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“You’re going back in there?” Claire asks, leaning out the window and squinting worriedly up at Leon. He can’t really blame her for that incredulous tone—anyone sane would be booking it fast in the opposite direction from Raccoon City, away from all the zombies and the deaths, and they wouldn’t look back. Initially, that had been Leon’s plan too.
Then he’d gotten the call on his radio—this is Carlos Oliveira, of the UBCS, does anyone from the RPD copy? Does anyone copy? Officer Valentine and I are holed up in the hospital—
So. Here he is, about to ride back into Raccoon, shoulder still aching something fierce, heart hurting worse, and looking at Claire and Sherry like it just might be the last time. “I have to,” he says. “If I can save just one more person from this hell—”
“I know,” says Claire. “I can come with you.”
Leon shakes his head, glancing at Sherry in the backseat, fast asleep and exhausted. “No,” he says. “No, somebody’s gotta look after Sherry. You go on ahead. I’ll get Officer Valentine and this Oliveira guy out, and we’ll meet up with you—where are we meeting up?”
“Muncy,” says Claire. “You’re sure about this?”
“Have to be,” says Leon. “There’s survivors from the RPD in there. I have to come get them out.” Even if his luck runs out, and god he hopes it doesn’t. There are still people depending on him. “It’s my job,” he says.
“Technically you kinda don’t really have one anymore,” says Claire, but she lets out a breath and lays a hand on the steering wheel, then passes him a thing that looks like a cross between a walkie-talkie and a phone. “My number’s pre-programmed in there,” she says. “Call me whenever you can.”
“How did you—” Leon starts, before he notices the blood on it.
Claire smiles wanly, a shadow passing through her eyes. “Let’s just say, it wasn’t easy to get,” she says. “I’ll see you in Muncy, yeah?”
Leon lets out a breath. One more promise, then. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll see you there.”
He rides back toward Raccoon City on a motorbike, this time coming in through the opposite side. Already he can see the military showing up, far too late, and he parks the bike warily some distance away, watching them set up some kind of checkpoint as they’re detaining people at the gates. All right. Can’t come in through there, but—if Umbrella had one secret way out via the sewers, there ought to be more.
Leon cringes at the thought of having to wade through yet more of the goddamn sewers. His poor fucking uniform. He hasn’t worn it more than a day and already he’s thinking about burning it, because there is no way he is going to get the stench of the sewers out of it now, on top of everything else. And he doesn’t even want to think about what this is going to do to his shoulder.
But duty calls, so he trudges away, looking for a sewer entrance, a storm drain, a manhole nobody’s taken notice of yet. He gets lucky half an hour in, and climbs inside praying to a god he’s increasingly sure is laughing at him that he’s not too late, god, please let him get there in time.
Hold on, Officer Valentine.
--
Carlos isn’t really expecting, well, anyone to show up. He’s seen the RPD, the place had been overrun with zombies, and what few survivors had holed up somewhere he couldn’t reach. By now they’re probably all gone, a thought that makes his stomach clench with regret. Jill, when she’d woken up a little dazed, hasn’t asked after her old workplace—he imagines she must know, already, what happened to it, on some level.
Tyrell’s still trying to raise someone from the military on the radio, trying to ensure their evacuation. Carlos is still searching through the hospital for a way underground, with Jill helping him get through hidden passageways and shit that he hadn’t even realized existed.
“What would a hospital need with this many hidden passageways?” he asks, while they’re trudging through a passageway that, good fuckin’ god, goes through the sewers.
“I asked myself that in the mansion too,” says Jill. “Still have no idea.” She cocks her head to the side, frowns, then holds out her hand to keep Carlos from going any further. “Do you hear that?” she asks.
Carlos strains to hear it, but hear it he does: the sound of something splashing through the sewer water. “Think it’s a zombie?” he asks.
“I think that it’s dangerous,” Jill says, holding her gun at the ready.
Sure enough, Carlos hears the sound of groaning, and despite how familiar he’s gotten with the sound by now, it still sends a chill down his spine. He slams another ammo clip into his assault rifle and follows behind Jill, the two of them barely breathing. And then—
Gunshots ring out, but not from him or Jill.
