And with that, I'm finally back on this story. And BOY, did I take a while getting back to this? I'm sorry I took as long as I did. I wasn't feeling the need to continue this and I had my hands full with other stuff. But now, I'm back. And hopefully, I'll continue this until I reach the end.
Escape
STARS officer Jill Valentine wakes in her apartment in the middle of a rainy night, which she notices via an open window, before she gets up and walks toward the window to close it.
It's been two months since the Arklay incident; she lost members of her Alpha team to zombies, monsters and her traitorous captain Albert Wesker.
Since then, she and her unit have been made into a laughing stock. Then, said unit got disbanded by R.P.D. Chief Irons. And after that, Raccoon City falls into utter chaos as it's residents fall victim to the same fate as the people that went missing in Arklay.
She walks to her bathroom after she hears the water running in there. As she shuts the sink off, a drop of blood falls from her face, much to her shock. Then, as she looks into the mirror, her shock turns horror upon realizing that she's turning into a zombie!
After stumbling a bit, she struggles to get back to the sink and turns her attention to her sidearm. She knows what she must do.
She takes the gun, plants the barrel to her left temple, squeezes her eyes shut and...
BAM!
(GASP!)
September 28th, 8:07pm
Jill wakes up in her desk at home, heart pounding from the nightmare until she starts breathing to calm herself down. "Fucking hell!" She curses to herself until a form of relief washes over her. "Gets worse every night."
She gets up from her desk and glances at her small marked down calender; it's on September and the 1st through the 27th have been crossed off, leaving the 28th to the 30th to go. "Three more days, than I can kiss this town goodbye." She thinks out loud. Than, she turns to her crime board before turning the light above it on.
Then, she looks over her crime board, which is overflowing with all the dirt on the Umbrella Corporation that she could dig up along with notes she made based on her terrifying experience at Arklay.
After that, she walks her way toward her bathroom door, enters the unlit bathroom and reaches the sink, which is still running, before turning on the light. She looks upon her reflection before inspecting her face for signs of infection. No such signs have been made known so far, much to Jill's relief. Though, as a good cop, she's not gonna let her guard down.
As soon as she turns the water off, she hears her phone ringing from the other half of her apartment.
"Who could that be?" Jill asks herself rhetorically, wondering who would call this late. So, she walks her way to her phone until she reaches it, picks it up and answers it to hear a familiar voice start frantically.
[Jill, are-are you ok?!]
"Brad? Is that you?" Jill asks, surprised by the sound of genuine fear in Brad's voice.
[Listen, you've got to get out of there!]
"What are you talking about?" Jill asks, not understanding why Brad would tell her to leave.
[I don't have time to explain! You got to get out of there RIGHT NOW!]
Jill goes for her sidearm as she complies to Brad, "Alright, lemme grab my-"
Suddenly, something bursts through the wall like the Kool-Aid Guy, sending Jill flying 2 yards away from the wall.
Once the dust settled, the thing that burst through the wall stood to approximately 7-ft-3 in height, is clearly humanoid, 90% of it's body is wrapped in black plastic gauze with biohazard signs and caution stickers all over, has some sort of contraption attached to it's chest with a tubing that goes over it's left shoulder, it steps in wearing black boots and has it's head completely wrapped in the gauze, making identifying the monster difficult.
Thinking fast, Jill reaches for her weapon, but not without getting kicked to the wall by the creature in the process. After regaining her composure, the STARS officer takes aim at the creature and opens fire on it before it picks her up by the throat with her feet unable to touch the floor.
Jill pops a few more rounds into the creature's head, possibly pissing it off as it slams the RPD cop to the and prepares to crush her under it's left boot like a bug, only for Jill to roll left before the foot could make contact with the floor.
As she gets back up, Jill narrowly dodges the monster's left cross before bolting for the door and closing it behind her. She, for some reason, leans back on the door to calm down for literally a second before said door warps from the other side, causing her to get moving.
"What the hell was that thing?" Jill asks herself as she moves toward the hall door to leave the building.
