May 15, 1999
2:40 am

Jill fell into a sudden, all-encompassing sleep. A sleep that came on so hard and deep, she didn't realize she'd even fallen asleep until she blinked awake in the middle of the night. The ever-present sounds of traffic and bustle were a distant murmur. The soft red light from the glowing numbers on Carlos' bedside alarm clock played across the shadows, turning everything on her right side a gradient from fluorescent red to black. Jill turned her head to check the time. She couldn't read those numbers, their shapes twisted into alien numerals which held no meaning to her brain, but she knew it was early morning. The fact she couldn't read the numbers didn't bother her — it was normal, maybe even fine.

It was warm in the bedroom: the early May heat seemed unsure whether or not it wanted to be humid as well. Carlos had fallen asleep on top of Jill, his arms wrapped around her, the side of his face nuzzled against the comfort of her chest. He was tactile and always reached for human touch, even in his sleep — searched for her with gentle gropes, pulled her against him. If she didn't come to him, he would crowd up to her side of the bed until he found her warmth, tangle himself around it like a vine. Being physically desired so charmed Jill in a way that felt almost girlish in its distant embarrassment. She was still getting used to being on the receiving end of intimate human contact again after almost a half year of no touches outside of accidental brushes against strangers on the subway; where before there had been only trickles, now she was on the business end of a fire hose. When Carlos was around, there was never long between some sort of contact, as if he still tried to determine she was there, solid, from moment to moment. Feast or famine.

Jill brushed her fingers through his hair, and he made a sound in his sleep, low and distant. It was a gesture that, at first, was tentative — afraid to wake him and be discovered. When he was asleep, she was less vulnerable, and was less hesitant to show affection so open. So, she waited until he slept to run her hands through his curls, feel their texture against and through her fingers, rough and soft at the same time, like cotton. When Jill's touch trailed away from him to smooth the darkness away from his forehead, look at his face, a coarse tumbleweed bramble remained tangled between and around her pale fingers, lifted soft out of his scalp. No resistance. Jill looked at her hand; her brain paused to make sense of what she saw, the handful she'd stolen. She looked back to him in panic, his new bald patch right on his hairline, impossible to hide. Carlos stirred as if alerted by violence against his pride and joy, and she could feel the flutter of his heavy eyelashes brush against her chest.

Jill started to say something to him about his hair — how she hadn't meant to. Carlos lifted himself onto an elbow. A deep, wet, animal-shake of a growl emanated from his chest.

"Carlos?" Jill asked, placed a hand against his face. Where before he was warm, the skin was now cold. In a split-second he turned against her, sunk teeth large and sharp and strong into the soft underside of her wrist, an entire mouthful of meat and vital, throbbing arteries. Jill screamed and struggled against him, tried to yank her arm away from his face; he made a muffled noise halfway between an scream and a rattlesnake's dire shake of warning, shook his head like a pit bull as it worried a small animal in its powerful jaws. A sheaf of muscle tore free, wet and bloody; veins pulled, stretched, and snapped like strings of bubble gum. An artery, now a dark hole in Jill's arm, still pumped with clueless urgency, sprayed blood into the air in arced metronome spurts. It didn't hurt, not in her wrist. Somewhere in her chest.

Jill held her wrist, tried to put pressure on it and scramble back away while he tore at the handful of flesh in his mouth. Her movement distracted him, and he looked at her with lolling eyes, distant and blind; their warm brown had split from the anchors, leaving milky blue-grey in a sea of blood red. A spill of fluid, cold and congealed like jelly, fell from his mouth and hit her bare chest (was she naked?), trickled between her breasts. She screamed again, thrust her hands against his face, pushed against him with all her might, muscles standing out under her skin like cables. He didn't budge, instead moved to her with dire inevitability. He was too heavy, his position too fortuitous. His hands, cold and spongy and strong, went to her face, grabbed it on both sides, and he screamed an animal hiss at her, sprayed her with blood and saliva and filth. Her own blood. He darted for the meat of her cheek, teeth bared.

A voice said something far away, but Jill couldn't hear the words; her throat stung like broken glass with every breath but was overriden by the thump of her heart, and she couldn't feel her hands. Hands grasped her face and she struck at the air, nerves and reflexes keyed and flailed in an attempt to save her life. Her elbow met soft resistance over a core of solidity and the voice cried out in surprise. When Jill realized what had happened, when no teeth sunk sharp into her skin and no weight pressed on her from above, when the world became the world again, her face grew blistering hot with panic, wonder, and dreamlike shame that floated somewhere in her head but refused to descend.

