Day 3 of captivity
"I was hoping that you'd look a little more decent for our entertainment," the smug voice of DeAndros called when Jill Valentine was led into what appeared to be the cargo ship's dining hall.
The conversation with Garza hadn't included much more when she had refused to wear his shirt after her shower. His warning of her fate meant very little when she knew horrors greater than she thought simple men could conjure.
Then again, she ultimately decided not to discredit them too quickly. Even simple men could come up with gruesome realities that didn't involve viruses, parasites, or any variation in between.
Her wet hair was drenching the shoulders of her still dirty dress, but Jill kept her head up while she stared at the dark-eyed man sitting at the large table with a few of his men flanking either side of him.
Food lay in half-eaten states around the messy surface and the smell had Jill's gut churning in need.
"I suspect people are often disappointed with you around, DeAndros," she replied simply as the silence carried on.
Gloves—the man who had pulled her out of the trailer previously—gave a guffawing laugh.
"DeAndros," he rumbled with a hand slapping the table. "God, I hate that fucking name."
DeAndros, or whomever he was, glanced over at Gloves with a grin before he shrugged and said, "I always thought it had a clever ring to it." His eyes turned back to Jill. "Care to join us, Rhamnusia?"
Garza's hand was at her shoulder while he led her toward the table. He had rebound her hands, but he seemed to be slightly more at ease with her after their conversation. It would be something Jill would exploit depending on how the next few minutes went.
Garza didn't lower himself to pull out a chair for her at the empty side of the table. He stepped back and remained behind her while the rest of the table waited.
"Lost my appetite, thanks," Jill said while she kept her eyes on DeAndros'.
"You know what I like about you?" DeAndros stood as he spoke. "And it's not much, mind you but you have a wonderful ability to maintain eye contact. It's rare from Americans and believe me I've killed plenty of them."
He strolled closer as he continued, "Americans all seem to have the same fault no matter what part of their country they hail from. They lack unity and they lack spine. Do you know why I think that is?" DeAndros leaned in front of Jill and pulled her chair out for her before his hand motioned for her to sit.
She remained standing with her eyes hardening and her chin lifting slightly.
"Mexico is old and has been around for a long time. The United States, in contrast, was created lonely and raised thinking it was one of a kind." DeAndros' hand was curling around the back of her neck, and he jerked her closer while he continued to speak. "Prideful little girl, you have no fucking clue what you walked into when you let us see you on that camera, do you?"
Watching the man of the cartel with a frankness that many people found her intimidating for, the man before her returned the look with a stillness that she suspected most of his people feared him for.
"Is this where you give me answers or do you really just like to hear yourself speak?" She tilted her face up toward him with the grace of a lover, but the bite of her tone warned of the enemy within.
When DeAndros' hand tightened at her neck, Jill was lifting her foot as he yanked her forward toward him and to the table. With her bare left foot bracing against the table, she flipped her lower half upwards and arched her right leg back around DeAndros' throat. Even with her hands bound behind her back, the momentum and leg lock had him falling into the table with her thighs locked securely around his neck.
The men around the table were standing with a clatter of their falling chairs while Jill rested atop of the table with their leader trapped between her legs. All it would take is one good snap.
"You know what I notice about men despite what country they're from?" Jill spoke harshly above his struggling form when his face pressed into some sort of meat platter below him. "They constantly underestimate their opponents when they're comfortable and if their enemy happens to be a woman? They're even worse."
"Let him go." Garza met her eyes from behind the sight of his gun.
Meeting those cold eyes over his front sight, she let that cold stare rise from the depth of her history and her mouth opened slightly with her harsh breath.
"Prideful little man," she hissed his own words back toward DeAndros who had ceased his struggling when she tightened her thighs. "You have no clue what I could do to you had we met on fair terms, do you?"
Jill opened her legs and DeAndros sprang up with a grunt before his hands were gripping the front of her dress and tossing her off the table. The floor was the result of her surrender before the thumping of boots were in her ears and a hand wove itself through her wet hair.
"You want me to treat you like an opponent? That works for me," DeAndros spat when his red face leaned down in front of hers. "I've killed men for less but you're no man, are you, baby girl?"
With a lurch, DeAndros began to drag her across the floor toward a room that had light spilling out from the cracked door.
"Chino," Garza called, making DeAndros pause for a moment. "She needs to be intact for inspection."
