The motel Jill Valentine found herself in could not have better defined itself as ramshackle. The floor upon which she stood had missing boards and jagged chunks ripped out of it. She had to maneuver around the open spaces in the wood until she came to the front desk. She rings the bell twice. No answer. She looks around and sees a sign taped to the back wall.
"'Take key, leave cash, and go'," Jill reads. "Real friendly place." She walks around the desk and picks up a random room key. "867, now where is that?" She looks at the small layout map on the desk. "Second floor, third door on the left." She pulls out what cash she has and slams 40 on the desk. "That should cover it, if not, screw it."
With key in hand, Jill jumps over the desk and walks up the creaky stairs next to it. Her boots make the stairs wince even more than they already do. She quickly finds the room on the key and jabs it into the lock. With a turn to the left, Jill pries the door open. Not the most spacious motel room she's been in, but it's relatively better shape than the rest of the place.
"This could work," Jill praises. She pulls her left pant leg up, exposing a small handgun strapped to her shapely thigh.
She cocks the small firearm and surveys the room. More out of habit than anything, Jill decided she couldn't be too careful these days. Being pursued by a hulking creature with a massive rocket launcher tended to do that, Jill thinks. The room checked clean…for now. Assured that there were no bogeymen or other people in the small room, Jill popped the clip out of her gun and set it down on the room's only table.
"Be paranoid later, Jilly," she says to herself. "Gotta get my 9mm out of the truck, and find a place that sells 16-gauge shotguns, if rumor is true."
The slick black BMW pulled up in front of an expansive hotel within an otherwise empty little city. Leon gets out, his newly acquired handgun holstered on his gun belt. He closes the back seat's door, as the driver side window rolls down.
"Remember, you are not an agent of the government's Special Forces, and if anyone asks, you're here celebrating your wedding anniversary," Thompson says.
"I don't have a fake wife," Leon replies.
"Not our problem, cowboy." Thompson rolls the window back up and drives away.
Leon watches the car drive away, having second thoughts about this mission. Among them being that he doesn't his way around and that his only way out just left him for dead.
Wouldn't be the first time, Leon thinks, and heads into the hotel.
Grimy and dirty didn't begin to describe the place. Termite damage took care of the walls, the floors, and even the front desk. Leon steps carefully through the lobby, his hand firmly grasping the hilt of his gun. His nerves were on edge, being in similar buildings on his first and only day on the force. He gets to the front desk and rings the bell. No answer.
"Perfect," Leon says, his voice dripping with sarcasm. He jumps over the desk and snags a key at random. "5309" reads the display on the mass-produced key. Leon jumps the desk and his boots make a sickening crack in the wood.
"Not gonna do that again," Leon berates himself.
The former cop trudges through the hotel lobby and comes to a series of three elevators. Being overly cautious, Leon draws the 9mm and hits an "up" button. The middle door opens and Leon aims the gun into the small chamber. Nothing wrong, except the elevator has no floor.
"Stairs."
Leon races up the stairwell, making sure to put as little pressure as possible on the dilapidated steps for fear of breaking them. He gets to his desired floor before he realizes that he still has his gun out. Holstering it quickly, he approaches his room. He slides the key into the lock and gives it a quick turn. He gently turns the knob and easily tries to pry the door open, but the squeaky hinges do not comply. At that point, Leon boots the door in and draws his weapon.
"Now, this is just creepy," Leon mutters.
The hotel room is the complete opposite of the downstairs lobby. Plush carpeting adorns the floor, highly detailed paintings on the walls, a California king bed, and a widescreen TV mounted into the wall. Leon checks out the bathroom for anything unusual, but the bright shine from its pristine linoleum floor told him all he needed to know.
"This place is creepier than that mansion Chris and Jill keep talking about," Leon says.
Jill, armed with her Beretta 9mm, strode down the empty streets of the small town. No sound seemed to penetrate the area. No sound of birds, or dogs, which made Jill slightly grateful about this place. She didn't hate dogs, but after what she'd been through, cats seemed to be more appealing. The heels of her boots clunk on the hard street, echoing off the surrounding buildings. She stops for a minute to swipe the sweat off her face.
"Stupid flannel," she declares. "If I ever meet the guy who made this crap, I'm gonna shoot him in the head." Jill rolls up the sleeves, exposing her forearms. "This'll do until I find a better shirt."
The former S.T.A.R.S. member continues down the street, her Beretta scanning the surrounding area. She stops suddenly and notices a clothing store to her left.
Jill looks skyward and says, "Thank you, God."
