The skyline over Raccoon City was dark and smoky as the helicopters crossed through it. There were thirty of the Umbrella Biohazard Countermeasure Service soldiers jammed into the big chopper, ready to drop down into the combat-torn city and rescue surviving citizens. Amir Naidaheb was one of them, sitting with his back to the wall, listening to the drone of the chopper. He was a member of B Platoon, in squad A, which meant little to him. All he knew was that he was with good men and they were here to help out the Raccoon Police Department and rescue some helpless civilians, maybe even get some "alone time" with one of the more grateful ones. He grinned at the thought, but let it drop out of his mind as he heard the pilot shout "We're a minute away from the LZ!"
The chopper hovered over a large industrial parking lot, as the men lined up to grab their weapons and drop down the line to the ground. Amir hit and rolled, lining up with the rest of his squad quickly. He looked over and saw a few of the men he knew from other squads and gave them a thumbs up and a grin, then stopped as the squad's leader, Sergeant Kuan, began barking orders at them. They found out that they were to head along one of the main roads, Central Street, towards the police station, and secure the area along with the rest of B platoon. Having received the orders, Amir and the group marched off, surprised at the lack of sound after the helicopters left. "Like nobody's home…" he thought to himself. Other than the sound of wind moaning by his ears there was nothing.
His squad separated from the other two in B Platoon, trooping off down Park Street. Amir saw lots of trash and debris in the street, as well as several cars and police barricades further down the road. Blood coated the ground in several places, as well as the spent brass of 9mm rounds and shotgun shells. Kuan held up his hand to order the squad to stop, readjusting the backpack he had been carrying, and motioned for Amir and another soldier, some new kid named Garcia, to check out past the barricade and report back. The pair walked up to the large blue metal walls marked with "Raccoon Police Department" and peered to the side of them.
Amir expected anything but what he saw. Bodies lay in the street, stacked three-deep in some places. Most of the had been shot to pieces, while a few wore a blue police uniform and lay on the street, long since bled out from several wounds. It looked like the officers had been bitten until they had died, skin torn off in several places. Garcia turned away and gasped something in Spanish, causing Amir to turn and look where he was looking, hearing moaning in the distance. Amir saw dozens of people approaching the squad, and heard the sergeant shout something, causing the men to open fire. Garcia ran towards the fighting while Amir froze, studying the battle from a distance, realizing with a shock that the moaning came from the crowd.
It was strange. The men in his squad started out firing what looked like well aimed three-shot bursts into the crowd, but that didn't do any good. Soon, the men were firing full auto into individual targets, backing down the street and yelling in fright. The crowd, however, was largely ignoring the shots plowing into them. Even the ones dropped were crawling forward. Amir saw all of this from the other side of the street, saw as Kuan and the other men were overtaken by the moaning crowd, how individuals staggered forward into a stream of gunfire and attacked the UBCS. He saw a few of the squad members break formation and run towards him, including two of the men who had fought out of the crowd. He saw them run by him, and he realized he was all alone on this street, suddenly no longer safe. Amir saw all of this, and he began running too.
Mad Jackal Run
Chapter 1: The Shit hits the fan
Story by John Malone (AKA Atticus Black)
"Oh shit oh shit oh shit…" Jose Garcia babbled as he ran. He had watched as Kuan and three of the other mercenaries were pulled down screaming, watched as they were covered and bit at by those crazy cannibal fucks, and he panicked. He fired the rifle dry, reloaded, and did it again. He watched as the target he fired at get up after the first magazine discharged, and watched as it continued to crawl toward him, leaving half of its body behind him. Garcia knew this wasn't what they talked about in the briefing, that these weren't sick people hallucinating things. He knew what he saw, and what he saw was zombies, plain and simple. That's when he ran, along with a few of the others, passing by the shocked Private Amir and through the barricades.
Garcia and the other four soldiers found themselves running down Ema Street, heading towards the sound of gunfire, hoping to regroup with the UBCS. They passed by a few alleyways and saw more of the "zombies" stumble out after them, heading towards them and letting out that hellish moan. Finally they were forced to stop, many of them gasping from the sight. "Oh… god…" Garcia said.
Dozens of zombies were on the street, heading for the UBCS mercenaries. It looked like they had caught one of the platoons while it was still together, and they fire upon them. Garcia and his group joined in, firing at the zombies in front of them. He knew it would do little good, but couldn't think of anything else to do. He fired a three-round burst into the upper chest of a man in a business suit, who stumbled backwards but continued on towards him. He fired again and again, his aim worsening, until he managed to accidentally score a hit to the head, blowing the right side of the mans head away, dropping to the ground. It lay motionless, which caused Garcia to shout with grim glee, yelling "YOU HAVE TO SHOOT THEM IN THE HEAD," as loudly as he could muster. He knew the men next to him heard him, as they shifted aim and began firing, and noticed that some of the others heard him as well.
