Chapter 42

"You good?" Jill asked as she walked into the suite I had reserved for the three of us.

"Yeah," I sighed as I put my Sig back together. "I'm just mad that my apartment is destroyed."

"At least you own yours," Jill sat down next to me and passed me a beer. "I'm probably not getting my security deposit back."

"Yeah, I wouldn't count on it," I laughed.

"We going to talk about the zombie?" Jill asked.

"I figured it was probably one that made its way down from the mountains," I said as I took a swig. "It was too decayed for it to have been a new zombie."

"But it is concerning that it was able to reach the city," Alice chimed in as she overheard the last bit of the conversation. "Also concerning is that Umrella was willing to move and ransack your apartment so quickly."

"I don't know for sure that it was Umbrella," I replied as I drank some more of the beer. "Could have been someone looking for an easy mark and picked the wrong house," I trailed off.

"But it's too close in timing for it to be a coincidence," Jill agreed. "Considering the way Wesker hated you, it wouldn't surprise me if they had some red flags in your personnel files."

"Agreed," I said as I set the beer down and lay down on the floor, stretching my arms and back. "I think I'm gonna sleep here tonight. Y'all can have the beds."

"Yeah," Jill snarked. "Because that's comfy. Get up and get in the bed. We're all getting some good rest tonight."

"You're confident that this is where your contact wanted to meet?" Rain asked Chris as they sat at a small cafe in England.

"If someone on an internet chat forum counts as a contact," Chris muttered under his breath before speaking up. "Yeah, we're looking for someone in a gray jacket with sunglasses on."

"I see him," Rain nodded in the direction of someone who matched that description as she took a sip from her drink. "Your seven."

"Got it," Chris said as he saw a reflection in the glass and noted the appearance matched that of the contact he had made. "I'll go make contact, keep it dialed back but be ready to intervene if necessary."

"The weather here is pretty dismal," Chris said the agreed-upon identification phrase.

"You think it's bad here? You should visit Greenland sometime," a British accent met Chris's ears as the other man spoke up. "Care to sit down and discuss the weather in Spain perchance?"

"Sure," Chris said as he gestured towards the table where Rain was seated. "We'd love to talk about what the rest of Europe is like."

"You're sure that going loud was the best option?" Enrico asked J.D. as they sat in a safe house just outside of Washington D.C.

"Didn't say it was the fastest or the best way," J.D. shrugged. "Just that it was the way that led to us having the best chances of survival. Now if they kill us it'll be obvious that it was them and there'll be an investigation."

"I hope you're right about that," Enrico said as he took a sip from his coffee mug. "Because I don't think that Umbrella is going to go down quietly."

"They're a pharmaceutical giant," J.D. laughed. "Of course, they're not going to go down quietly. They're a part of big pharma, only they've moved far beyond making a profit off of selling fixes to symptoms and have now decided to engineer their own bioweapons for profit."

"You think they've got more of the kinds of things we encountered in the mansion and training facility?" Enrico asked.

"You think they stopped at just one facility?" J.D. asked. "No, they're not the kind of people who will let this sort of thing go, they've likely got facilities all over the world just like that one."

"But it was easier to get away with up in the mountains because they owned the land and most of the city," Enrico grasped what J.D. meant.

"Yeah, In fact, I bet they've transferred some of that work to labs inside of the city, and if their safety measures are anything like what you saw in the mountain facility instead of the HIVE," J.D. shuddered.

"The Red Queen actually almost succeeded at her job," Kaplan said as he took a seat and joined the conversation. "If someone hadn't tampered with her core code she'd have been able to help us out and I'd have been able to recover more data from her drives."

"You ever figure out who else had access?" Natalia asked.

"No," Kaplan said with a shake of his head. "And there are only a few programmers who worked on the project like I did. And, the altered code was trash, so I expect it was an amateur who had just gotten to copy some of the work the team did and modified it to do what they wanted."

"You almost sound sad that she's gone," Enrico said. "It was just a machine, and one that tried to kill you, at that."

"She didn't have any choice in the matter," Kaplan said with a sigh. "And I spent years helping in her development. So, yeah, I'm a bit sad that she's gone. I might have to see what I can salvage from her code and try to rebuild her. She was effective at preventing an outbreak, and if Umbrella has more sites around the world then we're going to have to have scientists studying this thing to find a cure or something. Which means that safety measures like the Red Queen are going to be more important than ever."

"Sounds like you've got your career planned out for once this business is finished," J.D. smiled. "Just give me a heads up if you plan on implementing it on a site. I'll need to know where not to go in the future."

"Very funny," Kaplan snarked. "Jackass."

"You know you love me," J.D. ribbed the slightly younger man. "Besides, you'd have been dead years ago if I hadn't pulled your ass out of the fire a few times."

"Well, I'm off to bed," Enrico stood up. "Have a good night. We've got another meeting with the lawyers in the morning."

"Ugh," Natalia spat. "Lawyers."

"You said it," Kaplan yawned. "I guess I should head off to bed too."

"I'll take the first watch," Natalia said as she pulled out her handgun and set it on the table. "You never know what may come for you in the night."

"I'll take over from you after I wake up," J.D. said as he leaned back in the recliner and shut his eyes. "Give me four hours of shuteye and I'll take over from there. I've still got some favors saved up to call in any way."

Author's Note: Blaze1992, Yoko Suzuki is a character from Resident Evil Outbreak, which has never been established as standard canon or not. It depends on the writer.