A World Without Fear

by Onkwehonwe Kashatstenhshera

New pockets of outbreaks run the risk of the previous pandemic repeating itself. The DSO, BSAA & TerraSave are tasked with a race against time to battle the new epidemic and those responsible. From the NW to Iraq, the mission continues. The Raccoon survivors and their new allies must face new enemies. But what of the ghosts of the past uwilling to stay at rest?

13. Rain On The Scarecrow

Carlos

They lunged for him but he narrowly averted the first she came at him he fired two shots into her chest. She growled and stabbed him in the chest but luckily he had a melee vest and a bulletproof on under his fatigues. He fired striking her in the right arm to try and get her to drop the knife but she swung it at him and missed with the blade but the handle did catch him behind the left ear causing ringing. Carlos told her, "You know, I normally don't like to put hands on a woman, unless it's spanking her nalgas..." She swung the blade at him but he caught her knife hand this time. "But out here every bullet is prescious, and I'm an egleterian, mamacita. I belive in equal rights and lefts...'" He hit her with a left punch and she staggered back and he pistol whipped her. He grabbed her and swung her using her own bodyweight and she took a fall from the holes in each floor as he threw her from the floor he was on.

The next to come at him was a man of about six feet with jet black hair a dark gray almost black t shirt with an opening in the collar exposing his hairy chest, a light brown tan to his skin and hazel eyes plus gray jeans. The man carried a hatchet. Carlos ducked under it and a few strands of his light brown hair were chopped off. Carlos ducked down and fired two shots into his chest and one into his face. "I didn't ask for a haircut! You don't trim our hair and we don't trim your beards!" The man lunged at him again. Carlos was not able to dodge or bring the gun up to shoot in time and the man had him backed into a corner so Carlos hoped for the best, the best being not losing any fingers and he brought the gun up as the man swung. Luckily he didn't lose a finger but the blade did connect with the gun sending it flying back.

Another was coming with a scimitar. "I'm not one for haircuts I already told you but you look like you can lose a little off the top..." As the man tried to cut him with the scimitar, Carlos kicked him in the chest sending him staggering back and Carlos snatched up the foreign weapon and despite not knowing how he would use it if this were a battlefield 3000 years ago, he knew that swinging it would be simple enough. He took the top of the man's head off and the skull with it and dark red almost black blood sprayed everywhere. It reminded him of that scene in that movie about the cannibal where the guy made a fed eat his own brain. Sick shit.

One of them was carrying a chain and Carlos yelled "No! We're not doing that! Chingate!" (Fuck you!)

He threw the bladed weapon at the man and caught him in his right forearm. It bled and he went to get his handgun and realized it was damaged by the blade. He saw an infected carrier who had been Iraqi police and he was carrying a Handgun intent on shooting Carlos. Carlos held his up and then threw it beaming the cop in the face. "I'm borrowing yours. Mine's broken!"

He grabbed the pistol and pushed it into the guard's chin pulling the trigger twice. "Well, if you insist...yeah I'll take it off your hands...gracias..."

He checked the cop's body for ammo. He did not have anything besides what was in the magazine. "Well shit..." He took the facewrapping off one of the women and wrapped it around his own face making his way through the sand storm knowing that he still had to get to the rest of his team. "Well...at least I still got you..." He said to his Alejandro Sniper Rifle. Though not many realized this, it was the same Sniper Rifle he had used in his time as a guerilla.

He lucked out and found some of his equipment to rapel up the side of the building where his team spotted dead bodies all the way there, every one of them carriers. "Where's Deanna?" He demanded. Suzuki looked off the roof. "I don't know...she was here! She was holding off those things while we shot it out with them."

Alvin was screaming in pain. The Shreveport born man had two rounds that had gone through him. One in the left leg and another in the right arm. Carlos had retrieved the medical gear needed. Peter began to work on him. "I need you to hold him down..." The Mohawk-Oneida Indian stated and Carlos held his legs down while Suzuki held his arms down. Peter began to get in through the African American's leg wound first. "AHhHHHH! Motherfucker!" Screamed Alvin as the medic had to dig deeper into his wound blood pouring from it and he squirmed. "Hold him down! Hold him the fuck down! I don't want to hit an artery!" Peter warned.

"It's too bad there's no booze in this shit hole!" Declared Suzuki. "Sharia law...there's not..." Agent Fatima stated. She got a glare from Lars as if he personally held her accountable for what was going on here. "Don't give me that look!" Barked Fatima. "My father was part of the Lebanese Forces and we're Maronite Catholic!"

Lars snorted. "So? My countrymen worshipped Thor and Odin. Then we were forced to be Christian. Finally, most of us are atheists. You know how you go from being a land of barbaric pillaging warlords to the part of the world with higher standards of living than the US? You have to take god out of it. It doesn't matter when that happens in your neck of the woods we all progress according to the times and the ways of our society but i've been to Beirut. It needs to happen there too."

"Lars, shut up!" Carlos barked.

"Yeah well this isnt exactly a sterile envioroment for a surgery either but if I don't get this slug outta him he could get an infection. One of us is gonna have to stay with him and watch his back until a medivac gets here and who knows when that could be?!" Peter yelled.

"This is the best we can do on such short notice...we just gotta stay on top of him and make sure he pulls through. I'm gonna stay with him and watch out for him. He's my responsibility. The rest of you have to go after Al Mahseeh..."

He looked and saw another helicopter in the distance. He realized they were BSAA. "On second thought...you all stay with him. I'm going after whatever team that is. Alvin needs a lift outta here."

They got the first round out of him. Peter tossed the slug aside. He began to stitch up his wound and Alvin screamed again and they had to hold him down. He got to the one on his arm and it took even longer to get the slug out. He stitched him up and bandaged him up. Carlos looked out at the chopper coming in. He fired a flare off from his pack and the chopper came their way. They were firing a .50 at the streets below tearing up carriers and tangos alike. The pilot landed. "I'm Carlos Oliveira. I need your help. I got an injured team mate."

"I can take him out of here to HQ in Baghdad but once we take him, we're not flying him back here and he's not going to be able to help you for the rest of this mission!" Stated the pilot, a blonde Caucasian female. "Understood! All we want is for him to get to safety. He can't help us on a bad leg and aside from what our medic did we can't do much for him out here either."

"Captain...you trying to say I'm useless...?"

"No, soldier. You proved yourself in battle today. This battle is over for you."

"i want to stay..." Alvin said. "I can't let that happen. This is the only chance any of us are going to get to get any of you back. Besides one of us has to survive in case the rest of us don't. When you feel better they'll debrief you. Don't try and get yourself killed trying to be macho out here. You're gonna get a ride back to the states when you're better. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Just take it! There's no shame in it!"

With that, they got him on. "I won't be able to do this again, Carlos..." The pilot told him. "I have to refuel in Baghdad. I'm not coming back until it's time for my team to evacuate."

"Karen, i owe you one..." Carlos stated.

"Yeah you do!"

With that, they air lifted him out of there. "Lucky fucker..." Peter stated having lit a cigarette and gone halfway through it. "Maybe i should have let one of them shoot me."

Kruger used a green herb on herself for a knee wound she had sustained against a Jinn. "Captain..." The blonde German called out. "We've got a good amount of ammo for now but if we keep getting into fire fights like this, we'll be down to our last rounds. I didn't go through this much ammo in Edonia in '12 and that place was a living nightmare..."

"This aint Edonia..." Carlos told her. "This isn't China either. This is worse. Our team...you all survived those outbreaks. Here...we lost a few people. I'm gonna do my best to make sure we all make it outta here. I can't make any promises. All I can promise is to do my best to do right by all of you. But if that's not good enough, the each of you has to do the same thing if you want to survive. If you want your team mates to survive."

Carlos looked at Lars. "I understand that things have gone bad in Norway. Relgious extremists have gone there. But there's a bigger threat out there now. And honestly? It doesn't matter what a bioterrorist believes. They could be a right wing dictatorship like I once faced, it can be US Imperialism, they can be Socialist, Fascist, they can be religious extremists, or nationalists or unionists or whatever else you can think of. Bioweapons are still bioweapons. Period. The way things are going on now...people see it as just another new kind of weapon. The terrorists around the world see it as a arms race. What it is...is playing with fire. It's like nuclear weapons."

"Captain..." Peter said. "I agree with you. But I'd still say nukes are worse. We do need to get rid of B.O.W's but we also need to get rid of nukes."

"You're right. They're both weapons of mass self destruction. They'd kill us all. But you know what? I survived Raccoon. Barely. And I'm not saying that for bragging rights the way a lot of people think me and Jill and Chris do. Those are bragging rights you don't want. Why I say that is...when they decide that an outbreak has gone too far, they nuke the place. The US has done this twice now. In Tall Oaks and Raccoon."

"Yeah, I know. Eventually, it's going to be too many bombs dropped. The earth won't heal if it happens too much. We'll lose everything."

"That has to be your motivation. We all want to live. But if we don't do our job, the whole world can and will suffer because of it. Can you imagine Raccoon an Lanshiang and Edonia happening everywhere? That's what will happen if we don't crack down on EVERY single bioterrorist. Al Mahseeh is a religious fanatic and he's going to use everything he can to destroy the west. And drive the UN military out. But in the process he's killing his own people and he doesn't even care."

