Be Kind, Rewind Chapter 2: Rain, it's Apocalypsing!, a resident evil series fanfic

Rain watched the ash on the end of her cigarette, looking to see if it would remain intact once it finished burning down to the filter or if it would collapse under its own weight and the weakened nature of being turned into ash. She didn't normally smoke, but feeling the smoke burn her lungs and the nicotine sizzling her brain helped her cope with the all-too-real pain memory of having her flesh torn off and eaten before being exploded.

From what she gathered, after being sedated the pilot had returned with her to the barracks, where she'd been cordoned off into a cell. Oh, it was located in the barracks' clinic, not the brig, but any room that only locks from the outside was a cell.

It had been several days now and nobody had bothered to tell her, but she knew that all her teammates were almost certainly dead. Again. She had no idea what happened to Alice or Addison; assuming events progressed more or less as they had originally, then the two of them had made it out of the Hive, though there was no guarantee that Umbrella would just let them go free after all they'd seen. Whatever.

The crucial point was that she had lived. She thought about that goddamn Groundhog Day movie and wondered about the fact that she'd lived past the night, and then some. Did that mean she had escaped the time loop? A small part of her was hopeful that that was the case, but another (more cynical) part of her suspected it was nowhere near that easy. Didn't that asshole weatherman have to go through a massive personality shift and become a better person before he broke out of his own personal hell? Rain surely hadn't done that.

Ah, but seemingly the only way to really test this would be to take her own life. That, she was not prepared to entertain just yet. No, she'd keep living day by day, waiting to see if time would simply stop at some point and hurl her back into the helicopter as it closed in on Looking Glass House.

The door to her cell swung open, startling her just enough to shake her hand and cause the ash column on her cigarette to crumble. "Ah, Miss Ocampo, good news!" the shrink in charge of her case said. "You've been approved for a return to active duty!"

Rain snorted. "Thought I was deemed a hazard to myself and others, doc," she said. "'Patient's abrupt and severe panic attack on the cusp of initiating a dangerous mission is evidence that patient should not be cleared for field duty until a rigorous regimen of mental health treatment has been undertaken to determine the cause of her outburst and determine if it can be fixed.' Isn't that what you had written about me?"

"Ah, um, yes," the shrink admitted. The damned idiot had left Rain's file in the room with her yesterday afternoon, and by the time he'd realized his error Rain had already skimmed through the most insulting parts of it. Of course, the assessment was understandable given that she couldn't actually tell the truth; if she had, the report likely would have said something like "Patient needs a massive lobotomy and a strict diet of sedatives and electroshock therapy for the rest of her natural life. Bitch is crazy."

Rain stubbed out the cigarette. "So tell me, doc, what's changed?"

The shrink pushed his glasses up on his nose, and Rain could tell he was really, really nervous. "Oh, uh, nothing! I just… decided that my, ah, initial evaluation of you was erroneous, a-and so —"

"Save it, dipshit," Rain interrupted. She could read between the lines. Umbrella had given him his marching orders, and those were to give her her marching orders. Some bad shit was going down, and if Rain had to guess, some dumbfuck high up in the chain of command had decided to open up the Hive, leading to hundreds of zombies making their way through Raccoon City and causing untold amounts of havoc and violence. "When do I leave?"

A UBCS soldier appeared in the doorway — Carlos Olivera, whom she'd seen around the barracks on occasion. "We leave in ten minutes," he told her. "So hurry up and get your shit together."

Rain hurried up and got her shit together.

XXX

The helicopter. The rooftop. The jumper. The streets. The hospital. It was exactly the goddamn same as the Hive, except a lot more gunfire, a lot more explosions, a lot more screams and blood.

A lot more zombies.

"We don't need weapons, we need evacuation!" Nicolai screamed out of frustration, kicking one of the empty crates the helicopter they'd tried flagging down had dropped off.

"These weren't meant for us," Carlos realized. Rain had to agree — the sheer size of the weapons meant that they were either intended to be mounted onto a tank… or the individual meant to use them was one big motherfucker.

Yuri, who'd had the poor taste to die and not let the rest of them know, lurched forward from behind them and took a chunk out of Rain's arm. Carlos and Nicolai put him down; Rain began to laugh.

"Are you okay?" Nicolai asked.

"I think she's in shock," Carlos said, grabbing her by the shoulders and giving her a little shake.

