Chapter Text
‘Born under a bad sign,
Been down since I began to crawl,
If it wasn’t for bad luck,
You know I wouldn’t have no luck at all…’
The lyrics of your current favorite song keep repeating in your head, as you try not to fall asleep during the third lecture of the day. Botany drains the life out of you- how botanists stare at plants and cells all day and not feel the urge to quit their job is a mystery to you. You're interested in human physiology, not studying a small part of a random plant which will have no impact on your life whatsoever.
The class in which you’re sitting, trying to keep up with your professor’s blather, is filled with around a hundred other half-asleep students. You had promised yourself to do the best you could to top the class- you’ve had consistently good grades and enough internship experience to easily guarantee you your dream job- provided you tried hard enough.
But your botany professor must want your entire batch to fail or something, because his classes were like watching paint dry. For an hour and a half.
At one point during the class, you had tried to practice shadow drumming on the table to keep yourself awake- hell, you’ve damn near slapped yourself awake multiple times, yet the sweet lull of the professor explaining away dihydroxy-acetone-phosphate makes you want to just drift away. The gentle breeze drifting in from the window you’re sitting next to isn’t helping either.
Just as your head droops downward, the girl sitting beside you- her name being something you'd forgotten mere moments after she told you, points to the window.
“Uh, hey. The security guard. There's something wrong with him, look.” She whispers, nose scrunching up.
You drowsily lift your eyes to the guards’ post and… she’s right. He seems panicked, abandoning his post to run towards your building. You squint to see what he’s running from, or why, but don’t see anything. The barricade at the small guard’s post has nothing but a stopped car waiting to be let in. You squint again, leaning forward. The car has… noone in it. Strange.
You try to see if there's someone in the back seat, but the bell rings and the professor dismisses all of you. Sighing, you stuff your books into your bag, glad to finally have a break. Making your way to the washrooms, you ignore the hushed gasps and whispers that surround the halls.
Some students seem to be flocking towards the windows and pointing down to the field area- probably something to do with the guard, you'll hear about it later anyway. For now, you need to piss, and urgently . You set your backpack down on a chair and enter a cubicle. Bored, you start to read the scribbles on the walls, thinking about how very juvenile it is to use bathroom walls as a method of mass communication. A conversation about some friend of yours scraped into the wall catches your eye and you read through it, making a mental note to tell her about it later.
A few minutes later, you come back out and wash your hands. As you turn the faucet closed, you hear a loud thud of something big falling over from outside– heavy enough to cause a shockwave that you can feel through the floor. You quickly pull out your handkerchief, and halfway through drying your hands, you can hear the muffled noise of people suddenly screaming. There seems to be a lot of commotion about something. Curious, you shove the handkerchief back into your pocket and walk towards the door- a dumb decision, really.
‘What the hell is it this time, has someone discovered another dead rat behind the cabinets, or...?’
Walking out, you halt abruptly in your tracks at the horrifying sight. The door slams shut behind you, barely audible over the chaos that is the hallway.
Your feet feel bolted to the floor, heart dropping to your stomach.
Things don't register for the first few seconds, because all you see, all you hear, is a terrified, screaming crowd of your peers. Scanning the mass of people for the source of commotion, you notice the splatters of blood on the floor.
Correction: the rivers of blood.
Your eyes are glued to the crimson fluid flowing everywhere- a pop of color in contrast to the mostly beige hallways, along with bits and pieces of… is that flesh? You force your eyes toward what the people seem to be running from, much against your own will.
Vaguely humanoid, those… those
things
, break down the main door, running after people, taking bites out of their shoulders as they violently cry out in pain. The guttural, piercing cries bounce off the walls of the hallway, only spurring the
things
on.
You feel the blood rush through your ears as you watch people panic, trying to fend them off. Masses of pale looking, staggering things that you’re pretty sure used to be people, because you recognise some of them- even with their faces replaced with raw mouths and jagged teeth.
Remaining still, you take a moment to put things together, eyes glancing at the exit. More of them seem to be coming in from there. You’ve seen enough movies to know what
those
are. They're human-eating, horrifyingly gurgling, walking corpses. You believe the correct terminology is…
zombies
.
You observe a woman, against every fiber of your being warning you to screw your eyes shut, whose shoulder is being violently torn off by one of those creatures. Her gut-wrenching scream can only be called terrifying, the English lexicon not nearly vast enough to describe the tight feeling in your chest.
You are absolutely sure you will never, EVER forget that sound.
Finally, finally, you find the courage to move and grab your bag, making a run for it. You make it barely ten steps into the main hallway when one of them comes at you, and you hastily move out of its way, afraid of being touched by it. The mass of it is barely hanging onto its bones, and the gurgling sound it creates is enough to give you nightmares for a lifetime. Slowly backing up against a wall, you notice that the zombie is wearing the uniform the guard was wearing and… ah, fuck. You’ve effectively cornered yourself between the walls and him.