They made their way past a mostly abandoned resteraunt but Carlos decided to check it out as he noticed a trail of blood. There was a deceased BSAA agent with nothing resembling a face anymore and the body had been cut into the torso carved up. There was such a mess that Carlos could not tell the gender or even the race of the deceased agent. "Jesus!" Kruger cried out. "What happened here?"

"It looks like this could have been one of the SOU agents that arrived as relief. I honestly have no idea."

He looked and saw seven deceased Jinn and shell casings from the Rifle of the deceased. "Whoever it was they went down fighting..." Stated Fatima. "Yeah..." Carlos nodded.

"They were small, whoever they were..." Stated Carlos. "The average height for a malee in this country is 5'5. They're not too small to be a woman. They tend to be around 5'2 ."

Peter checked the mouth carefully despite the lack of a face. He hit the corpse with the butt of his gun. "What are you doing?! Have you no respect for the dead?!" Fatima cried. "I do..." He said. "But I lost my pliers..." He had knocked out the front teeth. He examined the back side of one. "Shovel shaped inscisccors. Whoever this is is either East Asian or Native like me."

"Is that a confirmation of the Bering straight Theory then?" Asked Kruger. "No," Peter said. "Because you would have smooth inscisccors in the back and so would Alvin. Doesn't mean you two are the same. But this does help us narrow down who this was."

"Female..." Lars said as he held the jaw bone. "The bone is larger and more pronounced. And see this?" He held up the top of the bloody skull of what had been the head. "The brow is taller."

"Alright, put it down. We'll mark her for gotta try and find ID if we can."

Carlos spotted the Sig that she had kept as a sidearm. There was no more ammo for her Rifle. "That body is still warm..." Stated Suzuki. "This had to be recent. Whatever did this is different than the other carriers. But even the regular zombies I've never seen them dismember a body like this."

looked and saw Deanna. She had two bullet wounds in her side and she stood up with blood around her mouth. "No...Deanna..." He thought she had been infected and turned until she spoke.

She said, "Captain...? You survived?"

"Deanna..what did you do?"

"I just ran into some trouble...there was a lot of Anubis tangos all around me...I was running low on ammo...I had to change clothes to blend in..."

"I'm sorry..." She looked at the other team mates. "Where's Alvin?"

"He got air lifted out of here. He's alive but he's wounded."

"I'm sorry...but that means he left us down here to die...?"

"He was hurt pretty badly. Hey Deanna...who was that BSAA agent dead in the other room. It looks like she killed all the other things in here so did one get away?"

"Yeah...it attacked me too. I shot it but it got away from me. Out the window."

Carlos asked, "Hey...where's your weapon?"

Agent Kruger held up the ID of the BSAA agent finally. "Captain...!" It was Deanna's ID! Just then, he turned back to 'Deanna' and her eyes were completely white and her teeth sharp. She charged Kruger sinking her neck into the German SOU agent's throat. The woman screamed in pain as she ripped out a chunk of flesh in her teeth. Peter fired striking Deanna with twelve rounds, Lars did the same, as did Suzuki, unloading their Assault Rifles into her. Carlos fired five rounds into her himself. Deanna's nails sharpened turning into claws. She reached out and grabbed Kruger's neck wound and dug in deeper causing her to cry out and gurgle with blood bubbling in her mouth and with a twist she ripped her head off spinal cord and all.

She then slashed Carlos's right arm intentionall trying to go for his artery. She did cut him but luckily it wasn't a fatal area. Carlos fired four shots into her jaw. Just them, Deanna's skin began to melt and it let out an unholy growling scream and what at first looked like a skeleton underneath was instead a greenish skinned ghoul its eyes glowing bright white almost yellow in color. To Carlos it looked a bit like the Regenorator but it wasn't. It did make the same sound, however. It fell over and bled what looked like acidic blood. "What the fuck was that?!" Cried Fatima. "That..." Carlos stated. "Was the thing that killed Deanna...and Kruger."

"I don't understand, Captain..." Suzuki stated. "It devoured Deanna. And then it became her. But I don't see Kruger coming back from decapitation. Unless I missed something. Completely. So it must depend on if they feed on whoever they kill."

"Goddamn it..." Peter growled. "Isn't zombies bad enough? Why does Neo Umbrella have to keep making more fucked up variants of it?"

"That looks like a regenerator to me..." Lars said. "It is. Kind of. It's sort of an upgraded version of it. But...now I guess it shape shifts too."

"Those things scare the shit outta me..." Fatima stated. "I thought they were extinct!"

"Well, every time we start to think that, some cabron in Umbrella decides it needs a comeback. We thought the last time we'd see Lickers was the 90's but then they were in Africa..." Carlos stated. He had a look in his eyes. "Something wrong, Carlos?" Asked Agent Suzuki.

"Yeah...I've done a bang up job so far as your Captain. Look how many of us are left. The truth is, I never asked for this ' not to say I got anything against any of you. I just was better in the SOA. But this pays more and I got 'promoted' I guess. You know...complaints aren't supposed to go down they go up. The chain of command. But since your lives are in my hand I'm honestly telling you that I don't have a good track record with teams. Everybody talks a lot about what Chris Redfield is like. But the truth is, I'm no better. My entire UBCS team was wiped out. And before that, in the war back home the same thing happened. Everybody but me. I see that as either me having the worst luck or maybe the best but either way I'm better off working alone and maybe with a partner."

"Captain..." Fatima stated. "If you get us through this mission alive and you capture or kill our target, you'd be the best leader in the BSAA for whatever that's worth. At least in my eyes."

"But i'm confused..." Lars stated. "if everything doesn't go your way when you fight in groups and you end up the sole survivor while everybody else dies, then why is a partner something you don't mind?"

"You know.. Jill Valentine. We weren't partners by any assignment. She worked for STARS and I worked for Umbrella. She was the only S.T.A.R.S. member to survive too. All the rest either died or already left the city. They were killed by this thing. Nemesis. It killed my team mates too."

"We know about Nemesis. It's a part of the history we had to know to pass the exams on the BSAA," Stated Suzuki. "Plus...my sister survived Raccoon."

"Yoko..." Carlos said. "That's right...she was a lot like me. She did the right thing. She was with Umbrella but she left. She must be proud of you. You're fighting the good fight. I know I am..."

"Yeah...I hope I get to see her again. And I know that Peter would want to see his sister too."

Peter nodded. "After my parents passed me and Kateri only got each other. But now she's got a guy she's sweet on. I'm all right with him professionally but I would like to make it out of here just to officially do my duty by telling him if he breaks her heart I'll break his neck. But if I don't make it, Captain...I understand that it's worth it. There's bigger things at stake than any one man."

Lars agreed. "I don't mind dying here as long as we put a bullet in that motherfucker Al Mahseeh before I do. He's been behind two attacks in Scandanavia that we know of. That was with bombs. I know that out here he's testing the BOW's in the battlefield so that he can invade the homeland's of the people he hates. What better way to see how a weapon you use on your enemy works than in your own backyard where he's invading you first so that when you get to his house you can hit them with everything?"

He sighed. "I got Nicki killed and I regret it. I can't make up for that but I will never stop trying to right the wrong I did. And a good way to start this for me is to kill Al Mahseeh. We all know we're not going to take him alive. That's a delusion. You can take a bioterrorist in before he's injected himself but not after. The point is to shoot somebody in the knee or hands before they inject themselves if you want them alive. But in a case like this? We have to kill him."

Carlos sighed. "You're an irritating pendejo, Lars. But I don't want you dead either. Your record in the European BSAA speaks for itself. I'm willing to die to keep the rest of you from dying..."

"We don't want to see that happen either, Captain..." Peter stated. "How about we just stick together and try and keep each other alive? And while we're at it, if we get our guns on a Bioterrorist, please...let's not do what we normally do. If they don't cooperate, I'm shooting them. Not because I want to. But because I want to see my sister again and I want all of us to get out alive."

"What are you talking about, Pete?" Asked Fatima. "I've seen it a million times. SOU and SOA. Pull guns on a bioterrorist and then they walk away and we don't shoot them? Or they run. For example, that whole thing with the Queen Zenobia. There's no reason Agent Valentine and her partner didn't open fire on Raymond. Even if he was really an ally... which he wasn't. So next time I see anybody we want to arrest I'm shooting them in the knee cap and I'll fill out whatever paperwork it takes. It's better that than killling them before we find out what we need and it's also better than just letting them go. I wasn't with the BSAA when this went down but if that had been me? I wouldn't have killed Jessica or Raymond if it could be helped. I would have shot them and taken them in though."

"I agree with you. And that's always been my way of dealing with things too. You wouldn't know that since this is our first mission together but trust me. Jill saved me in Raccoon City but maybe taht's just one reason it's a good thing guys like you and me weren't cops first. They treat things like it's still the Raccon Police Department. That's the only reason I can think of for it. But I grew up in war. And you? Well at the very least you're not a cop. Still a weird thing for a medic to say though."

"No it isn't. I preserve life when I can. Sometimes that means killing so my team mates and a lot more people survive. But that also means shooting them and fixing their bullet wound later, I'll do that too."

"Understood..." Carlos said. "But we already know Al Mahseeh is infected but he's still aware of everything he does. So your orders are to kill him. It'd be good if we can find out what he's up to but it's not going to do much good interrogating a man with abilities like his. We can just hope whatever it is he has planned needs him to go through with it."

