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Tie the Noose Chapter 42
Daniel Carter stared up at the roof of his SUV, eyes open, but unmoving, as his mind slowly churned over the difficult conversation to come. Rebecca snored lightly on his chest, a line of droll coming from her mouth as she somehow managed to fall asleep on him, despite the doubtlessly uncomfortable mattress he made. He wasn’t sure when she’d slipped in, but it was a testament to both how tired he was and, perhaps, how much he trusted her, so much so that he hadn’t stirred when she’d all but mounted him.
He had been watching her sleep, the worry lines and creases that had seemed endemic of her mood ever since they’d reunited had finally loosened, and she looked at peace, somehow, despite all the horror and trauma that had been inflicted upon her. Her, and the others, who by now were stirring from their own restless nights. He didn’t want to imagine what nightmares had haunted them in their sleeping hours, but if they were anything like his, he wouldn’t have to.
They would all have questions, he knew. They would all want answers. All the context, and evidence, and proof that he didn’t have to give. Much of what he did have was observational, or anecdotal, or otherwise loosely connected by strings that only he felt he could see. Wesker, snakey bastard that he was, offered to help corroborate, to trade some of that social capital he had with the team to help convince them, but that was far and away from a convincing argument. He wasn’t even sure what the man had to offer, only that he claimed he had something.
More fool him for agreeing to it without finding out, but that ship had sailed hours ago, and he’d been too damn exhausted to be able to spot the obvious trap. He was committed now, and god help him he would use Wesker if he had to. Because he did. He needed the legitimacy the blonde fucker had to sell the truth, the actual truth, and not some softly wrapped lie masquerading as it.
The conspiracy, the reach, the viruses, the weapons, the monsters, the labs and facilities, the… the infections, from the first, the second, and now this new one that coursed through his veins like lava, slow and ponderous, hot, but not hungry. Christ, he could still feel that bulb between his teeth, the pulpy, squirming mass that tasted almost like an overripe orange, the fluid that seemed almost alive as it poured down his throat, the feeling of the thing dying as he consumed it inch by inch, wildly, animalistically, and now feeling it slowly digest with an almost palpable satisfaction.
His muscles had been twitching, growing with the hum of a good workout, but with an underlying smoothness that belied its nature. He hadn’t been able to control himself, hadn’t been able to stop the need, when the scent of it hit his nostrils. Suppressor or no, it didn’t seem to do much to quell the Thirst when a veritable feast was lain out in front of him, steaming and freshly caught, like a predatory cat savoring the last moments of its kill, watching the last throes of death take it, as it began to feast.
The feeling had been orgasmic, like an instinct finally satiated after a lifetime of denial and that scared him more than anything. He hadn’t been in control when he ripped it loose, and hadn’t even realized he’d bitten down until it was sliding down his throat. And then he couldn’t stop. He gorged himself on it, like it was a particularly ripe fruit, and it tasted foul, but to him it was addicting in its intensity. He had swallowed all the little glowing orbs that had clung to that pod too, like grapes, consuming them whole, feeling them pop as they ran down his throat from the pressure, and even thinking about it now made his mouth water.
There was no hiding it. He couldn’t even if he wanted to, he was visibly changed now. Bulging muscles over a too-large musculature that had given him another seven or eight inches easy. Pasty white skin, not just pale, but bereft of pigment, and his eyes… he’d gotten a glance at them in the rearview mirror. Sunken, ringed with dark bruising, and terrifyingly empty. He looked like the particularly animated corpse of an obsessive bodybuilder. Or like a Tyrant, except for the trench coat and fedora. A freak. But then, that is what he was, wasn’t it?
A freak of nature. An accident, a random soul dropped into a body that had been lying in the woods, waiting for him. A puppet with a few extra steps, and how was he supposed to explain that? Even for all of this, that was madness. Impossible to explain, even more so to do it while not sounding even more insane than everything else combined, because even now it was so fancifully stupid that he had trouble believing it himself. Most of the time he put it aside, along with the horrifying sense of existential dread that came with it, relegating it to a box on his mental shelf that was bolted shut and welded closed.
No, he would be honest about everything else. They needed to know, to understand, and holding back the truth there would only hurt them at this point. It’s not like they needed convincing that the dead could walk and monsters beyond their darkest nightmares were real. That melted candle of human bodies the guys had called the Grafted was proof enough, even if they hadn’t all nearly been eaten in the underground. But that left the question of how he knew all this to begin with. Knew what was coming, and believed it enough to build an entire life around trying to stop it.
Sometimes he really wished he knew more about the timeline for the games. Maybe he could claim he was from an earlier incident, something that slipped through the cracks at some point and gave him his own first taste into this shitshow of horrors. Or he could just claim to be another victim, like Alyssa, brainwashed into a compulsive need to seek out the answers he knew had to be real, and finding the hole to be too big and too deep to handle alone.
He glanced down at Becca, and brushed her hair out of her face, savoring the slight crinkling of her nose as he watched her sleep. For a moment, it made him feel better, like they were laying in his bed, back at the apartment, cuddling after a long night, enjoying the mutual feeling of warmth and safety. Then he saw his too-large fingers on a too-large hand, and the illusion shattered. He leaned back to stare at the ceiling again, and let her rest as he drowned in his own thoughts.
She didn’t wake up for another hour, though he felt her when she did. Becca was a heavy sleeper when she wanted to be, and yesterday had been… taxing. That was a good word for it. Taxing. He huffed a quiet laugh at how hilariously understated that felt, which brought a small groan from the woman laying on him, as her hand came up to push against his lips.
“Shhhhh no laughing…” Becca moaned, almost inconsolably, as her brain slowly went from passive to active. He had seen it a hundred times, but it still amused him how he could practically see the pistons start to turn. The rolling of her shoulders, the slow rotation of her head, her eyes blinking in a weirdly incongruous was as she tried to get the little night gribblies out of her lashes, and finally the yawn, almost directly into his skin as she buried her face into his torso. He wasn’t exactly sure how he felt about her scrunching his pectorals up to form a pillow to nuzzle into but she seemed to like it, so he just went with it.