"I don't need you to tell me what the fuck he wants," DeAndros—or Chino—spat before he hauled her through to the next room with violence bunching in his muscles.
The men in the hall would remember the sound of fists impacting skin but what they would remember most is the violet-eyed woman who made no noise when El Chino proceeded to beat her into what he may have thought was submission.
When she emerged from the room again, it was Garza who took note of the distaste on some of the men's faces when their unit leader ordered one of them to take her back to the trailer.
The woman they called Rhamnusia said nothing while Garza carried her back. It would have been better for her had she cried or made any notice of her submission, but she didn't while the marks began to swell on her face and on her limbs.
The Rhamnusia didn't move much from her position in the trailer when they traveled on the sea of the 4th and 5th day toward Mexico. Garza wanted to say it was because she was too injured to do so, but something told him of the danger that came from wounded predators.
A wounded animal would lay in wait until it had the upper hand to strike.
The trailer wasn't on the road long after the boat finally docked against the shores of Mazatlán, Mexico. When the road smoothed out and the distinct rumbles of an airplane reached Jill's ears, she lifted her head in the dim setting of the trailer. The clumped strands of her hair slid across her sweaty forehead, and it was only from the noise of the air traffic did she manage to stay awake in the heat long enough to understand what would happen next.
The older man in the trailer, the one who had been whispering to the young girl previously, had been the one to check on her.
When the doors opened for their food and water, Jill hadn't moved while the other captives tore at their supplies. It was the older man who had reasoned with the rest of them and pulled the jug away from thirsty hands to get her to drink. It was he who had been patient while her broken but healing jaw struggled to chew the hardened bread.
The trailer doors were wrenched open, and hands were hauling Jill and the rest of the people out onto the hot tarmac. The skin of her feet burned from the heat of the ground while they led them all forward into the cargo bay of a plane. Still, she made no noise as the rifle was dug into her spine if she started to fall behind the speed in which the man behind her wanted her to walk.
Once the plane landed after the cramped journey in a cargo hold of plenty of other captives, the streets of Sonora, Mexico were unfamiliar to Jill when she was eventually taken from the plane hours later. The rest of the captives were led one way, while four of DeAndros' men walked her toward a truck that sat in a dirt lot. With a glance, Jill took in the mountains that dominated the eastern landscape of Sonora, while the other side was graced by plains and rolling hills.
Shrubs, small brushes, and cacti decorated the atmosphere when reality truly hit her.
No longer was she in South America, and no longer was she anywhere near Carlos.
The realization shouldn't have been surprising after what she had been told in the trailer on her first day. She was closer to her home country than she had been in weeks, and thus closer to a place she should have identified with. However, the knowledge caused a spear of true despair to enter her heart and it made her lips wobble for only a moment.
DeAndros was walking up to her side and his current cruel smile told her he had caught the action before it disappeared from her face.
"Welcome home, Rhamnusia," he sneered when he clutched her shoulder and tossed her toward the backend of the truck. "Since you wanted the equality of all of my enemies, I figure you won't mind the walk."
Lifting her head to watch the man who wore the vest approach her with a spooled ratchet strap. The man hooked one end to the truck and tested its strength before he turned for her hands.
Garza had tied her hands back in front of her this time around, and the man with the vest didn't remove the zip tie before he began to wrap the ratchet straps around her wrists.
Jill found Garza's eyes on her from over the man's shoulder and what she saw there was an edge of worry she didn't expect from the hazel-eyed man.
When the binds were tight and pressing Jill's wrists closer together, she watched DeAndros smirk before he stepped into the truck alongside his other men. Garza was the last to get into the truck and he looked angry before the truck rumbled to life.
"You want to act like a dog, Rhamnusia? We'll treat you like one!" DeAndros' voice yelled out of his rolled down window before the truck lurched forward.
Within seconds, the eight-foot length of the ratchet strap was going taunt, and Jill stumbled forward in a run as the vehicle began to turn for the road.
The vehicle creeped along at a crawl for the first few minutes as Jill's bare feet stumbled over the rocks and brush of the terrain. Her swollen jaw was clenched shut while she kept her eyes on the side view mirror that showed her DeAndros' pleased face.
The truck began to pick up speed and Jill was running now. Experienced muscles were straining from her injuries, the lack of hydration, and the lack of food in the last few days, but she kept up, nonetheless.
