Chapter Text
Back in the day, when Leon thought he would one day work in Raccoon City’s police force, he had learned everything he could about the place and its layout that he could get his hands on. He’d wanted, see, to be able to get to places as fast as he possibly could.
Obviously, this fell through. Still, he remembered: there were two hospitals in Raccoon, the one Jill woke up in once, known as Raccoon City General, and a high-rise skyscraper, known as Raccoon Regional Health. RRH was in the southwest of Raccoon City, but it too had its own Umbrella lab and staff of scientists who worked on their own projects. Apparently their side had some involvement with the G-Virus, which…well, it didn’t surprise Leon that somebody had smuggled some G-Virus samples over there.
Raccoon Regional Health was little more than shattered ruins now, sticking up into the sky. Leon picked through the twisted metal remnants of helicopters, and noted human remains scattered through the debris with a detached sort of resignation.
He really had been at this too long.
The doors to the emergency room had long since been broken, the metal frames twisted out of shape by the blast that had flattened Raccoon City. Leon had already stepped through them when he stopped in his tracks, glanced back at the helicopters, and silently counted up the number of dead bodies he’d found in the surrounding area.
That…was a significantly lower number than it should be.
“Sherry,” he said over the line.
“Here,” said Sherry.
“I’m at Raccoon Regional Health,” he said, turning to the ruins of an emergency room. A thick layer of grime and dust covered the wrecked, broken benches where once the patients must’ve sat and waited for their turn to be called. Claw marks had been gouged into the walls. “They were working on a spin-off of the G-Virus here, yeah?”
“Yes,” said Sherry. “Mostly with rats, but I did research. They held experiments on patients there as well. Why?”
“Did they add anything to the basic symptoms we know about?” Leon asked. Grace wasn’t here, at least, so that was something.
“As a matter of fact, they did,” said Sherry. “Their version hyper-evolved to the point where an initial host body could absorb other bodies into their own—like what Chris and Sheva mentioned they saw Excella transform into in Kijuju.”
“So,” said Leon, “assuming someone gets infected with it. They could very easily absorb…a hell of a lot of dead bodies, yes?”
“Yes,” said Sherry, slowly. “You think…”
“I think,” said Leon, “that I’m really not going to enjoy trying to go through this hospital.” He would have to, though, this was one of the easier routes.
Something skittered above him. Groaned, whined, moaned with a hundred mouths.
“And here I am with no minigun,” Leon muttered to himself. “Where’s Claire when you need her?”
--
Ada had told him, once, about the fate of Carla Radames.
“She’d bonded with the ship she died on,” she said, leaning on a balcony overlooking a Montrose street. He put his chin on her shoulder, hugged her from behind, and waited out her mood as she stared out into the night sky. “It was…grotesque, to say the least. Everywhere I stepped, it was her skin. Everything I shot, her blood would spill. At the end of it all, I just pitied her.”
“Simmons didn’t bond with anything,” said Leon. “But he did turn into a giant horrific dinosaur. And then a fly.”
“The C-Virus does enjoy hyper-fast cell duplication,” said Ada. “Still. That’s going to be in my nightmares forever, just…all that meat, that was meant to look like me.”
He hadn’t said anything, just tightened his embrace. Eventually, they’d gone back to bed together, taking comfort in each other’s warmth.
Here and now, he wondered if this was anywhere close to what Ada had seen.
Red, wet flesh was everywhere once he went deeper in, climbing up the walls, squelching underneath his boots, giving way under his palm. How long had a G-monster been here? Clearly, it had been long enough to have fully entrenched itself within a territory, spreading its flesh everywhere, and if he was right, it had been eating well enough these past few years to expand even more.
“Sherry,” he said. “If something’s been here long enough to expand itself like this…”
“Is there a way to take it down?” Sherry guessed. “No. Not from what I’ve been able to dig up. Do you have a grenade launcher, and some acid rounds?”
And he had given away his grenade launcher to Moira. Fuck’s sake. “Remind me to buy a new grenade launcher when I get out of here,” he muttered, passing by what used to be the elevators.
He heard, on the other side, a wet splotch.
“Ah, fuck,” he muttered, and yanked a flashbang grenade off his belt. Just in time, because wet red tentacles burst forth from the darkness of the elevator shaft, and it was only the flashbang grenade going off that kept them from wrapping around him.
His ears rang, and he sprinted away from the doors. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw—limbs, god, so many fucking limbs, and a monstrous eyeball like the one Birkin had sitting on his shoulder.
“Definitely the G-Virus, Sherry,” he reported, bolting into the staircase and running up the stairs, two at a time. “Definitely too mutated for me to take it out with what I currently have.”
“It’s affected by cold!” Sherry said, real worry in her voice. Well, yeah, she would be, this was her father’s legacy come back to bite them all on the ass again. “If you come across anything with liquid nitrogen—”
“Shoot and it’ll stop moving for a while, got it,” said Leon, bursting through the doors on the third floor and noting a liquid nitrogen tank situated nearby, half-buried in a mass of flesh. He got some distance away, took out his handgun, then aimed at the tank, watching as a fucking massive pile of flesh broke through the doors, snarling with its many, many mouths.
There was a face, he thought. Didn't look like any of the Umbrella scientists who’d gone missing during the Raccoon City outbreak, but then who could tell? That face’s eyes fixed on him, and it roared, lumbered forward—
Leon pulled the trigger. Freezing air hissed out, and the blob screamed in shock, its movements slowing.
He didn’t wait around after that.
--
Fifth floor was where the detonator part was, from what Leon had been able to figure out from the base camp he’d found. He didn’t enjoy the idea of having to get himself up all five floors, and he enjoyed even less the thought that he would have to find a route that didn’t use the staircase, because the stairs past the third floor had not survived the blast. Or the years of combat tests.
