"Hey there," I called out, in a friendly tone. But instead of smiling back at me like one would normally except, with impossibly quick reflexes, she drew a handgun from her waist and aimed it point blank at my forehead. My hands shot up into the air – the warm friendliness I intended to express gone just like that – all within a second.
"Who are you?!" the pretty girl demanded. She had a round, gentle face. Light brown locks of hair hung tiredly in wisps around it. Her crystal eyes stared intensely into my own, their bright blue color making the gaze all the more intense.
"K…Kenneth Feng," I replied, studdering in fear. "I heard the explosion and I …"
She recognized my name in an instant for some reason. My heart leapt. Finally, for once in my life, a pretty girl knew ME and I didn't know HER! "I'm so sorry," she said, withdrawing her gun immediately, tucking in back into its holster than hung by her thigh. That was when I noticed her clothes – a tight fitting black t-shirt over pink denim shorts that, if not for the black spandex shorts underneath, would've left nothing to the imagination.
"You … know me?" I asked, gulping back a wad of spit.
"Leon told me about you," she replied, wiping her face with the back of her hand. "He was really worried about you, when he went back to the S.T.A.R.S. room back and the precinct and found you gone."
"Yeah I shouldn't have left so abruptly like that," I admitted. "I just wanted to get out of that godforsaken city as fast as I could. I'm sorry, what did you say your name was?"
"Oh, I'm sorry," she quickly apologized, extending her hand. She sniffed the remaining mucus in her nasal cavity – a sure sign she'd been crying. "I'm Claire, Claire Redfield."
"That was quite an argument you had back there, Claire," I said, pointing towards Leon's general direction. She glanced back, surprised to see him and Sherry still standing there, looking lost, wondering what to do next. Claire coldly turned their back on them and faced me again.
"Leon doesn't understand what finding my brother means to me," she said, looking towards the ground.
"Your brother …" I rubbed my chin in thought. "You know, Redfield is a pretty uncommon last name. Chris, was it?"
Her eyes widened in surprise. "Yeah, that's him! How do you know him?"
"I worked with Chris at the precinct," I replied.
"YOU worked at the precinct?" She looked at me up and down suspiciously.
"Work experience."
"Ah." A short pause ensued. "So … sorry to be so direct but, do you have any idea where Chris could be?"
"Look, I'm not even supposed to know, and if he wanted you to know, he would've told you, right?" I felt like one of those people I hate, answering questions with questions, complicating the matter more that it needed to be my the mere twisting of words.
"I just want to know where he is," Claire said. "I want to know if he's alright. If you know something, please tell me."
"In Europe," I answered sheepishly. Chris would kill me if he found out Claire knew. Hell, I wasn't even supposed to know …
* * *
The summer heat was getting the better of me. I felt sleepy and nauseous at the same time, and the police precinct, being made practically of windows, didn't do anything to intensify the heat. I walked down the hallway, past the statue holding the red jewel and down the corridor to where the S.T.A.R.S. room was. In my arms, I held a silver tray in one hand with boxes of doughnuts of all kinds – chocolate dip, maple dip, long johns, sprinkled … In the other I had a huge pitcher of coffee about twenty five percent of my height. It weighed my arm down to the point where my shoulder was starting to cry out in pain by a series of throbs.
I opened the door to the S.T.A.R.S. room, albeit with a little difficulty with my full hands. The overwhelming stench of body odor assaulted my senses as the S.T.A.R.S. members ran about the room in a frenzy like nobody's business. I headed over to Captain Wesker's desk at the head of the room. Since his death at the mansion, the S.T.A.R.S. members have been acting a little differently. I expected them to show some remorse. I mean Wesker was a cold guy, but you'd think that working in such close quarters with someone will form some kind of bond between the both of you, right? It felt as if I was the one to be most affected by his death. The only person kind enough to help me out was Rebecca, the nice rookie of the entire group.
"That looks heavy," she said, taking the coffee pitcher from me.
"I can handle it," I said, grasping back for it. Rebecca only rolled her eyes.
"Boys…"
"Hey! How's my favorite little tike?" Chris asked, simultaneously rubbing my head, thus crushing it into my shoulders with one hand, grabbing a doughnut off the tray with another.
"I'm okay, Mr. Redfield," I replied.
"Tch, Mr. Redfield," Chris scoffed. "I told you, I want none of that formality bullshit."
"Oh, let it go, Chris," Jill called from her desk as she waved her hand. "Kenny's just being polite, like any respectable prospecting police officer should be." She turned her attention to me. "You have any mail for me this morning, hun?"
"Yes ma'am," I replied, walking over to her desk. I reached into my shoulder bag and pulled out a stack of envelopes, handing it over to her. Jill sifted through her mail quickly, pausing as she got to a magazine. "Playboy August edition, huh?" she asked, raising her eyebrow at me.
"Oops, I think that belongs to Mr. Redfield."
Chris overheard and choked, a nice chunk of chewed up doughnut flying from his mouth. "Ah … put that on my desk, heh heh."
"Yes sir." I walked over to the table adjacent to Jill's and placed the magazine onto the table. I reached back into the shoulder bag, looking for more mail with Chris's name on it and placed the enveloped on the table. However upon turning around, the shoulder back scraped some stacks of paper off his desk, scattering them all over the floor. I instinctively crouched to the ground and gathered them as fast as I could. "I'm sorry."
I never saw Chris move so quickly in my life. He dashed over from the doughnut pile on Wesker's desk over to his and began helping me sort out the papers. "Don't worry about it, kiddo, let me handle this one."
"But I …" that's when I saw what he was so worried about. I held up two plane tickets in my hand. I hardly had time to take a good look at it when he viciously snatched them from my grasp. "Sorry, Kenny. Classified information. You didn't get a good look at that, did you?"
"No, sir."
"Bullshit."
"Yes, sir. You're leaving for France in a few weeks. How come? I didn't record any vacation leaves this month, at least none from the S.T.A.R.S members."
"This is a top secret mission, Kenny," Jill explained calmly. "Nobody is supposed to know about this, not the police officers, not even Mr. Irons himself. So please, don't tell anyone about this, okay?"
"I won't."
"She means it, kiddo," Chris said, grabbing me by the shoulder and wagging his finger at me. "Do not tell ANYBODY."
"Yes, sir."
* * *
"Where in Europe?" Claire asked, the urgency in her voice rising with intensity.
"They don't want me telling anybody …"
"PLEASE, Kenny, you have to tell me! I've been so worried about Chris for the past few months. I haven't even gotten phone calls. His never answers his messages anymore, he didn't even tell me or his closest friends that he was leaving. Just tell me my mind can rest. I won't tell anyone."
"You have to swear to me, Claire," I said, holding up my pinky.
"Oh god, I haven't done this since high school."
"Pinky-swear, Claire!"
"Alright, I pinky-swear." We let our baby fingers lock for three seconds as I stared into her eyes.
"He went to Paris, France."