“I hate to say it, but you have to get up, sleepyhead. Got a lot to do today.” Danny hummed, pressing his lips into her forehead, gently, careful to avoid anything that looked like a cut. He was still acutely aware of the fact that he was still infected, and he would be damned if he passed it onto her somehow. But skin to skin was okay, probably. Or maybe not, but that ship had sailed hours ago.
He glanced over at the window, and let out a groan. Standing there was a surly looking Chris. He couldn’t see them through the tint, but he also looked like he was a scant moment away from hammering on the door to wake them up. Rebecca looked up, following his gaze, and then let out a squeak of alarm as she almost panicked before realizing that one, there wasn’t a cover to pull over her and two, she was still fully dressed, sans her boots. Nobody slept in their boots if they were sane, but that aside, it did take her a second to get her bearings.
“Yeah, I don’t think he’s going to wait for us either, hon.” Danny sighed, as he started jacking the seat back up. Rebecca slid into his lap as it rose, now much more awake, and looking just a bit surly in her own right about it, but she shook it off. It took her a bit longer to get back into the adjacent seat, taking a moment to check herself before giving herself the sniff test. It was good enough, it seemed, as she sidled out of the car.
“I’ll head him off if you need some time, Danny.” It was kind of her to offer, but he shook his head.
“No, the longer I put it off the more problems it’ll cause.” He said, after a moment. “I wouldn’t say no to something to eat, though. I’ve got some stuff in the back, if you wanna grab it. Mostly MREs and coffee, but it’s something.”
“The breakfast of champions. Alright.” She gave him a smile as she slipped out of the car, and with a sigh, he pulled the handle of the door open, and slid out. Chris, for his part and showing no small restraint, didn’t get up into his face immediately. It didn’t keep him from scowling though.
“Feeling all rested up?” The question was innocuous, but the tone was what set him off. Chris had a real self-righteous streak to him when he got his dander up, Daniel was finding. He kept it off his face how much that irked him, given the man had good reason for his bad attitude, at least to a point, but still. Daniel just sighed and let it go. He stepped past Chris without giving him the deadpan stare he so desperately wanted to, and shrugged instead.
“Where is everyone?” He asked finally, as he heard Becca pop the trunk of his car. Chris looked like he was about to shoot off a snide remark, but retrained himself at the last minute.
“With Barry.” He said, as if that was all that was needed. Daniel could infer the rest, even if it wasn’t. The two men stared at one another for a moment longer, before Daniel nodded and turned, moving over to help Rebecca as she fished out what looked like a whole box of his MREs, water bottles, energy bars and the camp stove out of the back. He hauled it out of her hands, her grateful smile all the reason he needed, and began walking over to the bunkroom.
Rebecca trailed behind, and Chris did too, further back, like he was trying to make sure Daniel didn’t slip off anywhere. Truth be told, Daniel didn’t quite know why the man was so prickly. It couldn’t have been just from that fight, but for the life of him he didn’t know what else. Though maybe that was all that was needed, and Chris spiralled from there, blowing it up more and more.
Or maybe he was just a prick to people he decided he didn’t like. Who knew? Daniel had other concerns besides whatever big feelings the STARS pointman had brewing, and if Chris took umbrage, too bad. He turned his attention away from the blisteringly frustrated man and to the people in the bunkroom as he entered. Wesker was leaned against a table, arms crossed and looking as distant as ever, somehow perfectly groomed despite the last day and a half of nonstop fighting. Jill was over by Barry, talking to him quietly, and Barry himself seemed to be in rough straits, a pallor of sweat dripping down his brow.
It was the last bit that caught Daniel’s eye, the normally big man looking more haggard than he was before, having been stripped down to his underclothes and drenched. Rebecca immediately set the camp stove down and went over to him, grabbing her medic bag from nearby, checking on him as Chris picked up the device and brought it over to the table Wesker was at. The two set their loads down, Daniel grabbing a pot off a rack that had been hanging off the wall, checking it was clean, and then dumping a couple of water bottles in to boil. Making cowboy coffee was a pain, but it gave him something to do as he felt the eyes of the others, sans Rebecca, watching him.
He shot Wesker a quick look, the man giving him the most minute of nods, as he poured himself a cup of the scalding brew. Some sugar and creamer followed, and he stirred it slowly. Just like how he liked it, more or less. He took a sip, and just enjoyed the flavor.
“Oh my god.” Chris groaned, as he stormed up, like he was going to slap it out of Daniel’s hand. Before he had a chance a second cup was practically shoved into his chest, and it took a herculean effort not to spill any coffee on himself, but Chris managed. A short chuckle echoed behind him, and he spun to give Jill a deathglare, one which she weathered admirably as she accepted a cup from Daniel, as did Wesker, and finally, he set one aside for Rebecca. Only then did he speak.
“I know you have a lot of questions.” Was the first thing he said, and both Jill and Chris gave him a stare that practically screamed ‘no shit!’ at him. He bore the looks with grace, as he continued, “But things are more complicated than you know. There are things I might not be able to answer, not because I don’t want to, but because I don’t have an answer. I’ll be the first to tell you that this whole thing is bigger and more complex than you might expect, and in ways you can't imagine."
“Try anyway.” Was the deadpan response from Chris, Jill nodding along. “No more lies, Carter. We all know you’re a grade-A bullshit artist, but you seem to know what’s going on here. That’s more than any of us can say, but mark my words, if I even think you’re making shit up or trying to cover for yourself, I will fuck you up.”
“Big talk, small dog.” Was all Daniel said in reply, and Chris went from surly to apoplectic within the span of a breath. Jill shot him a look, but then took a position opposite Daniel. Lines were being drawn already. Chris opened his mouth to speak, but Wesker cut him off at the pass.