"Jesus Christ, are you okay?" The voice asked. The genuine concern in it was heartbreaking, like she'd been pulled from a flaming car wreck and not awoken from a bad dream. Jill turned, sharper than she meant to, and missed butting her forehead against Carlos'. He adjusted himself, leaned on an elbow, one hand on her arm. His face was tilted in desperate worry; it struck at her like a hatchet.

"I—I—" Jill stammered, and couldn't meet his eyes. It had been so long since she'd had one. She thought she was better. She'd thought a lot of things which were turning out to not be true. "I'm fine. I just have… nightmares, sometimes."

"That's one fuck of a nightmare," he said. His hand left her arm and he worked his jaw, wiggled it back and forth. "Jesus, you hit like man."

"I'm sorry." Jill swallowed again. "I thought they were gone. Just a dream… I'm fine. Really."

Carlos looked at his hand, checked for blood. "You'd tell me if you weren't?"

Jill said nothing. In the throes where anxiety courted the shield of anger, her brain tensed for a fight. To shove at him and his concern, until it retracted from her sore spot, torn open and visible for all to see. Jill tried to organize her thoughts under the still-beating panic of her body. Carlos laid back against the pillow; his hand was on her back, ran between her shoulderblades. "C'mere," he said. Jill lowered to where he lay, put her face on his chest with all the surety of a woman reaching her hand into a beehive.

"I get 'em sometimes, too." He said. His voice was almost impossible to hear with her head on his chest. The low sound bounced and reverberated inside the cavern under her ear. "From when I was a kid."

It was a long time before she responded. "You just saying this to make me feel better about popping you in the mouth?"

"You're in good company is all. I don't think you're…"

"…crazy?"

His turn to laugh. "Not in a bad way, anyway."

Jill rolled her eyes. "Thanks."

After a moment, she felt the strange sense of a shift in his gaze. He'd craned his head down to look at her face.

"…You crying?"

Jill lifted her head; a sudden trickle of wetness, warm and tickling, ran from one of her nostrils. "No, I… shit."

Jill stood and put a hand under her face, stumbled into the dim of the bathroom. She pulled a sheaf of toilet paper off the roll, blew her nose into it with a loud trumpet. She folded it over to use the other side, when it caught her eye — the paper was dark. She hit the light by the door.

The paper was bright red, enough to soak through the tissue and onto her hand, tiny black clots dotted the tissue like shakes of pepper. She looked into the mirror; it poured down her face, over her chin, between her lips like saltwater. Jill held her head over the sink and watched the droplets hit pink against the white porcelain, entranced. Plink plink plink. They soon became a gush, and Jill groped for the towel over the toilet, held it under her nose. Her stomach rolled in a wave of sudden sickness and panic. Desperate, she searched the angles of her face in the mirror; her eyes were still blue and her skin was still clear, fair, but she watched all the same, as if to will it to stay. To not fall away into dark, recessed caverns under her eyes.

After a few moments of silence, Carlos appeared in the doorway, maybe to talk more about what happened. Unlike dream-Carlos, he was without a shirt, dressed in a pair of thin grey jogging pants slung low over his hips. A trickle of her blood had fallen onto his chest and dripped down his stomach, into the dark trail of hair just above the waistband. "Are you — uh…"

"My nose is bleeding," Jill said, muffled. Muh noz if bleedung.

"What'd I tell you about gettin' into fights in the house, lady?" Carlos said. It was a joke, as was his way, but his tone was soft, almost intimate. He put his fingers under her chin tilted her head up, pulled the towel away so he could see. His under-eyes were puffy and lined with pink, his dark hair mussed in a chaotic rat's nest of sleep. "Jesus, it's really goin'."

"Dr. Behara said that if anything weird happened, I should go back. There were little clots in it..." And I don't think that dream was a coincidence.

Carlos let her trail off, looked at her with a mixture of sympathy and amusement. "Yeah, well, Dr. Behara's a prick. Don't jump from nosebleed to zombie, okay? Sure it's just stress. You look perfectly fine to me. Here." He pinched her nose between his forefinger and thumb, just under the bony protrusion at its tallest point.

"Does this help?" Jill asked, deep and nasal. Dus dis hep?

"Who gets punched in the mush more often, you or me? Hold it there for about ten, you should be good. Don't tilt your head back."

