No, no no no no…

Shelly sprinted erratically through the dark forest, feeling rough branches slap at her face and arms as she fled. Behind her, a dark form rocketed on all fours through the underbrush, gaining on her. She couldn't hope to outrun it.

It had only been minutes since Shelly and two of her college friends had sat at their makeshift campsite in the Arklay Forest. They had been laughing and passing around a bottle of booze Lisa had pilfered for the underage trio when the howl had snapped their collective attention to the tree line. Now Shelly had no idea if her friends were even still alive. The monsters – whatever they were – had set upon the friends before there had been any time to react, a couple of them dragging Ollie away as at least half a dozen more chased her and Lisa into the darkness. Ollie's panicked, gurgling screams still competed against the sounds of her own booming pulse and ragged breathing.

There was a sudden shriek, probably Lisa, and Shelly realized with deepening dread that she was the only one left. The galloping feet behind her were uncomfortably close.

"Please, oh please oh please, just go away!" she cried between frantic gulps of air.

A hungry snarl, deep and primal, was the only response.

The trail came back into focus for only a moment as the moonlight peeked through the leafy canopy above, but it was just enough for Shelly to see an opening in the foliage. Lungs burning and muscles cramping for relief, she forced herself faster with every ounce of her being.

That was when her foot caught on the root.

Shelly struggled to recover her footing but instead careened into a small but sturdy tree, bouncing off and flailing face-first into the thick underbrush. Her skin stung where the bark had scraped it raw. Her head spun. She groaned and tried to get up, but her body refused to budge.

It wouldn't have mattered anyway. In a few seconds, it was all over.


"Jesus, what a mess."

Detective Elliot Edwards ran a hand through his uncombed hair as he walked towards the scene. The first warm beams of early morning sunlight contrasted the chill brought on by the gruesome display ahead. There were two victims; one in the campsite, the other just beyond a cheap, orange tent in the underbrush. The first thing he noticed was the smell. Edwards had smelled death before – plenty of times in fact – but this was different, and he soon saw why. The one vic he could see had been completely torn apart, only sparse tatters of skin and cloth clinging to dark red strings of slimy sinew. Startlingly white bone protruded in a number of places, most conspicuously where the few intact ribs arced over the hollow chest cavity. The small plants around the body, once bright green with fresh growth, were stained crimson-brown.

Edwards forced himself to look away. His partner, Detective Greg Haldane, sighed and shook his head. "You ever seen anything like this?"

"No. You?"

Haldane again shook his head.

The game warden who had found the bodies gave the two detectives a brusque nod before hurriedly stepping forward to greet them. Behind the warden, the medical examiner was already silently at work. A couple of nearby deputies from the Arklay County Sheriff's Department watched her with morbid curiosity as a handful of others processed the campsite for any obvious clues. He guessed they were part of ASD's crime scene unit. A few took pictures and placed evidence markers. Edwards noticed with a hint of unease that two of them also carried large hunting shotguns as he fished the badge from his pocket. In his peripheral, he saw Haldane had done the same. They introduced themselves.

"Ray Hasser, Wisconsin Department of Fish and Wildlife. Call me Ray."

Hasser was a lean man, his cheekbones appearing somewhat gaunt in the morning light. There was a certain blank look in his eyes that the detectives knew well from their years working homicide. From the faint odor of tobacco, Edwards could tell he had also been smoking recently.

"You know, you shouldn't be smoking here," Edwards gently reminded Hasser. "You'll contaminate the crime scene."

"Right, sorry. I just, with all this…"

Edwards nodded understandingly. "What happened out here Ray?"