“What—” Carlos starts.
“Someone’s alive down here,” Jill breathes, and whips around the corner, her gun raised up as she calls, “Freeze!”
And—holy shit, it’s an RPD survivor.
“Oliveira? Officer Valentine?” says the survivor. He’s drenched in sewer water, seeping into the dirty bandage wrapped around his shoulder, but he’s alive. Floating in the water beside him, blood pooling out of its head, is a zombie that might’ve once been a hospital nurse, judging from the scrubs. “I’m Leon Kennedy. I was supposed to start at RPD a week ago—I’m here to get you guys out.”
“Out?” Jill says, baffled. “And—shit, you’re the rookie?”
“Yeah, I know a way out of the city,” says Leon Kennedy. “And. Uh. Yeah, that’s me.” He swallows, and the smile on his face is a sad, tired one. Jesus. This kid’s seen way, way too much, but he came back for more. “I saw the banner. It was…nice.”
Jill lets out a breath, and says, “We were…We were really looking forward to meeting you, rookie.” It’s the first time, Carlos realizes, that she’s said anything about the RPD since they first ran into each other, despite the badge on her belt. “I wish it were under better circumstances than this,” she says now.
“Yeah, this is really not how I thought I’d be spending my first week,” Kennedy says with a sigh. “So. What’s going on?”
--
“How’d you get out of the RPD?” Jill says, once they’ve made it back to the hospital with the rookie in tow, once she’s made the kid sit down so she can better patch his shoulder up. It’s a goddamn miracle Leon’s running around, with that gunshot wound. “What happened there, anyway? I didn’t get a chance to drop by.”
Leon shakes his head, says, quietly, “I’m not sure. My friend and I, we came pretty late already. By the time we got there, almost everybody had turned except for Lieutenant Branagh, and he was just hours away from turning, himself. I—I had to shoot him, when he did.” And isn’t that a kick to the heart, hearing that Marvin, steady and calm and stern Marvin, is dead and gone. “I tried,” Leon says. “I tried, I swear. But he wouldn’t let me get him out.”
“That sounds like him,” says Jill, tiredly. God, poor Marvin. Someone’s going to have to break the bad news to his family in Huntersville, and Jill’s pretty sure it’s going to be her. She’s not going to make the rookie have to explain to anyone that he had to shoot his superior in order to survive. “So you and your friend, you’re the only ones who made it out of the RPD?”
Leon nods, says, “Pretty much. There was another survivor when we got there, besides Lt. Branagh, but—I. I didn’t make it to him in time.” He looks back down and fiddles with his sleeves, says, “And…a woman. A—mercenary, I guess. Saved my life. Um. Died.”
“Jesus,” says Jill, softly. “I’m sorry.”
“Me too,” Leon says, heaving a tired sigh. “Ow.”
“How’d you even take a bullet wound to the shoulder, huh, rookie?” Jill asks. “I thought all the hardened thugs in Raccoon got eaten already.”
“Believe it or not, this was from a scientist,” says Leon, and yeah, Jill can believe it. “And she wasn’t aiming for me, so.” He hisses in pain as she disinfects his wound, then sprays some first aid spray on it to help the healing process along.
“You got any other injuries we should worry about?” Jill asks. “You know, while we’re still here at the hospital.”
“Think that big grey trenchcoat-wearing bastard did a number on my ribcage,” Leon says, and Jill goes still, her heart climbing into her throat. Big and grey, huh? “Officer?”
“Jill,” she says. “Just—call me Jill, rookie. We’re a little past titles now.”
“Okay, Jill,” says Leon. “Call me Leon. Since I’m pretty sure I probably don’t even count as an officer anymore, considering.”
“Who knows,” says Jill, “maybe you’re the captain now.”
“Nah, I think that’d be you, ‘cause you’ve got seniority,” says Leon, and the tiny ghost of a smile that touches his lips is all that’s really left of the earnest rookie that rode in town. God, poor fucking kid. “Or—Claire, she’s my friend, she said Chief Irons died, so. Guess you’re the chief now.”
“Good,” Jill says, with such viciousness in her voice that it surprises even her. “He actively blocked any investigation that could possibly have done something about,” and she waves a hand to indicate the city-wide outbreak outside the hospital, “all of this.”
