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If there’s one truth Alice has learned since the world went to hell, it’s that Rain Ocampo never dies.
The first time it happens, that’s it. That’s the end. Rain is gone and Alice is alone on the train in a red dress headed towards the surface. There’s a hole in her chest, after that—it’s deep inside, too close to her heart to pry apart or close shut with her fingers.
Time goes on, dragging its feet in the dirt; the world dries up and rots the same way humankind does. Spilled blood and guts pave the way through empty cities and ghost towns, filling the potholes and the cracks that only grow wider every time the sun comes up. Death isn’t a thing that comes on wings, as it turns out: the foul smell of decay catches you by the throat, makes your eyes water, and makes you until you spit out your heart, or something else has gotten to work on tearing you open to eat it.
The hole doesn’t really close up; Alice just finds other things to help her stich it into something that could hypothetically begin to heal in due time. And then she loses one, and gains one, and loses more on the way; the stitches pop out and she bleeds a little every time she has to turn away from the sight of someone dead, someone she knew, someone she’ll never forget no matter how long she lives. Sometimes, she wakes up in the middle of the night, and her chest feels so full of blood that it feels like she might choke. Then she comes back to herself, realizes that Rain’s name is stuck in her throat, and lies back down, blinking up at the starry sky with no hope of going back to sleep.
Then Rain comes back—except it’s not Rain. It’s a clone. There are two she meets, flesh-and-blood copies of a woman her heart still hurts at the thought of. One of them has never held a gun in her life—and that one dies, and Alice has grown tired of losing her; the other is a colder version of the Rain she met back at the Hive. There’s no bond here, no memory between them at this point that might spark mercy or even an irregular heartbeat. Alice wants to plead, wants to reach out and touch Rain’s neck and maybe press her mouth to a forehead not shiny with blood and sweat, but she stays put. Knows that Umbrella has a thousand more like her—
And that doesn’t change anything. Alice’s heart is breaking, and the hole in her is opening up again. One by one, every stich is pulled out, and it’s like the not-really-there Jill Valentine is prying the wound open with vicious twists of her fingers, even though they’re half a suburban yard apart.
Rain is dead. Rain Ocampo succumbed to the T-Virus before it consumed the world, one of the first causalities, one of the first to be forgotten by all the suffering that followed her death—except she isn’t dead. Rain’s in front of her, gun strapped across her shoulders, finger hovering near the trigger. Alice tells herself that it isn’t her over and over again, but her heart doesn’t know the difference: all that it knows is the blood filling her chest, making it hard to breathe.
On the ice, Rain’s clone—another Rain—Rain—sheds bullets and stands there, solid, her presence irreversibly magnetic, drawing Alice closer. This isn’t a fair fight; it never was. But Alice is tired, so tired, of seeing her die—in her dreams, in front of her, by her hand or not—so she lifts her gun and shoots the ice.
Rain says, “you can’t kill me,” and Alice thinks wit relief, good, I don’t know if I can kill you again, and then Rain is being dragged down, down, down into those icy, infested depths. She surfaces, gasping, the bites of the undead healing on her skin as her fingers claw helplessly against the breaking ice, and makes a promise. It’s a promise soaked in blood and death with Umbrella’s seal of approval on it, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. If this Rain is the last of all of them—and she doubts this clone is—then she won’t kill her. Not again. Not after—
And then there’s the collapse. The ice cracks under her and her heart gives out; she wakes up in the air with a daughter she doesn’t know and a really-there Jill Valentine. There’s blood in her mouth, in her chest, drying from the cuts on her face, but, god—
Alice will keep this secret. She won’t tell the world about Rain’s fractured, corrupted version of immortality until the day comes. Someday—and Alice needs to believe it, somewhere, in the darker part of her heart—Rain will drag herself, half-eaten but still very much alive, out of the abyss, and she will crawl until she can walk, and she will walk until she can run, and she’ll come for Alice, bulletproof, practically invincible. She’ll cross an ocean and a continent to reach her, if she survives the death that dragged her down to the bottom of the sea.
If Rain keeps coming back—does that mean she never really died? The woman is always a blank slate, written differently every time she’s brought off the assembly line. She will never truly remember Alice, no matter what memories or life they implant in her: there will never be any memory of the train, or the red dress, or Alice’s relieved, I could kiss you, you bitch, and that proves it’s not the same Rain. It’s not the Rain she knew; it may never be.
And that will never matter. Not really. Not when it comes to the long term. Rain will never know Alice—not like they did or might have back when they were trapped down in the Hive—but it’s still Rain, even though things will never be the same.
The end of the world has shown Alice many things, and one of them she keeps tucked in her chest, something to stop the bleeding and fill the hole inside her:
Rain Ocampo will never really die.