"We are so focused on our search for the truth that we fail to consider how few actually want us to find it. But it is always there whether we see it or not. It doesn't care about our needs or wants… it will lie in wait for all time. Where I once would fear the cost of truth, now I only ask: What is the cost of lies?"
— Valery Legasov, Chernobyl
May 10, 1999
Washington D.C.
It was Friday. Friday meant a few things. There was more traffic. More cars. More people around — more people watching. It made concealing things more difficult, the chances of police higher. Chris was at a point where the police didn't matter anymore.
Chris had been watching. Collecting patterns. Making some sort of sense of all of the pieces. In a time not so long ago, this would have made him feel strange — intrusive. Creepy. Of all of the watching, all of the waiting he had done as a police officer, all of the sitting in cars and noting when Person A did Thing B, it was never watching people he knew. Never turning the eye inward. But times had changed, and he along with them. Necessity was the mother of invention, just as much as she was the mother of intercession. With any luck, she'd be giving birth tonight.
Fridays meant one thing with reliability: the large man in the wool coat. Carlos, Jill had called him. First-name basis. Chris had stared at the photo of him standing on the street corner, hands in his pockets and face turned aside, its grainy grey and black and white print, the blacks where his eyes should have been. He'd stared at the photo so long the man's Latin features, broad and full and handsome by any objective measure, had morphed into something insidious. Underhanded. Evil.
Where are your eyes? He'd thought, after one long night of drinking. Who took them? Who'd you give them to? Did you trade them along with your soul?
Fridays meant Carlos Oliveira, so reliably in fact, someone else had also picked up the pattern. In a black van, a man sat, smoking a cigarette. Watching those granite steps, waiting. Chris knew who he was — one of the men from the photos. "The Driver". The man wasn't focused on Chris. Didn't even know he was there. He waited, his eyes on the apartment. Chris also waited, his eyes on the man — the hawkish curve of his nose, the way his jowls drooped, interrupted by the hump of a subtle double-chin. The man saw something that jogged his attention — something coming down the street under the dark of night. He opened the door to his van.
Chris followed suit, opened the door of his truck.
"Hey," Chris called to him, striding after the man across a square of vacant parking lot. The man's hand, which had drifted towards the waistband of his pants, stopped, and he looked over his shoulder. "You got a light?"
"Huh?" The man asked, annoyed. "What?"
"I asked if you got a light," Chris repeated, "your smoke. I left mine at home, and—"
Chris interrupted himself as soon as he was within reach, shoved the man against the side of the van hard enough to send him in a bounce off its dinged metal, back against his assailant. Chris' fingers laced tight in a fist around the man's thinning grey hair, the layer of hardened gel crunching in his palm like a sheet of paper. The man tried to fight back, tried to push back against Chris' hand. The disparity of strength was obvious, to Chris. To the man it was terrifying, from the look on his face, now on the other side of a surprise attack.
Chris slammed the man face-first onto the side of the van. An angular clang of bone hitting metal, a crunch as the weaker of the two gave way. The man's face bounced off of the dingy black paint like a ball, and as he came away, his nose, crushed into a smashed pile of meat in the center of his face, poured like a spout, splashing against the paint's gleaming polish in a trailing crimson blot. Once, Chris slammed his head against the car, twice, three times. By the third time, the man was begging for him to stop through broken teeth. Chris didn't hear him.
One of Chris' arms wrapped around the man's neck, and he dragged him back into the mouth of an alley to their left, where his screams wouldn't echo into the street. Chris threw him stumbling to the pavement, disturbing a cluster of stray cats who had been feeding on something in the pile of trash bags. They scattered in a tawny flash, and the man fell, awkward and scraping, to the pavement below. Chris followed after, knelt over him.
Chris dug into the inner lapel of his jacket, retrieved a photo. "Do you know this man?" Chris asked, and thrust the photo towards him.
The man shook his head. "You're a fucking psycho," he said, "I don't know anything! Just tell me what you want, and…"
"Information," Chris said. "I want information. And I know you work for Umbrella. You're going to give it to me."
"I don't know who that is," the man breathed, his voice pitching high and low, like the squeak of a rusted door hinge. "Umbrella? You got the wrong guy."
Chris straightened the man's arm against the pavement, placed his knee against the hollow between where the bones met in the joint of his elbow, and leaned his weight down. The man screamed, tried to struggle away.
The man's expression changed. His eyes closed, squeezed together. "Okay, okay," he said, "look, we can make a deal. If you let me go, you'll never see me again. Nobody'll hear from me."
"Tell me about Carlos Oliveira." Chris said. "Now."
"I don't know anything about—"
Chris let his weight fall, felt the bones grinding apart. Between his knee and the asphalt, something soft inside the man's arm snapped, and he screamed.
"Tell me who he is."
"Okay, okay, shit! Shit!" The man panted, shaking, his voice a high pitched squeal. "He's a mercenary! A… fuck… he's a mercenary. Ex-military. That's all they told me."
"Is he still on Umbrella's payroll?"
"I ain't got shit to do with him man, I'm just… just here for the girl. The one from the TV. She's… she's the payday." He held his nose. "God damnit."
"Where is he?"
The man spilled his guts. Locations, times, names. All of it. Of course, Chris couldn't be sure they were true — torture a man enough and he'd tell you he'd bombed Hiroshima if it meant it'd get you to stop. But it was a starting point, better than what he had.
