"Information," the operator said.
"Hi, I'd like the phone numbers to a Terri Morales and a Jill Valentine," Alice said.
"One moment, please," the operator said. After a few moments of typing on her end, she rattled off the numbers, with Alice jotting them down on the paper. "Will that be all, ma'am?"
"Yes, thank you very much," Alice said. "Byebye!"
Terri was two glasses into a bottle of wine and halfway through a king-sized Hershey bar, watching a Conan movie. Being a weather girl FUCKING SUCKED, and she wanted to start the weekend with some nice drinks, a lot of chocolate, and shirtless Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Her phone rang. "It's Terri," she answered.
"Terri Morales, hi!" said an unfamiliar voice. "My name's Alice, and let me just say I'm a big fan."
Terri forced a friendly laugh. "Thanks, it's always nice to hear from my fans. Hey, if you write to the station, they'll send you out a signed headshot —"
"How would you like to be head anchorwoman again?" Alice asked.
Terri took a bite off her chocolate, contemplatively chewed, and swallowed. "If you're going to offer to kill Mary Thorvald, please don't," Terri said, not that she'd be terribly shaken up by that fucking bitch's death.
"Oh! No, nonono. Nothing like that," Alice assured her. "How does 'Pulitzer' sound? How about 'biggest story of your career'? Try 'Most important news story in the human race', does that get your blood pumping?"
Terri took another bite off her chocolate bar. "Oh yeah," Terri said, sounding bored. "Let me guess, your neighbor is a reptilian and he's using his satellite dish to make you sexually attracted to stuffed animals. Or, the government, secretly controlled by the Pope, who is also the Antichrist, is trying to implant a computer chip in your head that bears the Mark of the Beast." She took a sip of wine. "Am I close?"
Alice laughed. "Look, Terri, you can sit at home watching Conan all night — you might want to turn your volume down in the future — or you can get your dainty little butt to Looking Glass House with a camcorder ASAP."
"Looking Glass House?" Terri asked. She knew that was up by the Arklay Mountains, near where those murders had happened earlier in the summer. And that made her think about how she'd heard Jill Valentine get loudly booted out of the studio a few days earlier, demanding to talk to her executive producer. There'd been a lot of rumors flying around about the old STARS unit being a bunch of burnouts who'd gotten most of themselves killed investigating the murder, and some even more wild tales about skinless dogs and other nightmarish ghoulies cavorting around in those woods.
"Do you know where it is?" Alice asked.
"Yeah, but —" Terri began.
Alice cut her off. "Just get here, as fast as you can. Break traffic laws if you have to. You'll really get a… LEG UP on your rival!" Alice once more broke out into laughter before hanging up, some kind of bizarre injoke, Terri assumed.
She should have stayed in. She'd already been drinking a bit… and the chocolate was tasty… and Arnold was even tastier… and she'd gotten some nice-smelling bath salts and fresh batteries for her waterproof vibrator for later.
"Fuck it," Terri said, wedging the cork back in the bottle, hitting Pause on the remote, and stowing the chocolate in her fridge. She grabbed her purse (camcorder always at the ready inside, complete with spare batteries and memory cards) and was on her way.
Jill sat at her kitchen table, three empty bottles of beer next to her, cigarette dangling from her lips. She'd spent a lot of her free time, when she wasn't pounding the streets trying to get someone to listen to her about Umbrella or reveal some small nugget of info they had, just sitting here, letting all sorts of negative emotions roil around in her heart. Currently she was looking at the group shot taken of both STARS teams last summer, shortly before Chambers had joined. Joseph, Richard, Edward, Enrico, Forest, Kenneth… their names ran around and around in her head like a merry-go-round. There was a neatly burned hole in the picture, where Albert Wesker's face had been, courtesy of one of Jill's cigarettes during a pity party she'd had a few days ago.
Her phone rang. She answered it. "Valentine," she barked.
"Hey Jill, Alice Abernathy here," Alice answered. "You don't know me, but I know you."
Jill slammed the phone back on its cradle. Fucking prank callers.
The phone rang again. "What the fuck is it?" Jill snarled into the receiver.
"Jill, do you want to watch Umbrella die and dance on its ashes?" Alice asked.
"…Yeah," Jill said cautiously.
"Get down to the Looking Glass House as fast as you can, alright? It's gonna happen tonight." She hung up.
