Chapter 1: Faster

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

JUNE 8, 2009

1705 HOURS

As Jill Valentine's feet punished the whizzing treadmill in the exercise room of Chris Redfield's apartment complex, she thought about Habanero peppers.

She'd been 15 when she first experienced the deadly Habanero, playing "Truth or Dare" with her best friend, Gregory, in his kitchen, his parents out for a night on the town. Jill and Gregory had never crossed that boundary into anything more than friends, but she'd thought the whole point of "Truth or Dare" was to skirt the line and get a little naughty. Gregory's dare, though, wasn't quite of the saucy, flirty variety she'd been hoping for.

"I dare you to take a bite of a Habanero pepper, chew it and swallow it."

She'd quizzically arched an eyebrow when he said it. Hopefully he was starting out with tame dares and later would get to "the good stuff." In any case, he wasted no time retrieving a small orange pepper from the vegetable bin of his refrigerator.

Jill really didn't know much about food or vegetables. The little thing looked harmless. She'd always eat the little Jalapeno slices Gregory picked off of his nachos, savoring the sting and the heat, so she thought she had a pretty decent tolerance for that particular kind of pain.

Until she took that bite and chewed, she'd had no idea just what "hot" meant. Or "pain," for that matter.

What Gregory had failed to tell her was that a Habanero pepper is one of the hottest foods known to man, something like sixty times hotter than a Jalapeno.

At first, he just laughed. Her eyes went wide as saucers as tears streamed down her beet red face, veins popping from her forehead, squeals of agony escaping her tortured throat. His laughter started to fade as her squeals turned to something more like choking. "Oh shit, Jill, are you all right?"

She was near convulsions as she slapped and hit him. This was the worst agony she had ever endured. She could feel the exact location of the chewed pepper pulp traveling down her esophagus, as though she'd swallowed a hot coal. He got her water. Water didn't do a thing.

"Uh… bread! Bread is supposed to help! It, like, absorbs the oil!"

Gregory got a loaf of the spongy white stuff as Jill tried hanging her head down and controlling her breathing. She didn't bother to untwist the tie on the loaf, tearing into the plastic and shoving the bread into her mouth in handfuls. It helped a little. But right then, "a little" was very little.

Eventually they switched to a bowl of ice cubes. He helped her lie down on the couch, where she sucked on the ice, her eyes closed, trying to tune out the screaming agony. The pain was starting to ebb in her mouth, but her stomach felt like it was turning itself inside out, and every breath was like running sandpaper along her windpipe.

Gregory sat at her side the whole time, apologizing over and over again, asking what else he could do. She just shook her head at everything he suggested.

It took about an hour for Jill to be able to speak. Finally, she was able to muster a very hoarse sentence.

"Gregory. I am going to kill you in your sleep."

The peculiar thing about the whole incident, though, was what happened after. From that day forward, every Jalapeno slice she ate barely registered on the heat meter. She could eat all kinds of things she couldn't have handled before – vindaloo curry, maki rolls dipped in soy sauce mixed with huge globs of wasabi, five-alarm chili, tom yum soup. Didn't matter what she ate, didn't matter how hot. That one incident with the Habanero had, it seemed, permanently ratcheted up her tolerance of spicy food to levels that could probably win her contests.

Jill thought about this as she pounded the treadmill at her feet, savoring the burning in her legs, the throbbing in her joints, the tearing of muscle to build itself up anew, as she had once savored those now-pointless Jalapeno slices. She'd been running at nearly her fastest speed for twenty solid minutes; three years ago, five minutes of sprinting at this pace would have been the maximum she could manage, which is about what you could expect of a top athlete as well. She realized that, since the horrors she had experienced at the Tricell facility, being mutilated and operated on by Albert Wesker, her overall tolerance for pain had gone through the roof. She wondered if this was a good thing or a bad thing. On the one hand, it could one day help her endure an unimaginable situation; on the other, pain is a pretty important feedback mechanism. People that don't feel pain usually don't live very long.

Her abused legs should be killing her right about now; offhandedly, Jill wondered what kind of damage she was doing to herself. Her heart was pounding so fast she could barely feel the individual beats; she checked the treadmill's readout too see that the monitor on her hand was telling the machine her heart rate was around 220 bpm. Probably too high.

So why was she doing this to herself? After chugging three cans of nasty, highly caffeinated energy drink that had given her a piercing, but now tolerable, headache?

Even though she knew better, she chased out those thoughts and focused all her energy on running. I wonder how much faster this thing can go? she thought as she cranked the level even more. Her mind became a blur of activity and motion. Conscious thought was suppressed, worry and fear driven away. Must go faster. Must always go faster.

Chris's voice brought her focus crashing down around her. "Jill! What are you doing?"

