Revelations:

Mirror Mask

Episode 5:

Tundra

The Middle of Nowhere

There's nothing quite like the inability of man to fight in the dark.

With the absence of visual guidance, the complete and utter panic sets in almost instantly. It leaves the mind unwilling to adjust, at first, and exists only in a state of complete and total survival. Without question, the first response to saturating darkness is the bodies willingness to cower, hide, and await the arrival of the light again.

For Leon and Parker, there was no time for the mind to tell the body to hide.

The things in the dark weren't going to let them cower.

It was fight or die.

The flash of muzzle worked to guide each man through the layers of obscurity. When one fired, the other rotated to align himself to the back of his companion. They circled, picking off sounds with bullets until they were able to duck inside an open doorway.

They didn't know what they were fighting. They didn't know where they were. They didn't know how the hell they'd survive any of it.

But staying alive usually comes at such a price.

Into the headset, Jill shouted, "OH GOD! HURRY! PARKER!"

Parker glanced at Leon in the dark as they both turned on the tiny flashlights adorning their guns. They held gazes. The fear was palpable. It was contagious.

It was made worse when Jill shouted, "Leon, help me!"

Because she had to be dying to use his first name and beg for his help. They all knew that.

He froze. He licked his lips to help the dryness in his mouth. Her fear radiated. He was nearly paralyzed for a moment with the need to help her.

Parker shook his head. They couldn't answer her. Not now. The door was the only thing between them and death. They simply couldn't take all the monsters out there.

Not like this.

In this moment? Jill Valentine was on her own.

Jill dragged the girl in the darkness, jerking at the chains that bound her in a desperate attempt to set her free. She tried to stay as quiet as possible. She could feel the warm seeping blood and couldn't see a damn thing to pinpoint its location.

She felt blind, wildly, whispering, "Honey...where? Where are you bound? Can you help me?"

The girl just kept on screaming.

High, low, it was murderously chaotic in the eerie blackness. She shrieked like a banshee. She wailed madly.

And then?

She copied Jill's voice perfectly. She called for help into the void of light. "Leon, help!"

How in the hell did she KNOW his name was Leon? Parker was easy. She'd heard Jill yell for Parker. But how did she know that Kennedy was Leon Kennedy?!

Jill whispered, again, "...what are you?

Into the silence, the little girl wailed, "PLEASE NO! PLEASE NOOOO!" And gurgled wetly.

Jill narrowed her eyes into the dark. Was she trying to make it seem like Jill was dying?

She opened her mouth to clarify she was alive.

And the little girl punched her hard in the face.

The darkness spilled from the world to her head and took her down.

Parker and Leon waited until things were quiet in the dark before they ventured out. The beams of their flashlights flickered over the bloody walls. The red was somehow chalky in texture in the ugly yellow light.

But it still squished wetly around their boots as they walked.

What the hell had died out here?

Jill was quiet now in their headset. It was scary to think why. Leon was hoping she'd escaped or hidden...but he knew what silence meant. Silence meant dead.

Silence meant lost.

Some partners they were: Jill Valentine and her legendary ass were dead.

But that felt so wrong. It felt as wrong as strippers wearing boobie tassles. It just didn't wash. What game was happening here?

Was anything real?

Leon stopped and crouched. Curious, Parker watched him touch the blood on the ground and lift his hand. It dripped strangely.

They both held eyes as he sniffed it and said, quietly, "Kero syrup. Like they use in the movies."

Parker shook his head, "What madness is this?"

"I don't know."

He started to say something else and Parker shouted from somewhere in the compound. He roared for help. It echoed down the hallway.

And the truth was clear.

Something hear could mimic their voices.

Was it really Jill they'd been talking to before?

Was Jill even really here?

Were they being led through the compound to find her corpse?

Had she even made it off the Queen Zenobia? The questions were endless and each one spawned a new question. It was Murphy's Law - whatever could go wrong, would go wrong here. This place was a maze, a lie, and a front for something greater. Was it a test?

