May 3, 1999

Raccoon City was a place of tragedies as varied and personal as a fingerprint. Those September days, hot and rainy in turn, left their bloody marks on people in ways that were so intimate that no two survivors had the same experience. What one saw the other could rarely relate to; what the other lost, one could only dream of. Limbs. Children. Mothers and fathers. Hometowns.

Leon was one of those people. What he lost wasn't so concrete as an arm, or a parent, or a house. It was something that couldn't be seen, but had to be felt through its absence: the part of himself that hoped for things, that believed in the good of people. Took it for granted. He mourned that absence every night while he was alone with Jack Daniels, the man who'd become his best friend since 1998. His only friend, really. The only one who made it go away, if only for a little while.

Leon drove home that day in May in a fog, distracted inside his own head. He'd almost gotten into a car accident, almost rear-ended someone because his mind had drifted off of the road. The man had climbed out of his station wagon, body language tensed for a fight, but then had saw Leon's combat fatigues and thought better of it, his tone suddenly apologetic and deferential. Just as well — Leon wasn't listening. Not really.

That night at 7:45pm, as promised, Leon placed his phone base on the coffee table between the television and the couch that doubled as his bed, poured himself a shot, and dialed Claire's number. He'd had time to get into the sauce a little bit before he called her. Took the edge off.

"Hey, you!" She said, over the phone's grated speaker. "Gimme a minute, okay? I gotta go put Sherry to bed, then I'm all yours."

"Okay." Claire always talked to him this way, with the familiarity of a close friend, vivacious and sweet like sugar. She didn't seem to mind when he didn't know what to say. She was a woman who did scores of emotional labor for those around her — she'd run down her older brother, Chris, into a warzone. She'd made a good faith effort to join whatever survivors remained together, even talked about starting a nonprofit for them and their legal, medical struggles. Most seriously, at the tender age of 19 and halfway through her tenure in college where most girls were partying and getting hammered on the weekends, Claire had adopted a child. A little orphan named Sherry, a girl of 9 whose parents had died in the same event that had brought them all together. When Leon had expressed doubts that adopting Sherry was a good idea at this juncture of her life, Claire had said something that stuck with him: She saved me just as much as I saved her. I'm not really her mom, but, I don't know — it's like we adopted each other. We're a family now. You, too.

Claire had to drop to half-time in school, take another job to make ends meet, but didn't appear resentful or bitter. She glid across the waters of her new life with the grace of a swan, a tiny, strange hatchling of another nest tucked under her wing. Somehow supporting someone else's weight while her own hung precarious in the balance.

Leon wondered how she did it. Those same waters threatened to drown him every day.

Claire returned. "Okay, I think she's down. What station was it?"

Leon told her. The news anchors were doing their preamble, talking about the Monica Lewinsky scandal, like every other station. Leon might have been the only 23-year-old man in history that was sick of hearing about blowjobs.

They listened to the anchors switch topics, and talk about Alyssa — Alyssa Ashcroft, who was supposedly a survivor of what had been dubbed "The Raccoon City Incident". Incident. Like a train crash or a chemical spill.

Leon didn't know Alyssa, but Kevin did. At least he said he did.

"Hm. Did you run into her?" Claire asked. "She's pretty."

"No," Leon said, though the short, modern clip of her hair and the confident, slightly exasperated way she spoke reminded him of someone else he'd met in September. Most things did, if he was in a certain sorry mood. "I don't think so. I didn't see many people."

"Okay," Claire breathed, like she was getting ready to skydive. "Let's do this."

Somewhere far away across the city, Chris Redfield was alone.

He sat in the ominous darkness of the motel room, perched on the edge of the mattress, rocking his heel against the floor. The television blared blue and white into the shadow, lit his handsome face and the crags of tension it held like an Easter Island statue. The television was tiny, from the 80s at least with a pair of metallic antennae to pull down a picture from basic cable, where the screen rolled every few frames. It was chained to the stand with a padlock. It was enough.

He watched, twitching and laser-focused, the rest of the world dissolved away. There was only he and Umbrella, an affair where he was comfortable. Where he knew what to expect. A refuge, of sorts.

Then, over the speakers, a familiar voice — thoughtful and feminine, projected. An air of authority.

Voice of Jill Valentine, former Raccoon City Police, said the on-screen marquee, though she was embodied by a featureless, vague human shape on the screen, as if she hadn't wanted to show her face.

She talked about a few things, interspersed in snippets, used to bolster the points the reporter was making, going down the line. Like a headlight, one stood out:

"They had disbanded us," she said, "our unit — STARS. We were the pride of the force, but after we visited the mansion in the Arklay mountains, once we returned, the case was closed with no explanation. We were told we'd lost our jobs. Told not to investigate or there would be trouble. Like they were hiding something."

I asked Officer Valentine if the bioweapons she saw in that Mansion were the same that she'd saw on September 28.

"The same," Jill's voice went on to say, "if we'd been allowed to conduct an investigation, we could have stopped this. We had irrefutable proof that it was Umbrella. But someone didn't want us to, under threat of death."

They threatened your life?

"Yes."

Chris lit another cigarette, his fifth in the last half hour.

In her penthouse, all-white and stark and smartly furnished, Alyssa was pacing. Her bare feet pattered against the shine of the floor, over the ornate rug, and back again.

"Too on-the-nose," she said, "I should have let her explain it. It sounds like I'm leading her. Fuck, I knew I should have taken more time in post."