“Enough. Carter, I expect better of you. We need your information, and we will comport ourselves like STARS, Redfield. I’ve warned you already, stop trying to pick a fight to assuage your wounded pride. I don’t have the patience for it.” Wesker snapped, and the two fell into line as Daniel frowned, but let it lie. “Continue, Daniel. And Chris? If you don’t have anything useful to contribute, keep your mouth shut.”
“Sir.” Chris practically spit the word, glaring at Daniel as he stared back impassively. Daniel took a sip of his coffee, already unhappy with how things were proceeding, making this whole shitshow even more difficult seemed to be a talent of his, and having Wesker jump to his aid like that was unnerving.
“As I was saying, and don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m doing the best I can with what I have. I’ve been at this since before I came to Raccoon and I barely have a full picture myself. But the basics are pretty straightforward. I mentioned it to Jill and Rebecca before, so bear with me, but it all comes back to one thing. Umbrella Corporation.” Daniel said, somberly. He ignored the rolled eyes and said ‘Here we go.’ that Jill uttered, though the sharp look Wesker shot her that shut her up was oddly satisfying.
“Look, I know you’ve all seen the commercials. Top producer of medical equipment, makeup, appliances, blah blah blah. Umbrella does it all and they do it with a smile. All that is is the candy coated topping, the shit you know, the lie they feed you. What they don’t tell you is that Umbrella is also the leading manufacturer of bioweapons on the planet.” Daniel started, only for Chris to interrupt.
“Wait, are you trying to tell me the band-aid company that employs about half of the city is making anthrax and smallpox?” The words were delivered with no small amount of incredulity. “Because that’s quite frankly retarded. They’re one of the biggest companies on the planet. Why would they risk all that?”
“That was my question too.” Jill chimed in. “I haven’t seen any evidence of anything tying this place to Umbrella, aside from those soldiers you claimed worked for them. I’m not really seeing the connection.”
“Therein lies the problem. Umbrella is as good at hiding its messes as it is at causing them. I’ve hit multiple facilities in the last several months and most of them were tenuous at best. Once you get deep in enough it becomes obvious but-” Chris cut him off.
“But you don’t have anything solid, is that it?”
“No. I don’t.” Daniel grit out. “I was hoping to recover something more concise from this facility to show you all. Maybe get some real evidence, something actionable. I wasn’t expecting you to take it on faith, Chris.”
“So what, we just have to trust you?” Chris snapped out, “because you aren’t beating those crazy allegations right now. I’ll give you that something is seriously fucked here, and the zombies definitely aren’t helping with that, but you’re making a very serious accusation with nothing to back it up.”
“Would it help if I told you he’s telling the truth?” That brought them all to a halt. Chris’s head whipped over to Wesker, who stood still next to the counter. Jill followed almost an instant later, and even Rebecca had stopped what she was doing with Barry. “Because he’s right. On both accounts.”
“Captain?” The word fell from Jill’s lips with a flinch, like she hadn’t meant to say it. “That… that doesn’t make sense, Captain. How… how do you know?”
“That’s simple. I work for them.” He said, with all the calm of the eye of a hurricane, as the other two exploded around him.
000
Chris felt like the world he knew was falling out from under him as Captain Wesker almost casually revealed that not only was he working both as STARS and as an Umbrella agent, but that he’d been doing it for nearly his entire adult life. Working as a soldier, a scientist, and now an operation head, he laid it all out, piece by piece. When the question of why came up, the answer was simple.
“So I can destroy them from the inside out.” He was one of their experiments, one of the survivors, of a horrific program of what Chris could only describe as undiluted, unfathomable evil. The distant, haunted words of a man who had been taken as a boy, and then systematically weeded out through training, education and experimentation, only to come out as one of two to make it through the unending torment that the Captain had called a childhood. None of them had the temerity to doubt what he was saying. Chris could feel the anger, the hate, bubbling under that calm demeanor.
He couldn’t find it in himself to be angry about it, either. Not when he told them that he’d been working at almost parallel purpose to Daniel himself, until just recently. Between the two of them, they explained the nature of Umbrella’s work. About the T-virus, a mutagenic retrovirus that could reanimate the dead, or mutate the living into horrors that were beyond comprehension. When asked why the company would do something like that, the answers were as simple as they were horrifying.
Money. Power. Influence. A new way to win a war never fought, using disposable monsters that could do more damage than an armored battalion at a fraction of the cost. When Jill asked about the UN, about the Geneva Conventions, about the dozen regulating bodies that worked tirelessly to eradicate and monitor the use of bioweapons, Wesker just laughed, while Daniel looked almost broken.
“They control the government, or as close to it as you can get.” Daniel had said. “Not just local, but state, and federal. There’s a vested interest at every level to keep things under wraps. The money is too good, the potential weapons too valuable. It’s every excuse ever made writ large. That’s why I’m having so much trouble finding actionable, provable intel.”
“But what about the news, or… or someone. There has to be someone who can do something.” Chris had argued, but Daniel just stared at him like he was a particularly dim child.
“The people who care don’t know, and the people who know don’t care. Umbrella owns large swaths of the House and the Senate. They were cold war darlings, have had half a century to install people friendly to them, and it’s nothing so crass as money motivating them. These are old money families that got fat off the teat of First Aid Spray and Green Herb.” Daniel said with an almost dismissive air. “There’s a vested interest in these old money networks full of owed favors and incestuous interference to keep the big bloated pig at the trough.”
“But what about the military?” It was Jill this time, only to be shot down by Wesker.
“The US military just signed a three and a half trillion dollar contract with Umbrella to provide medical supplies among other things, on the public front. I can think of at least three high-ranking generals who want to test out their BOW lines however. Interest in it has been growing, as of late with tensions rising in the Middle East.” Jill got very quiet again, after that.
