Hey gang, I don't normally have notes at the beginning of the chapter, but I've got some important stuff to clear with you. The protagonist of the first two stories in this series has been Alice, a chaos goblin. She's a veritable force of nature, forcing her wacky will unto the world, and (most of the time) is very successful at this. However, at the end of the last story, Alice made a deal with Albert Wesker to save the life of Angela Ashford, at the cost of her own freedom. (And Matt Addison's too, haha).
This story follows the events of Resident Evil: Extinction, which takes place five years after the Raccoon City disaster led to a global zombie pandemic. Alice is still somewhere in Umbrella custody; so, it falls upon Rain Ocampo's shoulders to be the heroic loner that Alice was in the original narrative.
Rain is not a chaos goblin; she's a stoic badass. And she is also very, very depressed, being separated from her soul mate for so long. This is NOT going to be another happy-go-lucky jaunt through the world of survival horror. There will be occasional moments of levity, but for the most part everyone in this story is having a Bad Time.
Trigger warning: This chapter contains some amounts of suicidal ideation. Read with caution, friends.
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The dreams — the nightmares — always start the same.
She awakens on the floor of a shower, curtain pulled down and draping her body. The water is still running. Her head is sore. Her shoulder aches. She pulls herself up, walks to the mirror, and wipes off the condensation.
The face in the mirror isn't her own. It's hers, and God does it ache to look at. All the more so knowing what's coming up.
She has no agency in these dreams, no capacity to flip them into lucid ones. For all the internal screaming she does to stop, don't go any farther, stay where you are, she may as well be screaming at a movie. She puts on the robe. Stop. She walks into the bedroom and puts on the red dress. Don't go any farther. She goes into the hall and examines the picture of her and Spence Goddamn Parker. Stay where you are.
She goes to investigate the angel statue shrouded in plastic, and walks through her front door.
This is where the nightmares start going south, really really quickly.
Instead of her front yard — what Rain remembers to be a great expanse of grass enclosed by the looming forest — she finds herself in the laser corridor, the one connecting the Red Queen's antechamber to the room where her silicon brains were located. The hallway is empty, brightly lit. No sign of her dead, dissected teammates.
She walks through the hallway, and Rain can feel the fragments of the memories of her long-departed comrades-in-arms being butchered flicker through her mind. She did not witness this in person, and Alice had never had the poor sense to send her these memories. Yet they seem all-too-real, and though the contents of her torso are surely little more than dried-out, shriveled-up husks, she still feels her stomach churn experiencing them.
She skillfully dodges the lasers, her body as spry and agile as always. The lasers form an undodgeable grid pattern and she simply leaps up into a conveniently-located ventilation duct, one which sure as hell wasn't there in the real corridor.
Joy, this dream gets to continue. Sometimes she doesn't make the jump. Sometimes she doesn't dodge quite fast enough. The lasers burning through her flesh are a fairly quick and benign ending to this dream, compared to what's coming up.
She crawls through the vents, and Rain keeps expecting her to make some crack, probably a quote from Die Hard ("Come out to the coast, we'll have a few laughs!") but she's silent in almost every single dream. That's how Rain can tell that this isn't her Alice. But then, her Alice is dead, surely. And regardless, this is a dream, not reality.
After crawling what she feels to be a safe distance, she pulls off the vent covering and jumps down. She is in the Raccoon City Hospital now. Peeking around a corner, she sees a surveillance camera watching her, and a gurney parked on the side of the hallway. She ignores the camera, grabs the back of the gurney, and proceeds to start racing down the hallway. ("The next time you hear the beep, think of all the fun you can have on Supermarket Sweep!" Rain imagines her Alice saying here). She stops short when a guillotine, as wide as the hallway, comes down from its concealed spot in the ceiling almost too fast for the naked eye to observe, and slices the gurney in half.
Sometimes it slices Alice in half. Sometimes just the legs. Sometimes just the arms. The sensation of laying there writhing in agony as she bleeds out is never pleasant.
(Rain wonders, later, why she decided to push the gurney down the hallway, clearly having anticipated the guillotine trap. Is her constant screaming leaking through, somehow? Does she remember what happens to her from dream to dream? What kind of hellish Groundhog Day has her subconscious dreamt up, anyway?)
She takes a few hesitant steps forward, the guillotine disarmed, and Rain's futile screams once again echo into the darkness. Stop. Don't go any farther. Stay where you are.
The innocuous tile under her foot almost imperceptibly clicks, and from the center of the Umbrella logo on the floor ahead of her erupts what Rain takes to be a 'Bouncing Betty' style mine, except instead of doing something as pedestrian as explode, it instead vomits a torrent of small-caliber bullets in a fan shape into the hallway, peppering the surrounding walls in the blink of an eye.
And peppering her stomach. She puts her hands to the wounds and takes them away bloodied, already quivering with shock. Being shot in the stomach is a particularly excruciating way to die, but at least it is mercifully brief.
