The choo-choo arrived at the end of the line, where — surprise, surprise — they were met by more crates and barrels and shit. Alice watched most of the mercs get out and sweep the place like a well-oiled badass machine, smiling as she watched Rain dart around the stacks of crap. She eventually followed along behind them, finding them all staring at a big bank vault-style door with the Umbrella logo on it. "Hey, it's gonna take you guys a while to drill through that thing, right?" Alice asked. "Would you mind giving me a rundown of, like, who you are, what you're doing here, and maybe who I am?"
"Alice Abernathy," head merc said, pointing his finger at her. "Spence Parks," he said, indicating her alleged husband. "One," he said, pointing to himself. "Vance. Warner. JD. Ocampo. Kaplan. Medic." He gestured to each member of his squad in turn.
Alice frowned. "Medic? That's a weird name. Not as weird as One, I guess, but —"
One cut Alice off. "Do you want to hear about our mission or not?" Alice once more made the zip-my-lips motion. "You and I have the same employer. We all work for the Umbrella Corporation. The mansion above us is an emergency entrance to the Hive. You are security operatives placed there to protect that entrance."
"Okay…so it's not actually my cool-ass mansion," Alice said, glum. "Hey, and my so-called marriage?" She held up the ring.
"Your marriage is a fake," he informed her. "Just part of your cover to protect the secrecy of the Hive."
"YESSSSS!" Alice roared, thrusting her fist into the air with righteous victory.
"You just HAD to tell her," Rain complained.
"And what is the Hive?" Spence asked.
"Show them," One ordered Kaplan. Kaplan called up a schematic on his laptop and One began a long, boring monologue. "Blah blah Raccoon City, blah blah secret research facility, blah blah 500 scientists, blah blah classified, blah blah heat signatures." To be frank, Alice was staring at Rain the whole time, winking at her every time the merc glanced her way, eliciting an eye roll, or a sigh, or both. But she still kept glancing Alice's way, and Alice counted that as a victory.
Rain suddenly put on a big heavy welder's mask and Alice realized she'd gotten out a whole-ass big cutter thingy, and Alice had been too busy mooning over her to actually notice. She walked closer and murmured, "That's a pretty big tool, can I help with it?" Rain almost dropped the cutter and whipped her head in Alice's direction, a mingled look of surprise and horror on her face. "Hey, earlier, when you told Matt to blow you…" She leaned in and began to whisper. "Do you have, like…a peepee? A boy peepee?" Rain continued to stare at her, uncomprehending how this was suddenly her life. "It really doesn't matter to me one way or the other…" Alice bit her lip. "But I think I'd love having a baby with you." Rain grimaced (again, unseen by Alice) and proceeded to end the conversation by activating the cutter and turning away. "Okay, we can talk about it later, if you like!" Alice said, raising her voice to be heard over the machine's operation.
"Why can't I remember anything?" Spence asked. Alice moseyed back over to the others to listen to this part.
"The Hive has its own defense mechanisms, all computer controlled. A nerve gas was released into the house. Primary effect of the gas: complete unconsciousness, lasting anything up to four hours. Secondary effects are… varied…" He gave Alice another pointed look at that loaded word. "…but can include acute memory loss."
"For how long?" Spence asked.
"Subjective. An hour, day, week." One seemed unbothered at the duration.
"Hey, do workman's comp claims cover being poisoned by fucking nerve gas?" Alice asked. "Asking for a friend."
"So you're saying this place was attacked?" Matt asked.
"I'm afraid things are a little more complicated than that," One said ominously.
"…And you're just going to leave it at that?" Alice asked. "Great, love it when extremely sinister ambiguous shit happens in my basement."
Rain returned to the group, welding mask in hand. "Sir, we've breached the Hive," she announced. The group of mercs approached the vault door, triggered the mechanism inside the door that Rain had exposed, and stood back, guns drawn, as it ascended into the frame.
"Oh excellent, pitch black," Alice said. "This is monsters. Y'all opened a gate to Hell, and there was a ghost upstairs, and in five seconds Satan is gonna show up and be like, 'Thanks for helping me start the End Times, you dumb motherfuckers!'. We're all going to die down here."