The unfortunate effect of this interruption was a startled lurch on her part, which caused her to tumble backwards off the treadmill and crash into a weight-lifting bench behind her in a tangle of sweaty limbs and stringy hair.

"Oh shit," said Chris, rushing to her side. "Are you all right?"

She started to untangle and rubbed her head where she'd banged it on the bench's metal leg. "Yeah. I think so."

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to… I was just worried. You looked like you were about to have a stroke or something."

He helped her sit up, then get to her feet to sit on the bench and rub all the spots she'd just bruised.

"I'm fine, Chris," she said, an answer born of long, self-protective instinct.

"Jill, how long were you running like that? You should see yourself, you look like a veiny tomato."

She arched an eyebrow and glared at him. "Thanks a lot."

"I'm serious, Jill. You keep pushing yourself like this, pushing so hard. Talk to me!"

She wanted to shut down, pretend everything was fine. But that was the old Jill, the old habit. She knew now that was the worst thing she could do. So she just sighed and rested her sweaty head in her hands.

"Everything feels… dull and fuzzy all the time."

He started to get it. "The P30." The chemical agent that had granted Jill superhuman strength, agility and resilience had also overclocked her mind and expanded her senses. And rendered her a helpless slave to Albert Wesker, unable to resist following any order he gave her. Although Jill had been under the constant influence of the serum for nearly a year, she had been given a clean bill of health after Chris rescued her – but the serum was far from understood by BSAA scientists, and its long-term effects were impossible to gauge.

Jill had been gone from Chris's life for three years. The world thought her dead, although on some level Chris had never accepted that. On a hunch and a rumor, he went to Africa to look for her. She had been the captive of Wesker, their most hated enemy. Wesker had formulated a serum that turned Jill into his perfect super-soldier, that would allow him to compel her to do the most horrible things – kill, maim, infect, destroy. But Chris was the one who had rescued her from all that, defeating Wesker and helping Jill take her place again among the living.

It had been six months since their return from Africa. Jill had spent three of that in detention, awaiting charges of terrorism, of which she had been fully cleared. The three months after that, she had spent here, with Chris. He had BSAA desk work, and the occasional lecture or seminar, to keep him busy, but she still didn't quite know what she wanted to do. She had been offered immediate reinstatement as a BSAA field operative; she and Chris could take their places at each other's side again, doing the work for which they now knew they had been born. And Jill knew Chris wanted that more than anything, but bless him, he had brought it up once and never since.

But Jill wasn't ready. She had Chris's complete trust, she knew that; she just needed to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that she could trust herself.

So, Jill trained. Exercise, running, martial arts classes, weapons proficiency testing. Long days spent at the library and on the internet, coming up to speed on the world's events, the many changes to catch up on from her three year absence. Jill felt it was a full-time job just becoming normal again, at least by her standards of normalcy.

And worse, her ability to judge those standards had been warped by the P30. Under the influence of the diabolical chemical, she had felt mental and physical capacity that she never could have imagined. She knew what it felt like to have unlimited potential. She knew what it felt like to be perfect. This unfortunatel knowledge had all but erased her notion of "good enough," and now she had to learn that from scratch.

As Jill spoke, cautiously but trying to be as open with Chris as she could, her tone was vaguely ashamed. "At first, after the P30 wore off, those days and weeks after you saved me, I loved going back to being regular Jill – to feeling pain, getting tired, thinking a normal jumble of thoughts.

"But it's hard, Chris. It's harder than I thought it would be. I mean, some days I feel like I'm underwater. The world seems murky. Everything runs together like a big blur. I struggle with the simplest things, you know? I stand there in the grocery store for five minutes trying to decide on which shampoo to buy."

Chris nodded. "So you try to get the blood pumping, the adrenaline going. The caffeine, the energy drinks. All just to get your brain working faster."

A tear rolled down her cheek. "I know, Chris. It makes me sick. But I want to feel that way again. Some days, it's all I think about."

Chris put his arm around her shoulder. "I wish I knew what you're going through."

She smiled wryly. "And I'm glad for your sake that you don't."

She put her head on his shoulder and let her mind wander. She thought again of her friend Gregory, the pepper torturer. Gregory had died at the age of 17, their senior year of high school. Inseperable for much of their adolescence, at some point she and Gregory had started to fall in with different crowds. Jill was drawn to ROTC; Gregory was drawn to drugs. Heroin, to be specific. It was never clear if the overdose that had killed him was an accident or not. Jill believed deep down that it was, if not out and out suicide, then at least an attempt at massive self-destruction. Gregory had always shown an obsessive side, pursuing whatever his current interest was with an almost alarming intensity, whether it was painting models, entering writing contests, or playing his guitar. But no matter what his achievement, he always seemed disappointed. He set an impossible standard for himself, then always failed to match it. Maybe even when it came to drugs. Jill always suspected that he just got tired of chasing a high he could never quite achieve.

