Carlos awoke to light and a hard pain in his shoulder, jammed and stiff. He groaned and tried to swallow, throat dry and tight as sand. His head split down the middle in a thunderclap of pain, his chest and feet cold like blocks of ice. He waited for his faculties to come back to him. The halogen lights on the ceiling swam, multiplied, then swirled together to form a single spotlight with many eyes, encased in a metal cone.
"Good morning," said a male voice. Carlos lifted his head and squinted to the source of the sound – a small man with skin the color of wet sandpaper, thin jet-black hair, eyes as dark as coal. He was wearing lab coat and carrying a clipboard. The white of his jacket was painful to Carlos' eyes as they struggled for purchase and reason. Beside the doctor stood another man with a face like a boxer and hair shorn so close to his scalp that its color was imperceptible. He wore a dress uniform that Carlos recognized; he was a Captain, frocked in a tan-and-forest green uniform covered in medals and badges. The man watched, his face a stern rumble of forehead lines and a frown. Both men stood behind a heavy barricade, floor to ceiling, made of some clear material — plexiglass or plastic or something like that — that separated Carlos' hospital room, in its grey metals and stark whites and clinical emptiness, from an office beyond.
Carlos rolled onto an elbow, slow and stiff, and looked down. He was shirtless and shoeless, covered only by a pair of loose teal drawstring pants that felt like they were made of paper. They stretched and pulled against the big muscles of his legs as he stood from the bed.
A needle was buried in a thick pumping vein that snaked up Carlos' forearm; it pinched and stung as he moved, yanked his arm back towards the other side of the bed. A long tube connected it to a hanging bag of clear mystery fluid that dangled from a hook on a pole set on three wheels. Carlos smelled like alcohol, but not the kind you drank - the kind you cleaned with. His skin was dry as dust, flaking at the bends of his elbows, cracking at the crevices between his fingers. They'd shaved the tangle of black hair that ran from his chest to his groin, shaved his arms, the downy, fine, black hairs on the backs of his hands and his fingers. Everything was prickly with stubborn regrowth, even the hair on his head, which was now almost completely missing.
Carlos regarded the needle and tubing with immediate distrust.
"It's just saline," the doctor said by way of explanation, "you were extremely dehydrated. And I'm sorry about the scrubs, those were the only pair we had large enough. None of the shirts fit. We're trying to find some."
"I recognize you," Carlos said, "'I hope you can live with what you did.' Right?"
"An… overreaction made in the heat of the moment, to be sure. I apologize for my rudeness. I'm Doctor Behara—"
"I remember." Carlos said.
"—and I'll be overseeing your recovery. You're in the decontamination process, so... try to remain calm. If you're infected, anger and heightened emotional responses only contribute to the stress that makes the virus mutate faster."
Carlos pulled the metal tripod along with him, like a hesitant dance partner. "I don't need a science lesson. Tell me what you did with Jill."
The man's face didn't change a single degree, a single twitch, and he shook his head. "Not possible," he said, "that information is protected under HIPAA."
The anger flowed heavy and hot, the only thing Carlos could grab onto with both hands.
"The fuck does that mean?" Carlos forced himself to be still. "Jill Valentine." He repeated. "The woman I was with. You took her. Where?"
The man scribbled on his clipboard, and fixed Carlos with a look of exasperation. "Look, Mr. Oliveira, I understand you're upset, but that's breaking federal law. Nor can I tell her about where you're being treated, I'm afraid."
"So she asked, but you just didn't tell her."
The Doctor's face fell, just a touch, and Carlos thought he saw a vein of sympathy. "She hasn't. But, that's not why I'm here."
Carlos' remembered her face, the way she flinched away from him, refused to even get close to him. It made sense, though something heavy and permanent in his chest sank.
"Hopefully we can get off on a better foot than this." Dr. Behara said, his tone cautious. "We're hoping you'll come around and decide that we work better as a team than as adversaries. I understand our first meeting was most likely traumatic."