That was how it went for the better part of an hour. Why this, why that, how this, when that. The questions were never ending, but in this, both Wesker and Daniel were well prepared. More than once they asked why Wesker, in his position, hadn't done anything, or to Daniel, why he didn’t blow the whistle, but in the end the answers were always the same. The company was too pervasive, too controlling, too wide spread.
They had their own paramilitary and secret police, who had a very successful record of making problem people disappear, and when the Government, capital G, was tacitly helping them do it, if by nothing else than turning to look the other way? It painted a nightmarish picture. Both major newspapers in the city were owned and controlled by the company, either directly in the case of the Gazette, or through a subsidiary who in turn was owned by a shell company. On a more national stage, all five national news agencies took money from the company, and they had a pervasive system of net-trawling algorithms that looked for specific key phrases in forums and net hosts, to a level that would have made the most pervasive security apparatuses green with envy.
Wesker also confirmed that they actively ran disinformation campaigns. Usually in relation to covering up this or that accident, spill or disaster, either through negligence or from malicious action by an overambitious project lead. Even Daniel had admitted he only knew the broad strokes of the network, ranging from politicos, senators, house reps, even the Vice President himself. Hell, they’d funded almost a third of the current President’s campaign either directly or indirectly by giving him all the free media exposure he could get.
And the ones who were obstinate? Troublemakers, whistleblowers, survivors of their fuck ups? The ones who could be disappeared were. The rest were actively discredited, demoted, their reputations and lives destroyed, their records turned over and anything that could be used to imprison them after was dredged up and dropped on one of their ambitious young prosecutors. More than a few wound up in prison, where they suffered a quiet accident and went unmourned and forgotten. If they didn’t cave under the pressure first and hang themselves or something.
It happened disturbingly often. Doubly so when Wesker brought up the pattern of legislation that had made it increasingly easier to make happen. Anti-leaker bylaws and rulings that enshrined both libel and slander laws, expanding the definition to include nearly anything, and vastly upping the fines and damages one could get from being sued. Tradecraft and security protection mandates and reclassifications that allowed Umbrella to field its own heavily armed response forces, privileges that were once uniquely given to military and law enforcement. The right to hold, imprison and interrogate people under state secrets protections, almost as if the company was a branch of government all to itself.
This didn’t even account for the laughably weak and flimsy constitutions and national charters abroad. In many countries Umbrella didn’t even have to pretend that they cared about little things like legality or ethics. Big Brother America was in their corner, despite the company’s head office residing in France, and like the US, the company had had time to weaken the scant few protections that existed out there. All because the money flowed, in quantities that would beggar even a smaller developed nation. Because Umbrella sold those in power not only the lie of control, but the promise of something more, something greater, something impossible.
Umbrella promised them Immortality.
This was the apparatus that Daniel, and apparently Wesker himself had been forced to contend with. Daniel from the outside, Wesker from within, but both struggling to break the stranglehold the hypercorp had over their information control. They each had their methodologies, their process, Wesker slowly weaseling out names, connections, following the money, looking for the heads of the hydra, so he could follow it to the heart. Daniel, in contrast, was putting out fires, in a crusade to find that one silver bullet, the indisputable proof of the company’s wrongdoing. Neither was proving to be particularly effective, but that was the best they had given the circumstances.
Then Rebecca, who, admittedly, Chris had forgotten she had been there the whole time, asked a very simple question.
“How many times?” Her voice was flat, which was the first warning sign.
“How many times, Becca?” Daniel asked, as he looked at her. She had been tending to Barry, listening with one ear as the big man laid there, having dozed off far too quickly for her liking. She took a moment to snap off the gloves she’d been wearing, tossing the messy, bloody things away, before turning to look at him.
“How many times have you put yourself in danger ‘putting out their fires?’” She asked, and looked at him with a pinched expression. “How many times have you gone off on your own and nearly gotten yourself killed for this?” Daniel stared at her for a minute, before quietly answering.
“Since coming to Raccoon? Three times, including this one.” He said, finally. He knew what her next question would be, and continued unabated. “I already mentioned Arklay Hospital. I was there when it was leveled. Before that was an old bunker complex under the high school over in Hooverville. Former cold war shelter, converted into a lab by a lunatic named Hargreave.” As soon as he said the name, Rebecca jerked back like she’d been slapped.
“Hargreave? As in… Dr. Leonard Hargreave?” Her voice was shaky, as Daniel searched his memory, before nodding.
“Yeah. He had some kind of falling out with Umbrella, took a bunch of their stuff, including a viral agent called the P-Prototype, before he used it to make himself a small menagerie of monsters and infect the whole place, killing everyone else in it.” He said, giving some context to it. THen he noticed her shaking. “Why? What is it, Becca?”
“I knew him.” She said, quietly. “He worked with my dad at a virology lab back home in Utah. He was… He was my godfather. Used to come over all the time, before Dad… before he died.” She glanced up at him. “What happened to him?”
There was a pause, as Daniel thought back to that place, with the giant lizard monster that almost took his leg, mutilating him and nearly making him bleed out right then and there. About the mad cackling, the ranting and raving of the lunatic puppeting it. The unhinged tone, desperate and psychotic and too far gone, taunting and threatening him. And the quiet, disbelieving last words the man uttered as he bled out on the concrete floor, reaching for the hideous thing that lay curled in a hermetic case, barely a handspan away. The look on his face must have told Rebecca everything she needed to know.
“Why?” She whispered hoarsely.
“Because whoever he was to you, back then? He wasn’t that person any more.” Wesker said, from the side, and Rebecca’s head shot over to him. “I’ve seen the file on Leonard. Read his research, and why he was terminated from Umbrella. He had gone insane, driven mad by a series of mounting failures and when corporate came down on him, threatening to take his status as a Project Lead from him and reassign him to something else, he lost what vestiges of sanity and morality he had left.”