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Rain snaps out of the dream to discover it's daytime, sometime in the afternoon judging by the sun's position in the sky. Not that it matters, she has no pressing obligations. A few years ago (she has stopped bothering to count exactly how many) the world came to an end, and she was 'fortunate' to find herself among the ethnic majority of the world's now-deceased population, already being deceased herself.
She, of course, was the only one of them who could still think.
She was not, of course, the only one of them still moving around.
She spent most of her time plundering cities for crucial trade goods — mainly medicine that could no longer be manufactured, or some obscure piece of technology that one of the remaining human settlements needed. It's not like any of the zombies ever bothered her. And the humans were all (mostly) glad to see her, as she gave them the medicine, or the Macguffin, or oftentimes just an old can of beef stew or a bottle of water or even a stuffed toy, and she never asked for anything back (unless she was looking for something another settlement had need of, of course).
If she ever took her helmet off in front of them, though, she imagined all bets would be off. She rarely looked herself; she was never particularly vain in life, but watching her skin dry out and split and crack more and more over the years really weighed heavily on her psyche.
Alice (when the dreams were actually dreams, and not soul-rending nightmares) always reassured her that she didn't care about Rain's skin. "Oh, my poor little dead boo, I don't care if you look like you just crawled out of the mummy's tomb," she'd whisper into the crook of her neck, playfully nibbling on her rotting shoe-leather skin. "You're perfect as you are." (Not that she showed up dead in her dreams when she could help it — lucid dreaming meant she could pretend she was still alive, if only for those ephemeral moments when she was unconscious).
Of course, Rain hadn't actually seen Alice since the destruction of Raccoon City all those years ago. The last she'd physically seen was through the scope of her sniper rifle, then she'd flown off and Rain had slogged through a sewer to avoid the brunt of the nuclear blast. They'd maintained contact for a few short hours after that over their psychic love connection, until they arrived at an Umbrella base and Alice had been sedated.
And that had been that.
Her soulmate, the love of her life, and she'd interacted with her maybe twelve hours total. God must have had a sick, twisted sense of humor if that's how he treated the souls he ordained to be permanently mated to one another. Or who knows, maybe He Himself had been reduced to a lifeless corpse, doddering around without thought or purpose like His creations.
In the following weeks and months, as the world quickly descended to hell, Rain had found herself growing more erratic, prone to dark moods. Sometimes she'd be on a skyscraper doing overwatch with her sniper rifle, covering some civvies evaccing the city, and she'd just think how great it would be to jump. Or she'd be cleaning her guns — at one point she'd gotten her hands on a big, fat revolver — and she'd suddenly realize she was staring down the mouth of a bottomless pit, only it was the revolver, and she'd loaded it and was putting just a hair's amount of pressure on the trigger. (She'd thrown that revolver out after that — not that it was more or less likely to be The Gun She Used When She Finally Snapped, but she couldn't look at it anymore without it giving her the willies).
She'd taken to going into libraries for days and poring over whatever books struck her fancy, as a way to try to take her mind off her declining mental state. ("Bit of a contradiction there, love," she'd imagined Alice saying to her). She'd tried psychology texts here and there, but found them too dense and dry to really make any good use of them.
Her salvation was a book from a woman named Shirley Jackson, called 'The Haunting of Hill House'. She didn't know why she'd chosen it; the world was already one great big festering horror story, why did she need to indulge herself with another one? But she'd just shrugged indifferently at her own question and opened to the very first page.
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality," Ms. Jackson had written. "Even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream."
It hit her like a slap. She no longer needed to eat or drink (regular food…); she also had assumed she no longer needed to sleep. She certainly hadn't been exhibiting any signs of physical exhaustion from lack of sleep, and had kept going around the clock for… what was it at that point, weeks? Months?
Her subconscious apparently disagreed with her, and if she couldn't get some decent sleep (or at least an approximation of it), it was going to seize her metaphorical steering wheel and drive straight into oncoming traffic. Ms. Jackson had hit the nail on the head, it seemed… except for that part about 'live organisms', in Rain's case.
She dropped the book on the table, shoved past several zombies loitering in front of the card catalog, and after a few minutes of scanning through it found a few books on deep meditation.
It actually came fairly easily; a big part of meditation involves deliberately slowing your breathing down, and that was yet another physical need Rain no longer needed to indulge in.
Rain felt herself slipping deeper and deeper away from the library — a place where the city still had enough of a population that she could hear distant gunshots and the occasional scream, and the smell of smoke was all-pervasive, and the only light came from a crank flashlight she'd been using since it was midnight and power had gone out weeks ago — until she found herself blinking away bright midday sunlight as she was walking through a field of grass that swayed to and fro in a gentle breeze, and the distant smell of wildflowers tickled her nose, and just a few yards ahead lazing about on a beach towel was Alice, wearing a red dress identical to the one she'd worn in the Hive, inspecting one flower with another casually tucked above her ear.
