Chapter Nine.
The fact that Jill, Leon, and Ashley had all been sent to man the vehicle (which they were now calling The Bus) was largely a matter of timing. "The only places safe for anyone to run to were Umbrella facilities," Jill said, turning in her seat to face Seras and Integra.
"I thought Umbrella had gone kaput," Ashley has chimed in from her seat next to Leon. They had found the highway they wanted easily enough but it was blocked by cars, and pushing through them was slow work.
"You'd think killing the Board of Directors and freezing all of the company's assets would have done the trick," Leon said.
Seras sighed, another failure.
Jill continued her side of the story, telling how she had become separated from the rest of the STARS members after the place they had been living in was finally found by zombies and overrun. "We couldn't have stayed there much longer anyway. Food was giving out. It was an old bomb shelter of some kind."
She had looked for the other STARS, but the zombies made it difficult. "Impossible I should say," Jill said. Jill had then made her way south, moving by day when she could spot zombies the easiest and avoid them. She was picked up by an Umbrella scavenging team while on the outskirts of the city.
"I wasn't sure who they were at first," Jill said. "By the time I found out, they knew who I was as well and then I went from being a refugee to a prisoner."
Some surviving Umbrella executives still had a sore spot when it came to the STARS, especially Jill Valentine. Locked in a cell for a few weeks, she was told she would either be disposed of, used for breeding purposes, or saved as an emergency food ration.
"Say that again?" Seras said.
"I think they were playing mind games with me," Jill said. "But things were getting pretty bad where we just left."
"I'll say. That's horrible even if it was just a mind game," Seras said, thinking of the parts of England where food had been especially hard to come by. Bands of starving humans could be more dangerous than a horde of zombies.
"Then, out of the blue, they tell me they're going to train me to operate a special anti-infestation transport vehicle," Jill said, continuing. She had been given fresh clothes, a bath, and a meal, then introduced to Leon and Ashley.
"Small world," Seras said.
It hadn't taken them long to piece out the connections between one another. When they were told what they were going to do and who they were going to do it with, there hadn't been much to say. "It's strange," Jill said, "that the five of us would be alive and get together like this."
Seras had been thinking the same thing. When her dreams weren't being stupid, they were often quite vivid and difficult to distinguish from reality. Confusion really set in when she dreamed about something mundane, like Walter telling her she needed to clear out her room so it could be painted. She had done just that, only to find he had said no such thing and that it had all been a dream.
As surreal as their reunion was, she didn't think it was a dream, although Robert Lazarus had resembled Walter somewhat. In the end, she decided she would call humbug on the whole thing if and when she saw Sherry Birkin make an appearance.
"So how did Leon and Ashley wind up here?" Seras asked.
"My turn," Ashley said, getting up. "Jill, you're on map."
Jill smiled and got up, switching seats with Ashley.
"So they assigned Leon to guard me full time after what happened, right?" Ashley began. Leon had remained as her personal bodyguard, even into President Graham's second term and despite the growing attention they were getting in the press. "You wouldn't believe the crap they printed about me and Leon," Ashley said.
Seras laughed, remembering what the tabloids and even what the big newspapers had printed. It had made her all too glad that Leon had gotten the credit for rescuing Ashley from Los Illuminados.
"So after my dad left office, Leon stayed on as my bodyguard which, of course, led to more stuff in the press." Seras nodded as Ashley spoke. Scanning the girl's face and reading what was behind them, she thought Ashley was making a point to denounce what the tabloids had said about the relationship between her and Leon.
After things began to get bad, they weren't shunted off to some base beneath a mountain. Graham had lost that particular perk when he stopped being president. The next best thing had been his ranch in Carolina. It ended up being overrun as the people hired to protect it had more pressing matters to attend to.
"So Leon pulled my but out of the fire again," Ashley said. "Then we pretty much did what Jill did for a few years. We kept moving east, hiding when we could, running when we had to. I learned to shoot and stuff from Leon."
Her story mirrored Jill's from then on. They were picked up by Umbrella personnel out foraging, taken in, identified, and locked up. "I don't think they threatened to eat us though," Ashley said. "Just kill Leon and rape me."
Seras wondered what awful things Ashley had seen in her travels to make her talk in such a fashion. The façade she was putting up mirrored the Ashley Seras had known, but Seras saw something different underneath, something harder.
"This is all entirely too convenient," Integra said suddenly. There was a silence, followed by stairs from everyone not driving. Integra seemed to realize this. "Relax, I meant nothing by it. Umbrella isn't capable of orchestrating such a thing."
Seras's mind began poking at an idea, one she was afraid to latch onto lest it turn out to be stupid. Integra was right, Umbrella wasn't capable of having things come together in such a fashion. "Maybe it's karma," Seras settled on saying. "We've had such a run of foul luck, maybe the world thinks it owes us all a break."
She tapped the edge of her wooden coffin with her foot, praying she hadn't just jinxed them. The Bus was humming smoothly, pushing cars and junk off to the sides with its plow. Seras couldn't see the road, but felt that it had become a little uneven and worn. After a brief period of silence, the lights in the vehicle cut out along with the computer monitors and the engine. The Bus stopped moving.
