For all disclaimers: see earlier Chapters.
Faith
Chapter Eleven
/January 5th 2001, northern Afghanistan/
A whole day had passed since they'd escaped the blast, although maybe "survived" the final destruction of the facility would have been a better word to use. It hadn't done much to change the fact her whole body ached like she'd become one big bruise, nor had the constant throbbing from her gunshot wound gone away. The pain meds had made it tolerable, but that was it.
What Xenia Omerova hated more than any of those things, though, was the fact that she was still being forced to stay in her Infirmary bed by the camp Doctor, who had stitched up her side, dealt with her various other knocks, cuts and scrapes, then stood back and taken a good, long look at her. Following that, he'd advised her against getting out of bed for at least twelve hours and stated, for a fact, that he'd sedate her with a small hammer to the back of the head if that was what it took to keep her in bed.
Clearly, she'd realised, he knew her reputation for going on no matter what happened short of having internal organs hanging out of her belly tripping her up as she ran. Well...just maybe, after everything which had happened, she could actually use the rest this time?
Anna Neagley was in another bed further down the Infirmary room, a cold, white, sterile environment which had hard beds with just enough give in them to be comfortable. By far the worst hurt of the three of them, her head wound had been cleaned and padded because wounds to the head were impossible to properly stitch, only butterfly adhesive stitches had been used to seal the wound itself. Somehow they'd all escaped broken bones, but she'd heard the ageing camp Doctor mutter that Anna's skull being intact after what had happened to her brought new meaning to the expression "thick-headed".
Even the Doctor hadn't dared try to Order Anna to stay in bed, though. Her reputation as a savage in combat bled into her personal life in no small way and, Xenia had noticed with a smirk that she hadn't tried to conceal, the Nurses had been very careful to ask Anna's permission to touch her before they'd done anything else. Anna would have had the Doctors thumbs torn loose in her hands before he could scream if he'd tried to tell her to do something she didn't want to do-and he'd clearly known that.
In fact, seeing Anna, despite a severe Concussion, knock Leon Kennedy unconscious with one punch when he'd made the mistake of putting his hand on her arm to get her attention without asking first had been one of the few entertaining things she'd seen, experienced or witnessed over the last day. Thankfully, the young Agent had come to quickly enough to get her released by the Military Police before Anna had gotten angry enough to put the two officers in Hospital.
Now, Anna was sitting on her bed cross-legged with Matt Ryan, also confined to the tent for the next twelve hours, playing what looked like a game of Canasta. More to the point, given the grin on her face, the woman was winning-although Matt didn't seem to mind.
Easily reading the body language between them, Xenia could tell Anna would jump Matt in a short second if he so much as winked at her. Anna wanted Matt in a way which suggested sex in public places wouldn't have been out of the question if she got what she wanted-and the electricity crackling around the woman because of her physical proximity to Matt was obvious to anyone who looked.
Except to Matt, apparently, who seemed to be enjoying the card game far more than the look Anna was aiming at him, not to mention the curves and hard form almost straining at the t-shirt and leggings Anna was wearing. Nine out of every ten men Xenia had ever met would have fought a Lion with their bare hands and leapt over molten lava blindfolded for just the chance at a woman like her, but Matt couldn't have been more oblivious to the offer if he'd been dead, buried and dug up again.
Odd man, Xenia couldn't help but think, but then the odd one's were sometimes the one's most worth having. Whatever history was between the two of them obviously wouldn't hurt, either, but Matt seemed to have moved on where Anna evidently hadn't...
She had other matters to consider, though, far more important one's. Fatally important ones, in all likelihood.
She'd known about Umbrella Corporations work and "interests" since 1989, when she'd been with the KGB. Umbrella had often needed Test Subjects, humans, for their "work" and the Politburo had been only too willing to supply them, in return for adequate "Compensation" such as money in secret personal bank accounts and certain luxuries. It made the rich richer and allowed troublemakers to be "disappeared" forever in a way which no historian or investigator could or would ever solve, a win-win outcome for the Politburo members.
Reliable KGB Agents had been assigned to handle the details and keep things quiet, while disposable muscle in the form of Afghanistan Veterans hooked on Heroin or street trash thugs who would do anything for the right price had been employed to supply muscle. She'd been marked as "Reliable" very early on and, in fact, had actually been an assistant on one such trip herself.
The screams, howls and other...sounds...coming from the prison trucks had made her think of her Grandfathers stories of Nazi Concentration Camps he had found with his Regiment in Poland during the Second World War. Human beings simply weren't designed, inside or out, to experience certain things and live with the memories afterwards as though there was no more to it than that.
She'd finished the job at the time, because she'd have been made a Test Subject if she'd tried anything. Then she'd gone back to Moscow and Volunteered for the mission to Afghanistan, preferring the honest Hell of War to the damned and damning possibilities of Umbrella's labs.