Great job. Clap for yourself.
He- no, it - turns around, looking at you.
You're dead. You are dead. You have sealed your fate.
You look around for anything you can throw at it, and your eyes rest at a fire extinguisher an arm’s length from you. Convenient. Quickly pulling it out of its holder, you throw it full-force at the zombie, falling backwards onto your ass in the process. You crawl away from the zombie, now knocked out a few feet away, and scramble to your feet. Then, you run as fast as your feet can take you, the way you came from.
‘Where the hell do I even go? The way out, it's blocked.' You think for a second. Zombies are supposed to be dumb, right? If you were lucky, these fuckers would not know how to climb stairs. IF you were lucky.
'Higher ground. Yeah, higher ground will do. Clock Tower?' Contemplating, you glance to the direction of the clock tower and immediately discard the idea, seeing another horde of them breaking in from that side.
‘Nope-nope-nope, too many of them. Shit, where to go?’
You hear a growl.
An honest to god, hungry-rabid-dog type growl.
You whip your head around, and see a familiar figure. You recognize its shirt, actually. The real horror was the shade of diarrhea yellow he was wearing.
‘Who- Oh, I’m not having any of this. Is that our botany professor?’ This is not what you meant when you said you wanted him to kill you instead of assigning two-thousand-word essays on vascular plants and-
It lunges at you.
You run.
Well, who wouldn’t? You knew better than to voluntarily fight these. For you, the best way to avoid danger has always been to prevent it altogether. Hiding and running is better than staying and fighting. Or so it was until now.
Running around to nowhere in particular- you’re just trying to avoid those ugly bastards- you look for any place you can rest, silently maneuvering around the zombies. You need a place to be safe till you make a plan. Or to find someone who could help, like a proper, responsible, logical person. You highly doubt that your zombie-apocalyptic-movie-nerd self would be of ACTUAL use in this situation.
So far, the only thing you had observed was that they could be avoided if you were silent enough. Through bitter experience, you learn that if you enter their line of sight, they will attack.
Highly doubt that more than a handful of people will still be alive. Don’t really see a lot of humans around here. At least it's more quiet on this side of the building. These things are... dumb, but move fast. Still need to find higher ground. Chancellor’s office? OK...? OK, that works!’
You finally see a completely empty hallway and run toward it. It has a staircase in the corner. Yes! You go up the stairs, locking the stairway gates behind you as you go. They look too stupid to open them as it is, but better safe than sorry?
Climbing- no, more like running- up three flights of stairs, you gasp for air. You wait at the top for a couple of seconds, catching your breath as you lean on the railing. You hear gurgling sounds from downstairs mixed in with screams, and stumble away from the stairs in order to drown out the ugly noises.
You press your back against a wall and slide down, a leg extended and hands covering your ears. So far, it was like your body had been on autopilot. Now what? Tears start to form in your eyes from both a lack of breath and the thought of the people down there, as you try not to freak out. The screams, still audible, aren't helping.
You're alone, how will you get out of here? What if your family, your friends are… gone? Wheezing for breath, you realize that letting your feelings in at a time like this will only delay you- and you need to be efficient to live and make it out of this mess.
For a second, you contemplate just living out your life on the third floor of the building where you’re relatively safe from any hostiles. You smile at the mere stupidity of the plan and slowly get up, wiping your face with the sleeve of your sweater. Your legs are sore and your ass hurts, but you can do it, right?
You pretend that your overwhelming feelings are a piece of paper. In your mind, you crunch up the piece of paper, take a lighter, and let it burn. It’s a weird method but if it works, it works. That's all it is- a moment of weakness that you cannot afford to have more of. You need a plan, you WILL get out of here.
Looking around, you see the heavy wooden doors to the office, and slowly walk over to them. You put your ear to the doors to listen in for any sounds of the zombies, and hear none. Lucky you. You push the doors open.
Going inside, you see what a chancellor’s office would usually look like. A large, carved wooden desk with a comfortable looking chair, a set of worn leather couches, a lush carpeted floor and beautifully decorated walls and ceiling. Only, the chancellor is missing. You expected as much.
There isn’t a way to lock the doors from inside, so you push the couch towards the door to block the entrance. After angling it correctly, you throw your backpack onto it and walk over to the windows to draw the blinds. You squint at the sunlight streaming into your eyes and try to observe what’s going on downstairs. You expected a horrible scene outside, and you expected correctly.
First thing you notice: Fire. There was fire everywhere . How would you leave?
Second thing you notice: A huge crowd of those things- zombies- among which you can recognize some teachers and a lot of students you know, panicking and trying to run. You want to help, somehow, but well. You aren’t really close to anyone at the university, your only best friend was out sick- thank heavens for that- but still, you feel terrible. You’ve known these people for more than a year now.