The backroads of the small airport led into the hills of the surrounding area of Sonora. Smaller homes and cantinas were coming into view and soon Jill was being led through the dirt roads of a small community that watched them pass.
The eyes that watched her varied in their reactions and each one she met made Jill feel the loneliest she ever had in her life.
Some gazes reflected no change—as if this was a daily occurrence for them or something they had become used to over time. The other reactions came from the older women who watched beneath weathered and tired looking brows. The frowns marring their features were an understanding that Jill thought may have been a sisterhood of oppression.
This is how it's always been, their pleading gazes seemed to say.
A shout from inside the truck caught Jill's attention and before she could decipher the words, the truck lurched in a speed that Jill knew she wouldn't be able to maintain. Soon the tug on her wrists became a force she could no longer contend with. Her bare knees impacted the earth and the snap of the truck's force tightened around her wrists.
The road wasn't forgiving on Jill's legs as she desperately tried to regain her footing. The truck continued to pick up speed, and her dragging form swung out on a harsh turn of the vehicle. The bones in one of Jill's wrists snapped when the road rash began to feel like teeth in her flesh.
The sound of her first sob was lost to the rumble of the diesel engine, but she didn't need to hear it to know that her pride had fallen away with the first layer of skin on her legs.
"You are so much more than what's been done to you." Jill heard Carlos' voice whispering through her mind while she openly cried and skidded along the stretch of road.
It was Garza that stepped out of the truck first when it finally stopped.
Jill lay in the dirt shaking from adrenaline when he kneeled down beside her to cut the straps from her wrists. Her sobs were no longer hidden while the sound escaped from her clenched teeth.
"Jill," he whispered softly down to her. "Jill, listen to me, don't let them see you cry. Bury it right now before we get into that truck. You hear me? Bury it right now."
Garza's hands were gentle when he picked her up and Jill had been too distraught to notice the name he called her while she desperately tried to follow his commands.
When she looked back at it later, she knew it to be the only thing he could have done to reach her in such a state.
Just like Chris had.
Laying in the truck bed beside Garza, Jill's head lulled to the side with each winding turn for the next few hours. The skin on her face would be sunburned until her cursed body would allow her to heal. The rocks and debris in her legs would need to be removed prior to any worthwhile healing. Even so, she didn't move while the scattered mountains and wide plains passed around them like a tomb that was her choosing.
Leading her further and further away.
The truck came to a stop as the sun disappeared over one of the many mountains in the west. The blood on her fingers was now dry and Garza hadn't said a word when she finally sat up and began to pry at the pierced flesh on her legs.
He also didn't say a word when they began to scab over at an accelerated rate in just under an hour. When his eyes met hers, she remembered the name he had bid in desperation and her entire face changed. He must have been watching for it because even in the moving truck bed she watched as he gave his head a subtle shake before he cut his eyes to the back of the truck window.
Garza knew her real name. Did that mean he knew her history? Knew what lived beneath those scars and embedded further into her very DNA?
The truck came to a complete stop and Garza stood up beside her before he vaulted easily onto the slanted ground below. They were parked in front of a large looking estate tucked into the mountains.
Just beyond, to their right, the lowered plateau before her allowed the light from a distant city to puncture through the growing darkness that fell steadily around them.
Soon, the chatter of the men from within the truck permeated the air as one of them flung the door open.
"Do what they tell you." Garza took her elbow and kept his words soft when he spoke. Her sore feet clattered to the ground, and she stumbled slightly into him with her teeth gritting.
"Bet you wished you changed out of those disgusting clothes now, don't you?" The man who had been wearing gloves previously called.
"Enough chit chat," the man formerly known as DeAndros ordered, his tone back to that calm temperance she had encountered first. "Let's get this over with so we can get back to work."
Housekeepers gasped when the front doors to the estate crashed open and bounced off the walls in the entrance hall. A few of the women held their eyes on Jill before they turned and fled deeper into the home and out of sight.
"Bring her into the foyer," Chino called, the bejeweled eyes in his skull ring catching in the overhead light when he waved his hand at Gloves leading her off to the right.
"On your knees," the man above her hissed when they came into a living room of sorts. Despite the heat of the day, someone had lit the grand fireplace in the far side wall.
The room's décor was tasteful in warm browns and tans. A couch surrounded by two love seats was set up in the center with one large master armchair facing the fireplace.