She's halfway to the door when she looks back, only to narrowly dodge a large piece of wall that was thrown at her by the monster before entering the unlocked door to a recently abandoned apartment(both of which are very convenient for Jill), slams the door behind her and barricades it with a bookshelf before turning to head out the window.
She hears a pound on the wall behind her right before she climbs out the window.
"What the hell?" Jill could only say in disbelief upon finding the alley in utter chaos; apartments in both her building and the building next door are on fire and people are screaming in panic. "No way."
In fact, as she walks down the fire escape to the floor beneath the one she was in, she sees one of her neighbors holding onto the fire escape across from hers for a second before he loses his grip and falls 3 or 4 stories to his death, blood splattered all over the concrete beneath his body.
After that incident, Jill climbs into an apartment that is - or was - under construction, judging by the plastic wrap on the walls(among other things). Seeing the ajar door to the apartment, the STARS officer decides to go for it despite the hallway being in flames.
Before Jill can make a 3rd step, however, the ceiling above her collapses in front of her with the creature landing on it's feet, causing her to stumble and trip to her right.
She quickly evades the creature's left hook with a dodge roll, finding a small space in the rubble that she can crawl under. Jill briefly turns to her monstrous pursuer as it sprouts a fleshy tentacle from it's right wrist before she starts crawling through the space. Her escape is interrupted when the monster's tentacle wraps around her leg and it attempts to pull her out, only for the tentacle to be amputated by a sharp chunk of wall that Jill picked up at the last second before she makes it to the other side and escapes out the door.
Jill makes her way to the emergency exit door down the burning hallway before the force of an explosion pushes her hard through the door from behind her. Thankfully, the railing stops her from falling to her potential death before she gets herself back together and goes down the fire escape.
"Ok." Jill says softly when she sees fire escape ladder.
Before she can get any closer than halfway to the ladder, the monster bursts through the wall, grads her by her head and tosses her back inside.
On the floor while facing the creature, she scooches away from it as it stalks toward her. It attempts to crush her chest by slamming it's right fist into it, only for mentioned fist to meet the wooden floor due to Jill rolling away at the last second, which results in both of them crashing through to the ground floor.
As soon as they're both on their feet, the creature tears out a chunk of ceiling - or floor, if you prefer - off from above them. Knowing where this is going, Jill makes a run for the exit as the monster uses the chunk it tore out to tear through the walls flanking them both. Halfway through the hall, it let's out an awful, deep and somewhat guttural, "STAAAAAARRRRSS!"
Despite how close the hulking behemoth was to crushing her, Jill manages to make it out the exit door right before the ceiling, if not most of the building's interior, seemingly buries the creature alive. The STARS officer has made it. For now, anyway.
Despite how hurt she is from what she's recently sustained so far, Jill gets back to her feet to leave the alley, noticing several panicking civilians running for their lives in fear.
"What the fuck?!" Jill mutters to herself, still not believing what's happening before her eyes.
A man in camouflage jeans, boots that reach only above his ankles, and a white t-shirt with a yellow vest with the R.P.D. abbreviation on the left breast area nearly passes by the alley when he stops and notices her.
"Jill? Over here!" The man calls out, a voice that Jill knows well.
"Brad!" Jill acknowledges in relief upon seeing a familiar - and living - face amidst the chaos.
"Are you ok?" Brad asks before his fellow STARS officer asks about the creature, "What was that thing?"
"Damned if I know." Brad answers. "But right now, it's got a hard-on for the only 2 STARS left in town: you and me. I'm not sticking around. Just look around you. The longer we wait, the more screwed we are."
Then, Brad motions for Jill to follow him, both of them hoping to and intending on getting the hell out of dodge.
"How did this all happen so fast?" Jill asks Brad right before a car crashes from several feet to his left, causing him to raise his arms to his face so the flying pieces of glass don't get in his eyes.
"I dunno." Brad responds, showing the confusion he shares with Jill. "But one fucked up thing always leads to another. It's like Arklay on steroids."
As soon as the two STARS cops are on the main street, two helicopters shining their lights on the ground below fly over the cops' heads.
