Disclaimer – I own no legal rights to anything Resident Evil.
Alex Veltro – I knew I was going to kill off Pierce, but I talked myself out of it so many times. I kept going back and forth on whether I was going to play his death for laughs or for drama. In the end, I think he deserved going out like an MVP.
Jill looked at her companions as they rode Carlos' secret elevator back down from the roof. They barely looked back at her. Barely said a word. They were too busy catching their breath. Processing. Grieving. Thinking of all the shit they'd just barely survived, and the friends they'd briefly had that weren't so fortunate. At least they could be grateful for the key Carlos had acquired from Carver. The emotional anguish of all they'd experienced was hard enough to deal with without the physical torment of having to take the stairs all the way back down to the first floor.
"This is the worst hotel I've ever stayed at," Ashley muttered, right before the elevator doors opened.
That was a sentiment they could all agree on.
They stepped off the elevator, and a second later it disappeared back into the lobby wall. The night had taken as much of a toll on the lobby as it had on them. Hard to believe it could actually look even worse than it had after an airplane crashed into it, but now there was hardly a piece of furniture or décor that was still in tact.
A few stray zombies still shambled about the far corners of the room, moaning hungrily. They weren't even worth engaging with, although Jill still kept an eye on them and had her gun drawn, just in case, as they repeatedly walked into walls and tripped over what was left of the collapsed furniture.
Jill led the way through the conference center, into the room with the massive table Pierce and Rosita had used as a hiding place earlier.
She pulled her scrap of the Hieronymus Bosch painting and placed it with the rest of the painting in the frame on the wall. Then Ashley pulled her scrap out and did the same. They heard a latch click somewhere and the entire wall shifted, just enough to leave a finger-sized gap in the corner.
"Not really pleasant to look at, is it?" Carlos asked.
"It's not supposed to be," Ashley said. "It's Hell."
"So on-the-nose with their Hell theme," Will said. "Never thought I'd want to see a Norman Rockwell painting for once."
"I'd even settle for a Thomas Kinkade right now," Ashley said.
Jill braced herself. Even she didn't like the thought of reaching her fingers through that gap, only for something behind the wall to bite them off.
She got a good grip and, with a light tug, a portion of the wall slid away to reveal a hidden tunnel. About three yards in was a heavy steel door.
Jill ran her hands over the door, looking for any lock or knob or weakness. She pushed a panel in the middle of the door away, revealing an oscilloscope.
"Now what?" Carlos said.
The oscilloscope came to life, displaying the sound wave of Carlos' voice as he spoke.
"It looks like it has something to do with sound," Rosita suggested.
The oscilloscope display reacted again, displaying the pitch and frequency of the housekeeper's voice.
Ashley stared at it, her doe eyes wider than ever, before reaching into her pocket and pulling out what looked like a dog whistle.
She put it to her lips and blew.
The whistle didn't make a sound, but the mechanisms that caused the vault door to swing open did. Inside was a small room with a desk with security monitors on one side and weapon cabinets on the other.
"Some kind of panic room?" Jill said.
She eyed the monitors, then noticed the plaster bust of the ancient Roman poet Virgil beside them. She stored it in her sack with the other busts while her companions checked every drawer and cabinet in the room, including in the tiny attached bathroom.
"Time to see what's behind that administration office," Jill said, motioning to Carlos.
They moved to the door. When Ashley tried to follow, Jill stuck her hand out.
"I want the three of you to stay here."
"What?" Ashley put her hands on her hips indignantly. "We've come all this way. You can't tell us to stay behind right when we get to the part where you get to save the world! I want to help."
Jill crossed her arms.
"You're civilians," she said. "I'm not losing anyone else. Not tonight. Not on my watch."
"This place has got everything you'll need until we get back," Carlos said. "There's even a mini-fridge."
Will followed Carlos' gaze. He opened the fridge, grabbed a can of cola, popped the tab, and took a seat in a desk chair by the security monitors.
"Maybe he's right, Ash," he said.
Ashley stared daggers at him.
"Are we about to have our first fight?" she said.
She turned her gaze to Rosita, silently asking the question.
"I've lost family," Rosita answered gravely. "I've lost loved ones. Friends. I've faced down demons. Now I just want to rest."
She collapsed into the next chair beside Will.
Ashley groaned and took a step back.
"Fine," she said. "Whatever."
Jill started to walk away, only to turn around and look at Ashley again.
"Toss me that whistle key," she said. "Just in case."
Ashley dropped into a chair before begrudgingly pulling the dog whistle back out of her pocket and throwing it across the room. Jill effortlessly snatched it out of the air before she and Carlos left the room and shut the vault door behind them.
They made their way back into the general manager's office, again ignoring the straggler zombies shuffling listlessly down the hallways.
Then they turned their attention to the dust-covered, wall-mounted shelf.
Carlos reached into Jill's bag, grabbed the first bust his fingers touched, and placed it on the shelf.
There were several loud clicks and then machine guns emerged from the office walls around them, aimed directly towards the shelf, and therefore, at them.
"If we do something wrong here, I think those are going to . . ." Carlos started.
Jill interrupted him with a loud sigh and then plucked the bust off the shelf. She took each bust out of her bag, then carefully replaced them on the shelf, one by one.
"Virgil . . . Dante . . . Milton . . . and then Jean-Paul Sartre."
The guns disappeared, the shelf lowered, and a wall swung open to reveal a rickety elevator behind it.
"How did you know what order they went it?" Carlos asked.
"They're writers who lived literal centuries apart, Carlos."