Gloves kicked the back of her knee when she paused too long to take in the jeweled sword resting in a case above the fireplace.
A memory of the Spencer mansion lingered in her mind while she stared and the kick that was delivered caught her by surprise before her already damaged knees crashed to the floor when the shove of his hand on her shoulder.
Loud steps penetrated the echoing space of the large room. Dress shoes were coming into her line of sight before she lifted her sweating head to take in the well-dressed man who held a glass of liquor in one hand while he surveyed her quietly.
"This," he spoke with a deeply accented voice that was soft in tone. "Is the Rhamnusia?"
Before her stood the short frame of a new man. The red eyed haze she recognized from repeated drug use was assessing her while she took in the doughy features of who held her fate now. A slight dilation of his pupils created a deepening effect in his already dark eyes. Staring into them, Jill had the sensation of looking into two twin pits.
These were eyes she distantly knew as her hippocampus began to fire from the face she had seen on her TV.
"Joaquín Guzmán," she breathed.
While still in prison in Mexico, Joaquín Guzmán's case was infamous for several reasons. One of the last times she had been paying attention was he had been indicted in San Diego on U.S. charges of money laundering and importing tons of cocaine into California, along with the help of an attorney. After his incarceration, the man who stood before her now had bribed guards to aid his escapes and was still talked about in many of the American border cities.
Joaquín Guzmán, who was better known as El Chapo of the Sinaloa Cartel, was considered one of the most powerful men in the world.
A laugh bubbled out of her parched throat, and she lowered her head once more.
"That's me, sir," she forced her voice to come out soft this time around.
"What the fuck is this?" El Chapo barked above her, his dress shoes came closer while he ignored her bid to his name.
"I wouldn't do that—" one of his men began to say.
"Shut up." A hand grabbed her around the bicep and tugged her upwards to stand once more. "You disrupted my trades? An American woman who speaks with our tongue?"
With her head lifting once more, she stood at eye level with the short man before her.
Wood creaked above her, and Jill's eyes found the second-floor balustrade that beheld another man staring down at her. Smoke from a cigar rose from a red tip when the man above inhaled at the side of his mouth.
"I did," she confirmed with her Spanish clear.
"You killed my men," El Chapo stated, his hand still on her arm.
"I'd do it again." she smiled gently around the words. "For every scream they pulled from those children, I made them pay for it tenfold."
El Chapo's brows furrowed before he dropped her arm and turned to the circle of men standing around in the living room now.
"That true, Edgar?" he inquired.
"What? The kids?" Gloves asked with a shrug. "Marcos had a side operation. He took—"
El Chapo pulled something from his side and with the flash of a muzzle, Gloves—Edgar—dropped to the beautiful wooden table that sat in the middle of the room. The piece of furniture gave away beneath the weight and she watched as the remaining men flinched from the action.
Jill stared at the upturned face that rested toward her from the ground now. The blood leaked from Edgar's forehead while his body began to cool in death.
"Anything else I should know?" El Chapo continued, the gun still in hand.
"She was to be the wife of Carlos Oliveira," Chino declared with a point her way when he stepped forward. His expression held no fear from the action that had just tainted the room.
Wife.
Had it been any other year, any other time prior to now, she would have laughed at the absurdity of the title attached to her identity.
She had never been made to be anyone's wife. The daughter of a thief, soldier of wartime, officer of a ruined city, and puppet to a master had been a long-woven span of years before she found herself in this very position.
Somewhere, along the journey to find the man who she had met by chance, she had gained a new name and a new title among the rest.
Wife.
The word settled around beneath her skin. Beneath the dirt, grime, and human excrement that covered her, she hadn't forgotten that promise Carlos had laid across her wrist. Much like he had done with everyone else, he hadn't pushed with expectations or traditions.
No, he had let her come to her desires for her future and he did it with whispered words in the dark, car rides with delirious giggling, and love making until the sun rose on their next day.
Wife.
She would have been his wife.
"Ah." El Chapo turned his attention back to her, his soft brown hair swaying atop his head as he did. "Oliveira. There's a name I recognize. The brothers of Bolivia. Not many of them left anymore."
With her jaw straining, Jill kept her eyes on him while he walked back toward her.
"Do you know why you're here?" El Chapo asked, his gun waving toward her feet.