"Okay. You're right. I just need to go lie down, I think." Her fingers tingled again, as if her hands had fallen asleep. "I'm really sorry. Is your face okay?"

"Nothin' to be embarrassed about," he said, and Jill could tell from the cadence of his breath that he wanted to add more, but didn't.

Carlos returned to the bedroom and, by the time Jill returned, was asleep. Though he was convinced of the two events being a coincidence, Jill's brain, bathed in a stew of hormones, stress, panic, and fear, couldn't separate them from one another. He had the privilege of space; the privilege of a mind that still worked in a way which allowed anxiety to be examined and discarded, not fixated upon. Jill didn't. Not for a while.

She looked at the blood in the sink and succumbed to an overwhelming roll of nausea. She gagged and coughed, vomited into the toilet. Dr. Behara might have been an asshole, but Jill was going to be in a Congressional hall with hundreds of people in a week's time — she couldn't leave anything to chance, slim as they were. Even if those chances were a simple function of an unwell mind.

Jill looked at her wrist — still intact, spidered with blue-purple veins. She swallowed and vomited again, and brought up nothing but bile.

May 14, 1999
11:02 pm

Somewhere across the city, Kevin was taking a Break. He'd done jack shit all weekend since he'd gotten home from work on Friday, and it was looking like he'd be doing jack shit for the rest of the night, which was a good time by him. He was alone in his recliner, feet kicked up, drinking a beer and watching a re-run of X-Files, thankful to be off his sore, clicking knees. Kevin was 31, and it was a rough 31. He figured he could be allowed his aging, graceless as it was, considering he had survived this long despite all of the boneheaded situations he'd put himself in. Years of walking the beat in weighted gear and heavy boots had done a number on his joints. He was grateful these days to get a few hours on his ass.

A knock on his door, firm and official, perked his attention. He sighed; he'd just gotten comfortable, settled into the warm sweet spot which was so hard to find and therefore move from, that Kevin considered not answering at all.

"I'm comin', I'm comin'." Kevin pushed his footrest down and climbed to a grunting stand — he'd started making what the guys at work had dubbed "dad noises" in the last year or so, grumbles of exertion when he climbed to or off his feet. Kevin put his hands against the painted wood of the door and squinted through the peep hole, a tiny glass lens which distorted figures on the other side like a funhouse fish-eye mirror. This distortion was why Kevin disbelieved the image on the other side, at first, and had to squint for a few more seconds to make sense of who he saw.

"Who is it?" Kevin called, through the door.

"It's Chris," said the voice. "Redfield. That you, Kevin?"

Kevin slid the chain across its metal railings, unlocked the deadbolt with a heavy clank, and opened the door. He looked confused, but smiled all the same, his heart surprised and glad.

"H-hey, man!" Kevin said, and extended a hand. When Chris took it, Kevin pulled their chests together, clapped Chris on the back. Chris was strangely stiff, like an alien seeing a human gesture for the first time, unsure how to react. "Hey, it's good to see you!"

"Hey," Chris said, with an uneasy laugh. "Good to see you safe."

"So uh…" Kevin stammered, "come in, come in. You want a beer? Sorry the place is a wreck, been workin' a lot lately."

"It's fine," Chris said, turned his head to scan the apartment. "I'll just have a water if you don't mind."

"Sure thing," Kevin said. He opened his fridge and retrieved a plastic bottle. He took a glass that sat upside-down from a dishtowel beside the kitchen sink, poured the bottle into it, set it in front of Chris, then sat on one side of an island made of wood-printed plastic, his back to the kitchen. Chris accepted the glass as Kevin offered it and sat across from him. They chatted in brief, awkward stilts about what the other had been up to, how things had been. In Chris' way, he was the first to break the seal on the actual reason for his visit.

"So… I'll get right to it. I've got some questions I need answered. If you can help me, I'd be grateful."

"Oh yeah? Well, if I've got answers, they're good as yours."

Chris looked at Kevin for a long moment before he spoke. Then, "Do you know a man named Carlos Oliveira?"

Kevin was stunned, frozen with his glass halfway to his lips. He wanted no part of this blooming shit show: he'd gotten the distinct impression Jill was Fucking Up with a capital F U, some time ago. That the honeymoon had ended between she and Chris and, for reasons unknown to Kevin, she'd felt around in their little merry band of survivors for some new thrills. Heavy, in his blissful consequence-free view of the world, had happily gone along with it.

