Wesker waited patiently in the infirmary for Alice to finally make her appearance. He suspected he wouldn't have to wait long; with the (very real) threat hanging over her wife's head, Alice would have little choice but to come right to him.
She made him wait two hours. He supposed he couldn't quite blame her, and figured she was tearing ass through the facility looking for Rain. She wouldn't be found, of course — Wesker had captured her thanks in part to the research of Dr. Isaacs. (He also owed a bit of an apology to the late doctor for always deriding his research as pointless and stupid — it turned out that being able to neutralize a zombie without killing it was far more useful than Wesker had anticipated). Rain Ocampo was currently secured on his helicopter, which he'd wisely landed on a helipad outside of the facility. No way for Alice to find it, and her.
Finally Wesker heard her footsteps walking down the hallway, her steps slow and scared. Wesker grinned, revealing his canines briefly — he was a shark in the water that had just scented fresh blood. "Come in, Alice," he called. "No point in delaying the inevitable."
Alice finally appeared in the doorway, pensive, worried. She still managed to put on a brave face as she said, "Ah, Alfred Whiskey, we meet at last." Wesker felt a blood vessel under his eye throb. "What did you do to my wife?" she asked, not stepping foot into the room.
Wesker gestured for her to walk in. "She's safe… for now," he said. "And she'll remain so as long as you comply with what I want."
Alice stared at Wesker for a moment. "If you have your hands on her, she's not even remotely safe."
"Oh, there are degrees of safety one can be within," Wesker philosophized. "For example, if you don't set foot into this room within the next ten seconds, the degree of safety Rain will be in is zero degrees, while the degree of temperature she'll be experiencing will be something like 2,000 degrees. Fahrenheit." He gestured for her to come in.
Alice complied, stepping just inside the threshold of the door. "Now what?"
He gestured to a chair. "Have a seat. This should only take a minute." She sat down, and he nodded in satisfaction. He turned around to access the minifridge where he'd stored the syringe. He turned back around and was a little surprised to see Alice still sitting patiently in the chair. "I must admit, I expected you would have attacked me while my back was turned," he said, sounding a little disappointed.
"Well, you have Rain," Alice pointed out. "And anyway, according to the White Queen, you've been pimped out with some pretty intense superpowers, but she didn't really have any intel on what, exactly."
Wesker chuckled. "Very astute of you, Alice. I am, indeed, what you are — but better."
"Maybe," Alice said, her pupils dilating for a moment as Wesker felt a little defiant jab land right in his gray matter, causing him to flinch in pain.
He clenched his jaws tightly for a moment, willing himself to remain calm. "Well, even if you managed to defeat me, you'd never see your wife again in this life," Wesker clarified. He held up the syringe. "Roll up one of your sleeves, please. Either arm will do."
"But doctor, I'm up to date on all my shots!" Alice protested.
"Very cute," Wesker said, voice flat. "Would you like me to ensure that Rain is up to date on her shots? And just to be absolutely clear, I'm referring to the fifty caliber kind." Alice glared up at him and wordlessly rolled up her sleeve. "Good girl," he praised. He swabbed a spot on her arm with an alcohol wipe, then slowly injected the needle into her skin.
"Oooooowie!" Alice groaned, tearing up at the pain.
"Hurts, doesn't it?" Wesker asked.
"Well, yeah! I fucking hate needles!" Alice snipped.
"Well, that's just the start of the bad news. All those powers of yours… speed, strength, accelerated healing… well, you can kiss all those goodbye." He smiled in triumph.
"Yeah, well, I still have the power of true love, asshole, and that's something you'll never be able to take!" Alice snapped.
"I believe I literally already did," he remarked, reminding her of the whole 'kidnapped wife' thing.
"You know what I mean, dickshit!" Alice countered.
Wesker rolled his eyes behind his sunglasses. "The serum I've injected you with is neutralizing —"
"Yeah, great, I don't fucking care," Alice said, interrupting him.
Wesker sighed. "Part of the fun of being a bad guy is making elaborate victory speeches when I've finally won," he said. "Would you really rob me of that?"
Alice smiled. "Aw, that's almost charming, in a way. Okay, I'm sorry, continue."
"Thank you," Wesker said, giving Alice a nod of his head. "Put simply, the Umbrella Corporation is taking back its property. You just didn't work out, so you're being recalled."
"No, I'm a loyal employee of Umbrella!" Alice argued. "I'll sue your ass for wrongful termination!"
Wesker smiled. "Good luck finding a lawyer who doesn't want to eat your flesh," he said. "And loyalty, hell, you killed everybody in this facility. And… a little bird told me that you were the one who sold the Hive out to the Addisons all those years ago." A funny look passed over Wesker's face. "…Huh, that would have been before the outbreak, wouldn't it have been?" He shook his head, dismissing whatever internal confusion had sprung from within. "No matter." He turned and started walking out of the infirmary.
"What, you're not even going to kill me?" Alice called out.
Wesker didn't bother turning around. "Why bother? You're trapped in an Umbrella facility crawling with zombies, beneath a city of 13 million walking corpses, on an island that's thousands of miles from anyone who cares about you."