"You're sure?" Chris asked, though it sounded more like a statement.
"I think so! I don't know, man, I didn't read his fuckin' file. I'm just here for the girl."
"…the girl." Chris repeated, to be sure he'd heard it correctly.
"Yeah, yeah," the man gasped, "the girl. Not your buddy."
Chris considered this. "You promised nobody'll hear from you." He said, thoughtful.
"Promise. Not a word."
Chris stood to his feet, slow and sure. The lines of his face, carved under the plays of shadow and ambient light spilled into the alley from its exit on the other side, looked as unlike mercy or kindness as anything the man had ever seen.
"Not a word, you said."
"Wuh—waitwaitwait—"
Chris wasn't sure he'd dragged him far enough away from the street. Wondered if his screams would echo through the alley and exit somewhere further on. His instincts, whether they be toward the indifference of human nature or the science of violence had proven correct. Nobody came running, no hero yelling for him to unhand the man, whimpering and bloody under the repeated blows of Chris' fists. No wailing police lights spun into view. Only darkness and rage and sounds of human pain.
When the man's unconscious body was found the next morning beside the dumpster by a hapless sanitation worker, Chris had been gone for hours. The man looked dead but was still alive, still trying to form words whimpered under shudders of pain, his head leaned on the ground. His assailant wasn't to the point of cold-blooded murder. Not yet. But it had been a near-miss of a thing when the anger pumped, hot and blinding, and blinked everything else out of existence. Including the future. Including consequences.
For his part, the man in the van kept his promise, one way or another. Nobody saw him again, on this street or anywhere else in Washington.
Carlos had missed guys' night twice in a row, and hadn't thought much of it at the time. He'd made the young man's mistake which young men only learn to stop making through damnable experience: there were not eternal chances to make up days that had been given away. People were not here forever. The unit's numbers were now one less, and while the party raged on around them, it felt different. Stayed in a part of his brain that he acknowledged but didn't befriend.
Carlos explained to it Jill. He felt bad for skipping and couldn't miss any more, though he didn't explain why. She insisted she was okay with meeting on Saturday instead, in her easygoing sort of way, though her voice was full of questions. He noted them, but didn't offer answers.
Carlos decided to walk to the bar this time — about 45 minutes by foot, not bad — because he was expecting to get absolutely blitzed. Like, fresh out of Boot camp shore week chug chug chug blitzed. The occasion called for it. The guys had worked through their grief and their anger, and were now in the stage of it which required a celebration of Keith's life to close the circuit and move on. Carlos was unsure. It had been months going on years since he had been well and truly drunk. He needed more alcohol to get drunk than normal people did, and like most young people, tended to make bad decisions once he was in the bag. He had always preferred pot if he wanted to get ripped, anyway. Maybe he could convince Kevin to partake with him after they'd gotten done here. Kennedy was a boy-scout, more apt to tell on him and get him piss-tested than join in, and the rest were much older. Family men.
His building was clustered on a street corner between a small coffee shop which saw no traffic at all which Carlos could measure, and a Puerto Rican grocery store with a faded, cracked plastic sign. Small bars and seedy nightclubs packed the street on both sides. The heavy beat of electronic dance music and the manic, strident sounds of wailing electric guitars competed for dominance in the warm breeze. People laughed and talked. Their yells danced over the gouts of steam pouring from manhole covers and sewer grates. Empty beer bottles and plastic cups glittering in the gutters reflected buzzing, blinking neon signs in every color imaginable. He passed this scene, hands in his pockets, and once the familiar building came into view, wooden and squat under a blinking neon sign — Charlie's — Carlos pushed the wooden door open with one forearm, ducked inside. Kevin saw him almost as soon as he appeared, and waved him over, scooted over to make room.
They did their normal drinking. Played darts. Kennedy embarrassed one of the other guys at pool, coming out of his shell by a touch. The night took a turn when the jukebox played something modern, not its usual 80s rock — someone had chosen California Love. Kevin made a face.
"What the fuck is this shit?"
"Hey. Don't shit talk 2 Pac in my presence," Carlos warned, "the hell's wrong with you?"
Kevin squinted at him through a cloud of smoke. "You like this garbage?"
"That's Doctor Dre, man," Kennedy joined in, already halfway in the bag, "they're fuckin'… geniuses. If you listened to anything made in the last decade, you might understand."
Carlos laughed, pointing, as if to say see?. "When I've got Leon agreein' with me, you know you fucked up." Kennedy nodded as if to say it was true.
The song ended and a familiar peal of electric guitars squealed over the speakers, and Kevin was happy again.
"See?! This is music," he yelled, over the music, "not whatever hippity-hoppity shit that was."
Carlos rolled his eyes. You could lead a horse to water, he supposed, the same way you could lead it to art. Wouldn't keep it from eating the damn painting if it was a dumb-fuck like Kevin.
Kevin nudged him hard, under the table with his foot. "You wanna come outside for a smoke?"
Carlos didn't smoke cigarettes, nor did the rest of the crew, meaning they'd be alone. Carlos nodded, guzzled the last of his beer, and followed after.
Kevin leaned against the wall and lit a Lucky Strike, but didn't raise it to his lips. He watched the college girls walk by in their cutoffs and thong sandals, distracted but not interested. He rolled the smoke between his fingers, stared at it as it burned.
