Chapter Text
September 15th, 2013
A twenty-year-old man stood leaning against his parked motorcycle while surveying the once-bustling, but remote South American town of San Jumayo through a set of binoculars. He took one more bite of the apple he’d brought with him and tossed the exposed core aside. The man, his dust-covered sunglasses pushed up on his forehead, and his vehicle were perched atop the gentlest slope of the cliffs that surrounded the town’s valley. While he planned out his route, the podcast he’d located, on a lark, played in his earbuds.
After the revelation that both the bioterrorist attacks on Tall Oaks and in Lanshiang were the result of crimes committed by America’s own Derek Simmons, former National Security advisor to President Adam Benford, we at TerraSave want to know just how deep the corruption goes. We will keep—
He shut off the podcast and let out a short “hmph” of a chuckle.
“Claire Redfield,” he mused. “Not the soldier, but the same kind of idealist.”
His phone began to ring, so he pulled one of the buds out, grinned upon recognizing the caller’s name, and answered.
“Hey there, Super Girl.”
“Jake, where are you?” Sherry Birkin demanded, foregoing pleasantry.
He thought she might, given the circumstances. A smile played at his lips.
“You never reported back,” she reminded him.
“That’s not any of the government’s business, is it?” Jake Muller countered. “I’m not an agent.”
“No, but if you got involved, it’d become our business,” Sherry jabbed back, “you can’t go to Bolivia.”
Jake cleared his throat, glanced at the town, and shrugged. “About that…”
“Jake!”
“You’re the one who told me someone was trying to finish what my father started. How can I stay away? This already involves me.”
“I gave you that information so you could go into hiding,” Sherry insisted, “if someone had access to classified files they recovered on Wesker’s research, that person could have access to files about you. I don’t want you to end up under someone’s needle again.”
“That’s a little ironic.”
“Jake.” Although she’d only said his name, the flatness in her tone told him enough.
“I won’t,” Jake assured her. He let a breath out through his nose, loudly, while collecting his thoughts. “I’m here to figure things out, not get involved.”
There was a pause as he thought about how to continue. He wasn’t even sure what he was trying to accomplish yet. All he knew was that he had unfinished business, and the business was his bloodline.
“You and your friends going to make an appearance?” he asked.
Sherry seemed ready to let the topic shift go with her response, “FOS is only running intel this time. Leon and Helena are still tying up loose ends on China, and the government is trying to figure out what to do with me.” She paused. “The BSAA is handling this one, alone.”
“They sending their golden boy?”
Sherry hesitated. “Yes, Chris will be there.”
“All the more reason for me to stick to the shadows. I’m not gonna get mixed up with Redfield, or anyone else in the BSAA; too much red tape.”
“You can’t know that. You need to go home.”
“I don’t have a home, Sherry; never really did. I need to do this.”
Sherry sighed from the other side of the line. “Just…promise me you’ll be careful.”
“When am I not?”
“Are you kidding?”
“Fair enough.”
“Jake.”
Jake laughed. “I promise I’ll be careful.” He hung up without a goodbye, avoiding further interrogation.
He ran a hand over his buzz-cut red hair and let a sigh out through his nose, looking back at the town through the corners of blue eyes. It was too bad he wouldn’t get to see Sherry again, but it was probably best; he had no idea what kind of danger could be ahead. Although he knew the woman could hold her own in a crisis, he preferred her safe.
He took another look over the town with his binoculars, observing the empty streets. It looked like the cavalry had yet to show up, but the same could be said for everyone else. There weren’t even monsters lurking nearby, which was odd for the sort of fun he’d grown accustomed to while getting entangled in BSAA business. There wasn’t much to learn watching from afar.
Jake stuffed the binoculars in the motorcycle’s saddlebag and started the vehicle up while he pulled his sunglasses back down over his eyes. The loose dirt of the road billowed behind him as he roared down the hill into town.
---
2 Days Later
Four BSAA scouts, fresh uniforms already dusty from the mostly unpaved streets of the abandoned Bolivian town they’d been sent deep into, kept their breathing steady and quiet as they crept. Two of them wore the green badges that revealed they were from the native South American branch, while the other two wore blue North American variants. Of the four, only one was a woman, a sniper from Ontario.