"Yeah, well, it may not be in a positive way, but you care about me, you stupid fucking asshole!" Alice called out after him.
Wesker chuckled, shaking his head in disbelief. He supposed that was technically accurate. Truthfully, he left her alive because he might someday have need of her singular abilities. He figured she was probably tenacious enough to survive escaping the facility and leaving Japan if she didn't stay put, but hey, that's what Umbrella's satellites were for, to track threats like Alice.
He climbed onto the elevator and pressed the button for ground level. It ascended for several minutes, then abruptly jerked to a halt. "What the hell?" he growled.
The speaker on the elevator crackled to life. "Hey, fun fact," Alice's voice said through the speaker. "Did you know that, like, half a dozen safety features have to fail simultaneously before an elevator just plummets down the shaft?"
Wesker's eyes went wide in astonishment. He took one step forward to try to pry the elevator doors open before simultaneous explosions occurred in various places inside the shaft, sending the car plummeting to the bottom. It had honestly never entered his mind that Alice would sacrifice Rain's life to take his.
As the T-virus knit his broken body back together at the base of the elevator shaft, he had enough strength left to smirk in triumph. He'd lived. Her little gambit hadn't even worked.
XXX
Alice let herself splay out on the ground for a good few minutes after the long climb up the rope. She'd found mountain climbing equipment in the armory, had opened the hangar roof, and fired a grappling hook up and out. After testing the rope to make damn well sure it was secured in place, she'd begun climbing up, which (considering how heavy her pack was with all the essentials she thought she'd need) was an extremely onerous endeavor. She eventually made it up, however, and was laid out on the ground huffing and puffing like crazy when she distantly heard the sound of engines firing up. Turning in the direction the sound was coming from, she saw one of the fancy black Umbrella helicopters rise off the ground and depart. "Damn," she muttered. "Sorry, babe," she said, a tear escaping the corner of her eye. "I thought that gravity would do the trick." She watched Wesker depart with her wife mournfully.
She forced herself to sit up. Man, this 'no longer having superpowers' shit was hard on the old bod. Her upper body was screaming from the strain of climbing up the rope. Her legs, though, were doing okay, so she ignored the pain in her upper body, picked herself up, and started walking north.
Over the coming days and weeks, Alice concluded that there were no survivors in Japan, at least not anywhere she went. She'd frequently call out for people, only to be answered by silence at best, hungry moans at worst. There were no radio signals, no signs of agriculture. She became adept at raiding pantries and figuring out what was still good to eat and what to avoid. Every night she'd try contacting Rain via their magic love connection, and each time… silence.
Could Rain have died without Alice knowing it? Alice hadn't thought it was possible, but as one month and then another passed, she started to worry. And it wasn't like when she was in stasis either, because her dreams were the usual subconscious slurry. Rain would show up every now and then, but Alice could tell it was Dream Rain and not Real Rain. She had very little understanding of concepts like faith and religion, but having no other recourse she spent a few minutes each night praying for Rain's safety, and the safety of her other friends.
She reached the northern shores of Honshu, found a sailboat that was mostly intact, and sailed north. A massive storm system struck within hours of reaching Hokkaido, and she was forced to land and take shelter. When she emerged from the house the next day, she discovered that the boat had been battered to pieces against the shore. She shrugged and kept moving north over land.
Hokkaido was more of the same. No survivors. No hints of survivors. No communication with Rain. Old canned food. Zombies, zombies everywhere. As she kept traveling northward, she kept examining an old map she'd found and planning her route back home. If she could find another decent boat she could sail straight on to the tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula, resupply there, then press on to the Aleutian Islands and Alaska itself. Rain had told her about Arcadia, of course, and it sounded like a nice place to rest and regroup before going on the hunt for her beloved.
She didn't find a decent boat. She didn't find a shitty boat. The best she could manage was an inflatable rubber dinghy that was gathering dust in the back of someone's shed, which she used a lot of duct tape, a broom handle, and an old, dirty sheet to rig an extremely crude sail onto. The boat barely took her to Sakhalin, where she continued her search for a decent boat.
Instead, she found a little isolated airport. One plane, a Yak 52, according to the manual, was in the hangar. As best Alice could tell it was in good working order. There was a note, dated a few weeks after Raccoon City's destruction, saying that the barrel of fuel had been topped off and fuel preservative added to keep it good for a while. It was unclear as to who the note and the plane was meant to be for, but whoever it was hadn't shown up in the intervening years. Oh well, it was Alice's plane now.
There was a little cot at the back of the hangar and Alice stretched out on it and went to sleep. She'd leave early in the morning.
She woke up and opened the hangar door to a foot of snow. "Oh BULLSHIT!" she bellowed to the heavens.
XXX
Rain awoke to find herself in a dingy glass cube, several feet in diameter. There were airholes in the sides and a grating for the cube's floor, which was suspended from the ceiling. Looking out of the cube, she could see several dozen such cubes stretching out all around her on all four sides. Many of them had some sort of remains — human or Umbrella monster, it was impossible to tell.