"He wait! Down here!" Brad calls out to the choppers before he starts running in their direction, running passed a crashed truck, only to lose them. "Aagh! Goddammit!"
As soon as Jill goes around the truck the same way Brad did, she sees a metal fence barricade with numerous zombies, possibly bringing up bad memories of Arklay, as she says denial, "I've gotta be dreaming. How could this many people be infected?"
Then, things go really wrong really fast.
"Brad! Here they come!" Jill warns as the T-Virus infected corpses climb up the fences, causing them to fall apart.
"In here!" Brad says to Jill as he runs for a bar with the sign above the doors saying 'Bar Jack'.
"There's so many..." Jill acknowledges the hoard of cannibalistic corpses before running to the bar with Brad waiting outside the door.
As soon as Jill reaches the door, Brad picks up the chalkboard sign and throws it at the zombies in an attempt to buy himself and Jill time. But that only works to a point as one of the zombies reaches the door and tries to force it's way in with the two living humans keeping them outside.
"The door behind you! Go!" Brad instructs Jill, giving her a chance to escape as he holds the doors closed with all his might. Before she can touch the handle to the back door, Jill hears the sounds of wet tearing and cries of pain as she turns to see Brad having his arm chewed on by a zombie.
"Brad!" Jill cries out before grabbing a discarded knife from the floor and stabs the undead man-eater in the head, causing it to fall backwards and collapse dead on the sidewalk before she slams the door shut as Brad covers his bite wound to slow the bleeding, if not stop it, knowing what happens next.
"Don't think about it." Jill tells him as she and Brad try to keep the other zombies out. "We're gonna make a run for it!"
"C'mon, Jill. We know how this ends." Brad retorts as they both know the cruel reality of his situation, but Jill refuses to give up hope, "No, I don't."
"Are we still a team?" Brad asks, to which Jill responds, "Always."
"Then do me a favor and don't fuck up like I did." Brad requests before pushing Jill away towards the back door, choosing to stay behind. "Go!"
Reluctant, she heads out the back before saying remorsefully about leaving her teammate behind, "I'm sorry, Brad."
Jill runs around the back to the main street as she sees a dead beat cop laying back against the wall. Inspecting the body, she sees that he still has is sidearm holstered.
"Sorry." Jill apologizes to the dead man as she takes the weapon from him. Though the dead cop doesn't need it or the holster anymore, it's still basically stealing from the dead. She also slips on fingerless gloves and an elbow brace on her left elbow.
As she inspects the gun, which only has 5 rounds in the chamber, the door is slammed open before one of the zombies from outside the front of the bar comes out from the corner. Not wanting to waste the limited ammo she has at the present time, she runs up the sidewalk, which is flanked by rubble, before a large sign that says 'crazy' falls in front of her.
Conveniently enough, there's a space under the sign that she uses to crawl under. As soon as she's on the opposite side of the sign, a zombie climbs out the back window of a discarded bus before she runs to the gate of another alley and enters.
"You down there! Get to the parking garage roof!" A man, who had just noticed Jill, shouts out to her from an airborne chopper before departing to the mentioned roof.
"Parking garage. Got it." Jill acknowledges before entering a warehouse, which she realizes is currently occupied by a middle aged man. "Sir, are you alright?"
"Stay back! Don't come any closer!" The man demands jumpily before walking toward a large metal crate.
"Hey, come on. There's a helicopter waiting to take you to safety." Jill assures the older man, but he retaliates, "What 'safety'? I'm not going out there!"
"The parking garage isn't far." Jill tries to reassure the man. "I can take-"
"The only safe place is in here!" The man rudely interrupts before slamming the door shut.
"Sir, what's your name?" Jill asks the stubborn ass man in another attempt to reason with him. "I can't just leave you behind."
"It's Dario Rosso." Rosso responds before retaliating rudely again. "And yeah, right. You just wanna steal my safehouse! Get your own, missy!"
"'Missy'?" Jill questions, feeling slightly offended by that remark, to put it lightly. Not letting that cloud her judgment, she tries reasoning with the older man again, "Would you please calm down? I'm a police officer. I'm here to help."