Joining in step with the detectives, Hasser led the way. "Found 'em a little over an hour ago. Looks like they were probably drinking," he began, pointing at an overturned bottle of cheap vodka. There was still some of the clear liquid inside, refracting the sun's rays in a rainbow pattern on the ground. Hasser hesitated, eyes lowering to his boots. "Just looked like another one of those animal attacks to me at first," he added, referencing a handful of fatal maulings that had occurred earlier that month in the foothills of the Arklay Mountains, just north of Raccoon City and only a dozen or so miles from where they now stood. "But something was off. Usually large predators eat just about everything – muscle, guts, even bones sometimes – but as you can see, there's an awful lot of soft tissue that wouldn't normally get left behind. And usually they only attack people if they're starving, which clearly they weren't. Plus, when I got here, there were none of the scavengers you'd expect to be all over the place, which is weird to say the least. They typically find stuff like this real quick. Something must've kept them away."

"Like what?"

Hasser shrugged. "I dunno. Never seen anything like it."

Haldane gave a puzzled grunt as they got to Doctor Anna Moreau and the first body. She looked up at them with a somber expression and a curt nod. "Edwards, Haldane. I'd shake your hands, but…" She raised her blood-smeared gloves and wiggled her fingers for effect.

"Hey doc," Haldane greeted. "Must be a special occasion for you to meet us out at the scene instead of the lab."

Moreau scoffed. "Yeah, real special. I love field trips."

"What've you found so far?"

"Both of them appear to be late teens, early twenties. This one is a male, the other female." She gestured toward the tent. "I won't have a whole lot to offer until I can do a proper autopsy. Looks mostly like the right bite patterns for dogs, which is consistent with the attacks that've happened over the last month, but I did find something strange." She lifted the almost-skeletal remains of one of the vic's forearms and pointed at a series of marks on the radius and ulna. "Those weren't made by any dog I know of."

"Bear? Cougar?" asked Edwards, leaning in for a closer look. He could already tell both his guesses were wrong.

Moreau clenched her jaw. "Nope, not either of those. I've got a few guesses, but don't want to jump to conclusions. I've never seen this before."

"Wait." Haldane put his hands on his hips and furrowed his brow in mock confusion. "You're saying there's something you haven't seen before?"

She smirked back. "As hard as that may be to believe, yes. I need to get these bodies back to the lab." Moreau stood and carefully peeled off her gloves.

"Hey!" called one of the deputies from the edge of the trees. "I've got a trail over here!"

The two detectives jogged over to meet him, leaving Hasser with Moreau. Sure enough, there was a faint trail of trampled brush leading into the forest, telltale clumps of grass and dirt disturbed by what appeared to be footprints. They were deeper near the toe. Edwards guessed that whoever had left them must have been running.

Haldane took the lead. They carefully looked for more signs of the runner on the forest floor as they moved deeper into the woods. It wasn't hard to follow. The trail led down a slight decline, merging with a well-worn deer path.

Something didn't feel right. The horrible stench, which should have been getting fainter, was instead growing in potency the further they went. It was then he realized that he didn't hear any of the usual birds and other noises associated with summer. Edwards resisted the urge to reach for his sidearm. Warily he scanned his surroundings, suddenly less concerned with what he might find on the ground.

About a hundred yards further ahead was the source of the smell. A third victim lay face-down in a cluster of ferns, in worse shape than the two in the campsite. One of the victim's legs was missing, found moments later in a nearby sedge thicket.

They called down the deputies marking evidence.

"We're going to have to search the whole area, make sure nothing else got missed," Haldane remarked quietly.

"Yeah." Edwards had only partially registered the thought, still uneasily scanning the area. It felt like something was watching him. He shook himself out of it.

Something glinted faintly on the ground, a little further down the deer path. Edwards pulled on his gloves and stepped carefully around the body, eyes locked on where he had seen the reflected light so as not to lose whatever it was. He knelt down, squinting at the dirt.

It was a shell casing he saw, carefully pushing a leaf aside for a better view. And it couldn't have been there long – the brass was still bright, not yet beginning to tarnish as it would within even a week or two of exposure to the elements. It had been forced partway into the ground, the indentation around it definitely a footprint. A little bit of the tread had imprinted itself in the soft dirt; the knobby pattern looked like it belonged to some sort of boot. Edwards waved over a deputy, who quickly placed an evidence marker and began taking pictures. The detective rose back up to his feet and started back towards the campsite. Haldane joined him.