Kevin couldn't blame Heavy, but he could pity him, because Heavy didn't know Chris Redfield. Didn't know his intense flashes of anger, didn't know his tendency to knock people's teeth out when he considered himself justified — punch first, ask questions later. And now Heavy was going to know him. Know him pretty well, if Chris' tensed body language and darkened facial expressions were any indication. Kevin knew when a man wanted to kick someone's ass, and this guy was like a spring-loaded ass-kicking machine, just waiting to be pointed at a target.

"I dunno, man," Kevin said, part-sigh, and rubbed his hair, dark auburn peppered with more gray by the day. "I kinda don't want to get in the middle of this."

"So you do know him."

"Yeah? We work together. I know him pretty good." Kevin took a drink from his glass of beer, the swallow loud and uncomfortable.

"Work where?"

"The FBC. We uh, go after the bioweapons and stuff. Both on the same team."

Chris was silent.

"Look, dude, I'm not gonna bullshit you. I know you and Jill are… o-or were… a thing. Okay? But — Hea… uh, Carlos… he's my friend. I don't really think I should…"

Chris' smile dropped. His face was a chain-link fence that guarded something fully visible behind its security. "Your friend," he said, "I'm hearing that a lot from people, lately. Seems like he's gotten in pretty well with you guys."

"I know his past, man. But he's a survivor too, just like us—"

"He's not like us," Chris cut him off, sharp and hard, "he's Umbrella. Completely different."

Kevin paused again, unsure. He couldn't shake the feeling the whiff of violence he'd gotten had turned, slow and considering, in his direction. "He's a good guy. Whatever you two have got going on — look, I don't know what's going on and I don't want to know. But whatever it was it probably wasn't his fault. He's not that kind of guy."

"Why don't you tell me what kind of guy he is, then? Because I've gotten a pretty different impression."

Kevin shrugged, like Chris had asked him an SAT question, looked around. "I dunno, man, I…" he sighed, "he's loyal? Tries to look out for people? I know this isn't what you want to hear, but… he and Jill got out together and… I guess he did some pretty rough shit to bring her with him. He treats her real good."

"Loyal," Chris repeated him.

I guess he did some pretty rough shit to bring her with him, Chris' mind repeated, no way it's rougher than what he did to her. Of course… she's the 'payday'. Of course he would.

"Glad you guys are buddies," Chris said, "but I need to talk with him personally. Do you know where he is?"

Kevin fixed Chris with a look, open and the slightest touch sympathetic around its edges. "I don't think that's a good idea, man."

Chris tilted his head. "I'm sorry?"

"Look — I know we weren't buds or anything, back in the day. But I know you, and I know enough about you to know you wouldn't be here unless you had a score to settle." Kevin craned his head, lit a cigarette behind a palm cupped gold against the flame, "I don't want any part of it."

"This is important."

Kevin said nothing and clinked his lighter closed with a metallic snap.

Chris' tone was north of a growl, his patience worn into threads. "Not making a choice is a choice, Ryman."

Kevin met Chris' eyes for a brief moment behind a tendril of smoke that twirled and danced, then averted his gaze. "I know."

So there it was. An uncomfortable, tense silence hung in the air, dripped from its height, thick and viscous. Like blood. Kevin moved first, stood from his seat. "Look man, it's late, and I gotta get to bed. Maybe you should…"

Chris' eyes drifted over Kevin's shoulder, back to the small kitchenette recessed into the far wall. A cast iron skillet hung from a hook over the sink, black and heavy as night.

"It's my fault for not calling first," Chris said, and stood from his chair, glass in hand. "Sorry if I was sort of intense… it's been a long week." He moved past Kevin and placed his glass in the sink. Kevin laughed, still uncomfortable, and said yeah.

The handle of the skillet called to Chris. It would be so easy to grab it, turn around and swing it, maybe break Kevin's shoulder out of its socket. It was a small weapon, not exactly heavy, but solid iron. He'd have to be careful not to swing at his head, but everywhere else might be fair game.

Time seemed to slow. Chris' fingers twitched; he reached up.

Chris stopped. He put his hand back down, forced it to be still, clenched it into a fist, then turned. Turned in time to see Kevin looking at him.

An explosion of sound — breaking glass — and the smell of bitter hops was everywhere. A sharp pain bit into the side of Chris' head, knocked him sideways into the wall. When Chris looked up again, Kevin was four or five paces away, a pistol in his hands.