However, it was rapidly growing too late for A platoon. Two of the squad leaders had vanished during the fighting, and many of the soldiers had been drug down by the zombies. A few of them had ran for it, fighting their way through the zombies, while the remainder ducked into buildings or alleyways, or climbed on top of cars to fight it out. Garcia was firing into the horde when he noticed one of the men with him get dogpiled by a large number of the zombies from behind, screaming all the way as he fired his rifle dry. Garcia looked back and saw twenty or more of them behind them, too close for comfort, and yelled for a retreat, pointing down a side street. He didn't look behind him as he ran, hoping the others had heard him.
Meanwhile, Amir had been running as fast as his legs could carry him. He was sure that the people his squad had been firing on couldn't be killed by gunfire, so he dodged the few on the street, heading south towards the police station. Swearing in Arabic, he saw that the road ahead was blocked by a fence, of all things. He was on a dead end street, with no way out that he could see. Nothing was ahead of him, so he turned around and ducked behind a stalled police vehicle, and began firing at the men and women behind him, aiming down the carrying handle sight of his M4A1 for head shots, thinking desperately that if they couldn't see they couldn't find him. He was shocked when they dropped after having the top of their heads blown off, but kept up the firing. Soon afterwards he was the only person still standing on the street. Looking down, he saw he had fired two magazines off for his firearms, leaving him with another four in reserve. Retrieving the magazines, he looked for a building he could duck into so he could take a break and let his mind roll over the details of the evening. He saw a building that looked both empty and easy enough to break into, and read the sign with his moderate skills in English. "Jack's Bar. Hmm…"
Walking through the open doorway, he scanned the room with his rifle. There were a few collapsed bodies in here, shot in the head and chest by what looked like a powerful handgun. A pair of empty barrels lay pushed out of the way of the front door, and a jukebox was sitting against the far wall, playing old songs Amir had never heard of at a low volume. As he searched the bar he noticed that most of the hard liquor was gone, so Amir assumed some survivors had taken it, either for drowning their sorrows or drowning the zombies in fire. He popped into both bathrooms but found them equally empty, so he pushed open the last door, entering a stairwell.
Another body lay on the top of the second landing, next to a pile of garbage and other junk, as well as a few more corpses laying in a pile of smashed wood in front of a hallway. The hallway led to what looked like an employee break room, with a few other doors. Amir checked all the rooms, finding nothing but more bodies and junk. The third floor and roof were in a similar state, although there were a lot more bodies on the roof, including a few broken and dead birds. Sighing with relief, Amir walked down to the office he found and pushed the desk in front of the door, sitting heavily in the chair and looking out at the patio. From his position he could see the alleyway behind the bar, how apparently at one point there was a massive fire there. He lay the rifle down on the desk and put his face in his hands, moaning in despair.
His bosses had lied to him, to them. This wasn't any ordinary accident, he knew now, and these people weren't just hallucinating rioters. The town was dead, or it would soon be, and Amir didn't want any part of it. He picked up the rifle and began searching the desk and other areas of the room for supplies, knowing that the few magazines he had for the rifle and handgun weren't going to cut it.
Dr. John Ross knew when he heard the pounding on the door in the morgue that he was probably screwed. Ross was a research scientist at one of Umbrella's less than legal laboratories, working underneath the city to create new and more exciting means of killing off random folk. Specifically, he was the head of research on the MA Hunter series at the testing area in the Uptown part of town, hidden underneath a shell warehouse. The labs were designed to be self-contained villages for the scientists and other personnel, with living areas, generators, break areas, and even a medical lab and morgue. That's where Ross was, sitting on a gurney, reloading a riot shotgun.
He had been chased to this room by a trio of MA121 Hunters after they had escaped their enclosure a few hours ago, but he managed to lock the door and kill the two virus carriers in the room. Now he sat, waiting for either the Hunters to break the door in or the infected corpses in the morgue to escape. Standing up, Ross began to pace about the room, debating about letting the zombies or the Hunters in so he could attempt to finish them off. There was no food in here, so he couldn't hole up for long, and he knew damn well that he had to make it to the extraction point across town by the 30th. That was plenty of time, if there were no obstacles in the way, but Ross knew that the streets were overrun, making travel difficult.