Leon aimed his light around the hallway. Parker did the same. They ignored the screaming in the facility. Their ears were, officially, not trustworthy. It was time to use the one faculty untouched by subterfuge and trickery: common sense.

They shifted and the texture of the syrup turned to blood as they rounded the hallway. Here they'd killed mutants. The stench of gunpowder and lead was still pungent. It permeated the nostrils in a noxious offense to the senses.

Leon eased his shoulder into a door that sat ajar, bumping it further until he could clear high and let Parker move in low. They entered the lab that Jill had stood in, he was nearly POSITIVE of it. The acrid aroma of vomit was still sharp on the air.

The evidence of the why was lying on the small table by the sink.

Babies.

Someone here was messing with babies.

In all the things they'd seen, somehow children still offended in a way that left you breathless with rage. Evil should have limits, at least this, at least here, at least that. But it didn't. It killed indiscriminately. It didn't care if the victim was too small to protect itself.

It devoured the weak and the young and the old and the strong. Evil was an equal opportunity offender. No one was safe from its reach. It tossed a grenade into the center of reason and obliterated any hope of honor.

They were dealing with something so nefarious, so perverse, that even the innocence of a baby wasn't safe.

The rules of a game that sick resonated.

Evil had taken residence in the frozen wasteland where they found themselves.

The wet snarfling sound was coupled with a gasp of pain. In the pitch black, it was hard to discern the direction of the noise. It huffed like a pig but growled low like a dog.

It sounded close but smelled far.

Smelled?

She shifted. Yeah. Smelled. She was bound sitting against a wall. She was naked and freezing. That much she was sure of; the rest was up for interpretation. It felt like she was trapped somewhere near water.

Jill closed eyes against the encroaching dark and listened. The trickle seemed to slide into the other noises and give credence to the thought. She was near water and the outside.

The scent of snow and cold was faint under the curling stench of death, but she'd been in this game a long time, she was good at detecting subtleties.

Beside her, a quiet voice filled the dark. "Are you awake?"

Female, hoarse, and young. But what was real here? Was the voice real? Was it just whatever was out there mimicking them?

There was no way to know.

But she answered anyway. "Yeah. I'm awake."

"Are you Jill?"

Jill said nothing, leaning her head back against the wall. the snarfling sound moved further away and Jill figured one of the creatures was headed off again to hunt for more victims. Why hadn't it killed her?

Too many questions. She could spend a lifetime asking them with no answer.

After her silence, the voice called back, "It's ok. I wouldn't trust me either. Why should you? Someone trapped you here and left you for dead. But it wasn't me."

Jill, again, said nothing. But the voice filled her in, "At first...when it started...I just thought it was karma, ya know? It was karma. We did this to ourselves. We let this happen. But then it was clear that someone was just...torturing us, turning us against each other...playing god."

Jill's heart stuttered. Of God's and Men...she'd never forget glimpsing the manuscript on Wesker's desk in Raccoon City. She'd always wondered what started his megalomania...but it was really quite simple: Man would always hunger to be gods. They would always chase immortality. They would always strive to be more than human.

Would she die in this place, in the dark, to help immortalize whoever was playing them?

So she finally responded, "Who is hunting us?"

The voice scoffed, "I don't know. After the first wave of attacks, there was only a handful of us left. It started messing with our minds - copying us, mocking us, throwing voices and leading us into traps. We'd chase a "dead" friend and find ourselves surrounded. It's human enough to impersonate...but it can't seem to understand emotion. So it kept copying my boyfriend and saying things he'd never say...shouting out poetry, cooing at me...I knew that wasn't him. I knew it. Because he never spoke that way."

Jill nodded, sighed, and remembered it was too dark to see it. "It's capable of mockery but not actual cloning."

"I don't think so. I think it's just capable of copying us to a certain extent. Because at the end of the day? It's still not human."