Was this how it had been for Gregory? Did he feel like a stone sinking in water, ever further from the bright and clear surface of that first exquisite high? Would she follow him into a self-made trap? Would Chris find her in this smelly room one morning, collapsed in a heap, dead from a heart attack or a stroke as the ladies of "The View" chattered on in the background?

Chris knew when she needed him to be silent, but he could also tell when her thoughts were getting the better of her, and these days, that happened more often than ever. He broke her morbid trance. "We'll get through this, Valentine. We always have, and this is no different. You have my word."

His words were like medicine. Somehow, when he said something like that to her, it instantly registered to her as the absolute and inviolable truth. God, was she glad she was here with him. He had no idea how much he had helped her, how much he continued to help her. How much she needed him.

Jill wanted to be as honest with Chris as she could, but she didn't think they were ready for that level of openness. Patience, Valentine, she thought to herself, a smile creeping unbidden across her face. Since her rescue, Jill had learned a very important lesson: it was important to not obsess over what had come before or what was yet to come, but rather to savor the small joys of the moment. Like the feeling of Chris's strong arm wrapped around her shoulders, the sound of his heart beat as her head nestled into him. Jill didn't know what was in their future, only that their future was intertwined, that every day with Chris was better than the last, and that it had been so as long as she'd known him. Being with Chris was like holding a Christmas present in her lap; the promise and beautiful mystery it represented was as much a wonder as the eventual act of opening it. For Jill, there was no more delightfully exquisite agony than waiting, as long as it was for the right thing; few things made life more worth living and defending.

They lapsed into a more comfortable silence. She felt her heart rate decreasing, her ragged breathing returning to normal. With him there holding her, suddenly dull and fuzzy didn't seem quite so bad.

"See? You look better already," he finally said.

"No more veiny tomato?" she cracked.

"Well, not quite as veiny, and the tomato is less ripe, anyway."

She chuckled. The motion of her laughter made her aware of just how damp she'd gotten him with sweat. How was it she was always finding a way to ruin his shirts? He was so good about never seeming to notice, though the shirt always vanished at the first opportunity he got. She pictured him tossing a sack with the words "SHIRTS RUINED BY JILL" stenciled on it into a furnace.

He continued speaking. "So, I got a call from Captain Pyke. The BSAA wants me to conduct an inter-agency seminar on bio-terror readiness at Quantico."

Jill perked up instantly, glad that the subject of conversation was no longer her. "Really? Chris, that's fantastic!" The FBI's Virginia academy known as Quantico was a source of envy for law-enforcement professionals all over the world, especially those from overworked and underfunded agencies such as the BSAA.

He smiled. "I know, it's a good sign. I get the sense that, after Kijuju, there's a lot more conversation between the BSAA and US agencies. Feels like we're finally getting some traction in making the government face the B.O.W. situation. So, I leave tomorrow. Come with me!"

She looked uncertain. "Are you sure, Chris? You know you don't have to babysit me. No more danger zone workouts, I swear."

"I know. But I want you to come. I think it would do you good. Virginia is beautiful this time of year; you can hike and jog in the woods. Plus, the training facilities at Quantico are state-of-the-art. Not that you need training, of course," he was careful to add.

She smiled. "A little more training never hurt anyone. Are you sure I'd be welcome?"

"I already cleared it. They'll be happy to accommodate you, whatever you need. In fact, Pyke made it clear that he was hoping you could participate in the seminar, and I agree. You know, whatever you're comfortable with. These rooks are going to be green as hell, and anything you give them can only help them down the line."

She didn't need much convincing. As far back as STARS, the idea of green rooks always brought out both the nurturing mother and the drill sergeant in her. This was Chris's opportunity and there was no way she'd hog the spotlight, but she could definitely help him get his message out there.

Besides, even though he was circumspect and discreet about his feelings for her, she knew that, really, what it boiled down to was that he just didn't want to be apart from her. Not yet. And not due to some protective instinct, some desire to watch over her like a mother hen. No, Jill was no fool. It was obvious to Jill that he just felt more like himself when he was around her. She could recognize this as clearly as if he'd said it to her face. She knew it for what it was because she felt exactly the same about him. He had a way of chasing away all her doubt, her fears, her self-hatred for the horrendous acts her mind had not been able to stop her body from committing. It was still hard for Jill to be certain about anything after her ordeal, but she was certain of one thing: she would never get sick of being near Chris. There weren't enough hours in the day to spend with him. And though she didn't really understand why, she knew he felt the same about her.

She looked up at him. "Let's do it."

The discretion that Chris naturally practiced regarding his feelings for Jill was not in evidence as a puppy-dog smile lit up his face.