The silence weighed heavy on their shoulders, each one unsure if speaking up would bring havoc upon them. However, as time went on without results, the unrequited tension started to wear on them. Although they avoided saying anything to each other, aside from the quiet check-ins they’d grown accustomed to during their training as scouts, the lack of activity was quickly becoming more insufferable than comforting.
“We haven’t seen anything in over two hours,” one of them, an Argentinian man in his mid-twenties, finally spoke up, his rifle lowered but at the ready, “what if there’s nothing to find?”
The tiny squad’s sergeant, and the second oldest of the group despite only twenty-nine years of age, held up a fist, signaling them all to stop. He was an American whose head was mostly covered by the combination of standard-issue helmet and goggles he wore. He scanned the wider street ahead of them down the line of his chosen weapon, an M19 handgun equipped with a laser sight. Satisfied they remained alone, he straightened and looked back at the one who’d spoken.
“You really want to go back to Captain Redfield with nothing, Pérez?” he asked, “do you think he’d say we were wasting our time?”
The other two scouts recoiled slightly at the thought of disappointing a legend.
“Of course not,” Pérez replied, “but all we had before HQ sent us in here were rumors. I know he has a personal stake in this—”
“We all do,” the sniper interrupted tersely, her French-Canadian accent perpetually obvious despite her experience with the English language, “or do you not know what would have happened if Doctor Wesker succeeded?”
“I know…but this place is a ghost town.”
The leader angled his head. “Yeah, it is,” he agreed, “but how long has it been this way?” He jutted his chin toward a nearby market stall, empty, aside from one smashed melon. “How long would you say that’s been there, rotting?”
Pérez sighed after giving it a look. “Not long enough,” he admitted.
“If you were moving to another, better town, would you leave your laundry on the line and your vehicles in their drives?” the sergeant continued. He watched him shake his head, then nodded once. “The BSAA still has a mystery to solve and until we finish recon, we aren’t going anywhere.”
“But we’re not on recon alone, and we’ve had no updates,” Pérez continued, “at some point, this must be acknowledged as a waste of time.”
“Yeah,” the leader admitted. He stopped to look around, then turned to look back at the agent, holding his handgun aloft in a relaxed pose. “But until I’m sure it’s nothing, we’re not leaving. Is there still a problem, here?”
“No,” Pérez sighed, “I suppose I’m still being paid.”
“Don’t worry about it,” the squad leader replied, the caked dust on his lips cracking as they spread in a smile, “if it’s really nothing, I’ll buy you a drink.”
He turned back and gestured for them to keep moving, before proceeding into the wide intersection ahead of them. The four scouts spread out to cover all directions from which a threat might present itself.
“Sergent!”
The leader glanced back, but returned his attention to the street in front of him. “What is it, Lapointe?” he asked over his shoulder.
Lapointe, the sniper, took a long look through her scope. “I thought I saw something move,” she replied, “I can’t find it, now. It could’ve gone to that cantina.”
“Let’s go.”
At their sergeant’s word, the scouting party converged on the sniper and they moved toward the building she’d indicated as one. It was several intersections ahead, and the squad went about their well-practiced routine of checking roads and alleys as they passed, each letting out a quiet “clear” once they found them to be empty.
They entered the cantina to be greeted by the same silence and lack of motion they’d experienced nearly everywhere else. Dirt from the road coated the floor, and what they saw explained the lack of maintenance.
Scattered throughout the building were white, black-specked figures that looked like crude sculptures. The squad leader nudged one with the tip of his pistol barrel and a chunk of it chipped off the rest. He stepped back, as did the others.
“¡Ay, Dios!” the youngest of the team breathed.
The piece that had fallen off sculpture was the finger of an outstretched hand, stuck in place. The face of the man it belonged to was frozen in terror, the rest of him positioned as if he’d been trying to scramble outside on his hands and knees.
The other mounds of white were shaped like people, as well, and all of them were obscure, as if they’d been encased in cement. Some were still seated while others looked as if they’d just fallen to the floor, their stools and chairs overturned near them. Each of them was in a state of distress or panic, many grasping at their chests and throats.
“Why didn’t we see anything like this outside?” the youngest asked incredulously, “these aren’t really people, yes?”
“It would be a tasteless art installation,” Lapointe replied flatly. She slipped the strap of her sniper rifle over her shoulder and swapped it for a handgun that’d been waiting in a holster at her hip.
“Call it in, Vega,” the sergeant told the boy. He paused. “And keep an eye on the door,” he added before proceeding further inside.
