Village: Resident Evil VIII

Chapter Three: All Good Things

Ethan was cold. Yes, that was the first sensation that he became aware of during the effort to open his eyes, and then the cold sensation was joined by soreness the throughout his entire body the moment he tried to move. Coughing and then groaning with pain as his body seemed to wake up one sense at a time, the man was heavily disoriented, hearing wind coming from above his head, but able to see nothing but darkness… wait a second, there was a red light… and then it was gone. No, there it was again, vanishing before he could manage to look up and see that there was a blinking light positioned just above his head.

Hold on a second, there wasn't a light above him, it was next to… next to where Ethan was laying down? Yes, as more feeling came back into his body, the man realized that he was laying down on a flat metal surface, now looking up and seeing stars in the sky every time that the blinking light went out. Oh crap, cramping up now when he tried to raise his arm, causing Ethan to cry out loudly again during his efforts to get into a sitting position, but once the man was sitting up he saw that there were… seats on the ceiling?

Moving his arm backwards to steady himself while trying to figure out this mystery, Ethan gasped when his hand slipped on the even colder, wet surface, and now his head was even colder when the back of it fell into a pile of snow. Yes, snow… wet, hard packed snow that seemed to be everywhere around him, and worse yet, a pair of boots was right next to the man's face. Boots that were attached to a pair of black uniformed legs that… were attached to someone who was pinned underneath the… the overturned truck? Was that what happened? Was there an accident and his truck flipped over?

There were bits of memories coming back, but his mind was all foggy, probably due to all the blood that was on the man's palm when he touched it to the side of his head. Yeah, laying on the cold ground wasn't helping… come on, Ethan… gotta get up. It took a few tries, but he eventually managed to roll over onto his stomach, and from there it was starting to get a little easier to move, allowing him to get up to his hands and knees. Maybe his body was finally starting to wake up, and now another flash of memory shot across the man's mind. It wasn't his truck at all, he had been in the back and the uniformed man had been… guarding him?

"All right, asshole, I don't know how much time we have." The uniformed man had said, grabbing him by the shirt. "Why does Redfield want you so bad? What's your connection with all this?"

Umber… Eyes? Was that what the uniformed man guarding him was called? The uniform and gloves had covered every inch of his body, and he wore some kind of tactical mask that looked like some weird kind of cross between a gas mask and night vision goggles, distorting the uniformed man's voice almost as if it were coming from a radio. Well, Mr. Umber Eyes wouldn't be doing much guarding from underneath the overturned truck, but even if he were still alive, Ethan had no idea why Chris wanted him so badly, and… and suddenly a knot formed in the man's stomach, his head starting to pound as more memories came back.

Chris… Chris Redfield had been in his house… him and all his soldiers, including Umber Eyes. Yeah, Umber Eyes was holding him face down on the floor, the man's arm twisted up and behind him so that he couldn't move, while Chris… while Chris was standing over Zoe… aiming his silenced pistol and shooting her in the face at point blank range. The knot in Ethan's stomach moved upward, causing him to vomit up the food he had eaten for dinner as he remembered the Captain pulling the trigger again and again, firing at least five shots right into his wife's head before stopping.

But why… why did that happen? The taste of the food he had just thrown up triggered another memory, frustrating since it was like the man was reviewing the evening's events in reverse like one of those old Tarantino films, and it was… something to do with dinner. He remembered Zoe reading some story to Rose; some local thing she had picked up that Ethan thought was too creepy for a girl who wasn't even a year old yet, and then he… and then what? His wife was making dinner, some kind of local thing, and… and he remembered commenting that it didn't smell anything like her usual Cajun menu.

The man remembered putting his daughter down for the night and then going back downstairs, and then… and then Zoe did something that surprised him. Right in the middle of eating the strange stew, which was actually pretty good, his wife bluntly asked him what he thought about running away with her… just them and Rose sneaking away while their babysitters weren't looking, and then it happened. Zoe's shoulder twitched, and both of them seemed confused by it until the red stain began to form on her shirt, and then Ethan fell out of his chair when the window shattered from gunfire… silenced rapid gunfire that sprayed his wife's blood everywhere until she collapsed onto the floor.

"Rose!" The man called out, startled by his own echo as he looked around the vehicle's wreckage. "Oh, shit… Rose!"