Jill shifted on the floor, "I have two partners here. If we can find out where we are...we might have a shot in hell of getting out of this. But I don't know how to convince them, now, that I'm not a doppelganger."

The voice came back to her, shaking, "There are ways. Do you know either of them well enough to have some kind of code phrase they'd respond to?"

Jill sighed again, "No. I'm friendly with one and not even remotely friendly with the other."

The quiet drug around them. The snarfling was softer still. The smell of water was like hope in a world gone black with failure. And then the girl said, "Maybe you can make that work to your advantage. They can mimic us, like mirrors in a way, but they can't be us. They can't read our minds. Try using a memory or something that only he would know, that the monster can't possibly. Anything at all. Maybe if you use cues like that, you can avoid them falling into a trap."

As if they'd read her mind, after all, her headset buzzed, which meant her captor didn't even think about taking the earpiece out of her ear. Jill spoke, quietly, "Parker? Kennedy? Come back to me."

The quiet drug on until the cool voice responded, "Jill? Are you alright?"

Jill spoke, gently, "I've been better. I'm freezing, naked, and strapped to the floor. How's your day going?"

And, without missing a beat, Leon returned, "It's better now, though I might have trouble kicking bad guys with a big boner in my way. I'm gonna need visual confirmation of your current situation, Valentine."

Jill swallowed the laugh. He was incorrigible. She refused to encourage him. "I will as well, Kennedy. I need to clarify on the "big" adjective. Scientifically, that requires proof. Depends on what your opinion of big is, I guess. Didn't you say it had retreated up your own ass from the cold?"

Parker laughed into the headset. Kennedy snorted out a laugh of his own, "Yup. Now you're not the only one operating with a stick up their ass, kid."

Parker mused, "Wouldn't it be a dick up the ass, Leon?"

And Leon laughed, "Helping or hurting, Luciano. Helping or hurting."

Jill spoke, shaking her head, "I really hate that I'm glad to hear your voice."

Leon came back to her, amused but relieved, "Same. We found the lab."

The silence dragged until she eventually murmured, "...I lost it. I'm better than that. And I lost it."

Parker spoke, soothing her, "I almost did too, Jill. I almost did too. The good news is that the computers here seem to run on backup power or something. We might still have a chance of finding something useful on them."

Into the quiet, Leon informed her, "I need something, anything, that can give me an idea of what can mimic voices like that. I'm sure there's birds or animals that can, but I don't think we're dealing with a mocking-jay."

Jill whispered back, "We need to find out where we are. If we can do that, we can start to figure out anything local that might be significant."

To her surprise, the other woman in the dark murmured, "The Ojibwa. The locals. They are all over up here."

Quietly, Jill queried, "Where's here?"

And the voice whispered, "Quebec. But not the good parts. Not the safe part. You could walk for days and not find another person...but the tribes. They're here. They're all over."

Jill said, quietly, "You get that? I'm not alone here. There's another survivor with me."

And Leon answered, "Yup. The big "C" makes sense. Cold but still sustainable. And the good news? A helluva better choice than Siberia or the ends of the Earth."

Parker added, "Local folklore should be easy to track down if we can narrow down the specifics."

Jill huddled in the dark, listening to the snarfling sounds. Her companion breathed raggedly while the clack of keys on the other end signaled that Leon and Parker were at a terminal sifting through information.

Into the quiet, Leon teased, "I bet you wouldn't say no to a hug right now, Valentine."

She sighed, shaking her head, "Focus on the mission, Kennedy. Keep that dick up your own ass and away from mine."

He chuckled and finally gasped a little, "There's the money shot there, folks. Parker?"

Parker read into the quiet, "The wendigo comes from Algonquian Native American folklore and is the result of some severe hunger pains."

Leon picked up the reading and Jill listened, raptly. "As the tale goes, he was once a lost hunter. During a brutally cold winter, his intense hunger drove him to cannibalism. After feasting on human flesh, he became a crazed monster, roaming the forest in search of more people to eat. (*1)"

Jill made a small sound of fear.