Leon frowns, and says, “From what she told me, he sounded like a huge asshole. And I believe her, Claire wouldn’t lie to me about that kinda thing, but—he sounded so sane, over the phone.”
“Yeah, he was pretty good at that,” Jill grumbles, “right up until the end.” She wraps his wound in a new bandage, and says, “You know he was in Umbrella’s pocket the whole time?”
“Shit, seriously?”
“Mm-hmm,” says Jill.
Leon exhales, scrubs his hands over his face. Jesus. He’s so goddamn young. “She was right, wasn’t she,” he says to himself, and Jill ties off the bandage.
She asks, “The woman you were talking about, earlier?”
The corners of Leon’s mouth turn up in a sorrowful—she hesitates to call it a smile, with how brittle it is, like he’s only trying to smile because the other option would be too painful to even contemplate. “She was—someone I almost trusted, I guess,” he says, before he straightens back up. “So what are we looking for?”
“A vaccine that can save the city,” says Jill. “You’ve seen the military presence around, I’m guessing?”
“Yeah, had to sneak past a shitload of soldiers,” says Leon. “It’s actually why I ended up in the sewers again. They weren’t going anywhere near there, so I figured I’d fly under the radar if I went back underground.” He grimaces. “I was right, but Christ.”
“So bad news,” says Jill, “they’ll blow up the city on October 1st.”
Leon freezes up, and says, “But—But there’s still survivors here. Families—”
“They don’t care,” says Jill.
“They have to!” Leon says. “They have to, this is a whole city, they can’t—they can’t possibly think they can blow this place up without public resistance—”
“They don’t care,” Jill says again. God. He really is a rookie, saying this, with all this faith in the kind of authority that actually looks out for its underlings. God, Jill’s grown cynical, if she’s thinking that way now. “Tyrell over there,” and she nods to Tyrell, who’s angrily typing away on a computer keyboard, “is working on a way to talk to the military—we’re hoping that if we can find the vaccine…”
“We might be able to stop the missile strike and save the city,” Leon completes.
“But that’s only if the military will listen to us,” Jill says. “It’s just as likely they’ll call us out on it and just nuke the city.”
“That’s not gonna happen,” says Leon. “I’m sure of it. If we show them we have proof, not only of the vaccine but of Umbrella’s crimes—”
“They bought bioweaponry from Umbrella,” Jill points out, and Leon shuts his mouth then, his shoulders slumping as though he’s only just remembered that. Yeah. Definitely a rookie, looking to higher authority for his orders, for some guidance, for help in the middle of a shitshow.
Tyrell says, “Look—Jill, we find the vaccine, maybe we can save the city. Even the most trigger-happy general doesn’t want to fire on an American civilian population, not if they can help it.” He nods to the computer, and says, dryly, “At the very least, it’s bad publicity. As for the crimes…” He sighs. “Don’t know how you’ll make that stick,” he says.
“They can’t exactly cover this up,” says Leon. “The entire city’s gone to hell. Survivors coming out are going to talk, you can’t stop them.”
“They can try,” says Jill. “They did with us.”
That, of course, is when the lights above them begin to flicker and sputter. “Oh, shit, oh, fuck,” Tyrell mutters, as his computer also sputters, before the electricity finally, maddeningly, goes out. “Oh, goddammit. Those things outside must’ve gotten to the generator. I can’t do shit about contacting the military, not until someone engages the backup generator, and Carlos is busy.”
“I’ll go,” Leon says, getting to his feet.
Tyrell glances at him, his brow furrowing in worry. “You sure?” he asks.
“I’ll go too,” says Jill. “We’re the last of the RPD. We’ve got to stick together.” Okay, they’re not exactly the last—Barry, Rebecca and Chris are still alive—but they’re the last ones still breathing, still coherent. Still standing isn’t strictly true, on account of how the city’s infested with dead things that are still, horribly, on their feet.
“Backup’s up on the roof,” says Tyrell. “Be careful. The upper floors haven’t been cleared yet, god knows what’s lurking there.”