"No, goddamnit, it's… it's just one of those situations where you either have to laugh or cry, you know?" she said, snickering all the while. "It's… it's just this keeps happening. I'm getting fucking sick and tired of it!" And still she laughed.

"What do you mean, this keeps happening?" Carlos asked, wigged out by her behavior. Maybe she'd been on a psych hold for a reason?

Rain brushed him off. "Don't worry about it," she said. "I'll tell you next time, how's that?"

"…Sure," Carlos said, knowing full well that that bite meant there wouldn't be a 'next time'.

Most of the doors inside the hospital seemed to be locked tight, and rather than waste valuable ammo on blowing out one of the locks, they found a blood-spattered ambulance in the parking lot to raid for supplies.

Rain sanitized the bite and dabbed at the blood, even though she knew it was beyond pointless. "It won't stop bleeding," Carlos observed.

"The T-virus will do that," Rain confirmed.

"The T-virus?" Carlos asked.

"Why didn't they see us?" Nicolai asked aloud, still stewing over the helicopter that had just dropped off the weapons and left.

"What?" Carlos asked.

"The chopper," Nicolai clarified. "We were right there in the street in front of the hospital. How could they not see us?"

"They saw us," Carlos concluded. Rain nodded in agreement.

"What do you mean?"

"We're assets, Nicolai. Expendable assets." He stood up. "And we've just been expended."

"Yeah, you guys seen Sanitation around the barracks the past few days?" Rain asked. "I was part of that team until we infiltrated an Umbrella lab that went dark. They were all slaughtered. Guess what happened."

"…This T-virus, you mentioned," Carlos said. "It was created by Umbrella?"

"Don't sound so surprised," Rain said. "You're a smart guy, Carlos, you should have figured a lot of this stuff out on your own."

Carlos was about to respond to that when the ringing of a cell phone drew all their attention. It was a display model, laying haphazardly on the surface from the storefront window being smashed in.

While Carlos and Nicolai raised their guns and hesitated for a moment, Rain rolled her eyes, got up, marched past them, and answered it. "Who the fuck is it?"

"Your salvation," an English voice on the other end answered. "My name is Charles Ashford, I run the Advanced Genetics and Viral Research division at Umbrella."

"You one of the dickheads who made the T-virus?" Rain snapped.

"…Not sure how you could have heard that name, young lady," Ashford said, before sighing wearily. "I didn't create it, but I did work with it, yes. For what it's worth, my research was meant for more, ah, therapeutic purposes, rather than what you've seen around the city tonight."

"Hey doc…" Rain gulped, then pitched her voice low, so that Carlos and Nicolai (both of whom had approached) couldn't overhear. "Do you know anything about… time travel?"

"Physics isn't my strong suit, but near as I can figure it's complete bullshit," Ashford answered. "Ms. Ocampo, if you want to waste my time with stupid questions, I'll hang up, and you and your friends can find a nice spot to watch the manmade sunrise coming in in a few hours' time."

Rain's eyebrows shot up. A nuke, huh? Not all that surprising, but that'd be hell for Umbrella to try to cover up. "Go ahead, doc."

"My daughter Angela was meant to be extracted from the city this morning, but there was an accident and she was left behind. She made her way to her school, probably figured it'd be safe there… too bad it's not. You're to go there and keep her safe, and once I'm satisfied that you have her, I'll contact you again and give you exfiltration instructions." He gave her directions to the school. "Oh, and I've sent another group of survivors in to retrieve her. Be mindful you don't start shooting one another; there's plenty of room on the chopper for the lot of you." He ended the call.

"Well, who was it?" Carlos asked.

Rain pocketed the cell phone. "Some Umbrella prick lost his daughter, wants us to go be her babysitter in exchange for getting us out of the city."

"Bozhe moi, we might not die!" Nicolai said, relieved.

Rain smiled, but the smile didn't reach her eyes. Yeah, you two might not die, she thought. The universe isn't out to personally snuff your candles.

XXX

They arrived at the school and split up to cover different floors.

The floor Rain picked was the winner, if you can call what she found a prize. She heard screaming and arrived to one of the classrooms in time to watch the fucking weathergirl from Channel 7, of all people, being eaten alive by an entire group of zombie children. It made her stomach churn, but Rain set her gun to single shot mode and put down each and every one of the little ones. She looked at the weathergirl, already dead. Been there, done that.

