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All he could hear were their voices. They wailed around him, their thoughts pounding in his head as he reached out towards the doctor, begging for the syringe. He could barely think. The appendages wildly whipping behind him struck into the ceiling and the floor of the lab, pulling plaster and tiling into the gaping maw that he could feel replace his stomach. Saliva dripped down his legs, his unending slobber staining the floor as much as the blood that sprayed as the vicious teeth clamped down on the doctor’s head. He was hungry. He was scared. He wanted help.
Nonononononono—that was the woman, Agatha. Her voice cried out as a banshee from inside his mind, near deafening to the eternal torment from the others. Their pleas and cries—their final thoughts—rang on repeat and he wanted help. He needed help. The syringe. The cure. That could help him why was nobody helping him he didn’t mean to harm anyone he didn’t want to hurt anyone he was so hungry he wanted help he wanted help he wanted help he wanted help—
Movement. The ginger doctor, Stanley, the one who struggled to collect the cure—the cure that could help him—ran. Even through the residue of the falling plaster, the fire extinguisher’s smoke, he could see the door out of the lab slide open. He reached out to the man who was taking away his help, but was too slow. It shut on him as the blood-covered man trembled. The coward. How could he? How could he? Didn’t he know how much pain he was in? Didn’t he know how hungry he was—how he needed help?
He ripped open the door, and the man on the other side ran. He chased him, crying out for the cure—for the man to just stop and give him the cure—but his garbled moans fell on blood-deaf ears. The shattered window, the one he could view the tormented, fire-blazing city from, was behind the man and he charged him, grabbing him tightly and throwing them both out the window.
His new legs—a grotesque amalgamation formed from the disease and from the organic material his ravishing maw consumed—protected his body as they landed. The doctor held the syringe in his hands, and he called out to the man, “H—help me….” His voice sounded nothing like it should. A deep vibration rattled his bones as he called out again, “The cure….” He could barely understand himself, but it seemed that the doctor could.
He held the syringe above his head and, without a single ounce of hesitation, jabbed the needle right into the unblinking eye that formed itself beside his head. Pain rippled through his body as the doctor pressed in on the syringe and the green liquid made its way into his body. Without thinking, he swallowed the doctor like he did the man’s coworkers, and collapsed onto the ground. The tendrils that grabbed and killed and fed him wildly flailed in the air, their ends alight by an never-ending burn. His claws dug into the material beneath him as his vision was blinded not only by the lights of the helicopters whose blades cut through the voices, but by his own dying retinas.
The last thing he felt before succumbing to the silent darkness was a painful, dull rip; his muscle and sinew and skin freeing itself from his dying form. He would never wake again.
The road in front of him was white, the moonlight reflecting off the ice frozen on the ground. He barely registered the dashboard in front of him, the cracked glass obscuring half of his view, the stringent smell of fresh blood, until a hand moved to block his face. Bryan slammed on the breaks as he smacked away the hand, his heart jackrabbiting in his chest.
He swore, “Fuck!” as the wheels slightly slid on the ice before coming to a stop. Bryan backed away from the passenger in his car, throwing open his door and falling onto the ice. Sitting in shotgun, her seatbelt caringly belted in, was that woman. The woman who he heard the name of but could not remember the name of—that fucking monster woman. She—he’d hit her with his car back before even arriving in Raccoon City. Before being bitten. Before….
Bryan slowly closed the driver’s door to his car with his foot. His legs felt numb, and his mind turned at an abysmal pace as tired eyes slowly glanced around. This was… not the lab. This was… not Raccoon City. This was… the road. This couldn’t be the road. No, this couldn’t be the road because he had long since left the road, long since entered through that tunnel, long since fought his way up to the 28th floor of the hospital. His eyes lingered on his shoes, his J’s that he spent more than he probably should have on. They weren’t melted. They were on his feet. Sure, they were scuffed and well-used, but they looked much cleaner than he last saw them—no sewage or blood stained the fabric. He distinctly remembered his shoes melting into the tiled floor of the hospital, though.