“You too,” says Jill, walking over to squeeze Tyrell’s shoulder. “We’ll be back soon as we can. In the meantime, stay safe.”
--
They’re climbing up the stairs when Jill says, “You said you fought a big, grey monster, while you were running through the RPD.”
“I met the asshole in the RPD,” Leon corrects, wincing at the memory of the trenchcoat-wearing dipshit who has absolutely done a number on his ribcage. Ow. He’s going to be so glad once he gets Jill and her friends out of here. “I fought him while escaping from an underground lab. Oh, did you know there was an underground lab being used to develop the virus here, because I didn’t until I got there.”
“I knew about the lab in the Arklay Mountains, in the Spencer Mansion,” says Jill. “I—did not know there were functioning labs underneath Raccoon, although I guess I should’ve. That sounds like Umbrella.”
“Wait, the Arklay murders—” Leon starts.
“—were Umbrella’s fault, yes,” says Jill. “Rabid animal attacks? Mysterious cannibalistic murders? Yeah, those are just the lies they were telling to cover up the fact that they were experimenting on people and animals and turning them into monsters.” Bitterness colors her voice, and she thumbs a shell into her shotgun with some force. “I saw one of those big grey things in the mountains,” she says, finally.
“Oh, fuck,” says Leon. “How’d you get out?”
“Chris blew it up with a rocket launcher,” says Jill. “And then we booked it to the helicopter before the mansion self-destructed.”
“Yeah, that kinda happened here too,” says Leon. “We barely made it out in time.”
“That’s starting to be a depressingly common theme,” says Jill. “I…didn’t know they’d manufactured more of those things. I thought, if we took care of the prototype, that would be the end of those monsters.” She breathes out a tired sigh, and says, “Guess that was just wishful thinking. You know they made a new, worse one? Smart enough to use weapons.”
The thought of it, of the thing that followed him from the RPD down to NEST, being able to use weapons makes Leon’s blood run cold in his veins. “How do you know?” he asks.
Jill’s answering smile is almost ghoulish, in the dim light of their flashlights. “Because the fucker’s been stalking me through the city,” she says. “As far as I can tell, it wants all the former STARS members still in the city dead. And I’m the last one still alive, so.”
Leon cuts a worried glance behind him, out of habit, and Jill nudges his side. “Sorry,” he says, refocusing on the stairs ahead of them. The door to the third floor is shut tight, a yellow lock in place, but Jill slips a lockpick out of her pocket and kneels down, fiddling with the lock.
“Don’t be,” she says, while working. “God, I of all people oughta know, you get stalked by something so monstrous that wants you dead, looking over your shoulder’s the only thing that’s saved your ass multiple times.” The lock clicks open under her hands, and she tosses it to the side. “You don’t have to worry,” she says. “Right now, the thing and its masters probably think I’m dead. For now you’re safe, but once I’m spotted on the rooftop it’ll only be a matter of time until it comes back for me.”
“I’m not leaving town without you,” says Leon. “Monster or no monster, I came in to get you out, and that’s exactly what I’m gonna do.” He chews on his lower lip, then says, “What if you didn’t need to get out onto the rooftop? I can work on getting the backup running on my own. You just need to keep an eye out for things coming through the door.”
“You sure about that?” Jill asks, her brow furrowing. Her finger taps against the trigger guard. In the dim light given off only by their flashlights, she looks haggard, a ghost who just barely managed to crawl back into life.
“I’m sure,” says Leon, who really isn’t sure at all, but they’re the only two survivors of the RPD left. There’s a certain standard of behavior he has to uphold here, especially in front of a veteran such as Jill.
The door swings open into a dark, empty corridor, and Leon swings his flashlight upward as a precaution, then tenses at the sight of a Licker skittering along the ceiling. Jill holds her gun at the ready, and mouths, What the hell?
He puts his finger to his lips, and whispers, “Don’t run. Don’t fire a gun. It’ll hear you.” He gingerly takes a step forward into the corridor, slowly walking past the Licker, his heart racing in his chest. Its tongue sways lazily in the air, and Leon’s shoulder briefly throbs with remembered pain at the sight of it.