Turning away from the windows, you walk over to the couch and sit down, opening up your backpack. For the first time, you’re glad people made fun of you for having way too many things in your bag. You name it:
-
band aids (you were clumsy)
-
a small pocket torch (its required, okay?)
-
a dictionary (for looking up heinously weird words like gerrymandering)
-
a small roll of tape (that’s normal, right?)
-
a large pair of scissors (uh… okay, that’s going a little overboard, maybe)
-
a laser pointer (excellent for distracting frogs)
-
a tiny screwdriver (you thought it was necessary, and it has come in handy a few times, so...)
-
and your drum-sticks (absolute necessity, especially for light thwacks to your friends when they were being dumb), among other odds and ends.
You curse. Even with all of this crap in your bag, you need to find proper supplies if you want to make it out of this place before the evening comes. Taking a swig of water, you get up and look around for useful shit you can plunder. Hey, not like anyone will be using it in the near future, right?
‘Computer, huh? Yeah, I’ll take the USB, it's small anyway. Might be useful.
Is that a hand towel? Looks clean. Now looks mine.
Walking around, you spot an axe lying on the floor behind the curtain. That's… an odd place for an axe, you think, until your eyes land on the broken glass beside it. Making a mental note of the shattered emergency case on the wall, you bend to pick the axe up. It's got blood on it, you notice.
It would appear that someone failed to protect themself, given the proximity of the axe to its original case.
Oh, well. A weapon is a weapon, and you could really use one right about now. You just hope its previous user isn't…
lying…
somewhere nearby.
Feeling its weight in your hand, you realize you don't really know how to swing one, especially one this heavy.
That's a future me problem. The weight just makes it more lethal… I think. Could be good to kill those zombies, maybe.
Thinking of, where did the zombies even come from?
Wait, wait. Hold on.
Your mind begins to link together incidents, and you feel stupid that you hadn’t connected the dots yet.
Oh.
Oh, there is no way in hell that it's not related to THAT.’
Your thoughts immediately whisk away to the internship you had done at Umbrella- the “ pharmaceutical company” . There was something about it that had rung alarm bells in your head, and it wasn't just the lavish pay they offered you. You had gone there with your oldest friend, Talika. Being a big company, it was good for your career because you wanted to be a medical officer. Or researcher, if things went south.
On around the 20th day of your time there, you and Talika had gone to the lowest floor of the building to grab some vaccine samples, for microinjecting some fish with cancerous cells- nothing dubious. Just a bunch of research crap you were helping with.
Oh, but that fateful day, when both of you had exited the lift onto the floor, you saw the exact opposite of the usually quiet, deserted hallways and labs.
A bunch of vexed scientists with hand-held machines that looked eerily similar to flamethrowers, yelling at each other, for ‘letting
IT
escape!’, ‘putting the entire facility in danger!’ and the occasional ‘damnit to hell!’ was all you could process. They were hurrying around and had taken no notice of you two standing there, staring at them.
Three of them rushed into a hallway that you had never been in before (it was only accessible to high level researchers- you never understood why a lab required THAT much security), as two others came out with blood and gooey stains on their lab coats.
“Hey, uh, T? This doesn’t look good… Let’s just go. We can come back for the vax later.” You had told her, in an urgent tone.
“Please, yes. Something’s off, and they can deal with it. Come on, well go back the way w- Ah! What the hell?”
Your terrified emotions only multiplied tenfold as you heard an alarming siren go off, and the scientists telling- no, screaming- at you to get the fuck out of there. Both of you, shit-scared, looked at each other and made a run for the emergency staircase. After safely making it out of the basement floor, you met up with a few researchers on your floor and told them about what you saw. They listened to you carefully, their eyes widening when you mentioned what the scientists were screaming about, and they immediately started making calls and scrambling to their computers. As the news reached the other scientists, nearly a quarter of them on your floor emptied out to the basement level.
About an hour later, they had informed you that everything was okay ,that it was nothing and that you and Talika should probably forget about it. They were quite insistent, actually, on the point that you shouldn’t feel the need to tell anyone about this.
One of the researchers who you were close to, Alice, had pulled you aside later that day to talk to you.
Her voice had expressed a sort of urgency, her tone distressed.
“Take this.” she had said, handing you a small vial with something green in it. She pressed a syringe onto your palm as well, and continued, “You’ll know when to use it. I can’t tell you anything now, but if anything goes wrong, use it. I- I did some things, pulled some strings. Something big is coming.”
It had made the both of you very suspicious, but no matter how much you tried to question Alice, she refused to elaborate.