"Those who live in a warm climate can breathe easy; the wendigo is a cold weather creature, having been spotted in Canada as well as colder northern states like Minnesota. As the bitter frost is no longer a problem for him like was when he was a mere hunter, he is immune to even the harshest conditions. For a carnivore, he's not the buffest of creatures. His skin is stretched tight across his bones, making them visible. Though he is said to be very large in stature at almost 15 feet tall, his body is described as skeletal and emaciated. This can be attributed to the notion that he is never satisfied with his cannibalistic urges constantly luring him to prowl for fresh victims."

Parker mused, darkly, "Maybe...maybe it's just a story right? Maybe it's not what's here."

But Leon continued, "Different versions of the wendigo disagree on his speed. Some say he is unusually fast and can endure walking for long periods of time. Others say he walks in a more haggard manner, almost as if he is falling apart. But speed isn't a necessary skill of wendigo. He doesn't rely on catching and capturing his prey. Rather, one of his said traits is his ability to mimic human voices. He'll use this skill to lure people in and draw them away from civilization, and into the desolate depths of the wilderness. Once isolated, he feasts."

Jill whispered, "...christ almighty."

And Leon answered, "Not christ. Not even close. But it gets worse...Another rough translation of Wendigo is "the evil spirit that devours mankind." This translation is related to the version of the wendigo that claims he has the power to curse humans by possessing them. Once he has infiltrated their minds, he can turn them into wendigos as well, instilling upon them the same lust for human flesh that he himself has."

Jill repeated what he'd told her to the voice in the dark. The woman made small noises of grief and pain. But she didn't deny of it. That spoke volumes.

Jill responded, hoarsely, "So everyone here...he turned them all."

The woman in the dark let out a small sob. "It was Joe. Joe was the first one to go out into the woods. He found something out there. At first he thought it was a deer...but it wasn't a deer. He brought it back. We kept it in the kennels with the dogs. We started experimenting on it...and then Joe died. He died in his sleep but his face...his face just...erupted. Like his brain had imploded. It was Joe...Joe brought back the Wendigo."

Into her weeping, Leon interjected, "None of this helps us fight it. Fireworks, clearly. And sunlight. So the wendigo...someone figured out how to mate it to the plagas. Someone made the perfect hunter."

The silence fell between them. It filled up the chest and left you breathless. Because the perfect hunter was snarfling in the dark just outside where Jill Valentine was bound naked to the wall.

Finally, she whispered, "...what does he want with us?"

And the woman returned, brokenly, "...he needs children. He needs to make children. He needs babies to join the fight."

Terrified, Jill demanded, "Kennedy...does it say that? Does it say anything about mating?"

"I don't know." He paused, scanning the screen in front of him, "But it says plenty about killing one."

Parker mused, "How?"

And he answered, "A wendigo isn't easily slain. Bullets and wounds will simply allow it to regenerate. Fire - to cleanse it. And silver bullets - to keep it from healing. If nothing else, silver coated steel will do the trick. But immediately after a heart blow, the wendigo must be burned and dismembered and the ashes scattered. The other options is to bury the pieces far away from the others. Even still...the wendigo is a demon. Some believe killing it will simply release the soul to wander until it can find another body to inhabit."

Leon was still perusing the folklore when Parker said, from the other computer, "Jesus was buttfucked by Judas."

Leon couldn't stop the laugh. "I think he'd be surprised to know it. Although I bet that ship has a fandom following somewhere."

Parker shook his head, "Listen to this...it's a series of files from the one of the lab rats here..."

File 1:

Sample 1 positive.

Proactive completion of initial mating complete. Subject shows intense interest in male and females alike. Implantation of sack of "eggs" into either the anus or the vagina results in conception. Incubation is possible in both gender genetic hosts.