"Oh, yeah, you've been doing a bang-up job." Rosso scoffs, continuing to be rude and unreasonable. "You wanna help? Go handcuff yourself to one of those freaks."
Having had enough of his shit, like anyone else in the world would if they were in her shoes, Jill tries one more time to reason with him with a warning, "Sir, this is your last chance. No one else is coming for you."
"I'm not going anywhere!" Rosso responds stubbornly, sealing his own fate in the process. "I'd rather starve to death in here than be eaten by one of those undead monsters!"
With Rosso having made his choice, Jill leaves the older man to his potential fate, she heads out the back door, but not before picking up some spare ammunition for her sidearm.
As soon as she's out, the sound of feral growling catches her attention as she turns to see 2 zombie doberman pinschers trying to push their way to her. Knowing that fence is the only thing keep those dogs from ripping her apart, she takes advantage of this convenient opportunity and continues to head to the parking garage. However, a large truck that crashed into a longer fence some time before she got here is slightly blocking her path, with a small space on the ground being her only way to the other side. The zombies smacking against the fence don't really help, either.
Seeing no other way, she starts crawling through the space beneath the fence. As she nearly gets out, one of the zombies sticks his head out trying to get a bite out of the lone STARS officer. Luckily for her, she gets out of the crawl space relatively unharmed.
As she enters the parking garage, passing a zombified gate guard that's trying feebly to get out, Jill makes her way to the elevator before it opens and a zombie falls out on Jill. Before anything else could happen, she backs up and lets the zombie collapse to the asphalt ground before another zombie walks out of the elevator. Using evasive maneuvers, Jill safely makes it to the elevator as she presses the up button, opening the door and she enters. As the door closes, another zombie tries to squeeze his way in, only for Jill to literally kick him out before pressing the roof button.
As the elevator goes to the roof, Jill takes the time to calm down and recover. As the elevator makes it's stop, Jill hears the spinning beat of the chopper before the elevator door opens to the roof. She walks out before a bright light shines from the helicopter as it hovers over the garage.
"Hey! Down here!" She calls out to the pilot before he brings the chopper over the landing platform.
"Hey, get in!" The pilot calls out as he brings the helicopter down, but only barely touching the platform as Jill makes her way to the chopper, hoping that the nightmare is finally over for her.
However, that hope is quickly dashed away when something hits the tail, causing the chopper to spiral out of control, passing Jill by before crashing and exploding 2 or 3 yards away from her, with the explosion's force sending her flying into a car knocking the wind out of her for a moment.
She gets back up and tries to leave only to see the monster that tried to kill her not only survived being buried alive by her apartment building, but is closing in on her from 8-9 yards.
Thinking fast, she opens the door to the car she crashed into, moves the corpse of the "owner" out of the driver's seat, apologizes to said corpse and gets in.
Though the monster is moving at a slow pace, it's still closing in on Jill as she tries to start the car up to no avail so far.
"Oh, come on. Start, dammit!" Jill curses as continues to start the damn vehicle up while the creature still walks toward her.
One more turn of the key and, much to the STARS officer's relief, the car starts before she shifts the gear and declares with determination, "It's my turn, bitch!"
She pushes the gas pedal and steers the car to run the son of a bitch over, but it only makes it trip onto the hood - if nothing else - before it's right fist smashes through the windshield and grabs her by the neck. Before anything else could happen, she builds momentum in the car and drives it off the roof, both of them with it as it crashes from several feet in the air before it stumbles onto it's back.
Having survived by some miracle, Jill turns to see the monster get back up on it's feet as if it were only pushed hard from behind. As it starts walking toward the wreckage, Jill crawls out of the car just starts running before the car explodes, knocking her back off her feet.
Turning to face the stalking behemoth as she scoots away from it, the fire from the explosion has burnt away the gauze wrapped around it's face. It has no hair whatsoever, if it did have lips, they were removed, now exposing 2-3 inch long teeth, it's chin devoid of skin, holes in the cheeks, it's nose warped to it's right, it's left and only eye milky and devoid of a pupil with flesh apparently melted over the other eye and what seems like staples on it's ugly slasher villain face.