"No, but I know how you keep me here," she answered in a tight voice.
"I'm sure you do," he confirmed with a simple nod. "We're not in the business of trafficking children, but there's only so much I can control given the state of business currently here. It seems you know who I am but allow me to introduce you to your purpose here."
From the corner of her eye, she could see Chino cross his arms and turn his head her way. When he met her eyes, he sneered quietly.
"Los Ántrax," El Chapo drew her attention once more. "A large enforcer unit for this business specializes in its future. One that depends heavily on our ability to fight back against what threatens us now." His hand gestured to the men around Chino.
"You want me to fight for you." She had already come to this conclusion in a smaller vein, but still the thought sickened her. "I will not slaughter innocent people."
"I don't think anyone in this room, including you, is innocent," El Chapo said before he narrowed his dilated eyes at her. "Even then, our target and his family is anything but."
"You want me to kill for you," she seethed. "All while you hold my people under threat."
"You are an American," El Chapo's voice deepened when he stepped closer to her. "A highly trained one at that. Although I can appreciate the sentiment, the Oliveira's are not your people, but I will kill every single one of them and that village if I have to—I should be doing that after the trouble you caused but I can appreciate an opportunity when I see one."
The gun lifted in his hand, and she knew the barrel pointed now at her forehead.
"What's it going to be, American? Do they die now or later?" El Chapo asked.
"When all of your enemies are dead, what will you do with that game of brinksmanship you play?" she asked with the gun between them.
"Much like there will always be a business to contend with, my enemies are never ending," El Chapo chuckled around the words. "However, maybe they'll think twice when they get to know your pretty face beside me." He turned his head toward Chino. "Get her cleaned up and if she disobeys orders, send word for that village."
Chino broke from the line of men, and his hand around her arm yanked her toward a back area hall. Violence simmered from his touch, but before the living room fell from sight, Jill once again looked toward the man on the second-floor balcony of the room. Smoke clouded the space from the older pair of eyes watching her there, but it was a detail she wouldn't forget.
Day 6 of Captivity
Before dawn rose on the estate, Jill awoke on the small cot she had been given within the locked room. Her now clean hair spilled on to her shoulders but they hadn't given her fresh clothes to wear. She was to keep parading around in the filth of her current dress.
As she sat up slowly from what disturbed her sleep, she listened to the locks sliding back on the door in front of her.
Garza stared down at her when the door opened and the serious expression on his face was hidden in the shadows of the morning.
"Get up," he ordered simply.
Outfitted in nothing more than an additional pair of shoes, she sat weaponless in the back of the truck she had been dragged behind only a day ago. A vehicle trailed along behind them as Chino drove down the winding path of the hills.
In the distance, the city that she had observed not too long ago was coming closer with a twinkle of the pre-dawn lights that glowed from within distant homes.
"What do you know about the Juarez cartel?" Chino called, looking at her in the rear-view mirror as he drove.
"Very little," she admitted while she studied him.
"You make one wrong move out there—" Chino began as he glanced back and forth between her and the road.
"Your threats have been understood well enough," she interrupted as she touched her weaponless sides in a smoothing motion down her dress. "I don't need the reminder of why I haven't killed you yet."
Even from his side profile, Jill could see the muscles in his jaw flex. When she turned her vision toward the window, her stomach gave a roll for what would be the next violation in her life.
"The Juárez corridor, Valle de Juárez," Chino continued with his voice straining as he lifted a hand to point out the windshield. "Has been a highly contested area into Texas."
This was something Jill knew to be true, even with the TV reports only telling so much information, many of the local American police officers struggled with the drug trades and violence at the border of where she had lived in Texas. Even before her time serving beneath Wesker, she had heard enough stories about the crime rates.
"Juárez Cartel has a large and long-standing transportation, storage, and security operation throughout the country," Chino continued. "It counts on its ability to co-opt local and state law enforcement, especially the judicial or ministerial police and the municipal forces. It has long collected a tax for letting groups use its "plaza," or drug trafficking corridor, and relied on alliances to operate nationwide. But the new modus operandi in the country, that of using small, more sophisticated armies to control swaths of territory, has made it hard for us to complete our work now that they have expanded."
"A war for the corridor," Jill simplified. "And what difference do you think I'll make?"