Slowly, he backed away from his car and got to his feet. Bryan felt his body for injuries, searching into his pockets for the pistol (gone) or any spare ammunition he may have missed (none). He rolled up his left sleeve, his throat dried from the anticipation of what he was going to see—the bitemark, with it’s veins and blisters that turned him into one of those things. Those monsters.
His arm was clean. No bitemark to be seen at all. “No, no, no, that’s impossible,” he muttered. Bryan rolled up his sleeve further, but he was still uninjured. “Wrong arm?” He checked his right and came away with the same verdict: He hadn’t been bitten.
That was impossible. He had been bitten. That young girl bit him before he… defended himself from her. That bitemark had turned him into one of those monsters just moments after he delivered part of the cure, had…. Bryan tentatively opened the backdoor of his car and grabbed his courier bag. The woman in his passenger seat tried to grab him but he shut the door on her and locked the car before she could.
Bryan ran to the other side of the road, well away from the trapped monster, and unzipped the bag. Inside was the vial meant to contain the missing component of the cure. It was empty. No yellow liquid—no liquid of any colour—in sight. The vial was intact, no glass was broken, but the liquid was just missing. “What the fuck?” he whispered as he zipped the bag back up. “What the fuck?”
He could remember everything so vividly. The farmhouse, the dog, the monsters, the tunnel, the child, the bite, Maxine and Paul, the sewers, the raining bodies, the elevator, the maternity ward, the lab. His recording for Michelle. Bryan grabbed his phone—no service still, shocker—and opened his voice app. Only two recordings, none of them were his confession from the parkade. “What the fuck?” he whispered for the third time.
A bloody hand smacked against the glass, startling Bryan from his phone. It slipped from his grasp and fell onto the icy road, skidding to a stop under the car. “Fuck!” he yelped as the hand slowly dragged itself off the window. The woman was there. The woman he hit with his car was there, and she was insane and a monster and was going to kill him if he didn’t get away. He had no guns to defend himself with (or shoot out his engine with), and if that cop caught up with them, she’d kill him too.
Bryan crouched to see where his phone landed. He slowly made his way over to his car as it begun to shake, the woman trying to escape. His hand shook as he reached for his phone, missing it twice before grasping it and pulling away. He glanced down the road, quickly debating on where the fuck to go before high-tailing it back the way he came. He took three steps before remembering to grab his courier bag; he booked it.
“Someone else can fucking deliver this!” he cried as he ran. It was much easier to run without an injured ankle, and he hoped that the woman wouldn’t chase him. Why should he have to deal with this? For an extra pay? No, no, even if what he remembered was just a hallucination or something, he couldn’t deal with it. But it couldn’t be a hallucination because the woman was real, she was real and she was fucking chasing him again!
“FUCK!”
Where the fuck was that cop? At the very least, he could stall her long enough so that they could both get the fuck away from Raccoon City, if not kill her. (With what happened to the woman in his memories, he doubted she’d die. After all, taking a bullet to the heart did nothing.) Bryan could hear the woman gaining on him, could hear her getting closer and closer and closer and tears welled up in his eyes as he realized that she was going to get him finally. She was going to kill him, and he wouldn’t be able to tell Michelle how much he loved her, how he did want to start a family with her, how he was an idiot for what he said—
The woman pounced on him and dragged him to the ground. Bryan tried to force her off, but she was too strong and pinned him to the ground. He shrieked as her mouth dislocated like a snake and bit down on his neck, ripping away his flesh and throat and leaving him choking on his blood. The woman ripped off more and more of his throat as Bryan felt his head fog up, his limbs sink into jelly, and the world painfully fade to black.
Officer Wilson of the Arklay County Sheriff Department would come across his body, still warm, abandoned on the road. The only remains of the pedestrian would be footprints in the snow, leading away into the woods. Her body would eventually be found, the woman having taken her own life in the only moments of sanity she had since being infected. They would find remnants of the cure in her saliva, in Bryce Hodukavich’s blood which stained her mouth and clothes.