He lead them through the street as the sand storm was clearing up. "We already know he's planning on launching these things world wide. He can obviously control these things so that's how he'd maintain order and control them. So that they can differentiate between his allies that are human and his enemies."

Just then, Carlos heard screaming. He looke up. "That tower..." He heard movement and cursing. In English. He made a hand signal to his team mates. They began to rapel up the side of the building. They tried to do it as silently as possible. The cursing was more faint now but he could still hear it. He made his way to the room with the SIG. Carlos's eyes widened at what he saw. Not a BOW and certainly not a bioterrorist. He saw a naked Caucasian male with blue eyes and sandy colored hair, his haircut a 90's style.

The man was also fully erect. Carlos could smell that there had been sex in the air and he could smell perfume. "A little help here...?" The man asked.

"Yeah...I'll say..." Carlos said. His team mates were in now too. "Oh jesus!" Fatima cried out. Both Peter and Lars burst out laughing as did Suzuki. Carlos said, "Well...as much as I understand your predicament, and have bee there myself..." Carlos grabbed the blanket on the bed and threw it over the man. "All right now hold still..." Carlos had him move the handcuff aside. Carlos fired striking the cuff and freeing him. Suzuki got the man's clothes and tossed them to him.

He got dressed. "I owe you one...thanks. Leon Kennedy. Department of Security Operations."

"Capitán Carlos Oliveria. South American Branch of the BSAA. I'm guessing a woman did this to you. i can smell her," Carlos sniffed the air. "Smells like...DKNY...Urban Violet. She's got good taste."

"If he got laid why is he at attention?"

Carlos chuckled. "My guess is...whoever did this to him...showed him a good time but she left him cuffed. He got pissed off thinking about it and trying to get free but that also means he relived it and thought about it. Bit of advice, Romeo. Next time you do handcuff play, keep a bobby pin around..." Fatima had a hair clip that she forked over. Carlos straightened it out and began to go for Leon's cuff. "Alright...let's see if this is the single lock or double...let's just say the ladies have put me in both..."

He said, "All right...if this was a single lock, you'd straighten anything wire shaped into as close to a key shape as you can. Then you'd insert it into the hole..." He then chuckled at his own accidental pun. "You'd bend it at a 70 degree angle and then put the wire back in the hole and bend the other end. The shape should be a wavy line. Then you'd just slide it into the keyholeslide it into the lock mechanism until it's sliding along the wiggle it until it bends in the direction of the locking arm. Then it should be at a 90 degree angle. The goal is to lift the locking device inside the cuff and twist them in different directions. It'd take several tries. But this is a double lock."

"So I gotta just wear this thing until I can get a welder to get it off?"

"No. Magicians can escape these things in a short amount of time. The spring's pushed in the opposite end of the cuffs travel and takes the serrated bar with it. This makes it impossible to unlock..." Leon's eyes had despair in them and Carlos laughed. "With the single lock method...once the double bar has been unlocked the bar will slide back over and from there you can release the single lock. In order to release the double lock you gotta put the pick in the upper cut out but this time, point the pick in the opposite direction of the cuff's travel direction. Then turn the pick in the direction that a key would turn in order to release the double lock."

Carlos did all of this as he talked but along the way, he said, "It needs more tension and pressure in order to move but if it's done right, the pick will press the bar on the double lock and it should release. Now all we gotta do is take care of the single lock..." He did and with that Leon was free. "I owe you one..." Leon said. "Thanks for the help."

"Hey no problem. I can tell you're a ladies man and hell hath no fury like a woman's scorn...or kink in your case. So ladies men gotta watch each other's backs...' He said with a chuckle and Fatima rolled her eyes.

"So, you've had this done to you too, huh? You learned all of this just from being cuffed by women?"

"No..." Carlos said, the light in his eyes fading a bit. "Not really. Anyway, how did you get up here? I didn't see a rope."

"It's complicated..."

Carlos had an extra one for him. It had belonged to Kruger. "You can use this one. If you're with the DSO...I take it that means you're after Al Mahseeh?"

"How did you know that?" Leon asked. "Is the BSAA after him too?"

Carlos nodded. "Figures..." Leon said. He retrieved his own weapon. "We have to bring him down but we also want to know what he's up to. I got separated from my partner and we lost our guide."

"Well, I'd like to stay and chit chat but I gotta run, Leon. Maybe I'll see ya around out there. i thought I'd help a fellow Bioterrorism fighter but we have to get back to it. Anubis has thousands of insurgent in the area and we gotta be careful. I had twelve people in my team. What you're seeing is what's left of us."

Before Carlos left, Leon handed the hair pin back to Fatima. "Hey, Captain!" Leon called out. "Yeah?"

"You're the same Carlos that worked with Jill Valentine and escaped Raccoon City, right?"

"Now how did you know that?" The South American asked. "I was there too. Supposed to be with the Raccoon Police Department. It was gonna be my first day and it turned out to be my first and last. It looks like we escaped the city the same day. I'm surprised we missed each other. It would have been easier dealing with what we dealt with if we had two extra people."

"Yeah I could say the same. You had Chris Redfield's sister with you, right? Well maybe next time. Not that I want there to be a next time for this kind of thing but the way things are going that's probably what will happen.," He then noticed the dark skinned Fatima had stil blushed as she saw Leon's bulge. "Hey before you go out there you should probably clean the pipes, amigo. The moment after you let out the horchata a man's brain is more like a woman's cause he's not trying to get laid anymore. And you already have one loaded gun," He cracked.

Leon bitterly said, "Yeah...thanks for the observation, Issac Newton."

Before he left, Carlos warned, "You better be careful out there. There's a sand storm."

Helena

Their objective was simple. While Al Mahseeh was the priority, they were more concerned with the Neo umbrella side of things. It was up to Leon Kennedy and Sherry Birkin to go after the man but Helena and Ark's job was slightly different. They wanted to find a man named Saladin Ibn Shah. Shah was an Arab Iraqi man believed to be in his early to mid forties.

He had been in the Repblican Guard and had fought the United States as a young man during the Persian Gulf war. He would still be a loyal member of the Baath party well into 2003 and would defend the city of Baghdad against US forces. He had been loyal to Saddam to the bitter end but he had also lost two of his five children in the bombings in 2003, taking the life of a female child, Aisha, aged 6, and Ibriham, age 2. After the toppling of Sadamm's government, he joined the guerillas where he continued to fight another three years with the AQ leadership in Iraq.

When things got too dangerous for his family, he sent his wife and remaining children to live in Dubai while he would continue to resist the Americans and what he considered the "New American Puppet Regime" to the death if need be. Following the decline of AQ in 2011 with the dead of Bin Laden, he had joined Anubis. The reason they were after him is because despite his continued raids and attrocities on Iraqi state police, soldiers and US soldiers and the belief that he was involved in a number of bombings in Europe even though he had never been there, was because despite his intense hatred of Westenerners, despite his alliance with Anubis just to drive them out, he actually hated Anubis. They disgusted him. Word had it that he hated their genocide of the Yezidis, their forcing of children to be soldiers, the sexual slavery the rape. He had killed a few people when he could to prevent it but sometimes there were just too many who were not like him for him to stop them.

When it came to his comrades he tried to influence those who were like minded to not commit cowardly attrocities such as rape and pedophilia and using children as suicide bombers. He had gotten some to think like him but not many. When it came to Anubis, anotherj major difference he noticed between them and AQ was that AQ had female soldiers while Anubis did not.

Still, despite his own sense of honor, perhaps, due to the fact that he had lost his own children to attrocities by the west, as he saw Anubis's behavior as being no better than the Americans especially since most of their violence was done to fellow middle east, he still was anti American and turning him into an assett would be next to impossible.

He was said to have 75 confirmed kills according to the file the SAS had on him. He had killed 45 American soldiers in his life, 5 Israelis, ten Iraqi soldiers, six Brits, four Australian and five UN soldiers. He was in his picture, shown to be 5'8 with black curly hair and brown eyes a black goatee and beard and there was a look of anger and pain to his eyes.

"Are you sure this is somethin we can handle? He might be too much of a hardcase to deal with..." Helena stated as she readied her Glock 40. Ark Thompson replied, "I don't know but it's our only shot. I've faced longer odds than this..." Helana knew about his survival of Sheena Island and given how many tyrants were thers she agreed it was worse in that regard and he had to also have constant shootout as well. "We've gotta try or else whether or not Mahseeh gets brought to justice or not, we'll still be in the dark about what Anubis is up to with thoe bioweapons. We have to assume that his shipment isn't here. He want it somewhere safe but we won't get any answers from any of his men. The only chance we got is Ibn Shah!"

"You're right..." Helena admitted. "Even if Saladin has convinced some of his men to come more to his way of thinking, even if they start to follow his example more than Mahseeh's, they'd still be loyal enough to the cause to resist anything we tried on them including resistance. They might be willing to work with him and change some things but they won't cooperate with us."

"Exactly..." The older DSO agent responded. "The only chance we have in terms of a man on the inside is to get a man who's already trusted. Obviously, the BSAA couldn't infiltrate them deep enough to make a difference."

