The two survivors left the gas station, leaving all that happened inside to stay as an unspoken memory. Veronica flat out refused to acknowledge Kyle's words following their departure until he finally stopped talking. It wasn't so much resent that she held for him, as somehow she knew that she had no reason to hate him at that particular moment. Instead, she simply wanted to avoid bringing unwanted thoughts to the surface of her mind, absolutely hating herself for finding any semblance of comfort in his company. Even more, Veronica knew his interest in her displays of madness and blood lust remained and she couldn't bear to face his answerless questions.
The city had once again taken its toll on Veronica's appearance. Even all the care she put into making herself look and feel somewhat clean that morning had gone to waste mere hours upon leaving the motel. Her hair felt slimy with either sweat or blood and her clothing fared no better. Several tears ran across various sections of her shirt and pants, leaving them partially tattered. The bloody memories of her encounters with Death stained the fabric over her skin like inorganic scars. More so, even though the pain had long since faded, Veronica still boasted a few cuts and scrapes that almost seemed as if they would adhere to her flesh for all eternity.
Kyle had his share of minor injuries, though over all it seemed as if he had gotten off quite easy as compared to Veronica. She knew that the blood on his clothes didn't bother him half as much as the blood on her clothing did to her. In fact, nothing about what the city had done to him seemed to affect him all that much. Perhaps that was because of his drive to survive or because he chose not to think too much into it, having developed some mental barrier from the insanity that she felt consuming her. Veronica wished that she had the capability to do the same, but every drop of blood that fell by or from her only served to drill more so into her consciousness, forcing her never to let go of her discomfort.
In an odd way, Veronica noticed that her knife had started to take on a faint, red tint. Regardless of how often she tried to clean the blade against her clothing, the emerald green remained masked by the color of blood. Somehow, it seemed like her knife had begun to devour all the blood it spilled, all the damned lives it took, and the stains served as penance for its sins. Looking at the knife amounted to little more than reminding her of her own fall into blood lust. After letting the image of the bloodstained knife linger in her sight long enough for her to imagine her soul looking no different, she slipped it back into its sheath.
The creatures within Raccoon City began to stir as the two survivors continued their way towards the highway, crows once again starting to caw from their perches. They noticed an increase in zombie activity the more they traveled, to the point where staying on the main roads proved near suicidal. On more than one occasion, Veronica and Kyle found themselves in the center of an inexplicable zombie trap as the undead emerged from various nooks and crannies of the street's carnage as if their mindless bodies somehow organized a tactical ambush. Quick thinking and action, as well as a considerable expenditure of ammunition, allowed them to avoid a terrible death, but in the end, they had no option but to move their travels to the considerably slower side and back streets.
"Hey Ronnie," Kyle began after eyeing over a van that had crashed into a telephone pole, the bodies of a family still inside, rotting like leftovers in tupperware containers.
Without giving it much thought, Veronica grunted in some feeble way of showing her companion that she was, at least partially, listening.
"What would you be doing right now if all of this hadn't happened?"
She thought it over a moment and considered not even responding to him. It wasn't as if her past life really mattered anymore. "Sleeping, probably."
"Not exactly a morning person, huh?" In all honesty, she didn't have a clue as to the current time. "I take it you had a night job or something?"
That point proved to be the extent to which Veronica felt like sharing information on herself. She remained silent, an occurrence that by then Kyle must have gotten used to.
"You know what I'd be doing right now?" Of course, she didn't bother with a guess and after a brief couple of seconds, Kyle continued. "I'd be sitting in my friend Jimmy's recliner, eating a turkey sub and watching soft core pornography on his T.V. Now, before you tell me I'm a tasteless, despicable pervert, you need to know that Jimmy pretty much only has pornography to watch on his television, and I'll be damned if I'm going to stare at a blank screen while eating my turkey sub. No man should ever be forced to eat turkey without something to watch."
"Kyle," Veronica uttered, shortly followed by a sigh. "I don't care."
"You're kidding me? You mean, you don't care that I watched porn? Are you the world's greatest woman or something?" He paused, apparently thinking something over, and then added, "Wait, you're not a lesbian are you?"
"Do I need to beat you with a blunt object? You're really trying to piss me off, huh?"
Taking out an invisible notepad, Kyle put a check mark down with his invisible pencil. "I'll take that as a firm 'No' on the whole lesbian thing. Moving on to my next question-"
Veronica groaned. "Stop. Just, stop what you're doing. I'm not going to play twenty questions."