“I hate to say it, but it's true. When I encountered him down there, he had deliberately let his monsters loose. They had torn through at least a dozen of Umbrella’s toy soldiers and in the process infected the entire facility.” Daniel’s words were low, quiet, and haunted. “The ones who had been freshly exposed were covered in acidic pustules that detonated when they were touched into clouds of caustic mist. They weren’t alive any more, just walking bags of toxins that could eat through armor and clothing like it wasn’t even there. The ones who had been exposed for longer developed sacks that let them spit it like a hose. That was how I got this scar.”
He held up his hand, showing the gnarled, melted flesh across the back. It still looked like runny wax after all these months, and even his transformation hadn’t taken it away. It was only more pronounced against his pallid flesh. “I had to scrape it off with a knife before it burned through to my tendons and bones. It wasn’t just limited to those either. One of his pet monsters could spit it too. That almost took my face off, if I didn’t have a mask. It ate right through the glass and plastic though.” He sighed. “There were more, always more, but he was the source of all of it.”
“That doesn’t sound like Uncle Leo, though. None of it does. He… he wanted to cure diseases, not… not make them. It couldn’t be him.” She said, like she wanted to believe it herself, but couldn’t. Daniel stood, and silently left to go grab his laptop. It had the files, and the dossier. When he returned, and showed her, that was what broke the dam. Rebecca let out a quiet, pained gasp, as Daniel put a hand on her shoulder. She slapped it off, and he backed away, to sit down next to Wesker.
“I genuinely didn’t know she knew him.” The blonde man said quietly, and Daniel gave a small shrug. “I did see the after action reports from the lab complex, though. It was a slaughterhouse down there, between the various animal-morphs that Hargreave cobbled together and the infected staff. For what it’s worth, it was impressive work.”
Staring at his shellshocked girlfriend, Daniel didn’t feel like it was very impressive. Jill moved over to give Rebecca some support as she turned to Daniel. There was a complicated look on her face as she seemed to chew on what she was going to say.
“Was it worth it?” She asked, after a long moment. “Did you at least get something out of it?”
“In the end? No.” And that was the worst part of all of it. All that pain, all that suffering, and he didn’t have shit to show for it. “The one who sold me the information did it on the caveat that I give him all the technical data and samples I collected. By the time I got out of there I was in rough shape. Wounded, concussed, and… sick, I wasn’t in any state to stop him from collecting.”
Jill felt Rebecca shift, her head turning to stare at Daniel with red-rimmed eyes. “That’s how you got hurt. How you got sick. You were exposed to it, the… the P-Prototype, you called it. You were exposed from getting hurt, got sick, knew you could have died from it and just… just toughed it out.” The flatness was back, as Rebecca watched his face. He just nodded.
CRACK!
Daniel’s head shot to the side as Rebecca was in his face in an instant, her hand still ringing from the slap she’d given. “Do you realize how dangerous that was, you stupid bastard!?” In an instant her hands were around his head, and she pulled him into her. “Do you understand how risky it was to sit there, knowingly carrying something that could have killed you! Would have killed you! And just… and just… laid there, lying to me, telling me it would be fine, that it was nothing, even as I watched you sweat buckets, refusing to even consider seeing a doctor about it! What do you think would have happened if you died, Danny!?”
“There wasn’t anything a doctor could do. Going to the hospital meant exposing myself to Umbrella, and if they found one of their designer bugs in my veins, what do you think would have happened?” Danny said, tonelessly from against her chest. Even sitting, now, he came up to her chin. It was a stark reminder of his situation, and the other uncomfortable truth he had to tell.
“The standard protocol in that instance,” Wesker said, and the fact that there even was a ‘standard protocol’ for it sat heavy in the air, “Would have been to either euthanize him for study, or sedate him and move him to a secured facility, again, for study. In either case you would have been informed of his death, and then a reason would be made to prevent you from seeing his body. And make no mistake, Ms. Chambers, despite the claims of being independent, there is no such thing in Raccoon. Every doctor, every nurse, every practice for a hundred miles around the city and within, are entirely controlled by the company, specifically to find people like Daniel.”
“But… but there had to be something-” She started, only for Wesker to shake his head.
“There isn’t, Ms. Chambers. P-Prototype is a low-reactant pathogen, largely considered a failure by Umbrella. Only first-gen infected are capable of reanimating, and blood-contact with second-gen infection vectors has only shown itself to be lethal. This makes it much more stable, but also much less likely to create a later generation of BOW infectors. If Daniel had died from the infection, then the volatile nature of the P-Prototype would have melted him from the inside out by converting his blood and fluids into bio-acid. Gruesome, yes, but otherwise largely safe.”
That wasn’t what Rebecca had been worried about, and hearing Wesker talk about it so casually was jarring. She glanced down at Danny, who had been mostly silent as she hugged him, and she stepped back slowly. There wasn’t even a mark on his face from where she’d slapped him, and she felt ashamed for doing it. But still…
“That doesn’t make it right. I wish you had told me, at least. I could have been there. I could have monitored you. I could have… I could have done something, Danny.” She said, quietly, tiredly. He opened his mouth to say something, but she stopped him. “Don’t. Just… don’t, Danny. I already know all the excuses. I heard all of them from you before.”
“That’s not fair, Becca.” The words were as empty as he felt, but he still forced them out.
“No, it’s not, Danny. None of this is fair.” She sniffled, “Not to me, but especially not to you. Why, Danny? Why does it have to be you? Why is it you who’s going out to these god-forsaken cesspits and- and fighting monsters and zombies and god knows what else!?”
There it was, the big question. Daniel chewed on it, like he had for hours the night before, for days since things all went to hell, for months since before it came to a head. Why? Why did he persist? At first it was because he believed the apocalypse was coming. Now he was sure of it, but the reasons behind it had evolved, just like everything else. But it all came back to that one simple question. Why?