"Traumatic," Carlos laughed, a sarcastic sound devoid of good humor; it was closer to the shake of a rattlesnake. "You violate her in front of everyone, you strip me down and throw me in a fucking hamster cage, and you think I'm gonna work with you? Go fuck yourself."
"I do wish there was another way. Tensions ran high, I'm afraid – but we can still work together."
Silence.
"I owe you an apology about using the vaccine. It's clear that you care for her well being a great deal."
Carlos shook his head. "Whatever."
He turned his back and wandered to the sink, a small circular metal basin set against the wall under a rectangular mirror. Carlos' hair, the hair his mother would always chide him for not cutting but always seemed to run her fingers through when she thought he was asleep, was gone, clipped close to his scalp. Without it his face looked severe and angular, he thought, overtaken by the dark overgrowth of his eyebrows and long, thick eyelashes. He'd tried to cut those eyelashes with safety scissors when he was child, tired of being called "pretty". He'd have given anything to not be pretty, but tough and stoic like his papai. Now that tough and stoic were his only choices, Carlos didn't feel proud or happy; he felt trapped.
Carlos cupped his hands under the running faucet and splashed his face with water. The corpse of a black eye had rotted into a yellow crescent moon over his right cheek, his bottom lip split in two places and clotted back together with black scabs. His nose hurt, and he grabbed it between his forefinger and thumb, jiggled it to test for a break. His beard was the only recognizable part of him that remained; shaved clean but refusing to relent, it had already filled in the bottom half of his face with dark, coarse, sharp hair. Whoever had been shaving it had apparently met their match and let it linger, a fight Carlos had given up the minute the Marine Corps was in his rear-view mirror.
"Whether it feels like it or not," the man continued, "We're doing what's best for everyone, here. You can help a great many people, Mr. Oliveira. The antibodies in your blood, your battle experiences, data on the bioweapons themselves, rate of mutation, all of it. You're in a unique position to strike a series of killing blows against Umbrella's bioweapon division. We just want to help you harness them in a way that will make sure it actually stays dead."
Carlos rubbed his forehead. This all sounded good — this was what he wanted. What they wanted. It still felt less like volunteering to help save the world, and more like having your arm twisted behind your back while someone beat you with a baseball bat.
Over Carlos' shoulder, in the mirror, was the reflection of something bright; a calendar on the wall in the next office over, under a glossy color print of a picturesque autumn scene, had x's drawn through consecutive dates up to October 7th.
"What day is it?" Carlos asked, and approached the barricade again, his eyes on the wall.
"The seventh of October," Dr. Behara responded.
"Six… I was out for six days?"
"There was some pharmaceutical assistance on that score," the doctor said, "but yes. We kept you sedated for the most common incubation period without grievous injuries or blood contamination in our subjects, which is 5 days." Then, by way of explanation, "To protect both the staff and yourself."
Carlos considered this. "I'm no doctor, but I ain't stupid. If antibodies were all you needed, you would've gotten them by now." Carlos indicated his head with a point. "I'm thinkin' you need what's in here more, or you would've put a bullet in me. You've had a week to do both of 'em."
"Absolutely," he said, "Your knowledge of battle tactics and survival would be quite useful to us as well. Your history with both Umbrella and the Araguaia, for example."
It was a low blow; the absolute lowest, and the name itself made the blood in Carlos' face run cold, then blistering hot, the room suddenly clinging to him like the air had been sucked out and he was vacuum-sealed inside with his memories and their emotions, unable to move. Any mention of his time in Brazil was linked with intimate and tragic closeness to the pleading voice of his mother, the way she assured him through tears that victory was certain and everything would be okay again, food would be plenty, water would be clean, and everyone would have shoes and medicine if he would just be brave. Brave like his papai.
Carlos was so small he had to look up at her in those days, his rifle almost taller than he was.