They heard the popping of Assault Rifle fire in the distance. Ark readied his M9. Helena kept her Glock 19 ready as well. "You know it's times like this I really wish the DSO would have just given us Assault Rifles. I wouldn't mind having any of the weapons I had in Tall Oaks or Tatchi."

"Tell me about it. I had an M3 back on Sheena island..."

They made their way through the street. "We don't have much in the way of negotiations..." Ark admitted. "We're both the thing he hates most. Especially you being ex 's not something they welcome with open arms around here. And the DSO...they know so little about us that it's enough to distrust us. I just hope you know...you and i have a higher chance of not surviving this than Leon or Sherry. And...I don't want to be 'that guy' but this is a patriarchal country to boot. I mean REALLY patriarchal."

" So i'm a CIA spook to them plus an Amazon warrior, huh? Well you're still a male. If that's what it takes to make the world a little bit safer...it's worth it. Honestly though...maybe...just maybe...I can use the fact that I had a role in Adam's death."

"I don't know if I would bring that up if I were you," Ark advised. "They'll only wonder how it is you're not dead or in custody."

"Why? Do they think only people around here can use biological warfare and remain undetected?"

"Yeah but think about it. You'd have to prove you eve did it and that would already be hard to do and there's the fact that you were pardoned. It's just better off left unsaid. I know you're new to this particular job but you did work with the Agency. So you should know why that's a bad idea...trust me...I've been doing this for ten years and I'm the one that got Leon this job."

"We're not trying to get all of Anubis to lay down their guns. Just Saladin."

"Harper, I'm telling you no. You were a good agent. There's no reason for you have such a rash approach. We are in the middle of a goddamn war zone and Saladin Ibn Shah fucking hates crusaders do you understand me? And that's what we are."

As they moved down an alley as a truck flew past them, Helena asked, "Then why are we even here? Why even bother trying to turn him against Al Mahseeh? He hates rapists cause he has daughters but Al Mahseeh himself hasn't done that that we know of. Even his own men have described him showing restraint he' more into killing than anything but it's the rest of Anubis does all the raping."

"That's what we're here to try and stop...if it can be done..." Helena said. The firefight that Anubis was having with Iraqi police was going on up ahead just a block or two ahead of them. "We have to go into the thick of it."

"Yeah...I know," Thompson replied. "It's a pain in the ass but that's probably where Saladin is. You know I don't care if he doesn't violate women and children and take slaves personally. He's still a piece of shit wanting the west d ead..."

"You have to think about what happened to his family. If it happened to you, you'd feel the same way..." Harper replied.

"Yeah..about the individuals that did it and yeah maybe I'd kill till I got some answers but I wouldn't just want every American dead."

"When you're living in a country that's been invaded by a foreign power for the second time in what, less than ten years what else are you gonna think? Every American he's met has tried to kill him so he doesn't know any different. When would he have ever had a chance to meet anybody that was just trying to do the right thing? We're in their country. i wouldn't even be here myself if the same virus that was used on my sister wasn't being used."

"Yeah but he considers us a faithless country if I could overlook his nationalist views, what he says about us based on his interpretation of an ancient book...I don't eveen know that we should try and turn him so much as torture him until he gives us Al Mahseeh."

"Torture doesn't work. They'll say anything to make the pain stop. All torture does is get you to lie to stop the pain.

"I'm only saying. I dealt with his kind before. The corporate counterpart. Asshole named Vincent it turns out he can;'t be reasoned with we have to take him down."

They spotted four people all of them walked towards the duo bloodied and tattered. Just then, the air got smokey despite the sand blowing everywhere and Helena and Arks visions became obscured. Before long, they noticed four hyenas. They charged at Helena and she fired her Handgun six times striking the first one and the hyena jumped out grabbing her left arm and bit her. Ark backed her up kicking it off her and he fired five times and struck the next one but it jumped up and nipped at Ark's face and his right cheek bled.

He fell over and continued firing letting the pistol rock in his hand. All while this was going on, Helena cried out, "Fuck! We don't have time for this!" Ark growled, "No kidding! A firefight that seems like World War II is just under our noses and we're fighting pooches!"

Helena fired another three rounds striking the Hyena in the face the first struck the thing in the lower jaw the second hit it in the snout and the third hit it in the mouth and killed fired at the next one striking it with the next six rounds and she backed away, reloading. The first round struck the thing in he nose the next hit the chest the third hit to the left of the second the fourth hit the mongrel beast in the left ear and the fifth hit it in the left eeye and the next hit it in the lower jaw. It didn't die, however and it grabbed her hand as she tried to fire. "Fuck!"' She cried kicking it off of her. Ark fired at the last one putting three rounds into its back before it could try and flank Helena. "I thought pooches were fuckin haram around here!" Growled Ark and as one tried to bite his left ankle he clubbed it in the face with the pistol. "Down, fido!" He screamed. He fired the remaining five into its side. He withdrew his combat knife before it could get up and cried out, "Jesus! This thing shouldn't be able to get up after eight shots!"

He plunged the blade into its throat and drove it in there until he slashed through the flesh and fur and muscles blood spraying all over its fur and he forced the blade deeper until he felt its spine after slicing through its windpipe. He staggered back panteing getting to his feet. He got out a green herb dividing it in half and used it on both their wounds. "Jesus...you okay...?"

"Yeah...it just hurts like hell. Too bad we didn't pack some asprin. Hey...since when are hyenas neutered?" She looked and pointed. Just then the hyenas bodies began to bubble and the same kind of smoke from before began to fizz in the air and neither could see what was in front of them. They both coughed and when they looked again, they saw the corpses of the same four men that had transformed into them. "They started out humans...you know I saw some sick shit back in Tall Oaksbut this...? How did they even pull this off?"

"If you're going to ask that question, you might as well ask how they're able to make humans into Lickers for that matter. Or Hunter. I guess this is just a little bit more creative. But they still have signs of mutilation so what the hell gives? Did Anubis do this to them before or after they were infected? Or did they even do it at all?"

Helena sighed. "My theory? Probably Anubis is who you can blame for the cosmetic work there but Neo Umbrella had to be behind the viral side of it. Nothing else makes sense."

"Even though I been at this longer...i gotta say...you're probably more familiar with Neo Umbrella than I am. I've been used to going after the old Umbrella. We need to find whoever Al Mahseeh's supllier is. I'm thinking whoever supplied him is not only Umbrella but is probably from the west. Somewhere modern and industrial."

Meanwhile, they made their way across an alley and took cover behind a pile of garbage as a firefight happenedon the street between UN forces and Anubis. Both sides were taking casualties. Helena got her binnoculars out and watched from whers she was. She and Ark took turns. A man of Turkish descent fell in the streets wounded from a gunshot wound to the left thigh. The man who had shot him was none other than Saladin. Helena knew she could not go out after him however as they needed to isolate him.

The Turkish NATO soldier bled profoundly and Saladin approached him. "Asalaam alaikum..." The Turkish man smiled. Helena realized what he was doing. "Look...he's testing him..."

"How? Doesn't that just mean Peace Be Unto You?" Asked Ark. "Yeah but it's complicated. The Quran says that if two believers on opposite sides of a battle should encounter and one of them greets the other, with that greeting, the soldier that's winning in that battle is supposed to spare a fellow believer."

Though neither Helena and Ark could hear what was being said so Helena tried to get in as close as she could without being seen. Saladin looked at the wounded Turk. "Peace? This country has not known peace for a long time," Several 5.56 rounds flew just barely past his head, enough that he was able to feel the speed of the wind on his cheek. Helena and Ark were both astonished as it did not even faze him. He didn't even flinch! Helena noticed.

"And as for our faith...it as not served me. Allah did not protect my child from you. He did not protect the thousands of innocents the crusaders have dropped bombs on. Even if there is God, he is not worthy of worship. I live only to seek vengance and to end all western occupation of the middle east. And that includes Israel."

"Do you deny our faith? This must not sit well with your brothers in arms."

"They do not know. And it does not matter. And they are not my brothers. I stand alone. They fight you because you are not our faith. I fight you because you are wrong and evil. I have no concern for my own life."

"Then why don't you join the old Taliban? The mujahadeen?" Asked the Turkish American. "They have taken heavy losses and are ot as powerful here as Anubis. Anubis has thirty thousand men and we are well funded."

"You know this is not justice!" The Turk's voice said in a hoarse yell. "You know what these men do to their own country!"

"Yes...they do. And it is ugly. i am helpless to stop it. But you are no better. Americans have done far worse not just to this country but the whole world. So my 'brother of the faith'''peace may be also onto you. But it will not be Allah or Jannah. It will be the solace of death..." He pulled the trigger unloaded his AK-74 into the man's throat. The man gurgled coughing blood and the Nihlist Iraqi stood over him. "If I'm wrong and there is a god the I will see you in hell. Maybe all of us will be in hell but I'd do everything I already have again. We would all go to hell. And I'm fine with going as long as people like you and those you fight for are there too."

The man then noticed Helena and Ark nearby and he fired in their direction and they took cover behind the garbage. "Yalla! Yuhawil al'amrikiuwn an yuhituu bna!"

(Hurry up! The Americans are trying to flank us)

As the two DSO agents retreated, the crack of Assault Rifle fire followed them and soon they were being chased by at least eight insurgents.

