Disclaimer - This is strictly fanfiction. I have no legal rights to the characters or trademarks.
When Carlos fled to Brazil after his escape from Raccoon City, he didn't think he'd ever be returning to the United States.
His night of blowing off steam with Jill had been as good of an end to his time there as any he could think of. And he was no longer wanted as a terrorist for his part in a failed coup. Umbrella had taken care of that. Erasing his past was the only thing they'd ever done he was actually grateful for.
But the hatred for his former handlers and everything they'd done haunted him. The hatred burned inside of him, with no one to channel it towards. Or so he thought. When an old contact put him on to the rumors that Umbrella sleeper cells were operating under shell corporations, it was enough to bring Carlos back north in search of revenge.
But when chasing rumors didn't yield the results he was hoping for, Carlos began looking for other ways to ease his conscious and atone for his past sins.
Looking for another way to put his years of combat experience to use for the greater good, he decided to use his hand-to-hand combat training to teach a self-defense course at a local community center. Carlos had always had a reputation for not being able to control his flirting, even at inappropriate times, but he was now older and wiser, and several of his pupils had been drawn to learn self-defense because they had gone through some kind of trauma.
And Carlos could relate to the trauma. He'd seen atrocious things as a child soldier, running with resistance movements for as long as he could remember, but none of that had prepared him for Raccoon City. It wasn't just the nightmarish creatures Umbrella had unleashed on the city. He'd had to say his final goodbyes to Tyrell, Murphy, Mikhail, and Yuri that night. For years, they'd been the closest thing he'd had to family. Hell, even Nicholai, ruthless asshole he'd always been, broke Carlos' heart with his betrayal almost as much as the deaths. Not only that, but all the good Carlos had convinced himself he'd been doing as part of the U.B.C.S. was retroactively tainted by learning what Umbrella had really been all about. It was that knowledge, more than anything else, that kept waking him up in a cold sweat every night.
So Carlos made sure he kept a strictly respectful relationship with his students. He was so much in this frame of mind, in fact, that he hadn't even realized his top pupil had been hitting on him. Not until Maria completed the course and then asked him point blank if he'd be interested in taking her on a date.
After that, it was an unspoken race to see who would pop the question first. In the end, it had been Carlos who made the proposal.
He still had the occasional nightmare, but with Maria at his side, they became less intense and less frequent. Waking up in a cold sweat, only to roll over and find her lying there serenely, instantly lulled him back into a peaceful sleep every time. And he regained his humanity even more when their eldest was born.
Bringing something so beautiful into the world was another small way to feel redeemed for the ugliness he'd been part of. He could have lived contentedly like that for the rest of his life.
But that's when one of his contacts, after years of silence, finally got back in touch with him with more solid intel about an Umbrella shell operation.
He hadn't made the decision to act on that intel lightly. His life was no longer his own. He had a family to take care of. How could he leave them behind, putting himself in danger that would almost certainly end in his death, never to come back to them?
But, on the other hand, how could he raise a family knowing what was out there? It was already a different world than the one he'd grown up in. When he'd had nightmares as a child, his family had never told him monsters weren't real. But they'd told him the monsters were human, tyrants and despots. When his child woke up from a nightmare about monsters, the whole world knew that shambling corpses and things with long tentacles and sharp claws were all too real. Saying it was just a dream was never an option. The best he could do was say that he'd never let the monsters get to them. And how was he supposed to do that when he knew there were still labs out there creating more monsters? How could he raise a family knowing those monsters could be invading their front lawn at any moment?
Carlos had never found the strength to tell Maria about the past he was running away from, and now he was at a loss as to how to tell her he was going willingly back into that ugliness. Each mission, he tried to come up with the words to come clean to her, confess his past and justify what he was doing now. Each time, all he was able to come up with was more lies.
And that was why Carlos had been so easily persuaded to make this deal with the devil, reluctantly putting his faith in Cassius Carver. And maybe the reason he was willing to give Carver the benefit of the doubt was because Carver was a family man as well. Maybe he'd been struggling with his decision to betray the rest of his team for a long time, realizing every day that it would get harder and harder to protect his own husband and child from the monsters he was creating.
He felt uneasy as he waited in the corner of the lobby. When he'd passed through the convention center again, he'd passed the spot where he'd blown that newest variation on the Tyrant up. It had disappeared. That couldn't be a good sign.
What looked like it had been strictly a decorative bookshelf on the wall opened like a door, and Carver emerged, making quick strides towards Carlos. He didn't even acknowledge the other man's presence, but walked up to a clock on the opposite wall. He took something out of his pocket and pressed it into the clock's face. A second hand. Then he manipulated the hands of the clock until something clicked and the clock opened on to a hidden elevator.
"Get on," Carver barked.
"Good to see you, too, Doc."
Carver grunted and pushed a button on the elevator panel. The elevator rumbled and then began moving up.
"Convenient," Carlos said. "But won't this draw attention to us?"
"Most certainly," Carver said. "But unfortunately it's already too late. Despite my best efforts to remain surreptitious, I found my office ransacked and my research confiscated."
"Damn. So what do we do now?"