"Luis Carlos Vázquez Barragán is leading the faction and allegedly took direct orders from Carrillo Fuentes before his death. We are to hit him first after receiving his location three days ago."
"You deviated from the direct hit to collect me in Peru," she stated as she looked back toward Chino. "Why?"
"You haven't figured it out?" Chino grinned. "Should this go south, they'll see an American face at the head of it." The keys in the ignition clacked against the steering column when he made a sharp turn. "Even if you escape us, Rhamnusia, you'll never be able to go back home after this."
Barren were her eyes while she watched him in the rear view. He wouldn't know of her history, or her absolution from the land she could see distantly from their position on the road. Her plan had never been to return. Home wasn't within the United States anymore, and neither was her purpose.
A darker part of her simmered to know that her years fighting against true evil would come to an end with her face associated with the cartel but a more honest portion of her thought it may be a fitting end.
Many people had expected her to be different when she returned from Africa and they hadn't been wrong, but she hoped that Chris would see through her reputation to come.
She hoped that he knew she wouldn't be here unless she had been forced.
Soon, the first structures of Juarez's outer rim came into view, and Jill looked on at the homes and people that walked along the roads.
In some of the industrial buildings, traditional brick kilns were used in open-air fires. Certain materials that were burned generated a lot of air pollution that hung steadily above their heads as the trucks rumbled past.
Mile upon mile of squatter shacks, homes sprawled into the Chihuahuan desert as far as she could see.
The homes themselves, the better ones, adobe, or block brick. The others were jury-rigged structures of plywood, sheet metal and crating lumber. Roofs were held down by truck tires, yards fenced with discarded pallets and filled with broken-down cars and every imaginable kind of junk. None of the streets were paved or held lights for when the sun would rise on poverty in an hour or two.
The morning wind blew dust everywhere like a canvas while feral dogs rummaged in drifts of trash.
Everyone Jill could see upon the current early morning street appeared worn-out and dispirited as they shuffled toward what she assumed were their methods of transportation or just their daily walking commute for work. A feeling of hopelessness lingered in the air with the stench of raw sewage and bus fumes.
The squalor here was as bad as their area Wesker had pillaged in Africa and Jill found herself turning her eyes to the men in power of one of the most lucrative businesses in the world.
As she sat there, a passenger that was to add her own evil to the town's growing list, Jill placed herself in the shoes of a young Mexican women she surveyed. Those who labor eight or ten hours a day, six days a week, and lives in constant fear that they'll be raped and murdered on her way home from work. And still they walked along the rest, hoping to survive their day, care for the lives they cultivated and a powerlessness to control over what evil men would do in their wake.
The trucks drove on until the valley changed and so did the quality of homes. The sun would be up soon, but she didn't need the light to know they had entered a more well off and enriched neighborhood in Juarez.
When the vehicles came to a stop, they sat in a gated segment of a hillside that overlooked several homes below them. Only the soft clinks of gear could be heard among the shallow sounds of crickets and fluttering wind.
Still, none of the men armed her when they pushed her toward the back end of the truck.
"Follow me and listen to everything I say, when I fucking say it," Chino said so quietly that Jill nearly missed it. "If you do that, your precious village stands another day in Bolivia. The more days you listen, the longer their lives stretch on. Fair trade?"
She didn't dare trust her tongue with the rage that rose in her then. Whatever they had planned, it wouldn't be an easy trade for what was held over her head. There'd be no winning anymore.
She couldn't see a way out, even if it wasn't a drug forcing her actions this time.
With the light of dawn threatening to spill across the land, Jill Valentine followed expertly behind the men who led her up the hill and toward a Hacienda ranch-style house.
The one-story home was big and expansive over the gated land. Traditional hacienda homes did not encompass an open design; every room was separate. Whatever intel the men in front of her obtained, it took them through an open-air courtyard and toward the center building.
When Jill stepped past one of the shacks connected to the driveway, her eyes widened to see the body of a dead guard slumped against the wall from the glass window.
A scream sounded out against the early morning before it was abruptly cut off. The sound of a body hitting the floor strummed through her as she stepped in with the last of the men into the portion of the home.
A dining table sat in the middle of the large room. The kitchen was set off to the side while the scent of breakfast lingered in the air.
Two children sat at the table, the oldest among them crying softly while he held a younger boy in his arms. Garza, who stood in front, held his assault rifle pointed at the oldest child.