"What they did to you as a child was despicable," the doctor continued. "We know that, and we're prepared—"
"You like rules, lets talk rules," Carlos said, leaning so close to the barricade that his forehead almost touched it, his hands spread against its cool smoothness. His voice was low and calm despite the murderous trapped-animal anger he suddenly felt. Something in that tone, something in the change, also changed the way the doctor looked at him; it was the expression of a guy who'd gotten too used to giving orders and not following them, dishing out disrespect and always being saved from its consequences by the letters in front of his name. Someone who was now realizing that money and prestige and a plastic barricade couldn't save you forever, not if someone wanted to really hurt you. "You don't ever talk to me again about Brazil. Ever."
The doctor opened his mouth to speak.
"Ever." Carlos said.
The air was still and heavy with all manners of ugliness that went unspoken but somehow received.
The man beside the doctor, the man with all the chest candy and the suspicious squint, spoke for the first time.
"Watch it," he said.
The doctor waved to him; no, its okay, the gesture said.
"Loud and clear, Mr. Oliveira." Dr. Behara said. "Off the table."
Unsatisfied, Carlos pushed away from the glass and waited for his heart to slow.
"Two weeks," Carlos said, "I need guarantee of her safety. But after that, you got fourteen days, then I'm out of here."
"Surely," spoke the stone-faced man beside Dr. Behara, his voice deep and projected as a matter of habit, "but you also need to do something for us."
Carlos squinted at him. "The fuck are you talking about?"
"You want information, you want her safety, fine. But if we're doing you a favor, you'll have to give us something back."
"Did you just miss this entire conversation?" Carlos asked.
"I heard," the Captain said, "but you're in no position to make demands. If you haven't noticed, you're behind the glass, not us."
Dr. Behara's expression was solemn, his eyes averted, silent.
Carlos considered this. "And what exactly are you needin' from me? My car stereo?"
"Funny," the Captain said, unamused, "but we have uses for men who make it through a clusterfuck like Raccoon City and come out the other side in one piece."
"Oh, no," Carlos laughed again, "not just no, but fuck no. I did my time with Uncle Sam. There's no fuckin' way. The agreement was for information."
"And now it's changing. Do you want a guarantee of her safety, or don't you? Because last I saw, she was in a predicament much worse than yours — and its funny how easy tubes can get disconnected when one forgetful nurse decides to skip her rounds. Don't you agree, Dr. Behara?"
Dr. Behara didn't speak, didn't raise his eyes.
The man in the uniform held Carlos' gaze for a long, long time, both silent.
"You talk a big game like you're so much better than Umbrella," Carlos said, "but you're just as fuckin' evil as they are."
"Hard to win a war from the high ground," the man said, "give us your answer after you've thought about it — but I'd suggest you do it soon."
Carlos gave them every fluid his body contained, multiple times — urine samples (which he didn't think would be clean considering he and Tyrell's habit of victory blunts after coming back from the field with all their limbs, but the test somehow came back negative), saliva swabs, samples of other stuff he wasn't sure why they needed but they insisted on. He ran sprints on an outdoor track, and they timed him. They measured how many push-ups he could do, how many times he could touch his chin to a bar using just the strength in his arms. Boot shit. They always seemed so impressed that he'd managed to blow past the same fitness test he'd met as a gangly, pimpled 18-year-old, and he wasn't sure what to tell them that didn't make him sound like an asshole.
On the last day, the doctor gave Carlos a legal pad to write down his contact information. Dr. Behara slipped it into the pocket of his lab coat.
"We'll contact you when we need you to come back to D.C., but for now, you're free to do what you like." He leaned close, then, conspiratorial. "Make sure this number stays valid."
Carlos waited as long as he could. He waited for days that rolled into weeks, waited while the frenetic spray of color that was Autumn faded to grey and white. With eventual resignation, the day after Halloween he'd looked at his cell phone that sat, still on the table of his hotel room. It hadn't moved a single time, not a buzz, not a jingle.
Afforded the luxury of distance and time's dampening effect on even the hottest of blood, Carlos heard Tyrell's voice in the back of his mind: Have you thought about what you're gonna do if she's not there? We've gotta start thinking of our own extraction plan.