"What'd you find?"

Edwards kept up a brusque pace. "Nine millimeter casing, looks pretty fresh."

"Well shit. We're gonna need more people out here."

"Yep. I was gonna see if Sheriff Stephenson could spare any more people."

"Maybe." Haldane took a moment to think. "But they're already stretched pretty thin. Might make more sense to call in STARS for this."

They made their way back to the car – luckily the campsite was only about a five minute walk away from the logging road, which was well enough maintained that their unmarked Crown Vic had made it up without issue.

They called the watch lieutenant at the RPD with their car phone, who put them through to the Deputy Chief after subjecting them to a few seconds of overly upbeat hold music.

"This is Douglas," the Deputy Chief growled tiredly. In Edwards' experience, Raymond Douglas was very much not a morning person.

Detective Edwards got him up to speed, including the previously unknown third victim and Moreau's theory. "I also think this crime scene is a lot wider than we originally thought. We need STARS out here."

There was a momentary silence before Edwards heard an overwhelmed sigh on the other end of the line. "I'll talk to the Chief. Bravo Team just got in to the station; if Irons approves, I'll send them right out. Hold on."

There was a click, and the same sax-heavy hold music returned.

The Special Tactics and Rescue Service, or STARS, was a special division within the RPD. Raccoon City, while easily one of the fastest growing industrial cities in the Midwest (let alone Wisconsin), was still not quite big enough to require a full-time SWAT team. STARS was founded to fill that role as well as to assist Arklay SD with any search and rescue missions. Their special training and access to better equipment made this the perfect job for them.

With another click, Douglas was back. "The Chief just gave the green light, Bravo Team should be out there in about half an hour."

"Perfect," Edwards replied, glad he wasn't going to have to hang around the area for much longer.

"One more thing. The Chief wants this to stay hush-hush for now. He figures that with the other attacks and disappearances lately, if word got out there could be a panic."

"Understood. Mum is the word."


Richard Aiken swatted at the air as another mosquito took off from his skin, heavy with its full payload of blood. It deftly bobbed out of the way of his open palm, flying just out of reach of the frustrated man before he could take another swing. It was just after six and as the early summer heat began to fade, the nasty little bloodsuckers had emerged en masse from whatever accursed swamp they had spawned from. Richard swore silently to himself as he heaved his day pack up into the bed of the waiting pickup while Forest Speyer, Richard's partner on Bravo Team, ejected a handful of large, red shells from his shotgun before latching it back into its case.

The other four members of Bravo Team had also begun to stow their gear after the long day. They had been searching for almost eleven hours, hiking grid by grid in hopes of discovering the path of whatever had killed those campers. Unfortunately they had had little luck, losing the trail a mere twenty yards past what the coroner had determined to be their last victim. The trail had gone cold for now.

Forest and Richard hopped into the truck, its ageing suspension groaning under the sudden combined weight. It rumbled to life as Richard slammed the door, barely getting it to latch.

"When are you gonna replace this rust bucket?" he half-teased, elbow sticking out the open window as they bumped and jostled their way down the logging road towards the highway.

"Replace her? She was my first truck!"

"Yeah well, at this rate she might be your last truck too – I just hope I'm not in it when the brakes fail and you go over a cliff."

Forest just smirked from behind his sunglasses, turning on the radio. The station's signal was staticky out here, but occasionally part of a guitar riff would break through. A couple minutes later, the truck's knobby, off-road tires ground onto asphalt and they sped off down the highway back towards Raccoon City. The ride was smoother now, and the wind whipping through the open window chilled Richard's sweaty clothes.

It was nearly half an hour before they made it back to the Raccoon Police Department's headquarters through the evening traffic. After all their gear was properly stowed and the shotguns returned to the armory, Captain Enrico Marini - Bravo's team leader - dismissed them for the day.

"Hell of a day, man. I haven't hiked that much in a long time," Forest stated. He'd changed into a sleeveless tee, revealing the large, faded tattoo of a winged sword that covered his left bicep. "You hungry?"

