Chapter 10 ~ Subject: Ada Wong

Pretty wooden ceiling is Kash's first sight when she opens her eyes. The long bench she is lying on creaks when she gets up, and creaks some more with each of her small movements. At the edge, close to where her head was, Brenda is leaning to the edge with her left arm to pillow her sleeping head. Her wounded right arm seems to have been bandaged anew, although there still seems to be large patch of blood staining it as if it never really stopped. On the other side of the wall, Dean is laying on the floor, also sleeping with his hands still grabbing his rifle. Kash looks to the small clock on the desk close to her. It is now 9:00 AM, or 31 hours since her life began to take a sudden turn into Hell. The bulge she can still see on her chest, the strangely vacant feeling in the crotch and the yellowish white skin, all prove that this Hell is not indeed a nightmare. It is real, and besides being 'Ada Wong' and learning more about the outbreak along with Wong's role, she still has no ideas, clues or leads as to what links herself with Wong or why.

Kash pulls the gun out of her holster to turn on the safety, which she could not when she collapsed in the chief's room. Her hands still feel weak however, and she lost grip of it, causing it to fall onto the floor. The sound of it wakes up Brenda and Dean.

"Morning, Kash..." Brenda tries to sit straight. She rubs her fingers into her barely opening eyes.

"Morning, Brenda." She looks into Brenda's eyes for a while, before pulling up her shirt's sleeves up and picks the fallen gun off the floor. "You didn't nurse me all night, did you?"

"No..." Brenda's eyes turns grief despite her smiling lips. "As usual, I can't do anything but cry and watch. Dean carried you up here."

"That I did." Dean stretches his hands up with his back arched. "You're damn heavy, you know that?"

"It's only small shit compared to what I did for you."

"Yeah yeah..."

According to Dean, Kash collapsed after unlocking the door, which Dean went through. When he carried her up and back to the secretary's room, he found Brenda waiting for them there. After Brenda insisted, Dean told her the entire story.

"You know, if you keep fainting like that, one of these days you might get us all killed." Dean turns to sit facing Kash. He takes out his Glock from the holster. Pulling the slide, he looks into the chamber to check for a loaded cartridge.

"To be clear, I used to be a healthy African-American teenage boy who goes to gym every Sunday and jog 6 miles twice a week." Kash looks to her side, disgusted with Dean's attitude after she risked her life to get information for him. "God knows what this body swapping shit is doing to me."

"'Pimpin' yourself up eh? What, your self-esteem is so terrible that you have to make a point by looking buff? Guess your dick was so small, that God decided to correct it and turn you straight into a woman?"

Dean's words and laughing should normally piss Kash off, but she can sense that Dean still is not buying her story completely. She glared sharply towards Dean, though she keeps herself silent.

"I'm really angry that you didn't tell me about all this, but I guess this has gotten really out of hand." Brenda interrupts; she sounds powerless, resolved in her words. Kash could not look at her face for some reason. The only thing that kept them together before is the simple need to survive the initial zombie onslaught, and even she thinks that their relationship should stop there.

"Your arm... how is it?"

"Mom rubbed loads of antiseptic and made me ate 11 antibiotic pills she stole somewhere in the last 8 hours. It still isn't getting any better, but at least it slows it down, I think..." Brenda stands up and walks towards the door outside. "My parents aren't taking this very well though. They think I'll get better, but I know it won't. I just know..."

Kash cannot find the comforting words to say either. The glimmer of hope she had for Brenda's recovery and for the news to be fake, she can feel is fading inside her heart. She moves her eyes towards Dean. "Do you have to know them all right now?"

"No." Kash is going to ask what she just risked her life for, but Dean continues. "After you went in, I noticed a bulge just above the side padding on the lower parts of the walls. Apparently, someone's been tapping the chief."

"Any idea who might?"

"If we're talking intent, almost everyone in here has it. When talking about motivation though, I think only Chris Redfield or Jill Valentine would."