Sighing, he realized that he would have to fight something to get out of here. He knew there was ventilation access he could reach in the morgue, so he decided to play it safe and tackle the zombies instead of the Hunters. Even with the shotgun he knew the MA121's could kill him easily if he made a mistake, and he wasn't as trained as he would like to be in gunplay and combat. Walking over to the morgue door, he quickly turned the handle to the door and stepped back even quicker. The door was pushed open, revealing a half-dozen of his former colleagues, naked and covered in rot, gore, and wounds. He lifted the shotgun and fired it into the lead carrier, a former aide of his who was rather cute until something ripped off half of her face. Her head exploded in a cloud of buckshot and gore, which managed to hit another in the head as well, removing the former security guard's head up from the nose.
Stepping back, Ross pumped the gun and aimed again, targeting another. This happened for five more shots before he stopped, surveying the damage. The carriers were down, although he had misaimed a shot and left a carrier alive but heavily wounded, unable to move from its position due to the lack of most of its body. He fired the remaining shot into the still alive zombie, splattering the head all over the floor. He stepped back from the combat and reloaded, noting that he only had five more shells left, and entered the morgue, sweeping it quickly with the heavy gun. A body lay torn apart on the floor, evidently savaged before it could revive fully. The head snapped its jaws at him, and Ross was unsure who it was, or even what gender it was. He took a step back and kicked the head, once, twice, until it lay still. He sighed again, wondering what caused the virus to leak in the town, before he headed for the vent shaft in the corner of the room, climbing onto a table to enter it.
The newspaper office had seen better days.
It was an imposing three story building in downtown Raccoon City, especially now, as most of the windows were covered with locked down metal shutters. Smoke was curling out of one of the open second story windows, adding to the dangerous look of the building. The front doors to the building were hanging open slightly, as though inviting an unwary visitor to enter. The sound of gunfire echoed from the second floor, once, twice, then another a few minutes later.
Irene Bryant was climbing over the fire engine, trying to get past the rudimentary barricade, when she heard the shots from the building. She stopped, standing precariously on the edge of the ladder, and crouched as she saw a brown-haired ethnic-looking man in combat gear run from the front of the newspaper office, heading down the road. She was about to call out to him when she decided against it, worried he was going to kill her. Instead, she waited until he left, entering the shopping district further down the road. After seeing that he was gone, she clambered off of the engine and looked around for any hostiles.
The area was clear, she saw, although the dozen bodies laying about worried her none the less. She stepped gingerly over the body of a fallen police officer, a shotgun clutched in his hand (which she procured, along with the pouch of shells on his shoulder), and continued towards the newspaper office. Irene worked here, and wanted to get her notebook and her personal effects, including a .38 handgun she kept at the office.
She pushed open the doors to the office, noting a blood trail on the floor, leading up the stairs. An assault rifle lay propped next to the payphone, by a pool of blood that was no doubt infected by the Raccoon Syndrome, as the journalism team had been calling it. She picked it up, unused to the weight of the firearm, and slung in on her shoulder. She knew the basics about firearms, but had only really used handguns before that point. What worried her was that the other soldier had a rifle. "Was there another soldier in here?" she thought to herself, worried.
Walking up the stairs, Irene paused at the first landing. The printing room had caught fire at some point, slowly burning up, which explained the fire engine outside. She coughed at the rising smoke, noting that the door had been blown off at some point. The blood was on the door and other areas, so it must have happened before the soldier had been here. She paused at the door to the third floor offices. The door had bloody handprints on it, and the door's bolt had been broken, leaving the door open permanently. Irene pulled the rifle off of her shoulder and pushed the door open, aiming the rifle down the hall.
The door to her boss's office and the editor's office was closed, black smoke leaking out from the bottom. Further down the hall the door to the main office was open. A corpse of a man in a white paramedic's outfit lay in front of the door, its head ruined from what looked like gunshots. She walked forward, stopping to look through the window between the rooms, and gasped in shock.
Two bodies lay in the room. One was dressed in garb similar to the soldier outside, the back of his head blown apart, black hair messily obscuring the exit wounds. The other body was that of Jeremy Evans, one of her coworkers and an ace reporter. She knew he was going to stay at the office during this, but didn't think he would have been killed. Both showed signs of being infected with the Raccoon Syndrome, although the soldier looked… fresher than Jeremy or the paramedic. After checking the room one last time she entered, sweeping behind the desks with the unfamiliar rifle. The room was clear, so she sat down at her desk and pulled open the drawer.
Inside the large drawer was a locked case, which contained the .38, two speed loaders, fifty rounds of .38 ammo, and a holster that could be worn on the waist or shoulder. She withdrew the case and opened it, putting rounds into the gun and the loaders, and attaching the holster. She stuffed the extra ammo into her jacket pockets and stood up, deciding to check the dead soldier for ammo or anything useful/interesting.