"You can't help her," a voice said, and Rain turned to see a living little girl come out of hiding, one who matched Ashford's description of his daughter. "Not now. I've seen what they do."

"Yeah, me too, kid," Rain said, putting a bullet into the poor dead woman's forehead. "Angela Ashford?"

"Yes," Angela confirmed. "We should hurry, before more arrive."

Rain nodded and turned to leave, jumping in surprise seeing the woman standing there. "Hey," she said.

"Hey," the woman answered. "You're here for her too?"

"Yeah," Rain said. "The doc said there's plenty of room on the chopper for all of us."

The unspoken tension left the room, and the woman in blue relaxed a fraction. "Jill Valentine."

"Rain Ocampo," Rain nodded. "I read your profile once, you know. I used to be part of an Umbrella hit squad, and you were seen as a potential threat."

"Used to be?" Jill asked.

Rain nodded. "Yeah, before my entire team was killed in a secret Umbrella lab teeming with the undead."

"I can relate," Jill said wryly.

The three of them walked through the school, making for the cafeteria, where (coincidentally) both groups had agreed to meet up after everyone had finished searching.

"Those things are in here," Angela said with concern once they entered the room.

"It's okay, honey, they're slow," Jill assured her. "We can run around them."

"No," Angela said. "Not them… Them." She pointed to a goddamn zombie dog. Rain's lip curled in distaste; Alice had told her about her run-in with the fucking things in the Hive's kennel.

She jogged forward a few yards. "Hey, you ugly fucker," she snarled, catching its attention. It began running for her, growling and snarling, before she put a few rounds into its head.

More gunfire erupted, and she saw Nicolai had found the room and was putting down the rest of the zombies before they could become a hazard. He walked up to Rain. "You should have said something clever when you killed that skinless dog," he remarked. "Me, I would have said something like… stay." Rain rolled her eyes. He turned to Jill. "Sergeant Nicolai Ginovae," he saluted.

"You Umbrella, like she is?" Jill asked, a little guarded.

"I used to," Nicolai clarified. Rain zoned out, keeping watch as he explained their current circumstances.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw another zombie dog pop up from out of nowhere and leap right for Nicolai; she was quicker on the draw and put a few bullets into it, before walking up and delivering the coup de grace with a final bullet. She looked at Nicolai, an alarmed look on his face, and smirked. "Stay," she said.

Nicolai grinned. "Now that's what I'm talking about!"

The three adults formed a tight circle around Angela, facing outward, and picked off several more zombie dogs as they rushed in for an attack.

A full three minutes passed after the last zombie dog attack before they let their guard down, hopeful that it was the last zombie dog. Rain heard footsteps approaching and turned…

…and saw Alice walk up, exhaling a cloud of smoke as she flicked away the butt of a cigarette. Her body responded to her mere presence, almost like an itching sensation but all over. I could kiss you, you bitch. "Alice?" she said. Hey dumbass, she chided herself. She doesn't fucking know you from Adam!

"…Do I know you?" she asked.

"Uh… I was meant to be part of the Sanitation team, but I was, uh, pulled at the last minute before the Hive mission. I recognized you from the briefing."

Alice nodded. "Sorry about all your friends," she said.

"Yeah, me too," Rain said.

Alice's eyes roamed over the rest of the people Rain was with… and lingered on Angela, who stared back at Alice unblinkingly.

"You two know each other?" Jill asked.

"She's infected," Alice said, pointing the finger at Angela. "She's infected on a massive level."

"Shit," Rain murmured. She could relate.

"How can you know that?" Jill asked.

"Because she is, too," Angela said.

Rain scowled. Fuck. The urge to put a gun in her mouth to try and fix all her problems suddenly intensified.

"You're infected?" Jill asked, dismayed. "When were you gonna tell us that?"

"I've been bitten too," Rain said. "Just so there aren't any nasty surprises."

Alice and Angela exchanged a few quiet words, then Alice rolled up the young girl's sleeve. Christ, the kid's arm made it look like she was a turbojunkie. Alice pulled a lunchbox from her knapsack and within seconds a hidden compartment on the side of it slid open. Rain's eyes bugged out at seeing vials of the antivirus. What the hell was a kid doing with this shit?!

"It's the antivirus, the cure for the T-virus," Alice explained.

"There's a cure?" Jill said, stunned.