The body of a woman in a simple white dress was near the sliding glass door they had stepped through. Her pooling blood stretched toward the door jam and fell into the grout of the well cared for home.
Whispered pleas met her ears when Jill's eyes took in the sight of a second woman standing in the kitchen, her hands shook wildly when Chino stepped toward her, a bloody combat knife in his hands while he said something to her quietly.
"Where is he?" Chino repeated again, loud enough for Jill to catch the words.
The woman, presumably the mother of the two children who openly cried at the table now, shook her head and whispered, "He's not here. Please, he's not here."
"You'd risk your children for the lie?" Chino asked in a voice that brought on too many memories. It was calm, assured, and layered with a promise beneath.
"No, please, please, he's not here, he's not—No—" Chino turned from the woman, his knife twirling in his hand when faced her children. "—Please, he's not here!"
That was the first moment Los Ántrax armed Jill.
Chino yanked his handgun from his side and his black eyes were on hers when he pushed the gun into her hand and said, "Kill them, Rhamnusia."
"Kill him," Albert Wesker had commanded simply behind her back in 2008.
Fingers closed around the gun as Jill stared now at the children. Stared, in her memory, at the bound man she had been forced to kill first in 2008.
P30 had allowed her hand to lift, to place her fingers against the skin of her first victim, but it held no place over her now in 2010 while she lifted the gun.
"No! No! Please! Please!" The woman—the mother—sounded so far away in her ears while Jill looked down at those children over the barrel of the gun.
"Now, Rhamnusia," Chino seethed beside his men that stood around her.
I'm sorry, she thought while the gun shook in her hand. I'm sorry, Carlos.
When the gun went off, Chino fell first from the bullet hole now in his chest before the men began to reach for her, but it was too late for those secondary thoughts.
Her foot caught one of the men beside Garza in the throat and Jill could distantly hear her own voice screaming for the mother to take her children and run. A half-focus found the woman obeying when she fled from the house through the kitchen door.
The young face of one of the boys was the last thing she saw before the kitchen door fell closed. The firearm in her hand went off twice more and two more bodies fell around her. Head shots this time.
Two bullets found their home on her left side, and Jill Valentine could only laugh when they took her to the ground. She continued to laugh when she saw Chino rise before her and she knew she would die in the foreign land—Knew that she might have doomed Carlos and his people to a fate she could no longer protect.
But Jill Valentine wouldn't be a slave that killed for anyone anymore and that wrath in her chest opened fully when they hauled her bloody form to her feet.
The voices in the truck cab were shouting as a hand kept Jill's face pressed into the truck bed. The bumps along the road did nothing to tell her of their direction or their destination but a part of her no longer cared.
The mother and the children had fled and if there was anything left of the soul she possessed, she knew it to be the last act of her freedom she could expel into her long history.
Alonzo had told her recently that justice looked different for people like them, and he had been right in several ways.
She had taken the lives of those men in the warehouse that had held Carlos and his men, but justice also came in the quieting memories of the African citizens that were no longer screaming in her head.
Justice had found her at the side of the road and allowed Carlos and his men to drive away into the night while she stayed behind.
And now Justice would allow those children more time. Whether they were the children of a drug lord, or a saint, it mattered not to her while she breathed heavily against the truck bed, the weight of a man above her keeping her in place.
Zip ties held her hands pressed together once more, but she took pleasure knowing she had taken out two of the Los Ántrax members before she had been completely subdued. Their blood covered her dirty dress alongside her weeping wounds.
Unfortunately, Chino hadn't been one of the two; the bullet proof vest he wore had stopped her attempt.
The rush and flow of traffic around the vehicle reached her ears after a while and when the truck lurched to a stop, the doors of the cab were flinging open while car horns blared somewhere behind them.
In front of her face, a hand snapped up the previously spooled ratchet strap that was now dirty from its use of dragging her behind the vehicle.
When she was hauled to her feet, the lights from the lamplight along the bridge they were parked on were blinding to her watery eyes.
The ratchet strap was made into a noose before it looped and cinched across her throat.
"Get her out here, hurry," Chino hissed, his voice hoarse from the injury she had inflicted on his chest, despite the vest that protected his worthless life.
Before her stood the dichotomy of land.
They stood on a smaller bridge that looked over the Rio Grande canal. The truck was parked alongside the train tracks of the locomotives that transported back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico.