The road in front of him was white, a thin layer of powdered snow covering the deadly ice beneath. The faint glow of the dashboard before him went unnoticed as he drove forward, his foot on the gas. Suddenly, the tires slid and his heart jackhammered in his chest as he gripped the wheel and slammed on his breaks. The tires turned, unstopping, as the car slid off to road and onto the snow-lined grass. Now with traction, the car came to a stop mere millimetres before colliding into a tree.
Bryan heaved in his seat, eyes wide, as the phantom pain of having his throat ripped out of his still-breathing body sent flashes of white blanching his mind. Something shifted beside him, and he flinched so badly he opened the driver’s door and fell out of the car again. Without hesitation, he slammed the door shut and booked it down the road.
“What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck,” he said, swallowing down a sudden wave of nausea. His throat didn’t want to work probably and couldn’t stop the acidic bile that crawled its way up his non-torn esophagus. He grabbed tightly onto his knees for stability as everything in his stomach—which wasn’t much, he was planning to get something to eat in Raccoon City—made its way onto the icy road. “What the fuck was that?”
Mittened hands grabbed at his throat and found nothing wrong. No bitemark, no blood, not even a scratch. He threw off his mitts and grabbed at his throat again, the Colorado cold nothing compared to the numbness he felt in his heart. There was nothing wrong with his throat. Just like there was nothing wrong with his face, his legs, his eyes, his arms, his everything. Bryan swallowed. His throat felt just fine. But that woman had ripped it out. She had munched on it like it was a snack and he had…
He had died, hadn’t he?
Nope, nope, nope—first off, that was impossible. Second off, this was not worth the pay. It wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t worth it so he was just going to abandon the vile in his car with the monster woman, get a bad reputation for failing to complete his service, and possibly lose his career. But he wouldn’t be dead, so there was that. But without a job, a voice in his head said, how will you afford a child?
Bryan stopped in his tracks. Right. Yes. Right. Michelle was pregnant, and he wanted to have a kid with her. But they couldn’t bring a child into this world while he was unemployed. No, if was going to refuse this service then he needed to return the package to the hospital he got it from and inform Dr. Stokes that she needed to get someone else to do it. Sure, that person was probably going to get killed by those monsters but that wasn’t really his problem, was it? Sure, the package was the cure for everything—
The vile was empty last time. Last… whatever the hell happened, the liquid was gone. It had been there for his entire damned journey to Raccoon City General, but now it was missing. Bryan was great at his job, so it wasn’t his fault.
Is it still empty? he thought, turning to face his car. The first time whatever the fuck happened, the monster woman didn’t attack anyone until after the cop stopped him. But then she’d attacked him much sooner than that… who would say what she might do. But if the vile was empty and he brought it back to Dr. Stokes, then… god, he could imagine what accusation she might throw at him. She’d probably blame him because everyone always blamed the courier, and that could mess with his job just as much as abandoning this service could. But if the vile wasn’t empty, then nothing would be amiss. His car didn’t have chains on it, after all, so he shouldn’t be doing this anyway.
The woman was strapped into the passenger seat, she wasn’t going anywhere. (He ignored the fact that she was strapped into the passenger seat the last time she attacked him.) This couldn’t go wrong at all. Bryan crept over to the car and, as quick as possible, flung open the back door to grab the bag. The woman was still in shotgun, passed out, breathing slowly, and—was she asleep?
Bryan paused. Asleep? But she was monster, she didn’t need sleep, did she? He quietly closed the backseat’s door and peered at the woman through the passenger window. She didn’t look as pale as before, as sickly, and besides from the blood coating her face and chest, he would have thought that she was not a monster. Just a woman taking a nap. The urge to tap against the window, to see if her eyes were as yellow and bloodshot as his memory, passed through him but he resisted.
“Just stay asleep,” he whispered, slowly backing away from the car. “Sleep tight….”