Jill follows in his steps, clutching a grenade launcher in her hands like a lifeline, her knuckles white from how tightly she’s gripping it. Her eyes flick upward to the Licker, and Leon can see the questions building there. But she keeps her silence, keeps her footsteps quiet, until they reach a furniture blockade, turn left, and make it into a room that once might have been a dialysis center.
Leon locks the door behind them, then says before she can ask, “Those were in the RPD, too. That tongue is sharp—I saw a guy with his face basically slashed open by its tongue. That thing might be blind, but its other senses can more than make up for it.”
“Oh,” says Jill.
“The good news is,” he says, “you can stun it via a flashbang or something incendiary. The bad news is, I’m out of flashbangs and incendiary grenades.”
“I have some explosive rounds left for this,” says Jill, tapping the stock of her grenade launcher with a fingernail. “Jesus, rookie. What a first day, huh.”
“Yeah, it’s really not how I pictured breaking in the uniform,” says Leon, a faint sense of camaraderie stirring inside of him. Not for the first time since they met, he wishes he’d been able to meet Jill outside of a zombie apocalypse. Maybe he could’ve used her advice in adjusting to Raccoon. Maybe they could’ve been friends, hanging out at the bar after work, shooting the shit. Maybe he could’ve had a lot of things, but the door’s been slammed shut on that possibility—had closed, in fact, the second Leon received that phone call to stay away from the city.
A city doesn’t devolve into hell like this overnight. He knows that. They must’ve already been fighting and dying in here when he’d gotten that call, and for a second his mind drifts to Marvin’s blood-spattered note on the desk that had almost been Leon’s: Be glad you aren’t here, rookie.
God, what must’ve been running through Marvin’s mind when he saw Leon step through the doors of the RPD anyway?
Jill nudges his side, says, “Hey, Kennedy, focus.” She nods to the zombies beginning to take notice of them, and Leon curses under his breath—shit, he can’t lose focus now, can’t stop and think about the hell he’s been through. He needs to get Jill and her friends out of here. They need to find that damn vaccine. They need to fix the generator. No pressure or anything, right?
They make quick work of the zombies together, with Jill yanking one that’s managed to get past his guard off of him before it can bite down and shooting it in the face. Leon returns the favor a second later, blowing another zombie’s head off by sticking Matilda to the back of its neck and pulling the trigger.
“You’re good at this,” Jill says, her voice an odd mixture of pride and sorrow. Leon can make a guess as to why.
“Nothing like a zombie apocalypse to make sure you get good, right,” Leon says, a little morbidly, as they search through the dialysis center. Jill picks open a lock on a chest left lying around, and tosses Leon some shotgun ammunition. Leon throws her a vial of green herbs in response, then pulls out a memo addressed to the hospital staff.
“Hey, look,” he says, and Jill steps closer to look over his shoulder, her eyes flicking over the sentences on the page. “The generator’s activated with a special key, and it’s in the Chief of Security’s office on this floor. Should be easy enough to find a way in.”
“Unless it’s voice-activated,” Jill murmurs.
“What, seriously?” Leon says. “What kind of sci-fi shit is that?”
“You’ve seen Umbrella’s labs,” says Jill, which, yeah, okay, fair point. NEST was so sleek and clean in its design and aesthetic that Leon had half-wondered if he’d stepped onto a set for a new Star Trek movie. “This hospital was sponsored by Umbrella.”
“I thought it was government-funded,” says Leon.
“Here in Raccoon, they’re the same thing,” says Jill, which is—well, it’s not the first time he’s heard something like that. Welcome to corporate America, Ada had said, when the two of them were taking the elevator down to confront Dr. Annette Birkin.
At the thought of Ada, Leon touches a bedpost, his fingertips pressing against the cold metal. It grounds him, that cool touch, redirects his focus back onto the present and onto their current plight. He can’t think about Ada right now, can’t begin to untangle his complicated feelings about her and what they almost had, what they almost were. There’s a generator to fix and a city to save.
So instead he says, “If it’s voice-activated—we’ll figure something out. But if it helps, I don’t think it is.”
--
Leon’s right. The security chief’s door isn’t voice-activated, and the lock on it is easy enough for Jill to pick.