"Been meaning to ask," Kevin said, "Jill's gonna be at the trial, right?"
"That's what she said," Carlos leaned against the wall as well, his arms crossed. "She's stressin' about it, but she's gonna rip 'em open, man. She's chomping at it to tell everyone what they did."
Kevin nodded, a specter of a smile on his face. "She's fuckin' mean when she wants to be."
"You got that right. Why, what's up?"
Kevin shrugged, an uncomfortable gesture, like it had to be pulled out of him from his chest. "I dunno… I just… miss her, I guess." He rushed to clarify: "Them. We weren't like, close, or nothing. But she's…"
Carlos was quiet, let him finish.
"We don't got too many of us left, you know? I was gonna ask if we could go, together. To the trial, to show support. If you're gonna go."
This surprised Carlos. Kevin was their good-time guy; he didn't always keep things light, too mercurial, his heart affixed on his sleeve. But he was pure of intention in a way few people were, like a kid, no ulterior motive that lurked below the surface. Trials weren't Carlos' idea of a good time, either, but Kevin?
"Of course, man." Carlos said. "You know you're welcome any time. You don't gotta ask."
Kevin brightened. "I appreciate that, dude."
"I actually think the three of us should get together sometime and you guys can just catch up. You got a lot of common ground, no need to be a stranger. You know?"
"Huh." This seemed to flatter Kevin and cheer him in equal parts. "Yeah. Yeah, we can hang out. You think she'd want to?"
"Yeah. I think she'd like that, too. She asked about you, if you were okay."
Kevin smiled, opened his mouth to speak, but was distracted by a vehicle — a truck. Hunter green.
Carlos waited for a response, and when none came, he knocked his boot against Kevin's sneaker. "You still with me?"
"Oh, yeah," Kevin blinked back to Carlos' question, "sorry. Just thought I saw a familiar face. I'm fucking hammered, dude."
It was 2:30 AM. The bars weren't closed, yet, but the entire team was fall-over start-a-fight plastered and Carlos had seen enough. After he stowed multiple sets of car keys with the bartender and loaded them into multiple cabs, Carlos was sober enough himself to make the trek home.
Carlos kept his eyes forward, hands in his pockets as he walked. Parties still continued, though there was more yelling and less people. As the wall of sonic distortion died in the background, the thumps of beats became muffled and flatlined, the chatter turned to whispers and eventual silence. The clomp of his boots on the pavement and rushes of air from cars as they whizzed past became the only soundtrack to this walk, the neon lights lay to sleep in blackness.
Something tickled Carlos' neck, raised a hand to rub it, and found nothing. After a few moments, footsteps scraped and tapped against the sidewalk, behind him. He glanced back over his shoulder.
Someone was following him. Walking turned out to be a pretty shitty call. Like everywhere else in the world, there were weirdos, and they came out at night.
"Hey," the man said, "I need to talk to you."
Carlos shook his head and grumbled, but didn't respond. He quickened his pace.
"Hey," the man said to Carlos' silence, "I said I need to talk to you."
"Listen up, dickless wonder," Carlos fired back, over his shoulder. There were a few cases when his Bronx accent would come out strongest: when he was angry or when he was telling people to fuck off. His words became clipped, dipped in and out of the dialect. "I didn't respond the first time 'cause I don't give a shit. Fuck off somewhere."
The man followed, undeterred. Carlos was well aware of his qualities which made him more apt to survive in these sorts of situations. He was strong as an ox, always had been, back to his schoolyard days where he'd been relied upon to flatten bullies who picked on the weirdos and the nerds. High school had been a while ago, almost ten years, but the reputation as an equalizer had stuck.
Nobody Carlos knew could call him "practical", but violence was one of those topics where he favored experience and rationality. Street fights rarely ever ended clean and even the toughest dude could end up dead by assuming they would. Happened all the time at home. Tough guys stopped being tough real fast with a knife buried in their liver.
Though his brain had come around to defending himself if it came to it, Carlos was not that guy. The "tough guy" who thought the ability to hurt people made him special. Like most men who were dangerous, he knew he could hurt someone when he let loose. He avoided those situations the best he could — letting loose was his last possible option. He didn't enjoy his legacy being one of hurting people.
It didn't appear this man shared his philosophy, which put him in a tight spot which grew tighter by the moment.
"Won't take long," Chris said. He caught up with him, reached out and grabbed the man — Oliveira's — shoulder, and something in his grip, fingers pinched too tight, grabbing into the lines between muscles made the man's shoulder tense. "I just have a few questions for you—"
Oliveira whirled around, jerked out of his grip. He took a few steps back.
"You touch me again, and we're gonna have a problem, man." From this close, there was an obvious size disparity. Chris wasn't a small man, not by anybody's measure — five-eleven and somewhere in the neighborhood of 190 pounds, all solid, long, wiry muscle. The man before him had about three or four inches on him, broad and solid in places that suggested practical strength, not vanity. His knuckles and his face were both scarred in parts, split and healed together in shining lines of pale scar tissue against his olive skin. One of his ears puffed out like a cauliflower. He fought, maybe for a living. "I ain't in the mood. I told you to fuck off. You go your way, I go mine. We understand each other?"