Carlos decided then that her silence was his answer. That day after she'd dozed off against him — a simple, innocent gesture — had seemed enough for Jill to realize that she didn't want him anywhere near her. He had misread the situation, and though he wanted something wildly different, Carlos wasn't the type to beg. He had options. If you decided you didn't want to be one of those, wanted him out, he was out, no questions asked.
It hurt. It hurt like a bitch. But, that was life sometimes. You could do everything right and it not mean a damn thing — he had done what he'd set out to do, a good deed for someone else who needed it. She didn't owe him shit, and he wasn't gonna be one of those assholes who acted like she did.
Carlos booked a plane ticket for the next day, and went home.
New York was the same as it had ever been; bustling and vivid under stacks of neon lights and the squall of street performers, not prepared to give one single of an iota of a fuck about whatever pain you were feeling in the river-rush of people and activity. The hustle of the city had always given him life, fed into his optimism and energy — there was always something to do, always something to see, always someone new to meet. Things happened here, life was lived, not just survived.
But Carlos didn't want things, he didn't want experiences, he didn't want to go outside. He just wanted to be alone to sort through things. For the first time in his life, silence and solitude sounded nice, maybe not even nice — vital, necessary. He looked up to the towering buildings, the imposing skyline, and felt strange in his own skin.
Someone banged into him, sent him stumbling.
"Watch out, ya fuckin' idiot!" The man yelled.
Home sweet home.
When he'd been in the city about a week, people started calling. His mother, of course, upset that he'd been home for days and not come by; some of his boys, who invited him out for drinks, which he'd declined, citing being sick; and one that stood out.
One Carlos' old friends called him up. Someone had seen him at one of their old spots — could she come over? She could bring dinner, and they could catch up.
Carlos knew what "catching up" meant. They'd known each other for years, someone initially being the boyfriend or girlfriend of someone's friend or cousin or something like that. He'd forgotten, by now. Though they wanted vastly different things out of life, they'd shared a mutual physical attraction that they'd agreed they could act upon with no strings attached whenever they were both in town. She was pretty and fun and had her own thing, never made it weird — he decided that maybe this is what he needed. Get over someone by getting under someone else. It had always worked before.
That night, after dinner was eaten and TV shows were watched, she'd gone after him first, climbing onto his lap and suffocating him with kisses that were so hard that they stole his breath. Eventually, she stopped, and pulled away.
"Okay, so, I'm just gonna ask. Are… you okay?" She asked, squinting at him. Carlos blinked at her.
"Uh, definitely," he said, "are you?"
She looked at him in a strange way, like she didn't quite believe him.
"You just seem kind of… you know, like… not here. Do you want me to…?" She gestured to the door.
"No," Carlos said, "no, no. No, it's okay. Sorry, work has been…" terrifying, traumatizing, exhausting, heartbreaking "work has been kickin' my ass. No, you're okay."
She still watched him.
"What?"
She shook her head, and climbed off of him. "This is too weird. I feel like I'm, like, raping you, or something. You're usually — you know, into it, by now."
Carlos gleaned her meaning, and, a touch insulted, rubbed his face. He thought, for a long moment. "Yeah, it's late, maybe..."
"Yeah," she agreed, "I'll uh… I'll talk to you later, okay?"
That was a lie, and he knew it. "Be careful goin' home."
"Yeah." She left him by himself with the scent of her body spray and lingering heat. Carlos sighed.
"Great job, dumbass," he said, and sulked for a moment, pride injured. He picked up her neglected leftovers, and finished watching the episode on the TV, secretly thankful to be alone again.
This was going to be harder than he thought.
The cell phone, a hard, rectangular piece of navy blue plastic, buzzed and rattled against the table top so hard that Carlos almost dropped his food, spilled fried rice on his lap. He put the foil package back onto the table and picked the phone up, hit the green phone receiver button, and put it to his face, annoyed.