Moira

They made their way down the gravel trail. They could have come in from the bridge that was along the Row River trail where they would have taken a right going the other direction but now they were going down the trail and it would be a right onto the farm where as if they had come in from the less used route, it would have been a left they would have taken.

They had to drive past several bodies and Moira saw that they had been zombies. All had died of gunshot wounds. There were a few walking around. The vehicle Tobias was in headed up to the farm. "How well do you know this area?" Moira asked Martin in a whisper as they got out. "Pretty well..." Martin stated. "This leads to trail paths in the Umpqua Forrest."

Leah held her Glock in hand as did Moira have her pistol as she made her way up the driveway of the farm. Just then, they heard an explosion. Several zombies up ahead exploded. Martin flashed his light. "Jesus! That was a land mine!" He told his daughter, "Stay with mom..." He spotted a zombie further up the trail and he and Leah fired dropping two of them. One of them was caught up in the wire fence and Moira spotted a few of them biting into a deceased cow. They heard a horrible scream that wasn't human and Moira saw blood and heard the squish of flesh. She kicked the three off of them and proceeded to bludgeon them with her newly aqquired shotgun, a Remington 870. She cracked the skull of the first and followed up with a stomp. She did the next the same way but also broke its neck and then proceeded to stomp it out.

She went to shoot the next when she saw the horror that they had in addition to the mother cow been biting into a baby calf. "Oh god...!" She cried. Leah came forward and finished the poor baby cow off with a single round but in that moment that Moira had paused the zombie, a man wearing a blue denim jacket and black denim jeans over red flannel grabbed her. The smell was horrible, the stench reeking of rotten flesh, maggots rested in the cheek hole on the things right side and all the flesh on its face was gone. It still tried to sink its teeth into her throat. Moira drove a knee into it and she started to bring her gun up to fire but as she stepped she slipped in the blood and it fell on top of her. "NO!" She cried. Just then, the thing's skull exploded all over her face. There was a zombie further up the trail with its right ankle caught in a bear trap. Then another. And another Two young men, the first a Caucasian with freckles and reddish brown hair standing at 5'8 ran up and stabbed the first one in the back of the skull. Another, presumably the younger brother looking to be in his early to mid twenties and a more boyish look to his features and a skater cut did the same.

The older brother aimed an AR-15 at the newcomers. A man with a Sniper Rifle a .308 had been the one that had narrowly saved Moira's ass. "What the hell you doing on my property?! You're attracting those fuckin things!" Screamed a middle aged man with glasses and shaggy brown hair around the same height as the younger two men. "No, we're not, Ray!" Leah yelled. "The whole town is like this. We just came from there."

"Which one of you is Sean and Evan?" Asked Moira. "We need your help. We're with a group of survivors. We don't stand a chance of getting out of this place, any of us unless we work together."

"I aint going anywhere!" Ray stated. "None of us are. This is our home."

"Don't be an idiot, Ray. The police and the military can take the city back. There's no point in protecting your farm if you're not alive to return to it."

"Martin, don't you get all militant on me. You took a job out here instead of the reservation. So don't talk to me about protecting land."

"My ancestors lived here long before your family or this farm were here and our land is far beyond any reservation. If anything I'm being more traditional working outside of it."

"Yeah? Then why don't you go work in Portland with all the anti Gun liberals?!" Ray demanded. "Because, you right wing moron. One, I'm independent. When I vote I vote for the best man regardless of party. I'm not a partisan tool. Two, I don't like the big cities. The last time I did live in Portland was the 90's. Maybe if I'd lived there nowadays andnt then when it was full of crime, I might have stayed but as it happens I like the countryside. I like nature. I know you do too."

"Well well...look at us...a redneck and a redskin putting our differences aside...because of zombies..."

'

"Hey Ray. You mind not using that word around my daughter?"

"Oh my god, are you seriously that ignorant you hillbilly fuck?" Moira growled. "No...I'm not..." Stated Ray. "Just politically incorrect and from a different time. You're all covered in blood. Cow and human. Looking all painted up. Shouldn't it be you in the police uniform and Martin looking that way?"

Moira growled, "Oh my god, dude are you fucking retarded...?" Moira cried. "Relax, potty mouth. Me and Martin go back to college. We're old drinking buddies. You're kinda cute. Despite the lesbian haircut."

"Again, we've got a child RIGHT HERE..." Stated Leah.

"Look, miss, from the way things are going...hearing a few curse words are the least of that child's problems. No offense to you though. I know you're good people."

Martin smiled. "Yeah...Ray was a dumb jock then and now he's a dumb farmer now. And no offense taken. Sorry about your girl..."

"What are you talking about, Marty? My wife? She's been gone for eight years."

The Warm Springs Tribal member smiled saying, "Talking about the one with multiple tits, you pink bastard. I guess you won't be pushing her through the fence anymore."

Moira chuckled at Martin's redneck and beastiality joke. "Hey! I take offense to that. I don't push my girls through the fence. I'm a goat man...better leverage with the horns..." He said with a grin. This got a laugh out of his two sons. Sean and Evan introduced themselves to Moira. "Remarks about my hair aside, thanks for helping me. We...saw the zombies got some of your...cows."

Ray had a sad look to his face. "You know...when these two went off to the Air Force...the animals they kept me company. They're like family too ya know?"

Evan ran back to the cows and then came back. "I'm sorry...daddy.. Mae...they got her..."

"Goddamn it!" Ray cursed. "Ya'll might as well come inside. We can talk about what it is you're all doing here."

He got down on one knee and said to their daughter, "Hey sweetheart, you like horses?" She nodded. "Maybe if there's time, I'll let you ride one of them."

They fed all of them putting fish and mashed potatoes on the table. "So the whole church is gone, huh? That's a shame. I haven't had faith myself in a long time but...that's a lot of people gone. I still don't know hat it is ya'll want from my boys."

"There;s a plane at the airfield. We can get some of us out of town. Even if takes a little bit at a time. We have to get them out. It's better than nothing."

"So let me see if I understand right...you want to use my sons...the only part of my Rita I got left to risk themselves by going off this farm?"

"Be realistic, Ray. You can't stay on this farm forever."

"Look..." Said Sean. "I'm willing to help. But how do we know that what's happening here aint happening all over the country? You know what we saw the last time me and Evan were over by the dirt bike tracks? We had to shoot some green reptile looking things...I never saw anything like it before..."

"And the dogs..." Evan added. "They were bitten. They had pieces of their jaw missing but they came at us. Tore up our friends Willie and Mavis to pieces. Me and Sean barely got out of there alive..."

"The dirt bike tracks are a way up the road. How did you get back here?"

"Had no choice but to take those..." He pointed to a dirt bike and a quad bike. "That was theirs..." Sean nodded and said, "There's a ton of em up the road but luckily they haven't made their way down here in a large crowd. At least not yet."

"They have in town..." Leah stated. "What do you want to about it?" Asked Ray. "Even in a small town like this, the downtown area is bad for a situation like this. We don't need help from the cops. Not that you can even help yourselves. There's not even thirty people on your police force."

"Believe me, NOBODY is more pissed about that than me... " Martin said. "We thought it would be better that we knew everybody. But now...now nothing will ever be the same. Even if they do take the city back."

Moira turned to Ray. "I know you think it's better to not rely on people. i got stranded in an island off the coast of Russia and I knew a guy like you. But he lost his daughter. Trust me...you need to cooperate with people."

"I aint losing my sons so you can put that outta your mind. But they're grown...mostly they just live with me to help me take care of the farm. I used to have people for it but they got infected. As far as if they're willing to help you, thats up to them."

"I'm not leaving dad here alone..." Sean vowed.

"I'll help. If it;s the only chance they have of getting outta town alive it's my duty," Evan said. "I joined to serve the country, dad. Our enemies brought hellfire by plane in Manhattan, New York. Right or wrong I wanted to do the same with my plane. And I did. But that was I don't help people out here at home...it was all for nothing. This is worse than anything we've ever seen."

"If you want to risk your life for strangers, that's on you. This is family. I'm staying here..." Declared Sean. Ray also sighed and told Martin, "It looks like Evan's going with them. You and your family are welcome to stay the night if you'd like. While we wait for em. I understand you wanting to get outta town. Maybe you want to go to Warm Springs from here...or Portland. Me...this farm is all I have.I can get more animals but...Ive put my blood sweat and tears into this farm. I get what you mean by the land being sacred. You can breathe out here...in a way you can't in the city. Oh sure...we miss having a good burger and fries now and then and sometimes we don't wanna make it ourselves. Sometimes we want to go to the theater and see a movie. But once that's done, it's back to the farm. Country living is better for the soul and body."

"I've worked on farms like this before," Martin said. "Before I became a cop. So I know what you say is right. But I gotta say...you're the first farmer I've ever seen walking around in a brown suit jacket all the time and a tie. It's very city looking of you..." He said with a chuckle and Ray also laughed. "Yeah well...never really liked the cowboy look. Suits existed long before big cities. Just cause we farm doesn't mean we can't look good now does it?"

Moira and Evan meanwhile, got into Evan's dark gray '99 Dodge. He handed her a new shotgun and some shells for it. "If we're going into town...might as well have that..." He said. As they drove he asked, "So what brings you to Cottage Grove? You obviously aint from around here."

"I'm from Raccoon City originally..." She admitted. He got a look on his face and she chuckled. "But we got out before the city went up in smoke obviously..."