El Paso and Juárez lie together, surrounded on all sides by mountains and desert. The two cities were separated by the border and by thin trickle of the Rio Grande, which flowed through concrete channels, built to put an end to the river's natural habit of changing course and muddying boundaries. One side was Texas: the other, Mexico. The dividing line was thin here.
With the moments passing before her eyes, Jill noted that the cities were so close together here that one could sit on a park bench in El Paso and watch laundry wave behind a whitewashed house on a Juárez hillside.
The noose of the ratchet strap yanked her forward, closer to the edge of the bridge that overlooked the dirty canal below and Jill knew they meant to hang her in front of her own country.
When the sun would be high enough in the sky, anyone looking out their window in Mexico or America would see her defeat if they looked hard enough.
In 2006, she should have died from her fall from the cliff with her captain in her arms.
But she hadn't.
That wasn't what fate or Albert Wesker had intended for her.
When she had woken in Chris Redfield's arms, she couldn't see past her own crimes to understand what life could possibly offer her anymore.
Not until she had found him again.
"These will be your last words," Chino interrupted her thoughts beside her when he hauled her up to the edge of the bridge. "So, make them worth the wait."
The sun rose just enough to streak out the first light across the land, and beneath it, Jill Anthelme Valentine showed her teeth when she smiled at the fate before her.
"They used to hang women like me," she said before she turned her head to look into Chino's eyes.
Over his shoulder, the wide-eyed gaze of Garza gave her pause but she continued, "They used to own women like me." A breath as her eyes trailed back to the land of Texas she could spot. "They used to burn women like me. Better make sure I'm dead, Chino, because they also fear women like me."
In response, Chino spit in her face before he stepped behind her. He bid her no last word before she felt the knife slice across the expanse of her throat, and he shoved her forward.
The blood against her neck rushed up toward her face when Jill fell forward and over the side of the bridge. Had she wanted to make a sound, she wouldn't have been able to.
The memory that came last was not one she would have chosen, but her fall felt suspended in time as she looked on at the water rushing toward her face and waited for the ratchet strap to catch.
"What did you dream of?" Albert Wesker had asked her one afternoon while the soft clicks and hisses of his machinery worked hard at keeping her torn body alive in the later part of 2006.
"Falling with you," she had answered, honest in the defeat she'd held after trying to move her broken limbs all week. "Over that cliff."
"Did you now?" His voice was just over her shoulder as she stared out the window to the barren African fields. "'I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.'"
A gloved hand on her shoulder before the needle pierced her skin.
"Are you feeling sorry for yourself, Jill?" Wesker purred in her memories while she fell the last few feet.
"No," she mouthed her response to the dead captain before then the noose snapped her upwards and Jill Valentine knew nothing more.
When Chris Redfield sees the report on his television, he thinks nothing of it while he preps the food he continues to make in his kitchen. Not his division, not his problem, but everyone in the neighboring departments is talking about it right now.
The war in Juarez, Mexico.
He's never paid attention to the news reports, but he is today.
Back from his most recent mission, he's glad that he saw the email come through as it did.
The little black and white footage that's playing across his phone screen isn't from the local news. It's something that was sent to his email with an encrypted code as the sender.
WATCH ME, CHRIS, is the title of the email.
When the video plays, it does so without sound, but he wouldn't need it.
He'd know that figure anywhere. She looks terrible but the blue dress, even in its tatters, is still beautiful on her.
The bridge she walks across is high, and Chris can see the cluster of men that surround her now.
His eyes catch on the date and time.
This was only two days ago.
Why is she in Mexico?
Chris leans forward to notice the noose on her neck, and he's standing from the chair with his phone in his hand.
He watches the man on the screen slice something across her neck and the blood that blooms already has him going for the keys on his counter.
When they kick her off the bridge and the rope goes tight, Chris Redfield is shouting.
The video changes and he's just about to put the phone down to begin to drive. A new video is playing, and he almost can't see it from the tears in his eyes.
This one is dated from today.
And there she is in a closer image. Her serene face cut into a snarl while she held the gun toward the man that sat below her, bleeding across a tattered street, with vendor stands toppled over beside them. He can't hear what she says when her lips move in the video.
He wouldn't have believed it to be right—Chris would have thought it to be a rendering.
Until he saw the horrible scars on her neck scabbing over.
And he began to drive.