This close, Chris could smell the beer on him. Maybe his reflexes were slowed just enough to give him the upper hand.
"I'll tell you what I understand," Chris said, "I understand you're not so tough when you don't have your fancy company gear on, or your little mercenary goon squad to back you up."
Oliveira's face strained, but not in confusion — like Chris had said something he didn't expect him to know.
Chris took the opportunity. It might be the only one he would get. He rushed him, grabbed Oliveira by the collar of his t-shirt, bunched it around his knuckles. Chris dragged him into a nearby alley between two brick houses, and socked him against the wall. His weight was hard to move, but Chris had relied on something other than simple brute strength, and though it was a struggle, it ended with him in the high ground.
"Look," Oliveira said, his hands aloft in surrender. There was no panic in his expression, and he spoke with intentional slowness. "Just be cool. Nothing bad's gotta happen. Just tell me what you want. Money? I got some in my wallet, okay?"
"You all sound the fucking same," Chris snarled, and rocked him back against the wall, bumped the back of his head against the brick. "You talk so tough until you get separated from your friends, until someone gets you alone. Then the first thing you do is try to cut a deal. Beg for your life. You have five fucking seconds before I paint this wall with your face. Who is paying you to keep tabs on Jill Valentine?"
Oliveira's bewildered expression settled into something like consideration. "I don't know what you're talkin' about."
Chris slammed his fist into the exposed strip of skin of the man's stomach. Oliveira leaned over, the air swooped out of him in a sick sucking sound. He coughed, swallowed hard, and cleared his throat.
"Don't fucking lie to me," Chris said. "I know who you work for. I know who you are. And I know what you want."
"Nobody's payin' me," Oliveira said, "we're…" he faltered, "nobody's payin' anybody, man."
"Oh — so you're friends. Right?"
Oliveira said nothing. Impatient, Chris punched him again, punched him so hard he could feel the thick muscle wall press back against his organs, jostle something important. The larger man made a gagging noise and swallowed, loud and wet. Chris slammed him against the wall again. Oliveira made a noise, part grunt and part something else, edged by a yelp of pain, his chin tilted to the sky.
"Okay," the larger man said, his breath short from pain. It sounded sarcastic. Chris begun to grow frustrated: blows which had toppled the earlier man over, sent him tipping in and out of consciousness, didn't so much as carry this guy off of his feet. Like punching a heavy side of beef that dangled and swung, but always came back to neutral.
"She's the payday. Right?" Chris said.
Oliveria caught his breath, his heavy eyebrows furrowed. "You got this all wrong. I don't work for Umbre—"
This time Chris kneed him, full force. It made the other man vomit, spill a blast of what smelled like beer mixed with battery acid. It splashed on the ground and Chris hauled him to the other wall, slammed him stomach-first against it, bent one of his arms behind his back.
"You're supposed to be this big, tough guy," Chris said, his voice a whisper of promised menace, "but when someone big and tough gets in your face… you're kind of a bitch."
Oliveira sighed, jerked a little in his grasp, tested Chris' grip. Chris pressed on him, cranked his arm, felt the grind of his bones. Oliveira cried out through gritted teeth.
"If you like your arm only bending in one direction — don't."
"Look," Oliveira said, "I work for the Federal Bioterror Commission, okay? The FBC. I've got my I.D. in my—"
"I warned you about lying to me," Chris said, leaned close to one of his ears. "You're not going to get another one."
"Look man, I get that whoever you are, you care about her. Okay? I get it. Grab my phone, in my left pocket. I'll call her, she'll set it straight, whatever you wanna know. Nobody's gotta get hurt tonight."
Chris had been promised violence. By who or what, he couldn't remember, but the lack of pushback made this victory thin and unsatisfying, like getting to the ring and your opponent shrugging. Giving you the W when you'd dreamed all day of taking it out of his blood. All he was getting was compliance, and it confused him. Perhaps easier to tolerate, the confusion stirred itself into a frothing anger as he stared at the man's profile — his eyes, brown and tilted and frocked with long feminine eyelashes. Those eyes were enough to trick Jill. Chris wondered what other little houseflies he'd beckoned into his web before he spun them in silk and swallowed them whole.
Chris shoved his hand in the pocket of Oliveira's jeans, against the big muscle of his thigh, retrieved his phone.
Chris looked at the phone, tapped buttons with his thumb, the display shining onto his face. The phone rang and he hit the speaker button. Jill, said the display name.
Five rings. Six. Seven.
Jill picked up with a muffled click. Her voice was thick with sleep, soft. "Carlos? It's almost 3 in the morning."
"Hey," Oliveira said, and forced himself to sound casual. It didn't work, not to Chris' ears, and if not to those, not to hers. "What've you been up to tonight?"
Silence. Chris's eyes ground to a narrow slit, bored into Oliveira' face like a drill.
"Sleeping, until now," she laughed, "I thought you were going out with the guys? This better not be a 'I'm drunk and horny' call, because…"
Oliveira looked back over his shoulder, careful to catch Chris' gaze as he spoke. "You sayin' it wouldn't work?"
Chris pushed on him. Watch it.
"Well… probably. But I'd still be mad at you."
Chris' grip faltered. Oliveira didn't capitalize on it, didn't move.
"Hey, I've been meaning to ask," Oliveira said, "you ever thought about workin' for the FBC? We could use an infiltrator. The guys've been askin' about you since you've been on TV."