She opens the door and takes a quick look inside. No lights, which meant no power, and no power meant no employees.
"You did this once, so why this be any different?" Jill asks herself.
She wanders through the store and comes to the fuse box located near the back. She opens it up and hits a few breakers until the store lights up. Jill looks around with an expression that reads, "Not bad."
Jill wasn't much for dressing or undressing in public, but this one time she didn't mind. She pulls the red flannel shirt off and throws it into the nearest trashcan. Her smooth white skin of her chest and stomach come into contact with the low-running A/C in the building. She adjusts her sport bra before snagging a short-sleeve navy blue shirt. She wasn't ashamed of her figure, but didn't like the attention she sometimes got with it depending on how she dressed that day. Although her S.T.A.R.S. uniform fit her to a "T," it sometimes caused other people to gawk at her because of what the uniform accentuated.
I'm one of the few people that I know that could carry off that look, Jill pondered to herself.
She slips the boots off and snags a pair of socks off a rack. With her sweaty feet now covered, Jill rubs the aching muscles in her feet. She liked to wear boots, but aches and pains drew the line between fashion and function. She spots a pair of Nikes in her size and laces up. In this forsaken desert town, denim was definitely not the way to go, but after spending most of her remaining money on them, Jill didn't think it was right to just get rid of her stylish jeans.
"A place like this has gotta have a pair of scissors," Jill mutters. She checks the check-out desk, but nothing there. "You idiot," Jill chastises herself, remembering the combat knife strapped to one of her thighs.
She unsheathes it from the leg opposite of where her smaller gun is fastened and cuts the denim just below her knees. The torn pieces are then thrown into the same trashcan that occupied her flannel shirt.
"Blue's always my color," Jill sings in triumph. "I hope no one else heard that."
Jill absently wiped away the sweat that accumulated on her legs, and walked out of the store. As soon as she turned the corner, the door into the storage room began to shudder as if something was trying to get out.
Leon spent the better part of a half hour convincing himself that nothing was wrong with the hotel, but with something else in the town. After extensively checking his briefcase, Leon found a combat knife and a shoulder sheath hidden in a false bottom. He wraps the sheath around his left shoulder and fixes the knife in place. He throws his jacket on the bed, along with the Stetson, and draws his gun. He aims the sight at the green lamp next to the extra-large king bed. He adjusts the laser until it becomes small enough not to be noticed right away, but still large enough to be seen by the gun's user.
"I'd've preferred a Punisher, but beggars can't be choosers," Leon mutters.
He holsters the gun and pulls out his cell phone from the jacket's inner pocket. He flips it open and turns it on. Once its little load-up animation is done, the words NO SIGNAL flash on the main display.
"Great, it is just like Raccoon." Leon turns the phone off and puts his jacket back on. "You got nothin' better to do until tomorrow, Leonardo, so what fun can you have here?"
Jill sauntered down the street, showing off her legs to a crowd that didn't exist. Had there been an actual crowd, she wouldn't be swaying her hips as she traveled down the otherwise empty street. Jill wasn't a fan of exposing skin, particularly her own in a possible life or death situation.
But hey, that didn't stop Claire from running around the city in a pair of bike shorts, Jill remembers, thinking of Chris Redfield's sister.
She reached her truck and climbed into the cab. She inserts the drive key and turns, but the engine only grinds. She tries again and the grinding increases. Frustrated, Jill climbs out and pops the hood. Steam arises from the overheated engine block.
"'Ma'am, would you like us to replace the coolant in your right purdy vehicle?'" Jill asks herself, imitating the redneck gas station attendant she met on her last fuel up.
"'Why no, kind sir, I don't expect little ol' me to be needin' the services of such a thing'," Jill replies, imitating the accent of a stereotypical Southern Belle.
She then closes the hood, goes inside the truck, and places her head on the steering wheel. A bigger woman would have taken this time to get over it and find a gas station. Unfortunately, Jill wasn't that kind of woman at this time. She smashes her fists on the wheel and verbally abuses the truck, and she didn't care who heard. Satisfied after three minutes of berating the defenseless vehicle, she calmly gets out, and tries to find a gas station.
"When I need a getaway vehicle, I'm gonna need to depend on it," Jill reminds herself.
Leon's walk through the city couldn't be more uneventful. The wind died down, the echo of his boots echoed eerily off the buildings, and his stomach growling didn't help much.
"'Excuse me, sir, but would you like to try our continental breakfast on this flight?'" Leon asks himself, imitating the female flight attendant's Southern drawl.