It was then that he had an epiphany. Staring at Rebecca’s tear-stained face, Chris’s stony expression, Jill’s closed off features, and Wesker’s impassable smirk, he just… got it. In the end it was a simple thing, a simple metric of numbers weighed against numbers. More than a need, it was a purpose, a drive, and at its core, the simplest truth. Staring him in the face, pushing him on, directing him like a puppet even through the pain, through the lies, through the sleepless nights and sacrifices.
“Because someone else might get it wrong.” He realized, almost to himself, as the words tumbled out of his mouth. “Because there isn’t anyone else. Because if you knew what I knew, seen what I’d seen, then you would know that unless Umbrella is stopped, and all its research burned to ash, before long there won’t be anyone or anything left at all.”
“What does that mean, Carter?” Jill asked, leaning forward. He looked at her with a deep, impassable stare. “I mean that. You’re talking about it like it’s the apocalypse.”
“Because it is. Umbrella’s bread and butter is something called the T-Virus. I don’t know how they developed it or where it came from, but I’ve seen it in action. At the Arklay Hospital they were testing a variant of it on cancer patients. When those patients went feral, they shut the place down and left everyone who couldn’t get out to die. That was in 1993.” He started, retrieving his laptop and bringing up several files, ones of the first patient, patient zero, the dying wife of one Dr. Lester. Her name was Dorothy.”
He leaned back, recalling the incident, the strange, treelike growths that replaced the brains of the zombies, or rather, the walking seedbeds, shambling about, slowly being overtaken by bark and moss. The dogs, too, the giant bugs, the growths and pods. The giant flower, a perverse rafflesia growing from the roof like a beacon. The Huntsman and his axe, and the poor woman who found out that it was the fate of her partner, her friend, after Umbrella abused and manipulated her mind, making her think she was insane.
But it all came back to one thing.
“The variant was called T-JCC 203. It was capable of jumping species and caused woodlike growths to form from Dorothy’s cancer cells in her lungs. From there it began taking over the hospital, the other patients connected to it like a primitive hive mind. As it evolved, it began to grow parasitic trees inside the heads of dead bodies it collected through… various means. They would be put inside a pod where they were filled with nutrient fluid, caustic, but good for the plants. Then they would puppet those bodies like worker ants. Eventually, the body would be drained dry, and it would fall, becoming a seedbed for the plant to expand its influence.” Daniel’s words were chilling to hear, but what he said next? That was so much worse.
“If that sounds insane, you need to understand that that’s what T-Virus does. It infects things, mutates them, makes them more capable of finding nourishment while propagating itself. In the case of the hospital, it jumped to a plant. But it can jump to anything. Animals are easy, they aren’t too far off from people, in a broad sense, but it can also jump to plants, to insects, to birds, to fish… and every exposure event just speeds up the clock.” He said, as he set the laptop aside. “Because every time it gets out, it changes. Sometimes it creates a parasite, like the body-snatching trees. Sometimes it creates a pathogen, like in the bunker. Eventually though, it’ll evolve to something else. An airborne variant. Or one that doesn’t seem to burn itself out after a half-dozen generations. Suddenly it becomes a super-spreader. Suddenly it’s not just a lab, or an abandoned building, but a city. A state. A nation.”
“And the clock is ticking.” Chris said, finally chiming in as he sat there with his arms crossed. There was a frustrated, strangled look on his face as he took it all in. He and Jill both. The two of them had been silent through much of it, the dawning horror of not just the enormity of the corruption, but the weight of the knowledge that something like the T-virus existed at all. “That’s what you’re getting at. What you’ve been trying to do. What you’ve been hiding.”
“Not for lack of trying, Chris. You can’t just go to someone and say ‘hey, zombies are real, the aspirin company made them and they’re going to kill us all with a bio-engineered plague.’” Daniel grunted, “I needed concrete proof. Solid, indisputable evidence, and even then I had to find someone with enough power to listen and who wasn’t in their pocket. I might have the latter, maybe, if a contact I have pans out. I came here looking for something usable, that wasn’t just vague illusions or the rantings of a lunatic. For all the good that did.”
“Is that how you ended up hanging from that hook?” Jill asked, “We’ve all been ignoring it while you got us caught up, but…”
“But I put on a hundred pounds and grew most of an extra foot since you last saw me.” Daniel said with a snort.
“Don’t forget your rosy complexion, Carter.” The words were light, coming from the ex-Delta, but Rebecca shot her a sour look. Daniel put a hand on her shoulder, pulling her attention away. He shook his head, lightly, and she settled down.
“There’s no simple explanation to it. As you might have guessed, though, I was captured. Jill, you and Rebecca know some of it. Round about a week ago I came to this place looking to find some proof, something I could show you all to prove I wasn’t some crazy terrorist in the making.” That got a few uncomfortable looks going around the room. At least those concerns had been put to bed. “What I didn’t know was that there was an ambush waiting for me here. USS, on the orders of a man named Victor Gideon, who in turn was working for someone he kept referring to as his ‘Master’, were set up in the power plant. They’d apparently deduced that getting power online was going to be my first priority. Not a hard guess considering just how shit the weather is.”
“Is that when they caught you?” Rebecca asked, “When you got to the plant?”
“No. No, apparently they wanted the housekeeping to soften me up first. Getting the plant online was a job and a half on its own. I ran into a few familiar friends there. Those headless, one of the skittery bastards, and to top it off our big melty buddy, lying in wait. They hit me after I ran off the Grafted, lining up on the catwalks like a firing squad.” He sighed, leaning back, his mind going back to those first few moments, when Jacob and his little minions all lined up thinking that was enough to slow him down. He’d been confident, so self assured that he could take them, and then… “Then he came out, like the devil delivered him personally to fuck up my day.”
“He?” Jill asked, leaning forward. “Because it sounds like you know this person. Personally.”
“I did.” Daniel confirmed, a wan, pained smile on his face. “I knew him well. He was the man who trained me to fight. Those moves I used to take you down? All him. All go, no quit, if you hit the ground you get back up, if you break a bone, tough it out, if you spit up blood, wipe it away and get moving. Because he didn’t stop.”