"Dude, I could eat a buffet out of business. But Bridgette will kill me if I'm not home for dinner again," answered Richard as he grabbed his car keys from his personal locker. He had already gotten home late every night the past two weeks. Not to mention, she would probably appreciate finally having a break from their squirrelly two-year-old.

Forest chuckled. "Alright, suit yourself. Catch you later man."

"Later."

Richard watched as Forest left, having to sidle through the open doorway as a slight figure squeezed into the locker room past him with an awkward apology. It was Rebecca Chambers, the new recruit on Bravo Team.

Admittedly, Richard had been surprised that she had made it on to the team. She was inexperienced, having just gotten out of the academy two months ago, and there had been many other candidates who due both to the years under their belts and their solid track records were far more qualified. But both Captains Marini and Wesker had wanted her for the position, and their word was what mattered. Apparently she had graduated top of her class. But Richard had some serious doubts about how the timid recruit would perform under pressure.

As he closed his locker, its hinges groaning from years of overuse, Richard noticed that Rebecca's hands shook as she fumbled with the combination lock on her own and that the color had drained from her cheeks.

"Hey - you doing alright?" he asked.

She paused with her fumbling and let out a weary sigh. "Yeah. I just… I didn't expect my first call to be something like that." Her gaze shifted down to her boots.

"One hell of a day, for sure. But it isn't like this usually. More often than not it's just some hiker who wandered off the trail and got lost for a couple hours, or decided to stay out in the woods for an extra day without telling anyone," Richard explained. "Today was just a fluke."

Rebecca nodded, but didn't seem all that reassured. She finally got the locker open, grabbing a small, plain purse before closing it again, and turned to leave.

Halfway out the door, she stopped herself short. "Hey Richard," she began, looking back at him over one shoulder. "Thanks."

"Don't mention it. See you tomorrow."

As soon as Rebecca was out of sight Richard let his shoulders slump, the long day finally catching up with him.

Today was just a fluke, right?


Edwards and Haldane found Doctor Moreau in Raccoon General's cramped morgue the following day. She was tapping away at her computer's keyboard, glasses low on her nose and surgical mask dangling off one ear. Looking up to see the two detectives, Moreau pushed her chair back from the desk. "Boy am I glad to see you guys. I could use a break from all this damn paperwork."

"Anything to help out our favorite ME," Haldane replied. "You said you have something for us?"

She got up and quickly moved to the lockers, unlatching one and pulling out the rack that held one of the body-bag clad victims.

"Say hello to Oliver Mosely." As she unzipped the bag, they were hit with a familiar stench. The remains were in just as poor of shape as Edwards remembered. "He was the one near the campfire. Lisa Cobrin was the one behind the tent. They both went to the city college together, and I'm guessing so did our third vic." Her tone was calm, methodical, almost bored. "I won't be able to confirm that until we get a positive ID though. I asked the college to let me know if anyone else turns up missing, so hopefully it won't be long. The bodies were too mangled to learn much beyond the obvious – mauled to death. Probably died from blood loss, shock, or both. It's hard to get a definitive timeline with so little to go on – technically I can't even get a time of death. It's a little tricky to get liver temp with, y'know, no liver."

The detectives nodded.

"That's all pretty much what I expected," Moreau continued. "Now for the weird part."

"The unidentified bite pattern?" Edwards asked, not having been able to stop thinking about it in the day since the bodies had been found.

"Yeah…" Moreau trailed off for a second, pursing her lips, and her tone became more intense. "So most of them, like the other animal attacks, were pretty obviously canine. But that one I found didn't match any animal that lives around here – and upon further investigation, there were more bites of the same shape and size on our Jane Doe. So, instead of beating my head against a wall trying to figure it out, I faxed a few pictures to a colleague in Madison." She caught the look Edwards and Haldane exchanged. "Don't worry, I didn't tell him any details that might compromise your case."

The detectives relaxed. "What'd he have to say?" Edwards asked, hoping she would get to the punchline he could tell was coming.

"The bite pattern is human."