She glanced over at Rain and gave her a sly smile. "Hey stranger, you haven't been answering my calls," she said accusingly, reaching into a picnic basket Rain hadn't noticed yet and pulling out a banana, which had one of those long telescoping metallic antennas sticking out the top. "What, you got other soulmates you're forging a magical psychic connection with or something?"
Rain opened her mouth to banter back, but instead found herself bawling like a baby and falling to her knees, and Alice was just there, arms enveloping her, rocking her gently, making indistinct soothing noises to let Rain know that everything would be okay.
She'd awoken sometime later, with the first dim spears of afternoon light piercing the smoke cover over the city and filling the library with enough light to move about without tripping and breaking her neck. She didn't feel any different at first… but she then realized she didn't have the urge to contemplate ending her own unlife anymore either, so the dreaming (or the close-enough-to-be-dreaming, since she wasn't actually going to sleep) seemed to be doing the trick.
Rain didn't quite know what to make of Dream Alice. Was it… could it really be her Alice? Establishing the psychic connection had come easily enough in Raccoon City, once she got the knack of the mental 'muscle' (for lack of a better word). But after Alice disappeared in the grasp of Umbrella, never again in the waking world was Rain able to reestablish that psychic connection, no matter how soon she attempted it before or after the dream.
She had even attempted doing so fairly recently during one of her dreams, and it had turned into an unmitigated disaster. "Hey, you know how I'm not sure if Dream You is really… you?" she had asked.
"Uh-huh," Alice said, mouth full. They were in a McDonald's, where Alice had ordered a giant pot of macaroni and cheese, and had just been scooping out handful after handful and shoveling them into her mouth, unmindful of the tremendous mess she was making (or of the fact that McDonald's didn't have 'giant pot of mac and cheese' on its menu).
"I'm gonna try establishing our psychic connection in this dream," Rain explained. "It never seems to work out when I'm awake, so I figure if I try it while I'm asleep —"
"What makes you think we aren't already connected psychically?" Alice asked, licking the palm of her hand clean of all the greasy cheese sauce goodness. She glanced back at the pot, shrugged, and proceeded to dig in again.
"Because there's no way to prove that this is real or not!" Rain pointed out.
"But this is a dream," Alice counter-pointed out. "Anything is possible in a dream. Isn't that right, Spence?" In the corner, Spence (dressed as Ronald McDonald) was screaming as half a dozen zombie children tore into his guts, which constantly replenished themselves. "Now that's what I call a Happy Meal!" she said, pointing and laughing.
Rain took Alice's hand and kissed it (she was still alive in this dream, so she went ahead and licked the cheese sauce off her lips. Mmm, delicious). "Baby, I gotta try, you know? I can't just live off dreams alone. I've gotta have some hope that you're still out there somewhere, that I can find you."
Alice gave her a wry smile. "Aw, honey, we really are soulmates. I feel the exact same way about you." She took a quick glance around the restaurant. "Hey, nobody's looking," she murmured. "Let's slip over to the kid's play area and turn the ball pit into the ball pit, if you catch my meaning." She winked. "And I mean I will engage in extremely nasty sexual acts with you, if you catch my meaning." She winked again.
Rain bit her lip, suppressing a moan. These dreams definitely had their benefits. She allowed Alice to lead her to the ball pit, and giggled as they shed their clothes and sank into the sea of plastic… but as Alice's hands and mouth roamed southward, Rain ignored the sensations and flexed.
She felt gravity suck her down, deeper and deeper into the ball pit. Alice screamed out her name, but the sound was quickly drowned out by the… by the…
Water. She was in water. It was in her nose and it was in her mouth and it was in her lungs, and she began flailing around and pulling at something on her face and she saw indistinct forms surrounding her farther out in the water and —
Rain had snapped out of that dream like a taut bungee cord pulling its owner from the brink of death.
The other dreams — those horrible goddamn snuff show nightmares — had started not long after that.
Now, with dreaming or without, Rain's thoughts had begun the gradual descent into a very bad place once more. Dream Alice still visited her more often than not, but watching the other Alice — Nightmare Alice — wake up in the mansion and be murdered again and again and again was doing the exact same thing that staying awake for months on end had done to her.
Something had to give, and God help her, Rain had no idea what it would take to save her from a second death.
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So yeah, how about that massive tonal whiplash? Hahaha. Extinction is kind of a naturally low-key depressing movie all on its own! (Well, they all are, aren't they? Man, especially Final Chapter).
I think I'm going to upgrade the update schedule again, and try to post about once every three days. My backlog of chapters is, frankly, ridiculous. I… haha, I kind of went nuts with writing (I've been having SO MUCH FUN), and I'm currently partway through the events of Final Chapter. Once I'm done with that… well, maybe even more frequent updates? Well, we'll see how every three days works out first, I think.