Jill laughed, confused. "Not really? I'm pretty sure they'd frown on fraternization." Silence, like dawning realization. "Wait… are you okay? You're acting weird. I'm going to come down there. Where are you?"
Chris set his mouth in a line, disconnected before Oliveria could answer.
"See?" Oliveria said. "Gave you what you want. I don't work for anyone but Uncle Sam. She's fine. Now we can call it square. Cool?"
Chris blinked, hard and fast. His fists shook. Like throwing something to the ground from frustration, he released Oliveira's arm in a sudden shove. Once he was free, the man pushed himself off the wall and twisted away, got a few paces distance between them.
"I know who you are," Chris warned, "and I know you're Umbrella. I know what people like you do to people like us. Especially now." Not her — us. Fuck. "I don't know what your end game here is, but if you were smart, you'd find somewhere else to be."
Oliveira dusted himself off. He looked at Chris' face, and Chris tensed for a swing — none came. His brown eyes searched Chris' expression, like he was trying to read Chris' mind as he rubbed his sore elbow.
"I get that you're pissed," Oliveira said, "I get it."
"No, you don't get it." Chris asked. "You caused all of this. All of it."
Oliveira didn't move, continued to search him. "If you're Jill's friend, we're both on the same side. Even if you don't know it yet. There's been too much of people gettin' hurt already. We don't have to add to it." He paused. "It don't have to be like this."
Chris paused. A familiar ringing, all at once distant and close, like a television tuned to static, wailed to a crescendo inside his brain. He blinked, rapid, tried to shake it. Chris took a step back onto the sidewalk. Oliveira followed him, at the same distance.
"No." Chris said, though his tone was weaker, less resolute. He'd been presented a flower where he expected a fist, and it made him more pissed, more shaky. He was the one who'd gotten the upper hand here — he was going to kill him. Oliveira had no right to speak to him so, like he was his friend, like he was granting him reprieve. "No, we're not. We will never be on the same side."
Oliveira's phone rang, a jaunty little jingle into the tense night air between them, comical in its bad timing.
"I'm gonna answer that," he said, "I don't got a gun. It's probably her."
Chris stood, silent, as Oliveira did so. The conversation was short — yeah, I'm fine. Don't worry about it. I'm sure. Just go back to sleep, okay? It's okay, we can talk about it later. Okay. Bye.
Oliveira looked at the phone, as if he was considering its color.
"I'm not gonna fight you," Oliveira said, "so if it's that important to you, make me go. Hit me with your car or whip out whatever piece you got and give me one in the dome. But you gotta understand that once the conversation becomes about Jill, and not about us," his eyes flicked up to Chris, steady, "I ain't so inclined towards cuttin' you a break."
Chris wanted to laugh, but didn't. His eyes narrowed so hard they hurt.
"You and me can have our differences. But once you tie her up in whatever beef you've got…" no fear, no tension, only concern and gravity, like he was explaining something deathly serious to someone who didn't understand. "We're havin' a completely different conversation."
Chris bristled. Everything about him made Chris want to smash him off of every hard surface he could see. Most of all his soft tone, like he was doing Chris a favor by getting his ass kicked. Like he was some kind of hero, protecting his ward. The dragon trying to talk the knight down, while the quarry was still clutched in its claws, ready to have her head nipped off at dinner time.
Chris hated him for it. A deep, grinding hate in the basement of his soul.
"Is that a threat?" Chris asked.
A warm night breeze rustled over them, and Oliveira shook his head. "Depends on you, man."
Chris nodded. Perhaps they weren't so dissimilar after all — at least, not in the ways that mattered. Not about things like this. "Glad we understand each other."
Chris left Oliveira where he stood, and the man watched him retreat. Chris lit a cigarette as he stalked away, the thump of his bootfalls the only sound for miles. The pierce of the ringing inside his head persisted, drilled into his brain from both sides. Chris' hands twitched and trembled, as if still hungry.
Chris stumbled into his motel room. The room smelled of mildew and cigarette smoke, lit dusty orange against upholstery every shade of rust and brown the human eye could determine. Chris did what he hadn't done in months: he called Jill, forced fingers that shook and trembled to dial her number. Listened while it rang and rang. When her voice picked up on the machine, soft and thoughtful, he hung up.
Please, Chris thought, please, just pick up.
Jill was the last. The last of the STARS, a team once dubbed the pride of Raccoon City's police force, now a collection of forgotten headstones and dusty reams of junk mail stuffed into abandoned mailboxes with no new address to escape to. No future. Valor and honor and good intentions stolen. Snuffed out.
Every last one of the team that survived had scattered like a fistful of ashes picked up by a baleful wind. Rebecca, young and enthusiastic and so bright she made Chris look like he'd suffered some sort of brain damage. She had packed her desk and left. No goodbye, no contact information. Fair enough — field work wasn't for those who lacked the heart, and she'd been wise enough to know it.
Barry, their resident patriarch, was as bent on revenge as the rest of them. His deep sense of loyalty had never recovered from being used as a pawn to further such injustice, and he was a non-stop apology machine where Jill was concerned. She'd become annoyed by it after about the second week.