There was a weight around her neck, and she felt a thick, metallic collar affixed to it. Feeling all around, she realized that there was a thick needle jutting out from it lodged into her neck… likely straight on into her spine. The collar was in fact affixed to another strip of material that ran down her spine, with more needles attaching it firmly to her central nervous system. Even more metal encased part of her right arm, needles firmly implanted into it as well. She reached out her arm to send a tentacle through one of the air holes —
Her body was suddenly racked with painful convulsions. Rain had never known pain like this in her entire life, and thought she'd left pain behind altogether in death. Her entire body felt like it was on fire. She tried to open her mouth to scream out but it had been gagged shut.
"Hurts, doesn't it?" Wesker stepped out of the shadows cloaking the parts of the room that weren't the suspended glass cells. "Can't have you escaping, now. That tentacle arm is a neat trick, I must admit, but we had to wire it up to ensure you couldn't escape." He pressed his forehead to the glass. "I expect you're wondering why we sealed your mouth shut. Similar reason, to be honest — that screaming trick Dr. Isaacs did, we think you might be able to pull off as well. And…" He clucked his tongue in disapproval. "We can't have that, now, can we?" He broke into a smile. "Oh, it's not rigged up to shock you if you try, of course. But if you channel all that psionic force into a scream that cannot escape your mouth, well… I suspect you won't like what happens to the inside of your skull."
Rain opened her psychic love connection to attempt a message to Alice… and once again her world was nothing but agony. She quickly slammed the mental door shut and the pain ceased at once.
"Ah, bit of good news for us," Wesker went on. "We discovered that your little so-called 'psychic love connection' has a measurable energy frequency. Damned hard to find, but once we did it wasn't hard to rig that little punishment device to trigger every time you tried to use it. It'd be rather inconvenient if Alice discovered where we tucked you away at, wouldn't it?"
Careful to only raise her left hand, Rain began signing. "What do you want with her?"
Wesker let out a hearty laugh. "Oh, Mrs. Ocampo… I don't understand a single damned bit of sign language." He turned and left. "See you around," he called.
She glared after him, but seeing nothing else to do, she got into a meditative position and let herself sink deep, deep, deep down.
XXX
Four months passed, and Wesker was losing his mind. He'd first felt the hunger when he'd pried himself from the wrecked elevator in Tokyo, but had ignored it. His willpower was supreme.
Wasn't it?
But no, it had only gnawed at him more and more as the months went by, and regular food held less and less appeal to him. The only relief he'd felt was when he recalled that Ocampo had a quantity of human jerky in her belongings. He rushed to the room where she'd been locked away in, furtively glancing her way every few moments to ensure she was still in her meditative trance, before grabbing her backpack where he'd tossed it, opening it up, and (before he could stop himself) gobbling down every last piece of jerky.
He glanced once more. Rain was still in her trance. Good. He fled the room, dignity intact.
That had been a month ago, though, and rather than being sated, his hunger had only been spurred to greater and greater demands.
He realized he could no longer remain in the Hive once he began contemplating prying open one of the cryo pods and eating a member of Umbrella High Command. That would surely be a fast, painful way to end his career and his life.
He looked at the list of Umbrella facilities still active and saw that the Paris and London sites had both fallen sometime in the past few months. He hadn't re-established contact with the various branches since the fall of the Tokyo facility, and without his leadership the two branches (already on the brink) had fallen altogether.
Oh well.
His eyes alit upon the Arcadia and he realized it was perfect. It was isolated, yet mobile. Most importantly, it had a cargo manifest of several thousand civilians, all in cold storage.
None would be missed.
His stomach rumbled appreciatively as he made his way to the hangar.
XXXXXXXXXX
I think Wesker is more sinister if he compels Alice to just take a seat so he can casually jab her with the Superpower Removal Juice, hahaha. He is right in thinking he might have use of her later, though…
Wesker needs to be kill-crazy for plot reasons, and there's no convenient Mount Fuji for him to crash-land into this time, so Alice utilizes one of her favorite bits of trivia (remember chapter 3 of AIR?).
Alice finally gets to live the postapocalyptic scavenger lifestyle! The movie goes straight from "Alice and Wesker crash-land on the slopes of Mt. Fuji" to "Alice is flying around over Alaska six months later". Lame! I decided to fill in the gap with how Alice's journey back to America would logically proceed.
It would have been exceedingly funny if Alice had made it to Kamchatka, since that's where Umbrella Prime is located.
The plane she flies in the movie actually is a Yak 52. I looked it up!
The prison Rain finds herself in is the same one Claire gets stuck in at the end of Final Chapter, except Rain can't MacGuyver her way out, haha.
I figure the Hive has to have a secret hangar entrance, even though no such facility appears on the map Alice uses in Final Chapter. (She also uses a secret escape elevator in that movie that 100% does not show up on the map even though it should). (Not that it's a plothole, just that the Red Queen probably doesn't know about that shit because Isaacs doesn't trust her or something, haha).