"How did you get this?" Alice asked. Angela spun her sad story — father and daughter, both with some godawful degenerative disease. Father decides to use a highly experimental virus to alleviate his daughter's symptoms. Daughter now has to manage her infection for the rest of her life or become a hungry corpse. Rain's opinion of Charles Ashford was growing worse and worse by the hour.

"He's not a bad man," Angela finished. "He didn't mean for any of this."

Alice hugged her. "It's okay," she said. She pulled back from Angela and turned to Rain. "When were you bitten?"

"About three hours ago," Rain said.

Alice smiled. "Well, it's your lucky day," she told her.

Yeah, we'll see about that, Rain thought as she rolled up her sleeve.

XXX

They found a car, and Jill hotwired it before slipping into the driver's seat. Rain found herself sandwiched between Alice and Nicolai in the back. Every time Alice moved, she brushed up against Rain, sending a shock through her skin. Was Alice related to this time looping phenomenon somehow? Or was Rain just feeling plain old horny for the other woman?

She had to get her mind off of both of those topics. "So, you were bitten? But you're not taking the antivirus yourself?" she asked.

Alice shook her head. "Umbrella infected me, deliberately. Part of a twisted science experiment, I guess," she shrugged. "But don't worry… I'm not contagious." Was that a playful little smile Rain saw there for a second? Jesus, the last thing she needed was for Alice to reciprocate her feelings right now. If they both lost control and started making out like high schoolers at the back of a bus, it'd… it'd just be plain embarrassing. (Not that Rain was totally opposed to the idea…)

"Here," Jill said, passing back a hand-held camcorder. Rain remembered seeing Jill scoop it up from near the corpse of that poor weathergirl. "Tape the story. I'll see that it gets put to good use."

Alice started the recording, then pointed the business end of the camcorder at herself. "My name is Alice…"

XXX

Their takeover of the site of the chopper went well, until it didn't. They were there, on the helicopter, when the head Umbrella dipshit slipped in and held Angela at gunpoint.

So, Rain and the others were trotted out, stripped of their weapons, and had their hands zip-tied behind their backs. The plaza lit up like an arena as dipshit encouraged Alice to do battle with a hideously mutated freak in a trenchcoat, like it was Tyson vs. Holyfield if the bout had occurred in Hell.

"Fight him, or they die," the dipshit said, referring to the other survivors.

"What makes you think I care?" Alice said casually. Rain knew she had to be trying some reverse psychology shit, but damn did it still hurt to hear her say that.

Dipshit proceeded to shoot Charles Ashford for encouragement. …Well, dipshit or not, he wasn't all bad, Rain figured.

Watching Alice brawl with the giant monster took Rain's breath away. She knew the other woman had some killer moves, but damn, the T-virus had elevated her to another level entirely.

Then Alice impaled the creature and started to cry. Unbidden, Rain's last memories of her first go 'round came back to her — specifically, Matt Addison's arm being raked by the super-licker, creating great bloody gashes. It didn't take much extrapolation to understand why Alice was suddenly adamant about not killing this poor, mutated soul. God damn the sick bastards at Umbrella.

She watched as the creature — Addison — was ordered to kill Alice, then mentally cheered as he regained control and blasted Umbrella's soldiers with his minigun. Carlos (who'd had a secret knife) cut loose his bindings, kicked one of their guards down, and then Jill cut through her bindings, grabbed a gun, and shot some more Umbrella mooks.

"Shit, why didn't I get a secret knife?" Rain remarked.

"Hey, what'd I tell you earlier?" Carlos said, cutting her restraints. "You really should have gotten your shit together."

Rain just rolled her eyes and joined the fight.

Soon, Umbrella's soldiers were wiped out, and Rain and Carlos helped Alice onto the helicopter, blood pouring down the side of her face after taking a hit from debris from an exploding helicopter. Addison, sadly, had been slain by the crash.

Alice found enough strength to toss the head Umbrella dipshit out of the helicopter as they began to rise into the air, Rain smirking at the sound of his breaking ankle.

They were up. They were free.

But they weren't fast enough.

Raccoon City exploded, a massive fireball toppling buildings and incinerating zombies by the hundreds of thousands. The helicopter was buffeted by the massive shockwave, and a loud rattling echoed inside of the helicopter. Rain saw a crowbar that some jackass hadn't properly secured spring free… headed straight for Alice. She leapt up from her seat, trying to catch it… and looked down with numb resignation as it embedded itself into her belly. Everything soon went black.

XXX