outbreak had actually originated-only to loose all of the proof she'd been able to gather in the last panicked, savage battle for survival as she and the surviving S.T.A.R.S. had gone toe-to-toe with the ultimate monstrosity created by Umbrellas work: the Tyrant. An eight foot tall killing machine with its heart on the outside, a left hand replaced by massive claws that could cut through steel, all powered by enough muscle to throw small cars at them if it wanted to. Or a medium-sized car, Jill suspected. She wasn't sure she'd have rated a tank against the Tyrant in a close fight.

Then, after they'd survived that and told the truth? Ridicule, humiliation, personal and professional disgrace-and, to all intents and purposes, she'd been fired by S.T.A.R.S. on the grounds of extreme incompetence and serious questions about her mental health. Of all of it, that last had hurt the most. They'd known that Umbrella would throw everything at them after they came clean and gone on with their eyes open. But S.T.A.R.S…if there was one place, one person she'd always no-questions-asked given her total loyalty to, bar her father, it was the organisation she'd planned to devote the rest of her life too.

Only now that it had become clear they didn't care at all if someone had to be the sacrificial lamb to clean up a "mess"...? She was glad she'd submitted her Resignation before the official Dismissal notice had reached her through the post. She'd been so utterly disgusted by the S.T.A.R.S. organisations clear participation in the on-going Cover-Up she'd lost all faith in them despite Barry's objections, long before he'd realised why. She'd Quit without his even knowing about it until afterwards.

Barry had pointed out that Umbrella more than likely had ways to apply significant political pressure to the S.T.A.R.S. organisation if they wanted to. On top of which they all knew now that there had to be Umbrella Sleeper Agents feeding misinformation to the whole from the inside, more than likely meaning that the honest Agents-almost certainly the vast majority-simply didn't know what was really going on. He'd made some good points, but it had all been too late. She was done with this side of the law, she was going to do what she had to do to fight the good fight from the outside from now on.

That was what had led her to establish the roughly fortified school as a Safe House early on, when the Outbreaks had begun slipping out of Police control and media outlets all over the city had gotten so panicked they'd actually printed pictures of "live" Zombies alongside headlines such as "The Dead Walk!!!!" Of course, the moment the Outbreak had reached the city it had been too late to stop it. Even Evacuation would only have risked spreading the Virus, so she'd stayed behind with the civilians to try and help when Umbrella had built a wall to prevent the entire population from even trying to escape.

A hundred thousand people were going to die and worse, Umbrella Corp. knew it and weren't going to do anything about it except study the situation to gain all of the data they could of use. If she'd been any more angry about all of it she'd have simply suffered a Psychotic Break as the heat of her fury grew almost beyond her minds ability to even comprehend, let alone control. But that was what had left her helpless and waiting for death atop the building as Zombies smashed their way through the only realistic escape route, her increasingly desperate search for survivors having left her nowhere to run from the heaving hordes blocking the street below in both directions even as the infested building vomited up its walking disease to slaughter her.

Well, no question, she'd go down fighting. It was just a shame she'd only have a Corpse for company, to witness her last stand. She'd seen the other woman's final fall and awfully heavy landing, she knew with certainty that nobody could survive such a long fall directly onto concrete, let alone get up and do anything even if by some miracle they did survive.

That was why her heart stopped, for a long, long second, when the "dead" woman's eyes opened. A moment later, she sat up and shook her head, as though clearing out the cobwebs...

Y

Raven sat up more smoothly than she would have imagined possible after the beating she'd already taken, protesting strained muscles and creaking joints still responding instantly to her minds command. She rose to her feet quickly, not even staggering once-and it occurred to her that she should have been in far more pain than she was, for all of her bodies resilience, the kind of pain that left one screaming on the floor as screams of pain echoed out across the city. She didn't even seem particularly uncomfortable and, for the life of her, she couldn't understand why.

It was almost as though there was a break in her Nervous System between her pain receptors and her brain. In fact, it was almost as though this was the way she responded to great pain, by sealing it so far away from her consciousness that it had no impact in reality on her ability to function, at all. But she'd picked up plenty about the human body and how it worked from Umbrella Scientists since she'd begun working for Umbrella in '96, plenty more about the mind as well. Even a Psychotics mind didn't function like that, deranged with rage and the demented need to commit physical violence on a level which would literally kill them if not stopped or even worse. The mind had to be "trained" to ignore or override signals of that nature-and, at her best guess, hers had received much more than a "basic" form of that. Not that she wasn't injured, of course...

Her mind finally caught up with what was going on even as she registered the look Jill Valentine was shooting at her-half shocked, half appalled-even as the door to the roof finally snapped open as the lock gave and three Zombies fell out on top of each other. Two more tried to force their way out of the small doorway and over their fallen fellow creatures even as the first three hit the floor-Jill Valentines pistol spoke once and the left hand Zombie was catapulted backwards with a neat hole between the eyes. She aimed at the second standing Zombie-only Raven beat her there.

Charging Zombies as though she did it every day was not something which struck Raven Ferris as a good idea, but some instinct told her it was the right thing to do. She got to within arms reach of the standing Zombie and, before it could even snap at her, grabbed it around the throat with both hands, lifted it off of the floor and slammed its skull into the top of the doorframe with such force the bone splintered and was driven deep into the brain.

Knowing it was dead even before she threw it away over her shoulder like a rag doll, she drove her right foot down like a hammer from Hell and snapped a second Zombies spine with such force that her boot penetrated its chest cavity entirely and slammed into the ground beneath. Ripping her foot loose trailing shreds of flesh and smeared in thick, dried dark blood, she finished the job with the same foot by kicking the Zombie in the back of the head as hard as she could. The top half of its head almost came completely free of the lower half even as the contents of the shattered skull exploded out of the Zombies eyes, nose and mouth.

Reaching down, she picked up the third Zombie and threw it at Jill before grabbing the fourth and simply hurling it down the stairwell with an awful clatter of bending and buckling steel, snapping bones and tearing flesh. A single shot behind her told her that Jill had done her job-and why did she find it so natural to do all of these things? How did she just know how to take down Zombies, for pities sake?

She turned around to face Jill, sure that they were clear at least for the moment-and, not at all to her surprise, found herself staring down the barrel of Jill's pistol. If she'd just seen someone kill three Zombies with their bare hands in thirty seconds she'd have been a bit more than just nervous, too.

"You and I need to talk, woman" said Jill, slowly and carefully pronouncing each word as though she was afraid she'd be misunderstood. Well, caution was a given what had just happened?

"Alright, I'll start. My name is Raven Ferris and-what-?!" Raven began, even as Jill's eyes shot wide open in shock. She span-and came face to face with an almost dog-shaped skinless blood red creature, with huge teeth and claws clearly designed to rend and tear. Worst of all, it had a long tongue which could punch right through concrete and tear anything softer to pieces.

Licker.

It had to have crawled up the outside of the building, drawn by the gunfire to look for fresh meat in the increasing dusk. It had caught them both cold because she'd been concentrating on the only human being she'd seen in over a week.

Even as it leapt at her, claws flashing in the dimming sunlight, its long tongue licked out-and nearly tore her throat open as she failed to duck in time. The impact span her around, which let one of its claws bite deep into her side. She knew she was infected even before she began to collapse.

She had to wonder if she really was going to die, here, now, with so many questions left unanswered, with so much left undone. She couldn't die like this...

Could she?

The End?

/All Reviews and/or comments welcomed/.

IS she or ISN'T she? All I'll say is this is the End of this story...