2 weeks later…

Buffy Summers, Umbrella Corporation's newest employee, entered the Security Department via a glass door, located on the first floor of the building. She checked out the room that was to be her new workplace. One whole side of the wall, opposite the door where she had entered, was covered with security monitors, which appeared to be surveying every section of the building. Four men and one woman, all dressed in the same security uniform, one light-blue sleeve emblazoned with the Umbrella logo, were seated at the long desk that was in front of the monitors. Buffy herself was dressed in the same thankfully-not-bright-orange uniform. In the middle of the room was a large desk, where another man in uniform sat. The name placard on his desk indicated that this was the man she sought. She approached him, smiling.

"Mr. Pritchett? Hi, I'm Buffy Summers. I'm your new security assistant."

Mr. Pritchett, Chief of Security for the Sunnydale branch of the Umbrella Corporation, stood up, smiled, and shook Buffy's hand. He was 46 years old, a bit pudgy, and with an affable, forgettable face. "Ah, yes. Miss Summers. Good to meet you." He looked at her for a moment. "Well, you are a tiny thing, aren't you. Not the usual type we get working in here. What's your experience with security, if you don't mind my asking?"

Battling the forces of darkness for the last seven years wasn't exactly something you could put on your resume, but Buffy had been able to fudge a bit about her experience, with the help of glowing references from Giles and Anya. Plus, she had passed her defense skills test with flying colors, so she had been hired pretty quickly.

Buffy smiled cheerily at her supervisor. "I worked a, uh, private security job for a local shop for the past couple years, and I've taken a lot of self-defense and martial arts classes. I've never worked for a large company as a security assistant, but I'm pretty good with my hands, and I have… people skills." Buffy mentally cringed. How she had grown to loathe that phrase. "Don't worry, Mr. Pritchett, I'll be able to handle myself in tense situations, and emergencies, and whatever you throw at me."

"Well, Miss Summers, I'm glad to hear that. See, security isn't just throwing angry people out the front door, like you see in movies. That's only a small part of the job. Ninety percent of a security detail is observation. Watching for suspicious activities, making sure everyone follows the rules, that sort of thing. Now, here at Umbrella, we do get more activity that your average company since this is a research facility. At the facility I used to work at back east, we'd get animal rights activists, anti-genetic experimentation folks, the usual suspects, showing up about once a month. This is a new facility so it might take awhile for word to get around. So, from time to time, you will have to deal with some irate people, protestors, you know. Most of the time, though, you'll be watching these security monitors here. A lot of classified information goes in and out of this place, so you gotta keep an eye out. Two, even." Pritchett chuckled at himself. "Anyway, I try to run a pretty tight ship here, but if you do your job, and get here on time, we won't have any problems. I'll be showing you the ropes for the next couple of days, but for now, do you have any questions?"

No more Double Meat Medleys? Color me a happy Buffy, she thought. She should think up a question, though. Curiosity and willingness to learn – that's supposed to impress the boss. "I'm kinda curious about the research that goes on here. Do you know anything about it?"

Pritchett nodded. "A little bit, sure. Umbrella Corp is mostly known for doin' a lot of medical research, developing pharmaceuticals, and whatnot. From what I hear, they're working on something really big right now. Top secret type stuff, so a'course I don't know any details. But, it might please you to know that you're now working for one of the leading medical research and pharmaceutical companies in the world."

Buffy, mildly for-real interested now, asked, "So some people are against the research that goes on here?"

He paused, then, a little reluctantly it seemed, said, "Yes, and not just your usual anti-research groups. See, Umbrella had… some problems… at its Midwest facility a couple of years ago. There was an epidemic of some kind. I think the town had to be evacuated 'n everything. A lot of people died. Damn shame."

Buffy was surprised to hear about this. She wasn't exactly a habitual newspaper reader but she thought she would've heard something about an epidemic that evacuated a whole town.

"An epidemic? Like a virus of some kind? How did it happen?" Whoa. Could something like that happen in Sunnydale?

Mr. Pritchett hastened to reassure her. "I don't want you to worry about that, Miss Summers. It was a terrible, terrible accident, what happened there. There was a mishap in one of the labs, some of the employees were infected, and, well, it went downhill from there. Apparently, adding insult to injury, the rescue teams that were sent in to help out mishandled the situation pretty badly, so a lot of their people died too. But since then, Umbrella has really tightened up their regulations and procedures to prevent that sort of thing from happening again. One thing's for sure, Umbrella has made safety its top priority."

Buffy was still feeling all kinds of uneasy about this. She'd had no idea that Umbrella did research of the dangerous and icky kind. If there was one thing Sunnydale didn't need, it was an outbreak of disease. Disease-y horseman of the apocalypse, you are not welcome here, she thought to herself. Give her vampires and demons any day of the week, but anything that held the possibility of pus and/or flesh-eating bacteria evoked many feelings in oogieness. She wondered if Xander knew anything about this virus outbreak in… hmm, Pritchett hadn't even said where the epidemic had originated. Xander hadn't mentioned anything when he was part of the construction crew for the new facility, so maybe the outbreak just hadn't been of the national news variety.

Umbrella might've cleaned up their act but, just in case, she'd have to keep an eye out.

Two, even, Buffy thought.