Unfortunately, the reason why the door had a lock on it quickly becomes clear when the security chief’s corpse tumbles out, and—his head barely has any skin left on it. She can see exposed muscles, the remnants of eyes, and the skull has shattered open, exposing a brain. His fingers are deformed, halfway to claws, with strips of skin hanging off of them and flying off as he moves towards them on all fours, and when he snarls at them, his tongue comes swaying outward like a snake.
“Oh,” says Leon. “Well, I guess now we know how those skinless things with the sharp tongues were made.”
“Back up!” Jill snaps at him, and Leon backs up with her. Okay, she knows how to deal with Crimson Heads, but now she has Leon to worry about. From that comment, he’s only seen zombies and Lickers. She loads in an explosive round, takes aim at the monster, and fires, watching the force of the blow knock the zombie back.
It doesn’t put it down, but then she wasn’t expecting it to. These things are far more durable than the usual zombies, so Jill switches from her grenade launcher to her assault rifle, swinging it off her back and shooting off one of its legs to knock it down for good. Then, for good measure, she aims downward and fills its head with lead.
“Is it down?” Leon asks.
“I can’t tell,” says Jill. “Get some gasoline. The only way to make sure this doesn’t come back as one of those skinless freaks is to burn it.”
Leon goes, and comes back with a gas can. Together, they end up burning the thing with Leon’s flamethrower, and the familiar stench of burning flesh fills Jill’s nose. She steps back, and takes note of Leon stepping away to search for the key they came here for, yanking drawers open. Her hands roam over the desk, snatching up the files.
Her eyes catch on a name: Nemesis. When she reads the file, her blood runs horribly cold.
“I found it!” Leon exclaims, startling Jill out of her fearful reverie. The keys jingle as he tosses them up, then catches them in his hand, and Jesus, he looks so damn young in that moment. He shouldn’t be here, she knows that. He should be at home, wondering why the department hasn’t called him in, lazing around eating chips and donuts. Not here, in the middle of this hellscape.
And he went back in twice over, because he thought he could save someone else. Christ. She doesn’t know whether to call him brave or reckless, but either way, the kid’s gone above and beyond in the name of doing his duty to the people he’s never going to work for, after today. Even if they save the city somehow, the RPD’s been damn near decimated—it’s just her, the few STARS survivors left, and Leon, now.
She wonders, morbidly, if Leon will accept a promotion into Captain. Certainly Jill wouldn’t mind becoming Chief, if only to gain access to whatever secrets Irons was keeping for Umbrella’s sake.
“Hey, what is that?” Leon asks, leaning over her shoulder. His face goes pale, and now she remembers—he’d faced a Tyrant, on his first day.
“They called it the Nemesis,” Jill says, softly. “They implanted a parasite into a Tyrant—that thing that was following you around, back in the RPD. They were,” she reads the file over again, bile rising in her throat, “they were in a race with a different lab, trying to make a bioweapon like the Tyrant that didn’t become—”
“Dumb as a sack of rocks,” Leon completes.
“Yeah, pretty much,” says Jill. She swallows the bile back down, and says, “They’re trying to make more of this fucker.” It makes a horrific amount of sense. Why hire mercenaries like Carlos and Tyrell and even goddamn fucking Nikolai, when you can just make your own soldiers, but better and smarter and larger and damn near impossible to kill?
“We have to take them down,” says Leon. “Does it say where they were developed?”
Jill shakes her head, but folds the papers up and tucks it into her binder. The poor thing is stuffed damn near full to bursting by now, but it’s the only thing she’s got from the RPD now. The precinct is gone—there’s nothing left there but zombies and ghosts. “But we have a paper trail,” she says. “We’ll look around after we get out of town.” Even if they save the city, somehow, a dream Jill is trying so hard to hold onto, she knows with a rock-solid certainty that after this, she’s never coming back again.
It feels like betrayal. But the city turned on her first, her and the rest of STARS.
“And to do that we need to get this generator turned on,” says Leon. “Right. Okay. Lead the way, Officer.”
--
Leon spots the Nemesis stomping around on the ground once he makes it to the roof, shoving zombies and cars aside with a casual manner that Leon finds uncomfortably familiar. Trenchy was the same way, before Leon blew him to bits with an anti-tank gun. The difference between them, though, is that Trenchy didn’t bother to talk much, just tried to kill Leon as fast and as messily as possible.