Kevin offered her another beer. She waved it away, and then when he took it back, she thought better of it and took it from his hands, twisted off the cap and took a greedy swig.

"Calm down," he said, "this is amazing. I don't think it's too… whatever you said. Come sit down."

Alyssa sighed, and followed him to the couch in front of the television. Her posture was tense and rigid, as if she was still standing, just at half-height.

"I can't watch," she said, "I need to turn this off. I can't."

"Well, I'm going to watch it." Kevin said. "You can go or stay, but I'm invested now."

Alyssa glared at him. "This is my apartment."

"Yeah, so?"

She quieted, then. She could have argued — one of her strong suits, in fact — but she didn't have the energy for it nor the heart. Not against him, not against the strange black magic that hovered around him, warding off her incisive nature and her need for conflict. Alyssa had many work associates. She had admirers and colleagues. But friends… she'd never been very good at friends. Somehow this tragedy forced her into it, took and gave in equal measure.

She'd considered many times just never responding to Kevin ever again, leaving him in the rear-view mirror and with it their connection to that smoking crater. Moving on. Maybe if this won her a Pulitzer, she'd be whisked away into another echelon of glitz and importance and their friendship would just die a natural death, too mismatched to survive. But then, with a note of uncharacteristic shame, she'd recall how he'd always come back for her, for them, even in the grimmest of situations. Situations when he could have run, or let nature take its course, harvested their resources to help himself survive. What she probably would have done, in his situation. How he'd doubled back for George when George passed out from exhaustion, hit his head on the pavement — she and Kevin both had drug him by his arms. Alyssa had been so convinced they'd had to leave him behind, that they couldn't afford to be slowed down, but Kevin refused, and she couldn't leave Kevin. So they'd drug him.

Kevin even went back for Cindy. Even when she broke her leg, he tried… even when they had caught up, were pulling on her legs, dragging her back into the crowd, and…

Alyssa shoved the image, the screams that ended with a gunshot, the tears that he'd tried to hide by pulling out in front of the pack, out of her mind.

Half of her wanted to leave it. Half of her was convinced that she couldn't leave it. She wished one side would win.

"Lyss," Kevin said, jogged her back to present moment. Alyssa looked up at him, his gray eyes questioning.

"I'm good," she lied, and cleared her throat, "sorry."

They watched in silence.

The next morning, Carlos rolled into the hangar, fuzzy-headed from lack of sleep. The mood was dim, heads bowed and silence absolute. No chatter, no radio. No TV. No paper balls flying back and forth. No tinkering clinks and clunks of metalwork. A hole — someone was missing.

Carlos came near, cautious, like a man approaching a rattlesnake. He sat beside Kevin, his usual spot.

"What's goin' on?"

Kevin shook his head, swallowed hard, and looked up. Tears streaked wet into the red scrabble of his beard, and he wiped them on his t-shirt, sniffled. Carlos struggled to make sense of what he was seeing.

"It's Keith, man," Kevin said, voice wet and thick, "he…"

Realization dawned like sinking into black depths at the bottom of an ocean. Carlos' stomach dropped.

"You serious?" His voice was small, quiet.

Kevin nodded. "Last night."

Carlos sighed and leaned his head on his hands. His brain returned to Tyrell, walking a well-worn path, smooth from use. Of letters to widows, of how Ayesha Patrick had gotten one look at him on her doorstep in Atlanta late October last year, the greens of the trees still green and the oily Southern summer still lingering long past its welcome, despite paper cutouts of Jack o Lanterns and bats strung about the neighborhood. How she had at first wailed and refused to see Carlos, slammed the door in his face, knowing what it meant. Knowing what Tyrell's letter, with no Tyrell to accompany it, meant.

Carlos realized then — there most likely was no widow, nobody to deliver letters to. Keith and Ayesha were the same. The one left behind, waiting for some sort of justice to be done before he could rest. Now it was here.

Across the table, Kennedy's young face seemed to earn a line or two that day, distant and sad.

The funeral the next week was small, only these six in an otherwise empty church. Keith had nobody else, Carlos realized. They'd been his family, for however short a time they'd had together.

A Baptist preacher rained hellfire from his pulpit, and from what Carlos heard in the spaces between where his attention flagged in and out, the man was using it as a performance piece for himself, garments waving with dramatic gestures, as he warned against the sin of suicide.

Jill didn't watch the expose like everybody else had. Carlos had offered to be with her if she wanted to, but it wasn't a consideration; she'd lived it, up close and personal, and didn't see a reason to do so again. She'd left him to it.

That morning on her run, even over the thump of music piped directly into her ears, the story was like an ex-boyfriend, hard to shake and insistent. It screamed from the print on newspaper stands — UMBRELLA IMPLICATED IN CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY!. It played on television displays in store windows, people gathered around in gaggling flocks, watching the grisly body-cam footage as it looped over and over. People talking, not everybody believing, but people talking nonetheless.

Alyssa had gotten what she wanted.

For the first time in months, Jill remembered the man in the black van. His revolver. The squealing tires. Carlos' blood. She couldn't shake the feeling that this wasn't the victory they'd assumed when the news had broken, and considered the tendencies of cornered animals. How, when given the choices between fighting and death, fighting was always the preferred option.

Jill looked over her shoulder for the black van. She saw nothing, but her instincts had never betrayed her, and they yelled at her to get off the street. She turned and headed back the way she came, watching all the while.