"Hey, fuckface!" A voice crudely calls out from behind, drawing the ugly monster's attention away Jill before a rocket is fired at it, which the creature catches with it's fleshy tentacle and sends it flying into an abandoned car, resulting in an explosion.
The man that fired the rocket with an M202 launcher is approximately around Jill's age, has facial stubble, messy hair that looks like it hasn't been cut in months, is wearing a pocket-covered kevlar vest over a black short-sleeved shirt, green cargo pants with knee pads and black army boots.
Before the man can fire another shot, the monster launches a tentacle from it's left wrist to snatch the M202 out of his hands and toss it several yards away. As the creature stalks toward him to tie up loose ends, things seem pretty hopeless until an all-black armored van comes out of nowhere and crashes into the monster, sending it rolling a good 3 yards away before it gets back on it's feet with one knee to the ground. As soon as it looks towards the vehicle that ran it over, an incendiary grenade hits the monster and seemingly knocks it out of commission.
Jill and the other guy turn in shock to their rescuer - who is none other than Frank Castle, not that they know it yet - before he urges loudly, "Get in!"
Snapping out of their respective shock, they do as Frank says as the other guy helps Jill up, wraps her left arm over his shoulders and holds her by her waist to keep her on her feet before making their way to the back of the van, which opens as soon they reach it.
"What are your names?" Frank asks the two passengers.
"Jill Valentine, former member of R.P.D.'s Strategic Tactics and Rescue Service." Jill responds first. The profession catches Frank's attention.
"S.T.A.R.S.?" Frank asks with a rising admiration for the STARS officer, which she confirms, "That's right."
"I'm Carlos. Carlos Oliveira." Carlos introduces himself. "Thanks for the save."
"Where are hauling up?" Frank asks as he starts up the van before Carlos answers, "Me and my unit have been gathering survivors to the subway station in Redstone Street."
"Alright, then." Frank says as he makes a u-turn and starts driving toward the station, leaving the unconscious abomination behind.
On their way to Redstone Street, Jill and Carlos can't help but notice that Frank's van is loaded with firearms; among them - and to name a few - are a Lockwood 300 shotgun, 2 automatic rifles(M4 and MK2 Carbine), a Desert Eagle and a pair of customized Colt M1911A1 handguns.
Another thing that catches their attention is the black Molle tactical body armor vest with the the large, white, fear inducing, angry skull spray painted on the chest piece. Then, it hits them both. Jill, especially.
"You're Frank Castle, aren't you?" Jill asks Frank knowingly, now trusting him less considering that the man is a gun wielding vigilante that acts outside the law and goes open season on every killer, drug dealer and sex offender he comes across.
"Not the Frank Castle I used to be. Not anymore." Castle responds, referring to the good times when his family was still alive before Howard Saint tore his entire world apart. Along with his soul. That response reminds Jill of what she about Castle's family being gunned down like animals during their family reunion at Puerto Rico. That's was when everyone thought Frank was dead, too. After that was when she keeps hearing about Frank's one-man war on crime since the death of Howard Saint. When people started calling him, "the Punisher".
Deciding to change the subject, Carlos speaks up, "The subway station's not that far. We should be there in a couple of minutes, tops."
Jill decides - for the time being - to set aside her issues with working alongside a vigilante whose idea of cleaning up the streets is killing people. Sure, his targets are all murderers, rapists and drug dealers, but none of that - in Jill's opinion, at least - gives anyone the right to do what Castle does. Of course, that's all the least of her worries right now.
AUTHOR'S NOTES -I know I said that I was planning on combining the 2004 variation of Frank Castle with others, but in the end, I decided "fuck it" and just went with the 2004 version alone. He's still wearing the button-up long-sleeved shirt, like I promised in the Warning and Disclaimer.
Thank you for your patience and I hope you'll favorite and follow the story and share your thoughts in the comments section below.
11-19-22