As soon as he got far enough away from the car that he was pretty sure the woman couldn’t hear him, he took off running. The bag bounced against his hip as he ran, and Bryan slowed to a walk so that he could peek inside. Again, the vile was intact. And again, the liquid inside was missing. “Fuck,” he said. There was no way he could return the package to the doctor now, it’d be all his fault for the vanished contents. What the fuck was he going to do now? It wasn’t as if he could throw the bag away and pretend that someone signed—
Actually, maybe he could. Bryan grabbed the transfer form from his pocket and unfolded it. Sure, the doctors on the top floor of Raccoon City General were alive for a long time, but they’ll eventually be infected by the monsters, right? He remembered the name of that scientist he met—Carl—and sure, he didn’t know what his signature looked like, but he could forge it, right? And it wasn’t like they could ask a dead man to check, right? Of course, wishing death upon people was bad and it felt bad to do, but going back to the city to authentically complete the transfer (which wouldn’t happen cause the contents were gone) was impossible. The chances of him surviving that again was impossible. Especially given the reality that he didn’t survive, originally.
Originally.
This was the third time he was on this icy road. The third time the monster woman was in his car. How was that possible? How was any of this possible? Bryan shook his head and continued down the road. Could these be premonitions, maybe? No, he wasn’t psychic though—not that he knew, of course. Could he be psychic? Wait, if he was seeing the future then why did the woman act differently than last time? Was it because he stopped the car earlier? He stopped the car earlier, again, but she wasn’t chasing him (he turned around and, nope, no one was there). But if those were the future, then why did they feel so real?
He shivered. It was freezing, the cold biting down to his bones. This felt real. The cold felt real, the panic in his chest felt real, the weight of the package against his shoulders felt real. It had all felt real back then, too. Was this a premonition? Nothing felt different from normal, though. Bryan shivered again.
Headlights in the distance. It had to be the cop. Bryan kept to the side of the road and hoped that the man would keep driving but, of course, the universe couldn’t be so kind. The cop turned on his top lights, the siren quiet, and slowed to a crawl right beside Bryan.
He rolled down his window. “And where are you going this time of night?”
Fuck. “My, uh, car broke down up ahead,” he lied. “I have no service to call a tow truck, and I have to courier this package—” he held up the bag—“to Raccoon City General within the hour. It’s life and death.”
“So, you’re just gonna walk to Raccoon City from here?” the sheriff asked, unconvinced. “You’re going to the wrong way for that. Raccoon City’s the other way.”
Bryan shook his head, “Uh, no, officer. I’m going to walk back to the hospital this transfer is coming from and tell them to call another courier.”
“Kind of dangerous to walk half a dozen miles to the city in the middle of the night,” the sheriff said. “Someone could accidentally hit you.”
No kidding. “I appreciate the concern, officer,” Bryan said. “But, really, I’m fine.”
“Stop walking,” he said as he stopped his car. Bryan swore under his breath as the sheriff came out to join him on the side of the road. The officer reached for his breathalyser. “Your car was swerving earlier—I’ve been trailing you since I noticed. You say it broke down? You wouldn’t mean to say that you got into an accident and swerved off the road into a tree, would you?”
Bryan knew what was coming next. He hadn’t had anything to drink, so he knew that the test was going to be negative. However, before he could explain that there was no accident, a scream from down the road caught both their attentions. A woman.
Fuck—the woman! Bryan turned to run away from the woman stumbling down the road towards them, but stopped as she called out, “Help! Help me!”
He couldn’t remember the monster woman every speaking. Bryan kept his distance as the woman’s bloodied form stepped into the light from the headlight of the sheriff’s car and he heard the man swear. He placed his hand on his gun.
“What happened to you, ma’am?” he asked. “Do you need medical help?”
The woman nodded, blood and tears dripping off her face. “Y—yes—something, something attacked me. He… oh god. Oh god….” She went to cover her face with her hands but flinched away at the pain. “What… what happened to me?”
Bryan could only stare at the woman. She… was nothing like how he remembered. She wasn’t attacking him, she wasn’t trying to kill him—rip out his throat—she wasn’t chasing him down relentlessly. She was crying.
The cop huffed in frustration. “Have you seen her before?” he asked Bryan, who shook his head mutely. He turned back to the woman and cautiously stepped towards her. “Ma’am, ma’am—what’s your name? What happened to you? Who attacked you?”
