~ 2 ~ A city in crisis
"Okay, Chris, I can't force you to eat, but listen to me at least. I want you to meet someone."
Once again Claire's voice gets mixed up with the memory of my past, taking me back to our mutual present. I look away from the setting sun and at her instead.
"He's a friend of mine, and you already know him, actually," she explains. "His name is Piers. He's been to my birthday party last month."
The name rings a bell. And then I remember again. A tall, slender guy in his early twenties with spiky hair, roughly resembling the person I was eleven years ago. It's the only reason why I still remember him. Claire has so many friends it's difficult to keep track of everyone. The house was overcrowded on her thirtieth birthday.
"What about him?" I ask.
"Well, you're looking for new recruits for your BSAA team, right? Piers is an excellent sharp shooter and used to be with the police, just like you. I told him about your profession at the party, and he was interested."
I sigh. "Claire, we don't just take anyone. The BSAA is fighting against international bioterrorism, that's something completely different from the police, so don't annoy me with friends of yours who are just keen on an adventure."
I feel sorry for what I said just the moment after I said it. Since I'm back from my mission in Africa, I suffer from problems to keep my temper under control, but my sister is definitely not the person I should take it out on. Not with everything she does for me.
But she just smiles, ignoring my tantrum, and says: "That's just why you should get to know him better. I know it usually doesn't work this way, but give him a chance! I invited him for today, he should be here soon."
Claire still thinks that post-traumatic stress disorder after the mission in Africa is what bothers me. She's partly right about that: That I haven't been the same as before for more than a month now has something to do with Africa. But the ghost haunting my dreams at night, and sometimes even by day, is not called Uroboros or Majini – no, it carries the name of the man who started it all: Albert Wesker.
At first I thought it had been just a dream. I don't remember what I told Joseph after the night in the cell, but the poor guy was busy enough with his hangover to not be bothered by my problems too much.
I had a whole weekend to think about what might or might not have happened, and only when I appeared to work on Monday morning with Wesker treating me just as usual, as if nothing had ever happened, I came to the conclusion that really nothing had happened after all. Nothing but a dream, I was sure about it now. But still, it wouldn't give me any peace anytime soon. Why did I dream something like that? The thought that I might have fallen in love with Wesker without ever noticing that I felt attracted to men seemed ridiculous to me. I was twenty-five years old and quite sure about my identity, even though I have to admit that women had rarely played a big role in it.
Days, weeks passed, and everything, including my thoughts, went back to normal. I decided to no longer think about it, but take care of the really important things, namely my job. Raccoon City was haunted by a new crisis with sharp teeth and an insatiable hunger for human flesh. It all began in May; every now and then we received reports about citizens disappearing in the outskirts, usually reappearing dead after some time, mauled by rabid dogs, it seemed.
Everything got confusing when one of the autopsy reports said that some of the bite marks on the dead bodies had been caused by human teeth. "Confusing" eventually turned into "scary" when the rumor spread that one of the bodies had suddenly risen during the autopsy and attacked the forensic pathologists. Jill had theories we discussed several times during the meetings with the entire S.T.A.R.S. division, but nothing seemed to make sense.
I once spent half a night in the records room to search for any clues we might have overlooked so far. In the meantime there were numerous files about the grisly cases and I searched every one of them, without success. It was devastating. Some crazy people were killing our citizens by the city limits, and we, the elite unit of the police, couldn't do anything to stop them. I would have loved to take out my sniper rifle and shoot something with it, but there was no target.
My insecurity concerning the captain was something I had completely forgotten in the course of that long night, so I didn't mind meeting him in the waiting room by the reception when I went there to take a little break. He seemed as exhausted as I was, sitting on the only couch with his legs spread and his head leaning against the backrest – an unusual sight. When he heard me approach, he looked up without taking off the sunglasses he always wore.
"Chris! Still around?"
I rubbed my sore eyes and made myself comfortable next to him. "The current case is still bothering me. I can't go home now, it would follow me into my bed anyway."
"And so you stay here to dig through files, looking for a clue. Your employee morale is praiseworthy, Chris. As I said: You're one of my best men."
I was just about to reach into my pocket to take my lighter and cigarettes out, but froze in the middle of the movement. What had Wesker just said? There was only one time I had heard him praise me for being one of his best men, namely during our intimate encounter in the cell which was supposed to never have happened...