Flipping the body over, she unlatched the tactical vest and pulled it off, along with the man's holstered pistol. She put those on the desk and frisked his pockets, turning up three magazines for the pistol and a wallet. Looking in the wallet, she saw the man as he was alive, a cute, black-haired man of 25 named Randall Thomas, who worked for the Umbrella Biohazard Countermeasure Service. Putting the wallet and ID down, she went through her acquisitions, nodding in approval.
She had a .38 revolver with fifty rounds of ammunition, a SIG Pro handgun with sixty rounds of ammunition, an M4A1 assault rifle with one hundred and eight rounds of ammo, and a Remington M870 shotgun with twenty-five shells. She smiled at this; although the weight was a lot, even with the holsters and the slings, she had enough ammo to hold up on her own for a while. Sighing, she realized she would have to wear the dead soldier's tactical vest to carry all the ammo.
Irene was about 5' tall, with a slim build. She was dressed in a pair of black ladies slacks, nice casual shoes, a blue blouse, and a light jacket. She stripped the jacket and put on the UBCS vest, tucking the jacket back over it and stuffing most of the ammo back into it. She slung the rifle over her shoulder, put the gun belt on, and attached the .38 to the belt. She imagined she looked like some sort of B-Movie action star, covered in guns and ammo. Irene really hoped she wouldn't turn out like one of them, as they tended to die off rather quickly. She grabbed the shotgun and started towards the stairwell door, weighed down with both weapons and worries.
The zombies that had overrun B squad had dissipated, either following the few survivors or wandering off after feeding on the corpses. Unseen by them, Sergeant Li Kuan crept out from under a parked car, clutching his right side. The zombies had taken a good chunk out of his arm, shoulder, and chest, and while it wasn't fatal, it was damn sure inconvenient. He needed a spot where he could rest and treat his wounds, deciding to loot the three corpses of his comrades when he wasn't bleeding severely. He stopped and picked up the backpack he had been carrying, however; he didn't want to lose what he had inside there.
Looking around, he saw that the store next to him had yet to be broken into, possibly because the window had a big metal shutter over it. He decided to change that, cracking the glass of the front door with his rifle stock and unlocking the door, entering the building a second later. He scanned the room quickly using the in-store mirrors and his flashlight, and saw it was clear. It was a small pharmacy, which caused him to feel extremely lucky. Picking up some gear, Kuan maneuvered over into the back room, behind the counter, and began applying gauze, bandages, and ointment to his many wounds. Other than a large chunk taken from his chest, most of his bites were shallow and weak, like they had been gnawing him instead of biting. There was a lot of blood lost, though, which was making him woozy and light headed. "Or it could be the virus…" he thought to himself, before driving that from his mind. He needed to keep calm and focused, now.
After applying the bandages rather haphazardly, owing to the fact that he was doing half of them with one arm, Kuan found a case of bottled water and began chugging them, hoping to get enough to replenish himself before securing the room and taking a nap. As he drank, he heard the door to the place get pushed open, and swore silently in Cantonese. "Those fucks have found me…" he thought, hefting his handgun, a Chinese Type 67 silenced pistol his father had given him as a gift. He needed to keep this quiet, so he opened the door out into the main room quickly, aiming at the first figure. It was dark, so he couldn't make out the details, but saw that there were three of them. One of them moaned as it saw him, and started shambling towards him, like the others had when they attacked him. Waiting no longer, he fired twice.
Both shots hit high in the temple. He aimed, his vision blurring, and fired at the next two, dropping them as well. Kuan stepped over the bodies, careful to keep away from their heads, and walked to the door, locking it. He thought for a few seconds, and slid a small shelf full of vitamins in front of the door as well. He then took out his flashlight again and looked over the bodies, eliciting a gasp after he saw who they were.
"My squad!" the sergeant said to himself, shivering from fear and realization. "The virus was only in them for thirty minutes!" he though frantically to himself. "How long do I have," he wondered aloud. He holstered his Type 67, rolling the bodies over and scouring them for ammunition. The zombies of his former squad had left their rifles outside, but they still had a lot of ammunition in their vests, as well as various side arms. One was carrying several grenades of varying types in a pouch, which was definitely not issued to him. He retrieved all of this and set it in the back room, moving the bodies into a storage closet.
He had found twelve more magazines for his M4 and seven grenades (three anti-personnel, two flash-bang, two incendiary), a Browning High Power with four spare magazines, a Desert Eagle .50AE with four spare magazines (which he tossed onto the counter with a snort of laughter), and a Glock 18, unloaded, with six spare 33 round magazines. This joined his M4 rifle (with 3 spare magazines), his Chinese Type 67 with five magazines, and his secret ordinance in the backpack, given to him to field-test in Raccoon City.
Kuan grinned. He'd need this, and more, to make it to the labs further in the city and complete his mission. The virus merely made things more interesting.