"Oh..." He said. "You don't really sound like you're from the Midwest...but then I guess that was a long time ago. I was about ten when that happened..." Evan stated. "Still, sorry to hear that."

Moira joked, "It's okay. I haven't been back there since '98..."

He laughed at that as he drove past a heard of zombies who lunged at the vehicle but were too slow to get at it. "You're pretty funny. Hey...maybe when this is over what do you say I show you around some time? Cottage Grove aint all boring."

"Are you asking me on a date?" She asked. "Maybe. I mean I could show you around my world...but I am Ex Air Force too so if you ever wanted to travel anywhere, we could."

"Whoa slow down there...i haven't said yes..."

"You haven't said no either..."

"It's a...maybe."

"Isn't maybe just a polite way of saying no?"

"Maybe..." She replied. She then laughed. "I'm fucking with you dude. Anyway when I say maybe it really means maybe. Maybe a lot of people don't mean what they say but I never had that problem. if i wanted to say no i'd just say no. It's a maybe because we don't know how all this is going to turn out."

Just then they screeched to a stop wen they saw a large herd of what had to be at least a hundred zombies blocking them. "Shit! We have to turn around!" Evan did exactly that but Moira's heart skipped a beat when she saw that there was twenty zombies just behind them. "You've gotta be fucking kidding me!" She cried. Evan told her, "Hold on...I'm turning back!" He ran over one of the zombies and it cracked the windshield as it rolled off. "Fuck!" He cried but he smashed out the rest of it as it rolled off and Moira helped. "Shit..." He then realized. "We can't drive back to the farm. We'd just lead them back there!"

Just then, they saw an Apache helicopter flying above. "What he hell? About time!" He cried out. The chopper sent missles down towards the road and the deafening blast was so loud it hurt Moira's ears and she was almost positive she would never hear a thing again. Evan swerved crashing into the barbed wire fence and the car got through it and rolled and Moira's whole world was spinnin, spinning, spinning, and she couldn't hear and she couldn't see...and she was getting dizzy.

Finally the car stopped rolling. She got out weakly her head bleeding crawling out. Evan was out cold but she checked his pulse and saw he was alive. She punchd through the air bag and she had to cut him from his seat belt. She still could not hear a thing, everything was ringing and as she looked toward the road it looked like at least fifty of those zombies had been blown up. She looked and saw the chopper fire Machine Guns down onto the twenty man crowd of the zombies as they lurched down the street that was their farm on one side and the begginning of the residential neighborhood just off Bigalow Way on the other side. The crowd of zombies rattled and shook as blood was everywhere being lit up in the bright spot light and pieces of internal organs flew from the inards of the zombies gaping and ghastly entrance and exit wounds.

"Hey...help...!" Moira tried to cry out but she was too weak and she didn't know why she thouht they would hear her anyway. The helicopter did another flythrough and they mowed down another twenty zombies. Moira was having a hard time trying to carry the unconscious Evan and she was not more than 5 feet from the car. As the chopper turned around and was chopping through another line of zombies and Moira was limping holding up Evan with all tha remained of her strength trying to get clear of the vehicle, ten, fiften feet, she realized the chopper was coming for them. No...at them. It fired a barrage at the car and almost hit them and she threw herself and him to the ground and the vehicle exploded as the rounds easily went through the gas tank. Even if the car were not shot in the gas tank and was not wrecked, the rounds fried the engine. The explosion mostly did not harm them except that it did send them both flying.

Moira still could not hear anything but ringing and it was so loud seemingly as loud as the blast had been and she hated it. She collapsed, tired and weak and she welcomed unconsciousness if it meant the ringing would stop. The last thing she did see in the distance, however, was the muzzles flashes in the distance towads where Evan's father and brother as well as Martin and his family were. She could see that they were shooting it out with more zombies coming from the driveway and saw the explosion of the mines going off as several stumbled across them.

It was starting to rain and though she wanted to get up and go help them, to get Evan to safety, her fatigue made her realize it was too late to try and stay conscious. She did not expect she would ever wake up again on the off chance that the chopper missed a few zombies and they were to stagger upon Moira and Evan's unsuspeting unconscius bodies. Moira's last thought as gravity pulled her down was that she hope that if they did kill her, she would be too out of it to feel it and God willing, should she reanimate, that Martin, or even Claire if she made it back here, would put a bullet in her.

Jake

Sherry had insisted on coming with him back to Malak''s house. He was apprehensive about this at first but then decided it would probably be a good Hassan decided to give him any shit again, he wanted backup but he doubted the militant Yazidi man would be thrilled to see another westerner. They knocked on the door, Sherry holding the sack of fruits and veggies they had recollected from nearby stands after getting out of the primary blast area.

Hassan opened the door again with the barrel of the Rifle out again and he had a look of concern on his face but he was nowhere near as hostile as before. It seemed, the iraqi man was tired. He'd been looking after his nephew and trying to keep the boy's mother alive and trying to protect the household from inurgents."Who is this?" He demanded looking at Sherry.

"This is Sherry Birkin with the Division of Security Operations. They're like the BSAA but they're moe American than UN based..."

"I see...are you as useless as the CIA?"

"i'm not CIA. I was with Jake Muller in China...where a situation like this happened.

"Ah wait...now i remember where I heard your name before. Your name was in the newspapers. Miracle boy, they called you. Used your blood to try and find a cure."

They got Hassan and his mother some food to try and make her feel better. After they ate, the woman had her son lay next to her and she held him straddling his hair and she sang softly to him in their language.

Jake observed Hassan's face. "You look tired."

"I haven't slept in two days. but I can't now. Not while those men and those creatures are out there."

"You may want to evacuate anyway. Those things can get in here. The only reason they haven't yet is don't want to be trapped in a house with limited exits when they start coming from all sides..." Sherry warned.

"I'm not running away from this country. I don't want to see them do it either. But they might have to. Too many Yazidi are already leaving our homes to go live in the west. I would rather die than do jihadists don't scare me. But I am a warrior as was Malak's father. We...don't see any future for ourselves in the west. But Malak is too young to be a soldier. No...I was born here and I will die here. The Christian missionaries, the Islamic caliphate, hey won't drive me out."

"But isn't Hassan an Arabic name?" Asked Sherry. "So? Even though we were never meant to outmary with other groups...many have. But Hassan is a pre Islamic is what angers me the most about these monsters. They kill all things they deem Satanic. Yet their own mythology is full of pre Islamic pagan rituals. The Ka'abaa, the jinn,even the name of Allah. Was just one of many Meccan gods. They are ignorant of their own book and their own pre Islamic history. They call the time before Muhammad's 'revelation' the time of ignorance. What a farce. Before is when the middle east thrived and contributed great science and mathematics to the world. We are in the dark ages."

"They're not all insurgents..." Sherry said. "And I'm not from here so I shouldn't have to tell you that."

"Don't try your...western American tolerance speech here. All those westerner post 9/11 that defend Islam...have no idea what it is like to live in a theocracy that has declared jihad on your very way of life! Christians, Muslims and Jews have been at each other's throats for over a thousand year. This I now. This I understand. But our ways predates them and they try to destroy us! We stayed out of their war. And when the United States invaded...we defended the country with the Republican Guard. The same as anybody else. Arab, Kurd, Yazidi we all did. And you don't have to look at just what they have done to us here...in Iraq and Syria. Look at what they have done to the Zoroastrians of Iran...or the Buddhists of Afghanistan!"

"There are people where I come from that would say that Anubis doesn't represent their faith. I had a co worker say that they even prayed to the west instead of the east so that means they can't be Islamic..."

"Your co worker is a fool. You don't pray to the east if you are east of Mecca. If you are east of it you pray west. And if they're not true Muslims, then who is? Muhammad himself annihalated pagans under the pretense that we were persecuting him. He claimed we censored his teachings in Mecca but that was a lie. He was tolerated until he started condemning the other gods that the Meccans worshipped as false idols. It's funny how Islamic apologists, whether moderate or extremist never tell that part of the story. He was involved in 28 military campaigns."

He then laughed. "That's the irony of Wester Imperialism. You and most of your country know that yes...the average Muslim does not commit acts of violence like this. Even if you believe that invading a soverign nation is justified to get a few terrorists. But even among yourselves even those who critique Islam they know there are some on their side fighting in the US military. Still...I live in a majority Islamic country and you don't. We've had to live next to these lunatics for over one thousand years. So while westeners weep about either Kurds being wiped out by the Republican Guard or or a mosue getting hit by a US drone...because it violates their rights...do yu ever once stop to think of how those worshippers in the mosque do the same to my people?"

"I'm confused as to where you stand. Are you for the invasion or against it?"

"I fought in the Republican Guard against you people. What do you think? You Americans demonize Saddamm for what he did to Kurds but the Kurds have been helping Islamists kill us for a long time. We used to be one with the Kurds but they forsake the old ways for Islam. So while Americans paint this as an anti Kurd ethnic cleansing do you ever stop to think maybe Saddamm who did not hate the Yazidi was helping curb Kurdish radicalism? That he had a more secular view?"

"That would be guillable," Sherry replied. "He killed a lot of Yezidis because they were Kurds."

"I don't deny he was a Devil. But he did this because of ethnicity, not religion and because we speak the same language, I can understand his confusion. He knows we are patriots. We ought aginst Iran."