They both carefully stepped on to the elevator, closed the gate, and then threw the switch.
Once they reached the bottom of the shaft, the elevator gate opened on to a large office.
A young woman was leaning against the desk in the center of the room, filing her nails. She didn't even bother to look up at Jill and Carlos as they approached her with their pistols drawn.
"Who are you?" Carlos demanded.
"Jasmine Scott-George," the girl said. "My husband's out of the office right now. Is there a message I could pass along to him?"
Jill pressed her gun directly into Jasmine's back. The girl raised her hands above her head.
"You've picked the worst possible human shield," Jasmine insisted. "Almost everyone here would gladly watch me die. But do what you must."
Jill kept her gun pressed against Jasmine's spine with one hand while covering her hostage's mouth with the other, and then she and Carlos forced her out the office door and into the rest of the lab.
Jill saw exactly what she'd been expecting to see ever since Carlos roped her into this. She and Carlos both had a weird amount of experience with labs just like this one. Glass tanks with bizarre monsters floating in strange fluids. Rooms with people in hazmat suits carrying vials of chemicals behind one-way mirrors. Even the crimson stains on white walls came as no surprise. Jill had seen it all before in other places where mad scientists had tried to play gods.
One thing they didn't see a lot of, as they crept as quietly as possible through the darkest corners they could find, was armed guards.
When they arrived at the center of a large room, surrounded by converging hallways and chemical tanks of various shapes and sizes, Jill finally noticed the surveillance cameras hanging from the ceiling.
It was too late. The curse she uttered was drowned out by personnel in body armor cocking their rifles and marching down the hallways to surround them.
Jill held her hostage tighter. Thanks to the bullet sponges they'd encountered on the roof, they didn't have enough ammo to try to shoot their way out. Even if they had, the odds of making a dent in their number before being reduced to slices of Swiss cheese weren't very high.
"Bienvenue, mes amis," the man who had taunted them on the rooftop said, sprawling out over a nearby crate. "We have been expecting you, naturellement."
A brutish figure in military regalia pushed a decrepit old man in a wheelchair to the front of the crowd.
"I am Dr. Andrew George," the man in the wheelchair said. "Know my name and know it well, for I shall soon be your new god. Now, tell me, what are you doing with my wife?"
"Put your guns down or we blow her brains out!" Carlos said.
George only laughed.
"You think you have me at a disadvantage. But in reality, we are even. You see, you have my wife, but . . ."
He nodded to his side, and two men entered the room, each holding one of a bound and gagged Maria Oliveira's arms. They tossed her to the ground beside George.
"I also have yours," George finished.
Jill looked over at Carlos' face. There was a wild look in his eyes, and part of her worried he was going to attempt something rash. But she could also tell me was trying to stay cool for Maria's sake.
"I hate to see a damsel in distress," George continued. "Let alone two of them. So give me back my wife."
"You first," Carlos demanded.
For a moment, Carlos and George just stared at each other. Then, finally, the old man spoke.
"Fair enough."
The guards pulled Maria back to her feet and then pushed her away. She walked the rest of the way to be at Carlos' side. Her eyes were scared, angry, and betrayed. The moment of truth Carlos should have faced a long time ago was finally here.
As he looked at Jill, she knew they had no choice but to cooperate. Reluctantly, she let go of Jasmine, who ran to George and sat in his lap. The glaringly obvious age gap of about seven or eight decades between them made Jill's stomach turn.
"You're a fool, Jill Valentine," the old man said. "We'd already been planning on luring you right into a trap for a while now. Oz, Ed, Jim, and I!"
Jill's ears perked up at the names, and she looked over at George, confused.
"We've already planted one of our own," George continued. "In your precious S.T.A.R.S. Little does your precious squad know their walking right in to a trap. Once in the Arklay Mountains, terror awaits them below the Spencer Mansion! Once they've witnesses the power of the Tyrant . . ."
Jill blinked incredulously, then leaned closer to Carlos.
"Is he . . . ?" she whispered. "Is he . . . talking about . . . Albert Wesker?"
"This guy's gotta be at least a hundred years old," Carlos said out the side of his mouth. "And I'm thinking he must not get out much."
"But what lies under the Spencer Mansion is nothing compared to what we plan to unleash on Raccoon City above!" George said. "You will behold . . . the Nemesis! Once we've programmed it to attack . . ."
As he droned on, Jill and Carlos both looked over at Daniel, who smiled and shrugged his shoulders as if to say "What can you do?"
Several keywords hit Jill's ear as George kept outlining his schemes. Russian village. Terragrigia. Il Veltro. Queen Zenobia. TRICELL. The Connections. Maria looked increasingly terrified as George laid out conspiracy after conspiracy. All conspiracies Jill had already untangled, all in excruciating detail, and all in future tense.
Jill leaned over to whisper to Carlos again.
"Now I actually feel kinda bad about spending the last twenty-five years or so of my life single-handedly foiling all of this guy's plans."
"Single-handedly?" Carlos whispered back. "I seem to remember helping out with the whole Nemesis thing a little. And what about that Redfield guy you never shut up about?"
When George finally stopped to catch his breath, Jill cleared her throat.
"Okay," she said. "I'm afraid I have a lot of bad news for you. Let's see. Where do I start? The Umbrella Corporation is kaput. Let's rip that bandage off real fast. And then . . ."
"Silence, mortals!" George screamed. "We still have so much more fun in store for you tonight!"
And with that, George's men grabbed Jill, Carlos, and Maria to escort them to their cell.