“All those bruises you came home with, the ones you were practically overdosing on herbs to fix up every day.” Rebecca said, quietly, with her eyes widening. “Jesus Danny. I remember arguing with you about it, when you were dragging yourself home looking half dead and then swallowing half an arboretum to fix it.” Her lips pursed, as she swallowed that down. “I thought I was looking at the first real case of someone being addicted to them. I still don’t know how you didn’t boil alive from the side effects.”
“I guess I’m just special like that.” Danny chuckled, but nobody else was laughing. After a moment he cleared his throat awkwardly. Jill picked up from there.
“Who was he, Daniel?”
There was a long pause as the pale, bearded man chewed on it, sourly. “His name, as I knew him, was John. Just John, no last name asked or given. Like I told you before. He has a couple other names, though, one you might recognize, Wesker.” Daniel said as he shot a look at the blonde man hiding behind his sunglasses. “Mr. Death. Or in your case, you would know him as HUNK. The acronym, I was told, stands for Human Unit Never Killed, whatever that means. He one of Umbrella’s other pet projects?”
“Yes, and no. In my circles he’s known only as Umbrella’s top operative. Supposedly he has a perfect record, never having failed a mission or missed an objective, even when his entire team winds up wiped out in the process. Where he came from, his history, his record before joining the USS, all of that is a mystery. He just appeared on the operations rolls some time in the 80s, and has run a flawless mission count since.” Albert said, coolly. Looking at the man, he seemed almost uncomfortable discussing it, or rather, just mentioning the man. Like he was some kind of poltergeist, and saying his name out loud might summon him. Seeing that on Wesker of all people was… disconcerting.
“Wait, you’re telling me that Mr. Death works for Umbrella?” The words were almost a surprise, coming from Jill, who had sat up at the first mention of the name. “Are you sure that’s what he’s called, Carter?”
“I am. MacKinnon and his little torture buddies let it slip more than once.” Daniel asked, and Jill nodded, just once, with a cold look in her eyes. “Why? Are you familiar?”
“Only stories. Legends, really, which is weird to say. It’s hard to explain, if you’ve never been part of Tier 1, but the name Mr. Death is synonymous with things going weird.” Jill said, warily. She looked like she was somewhere else, just for a moment, before she came back to them. “Bad weird. Creepy weird. Sometimes when on-mission, we would find a village or a compound that was wiped out. Everyone dead or gone, killed fast, almost too fast. Like they didn’t have a chance to fight back, that they didn’t even know it was happening, until everyone was glassy-eyed. Not the work of a warlord or a raider band, those you could tell right away from all the carnage, but these were professional.”
“How so?” Chris asked, as he watched his partner seeming to relive something. Jill just shuddered.
“I was in Cambodia in the early 90s, me and the rest of my ops team were tracking this group of slavers that had been operating out of Chamlang, nasty fuckers, real sadists. They’d been taking women and children from coastal villages to sell on to the middle east for drugs and cash, and we were working to take them out. We’d staked out their main base, were waiting on a sabre to come in and back us up. There had to be two hundred men there, maybe more, on top of the latest catch, so we settled in to wait it out.” She said, quietly. “When we moved in nothing was moving, nothing was breathing, everything was quiet as the grave. Everyone was dead, when we infil’d. Most of the slavers had been cut up, knife work, real close in, most of them with their throats cut. The rest? All broken necks, every one. Snapped like twigs, and the catch? They were too scared to speak. Kept saying a black demon rose up from the jungle and took them. Punished them for being evil. When we reported in, all our handler said was Mr. Death came to town.” Jill looked up, coming back to the here and now.
“You never thought he was real?” Chris asked, and Jill shook her head no.
“Most of us thought it was some deep-strike Tier 0 spook division. CIA runs those all the time, the real black baggers, with the redacted names and faces. Nobody ever confirmed anything, and we were told to stuff it. Usual military BS, but there were stories like that going back for almost two decades. They all got blamed on Mr. Death, because anyone who ever saw him was a corpse.” She turned to Daniel, “Are you sure that’s what they called him?”
“It was.” Daniel said.
“And he was the one who trained you?” She asked, before he nodded again.
“How do you know he wasn’t someone just borrowing the moniker?” Chris asked, but it was Wesker who cut in.
“Because anyone who pretends to be Mr. Death rapidly wind up meeting him. Usually to their final detriment. Often they disappear, and the few that are found are brutalized beyond recognition. The fact that you’re still alive is… impressive, Daniel.” Wesker nodded to the man in question. “I’ve no doubt you’re a skilled fighter, but if he was coming to capture you, I’m afraid you were, if you pardon my phrasing, fucked from the start.”
“Yeah. Yeah I was.” Daniel snorted, almost amused. It got a strange look from the others, but he waved it off. “John was testing me, in his own way. Not sure why, or for what, but he said I passed. It was almost heartwarming if it wasn’t for him almost ripping my arm off in the process. Among other things.”
“Thus you were captured. The question remains though, why? And how it resulted in all this.” Wesker waved at him. Daniel settled back and grimaced as he remembered the aftermath. Now comes the hard part.
“As far as I know, they were there on the orders of Gideon, like I said. He… injected me with something. A lot of somethings, including a hard drip of purified herb to keep me alive and healing. The man seemed aware of how well I could handle high doses of Green, and mainlined me on it while I was insensate.” He said, and didn’t notice the look of dawning horror on Rebecca’s face as he continued. “I woke up hanging from a meat hook in one of the side rooms, strung up like a turkey. You know how that went, but the long and short of it was they kept me hopped on herb, awake and aware, best as they could. Something about making sure their little pet project took hold. They needed me stressed out, my body wrung thin so the crap they pumped into me would do its thing.” Then, and only then, did Daniel Carter give them all a smile that chilled their blood, a tiny, withered, vicious thing that only hinted at how much he enjoyed it. “It worked.”