"Yeah, hello?"
"Mr. Oliveira — this is Liutenant Granger, from the FBC. Your screen came back clean. You're scheduled to start training next Monday at 0600 at Anacostia-Bolling. Bring your Social Security Card and your Driver's License. We'll have more information when you get here. You'll be flying by American, here's your ticket number —" he read off a string of digits Carlos scribbled on a nearby receipt — "we'll see you on Monday."
Click.
This is what he wanted — to bring Umbrella down, some kind of tangible action to bring someone to justice. But it didn't feel tangible. It felt like those days he tried to forget, under the whiz of flying bullets in the lurid jungle heat, a rifle gripped in sweaty palms, being told you were fighting for something noble, something just, but always being forced to do someone else's bidding.
More than that, something elemental had been kicked out from under him; he didn't feel at home, comfortable, or safe anywhere. Things that used to bring him happiness and peace now were strange and distant, like he was living someone else's life, stepped back, out of his own body.
Carlos realized, with belated resignation, that he was. For the first time in his young life, alone in this apartment with the ghost of vanilla-coconut on the air and a rerun of The X-Files on the TV, he understood with intimate closeness what it meant to not be able to go back — that when some doors shut, they were meant to stay that way.
In those months, Jill awoke exactly once. The room ebbed and flowed like something impermanent. Somewhere to her right, something beeped, with regular rhythm. Over her face stood a woman, clad in a teal-green paper gown and a matching hat, her face covered with a mask that looped behind her ears. Jill reached up to her.
"Help," Jill tried to say, but her throat wouldn't move. She reached up for the woman, and missed; Jill's arm pawed at the air in front of her scrubs, and the woman looked down, her eyes concerned.
"She's awake," the woman said, with a start, "Doctor, she's awake."
Jill lifted her head. A huddle of men in the same scrubs leaned over her feet; the skin of her right leg was split down the middle from knee to toe, skin and flesh laid open, the flaps pinned to either side of her prone leg like a taxidermy bird, or perhaps a frog that you'd dissect in a biology class; the vital red of her tissue, the gummy pink tendons on full display. Jill felt no pain, but started to hyperventilate, staggered onto her elbows. She tried to move her leg but everything below her waist was numb, heavy.
"What are you… what are you… what the fuck are you doing?"
She screamed for help, tried to crawl away backwards. The doctors leaned over her with their gleaming scalpels pointed and yelled for something with the ending -fol. The nurse turned, grabbed a syringe off the table; she jammed it into the clear liquid chamber of the IV. Within seconds, Jill's arms refused to move. She tried to cry out, tried to scream for anyone to hear, but her mouth remained still. Her head hit the bed, the sound of the oxygen over her face hissed, soft and cool, over the sound of her pounding heartbeat.
"It's okay," the woman said, stroked her hair. "It's okay. I know it's scary, but it's okay. Just go back to sleep."
Under the strokes of the nurse's fingers and the hiss of the oxygen, the world ceased to exist again.
The first thing Jill heard on that frigid morning was a voice, was a deep male voice, close by. He was having a discussion with the high-pitched tones of a woman somewhere in the foggy periphery. Jill couldn't hear what they were saying. One of them laughed, and it made her stir — their conversation stopped. Something warm and dry and strong wrapped around her fingers.
"Jill," said the male voice, now above her, close, "Jill. Jill, can you hear me? I think she's awake. Go get the doctor."
Jill stirred. "Carlos?" She said, her voice slurred muffled beneath the plastic mask that puffed cold air against her face, "Carlos, where… what did…"
"Shh," said the voice. "Try not to talk."
Jill opened her eyes. When the room stopped spinning, a face, concerned and watchful, broke into a smile that reached its eyes, dark green and tired.
"Hey," Chris said. He brushed her hair from her face. "Morning." His face, handsome and peppered with stubble, was jarring; Jill felt like she was in some sort of dream, or maybe had just awakened from a long, bad one. Jill's eyes searched his face in frantic darts. "What…" she looked around, looking for something, someone, that eluded the grasp of her brain, confused and disoriented. "Where?"
