Chapter 1

Wheels of Fate

September 26th

            The weight of the heavy led pipe in Annette's weak hands was enough to make her want to fall over and die, but she knew it was her only chance. The stage two carrier approached her, jaws wide with outstretched arms pleading for a taste of her faint skin. She took a step back, her dusty lab coat swaying as she taunted the creature with the piece of utility in her sweating, gripped hands.

            With all her might, Annette swung the pipe at the creatures face and with a little luck, she prayed that it was enough.

            I don't have enough strength…if only I had more time to get another shot… she thought to herself, but she knew that thinking harder wasn't going to make the effect of the pipe smashing against the carriers skull any more efficient. Just a few doors away, and I'll get it…everything will be okay…

            The carriers skull exploded in a rain of gore as the pipe smashed against its right temple. The zombie crumpled to the floor after sliding against the west wall, covering it with oozing blood and brain. Falling to the floor and twitching, the creature didn't move, and Annette knew that she had beaten it.

            Now…

            She made her move, holding her left arm as tightly as she could. One of the stage threes, the licker, as William had called it, had bit her hard in her arm just before she had made it out of the monitor room.

            Sneaky bastards…oh well, in a few days they're all going to be blown to shit anyways.

            The morphine shots were wearing off, and she needed another fast. She hadn't slept for days, and  the more drugs she had in her the better she felt. William was gone, probably dead. She hadn't seen him in the lab levels for a day or two, which meant that he had probably been let up into the city.

            Sherry…just be okay…be in the station, please…

            Finally Annette made it to the lab where William had been days before, the day he had been assassinated. She scrambled to find the viles of the drugs she so eagerly craved, and finally she did. Tucked neatly underneath a stack of papers where she had hid them. She shot a quick glance to the east lab table where a pool of sticky dried blood lay, filling the lab with the scent of death and decay. It was William's blood, the shell casings of the automatic rounds he had been peppered with laying somewhere close by. She had only been a second too late…

            In a day or two I'll blow this lab to shit anyways…I've got one of the G Samples, it doesn't matter any more, Umbrella wont have it. I'll make sure of it.

            She pressed down on a small clear syringe and felt a wave of relaxation hit in her the face like a ton of bricks. She exhaled and withdrew the needle from her arm. She smiled and giggled and let out a shriek of excitement. Finally the time had come. Umbrella would get what they deserved.

            Cindy was getting tired. She had been hiding in the back of the diner for a few hours, but she wanted so desperately to find out what was going on outside. The cries of the people hiding in the diner had died off about twenty minutes before, but still her conscience hadn't allowed her to go back outside. Ronald, the cook, had told her to hide in the office until he came to get her.

            He never came back, and that was over an hour ago.

            She was sweating like crazy, holding a wood plank in her hand, praying that the monsters that had overtaken the city didn't come looking for her. In all her twenty one years, never had she seen so much horror. The population of Raccoon had been transformed into the walking dead, and she didn't want to believe it. If there was one thing she could do, one thing at all, it would be to help the people she cared about most.

            Except most of them are dead, Cindy, and you watched them die. You were scarred, and you ran back to the diner in hopes that maybe there would be someone to help, but there was no one except for Ronald and a few people who had managed to survive the onslaught.

            She sighed, knowing that her mind was telling the truth. She had just gotten off work when she saw the parade of monsters heading down the street and she had nearly been run over by a swarm of police cars that had showed up right on Main Street. There was a war waged against the once civilians. She took cover in the back of one of the cop cars for a few minutes, and that was when she met the man who had saved her life.

            He said his name was Kevin, and that he had only been with the RPD for a few months…I wonder if he managed to survive…

            He had told her to get to the diner as fast as she could, to take no one as anyone could be infected with the cannibal disease, and she may not be able to tell. So she did. She fled the supposed safety of the police car, and made it back to the diner. When she got there though, things got very ugly very fast and she didn't want to think about it anymore.

            But you should, you should think about it some…you should know by now that in panic situations people become different, they become rancid and angry panicked people, not the calm people you thought you knew when you got them their coffee every afternoon.

            One of the old men she used to serve every morning had seen her coming, she just knew it, but he had locked the front door as she approached, tiring with every running stride she took. She was still in her waitress scrubs, and her hair was matted from the smoke that had bellowed out of a burning oil tanker she had passed on Cole Street.

            She pressed her wet fingers against the front windows, and she remembered the old man's name.

            …Carl…

            He had pretended her never saw her, and from out of the corner of her eye Cindy had seen a monster rise out of the shadows, a civilian creature. He stumbled forward on one leg, the other shredded and gouged. His clothes were blood stained and he was missing an eye, and his upper lip seemed to be shredded. She could tell that he was one of the more further along monsters, his nails curving forward and steam rising slowly off his face beet red face. He was moving fast, and Cindy started to scream, starting to cry for help on the desolate burning street.

            Then Ronald saw you and pushed Carl out of the way and let you in, thank God, or you may have been on of those-

            "Don't say it, Cindy," she whispered to herself, "You wont be one of those…you're going to get out of the city no matter what it takes…"

            She stood up on two shaking feet, still holding the wood plank tight. She brushed her sandy blonde hair behind her ears, and pushed the lock on the wood door to the left, and then sliding the chain lock off its hinge. Grasping the handle, Cindy took a deep, hollow, raspy breath and entered the L shaped diner for what seemed like the first time in an eternity.

            In his lifetime, George had seen some pretty messed up people. He had operated on brain tumors, open heart surgery, and in all his glory he had even managed to sit through a few plastic surgeries.

            When I get out of this, I'm never gonna do another god damn lipo in my entire life…

            He still had on his scrubs, a pair of blue surgeon pants and a matching short sleeve, but he had found a nurse jacket in one of the open lockers. All he could think about was what had gone wrong, what he could have done to prevent the slaughter that happened right before his eyes.