Kash recognizes the two names. They were supposed to be the two survivors of the so called Arklay Mansion incident a few weeks before the start of the outbreak. The town papers suppressed their exact claims, but many people know what they were trying to tell: Man-made zombies being created for the purpose of biological warfare. It sounded so absurd back then, and most people only laughed it off before going back to their lives as usual.

"In any case, I improvised the cables and rigged them to my walkie talkie. I heard everything clear as day. Such a waste that I can't find a tape recorder though."

"Then you've got your share of information. Good for you." Kash lowers her head. Her teeth is locked in frustration. "And here I am still wonderin' what the hell do I have to do with this whole shit. What did that Ada Wong do to me? Why me...?"

"If I have to be frank, I honestly believe she picked the worst person to frame." Dean reaches for some papers and files from the desk and browses through them as he explains. "My friend couldn't dig enough into her personal data because she didn't have enough evidence to grant her a 'suspect' label and a search warrant. He can tell though that this is one high-maintenance woman who takes care of her words and manners."

"High-maintenance? I'mma stab my cock deep into her ass and give her a real maintenance. Bitch is REALLY pissing me off."

"You ain't got none now, nigga." Dean mocks Kash in her own accent. "...Well, my contact in the U.S. STRATCOM did tell me once that spies make real good actors, but heh, you sound every bit as 'gangsta' as every immature 16-year-old wannabe rappers."

"You tryin' to say that you believe in me? Because the way you put it is pissing me off, dirty-ass punk-ass cop." Brenda slaps her arm with a concerned look in her eyes, as if trying to tell her to watch her words. She ignores it.

"Sigh... the more you talk like that, the less intimidating you sound."

"Wanna take it outside? Fuckin' good-for-nothin' cop."

"Well, if you're going to push it, I WILL charge you for assault on a police officer. Try to behave and respect your elders a bit more. It'll make it easier for you to survive, you know?"

Both Kash and Dean are again locked in an angry stare and counter-stare. Brenda gets frustrated at the both of them.

"YOU ARE BOTH ARGUING LIKE CHILDREN!" Kash and Dean looks at Brenda, her face flushing red. "I want to know more about this Ada Wong person. She killed my boyfriend and I have some grudge I like to settle with her as well."

"...Alright, if you gotta dig that deep..."

Kash has an urge to stop Brenda from getting involved anymore than necessary, but she cannot open her mouth to tell the girl.

"She's supposed to be here on a business trip on behalf of Sanderson Consultancies Incorporated based in Washington, as an auditor employed to assess Raccoon University's management efficiency. In the initial interview by my friend relating to the murder of professor Chad Orwell, she claimed that it was Orwell who repeatedly approached her during the week before the audit to coerce her into granting him loose evaluations so they can win the ISO certification. However, Orwell's collegues from other departments have known about Orwell's dangerous and secretive research and said that Orwell was complaining to them about Wong insisting to audit their off-limits lab despite it not being within the original standard operating procedure the management handed them with.

On the night when he was hacked to death, Wong said she was working overtime in her room. CCTV recordings at the hotel she stayed in proved her alibi. Needless to say, she was removed from the list of suspects and the court wouldn't grant a search warrant for her.

As for the murder of Orwell's research partner Martin Oakley, she was jogging on the morning of the shooting. Several public eyewitnesses confirmed seeing her going through the walking path at the Warren's Garden at the time of the shooting. Despite the location being very close to where our ballistics specialists guessed the sniper would be, no murder weapon could be found at either the building where the sniper could have been, or Wong's hotel room."

Kash gets closer to Dean to peek into the files, although Dean tries his best to conceal it. "Could Wong be acting alone here, or is the whole firm involved as well?"

"My friend had some ideas, so he tried to break into their office in Manhattan. He got busted before he could get any information and was barred from approaching the firm again. Whether or not the whole firm is involved can only be left to our imagination."

"...Wong's involvement in the whole thing is no imagination. She might have not been able to get any useful information from Gene's dad, so she decided to take him out and search his home herself."

"Gene's dad...?" Dean looks at Brenda, who is also approaching him to steal a glance at the files.