Before Chris could respond, the doctor — short, dark skin, black eyes, thinning black hair — entered the room, the nurse behind him. Jill's eyes focused on the doctor, and she shot upright.
"You," she said, in a snarl. Her voice shook.
Chris looked back and forth between them. "It's okay, he's from the FBC. They've been helping you."
"No, she's right to have her reservations," said Dr. Behara. "Our first meeting was not a positive one. Hopefully we can now have a conversation about what has transpired, and our next steps."
"My next step is going to be right up your ass," she addressed the doctor directly, "He killed him—" Jill told Chris, "he killed him, and they did things to me, they cut me open and—"
"Whoa whoa whoa. Jill, what are you talking about? Killed who?" Chris turned to the doctor. "Do you know anything about this?"
The doctor sighed, and shook his head; his tepidity was infuriating, as if Jill had overreacted.
"Yes — we did perform surgical corrections on you while you were asleep. You had been infected so long that your fingers, your toes, had started to die, a normal reaction of the body when deprived of oxygen for long periods of time. We had to graft new blood vessels, but luckily, your internal organs were fine. And we didn't kill anybody, if you're referring to the man who was with you, when…" the doctor paused, "when we met."
Jill ignored the excuses. "Where is he?"
"I don't know. He left, as soon as his quarantine ended."
The air left Jill's lungs in a swoop. She looked down. "How long have I been out?"
"Close to three months," Chris said, "right?"
The nurse nodded. "Right. As of Tuesday, I think."
Jill's lips moved without words, her eyes vacant. Three months. Three entire months, lost. She looked at her hands, stripped off the sheet to look at her feet; pale scars, bisecting her forearms to her wrists, from her knees to the tops of her feet, stared back at her, souvenirs from travels she hadn't agreed to attend.
"Three months? You kept me out for three months?"
"You must understand — the amount of surgeries, then surgeries to correct those, then waiting for your T-virus titers to fall, collecting the requisite blood samples to reverse-engineer the vaccine you were given… it takes time. We're not even halfway done, but now you're out of the mutation stage."
Chris watched this exchange, a hand over his mouth, one eyebrow cocked. Jill looked to him. "Did you know about this?"
"Can you give us a minute?" He asked the doctor.
"Of course. Please take your time." The nurse and the doctor both left the room, closed the door behind them.
Jill looked at Chris, sitting by her bedside, his brown hair mussed and unstyled, dressed in a pair of jogging pants and a t-shirt. A duffel bag sat by the door — he'd been here a while.
Overwhelmed, Jill put her hands over her face, and was overtaken by a peal of silent sobs that shook her chest.
Chris made a sound, a curse in definition but sympathetic in tone, and he gathered her into his arms. She cried for hours, it felt like, while he held her.
"I'm so sorry," Chris said. He leaned his face on her shoulder. "I'm so sorry I wasn't here. I'm so sorry, Jill."
Jill looked around the room, squinted through swollen tears, over the line of his shoulder. The room was empty, save for them. She pulled away, and Chris wiped her face with his thumbs.
"The man you were with…" Chris said. "That's Carlos, right? You were asking for him when you woke up."
Jill nodded, sniffled. "They… they drugged me, and then they… I think they shot him. I saw them dragging him away, and then…"
"We'll figure it out," Chris said, rubbed her back, "it'll be okay."
The disconnect of his words, the gentle way he brushed her worries aside… Jill searched Chris' face, confused. Chris pulled her close while the final tears rolled and she buried her head against his shoulder.
The feeling of being violated, of being weak and confused and adrift, triggered something deep in Jill's brain — it looked for him, his dark hair that stood up away from his head in loops in cowlicks; the feeling of security that followed him, like a rampart around a castle that caught slings and arrows. Though Chris held her, tight and warm and strong, Jill had never felt so vulnerable, or so alone.