"Putting a checkmark next to 'Does not like to play games.' Tell me Miss. Ronnie," obviously, he completely ignored Veronica's request and continued to plague her with random questions, "if you had to choose between a long walk on the beach or pounding down a bottle of vodka, you'd choose?"
Without missing a beat, Veronica replied, "What? No option to beat the annoying prick who won't stop bugging me? Because I want to do that."
Kyle shrugged his shoulders and threw the invisible notepad behind him. "Okay, okay. Fine, I'm done. Besides, look, more zombies! I NEVER get tired of running into these things." He offered a weak laugh as he pointed off in the distance, apparently finished with his pointless questions.
Trekking through the city, outside of their occasional run-ins with the undead, became rather daunting. While the horrors lurking behind every corner managed to keep Kyle and Veronica on their toes, it became all too easy for Veronica, at least, to fall into her usual survival-driven lull. That was until they entered a small part of the city that she used to occasionally frequent before everything went to hell. They passed by a couple of the club scenes that she attended when feeling somewhat outgoing and it felt odd to her to see those places empty and void of life, as if her past experiences inside their walls were nothing but dreams. While she made no comment to Kyle about her memories of the area, she did mentally linger on a particular bar that they passed, her mind shifting back to a particular evening that occurred only weeks prior.
A woman that Veronica worked with on the few instances that their schedules overlapped named Carol had invited her out drinking. Honestly, Veronica only agreed in order to get the woman to stop bugging her, dropping her usual cold and distant persona in order to appease this person's desire to start some sort of friendship between them. Of course, the prospect of getting hammered and forgetting about her dreary life also held quite the appeal to Veronica, even if it meant dealing with Carol's asinine bullshit.
Walking into J's Bar, a place that she had gone on seldom occasions beforehand to spend a quiet evening drinking, it didn't take long for Carol to flag her down and practically drag her to one of the tables in the bar.
"V! There you are!" the woman exclaimed, her chest bouncing in an almost comical fashion as she ran to greet Veronica because, apparently, she was far too good for bras. "For a moment I didn't think you were coming."
Carol forced a pretend sad face and took Veronica by the arm to lead her to one of the tables in the room. "Please, don't touch me," Veronica ordered to no avail as Carol simply continued to tug her along, thinking her words as little more than a playful joke.
The general quiet lackluster of the bar became all too apparent with how few patrons had decided to stop by that night. A couple of security guards, still in uniform, sat at the bar along with a couple of other men. The waitress kept herself busy serving drinks to the patrons, every now and then cleaning off one of the unused tables. If only to make matters worse, Carol wouldn't stop talking about her personal life, driving Veronica to the point where she felt like smashing a glass mug against the table and stabbing the woman in the eye. Instead, she ordered a few shots of tequila, figuring that going into a drunken stupor would help prevent Carol's boring tales from making her kill the woman in order to save her sanity.
As the night wore on, Carol eventually left the table to head off to the bathroom. It was only shortly thereafter than one of the men who had stood at the bar for most of the night walked over to Veronica's table and sat down. He asked her in an all too typical fashion, "So, what would a beautiful woman such as yourself say if I offered to buy you a drink?"
Veronica replied with a simple, yet harsh, "No," as if to drive the word directly into the man's heart and cease his life.
"Come on, it's the least I can do for gracing me with your presence this evening."
"The least you could do for me would be to go hang yourself in the bathroom." If anything, drinking did tend to unlock a nastier-than-usual side to Veronica's demeanor, removing that fragile wall which often stood between her and verbally cussing out everyone who annoyed her.
The man seemed little phased by her direct insult, but in the end, he wound up walking away with his tail between his legs, utterly defeated. Shortly after he returned to his position as 'Bar Fly,' Carol returned as smiley as ever. "I saw you talking to that guy! Cute, huh?"
"If by cute, you mean he makes me want to vomit, sure." While her words may have been a little exaggerated, she really found nothing too appealing about him. In fact, it was rare that she ever found a guy particularly attractive, finding most people in general nearly unbearable to be around as soon as they began talking.
"You mean you turned him away!?" Carol seemed awfully hurt by Veronica's ability to cockblock herself. "Come on, V! I told him you could use some company, why'd you have to go and do that? Do you want to be alone forever?" She sighed and took a sip of her martini. "I knew I should have kept him for myself…"
She had half a mind to answer, "Yes, I do want to be alone forever," but she was too filled with drunken disgust towards Carol to say much of anything. If she had opened her mouth to speak, she would have probably wound up saying, "There's still time for you to go throw your legs around him and leave me the hell alone."