The woman could only sob. She collapsed to her knees onto the blood-stained snow and the sheriff swore. “We need to get you to a hospital,” he said. “You—” he turned to Bryan—“get into the back of the car.”
“What?”
“Did you not hear me?” he asked. “Get into the back of my car or I’ll arrest you.”
Bryan flinched. “What—I didn’t do anything! All I’m trying to do is transport this package—why would you arrest me?”
“A man walking down the side of the road in a snowstorm, alone,” the sheriff said, crouching down beside the woman to help her to her feet. “Your car was swerving on the ice before it ‘broke down.’ And now there’s a woman who looks like she’s been hit by a car, who says something attacked her. So get in the back of my car so I can drive you to the station after taking this woman to the hospital. We’ll finish this conversation there.”
Bryan took a step back. “I’m not getting in the car with this woman.”
“Yes, you are.”
“No, I’m not. She’s… she’s dangerous!” he exclaimed. “If you get in the car with her, she’ll kill you.”
“This woman,” the sheriff said, glancing down at the still sobbing woman. She was shakingly standing. “She’s the one who’s dangerous?”
“Yes, god yes!”
The sheriff helped the woman into the passenger seat of his car. He buckled her in and closed the door. “Get in the car,” he said with a sneer, “or I’ll arrest you for—”
“This woman attacked me,” Bryan said in a rush. “She attacked me, and she’ll attack you, because she is sick and infected and insane.”
The sheriff asked, “She attacked you? Is that why she’s so injured, you defended yourself?”
“No,” he lied. “I don’t know how she got so bloody. But yes! She did attack me! And we can’t go to Raccoon City because the tunnel is blocked and if you try to go around the blockage, you’ll just end up shot or infected and you’ll be killed. We need to get as far away from here are possible! Raccoon City is not safe—this road is not safe!”
The look on the sheriff’s face made Bryan think that the man believed not a single word he said.
The handcuffs were still cold as they pulled to a stop by Bryan’s car. It was still going as he forgot to turn off the power, and he wondered how much gas he had left in the tank. Probably not a lot.
“Your car, I presume,” the sheriff said, looking at Bryan in the review mirror. “It doesn’t look broken down.”
Bryan blanked. “Um….”
“Stay here,” he said. “Don’t leave the car, or I’ll shoot you for attempting to escape.” Then he opened the door and headed over towards Bryan’s still car. As the sheriff slowly walked around it, looking for damages, most likely, Bryan glanced at the woman.
He sat as far away from her as possible, which meant that he couldn’t see her face as it was pressed up against the window. He cleared his throat. “Uh, excuse me?”
The woman swallowed. “…Yes?”
“You don’t, uh, remember what happened to you, right?” he asked. “Or, uh, what happened at your home? With your dog? And that man?”
She still didn’t look at him. “…What do you mean?”
“You were hit by a car, right?” he asked, thinking about the sheriff’s deductions. “Do you know who hit you?”
“…No,” she said. “I don’t remember.”
“Okay, okay, okay,” he said. “Uh, you don’t feel like you want to attack me and rip out my throat, do you?”
“What? No. Why would I…?”
“Great, that’s great,” he said. Bryan glanced down at the courier bag, which was sat right beside him in the back. “Do you know what happened in Raccoon City?”
The woman was quiet for a moment. “No… I don’t remember. I haven’t been to the city for some time now.”
It was getting harder and harder to think of the woman as a monster. After all, it wasn’t like the monster woman had responded to his questions or words—and she had also been hit by his car, so she hadn’t been untalkative because of it. Bryan didn’t say anything more as the sheriff headed back towards the car, having turned off Bryan’s own.
The sheriff opened the backdoor and grabbed Bryan, pulling him out of the car. “You want to explain the blood on the front of your car?” he asked. The man shoved him against the side of the cop car, his hand resting on his gun, “Looked like you hit something big and bloody. Funny thing, we didn’t pass any roadkill on our way here.”
“Oh, yeah, uh,” Bryan said, brain franticly thinking of an answer. “A… dog jumped in front of my car a few days ago…. It was an accident.”
“That blood isn’t a few days old,” the man said. “Try again.”