Again, the team ignored her ramblings. "JD," One urged. JD gave a brief nod, activated some kind of monocle night vision goggle thing, and advanced alone into the darkness. After a few moments, a creepy sound came from the void, and Alice bit her lip to resist screaming about the devil showing up again.
"Got it!" his voice finally said, and light began filtering through the entry. Alice walked up to the fake window display, showing a mockup of what was presumably Raccoon City aboveground. The display even came with the faint sounds of traffic, and an overpassing helicopter. One wasn't fucking around when he said people actually lived down here. She heard Medic say something, but was too distracted from the creepy-ass segmented mirror display on the wall, looking like something a serial killer would design with one hand otherwise occupied.
"Makes it easier to work underground, thinking there's a view," Matt remarked, still staring at the fake window. A fire truck recording played, blasting its horn.
"If I was in charge of this place, I'd make it look like fucking outer space or something," Alice told him. "That way, all the poor assholes waking up with no memory would think they were in space or something."
Matt frowned. "Is that supposed to be funny?"
Alice shrugged with a smile. "I guess so? I mean, my employer fucking nerve gassed me, so I can either cope by making dumb jokes about it, or by finding where the CEO lives, breaking down his door, squatting on his face, and laying a big ol' whopping shit in his mouth."
Matt grimaced. "Well, when you put it that way…"
Alice turned hearing the sound of elevator doors opening, and saw that the mercs had forced one open. The other side was again pitch black. One of them popped a flare and tossed it into the shaft, and the looks on their faces when they turned around said enough. "Looks like we're taking the stairs," one of them said.
"Oh cool," Alice said. "You all know that, like, half a dozen safety features have to fail simultaneously before an elevator just plummets down the shaft, right? Do you suppose we could get some more enlightenment on what 'complicated' means here?" One gave her a look then proceeded to the staircase without acknowledging her in any other way. "Or not. Great." She then proceeded to join the Hive Staircase Power-walking Championships.
"Status," One said after they'd gone down a ways.
"Red Queen is locked onto us," Kaplan(?) said. "She knows that we're here."
"Okay, can we hear who or what that is, or is this another 'bullshit ominous silence' situation?" Alice asked.
"State of the art artificial intelligence," One said. "She is the computer that controls the Hive."
"Fucking rad," Alice breathed out. She glanced around until she spotted a surveillance camera. "Hi, Red Queen!" she waved. "I love you!"
"What the hell is that about?" Matt asked.
"Ain't you ever seen literally any movie?" Alice asked. "Not that I can remember anything specific, but creepy underground laboratory, plus mysterious computer overlord, equals extremely bad mojo, and I want to get on her good side while I can."
"I can…kinda see your reasoning, but the Terminator was just a movie," Matt countered.
"Yeah, and HG Wells thought that War of the Worlds was just a book when he wrote it," Alice countered.
"What, now you're saying that aliens are involved?" Matt crossed his arms.
"No!" Alice snapped back. "Well, they might be, but that's not the point I was trying to make! The point is, the weapon he gave the aliens, the heat ray, sounds an awful lot like lasers, which were invented like sixty years later! So just because someone made up some shit for a story doesn't mean that it can't actually happen!" That shut Matt up, and he couldn't tell if it was because Alice had made a good point or if she'd said something too crazy to properly rebut.
They reached the bottom of the stairwell and the next few corridors took them to a dirty-ass room-sized fishtank that had water leaking through holes in its glass. "You guys gotta change the filter in your aquariums," Alice remarked. "I think all your fish died, I don't see any swimming around in there."
"This is gonna slow us down," Kaplan said, looking at the water. "Our route to the Queen takes us straight through these labs."
"Oh, so they're not fish tanks," Alice said. "Sure hope there aren't any corpses in there."
"Rain, JD, see how bad the flooding is," One ordered. "Kaplan, find us an alternate route.