He can hear the word the Nemesis groans even from the rooftop. “Staaaaaaaaaars,” it growls. Even now it’s still looking for STARS members, like Jill, and Leon casts an uneasy glance back at the door that Jill’s hiding behind, to keep the monster from seeing her.
“Would it know if you’re still alive?” he asks her.
Jill shakes her head, and says, “Not unless Nikolai’s figured it out.”
“Who?”
“Carlos and Tyrell’s coworker,” says Jill. “Former coworker, anyway, considering he got their leader killed for some fucking combat data.”
Ah. “And he’s in charge of this Nemesis?” Leon asks.
“I don’t think so,” Jill ventures, after a moment. “Likely he’s just assigned to it as its handler, for the moment. I don’t know if he’s figured it out yet, but, and I really hope he hasn’t, but realistically, I don’t think he’s written me off just yet.” Her lips press into a thin line, and she says, “You’re gonna be in his sights too. You took down a Tyrant.”
“I had some help,” says Leon. “This anti-tank gun just—fell right in front of me.” He’s pretty sure Claire must’ve thrown it to him. She’d taken a different route to get to the train, she must’ve found it somewhere.
“Still, you went up against one and you survived,” says Jill. “That’s something.”
“You’ve been going up against this thing a lot, right?” Leon asks her, glancing around the rooftop. There are zombies near the back-up generator—of course there are—and Leon takes note of how many there are. Three isn’t great, but it’s still doable, he’s got enough buckshot in his shotgun left. “And you’re still here. That’s something.”
“It’d be better if killing it actually stuck,” says Jill. “Don’t suppose you’ve still got that anti-tank gun stored somewhere?”
Leon huffs out a tired laugh, and says, “Not really, no. I gave it to Claire and she used up the last of it blowing up a monster that got onto the train.”
“Damn,” Jill sighs. “I’ll have to find something else, then.”
“I’m sure you will,” says Leon, racking his shotgun as soon as he’s sure the Nemesis is nowhere in earshot. He steps closer to the zombies, and sidesteps one that lurches towards him, taking it down with a blast toward the back of its head. The other two he takes care of easily, and he’s slinging his shotgun back over his shoulder when he hears another guttural moan. He whips around, just in time for a zombie to grab hold of him, cold, blood-slicked hands gripping onto his shoulders.
Leon steps back, pushing against the zombie as best as he can, but he can’t—he can’t quite reach his knife—
A gunshot rings out, and Leon shuts his eyes and mouth as he feels brains splatter all over his face. When he cracks them open again, Jill’s pulling the now headless corpse off him, saying, “Jesus, Leon, you okay?”
“I’m all right,” he says, wiping the blood off his face. “Is this going to—”
Jill shakes her head, and says, “Honestly, Leon, if you were infected, you would’ve turned by now. You’ve been fighting these things the whole night, and you’ll notice, the virus acts quick.”
Leon has noticed. It had just barely been two hours between when he’d first met Marvin to when he’d seen the lieutenant shambling around. “I’m probably just really lucky,” he says.
“Some of it is luck,” says Jill, “at least the part where you’re lucky enough to be immune to this strain. The rest…it takes a lot more than luck to survive this city. I think you know that.” She claps him on the shoulder, smiles tiredly, and says, “When we get out of here, and I find the rest of my old team, you ought to come with us. We’re going to take down Umbrella.”
“There’s a couple other people I have to look after first,” he says. “If you want, you and Carlos and Tyrell can come with me to Muncy, to meet up with them.”
“Well, the more the merrier,” says Jill. “And after that, we’ll throw that party you were supposed to have, banner and all. Although we’re probably going to have to change the banner out for something more appropriate.”
Welcome, Leon. The letters, a cheery yellow on bloodstained blue, are indelibly printed into his memory forever. He sighs, smiles, and says before he gets down on his knees to start working on the generator and bring the power back to the hospital, “Y’know, I think I’d like that very much, Jill.”
“Yeah,” says Jill, with a wistful tone like she’s missed a good party, “me too.”