Jill scowled at the phone before replacing it on the cradle. This had 'trap' written all over it… but this was the first decent lead she'd had in weeks. True, it had come out of nowhere, a bolt out of the blue… but then, so had Trent, and the intel he'd given her on the Spencer mansion had proved invaluable… and hopefully the intel he'd provided on Caliban Cove was just as good, as Jill spared a thought for Rebecca Chambers, David Trapp, and the rest of the team assembled to investigate that Umbrella outpost.
Mind made up, she quickly darted into her closet and secured a little present Barry Burton had loaned her from his collection, after Jill had lost access to RCPD firearms during her suspension. It was one of those absurdly powerful six-shooters Barry favored, hand-customized by his friend Robert Kendo, and Barry had included a few speed loaders for Jill as well. She secured the gun in her holster, pocketed the speed loaders, and was out the door in two minutes.
"Ladies," Alice greeted. "Have you been here long?"
"I just got here," Terri said.
"Been here ten minutes," Jill said.
"Good, you haven't been waiting long," Alice said. "Come on, we're on a tight timetable," she said, gesturing for them to follow her.
Terri stood up, but Jill remained sitting. "I want to know what's going on here first," Jill said, lighting a cigarette.
Alice gave her a stern look. "I'd tell you no smoking in my house, but this joint belongs to Umbrella." She took a deep breath. "Okay, short answer: Earlier tonight there was a T-virus outbreak in the secret lab Umbrella has under the city. I called Terri here to document all this shit, and I called you here because I knew you had experience with spooky mansions and secret labs crawling with monsters."
"Oh my God I could have been soaking in my tub already," Terri griped. "Instead, I decided to chase a lead from a complete maniac."
Jill nodded to Alice, ignoring Terri. "Okay…" she said, taking a long drag on her cigarette. "I don't see how that leads to Umbrella being taken down, since the last time this happened the consequences they faced amounted to jack and shit."
Alice gave her a big smile. "What do you know about Umbrella High Command?"
Jill sighed. "Not a whole lot. At the very top, there's Isaacs, there's the Marcus woman — neither of whom have seemingly ever been photographed publicly — followed by a phone book's worth of more or less anonymous executives. They're supposed to be headquartered right here in Raccoon, but nobody's seen hide nor hair of them in months. Everyone seems to think they just pulled up stakes and moved to Europe without bothering to tell anyone, but…" Jill shook her head. "Something about it doesn't seem right."
"Wouldn't you like to find out where they are?" Alice asked. "Maybe even get a chance to file some complaints in person?" She gave Jill a shark's grin, making it abundantly clear that Jill could file some incredibly high caliber complaints indeed.
"…Shit, you're for real, aren't you?" Jill said, stubbing her cigarette out on the tabletop. She stood and drew her gun. "Alright, let's go," she said. She turned to Terri, who'd been edging towards the door. "You too, Morales," she said, gesturing to come along with a tilt of her head.
Terri nervously followed along behind Jill, who watched impassively as Alice opened a secret doorway. This all was 100% bullshit, it had to be. Alice Abernathy and Jill Valentine had to both be nuts, or… or pranking her, or something. But watching the secret door opening, like something straight out of a James Bond movie, made her deathly afraid… afraid that they might be right. So she fished her camcorder out and began filming, quietly murmuring the things she was seeing aloud for the sake of any potential viewers.
The subway caught Jill by surprise, but she shouldn't have been — after all, Alice had mentioned the lab was underneath the city, and this mansion was all the way out in the sticks. She sat down, tense, feeling like a zombie or a monster could leap out at any minute, even as the subway began rolling down the tracks.
"Excuse me, Miss Valentine," Terri said, recording her. "Do you really believe there are, ah, monsters?"
"Yes I do, Terri," Jill replied. "And a lot of them work for Umbrella."
"Hahaha, fucking burn!" Alice whooped from the control nook.
Jill leaned forward. "I'm sure you've heard rumors, over there at Channel 7. What do you think? Are there monsters?"
Terri frowned. "No! I mean… it's impossible, right? Why would Umbrella even want to make monsters?"
"Well, it's the War on Terror, after all," Alice pointed out. "Fighting fire with fire!"
Jill nodded in agreement. "Imagine you're in the forest. You see a skinless dog running full-tilt in your direction, growling for your blood. You shoot and shoot, and it doesn't go down until a lucky shot hits it in the brain. And then, all around you in the forest, you hear a symphony of growls, and can hear many such creatures running straight for you."