"'Why no, thank you, ma'am, because I'm the world's biggest idiot, about to be left for dead in an empty town by the government'," Leon replies, making his voice sound more Texan. "God, I'd kill for a cheeseburger!"
The government agent continues to walk down the empty road, taking note of the structures around him. He didn't understand that if there was no one here, then who was taking care of the buildings. Everything was pristine and orderly, as if the mayor had a bad case of OCD, and wanted the town to always be this neat. An opened up clothing store grabbed Leon's attention.
"Might be somebody else here," Leon mutters.
Nothing terribly exciting about the place, other than the absence of the cowboy stuff he was expecting. Leon walks into the store and immediately throws his standard-issue combat boots to the floor, his socks stained with sweat. He snags a pair of black sneakers off one of the shelves and slips them on his aching feet.
"Next time get boots that fit," Leon chastises. "You coulda gone with the cowboy boots but no, you wanted to look like a commando."
A shuffling noise grabs his attention. Leon pulls out his 9mm and slowly approaches the store's storage room. He raises the gun and kicks the door in. A dark body rises out of the shadow of the unlit room. It stumbles forward, hands outstretched. Its missing jaw and absent right eye was all Leon needed to know.
"Aaah, zombie," Leon says, not the least bit scared. Without a second thought he aims at the creature's head and pulls the trigger. The zombie's skull bursts into small fragments and chunks of brain matter splat on the ground. It falls to the ground with a sickening thud.
"That was easy." Leon holsters the gun and walks away, as the creature rises again.
The noise of its stumbling feet immediately catches his attention. He turns; gun aimed, and fires until the zombie's head falls from its neck. For good measure, he stomps the head into the floor with a satisfying crunch.
Jill's attention was diverted from her quest to find a gas station when she heard the unmistakable sound of gunfire echoing through the empty town. She draws her Beretta, should whoever did the firing find her. After a few tense moments, she holsters the gun and continues on her way. Jill comes across a run down, beat-up gas station, much like the one she saw in Raccoon City. According to Chris Redfield's sister, Claire, a truck driver got bit by an infected person and crashed into it. She shakes the memory out; since it was right around the time she encountered the hulking creature known as Nemesis.
She swaggers into the gas station's concession store, finding it to be as every other gas station she's ever been to in America: grimy, greasy, and not a descent place to sit. Jill scours the small store, her sneakers making a strange crunching sound on the sticky floor. She finds a couple plastic containers of engine coolant, but their contents were either drained or in puddles at the base of the display.
"Looks like I'm not getting out here anytime soon," Jill says. "Well, I've been in worse situations than this." Her stomach growls in annoyance. "May as well see if this dump has any food." The last thing Jill ate was a BLT two hours before she rented her truck, and that was well over 12 hours ago.
The former member of S.T.A.R.S. Alpha Team searches through the stores displays of potato chips and other various snack foods. Plastic bags were ripped apart, food was crushed into the sticky substance that coated the floor, and the stench of moldy bread filled the air.
"On second thought, I need a Coke," Jill resolves. Noticing that the only thing in the small store that was intact were the fridges for the sodas, Jill opens one up and snags a C2. "You coulda stayed with diet, but no, you wanted to go with half the carbs and calories."
She pops the top off and is about ready to drink when she noticed that the hissing sound a soda bottle makes when opened is absent. She turns it upside down and the half-calorie, half-carb Coke slowly oozes to the floor, making a small caramelized puddle.
"This is gonna be a long day."
A stumbling noise breaks Jill out of her disappointment about not getting a drink. She draws her gun and gingerly steps through the store. She comes to a door and slowly opens it. Beyond it is a small sit-down restaurant that has seen better days. Mold and mildew piled up on the floor, exposed boards in the wall, and most of the tables were smashed into the floor. The stumbling noise comes again, and Jill looks over the counter.
A creature that used to be a woman named Doris rises over the counter. Sections of the flesh from her face were missing, along with a part of her jaw. Without being fazed by the sight before her, Jill raises the Beretta, takes aim, and fires. Doris' head explodes, cascading a shower of blood and brain matter. When she staggered back and attempted to climb over the counter was when Jill fired a second shot that blew off a chunk on the left side of Doris' skull. A third shot from the Beretta caused Doris to stumble back and land her head into the deep fryer just off to the left of the counter.
The stench of rotten, fried flesh mingled with stale French fries, causing Jill to cover her face and mouth. She makes a sweep with the gun, expecting possible reinforcements, but none came. That's when she heard some running footsteps heading towards the gas station and burst through the back.