"Can I have one too?" asked Wesker, who saw where my hand was going and knew I was a smoker. Confused, I finished the movement, took lighter and cigarettes out and held the latter out to him. He scrutinized every single cigarette as if he wasn't sure which one to pick, but eventually chose one. I did the same.
"Do you know what fascinates me about you?" Wesker reached into his own pockets to look for something, a lighter obviously. "It says in your leaving certificate of the Air Force that you can be very stubborn and have problems with authorities. That's strange, because it's not the impression I've had of you so far, and I've been your captain for months."
"Mhm..." It was all I managed to say while I was lighting my cigarette. The waiting room was supposed to be a no-smoking area, but no one was here at that time of the night anyway, and since even Wesker did it...
"You don't seem to have problems following my orders." He didn't find a lighter and held his cigarette out to me. "Give me a light."
I obeyed, to which he replied: "See?", and then he took the now lit cigarette to his lips with an impish grin.
I couldn't take it anymore. Till one minute ago, I had no longer been thinking that my dream about the incident in the cell could be more than just a dream, but the tone of Wesker's voice sounded just like back then when he had said that he liked to watch me. He must have done the same today, because otherwise, how could he know that I had browsed through files? I had been alone in the records room. I just had to call him out on it.
"Wesker?"
"Oh, why so formal?" he interrupted me at once. "I call you by your first name too, right? Just call me Albert."
"Wesker," I insisted to not follow another order of his, "I need to ask you something. Back then, after our evening at the Black Jack..."
Once again I wasn't able to finish, but this time Wesker didn't interrupt me with words. It was the way his lips pulled on his cigarette. It downright hypnotized me, but I managed to tear my eyes away from it before my thoughts could get carried away to spheres where they didn't belong.
Wesker tilted his head to the side and blew the smoke of his last pull into my face. "Don't be shy. If you want to ask your captain something, just ask. Or would it be easier for you if I ordered you to?"
I didn't know what to say, but he didn't leave me much time to think about it before he started to speak again. "You know, a few weeks ago in the cell downstairs, you weren't so shy. Of course you had to thaw a bit at first, but after that, you followed every one of my orders and did things I would never have expected a guy like you to do."
I stared at him with my eyes wide open. So it had actually happened, and it hadn't stopped where my memory did. A cold shiver ran down my back. What the hell had Wesker done to me?
Although he didn't return my look, but kept on taking pulls on his cigarette as cool as a cucumber, he seemed to know exactly that I was staring at him, because he laughed and said: "Calm down, Chris, I'm just kidding. It was kiss, nothing else. But a good one, if you allow me to say that."
"Why did you kiss me?" I asked, relieved and startled at the same time. Relieved because there was nothing I had forgotten, startled because Wesker was talking about it as if it was nothing special, after weeks of making me think that nothing had ever happened between us.
"Oh, I just felt like it," he said, shrugging as if it didn't concern him at all. "But before you consider reporting me to the police for sexual harassment, let me tell you that there was nothing you didn't want as well. And how you wanted it! If you'd had it your way, we wouldn't already have stopped after the kiss... But you were also pretty drunk, there was no challenge."
He dropped his half-smoked cigarette on the clean ground and got up, not his first unusual action on this day. Yet I still couldn't stop staring at him. For a moment I thought I was dreaming. I had been drunk in the cell, now I was exhausted and tired... Was it really happening? But there was a much more interesting question: Did I want it to be really happening?
"Get undressed," Wesker said, positioning himself in front of me with his legs apart. "That's an order."
I wanted to protest, to tell him that it didn't work this way, that it didn't work at all, because first of all he was a man, and secondly my superior, who, it seemed, I didn't know nearly as well as I had thought...
But the only thing I said was: "Here? Now?", after taking a look around and perking up my ears to make sure that nobody was here apart from us. This situation was just too unbelievable, too unrealistic, yet it was still real.
"If I had wanted us to go somewhere else, I would have said so. But if you prefer the S.T.A.R.S. office, I don't mind." Wesker was already handling the belt of his pants – he was serious! –, but didn't lose sight of me for one second and watched every one of my movements through his sunglasses which were completely non-transparent from the outside. "Well, will you hurry up?"
I hadn't been smoking my cigarette for a long time. It was glowing in my hand until I dropped it, shook my head and fled the waiting room as fast as possible, ignoring my growing erection while I could...