You hadn’t done anything about it since it had only been a couple of days ago- besides, what could one do about this sort of thing anyway? Complain to the authorities? They'd either laugh it off as something that didn't happen, or reassure you by telling you it was probably nothing since Umbrella labs usually test on animals. You had already been suspicious of Umbrella running shady experiments, because what kind of lab requires the security measures of a goddamn bank ? Most of the labs in the lowermost levels were prohibited to enter, and only the head virologists were allowed in there- most of which worked at NEST, a sort of sister-facility. Paired with all the rumors you had heard about human experiments and harmful viruses (some of your co-workers had gone as far as to say that the scientists were paid off by the military to run experiments- pretty scary shit for an intern), you had begun to get extremely uncertain on whether Umbrella was solely a pharmaceutical company.
You had just begun thinking of quitting the job when Umbrella themselves took the decision to terminate you. They had, for some reason, decided to keep Talika for the time being because they were "short-staffed."
Ah, she was always more proficient than you. The company had given you two more weeks on the job, but it hadn’t finished before this... thing ... happened. You were supposed to show up for work tomorrow, actually.
The vial is in your backpack, the memory is fresh in your mind, and you know it can’t possibly be a coincidence.
You’re shaken out of your thoughts when you hear an ear-piercing scream come from outside. You run to the window and watch as a zombie-thing eats another one of your teachers.
You immediately look away. You need to go to someplace safe- like, actually safe. Maybe you could even gather enough supplies, find Talika and go investigate stuff in Umbrella. Yeah, you could go there and look for Alice too.
It’s dangerous, but what other choice did you have? Leave the city?- to go where?
You believed you were many things, but a coward was not one of them. Umbrella it was, then. It would probably be the safest place in the city anyway, with the levels of security employed by them.
Okay, so now you have a plan. At least half a plan. All you need to do is escape- but how? You live off-campus. Your car is at your house. All you have is a bicycle parked on the ground floor. Granted, you could break into a car, (you were suspiciously good at that- you had once asked a shady kid to teach you how to do it, for god only knows what reason) but that needs time and these zombies can only rush you.
You check your watch.
5:04 PM, September 27th 1998.
The sun will set soon, and a situation you do not want to be in, is: outside in the dark, fighting zombies with nothing but your drumming sticks. You have to move, and you have to move fast.
‘Aight. Objective 1: Get downstairs and find your bicycle
Objective 2: Go home and gather supplies.
Objective 3: Let’s not get THAT ahead of ourselves. With the singular braincell I have left in my brain, it’ll be hard enough to complete the first two.’
First, you push the couch out of the way and open the doors slightly to check if there are any zombies that made it past the staircase gates. You find none. Then, you gather all of your belongings, grab the stolen- ahem, borrowed- hammer and make your way out of the office. You tiptoe around and look for a way out that does not involve the staircase down. There should be a fire exit somewhere, right? That should be relatively safe. You roam around the hallway and eventually find one. It looks really, really old, though. A lot of the buildings in Raccoon look like they were built more than a hundred years ago, actually. Your campus was not an exception.
You open the small window and put a foot down on the decayed platform experimentally, checking to see if it’ll hold your weight without collapsing. Deeming it stable, you jump onto it, lower the rusty ladder and begin your descent. You make sure to land as silently as you can when you jump off the creaky platform. You can spot a lot of zombies scattered here and there amongst the fire.
Your heart does a backflip as you think of the consequences of being spotted by them.
Fortunately, they’re pretty far off from you, the closest being about fifty yards from you, you estimate.
Going around the back of the building, you eventually reach the front side.
If you remember correctly, your bicycle should be near the entrance, and, ah-ha! You can see it now. What you can also see is 3 zombies around it.
‘Uuuuuuuugh...’ is all you have to say.
From the side of your bag, you produce the ‘borrowed’ axe. Your grip on it tightens, and as you jog closer, you throw it at them, using most of your weight as counter-force for the heavy object. You always liked the idea of long-range weapons. No unnecessary interaction with the foe, and it gets the job done. Not that this was your best idea -an emergency axe is nothing close to a proper weapon- but hey. At least it hit one of them in the head, which in turn knocked the other down, so… still a win.
Scientific analysis: Oh, they are SO dumb.
You distract the third by yelling at it and running away, only to circle back and unlock your bicycle quickly in the blazing heat from the spreading fire. It works. You get on the bicycle and push the pedals with your feet as fast as you can, putting immense pressure on your knees. It doesn’t matter, you’ve got to get out of there fast. Some of them lunge at you through the fire, but you’re fast enough to narrowly avoid them and weave through the flames. Your heavy bag is not helping, but you can't really get rid of it.
Four exhaustingly scary minutes later, you make it out of the campus onto the free road. There’s not a lot of them around, probably because the campus had absolutely nothing outside it within a 5-mile radius.
You need to find a car.
You also need water.
You need a lot of things.
But at least you’ve made it out.