Barry was on board, and to hear him talk, he was ready for whatever murderous end awaited him in his search for Wesker, their former Captain. The betrayer. But then the worried faces of Barry's girls — both under ten, and who both loved him with the fierce, innocent devotion of young children — had won out, and he'd whisked them and his wife somewhere far, far away, to the distant safety his native Canada.
Chris shook his head. It pounded. His chest grew tense, and he felt his pulse in his ears. Oliveira's soft tone, almost diplomatic, rolled like smoke inside his brain — If you're Jill's friend, we're on the same side, even if you don't know it yet.
Chris hadn't bought it. Not from Oliveira. But Jill — her voice lulled him into complacency. Convinced him. And now she'd suffer for his weakness, his lack of forethought.
He dialed her number again, sat alone with the dial tone, and hoped to be proven wrong.
Carlos walked the rest of the way home. One of his arms was now his 'good arm'; the other hurt, hurt bad, like he'd fallen and landed on it wrong. His elbow throbbed from the joint out, hot and stiff and swollen. At least it wasn't his dominant arm, which he'd looped around his midsection over a solid bloom of bruises and ruptures, blood now clotted in hard oblong knots under his skin. Across the street, the parties had died to the thoughtful silence of early morning, the stretch of black nothing between last call and the lilted songs of birds. The neon lights of the club had been turned off to sleep for another night, and the street looked like a street again, not a circus. The darkness was a comfort.
As Carlos approached his apartment complex, he saw the toes of her white running shoes first. Jill sat, knees together, on the first step in the cement staircase. She was still in her pajamas — a tank top and tiny basketball shorts piped with gold around the edges. Jill never wore anything like that outside. She must have run out the door without stopping to change.
Carlos considered a dive into the bushes or maybe behind the building, a sudden knee-jerk reaction of shame with no real anchor in reality. But this was Jill — as much as he didn't want her to see him right now, he'd struggled to remember a time where he hadn't wanted to see her.
"Hey," Carlos said as he drew near, and tried for a smile. "You come here often?"
Jill turned to the sound of his voice and climbed to her feet. She went to him with a hand outstretched in concern, and touched it to one of his shoulders.
"What happened?" Her eyes searched him — they paused for a moment on the torn rumple of his shirt collar, climbed back to his face. Carlos welcomed her roaming glances when they were a byproduct of hunger or desire. Not concern. Concern felt different.
"Aw. You worried about me?" He asked. She didn't appear amused, and his tone sobered to reflect her seriousness. "Just a dust-up at the bar. Told you it wasn't a big deal."
Jill looked him straight in the eye. Her gaze flickered back and forth.
"What?" Carlos asked, with an uneasy chuckle. When she didn't trust what you had to say, she had eyes like x-ray vision, and sometimes he thought they would pierce through his skull to get to the truth.
Jill shook her head. She slid her hand to his upper back, rubbed him there; a reassurance. "Lets get you laid down. Looks like you could use it."
Jill followed him inside. Carlos kicked off his boots, sat on the edge of his bed, and laid back with a wince and a sharp gasp through his teeth. Once his head hit the pillow, Carlos closed his eyes; between the alcohol and the adrenaline it was hard to keep them open. Sleep rolled heavy and sudden like a dark thunderhead. The soft spider-creep of Jill's fingers traced the center line of his stomach. After a moment Carlos put his hand on hers, gentle, to still it.
"Maybe later," he said, and moved her hand away. Under the weight of his exhaustion, there was no stir from her touch. It would have to wait.
"I'm trying to look at your stomach," she laughed, "Let me see."
"It's just a few punches in the gut. You've seen me bite it way worse than this. Promise."
"Don't do the guy thing, okay? Even Mike Tyson uses an ice pack and a couple of Tylenol when he gets hurt. Do you have any actual medicine?" Jill stopped him when he opened his mouth to speak. "Not booze."
He didn't.
Jill looked in Carlos' freezer and found emptiness in its gouts of cold steam save for packages of frozen vegetables. It seemed all he kept on hand was frozen broccoli, endless bags of chicken, eggs, condiments, rice. One of those bags of broccoli would have to be sacrificed for the greater good. She wrapped it in a ziplock bag found in a drawer, brought it to him, set it on his stomach over his t-shirt. He moved under it, unable to find a position where he was comfortable. Somewhere in the haze Carlos felt the bed compress under her weight as she picked over him, found a spot to settle between his arm and his torso. It reminded Carlos of a house-cat on tiny tentative feet, lowering down and curling in once they'd found a warm spot to nap. He put his arm around her.
"Did you know them?" She asked. The question reeled him back from the shallow waters of sleep.
"Hm?"
"The guy, from tonight. Someone you know?"
Carlos sniffed, cleared his throat. "No. Never seen him before. I was walkin' home and he got the drop on me. Nailed me a few times, then ran away."
"Hm."
Carlos hesitated, then said: "I was thinkin'… did you want to stay here for a few days?"
Jill's expression was confused. "Well, that's out of nowhere."
It wasn't. Not to him. And not to her, either, if she'd heard what he'd heard. He craned his head, repositioned it on the pillow to look at her. "I'm not askin' you to move in or anything like that. I'd just feel better if we weren't split up, until all this trial stuff's done. It's gettin' crazy out there, and…" he trailed off.
"Aw, you offering to protect me? Or do you need a bodyguard, tough guy?"