She'd been raised as an Orthodox Roman Catholic by her parents, who had been very clear and careful about keeping the fact to herself when she'd been young, but she'd never really had any time for belief in anything greater than herself so had never even gone to a church. Despite that, the night she'd gotten back from her first "Transporter" Operation she'd gotten down on her knees in the mud and Prayed to God that there was a Hell for people capable of what she'd witnessed and those who would aid them. She hadn't asked for forgiveness for her own actions because freedom of will meant that you made your own choices, then you paid the price when either old age or something considerably less natural ended you.
It didn't change the fact that it hadn't been the last time she'd been on one of those Ops. It didn't change the fact that Umbrella was still around and undoubtedly still buying human "waste" from whoever had a "surplus" they didn't want. It didn't change the fact that she could have proved what had been going on for decades behind the scenes in 1991, after the KGB effectively disintegrated and she gained access to all sorts of information she wasn't supposed to know about, let alone possess.
She'd sat on the information for seven years as an Ace in the Hole in case she'd ever wanted something to hold over Umbrella Corporation-then Racoon City had first of all been infected by an apparently freak release of one of Umbrella's Virus experiments, before being nuked by the US Government to contain the threat. The very fact that such a thing could happen without Umbrella being taken apart piece by piece by a combination of both legal and military assault in the USA itself had nearly stopped her heart.
That was when she'd realised just how far Umbrella's reach really stretched. The only thing which could have so much as slowed down a full-scale assault on the corporation, by everything the Superpower the USA still was could bring to bear, would have been an Executive Order from the White House itself. By back channels, no less, which normally meant either Politics were involved or a sensitive matter had to be dealt with...carefully.
The invasion of Afghanistan was a sop to the hard-liners in Congress and the Senate who were Hell-bent on making sure they got their pound of flesh from Umbrella. The near-collapse of sales of Umbrella products had occurred because everyone had seen the news reports of Racoon City being nuked and it was common knowledge that the corporation effectively owned the city.
It didn't change the fact that the viewing public had short memories. Sales were already starting to creep back up, Xenia knew from business reports in newspapers. Despite the horror and atrocity that had occurred in the vaporised city, not even a nuke was enough to keep the attention for longer than a couple of years, it seemed.
Well, America had nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki back in 1945 to end WWII. Maybe this meant that nuclear destruction was acceptable in the USA as long as it was for a good reason?
The evidence she had of what Umbrella was up to, had been up to, she kept in a hidden place so secure that nobody would ever find it unless she led them to it on purpose. The blood of everyone who had died in Racoon City was on her hands as much as anyone else's. But she wasn't naïve, if she'd tried to go public with it even back in '91 she and her whole family would have disappeared as an example to others and nobody, at all, would have asked any questions nor gone looking for them, ever.
Now she knew that Umbrella's scope of operations extended far beyond what she'd learnt after over a decade of investigation and intelligence gathering from sources scattered throughout the world in every layer of business, industry, military and political circles. If they had facilities in Afghanistan? It was just as bad as she'd always feared, no one was safe...
Which led on to why she'd stayed a Mercenary for all these years, rather than accepting job offers from various potential employers who she would have loved to take. Being a true Mercenary meant having no loyalties but to yourself, having a past but no future, living pay cheque to pay cheque on hire for the highest bidder. You sold your skills and knowledge for the highest price you could get and forgot about things like loyalties and beliefs, because you had to.
She wanted to live, so she'd do whatever she had to do to stay alive. If that meant shaking the Devil's hand and "forgetting" about "inconvenient" details, that was what she had to do. If it meant being worse than dead in some ways? While her heart still beat, she still had hope.
Besides which, just because she didn't dare go up against Umbrella Corporation by herself, despite everything she had on them, that by no means meant she'd given up on putting to rest the Demons and Ghosts of her past. She'd wipe off the blood on her hands Umbrella had put there before she died if she had to do it with the ash of a nuclear weapon herself, she'd have her revenge on those sick old men who'd destroyed her country so long ago now while she was at it.
She just hoped that Matt and Anna would never get pulled into the nightmare Umbrella represented, especially given that neither of them knew the world the way she did. Especially given one simple, irrefutable truth: death hadn't been the end since 1967, literally, she'd discovered that much back in '91.
God's help the brave men and women of the S.T.A.R.S. who had stumbled across the truth and dared to declare War on Umbrella Corporation when nobody else would, she couldn't help but think, yet again. No matter what they knew, no matter how far they were willing to go to get the job done, no matter what sacrifices they made and were willing to make, no matter what they knew?
She, better than anyone else, knew that they had only scratched the surface of the thick hide that concealed the Beast itself. If it ever set out to honestly kill them? Umbrella could destroy all of the S.T.A.R.S. in a week no matter where they hid, who helped them or what they did, that she knew for a simple fact.
Sometimes, she wondered if there would even still be a world left for people like Matt and Anna after the nightmare finally ended and all of the lies were finally exposed. In reality? She very much doubted there would be...
/End of Part Eleven. All Reviews welcomed/.
The End?