Carriers were found to be able to succinctly sustain six "fetuses" at any time. Removal required scientific extraction.

Jill spoke, voice shaking, "You're saying it doesn't have to be women."

Leon laughed, dryly, "So much for hoping I was wrong. Apparently, my sweet ass is as legendary as yours here, Valentine."

Jill returned, coolly, "Come find me, Kennedy. We'll use the buddy system. When in danger, offer your buddy's ass first."

He laughed, shaking his head. He and Parker held eyes across the room. "We need to find you yesterday, Jill."

She laughed herself, surprising him. "You think? I'm someplace near running natural water. I can smell the outside. Maybe a barn or a former garden. We need some kind of layout of this place. I don't know how much time I have. But we need a code word in case this thing starts mocking us."

Leon mused, "You yelled my name earlier. Not Kennedy but Leon. It's how I knew it wasn't you."

"Good. That works. We both know I wouldn't be yelling your name otherwise."

"You would. If I was there replacing that big stick up your ass with mine."

Jill rolled her eyes. Parker chuckled. Jill mused, "Honestly, it's unlikely you could compare. It's a pretty big stick."

He laughed, clicking around to try to find a map. "You got me there, kid. Not sure a mortal man can compare with a stick that's twenty years long." He paused, clicking on a set of security cameras. They flickered around the dark, showing heat signatures and using infrared to illuminate the dark.

Leon clicked through rooms, noting date and location stamps. He clicked on Northwest Kennel and found the horror of what had once been dogs. Nearly gagging, he almost clicked off...when he noticed the dripping pattern of the blood. It ran and stopped, disappearing into the straw beneath the pile of mutilated corpses.

Curious, he zoomed in on the mess of it, grateful it was in black and white and saved him from the full frontal.

Parker called, "I got it! A loose blueprint of the facility! It's enormous, which is the bad news, but at least we're only flying MOSTLY blind now."

Leon queried, "Jill? What else do you smell?"

She sniffed, wincing, "Rot. Old mold. The faint suggestion of snow. Urine."

He shook his head, "Strange question...but does the urine smell human? Or animal?"

Jill shook her head, "You spend a lot of time sniffing dog pee, Kennedy?"

He laughed, "Just tell me if you can discern a difference. It matters, I promise."

After a moment, she mused, "It's missing the stench of a man missing the toilet, if that's what you're asking. Smells almost like a barn at a farm or something."

"...like it saturated into hay maybe?"

She arched her brows, "...yeah. Maybe. Why?"

"I might know where you are." He clicked the camera to circle the room, "Parker...how far to the Northwest Kennel?"

Parker studied the blueprint, narrowing his eyes, "If we're in the central laboratory than the kennel isn't far."

Leon nodded, "Worth a shot. Jill? Don't die. It's a waste of a perfectly sweet ass."

She rolled her eyes and he added, "Besides...if anyone's dumping a load in there, I'd like to be considered for the job."

Damn him. He was a complete pervert. The truth was? She was glad of it. He was good at keeping her mind off the fact that she was kneeling and waiting to be bait for a demon looking to mate.

"You have to get those balls to drop back out before you can make babies, Kennedy."

He laughed, shifting with Parker to hurry for the door. "Good point. Maybe you can go on an exploratory mission when I find you. Finders keepers, I promise."

"...are you offering me your balls?"

"They're so cold right now, sweetheart, I'll let you keep them if you can't restore some feeling down there. Honestly."

She hated herself, she really did, but she laughed. Parker arched both brows. Leon tilted his head, pausing, "...I heard that."

"It wasn't me. It was the floor squeaking."

She wasn't lost if he'd finally wrangled a laugh out of her. Not completely. But he was kinda afraid she'd stop laughing before he could find her.

One thing was true: this facility belonged to the Wendigo. They needed to find Jill...soon...before she did too.

(*1) The Wendigo - ancient-horrors dot net

(*2) Wargs -Wikipedia