"You're joking. For real?" Leon said in the darkness.
"You jinxed us, Seras," Ashley said.
Seras's jaw had dropped and she looked around the cabin for some sort of explanation. Her night vision enabled her to see just fine, but she could tell her human companions were completely blind as they remained still.
"Relax, people," Jill said. Getting a flashlight from her pocket and turning it on. "Remember that power cord on the bottom they told us about? It's probably that."
"This thing had a couple design flaws," Ashley said. "There's a cord underneath that they said might become disconnected of we went over something that got past the plow."
Biting her tongue and tapping her coffin with her foot, Seras nodded as the flashlight beam scanned the ceiling and then made its way onto the floor. Jill had gotten up and gone back towards the roof hatch. "We just have to go out and reconnect it," she said. "Hopefully we won't have to replace it completely."
"I'm going," Seras said, getting up. "You said there were three of them hanging out there, it's not safe."
"Do you know what you're looking for?" Jill asked.
"I'll come back in and ask if I'm confused," Seras said, suddenly feeling stupid and angry. "I'd like to insist on a rule: if anyone is to go outside to do anything, it's going to be me. There's no reason for anyone else to risk it."
"Alright," Jill said. "I wasn't really arguing."
"I'll be right back," Seras said, climbing up the ladder and opening the hatch. Her machete was sheathed at her side and she got up and out quickly, not knowing exactly where the stragglers were.
Once on the roof, she saw that they were near the back. Their clothing and flesh had become tangled into odd parts of The Bus's exterior. They hadn't been hanging on like Seras thought. She closed the hatch and dispatched the zombies, then shoved their lifeless forms off the roof.
Seras looked around The Bus, taking stock of the area. The plowed path they had made through the cars was easy to spot, as were the shuffling figures slowly making their way down towards The Bus, having been rousted from their prior routines.
Jumping down off The Bus, she got onto her stomach and looked for the loose cable. The concrete on the highway was cracked and uneven from the winters it had seen no maintenance. She saw the loose cable hanging near the center of The Bus and began crawling towards it.
Her chest made it a tight fit and she was glad she didn't need to keep air in her lungs. Wanting to be back on her feet before any zombies got close, she reached the cable and noticed what had disconnected it. A piece of rebar had stuck of out of the cracked concrete and caught it. Springy enough to bend back up after being pushed down by the plow, but stiff enough to unhook a cable, Seras wondered how many times she would find herself beneath The Bus, doing some such work on it while undead closed in.
Seeing that she hadn't jinxed them too much, as the cable had merely become unplugged and not severed, she reconnected it and heard the machine power up once more. Tucking the cable back in as best she could, which wasn't much, she slid back out from beneath The Bus and got up.
Two zombies had made their way to The Bus and she split their skulls with her machete easily, her attention focused more on the zombie near the guard rail. She could see it easily in the dark, but The Bus's sidelights kicked on, illuminating the thing.
It had crawled up the bank and made its way over the guard rail with far more grace than any zombie could ever have mustered. Its movements seemed to fall somewhere between catlike and apish, but Seras wasn't in the mood to make a distinction.
Its skin was crimson, perhaps from being covered in blood but nothing on it smelled fresh. Its scent was as stale as the other zombies that had been wandering for years. When the light caught its eyes, they glowed orange, something human eyes did not do.
She noticed the feral claws on its hands and that it was wearing a tattered business suit right before it hoped off the guardrail and bolted at her. She had seen zombies pour on a burst of speed, but nothing like this. It was fast, it was deliberate, and would have stood a good chance of ripping her to pieces had she not been faster.
Seras sidestepped it, waiting until it was a foot away from slashing at her. It ran past her, stopping before it hit the side of The Bus. Twisting into it, using her hips, she brought her machete down on the creature's neck at an angle, severing the head and right arm from the torso in one sideways chunk.
It fell to the ground and tried to right itself using its arm. Snarling and gnashing its teeth, Seras kicked it away from The Bus and into the light where should make out detail and color a little better.
"Seras, stop poking that thing and get back in here," Integra's voice said over a speaker. The Bus seemed full of handy features.
Noting the zombie's pointed teeth, she stuck her machete through its eye socket and climbed up to the top hatch after wiping her machete on its pant leg. With the weapon sheathed, she slipped down the hatch and closed it behind her. "A piece of rebar caught it," Seras said.
"Really," Leon said. "I foresee this routine getting old." He peered out the windshield at the cars blocking the rotting highway and sighed.
"Maybe we can fix it later, if we get a chance," Ashley said.
The Bus continued forward and Integra left Leon's shoulder to go over to where Seras now sat in the living area. "What was that thing out there?" Integra asked. "I saw it come up over the rail."
Shaking her head, Seras shrugged. "It looked like it started out as a zombie," she said. "We should ask that Wesker if and when he calls and hope they don't all stand to get like that."
To be continued…