"We're going back to my hotel room," Carver said, leaning against the wall and folding his arms. "I've got backup copies in a hidden place. I'm sure you'll want to see the notes to come up with countermeasures the next time one of these situations comes up. Then we grab your friends. If we have time, that is. Either way, you're getting me the hell out of here. After that, you can come back, blow the place sky high for all I care. I just need you to get me as far from here as possible first."
Ashley stood on the ledge of the broken window, looking down and bracing herself. She stepped out and landed on the terrace of the window below.
She looked through the window and saw that the room was crawling with zombies.
The rain seemed to have let up for a moment, but the balcony was still soaking wet and slick. That was going to make this next part so much more dangerous.
She took a deep breath and climbed up on to the railing. It was already hard to keep her footing. And then she attempted to long jump to the next balcony.
She was just barely able to catch the next railing. Her fingers were wet and dirty and already starting to slip. Despite her best efforts not to, she looked down. It was at least a seventy foot drop. and
She managed to pull herself up on the terrace.
"Dammit, Will," she muttered. "I know I promised to keep you alive, but did you have to make it so difficult?"
She looked through the window at the monsters demolishing the hotel room. She didn't want to have to jump over the seventy foot chasm again, but her odds of surviving the jump still looked better than trying to fight the menagerie of creatures waiting for her beyond the window. She growled and jumped to the next terrace.
"Ugh. Is this how I made Leon feel the whole time?"
On the next balcony, she could see a twitching body. Three of the monster seagulls swooped down to go to work on it.
She looked through the window and saw no immediate threat. She used the barrel of the shotgun to smash through the glass and then climbed through to the room.
There had been children in this room. There was a huge pile of creepy stuffed animals and dolls. She backed away as they started moving.
The mountain of toys fell away as zombies emerged from it. Ashley turned and ran out of the room, slamming the door behind her, and only then quickly looking side to side to make sure she hadn't run into something worse.
The hallway seemed clear, but she held the gun ready just in case. She rounded the corner, only to walk straight into the barrel of a hunting rifle.
They both had their guns in each other's faces. The other woman was also a blonde, but with dark roots, hair obviously dyed platinum. Skinny, in a tank top with a pink camo pattern and a pink baseball cap with the acronym for the Defenders Backing American Gunowners on it. She'd obviously escaped from the floor above.
She slowly lowered the rifle.
"You're President Sham's daughter," she said. "I mean, President Graham's daughter. Sorry. I'm just used to referring to him as . . ."
"I always thought that was such a stupid nickname," Ashley said. "At least not as bad as the one where they call him 'Lame' but try to stretch it out so it rhymes with 'Graham.' 'President Layh-am.' Dad actually kinda liked 'Alexander-Layh-am-Bull,' like the inventor of the telephone. But of course he would. Total dad joke. His first name's not even Alexander."
"I'm Lee," the other woman said.
"I'm Ashley. I mean, obviously you already know that, but . . ."
Lee grimaced and grabbed her side, and Ashley saw the blood leaking through the hotel bath towels Lee had tried to tie around her waist to clot it.
"Were you bitten?" Ashley demanded, keeping her gun pointed at Lee.
"No way," Lee said. Her voice was dead serious, and she spat on the floor. "I swear to God, I'd sooner kill myself than turn into one of those things."
"Then what's happening there?" Ashley asked, indicating the wound with the end of her shotgun.
"Friendly fire," Lee said, and grimaced again. "Took a bullet in the crossfire when those monsters attacked the ninth floor and all that craziness broke out. Look, we both know I didn't vote for your old man. And pleas for unity ring hollow, especially in these times. But if there was ever a time to put political differences aside, it's now."
"Agreed," Ashley said, finally strapping the shotgun back across her back. "Can you move?"
It was clear each step was painful, but Lee began hobbling down the hallway.
Inhuman growls and heavy footsteps echoed down the corridor. Something was coming. Something big.
Ashley grabbed Lee and pulled her back around the corner. She peeked down the hallway.
Minos had mutated again. It was so big it had to hunch forward to even fit beneath the ceiling. Several tentacles flailed from each side of it. What was left of her pilot's face seemed to be staring at her, hollow eyes and wide open mouth judging her, but Ashley knew those weren't the eyes the creature saw through. Not anymore, anyway.
Lee grabbed her rifle, preparing to cock it.
Ashley put her hand on it and forced it back down. Lee's eyes flashed murder.
"Don't make a sound," Ashley hissed. "We need to hide."
"We can take it!" Lee said. "Between the two of us, we've got more than enough firepower."
"Don't be stupid."
"I'm not some soft-handed, precious snowflake like you. If I'm gonna die, it's gonna be . . ."
Ashley pressed her hand over the other woman's mouth and pressed her into the wall.
"Shut up!" she said. "I've already seen that thing die at least twice. It doesn't go down easy, and it always seems to get back up. We'd be wasting time and ammo and risking our lives for nothing."
Lee's eyes were still defiant as she tried to struggle out of Ashley's grip.
"You've seen plenty of terrible things tonight," Ashley said. "You know what it's like to face things most people only come close to in their worst nightmares. Well, I've already been there. Around fifteen years ago. I didn't live to tell about it by trying to go out in a blaze of glory. Instead, I trusted someone who had more experience with this type of thing. And I got very good at hiding. Understand?"
For a moment, Lee kept looking at Ashley with hatred, but she finally nodded. Ashley took her hand away and they silently retreated back around the corner.