"Martin Oakley was my boyfriend's father. Just a few hours before zombies hordes started attacking our precinct, I was passing by on my way to school when I saw Ka..." Brenda looks at Kash for a moment before she corrects her statement. "I mean, Wong... bolted out of the Gene's house with a gun in her hand screaming like a lunatic. I had a bad feeling, so I rushed into the house to check on him. That's when I saw Gene's bo..."

Brenda breaks down and cries. Kash can see she tries to hold it in by closing her mouth with both her hands, yet the tears kept flowing anyway. "I'm sorry, I... need to calm myself down." She leaves Kash and Dean in a hurry and gets out of the room.

"She... supposedly saw Gene with gunshot wounds. That's what she told me when I first met her, and how she thinks I did it." Kash resumes Brenda's story, despite Dean's sharp glare at her.

Dean takes a deep breath and closes the files. He sits there remaining still for a moment. "To Wong's credit, Brenda didn't see her pulling the trigger."

"What about silencers?"

"There is no such thing as silencers." Dean takes out a cylinderical object from his pocket and mounts them at the end of his Glock's barrel. After drilling it in secure and tight, he fires his gun towards the ceiling once. The noise was not as loud as standard guns, but it was still loud enough to be heard at least 50 feet away. "Hear that? These are called SUPRESSORS. They only lower the noise from a bomb to firecracker, not a leaking tire like you see in the movies."

"...I get it, jesus..." Kash's irritation and frustration with the whole affair are growing. All the wealth of information still has nothing to link her, or anyone in her family, with Wong. Her fists are clenched tight, and she walks away from Dean, trying to contain those feelings. "Still nothing to link me with the whole thing. Why the fuck am I doing this in the first place?"

"The plot sure is thickening, at least." Dean reaches for a black clear folder underneath the pile of documents he left on the table, and opens it. "Gerard Oakley was twice issued a ticket for carrying excess weight on the truck he drove for Carrion Transport and Mailing Services."

"...Wait, my dad's a bus driver."

"Not 9 years ago. In case you're wondering, Carrion is a subsidiary of Umbrella Incorporated."

"Fuck... I never knew."

"According to the records, those were the only offense he ever did. When I checked SpeedStrip's employee records for you father, he started working there just a month after the last ticket offense. Also, Wong was seen once entering a Carrion office a day after the second murder, asking the receptionist about a man named 'John'."

"So she was looking for 'John' in a transport company my dad left 9 years ago. What's that gotta do with him?"

"That excess transport material that gave your father the ticket? Apparently your father repeatedly tried to deal with the office here to make them charge them up to a certain 'John' from Umbrella Incorporated, the guy who supposedly made him mount all the materials on the truck beyond the limit. Don't you think that's something; to know that he quit right afterwards?"

"And for all we know, it could still be pure coincidence. DAMN!" Kash kicks the wall, venting it out. "I can't give a FUCK about Wong and her espionage shit! Why is this happening to me? What the hell did my father do that turned me this way! This is... This is INSANE!"

"Jaeger!" Branagh shows up at the door outside. His uniform has freshly red blood stains on his left shoulder. Looking at him, Kash's heart begins to beat faster. "We need able hands, NOW!"

"What's wrong?"

"A whole army of zombies and freaks are approaching the station from two directions. The freaks are coming in small herds, but the zombies, they have these claws and are getting to us way too quick! We already lost our first and second posts!"

"Crimson heads..." Dean looks at Kash, while Branagh watches on still confused and in panic. "The zombies put down without headshots or decap are coming back to life. Judging by the last time we saw one in action, this shit could get out of hand."

"Hurry up, Dean! You're the best marksman we have right now! Refugees at the tent are already losing control and we'll lose everyone if we don't act NOW!"

"You have two right now, Marvin." Dean immediately gets to the pink crate and takes out all their weapons and ammunition, including Kash's shotgun along with several types of grenades. Kash only stands there feeling nervous, yet annoyed angry at the same time.

"...Shit!"