Carlos laughed along, but something in his face stilled her, and she fell into a silence that felt like consideration. Her eyes traced over him again, clear and steady as rain.
"Okay," she said, "if it'll make you feel better, I can stay for a while. Until its done."
"We can talk about it in the morning. Gimme a list of stuff and I'll go…" he yawned, wide and loud, and it reminded Jill of the careless, bellowed yawn of a lion. "I'll go… get…"
Carlos trailed off and sunk easy into the twitches and flutters of early sleep. Jill looked at his stomach; a hard, unrelenting force deep in her brain realized it didn't believe him. It was well-known you had a good chance of getting jumped if you walked home in a rough place like downtown D.C. That wasn't in question.
But the severity, the timeline didn't make sense. She'd seen Carlos in action. She'd seen the easy way he could move people if he wanted them moved, and unless he was held at weapon-point, some random tweaker couldn't have beat him like this for his wallet or his phone even if they had surprised him. His knuckles weren't bloody or scraped, or even red. No physical evidence of a struggle on his part.
When she'd first seen him have an honest go at someone — one of his old teammates, Nicholai — he'd jammed his thumb in the man's eye, smashed Nicholai's jaw into multiple pieces that floated inside his broken face with a single, freight train of a punch. She remembered being scared of Carlos in that moment, like she'd just realized someone you shook hands with had hidden a gun in there the entire time… they just hadn't had reason to use it on you. Not yet.
Why would they try to shoot him, and de-escalate from there? Why wasn't this also a hit attempt? These didn't go backwards. You didn't try to murder someone with a gun and later decide a few love-taps were how you convinced him you were serious. Maybe he wasn't able to fight back. Maybe it was a message of some kind.
Jill groaned against the spin of her brain. 4am was not the time to convince yourself of anything good, not if you wanted clear, rational answers. Maybe after some sleep they could talk about it again, make some sense of the situation.
As she closed her eyes, Jill's curious brain brushed against Carlos' question on that phone call. She'd said no — she saw how the FBC operated from an angle so close and grotesque where she wanted nothing to do with them as soon as they'd released her. But her own investigations had ground to a halt, the leads gone cold, trails evaporated. Maybe there was a way not involving field work. At least until she was better. The FBC weren't perfect, but maybe they were her best bet, as committed to putting their boots on Umbrella's neck as she was — whatever it took.
And wasn't an enemy of her enemy her friend?
Maybe not a friend. But a partner.
Jill's eyes blinked open, and trailed along the lines of Carlos' throat. He still bore the scar of the charred black line where the bullet had missed him.
Maybe.
Carlos' dreams were filled with words.
I know who you are. I know what people like you do to people like us. We will never be on the same side.
What people like you do to people like us.
What people like you do.
people like you
As he slept, Carlos dreamed of the angry, snarled mask of the man's face, and of Keith: so tough and sure and diamond-hard, until he blew off his own head to escape what banged around inside it.
When Jill failed to answer the phone the next day, and the next, and the next, Chris went to her apartment, rang her number. Someone let him in and he knocked on her door, knocked for twenty minutes, until someone screamed "THEY'RE NOT THERE, SHUT THE FUCK UP!" from an adjacent unit. No answer, no movement from inside. Silence. He considered kicking the door in, and thought better of it — it would attract the police, if he hadn't already.
Chris called Claire, asked if Jill had been in touch. Maybe she had called someone, reached out to someone through the page Claire had made on the Internet. Claire turned out empty hands as well, but couldn't be one-hundred percent sure. She was at work, in the middle of the lunch rush against the sounds of clanking dishes and bellowing line cooks. She told him she could double-check later when she got home, and hung up.
Later that day, Chris called the rental office number printed on the front door of Jill's complex. Pretended to be Jill's boss, asked the lady who answered if she'd seen Jill around — she had a last check due to her and it had come back as no tenant at address, had she moved out? Did she leave an address it could be forwarded to?
"Hmm," the woman had said, "her bills are paid up, but she pays in advance. She's quiet. I haven't seen her in a while, but she didn't break her lease. What did you say your name was again?"
Chris had nobody to blame but himself. Easy to say but hard to accept.
He had let Oliveira go.
Somewhere after midnight, Chris returned to the scene of the crime and parked far away from Jill's door with the intention of getting into the building and finding out exactly what had become of her, and where. The silence had given him enough time to fill in the mysteries with his own worst case scenarios, allowed him to imagine whatever breed of tragedy he'd cared to. Images of her body, lonely and curled on itself in the purple mottle of death, skimmed across his mind so vivid and strong they turned his stomach.
As Chris shouldered the truck's door open, the gauzy yellow light from the complex's doorway darkened, blotted out under the shadow of a large frame. Like a bad dream, Oliveira emerged, the dark colors of his hair and skin an open challenge to the light which surrounded him. For a moment, he sucked everything bright into his vortex.
Chris didn't get out. He closed the door, slowly.
Oliveira carried something, tucked under the heft of one of his arms, against his side. Chris squinted. A cardboard box. The box was stuffed to the brim with things — objects. File folders. Oliveira looked over his shoulder like he expected somebody, then unlocked the doors of a gray-black Jeep with a remote starter, beep beep, and shoved the box inside. There was nobody else in the car. No Jill. Chris' fingers ran cold as if the blood had been stolen, left with only a hollow tingle where they touched the steering wheel.