Now the last pieces of the memories were coming through, seeing Zoe's mangled corpse lying on the broken tile floor while Umber Eyes forced him to his feet, and then Ethan saw one of the other soldiers coming down stairs with his daughter in his arms. He tried to fight back as they brought Rose to Chris, but his captor was too fast, twisting the man's wrists behind his back and slamming him face down on the table as easily as if he had subdued people like that a hundred times, and then the Captain ordered both of them to be put onto the trucks. Wait, there was a second vehicle? Yes, there had to be… yeah, the one Rose was on.

Crawling away from where Umber Eyes was pinned under the first vehicle, it didn't take him long to find the second one just twenty or thirty meters behind it, and… and the second one was in even worse condition than the first. Overturned and slammed into a tree that was a pretty good distance from the snow covered road, it looked like the whole back end of the still smoking truck had been sheered off… discarded against another tree that was again a good distance away. No bodies this time, just a single combat boot lying nearby in the snow along with a compact flashlight, which was how Ethan discovered the boot.

No Rose, either… no sign of anybody, just a strange trail of disturbed snow, more like something large was dragged away instead of a simple set of tracks. So what happened? Had one of Chris's soldiers survived, and taken the baby away to rendezvous with the Captain somewhere else? If so, then the man needed to get after him… had to catch the soldier and get his daughter back before he reached Chris. With the disappearance of Rose, the question of why the Captain stormed into their home and executed Zoe like that was no longer important, nor was revenge to tell the truth… all that mattered was getting his daughter back.

With the compact flashlight, following the trail away from the two vehicles, which was the only place besides the tire tracks where the snow was disturbed, should be easy, and Ethan was about to go running after them, when he remembered how alone and unarmed he was. From his experiences at the Baker Estate, the man knew how awful it could be to face any kind of hostile enemy unarmed, but there didn't seem to be any surplus weapons or supplies laying around anywhere, as if someone had picked the place clean while he was unconscious for… however long it was before he woke up.

As much as he wanted to go into fatherly panic mode and go tearing off after his daughter with nothing but his bare hands, Ethan knew that doing that against a soldier who was both armed and trained would probably get him killed, but what was he supposed to… wait a minute, Umber Eyes. Stumbling his way back around to the first truck, the man saw that while the top half of the soldier's body was pinned under the vehicle, his bottom half was completely exposed, along with anything that he might have been carrying. Their feet were different sizes, so Ethan's own less protective hiking boots would have to do, but the soldier had a pistol in his hip holster.

The grip of the weapon was just about touching the truck's roof, so it was kind of a struggle to get it free, but when he did, the man was relieved to find that it was the same kind of Beretta 9mm that Chris had been training him on. No extra clips, though, so fifteen shots was all he had… then again, how could he possibly need any more than that? Umber Eyes must have been carrying most of his equipment in pouches on his body armor or something, because there was surprisingly little on his belt or in his pants pockets, so this was it… a flashlight and fifteen bullets was all he had to save his daughter.

Part of the man's brain wanted to believe that all of this was some kind of twisted nightmare, and that any second he was going to wake up in a cold sweat, before spending the rest of the night holding onto Zoe as if she were a priceless treasure… and she was. Damn it, why did this happen, Ethan thought as he stumbled away from the road, following the trail into the forest where a low hanging branch smacked him in the face. He and Zoe had done everything the BSAA asked of them for years now; going no-contact with friends and family, packing up and starting over in another country halfway around the world… only to have Chris Redfield… the man who was supposed to protect them… kill his wife and kidnap his daughter.

Another branch hit him in the face, and since there was no obvious trail through the forest, the man had to keep ducking under them or take longer routes around in order to follow the… now how the hell did that surviving soldier manage to keep going straight through the trees like that, especially while carrying a little baby? Suddenly something stabbed him, not a wooden branch like he thought, but something metal… rusty and metal. It took Ethan a second to realize that he had walked right into an old barbed wire fence, and there was a sign on it, but he couldn't read Romanian writing. Figuring that it probably said no trespassing or something like that, the man dropped down and crawled underneath it, and that's when he felt the air temperature drop.

Shivering now that the adrenaline he felt from the crash and Rose's disappearance was wearing off, Ethan felt the icy wind go right through the shirt he was wearing, since the soldiers hadn't exactly allowed him to get his coat before forcing him into the truck… hell, he was lucky that he hadn't yet taken his boots off after getting home from work. Well, if there was a fence, then maybe there was a hunting shack or something out there that he could take shelter in for a while, or at least find something a little heavier than his shirt to put around his body… after all, the man wouldn't be much good to Rose if he froze to death before finding her, and the temperature just seemed to keep dropping with each step that he took deeper into the thick forest.