Vega nodded and stayed where he was, trying to compose himself.
Pérez and Lapointe followed their leader, spreading out as they got further indoors to check all sides for movement and signs of life. Vega reported their location over the radio strapped to the shoulder of his vest, hesitated, and settled on “anomaly” to describe what they’d found. It wasn’t informative, but none of the others could blame him for being vague.
“There are no heat signatures, signs of life,” Pérez reported after scanning one of the sculptures near him with a handheld device, “and it doesn’t look like the C-Virus.”
“No,” Lapointe agreed while carefully touching another with her gloved fingers. “This is something different. They’re solid, like brittle stone.”
The squad leader stopped when he noticed a line of disturbed dust that looked like nothing he’d seen before. It was as if a concentrated gust of wind, no wider than twelve inches, had blasted a trail from the entrance, around the counter. He raised his handgun and followed it. The door behind the counter had dust piled at its base, but that wasn’t where the trail led. It ended, instead, at a wall next to a tall set of shelves packed with bottles of liquor.
He felt along the faded wallpaper and noticed a consistent line, then looked at the shelf and saw nothing out of the ordinary. He turned his gaze back to the trail and saw dirt heaped conspicuously in the corner where the wall met the shelving unit’s base.
“Over here,” he called, “I think this swings open.”
The other two came to see what he’d found before looking to him for direction. He didn’t say anything, his gaze fixed on the hidden door with his gun at his side.
“We found something,” Lapointe pointed out, “we should wait for a full team to investigate further, non?”
“Right,” the sergeant agreed. He raised his hand to his radio, but stopped when he heard a thump in the room beyond the false wall. He whipped his handgun up and put a finger to his lips, telling them to listen. The wait seemed to last ages, their eyes fixed on the door, as the silence continued.
“What do we do, Sir?” Pérez whispered, at last.
Another thump.
The leader looked at the other two, but they were just as perplexed as he was.
“Is there someone there?” he called, “we’re with the BSAA; we can help you.”
That time, there was a loud clatter.
“Pérez, try it in Spanish,” the leader suggested while he reached up to touch the false wall.
He stumbled when it gave way, opening inwards on smooth, greased hinges. He stifled a gasp and straightened, bringing his weapon up. The others did the same behind him.
“Eyes up.” He gestured with his head in Vega’s direction and Lapointe turned to motion the scout over to them.
Vega started to run, before the others hushed him with fingers on their lips. He grimaced and slowed his pace, approaching with light steps.
Lapointe directed him to keep watch by the hidden door. Vega nodded his agreement and stayed behind as the others slowly moved through the opening, clicking on their helmets’ mounted flashlights.
After a short, single-cornered hallway and a flight of stairs composed entirely of undecorated wooden planks, the trio set foot on a clean cement floor. Their flashlight beams washed over small sections at a time as they scanned the room ahead to find it wasn’t equipped to be a cantina’s cellar.
Several metal desks lined the back wall, supporting two dusty, and very old computers, as well as file boxes and a microscope. The squad leader took another step, to be surprised by flickering fluorescent light rods that took a few seconds to stabilize. Even then, they hummed uncomfortably and one of the rods was dim to the point of nearly dying out entirely. The three scouts clicked their lights off and looked around for clues.
Behind them gaped a heavy metal door with a sturdy deadbolt lock on one side, retracted, and positioned at the base of the staircase. There was a small, cube-shaped freezer on a table in one corner, so caked in dust that its glass door revealed nothing inside. The squad leader opened it to find it wasn’t working anymore but, thankfully, it was empty. There was a vent in the right wall near the ceiling and a dirt-streaked plastic curtain toward the far-right corner.
“When is the last time you saw a floppy disk?” Lapointe asked, plucking a half-ejected 8-inch disk from one of the computers to reveal the half that was protected from dust inside the drive was black in color. She brushed it off and found there was no label, so she set it down.
Pérez was looking over a collection of petri dishes, flasks, and pipettes, all serving as empty perches for more dust.
“It looks like no one has used these in decades,” he murmured.
“Yeah,” the squad leader agreed, “this place is too old to explain what happened up there.” He paused, looking over the floor. “But someone swept.”
While the dust was obvious on all objects within the room, the floor was nearly spotless, and there was no sign of the odd trail he’d spotted in the cantina. A mixture of frustration and interest starting to seep in, the sergeant moved over to the plastic curtain toward the back corner. He held his gun up while pulling it aside with his left hand to find a second metal door with a window at head height, and a much larger window set in the wall beside it. The room beyond was unlit.