Oliveira paused, looked over his shoulder again. Slow, as if Chris had called his name, Oliveira turned, and stared straight at him. Oliveira shook his head, rubbed his eyes.
Chris should have killed him when he had the chance. He'd known what the man intended, instincts had served him well, but for some ungodly reason
Jill
had let him slip. Chris had been taught through experience, especially recent experience, that he always regretted being too merciful, but had never regretted when he'd been too cruel. This was a reminder, and Chris' brain stopped just short of considering what had to be lost
Jill
to remind him of a universal, objective fact: this was the way Umbrella operated. Any kindness was weakness, and given the chance, Umbrella found ways to turn your weakness into tragedy. There was money to be made from tragedy.
And now here Oliveira was, collecting the evidence. Her evidence. He was the last photo in a pile, all the rest broken in a hospital bed somewhere, gone or dead or arrested. He was the last. And he'd gotten what he wanted. Buzzer beater. Knew someone had smoked out his trail, so he'd hustled and closed shop, done what he'd come to do before any further warnings or their punishments could be issued.
Chris wouldn't make the same mistake again.
Oliveira waited for a passing car to clear the road, climbed into his driver's seat with one hand on the roof, and fired up the Jeep's engine into a purring rumble. Chris turned the key in the ignition of his truck, and didn't stop to consider how quickly Jill was forgotten under the smell of a brewing chase — it was now Chris and Umbrella again, the hunter and the hunted, and the moon was bright and full. He followed.
Chris kept two car's lengths between them. He followed the Jeep in creeping time around corners, fell behind larger vehicles when they presented themselves. Oliveira didn't look for a tail, and if he did, he was pretty fucking awful at avoiding them. They stopped at a red light, and Chris could see the shadow of Oliveira's head leaned on a fist, propped against his driver's side window. When the light turned green, the Jeep turned left onto an on-ramp to a section of mid-city highway.
The red-and-blue strobe light atop the police car in Chris' rear view mirror came sudden and jarring — couldn't be for him. Not now.
The cruiser followed behind, didn't switch lanes.
"Fuck," Chris spat, looked back and forth in a desperate man's calculus between the frenetic spin of lights and the form of Oliveira's jeep as it shrunk into the distance. At the last second he pulled over to the side of the road, turned into a gas station parking lot at a slow glide.
The officer was tall and severe-looking with dark hair pulled back tight in a ponytail, and she took her time on the walk to Chris' driver's side window. Chris watched with spiteful resignation as the Jeep disappeared into the night, and considered that if he drove off now, maybe he could still catch him. His hand itched to pull the gear shift back into first. It took every shred of self-control he contained.
God damn it.
"Sir?" The officer asked. "You okay?" It was a question of concern but came out more like we got a problem here?.
"Yes," Chris said, "sorry. What seems to be the problem?"
The officer pointed at the back of his car. "Your tags are expired."
"Right," he said, "time got away from me this year. I'll get them renewed."
She wrote him a ticket on a pink pad, ripped it off and held it out to him. Her equipment jingled and clanked as she moved, and she eyed him with distrust. "They'll throw this out once you pay them. Make sure you take care of it."
"Thanks, officer."
Chris waited until she pulled off and left. Her silver cruiser became smaller and smaller and then disappeared entirely. In a burst of fury, Chris punched his dashboard until one of his knuckles barked at him in sharp, desperate pain. Blood trickled down the black faux-leather material, dripped onto the cup holder below, into a silver ashtray filled with lonely tan-and-white filters, smoked down to their corpses.
Then… he remembered.
Chris pressed against his fist with a wad of fast-food napkins and called Claire's number again.
"Yes, big brother?" She asked, in an exasperated sing-song. A tiny voice on the other end of the line asked Who is that? and Claire mumbled something with the receiver covered.
"You have the contact information for the survivors, right?"
"Mmmmyep," Claire said, "I'm starting to think you don't listen to me when I talk."
"Give me Kevin's. Kevin Ryman."
Claire paused. "I think I've got it. Are you okay? You sound pissed."
Chris took a breath. A broad, pale flap of skin had peeled off of his knuckle, opened like the mouth of a tin can, connected by a shred of skin. He ripped it off. "Just business," he said, "I've got some stuff I need to ask him."
"Hang on," Claire said, and Chris could hear her as she typed, clicked on a computer. "Okay, here it is. You ready?"
"Shoot."
Claire rattled it off. Chris read it back and she confirmed. "That's what I've got," she said, "a friend of yours?"
Kevin and Chris had never been friends. Not even close. Kevin was an idiot who shirked his work, and when he did it, did it lazy, made other people clean after him. He was the guy who you never knew how he kept his job, but keep it he did. Ryman's work ethic wasn't the issue here — Chris had seen him outside a few night's past, where he stood outside of some honky-tonk piece of shit bar or another, talked with who looked like then turned out to actually be Oliveira. Talked like they were friends, despite Kevin escaping Raccoon City himself. It didn't surprise Chris that Kevin's loyalty ran thin; you never really knew somebody. Never really knew what was going on in their head. Even the Nazis had Germans who helped them, fed other people around them to the alligators if they got the idea that the gator would eat them last.
"Yeah," Chris said, his mind already far away. He watched the blood bubble and pool, and when it dripped between his fingers, he let it run. "A friend."