They heard a large explosion outside. "Do you really want Malak to stay behind and be exposed to this every day?"

"He already has. And yes it's true this county is rough. But what are we supposed to do? Just fly away like you people? There was a time when you were just English citizens and you fled.. Instead of fighting the monarchy there you ran to America and did it from there. So sure the colonists no longer were under the King but they just ended up under new corrupt system and nothing changed in England. Many Iraqis run away too. Good men and women. But if all those who could rebuild our nation leave, what hope does this country have?"

"Thats a lot of burden to put on a child."

"Sherry...it doesn't matter...listen...whether you stay in the country or move you'll need to get out of here eventually. It's just not realistic to think you can hold off this many people."

Hassan thought a moment glaring at both but then looked at Malak and his mother. "You know why my brother named him Malak? After Malak Taus. Our peacock god. Christians and Muslims they call us Satan worshippers even if this is true, what harm have we done physically?" Jake asked him, "What do you want to do, Hassan? We need a game plan."

He looked at his sister in law and nephew with a look of compassion. "She can maybe still get better. The Shinjaar Mountains are not safe but they are safer than here...there are 50,000 Yezidis up there hiding out from Anubis. Refugees displaced...many are starving...but at least some are armed and shoot Anubis when they try and come there. They have a better chance of surviving there still, than here. I can only hope the west will evacuate them. i do not wish to leave my country i will die here but they...they have a chance to leave and survive and if they want to, they can come back some day..." He looked at Sherry and Jake. "Help me get them to the mountains and i will help you to the best of my ability with whatever you need to do here."

Barry

"Hang on!" Barry called out to his two team mates as they made it back to the blast point with the BOW hot on their trail. "I got you covered!" He fired off his entire magazine into the female BOW striking it with six rounds in the head and the rest into its body. There was another one coming straight at Coughlin and it raked into his back and he cried out driving his combat knife back into the thing's left eye as he bled and he fell down to avoid her frenzied slashes but he didn't seem to believe he had much time left.

Elias fired five shots into her, stopping it in its tracks with chest shots. He aimed four more at the head. It went down but was not dead. Coughlin plunged his combat knife into the other eye blinding it and then proceeded to keep stabbing moving behind its head as it slashed its claws out. Thurston grabbed one of her limbs midair and brought an ax kick down on it causing a compound fracture and it shrieked but the Brit did not stop even though its screams had the sme impact as a sonic cannon. He did the same to its other arm and Coughlin in apanic plunged his blade into her throat trying to hack away at the vocal cords. Luckily, this worked and it let out only a gurle as he continued his own frenzy several slashes after it stopped moving. Thurston, ears bloodied and all, pulled him off of the corpse. "I think she's dead now. Relax..."

"Fuck...how can I relax when this...jesus...you know...there's BOW's...and there's demons straight from fuckin hell and that's what that was!"

"Come off it, you can't really believe that. We've got scientific evidence of all these , Cereberus...the Africans and Greeks were right about their myths...just not in the way they thought. But demons from hell? No, mate. This is the Black Annis. it used to give me nightmares hearing about the fucking things. Then I was a teenager and I said it's not real. Not demons, Satan, and not Black Annis. But somebody went and made her real. So I don't plan on sleeping for a few days."

"You probably won't anyway..." Agent Okwari said. "I'd say if we all live through this we sleep maybe four days from now. Or four days from whenever our mission ends. Truth be told, I haven't slept in a day and a half. Thats what we prepared fr. And after seeing shit like this you won't want to but your body gets exausted so we'll all probably sleep for 20 hours or so. And yeah. All 2 of those hours will be full of this nightmarish know my people believe dreams are untold prophecies just as much as unfufilled desires."

"So what are you saying? You dreamed of this?" Asked Barry. "You were abut what, six when Raccoon happened? If you were dreaming about this, you must have snuck Georg Romero movies. For me that was reality by July. I may not have dreamed about fighting these things before hand but I sure as hell did after...it's just like veterans from Vietnam...only in some ways...a lot of ways...worse."

"They went from dreams to memories. I used to dream I was fighting things like these but I thought it was from movies. I always thought it was just that. I never thought I'd ever be doing it...I always dreamed...that i'm running from a whole pack of them. Maybe a dozen or so. Always I got a handgun. And im firing at them and climbing up a ladder. I'm always trying to get to the top...then kick it down befoe they get up there because somehow they're always smart enough to get up there. I haven't had that dream in a long time but i never remembered just how they got up after me. Maybe the climbed on top of meach other..."

"Like in World War Z?" Kiya asked. "I guess so.." He replied.

"You ever seen Night Of The Living Dead? I'm talking 1968."

"Yeah. Radiation or something. No survivors, right?"

"Yea you think the brother will survive. But then he just gets shot at the end..."

"Yeah that happens a lot..." Elias admitted even though he often had trouble trusting those that were not Native American based on his own experiences with racism especially Caucasians and African Americans,, he could concede that the blacks getting killed in films was an overplayed horror trope. "What about the woman? You're not a man. We've seen horrors all the time where it's a woman...Halle Berry in Gothika..Sanaa Lathan in Alien Versus Predator. Think you got a better chance than Duane? Do you think the women in general got a better chance of coming outta this?"

"Only time will tell..." She said. Coughlin held out his hand, "Look...I was just kidding before...i owe you my life as well as Thurston and the captain but we gotta work together if we're gnna get outta this. I apologize."

"I don't shake my thing. Not my custom. But duely noted. Truth is...I don't give a damn about you but by helping you i help me and Kateri survive. It may not be the nice response but its good enough especially if it keeps you and me alive."

Wilson sadly stated, "We already lost too many...I don't want anymore of us to die either."

As Elias added the finising touches to his homemade explosve, Dayva spke up. "Captain...i don't want to be the one that has to bring this up. But I have to address the elephant in the room. Natalia..."

"There has to be a way to help her..." Barry stated. "There's been anti viruses fo most of these viruses. There has to be a way to get Alex out of her head..."

"Look, I'm not thrilled about the idea of going against a kid either..." Kateri stated. "But you may have to deal with the possibility that it might not be possible to help her. If that's true, Natalia would want you to end her life rather than have herself be a puppet to hurt people."

"Didn't you hear what i just said? I'm not giving up on her. I'm glad we can all stop fighting and we're working together. I may not be cut out for leading a team but i sure as shit am not signing off on that.. If any of you tries to kill her...I'll shoot you. That's a promise."

"Captain..." Elias said. "What, Okwari?" Barry demanded. "You said that there's anti viruses and that there has been for most of the outbreaks that have happened. The one with Raccoon City with Sherry Birkin, Jill Valentine, what happened to that guy Leon kennedy in Europe...plus Jake Muller in China."

"So?"

"But before there was or before any of you knew that...back at the mansion you just were all trying to survive. You didn't know about any cure. For all you knew if you got bitten or anything you were fucked. You were walking blind on Intel. You guys found some things out at the end but that didn't matter. It wasn't until Leon Kennedy and Claire got to Racccoon and even that same day Jill was there dealing with Nemesis. They dealt with the G virus and the T virus. And they found cures for Sherry and Jill. Leon, he found a cure in Spain. And Jake Muller with his blood. But a lot of that research we all discovered after you left the island...we knew about what the virus was but it's been three years and we still don't have a cure for the T Phobos. Every time there was an anti virus it just so happened that Umbrella had created one. They had a contingency plan in case any of their own got infected. But Alex Wesker didn't leave behind anything like that."

"What's your point?"

"My point is this is the Spencer Mansion all over again, man. We got shit for intel. We got nothing for a cure. Maybe Alex did put herself into Natalia's body. And maybe that was her plan all along. Even the suicide right? But she never wanted a cure for any of this. And didn't you notice that at the mansion, in the Raccoon Police Department, even that water treatment plant Jill was in, Rockfort Island, Antarctica, Europe, Kijuju, Lashiang, there was always a lab but there's not here. This is just an international airport. So hether it was Nei Umbrella or the Family we don't know but wherever they keep their viral stockpiles it aint here. So even if there was a cure for Natalia, we're nowhere near a lab. This is Terra Save's alley...'"

Thurston agreed. "And if you don't see that within the context of the BSAA, then think back to when you were a constable, yeah? Or even with the Air Force. As a military man you were familiar with situation that were fucked up beyond all recognition long before you joined the RCPD. Its the same principals back then as now. You were a policeman. And a pilot. Soldiers are meant to follow orders rather than ask questions. That's not a dig at soldiers, either,"

He showed his left forearm and he had a tattoo in Latin of the phrase Qui audet adipiscitur.

"I already know you were with the SAS, Thurston," Barry stated. "So what? I was AFSOC. you don't see me bragging about it."

"it's not bragging you dullard. it means who dares wins. It's our fucking motto. In any case, even if it is a suicide mission, I'm willing to help you with your daughter. But we still need to get to the mall. There's a high probability that Natalia has gone there."

"Listen up!" Barry barked."We're gonna get out of here as soon as Elias is ready. And I'll even come with you. Chances are, Alex is going to the mall anyway. If she's inside Natalia's mind, which she is, she'd want to go to the other major place the BSAA were deployed.I have new orders for all of you. My word still stands that if any of you try and shoot her, I'll shoot you. But you are all clear to use whatever force it takes to take her alive. Natalia is to be captured, not killed, understand?"