“That was when you got loose, wasn’t it?” Jill asked, rhetorically. Daniel just nodded, settling in, before he glanced over and saw Rebecca, shaking, pale, and upset.
“Becca, what’s wrong?” He asked, reaching out to her. She stared at him, at his outstretched hand and then back again, shying away from his touch.
“I did it.” She whispered harshly, as she stared through him hauntedly, not even noticing when he shook her shoulder, “I was the one who did it. Who brought you to their attention, Danny.”
“What? You aren’t making any sense, Becca.” He tried, but she shook her head violently.
“Last year… last year when I first started getting worried about your herb usage, I snuck a few samples of your blood when I was changing your bandages. I just- I wanted to check, to make sure you weren’t poisoning yourself.” She laughed hollowly, “No, that’s not right. I wanted something that I could show you that you were. I wanted you to stop. You kept on using them like a crutch to patch up every new bruise and scrape you came home with. So I took some of your blood and sent it to Raccoon Memorial.”
“Oh, Becca…” Daniel uttered, not really surprised, and unsure of how to feel about it in general. “It’s-”
“It’s not fine! If what you’re saying is true, I put a spotlight right on top of you. I’m the reason they took you! I’m the reason they tortured you! I’m the reason they infected you! Me, Danny!” She sobbed out, quietly, her face dropping into her hands. Daniel crushed down what he was feeling in an instant. “Because you are. That’s what you’re getting at. They injected you with something, some plague, some mutagen, and it turned you into… into this!”
“Becca, no.” She shook her head, pulling away, but he didn’t let her, “No. You might have contributed, maybe, but they were already looking at me. Already hunting me. They didn’t know who I was, just that I was the guy who kept pissing in their cheerios.” He didn’t know if that was true, but he suspected it to be so. Even if they did, even if Rebecca was the reason, he wouldn’t blame her for it. It was his inability to explain the truth behind everything that led her down that road. He was as responsible for it as she was. More than. Mostly.
She didn’t care.
“Maybe, or maybe not. This Gideon person knowing that you could handle herbs in quantities that should have left you a burned out husk was a monumental factor in them pumping you full of god knows what, then torturing you for days until you snapped and went on a killing spree!” She snapped, desperately.
“Or they found out through the guy training him. Or from the guy who sold him the location of this place. Or from a dozen other sources besides.” Jill butt in, bringing the topic back around. “I don’t know if this HUNK person is actually THE Mr. Death and I don’t care. You said he worked for Umbrella, and he was the one who made you into a modern-day action hero? Because that sounds like a hell of a lot more likely source for your leak. How did you even meet that guy?”
“I met him through the-” Daniel trailed off. He stopped dead cold, mid-word, as something, somewhere connected together. He met HUNK through the Survivalist. He’d almost forgotten, right up until Jill asked him. He hadn’t thought about it, really, not in months. There had just been too much going on. But now that he did, it seemed… awfully convenient didn’t it? The timing of it.
Then he thought back to the info on the mine. Delivered right before the whole area would be cut off by a storm. How had Umbrella known that he’d be there at this specific point in time? So much so that they had managed to not only catch him, but they’d catch him and then have him be trapped here by the spring snows. If Rebecca and the others hadn’t shown up, he would have been up here for weeks, gestating, killing, hunting, with nothing to stop him from just going out over and over again, consuming, evolving, mutating…
It would have been the perfect microcosm. Gideon and his Master wanted to see him evolve, to push the limits of what was possible, but the timing of it… it was almost too perfect. Then he thought back to the Arklay Hospital. How USS had been practically waiting for him to trigger the burnout system, flooding the hospital with antigen-laced water, only to show up at the last minute to ambush them. He’d chalked it up to them setting off some kind of alarm, but the people monitoring the area were all dead or indisposed. The flower and its minions were left to run rampant, over the boundaries of the hospital and infect the mountainside below.
Nobody had cared then, if there was even anyone left to do so. Sundaram, the researcher in charge of keeping an eye on things, had gone out and hired mercenaries to try and cleanse the place when Umbrella stopped responding to their inquiries on what to do. They all died there, so nobody was left to pull the cord, and even if his fucking around with the mainframe was enough to trigger something, they had managed to get there in record time.
Then there was the bunker. It was dropped into his lap oh so perfectly timed between Umbrella’s USS team getting butchered and their response team being sent in. It had also been the best source of data and provable evidence that he’d run across. The hospital was a pittance at best, but he’d had samples, data, sworn testimony, hell, he had the rantings and ravings of Hargreave practically giftwrapped through the security system recordings. Then it was taken wholesale while he was out. Stripped out of his computer and pulled from his pack and it left him back at square one.
But even before that, even going back to that first day. That first hour. He had been there, watching, waiting, with anything Daniel could possibly want, but nothing that he really needed. Gear and weapons were good, but data was the currency of the realm, and the man had been skeevy about it from the word go.
“Danny?” Rebecca asked, quietly, as a grinding sound filled the room, like two tombstones slowly being dragged across one another. Daniel blinked, as he realized that it was coming from him, from his teeth slowly running across one another, as his hands clenched into fists so tight that his nails, no, his claws were digging into his palms. Blood dripped from between his fingers, the pointed tips sharp enough and strong enough to punch through his leathery skin. He barely felt it as incandescent, apoplectic, pure and undiluted RAGE ripped through him with the sudden connecting of the dots.
He didn’t notice the others backing away. Or how Chris’s hand went to his gun, while Jill moved to cover Barry, and even Wesker seemed surprised when he shot to his feet, teeth bared. All he could think of was the man in the next room. The Survivalist had been playing him. Had betrayed him. Had used him while pretending to be on Daniel’s side. He’d had his suspicions, had his doubts, but this? Now? It was all so clear to him.
He needed a weapon.