“Fine, it wasn’t a dog,” he said, all his fucks gone. What the hell did it matter if he told the truth? If they were going to Raccoon City, he was doomed anyway. “It was the woman. I was driving down the road, heading to the hospital, when this woman just jumps in front of my car! I was driving her to the hospital when my car… broke down.”
“You hit that woman with your car?” the sheriff asked, gesturing to the woman in the car. “And then you lied about it.”
“She jumped out into the middle of the road!” Bryan defended. “It wasn’t my fault!”
The sheriff gritted his teeth. “Get back inside the car before I shoot you. I’ll deal with you at the station.”
By the time they reached the dark tunnel, the handcuffs were finally warm. He would try to run away from the sheriff so that he wouldn’t be mauled to death by the woman, but it turns out that he could be persuaded into nearly anything if a gun is pointed at his head. Bryan watched the woman carefully the entire ride, waiting to lunge at her if she as much as stretches in the direction of the wheel. She didn’t move from where she was slumped against the door, unconscious.
The sheriff pulled the car to a stop at the beginning of the tunnel. Bryan felt his heart stop in his chest as he realized that not only was he going to have to face that little girl again, but he also didn’t have any way to defend himself from her. And his hands were handcuffed in front of him, which was a double disadvantage.
“Come on,” the sheriff said. “Looks like we have to go by foot.”
“Don’t you think it’s strange that the cars are piled up—almost like everyone was trying to evacuate the city,” Bryan said, happy to get out of the car. (He could try to make a run for it now.) The sheriff went to help the woman, carefully waking her up. “Almost like there’s something dangerous and deadly about the city, and we shouldn’t go anywhere near it.”
Although the sheriff said nothing, he could see that his words were reaching the man.
“I think we should turn around and head back,” Bryan continued. “The hospital is not that far from the entrance to the city. It’s certainly a lot safer than Raccoon City.”
“Get moving,” the sheriff barked. The woman was barely conscious at this point, which was better than being an amalgamation of her and that man. If Bryan didn’t know better, he’d think that she was actually harmless and was just a woman who got run over. “If you try to run, I’ll shoot you.”
He shoved Bryan forward and forced the man to walk forward. Which, while he knew that the only threat in this tunnel was the girl, didn’t make the terror in his stomach falter. After all, this was where he was infected—where he got doomed. The catalyst for his death. “We really shouldn’t go forward,” he said, stalling. “I’m serious. We’re all going to die.”
The sheriff grabbed his gun out of its holster. “Keep walking,” he said.
“Look around you!” Bryan exclaimed loudly. “Does any of this seem normal? You don’t know the half of what’s happening to Raccoon City—the whole place is dead! It’s gone, and the people here tried to escape but failed and if we continued forward, we’re all going to die! Umbrella released a disease that infected the whole city in the matter of hours, and it’s going to infect and kill us too if we don’t get out of here!”
Something screamed from inside the tunnel, as if activated by his words. He recognized it—the sound had burned its way into his mind when he first heard it. Burned like the pain that cascaded up his arm from the little girl’s bite. Burned like his heart did when he stared at the red mural he created with a single press of a trigger.
He couldn’t get bitten again—he couldn’t. If he became a monster again—if the only thing he could hear were their voices screaming in his head—he couldn’t. He couldn’t. HE COULDN’T! Bryan took off running, ignoring the shout from the sheriff, the single warning, before loud pain cut itself deep into his chest. He collapsed onto the road as thick bursts of blood leaked from his heart, and he heard more loud gunshots behind him. Fighting something.
It hurt to breathe. It hurt to think. Tears trailed down his cheeks as he watched the shadows of the tunnels sway and dance with every shallow breath. Bryan closed his eyes and prayed that Michelle would forgive him for everything he did and everything he wasn’t strong enough to do.
The scientists at Umbrella waited for the sample to arrive, but it never would. Even if the package arrived, it would be useless. The vial itself would be empty, and it would always be empty of its contents. Without Bryan Hodukavich, the cure for the outbreak could never be made.
The road was covered in a thick sheet of ice, cleverly hidden beneath a flat blanket of snow.