"You want us to capture her?" Emily asked, seemingly confused. "What good would interrogating a Wesker do?"

"We won't be. She'lll be detained at the nearest lab we can get her to that's equipped to dealing with this sort of thing. I won't prtend to know the science behind how Alex transferred her mind into Natalia's but it has to be something like a virus. I'm not saying it'll be easy to get her out of Natalia's mind but it'll be easier to flush Alex out than it would have been getting Alex in. We just have to buy them time."

Elias told Barry, "Ready to go, Captain...whenever you are..."

"Everybody get clear!' He lit the alcohol trail and that led to the booze soaked fuse and this finally made its way to the hordes of sugar he had at the blast point. Barry was not sure it would work but they all covered their ears. Sure enough, however, it did explode. The blast was deafening and sent glass finally had a way out. The BSAA members wasted no time making their way over the flames. Barry chuckled looking at the flames as they got outside. "Kid, I could kiss ya."

"You may have rank but you better not," Warned Agent Okwari despite the grin on his own face, breaking his stoicism for once. They made their way to the parking lot of the airport. "All right...now we gotta get to the Southcenter mall, pronto!" Barry announced and they got to work looking for vehicles and deciding which would be best to take and they knew they would need to take more than one.

Kiya scoffed as she walked past a dark red Accord. "With all the bullshit dealing with Airport Parking all these years and how much they charge you...this feels like poetic justice. Really, all the bullshit airports in general make you put up with. I just hope one of these cars belongs to a TSA agent."

"It probably doesn't. For all the crap those glorified hall monitors put people through post 9/11, they can't afford a damn car," Jackson stated. The east African agent shrugged. "A girl can dream, can't she?"

Claire

She had gotten the things Vasily had needed to repair the plane. Now she and billy were making their way through the farm. They cut around what had to be up to 70 made their way down the gravel driveway and turned right when they got to the driveway going to the heard several explosions up ahead and several zombies went sky high. "Mines!" Billy warned. "We better get out and go on foot. We can make it past them..."

Claire nodded and said, "I hear gunshots...that must be Moira..." They ran up and saw Moira laying on the ground next to a younger white male and the farmer plus Martin and Leah and the farmer's son were firing at the called out to them but they didn't seem to hear them. The farmer and Martin ran to the fields as did Leah and her daughter. It was raining heavily and Claire and Billy began to assist as best as they could. Martin and Leah were concerned with keeping themselves between their daughter and the zombies and the farmer as trying to get to his downed son who was closer to him than Moira was, who as it turned out had seven zombies making their way towards her. Claire was not sure if she was dead or just out cold. She hoped it was the latter but she had to try and get to her on time. She fired rapidly aiming headshots at the zombies dropping three in a row and Billy did his best to fire at the other four. He managedto send three crashing to the ground in the muddy soil.

A scarecrow in the cornfield loomed over the field of corpses almost as if watching them like the Grim Reaper must have been on the battle of Gettysburg or Stalinrad or Normandy or Little Bighorn or even the Battle Of The Boyne. Just as those had all been days of so many killed, this too was and it was as though death could only stand back and watch the carnage unfold and would not begin to reap souls until the slaughter had finished. The rain took its hat off and the way the dim light looked it almost looked like that of a skulll.

Meanwhile, as they tried to get in closer, Claire saw that Martin and even the farmer and his son had run out of bullets and they were resorting to farm tools to defend their nearby family. Martin had a pitchfork, Leah had a shovel and the farmer and his son both had plows all of which were they swinging at the encircling carriers. Billy reloaded and tried to pick off as many of them from behind as he could. However, due to his own distraction, he was of no help to Claire when she saw that the zombie both he and she had shot, a total of six times in the torso and once in the face was still alive, crawling and wounded but alive. Claire also looked back to see that Tobias Warner had arrived behind them and he was firing at the zombies but he was firing at the zombies further down the driveway so that when needed they would all have a clear path to their vehicles.

Claire saw Moira stir a bit, possibly coming out of unconsciousness and perhaps shivering from the rain bombarding her skin. The zombie was five feet from Moira's face and closing in while Claire was ten feet from it. Claire aimed and pulled the trigger only to hear the dry click. Shit! She thought realizing she forgot to reload in all the panic. There was no time to call out to Billy for help either. Claire dove for the thing tackling it from behind just as it was inches from Moira.

Please, don't let me be too late!

---

Scarecrow on a wooden cross

Blackbird in the barn

Four hundred empty acres that used to be my farm

I grew up like my daddy did

My grandpa cleared this land

When I was five, I walked the fence while grandpa held my hand

Rain on the scarecrow

Blood on the plow

This land fed a nation

This land made me proud

And son, I'm just sorry there's no legacy for you now

Rain on the scarecrow

Blood on the plow

Rain on the scarecrow

Blood on the plow

The crops we grew last summer weren't enough to pay the loans

Couldn't buy the seed to plant this spring and the Farmers Bank foreclosed

Called my old friend Schepman up to auction off the land

He said, "John it's just my job and I hope you understand"

Hey, calling it your job, ol' hoss, sure don't make it right

But if you want me to, I'll say a prayer for your soul tonight

And Grandma's on the front porch swing with a Bible in her hand

Sometimes I hear her singing "Take me to the Promised Land"

When you take away a man's dignity, he can't work his fields and cows

There'll be blood on the scarecrow

Blood on the plow

Blood on the scarecrow

Blood on the plow

Well, there's ninety-seven crosses planted in the courthouse yard

Ninety-seven families who lost ninety-seven farms

I think about my grandpa and my neighbors and my name

And some nights I feel like dyin', like that scarecrow in the rain

Rain on the scarecrow

Blood on the plow

This land fed a nation

This land made me proud

And son, I'm just sorry they're just memories for you now

Rain on the scarecrow

Blood on the plow

Rain on the scarecrow

Blood on the plow

Rain on the scarecrow

Blood on the plow

This land fed a nation

This land made me proud

And son, I'm just sorry they're just memories for you now

Rain on the scarecrow

Blood on the plow

Rain on the scarecrow

Blood on the plow

---

That's it for this chapter. I meant to have this be longer but I can always save the parts with Chris and Jill and Sheva and Josh and Rebecca for next chapter this chapter was a pretty decent length.

As for the title song that's John Mellencamps Rain On The Scarecrow. It's just not as well known of a song as Jack & Diane but I like it and it fits with what happened all though I admit the stuff I wrote with the looming scarecrow, the rainstorm, the running out of ammo to have to use farm tools to hold off zombies, I'm not sure if that makes me a better writer or a worse writer that i wrote a scene to fit a song more rather than just having the song fit the scene. What I'm saying is i wrote that scene because of the song but also the song fits perfectly with the farm setting so it kind of feeds off each other.

As far as Hassan's views as a Yezidi thats again based off an actual person of that group because you see in the west even though many are suspiscious of Muslims even the most right wing idiot knows that every Muslim is not an extremist so there's a level of political correctness with living in the west where as somebody straight from Iraq that is not a Muslim or even a minority Christian but is insteadd part of a dying pagan culture and religion, if they lived to tell the tale of what happened many are like fuck them fuck them straight in their neck. Honestly, they have more right to be mad at Islam than the uS does over 9/11. I'm not a fan of monotheism of any kind but hel those are the real victims of jihadis over there. If none of you knows what I'm talking about and this story didn't arouse curiosity about it, look up Yezidi and ISIS together. You'll see what I mean.

Asfar as Helena I wanted to finally have her perspective on the mission and with this guy they're looking for Saladin, he's a guy who was not a radical before but was pushed to be by US bombings and right now he's actually lost his faith but he still wants to drive all westerners out. The only chance Helena and Ark have of getting him on their side is indeed his own distaste for BOW's as well as the raping and enslavin tactics of Anubis (ISIS) he's really more AQ than Anubs anyway to tell you the truth and obviously former Republican Guard but I'm just saying.

As far as Carlos findin Leon handcuffed I thought that would be the funniest outcome at least to me it is. This isn't a parody fanfiction but there is occasional humor. And that reminds me, to that bitch who reviewed my jill sandwich and my other parody story saying you're not interested or tellin me "This is not how dialogue is written" What do you know? All you have is bible verses on your profile/ And if you want an example of how things are NOT supposed to be written why don't you read the bible and look at the glaring contradictions in it.

like Mark 15:25. Jesus was crucified at the third hour. (9AM)

YET John 19:14-16 says Jesus was crucified after the sixth hour (Noon)

Ephesians 2:8-9 You are saved by grace through faith and not work. James 2:17-26 You are saved by works and not faith alone.. So if you're going to sit there and explain to me how the english language and dialogue is written maybe try not taking a book written by a bunch of stone age schizophrenic goat farmers as the word of God yourself.

To the rest of you, thanks as usual for the support i don't mind critique but if you dislike something or find something bad then say it don't just say "I'm not interested"

I am so on board with Lady Frot regarding flamers it's not even funny.

Anyway, next chapter Barry and co. converge on the mall. But is it possible to save natalia? Also you know what i kind of wonder I don't get why the BSAA and Terra Save don't just merge. Clearly they need each other they might as well.

Anyway until next time. Enjoy your weak, friends.