            George was locked inside of his private quarters, his personal office, knowing that there were things crawling around the hospital, his hospital, that had once been his patients. He took a deep breath and reached for the hand gun he had found in the same open lockers that he found the coat in.

            Never in my life…

            He was unfamiliar with the model, and he let out a brief chuckle. He was unfamiliar with guns period, never having really touched one in his entire life. But, it wasn't too hard to figure out. There were what seemed to be about four or five bullets left in the chamber, and he had found a full clip in the coat pocket.

            What was this guy thinking… George thought, reflecting on the stolen gun's owner. A loaded pistol in a hospital…the nerve…

            CSH…CSH…SCRTCHH…

            There was a sudden pounding, and then scratching on the door. George leveled the gun with shaking fingers, but then let out a sigh of relief as the noises died off. He sat back down, thinking softly to himself that it was probably another infected carrier…

            …but what if it was a person, begging for help? What if someone had survived?! You need to help them…

            "No…" George said quietly to himself. He knew that he should open the door to help, but what if the obvious was true? What if it was another monster…what if something out there was waiting for him to get out there, so it could kill him like it had killed the rest of the patients?

            It was true, there was something bigger than the regular virus carriers. George knew what happened to the people infected, he had seen that first hand. Hell, he even could label the stages. At first, infection caused a person to go unconscious until they rose again as the undead. Stage two involved progression into a steam breathing, razor clawed demon that he had only seen once.

            And that is all I need to see…it was the last thing the nurse saw, her left cheek slashed off and then her spine nearly completely severed in a few slashes…

            George shuddered at the thought, but then slowly realized what he had seen when he saw the creature mutate into what he had named the stage three. The few that had seen the monsters had dubbed them the 'inside out men'. After what seemed like a few hours, the stage two monster he that had attacked the nurse mutated into a creature that seemed like a big cat.

            We locked it in the medical office, and then it broke down door…it had changed drastically… he remembered quietly. The thing crouched like a cat, but had the tongue of a lizard and the claws like nothing he had ever seen on earth, nothing that belonged.

            He remembered seeing his best friend's face as the inside out man's tongue warped out of it's mouth at lighting speed and wrapped at what seemed to be lighting fast speed around his neck. George tried to help him but the inside out man was too strong. In a speedy whipping motion, George saw the monster spin its tongue back and he felt Charlie's neck break in his own hands. Then, to George's horror, the inside out man popped Charlie's head off as if it was a balloon.

            In sheer and absolute fear, George had escaped back into his office just in time before the inside out man would have attacked him.

            For sure, I would be dead now had I not escaped when I did…

            George looked to his left. There was a window leading down into an alleyway just beside him. If he could climb out, he could probably make it to the back yard of the hospital and then past the fountains to Main street. The front yard would lead to the clock tower, and he knew from a few survivors of the first wave of attacks that the tower was far from safe.

            Main street it is…

            George grasped the gun and pocketed the clip. Taking a few short breathes, he headed for the window and pressed the pane upwards. It took more than a few tries, as it was jammed on something but in a snap of wood the frame broke and the glass cracked a bit, enough for him to be able to kick through it. In a shatter of glass and window pane, George busted through the window and found himself hurled back into the nightmare that was once Raccoon City.

            Yoko watched from the rooftop of the newspaper building as a helicopter raced through the star filled sky above Raccoon City. It was holding a large, heavy looking green canister labeled with a massive white letter N. She couldn't possibly think as to why it wouldn't be landing, it seemed to just hover above the streets. She felt a tear run down her cheek, and silently the said a prayer to herself in hopes that she could take another bold step onto the streets.

            It wasn't like she didn't belong in Raccoon City. She had been there on vacation, to visit her mother who had moved there recently. But when she got to the apartment, it had been ransacked and when she found her mother…

            No…not your mother…she wasn't your mother.

            But she knew she was. The shadow that had once been her mother was just another zombie…

            Straight out of the horror movies they showed in Japan…the zombie monsters that ate people…but those were just movies, this real life…

            Yoko couldn't believe the thoughts she was thinking. There were zombies in Raccoon, and her mother had become one of them.

            But why would Umbrella send a helicopter in? What did Umbrella have to do with the Raccoon disaster? Yoko looked up and saw the pilot's masked face, and then she realized she was close enough to see the pilots hands move. The copter hovered over the street for a moment, and just as she thought she should duck back into the big vent she found and was hiding in, the cylinder was ejected and spun violently towards the city street.

            There were a few monsters down on the street, and they were caked in dust and cement as the big red tube crashed to the ground. Pieces of it shattered off, and Yoko thought she saw what seemed to look like a-

            -oh my god…

            A big man stepped out of the tube. Yoke squinted her eyes in the darkness. She felt her hand cover her mouth in astonishment. The big man was at least eight or nine feet tall, maybe ten. She couldn't see any hair on his brown skin, but she couldn't really see any eyes either…

            What in the world is that?!

            It was wearing a big black trench coat, and she could feel the evil radiating off of the monster as if it were a sickness…or a glow of some kind. Yoko knew that this thing was bad, very bad, and that she really should get away as fast as she could…

            But for some reason I cant move….its like I'm in a trance…this thing CANT be real…

            The monster cracked its neck and then pressed forward, smashing through the bricks that led to the Arcade Mall alleyways. And then it was gone.

            Oh man, this cant be good…this thing cant be good, she thought to herself, and she realized how stupid she was sounding. The thing was real. It was going after something, she could tell that much through the determination she felt off of it.

            But there was a question in her mind that she couldn't seem to rationalize.

            Why would Umbrella send something like that in?

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