"'Pride of the Force' my ass." Kevin said, no humor in his voice. "Gun on the ground. I know you have one."

Though Chris' anger was thick and heavy, the sight of Ryman with a gun in his hand was sobering for anybody that knew him; he was a surgeon. Chris wouldn't be able to so much as get his out of his holster before he'd be on the ground with a cavern between his eyes. Blood trickled hot from Chris' temple to the line of his jaw, tickled over the curves of his throat. He could feel shards and needles of glass in his short hair, against his skin.

"No need to do this," Chris held his pistol up in surrender, knelt and placed it on the floor.

"Sure there is. God made man, but Sam Colt made 'em equal. You can whoop my ass six ways from Sunday, but that's not gonna matter with a bullet in your brain." Kevin gestured with the barrel of his gun. "Back, against the counter."

Chris took a slow retreating step towards the kitchenette. Broken glass crunched underfoot. "Kevin," he said, "Think about what you're doing."

"Ryman, dipshit. Shared trauma don't make us friends." Kevin said. He kicked Chris' pistol away. It spun somewhere across the carpet into the dark. "I saw you reach for it. I said get back."

"Okay," Chris said, and fell back another step. "See?"

"You want answers so fucking bad," Kevin said, "now I want some. Why are you actually here? This ain't just about him."

"It is about him," Chris said. The sharp throb against his head dissolved as his attention became distracted.

"Tch," Kevin sucked his teeth. "All this, over some girl?"

"What?" Chris said, like Kevin had asked something so stupid Chris didn't understand the question. "This is… no. It's about them. Everyone is so sure that Umbrella is safe, but I'm not. I never will be. I've seen what they do, Ryman. This is the playbook."

"Carlos isn't Umbrella, man," Kevin protested, "What about what Irons did? He was our boss but we were fuckin' clueless too. Carlos is just a guy who got caught in the same shit we did. Listen to yourself."

"If he's not Umbrella, after working for Umbrella, then who the fuck is? Where does it stop?"

"You've lost your goddamned mind," Kevin said, after a silent moment of disbelief. "You don't even know him, man. This isn't about him, this is about you, and your—"

"DON'T FUCKING TALK TO ME ABOUT LOSING YOUR MIND!" The roar of Chris' sudden shout bounced off the walls. "This is what they do! Why do you not see that?! I am the only one whose mind is still working, god damn it! Irons! Wesker! The entire fucking city council! All of them! They all did this! And now one of them is here, infiltrating again, gaining our trust again, and I'm the ONLY one who sees what's happening! Maybe you are comfortable with sacrificing the last of MY team, making everything we went through for nothing, but I'm not!" The ringing, high-pitched static that squealed and broke under its own volume began to blare, drowned out noise and sounds and sight alike. Chris' teeth throbbed and ached from the pulse of it. Chris clutched his head. "God damn it!"

"None of that's true, man," Kevin said, and let his gun sink, pointing to the space between his feet. As tough, as sure of a shot as Kevin was — he was soft, touched easily by human pain. Pain like what he saw in front of him. "You need help. I'm not trying to be funny — this is some serious shit you're carrying around."

"And I'm the only one carrying it," Chris said, contemptuous and shaking, "everyone else was content to accept an apology that never fucking came, while the crater of my god damned hometown was still smoking. I will never forget that, or them, no matter how they try to correct the record. Never."

"I want to help you, man, but I don't know how—"

All it took was a split second with his pistol disengaged and his eyes averted; one of the chairs in which they sat, pushed out from the island, flung through the air. Kevin raised his arms in time to shield his face; the wood smashed in cruel, hard lines across the bones of his wrists, staggered him back a step. Chris was upon him, like a charging train. They tumbled to the floor under Chris' weight, Kevin's gun lost somewhere in the rush. Kevin was a strong man, solid and physically capable, but was soundly outmatched; it was all Kevin could do to raise his arms to guard himself, his face, but under enough force, enough times, even those failed.

The heat was impossible to stop once it started to churn. That train barreled along tracks unending, tracks which lead nowhere as it fed on itself. It wasn't Kevin that Chris saw underneath him after enough blows, nor even a human form — it was Umbrella. The weakness, the complacency, the willful ignorance from those who could stand against Umbrella — but just chose not to. That made Umbrella possible. For every Oliveira, there were thousands of Rymans; so content with their comfort, their money, their power, their "safety".

When Chris had arrived, he wanted answers. Now, he didn't remember what the questions were.