"Who's Rain?" Alice asked, before watching Rain walk through the streams of water to parts unknown (followed by JD, but who cares). "Oh, is that, like, her first name?" She sighed. "What a beautiful name: Rain Ocampo… Mrs. Alice Ocampo… Mrs. Rain Abernathy? Mrs. and Mrs. Abernathy-Ocampo?" Everyone did their best to ignore her.
"What happened here?" Spence asked.
One looked from him, to Matt, to Alice, and spoke. "Five hours ago, the Red Queen sealed the Hive and killed everyone down here."
"Fucking called it," Alice said. "Also, thanks for answering him right away when I've been pestering you about it for a while now, sexist dick."
One continued to ignore her, a winning strategy. "When we realized what was happening, my team was dispatched to shut her down."
"Well, maybe she had a good reason for all the mass murder?" Alice suggested.
"Is there ever a good reason for mass murder?" Matt asked.
"Yeah, it was called World War II," Alice said. Upon receiving a number of horrified looks, she corrected herself. "I mean, the part where we sent armies to kill Hitler! Not the part with the Holocaust!" The horrified looks only lessened in intensity, but she counted that as a victory.
"Jesus!" Matt abruptly yelled. Alice turned and saw a corpse, indeed, was in the flooded laboratory.
"Sure hope Rain doesn't realize that we're soulmates!" Alice said loudly to God. "I mean, if today is Grant The Opposite Of What I Say Aloud Day!"
"Hey, you okay?" Spence asked, looking at Alice.
"Oh yeah, sure, the computer that lives in my basement probably went axe-crazy and I'm staring right at a corpsequarium, and from the looks everyone keeps giving me I'm preeeeeetty sure that nerve gas turned me into a lunatic, but other than that I'm fine," Alice said, all casual-like.
"Here," he said, shrugging off his leather jacket and offering it to Alice.
"Oh, cool, thanks," Alice said. "I mean, I still want out of this fake marriage, but I appreciate it, bud." As she took the jacket, her fingers briefly touched his and she had a flash of memory of the two of them making love. "Ergck!" Alice gagged. She did her best to choke it down and put on the jacket. At least it'd give her a few seconds of protection before the claws of the demons (or whatever was lurking about down here) shredded through it and got to work on her internal organs.
XXXXXXXXXX
The 'Abernathy' last name comes from the novelizations, and I'm using it because I don't feel like sitting around for hours trying to think up a better one. (Seriously, why is it so hard to come up with good names sometimes? And not just for characters, I've sometimes been stalled for days uploading a new story because I couldn't think of a good name for it. It's especially odd when you can otherwise pump out a 2000~ish word chapter, haha). It's the only thing I'll be using from the novels, as well, which is admittedly silly since the author gave Medic a whole-ass name (something Russian, I wanna say). I dunno, I just think it's funny that everyone on the squad except Medic has an actual name. Is that her actual name? Maybe Alice will have long, heartfelt talks with her about her life story! (Spoiler alert: We've all seen the movie, so we know that's not the case).
One of the consequences of the start-stop watching of the movie I did while writing this is that I assumed everyone was standing, like, five feet away from Rain while she cut through the door. Then I got to the part where she finished and they were in an entirely different room, haha. I kinda went 'fuck it' here and didn't change it to compensate for that, but there is a part later I had to go back and rewrite — I'll point it out when we get there!
On a related note, I have finished writing this as far as the end of RE1. I've already watched through Apocalypse (God I fucking forgot how great that movie is!), Extinction (a lot better than I remembered!), and Afterlife (the first 20 minutes are a tragedy), and while I'll be doing the start-stop process to catch specific details for them like I did with RE1, at least I won't accidentally fumble something since I know generally what's forthcoming!
(If you're wondering how long this will eventually be, well, so am I! I definitely have an idea of how things will play out as far as the end of Extinction, but beyond that I'll probably have to rewatch the rest to figure out how things shake out for poor ol' Alice and Rain in the end, haha).
The reason One spoon-feeds Alice exposition is probably for the audiences' sake, but it's gotta be really off-putting when you're Alice or Matt and One says "It's a lot more complicated than an attack" and just leaves them hanging for twenty minutes until they've gone through half the facility. Off-putting AND HILARIOUS.