Looking back on the entire situation, Veronica felt compelled to regret how mean she had been to that guy, even if he had only approached her because Carol told him to. Maybe she should have at least gotten his name and let him buy her a drink. After all, he hadn't asked the world of her, just for a drink and the time to get to know her. Was that really so bad? Did she have to push him away like that?
Yet, in the end, she knew that she never really cared to know the answer to those questions. She had always been like that, reluctant to get close to anyone because of how much most people tended to bother her. In fact, what surprised her the most about her brief reverie was more so that she never truly cared what happened to that nameless man who tried to pick her up or Carol. She felt pretty sure that they were both dead and even though she knew that she should have probably felt something over that idea, she didn't. Carol was a self-focused, gossipy bitch that Veronica always found difficult to actually tolerate and without a doubt, the man was probably nothing much either. In the end, she simply didn't care.
"Ronnie," Kyle whispered, thankfully pulling Veronica out of her thoughts. She hadn't realized it, but they had stopped moving right across the street from J's Bar. In a way, it didn't look much different from the few times she had went there in her past life. "You heard that, right?"
Before she could even ask, "Heard what?" a man's scream for help came from a behind nearby buildings. Both survivors looked towards the nearest alley, then to each other. Obviously, Kyle wanted to go off and help the man, but Veronica felt all too inclined to leave him to his fate and continue with her own escape from the city's terrible clutches. However, she could practically see the pleading in her companion's eyes to go and check on the source of the scream. If she wasn't so certain that Kyle would go off on his own if she chose to ignore it, she probably would have wound up walking away.
A quick run through the nearby alley, around a corner into a small series of back alleys revealed a small congregation of undead, animate bodies closing in on a dead end. Trapped in front of them stood the source of the scream; a defenseless man facing down certain death. Kyle and Veronica stopped at the back of the undead mob and it took a moment for her to be able to make out that the helpless man was wearing Umbrella's mercenary attire.
"SHIT!" He cried, desperately looking around for a source of escape until he finally noticed that two living beings stood behind the zombie crowd. "Hey! HEY! Get me out of here! I ran out of ammo! Hurry!"
Veronica stood still, staring down the individual for a moment before calling out, "Would you do the same for us?"
Kyle looked at her with surprise splashed across his face. "Ronnie, you can't be serious."
"OF COURSE! PLEASE!" He screamed as the undead closed in on him.
Kyle lifted up his shotgun to begin clearing out the small horde in order to save the man, but Veronica took a swift step in front of him, apparently valuing the death of the mercenary over her own life. Needless to say, logical thought had escaped her for a brief time "Fuck you. You don't give a damn about us, so why should we give a damn about you?"
"Ronnie!" Kyle lowered his gun for a moment before stepping to her side. "We're not letting him die."
The mercenary cried out again, the undead far too close for comfort. "I was sent here to SAVE people like you! You have to help me, please!"
Kyle lifted his gun again, but Veronica grabbed the barrel and lowered it. She replied to the mercenary's pleas with a simple, yet harsh, "No," as if to drive the word directly into the man's heart and cease his life.
The mercenary never had time to get out another word. The small mob overwhelmed the defenseless man and took him to the ground. They circled his body and began to feast on him like a bunch of hungry, savage family members devouring turkey at a Thanksgiving dinner. Veronica released Kyle's gun and turned to leave the alley, the man's dying screams filling the air for a few moments before finally fading off. She could hear her companion mutter, "Ronnie…" before turning his back on the forsaken man to follow her.
She knew that Kyle would hold that against her, that she shouldn't have let that man die like that, but in the end, Veronica simply didn't care. If he had been another survivor, maybe the outcome would have been different, but she couldn't bring herself to aid someone who worked for the very company that brought the entire disaster to Raccoon City. Like Carol or the man who had tried to pick her up, the mercenary probably should have held some sort of significance, however faint, to Veronica, but he didn't.
In a way, perhaps Kyle realized that and understood why Veronica had done what she did. After all, he did admit to the mercenaries being the 'Bad Guys' some time back. Either way, he never brought up that incident again after they left the alley. Even after a few minutes of silent traveling, he picked up his invisible notepad once more and asked her, "This next question is VERY important in deciding just how kickass of a woman you are. Ready?" He took a slight pause. "Are you bisexual?"
Even though she felt like hitting him for such a question, Veronica couldn't help but to crack a smile. If he had pressed the issue of what had happened, she knew he would have made her feel terrible, a lot more like the monster she knew she was starting to become, for letting that mercenary die, but he didn't. For that moment, he allowed her to let herself claim that she made the right choice and ignore the fact that she had begun caring so little about human life.