Terri took it all in. Jill's words, the thousand-yard stare she said while she had them, the way her trigger finger kept twitching… her gut was telling her this wasn't just some hypothetical Jill had thought up on the spot. "Should… should I have a gun?" she asked in a quiet voice.
"Nah," Alice said dismissively. "Well, actually, yes, but that's just as a general rule. If all goes according to plan, we should be in and out with minimal monster mayhem. And just think, I'm only three days until retirement!" She looked back and saw their confused stares. "You know, when someone says shit like that in a movie, they tend to be horribly murdered? It was a joke!"
"Oh!" Terri said, giving a polite fake little laugh.
"Don't give me any bullshit fake laughs, Terri!" Alice scolded. "I'll turn this train right around, so help me God!" She suddenly began making car sounds with her mouth, complete with screeching tires as she sharply turned an imaginary wheel.
Jill watched, fascinated. She'd never met a lunatic before. "Should we be worried?" Terri whispered to her, also unable to tear her eyes away.
"Nah," Jill whispered back. "If she really loses it and decides to wreck the train, we'll be going so fast that our deaths will be too quick to hurt. …Probably." Terri recoiled from Jill, doubly disturbed.
Alice did not, in fact, really lose it, and the train pulled to a halt once more at the Hive station. One saw her coming and was relieved to see her for half a second until he saw Terri and Jill. He raised his rifle. "Abernathy, I don't know if you're aware of this, but Valentine is a Person of Interest in Umbrella's database. Orders are to arrest her on sight if found to be on any Umbrella property."
Jill had her gun out and trained on One as well, and Terri had ducked behind a pillar, only peeking out enough to make sure she was getting a good shot with her camera.
"WHOA!" Alice shouted, getting between the two of them. "Jill is here to help back us up tonight, just in case shit goes south. She has experience with this kind of thing." She gave One a pointed look. "Need I repeat the command code?"
One gave her a hard look, but he and the rest of Sanitation stood down. Great timing, too, because Rain finished cutting through the locking mechanism on the sealed door, the thick metal plate clanking to the ground. She turned around to announce the breach… then stopped short at seeing Jill and Terri. "Who the fuck are these people?"
"New guests of Abernathy's," One said, anger etched onto his features.
Rain humphed and said, "Well, sir, we've breached the Hive."
Kaplan approached the door and triggered its opening, then stepped back quickly as it rose into its frame. As JD lowered his night-vision monocle thing and stepped into the darkness, Alice's mind again drifted to Rain and JD and their… whatever-it-might be. She turned to Rain. "So, you and JD seem pretty tight, huh?" she asked. Rain stared at her in response. "You guys friends? …Or maybe something more?" Again, Rain's only response was an unfriendly silence.
"I have a strict policy against fraternization in the team," One offered.
"Yeah, 'Don't get caught'," Warner added with a smirk. Rain gave him a sharp elbow in the ribs.
"Ooh, is there any hot gossip I should know about?" Alice asked, hoping it actually concerned the matter of her heart.
"Is this about Rain?" Vance said. "Because —"
Rain grabbed him by the ear and twisted. "Enough," she hissed into it, before relinquishing it. "Abernathy doesn't need to know any goddamn thing about my private affairs," she declared, staring Alice right in the eyes in defiance.
Before Alice could inquire any further about Rain's love life or her hostility, there was the call "Got it!" from JD from the darkness, and lights began to flicker on within. (Alice noticed with some annoyance that these lights weren't accompanied by big loud thumps). Sanitation, Alice, and her guests finally marched into the Hive proper.
The chapter title comes verbatim from a message that would show up in the early RE games whenever you'd reload a game. Seemed appropriate!
So yeah, Alice's two other phone calls were to information (because why would Alice have ANY phone numbers? When did she ever call ANYONE? Hahaha!) and Jill a second time (because Jill hung up on her the first time, haha).
I first wrote about Terri's rival Mary Thorvald for this story, as it so happens. She just found her way into publication via BKR first!
Some of you might be asking, who is Trent? Attentive readers will remember that I canonized the events of Caliban Cove (a Resident Evil novel in which Rebecca and a bunch of OC STARS agents) go investigate an Umbrella facility in Maine for the AIR series. Well, the RE novels also had as a character the mysterious Trent, who showed up and fed the good guys bits of info about how to get through Umbrella's bullshit. Fun stuff!