The squad leader flicked his flashlight on again.
“That’s special,” he murmured flatly.
The windows were half-covered in the same, solid white substance they’d encountered in the cantina above, but the shapes were far from human. It looked as if tendrils of slime had erupted from a single source in the center of the tiny room and clung to all four white-tiled walls, before hardening into another grotesque sculpture. A section of the far wall had been left untouched and on it, in the reddish brown of old, dried blood, was written “LEt It ROt”, accompanied by bloody fingerprints, indicating it’d been scrawled with clumsy strokes of a hand. The other two scouts came to gawk at the sight.
Without fully taking his eyes off the window before him, the scouts’ leader tilted his head over his shoulder. “You said you found a floppy disk?”
“Oui,” Lapointe answered, before heading over to put the disk back in the computer. After fiddling with the device, she groaned. “It’s not working. Of course, it looks older than I am.”
“We’ll take it with us, then,” the leader told her.
Lapointe ejected the disk again and handed it to the sergeant, then watched him slip it into one of hip pockets of his uniform pants. The trio started back toward the staircase. They stopped when they heard thumping from the vent and raised their weapons at it. A burst of air forceful enough to blast the vent from its place on the wall caused a surge of grey motes to permeate the room in little over a second.
Lapointe was closest to the blast. She collapsed to the ground, coughing. Pérez dropped his rifle and backed against the desk by the left wall, but began to wheeze and fell to his knees. The squad leader fell against the staircase’s door in front of him, gasping.
Lapointe’s legs were already starting to change color and harden, her clothing along with them, as she clutched both arms over her chest, rasping breaths shaking her body. Pérez let out a hoarse cry as his hand began to solidify before his eyes. The squad leader heard Vega running down the stairs.
“No!” he cried. He grabbed the handle of the metal door and slammed it shut, bolting it.
Vega reached the base of the steps in time to press his hands against a securely-locked door. He looked through its window to see his team turning into more sculptures of terror. His sergeant slammed a fist against the glass, startling him out of his stupor.
“Get out of here!” the man shouted from the other side of the door, before stopping to cough, “tell—Red--!” He was seized by another fit.
Vega understood. He turned and ran back up the stairs.
---
A man dressed in black watched one of the BSAA agents rush from the doors of the cantina, shouting updates to his HQ using the radio on his shoulder. The man proceeded around the corner he’d been hiding behind and went inside, unwilling to waste more time.
He descended the stairs, an old key in his hand, and unlocked the bolted door. He entered the spore-filled lab with confidence, a full gas mask and hood protecting him. He stepped over the woman’s curled body, sighing through the mask’s filter.
“Disappointment after disappointment,” he said, looking at her, then at the boy who’d backed away from the inescapable cloud. The victim had found himself against one of the desks, his frozen face still screaming at his hand.
The man turned his gaze to the last of the agents, who’d collapsed face-first against the wall beside the door. He’d had yet to calcify, but he must have inhaled the spores. Judging by the badge on his shoulder, he seemed to be the squad’s leader. The man in black approached him at a leisurely pace and stopped to stand over him, watching. This one was still breathing. He nudged him with the toe of his boot.
The BSAA agent stirred. “Get out,” he murmured.
“Do you think you’ll live?” the man asked him, his voice slightly muffled by the mask.
The agent shuddered, moved his arm under his chest for leverage and gasped, turning his face to look at him.
“Who are you?” he asked.
The man noted his voice was clearer. “Do you think you’ll live?” he repeated, forcefully.
“I’m with the BSAA,” the agent continued. He pushed himself up on his knees, breathing heavily. “I need to…get back to my captain.”
“You do,” the masked man agreed, “so, tell me, who is your captain?”
“Who are you?” the agent repeated, his eyes squinting at the mask, but the rest of his body swaying in a daze.
“I’ll need to report this,” the man replied, firmly, “I need to know who your superior is.”
“Redfield,” the agent replied, his voice strengthened by the sense of duty imposed upon him, “Captain Redfield.”
“Perfect.”
The man in the gas mask knelt and reached down to cradle the agent’s head in his gloved hand. Without another word, he shoved the needle of a syringe into the man’s neck and allowed him to slip into unconsciousness.