If he thought too hard about the combat tests he would actually throw up. So he didn’t.
Mostly, there was a flesh blob to hide from and a hospital to explore. He knew how this went. He found keys. He opened doors. He picked up ammunition and grenades and whatever else he could get his hands on, it wasn’t like anyone was using it.
On the first floor, there was a hole in the ground that led directly to the parking lot. Leon scooted down into it, landing on his feet, and shot a few zombies still lurking about—half-skeletal already, all identifying features rotted away from just how long they’d been down here. The blob hadn’t come through here, it seemed.
There was a side office with an intercom system and an old computer that still, mercifully, worked. It didn't have Internet, but that was fine, Leon just read out the files on it to Sherry, who took down notes. But there was a tape recorder on the desk…
Leon sat down in the old office chair and let it play.
I think you would be an amazing mom.
This was the worst part of the job. It always was. This was happening during the outbreak, it had to have been—the man sounded too scared, too much like a civilian, to have been here after the city had been destroyed. There had been a very real chance that at the same time this man was fighting and dying, Leon had been across the city, being chased by the Tyrant.
He could’ve done something, if only he had known.
“I got a message back from Claire,” said Sherry, over the line. “She says, and I’m quoting her here, haha, I have a grenade launcher and you don't, haha.”
Leon laughed, a little wetly. “What an asshole,” he said, fond. “Sherry…I found a tape.”
“What’s it for?” Sherry asked. “Can I hear it?”
Leon played it for her, and afterward said, “He was here during the outbreak.”
“The G-Virus was raging through RRH’s part of the city,” said Sherry, softly. “Do you…want me to track down this Michelle?”
“If you can,” said Leon. “She should know, at least, what happened.” Though he figured she probably already had some idea, knowing that whoever had left this tape behind had gone to Raccoon City.
Sherry said, “Leon…”
“I’m fine,” said Leon, shortly. He got up, knees creaking a little—ah, he was getting old. And there was the Raccoon City Syndrome too, but mostly he was just getting old. “I’ll head to the fifth floor now. I’ve found ways to hide from the blob, at least—we need to do something about this, after I get Grace out of here.”
“I’ll let the BSAA know after,” said Sherry. “Be careful. Don’t let the blob eat you.”
“I’ll do my best,” Leon promised.
--
The blob was a hell of a pursuer. Not a half-bad climber either, Leon would concede that to it—he’d had the smart idea of climbing up to the fifth floor via the outside, but the blob monster had followed him out. It had taken two grenades to knock it away for a little while, and even then it had only scurried back inside, possibly to lick its wounds and nurse its grudges.
“Jesus fucking Christ, what did I do to you,” Leon muttered. Sure, all right, he’d thrown a lot of flashbangs at it, but to be fair it had tried to eat him first. Or maybe it just didn’t like having people on its territory.
The fifth floor was almost fully overtaken with pulsing wet viscera. Intestines hung from the ceiling like macabre ribbons, and with every step, Leon felt the flesh under his boots reluctantly pulling away. He ducked, warily, under giant cocoons, not unlike the ones down in the sewers where G-spawn would explode out of, back in 1998.
Because this is a G-monster from all the way back in 1998, dumbass, he reminded himself. Those were, in fact, G-spawn.
The detonator part, from what he remembered reading off files he’d been picking up here and there, had been stowed in the ENT clinic. Whatever remained of the clinic, anyway. A few little G-spawn tore their way free of the walls, landing with wet plops on the floor, but those were easy enough to put down. He tried not to think about how human-shaped a few of them were.
The ENT clinic’s door was gone, a few lonely hinges the only remnants of its existence. Leon stepped through, and blinked at the militarized set-up that had taken over the place—a computer, a yellow armory box, even some lights and a board with maps pinned on it. Against the wet red viscera splattered on the walls, the ruined and bombed-out structure of the hospital, it all seemed so incongruous.
One thing remained consistent, however: there was no one here. Most likely they’d been killed by that flesh blob creature, their bodies absorbed into it. If he thought back he could recall seeing a few sleeves in military camo, sticking out of the blob’s back along with all the other arms.
He sighed, exhausted, and set his hands on the table in front of the yellow armory box. After a moment, he touched his earpiece and said, “Sherry?”
“Hm?”
“Your father didn't show any inclination towards assimilating bodies, from what I remember,” he said. “Is this a different strain of the G-Virus, then?”
“No, but he did take over a train car just like this at the end,” said Sherry. “So, yeah, this does seem like a different strain to me. I recognize the assimilation from Chris’s reports on the Progenitor virus, y’know, like what happened to Excella?”
“Mm, I remember he mentioned it,” said Leon. “How’s the research coming along?”
“I’m narrowing down the Michelles, at least,” said Sherry. “But that’s a side thing running in the background right now.”
Leon lifted the lid of the armory box, swiped the detonator part and tucked it away into a pocket. “All right, I’m headed back—”
Something roared. Something not too far away.
“—for fuck’s sake,” said Leon. “Sherry, I’ll call you back.” He hung up, then absently swiped a file off the table for later reading and broke open a few cases. Couldn’t jump out the hole, it was a five-story drop, which meant he’d have to kite the flesh blob somewhere cold or hide somewhere and wait for it to pass. All right.
He stepped out, then noted the G-spawn littering the corridors and the flesh blob crawling out of the elevator shaft, hauling itself up and out onto the floor. Multiple limbs slapped against the ground as it shook itself like a dog.
“Mostly ‘armful,” Leon said to himself, then snickered. He pulled a grenade from his belt and tossed it, then turned and sprinted like hell down the hall away from the monster, shooting down G-spawn.
There was a giant gap in the staircase leading downstairs, but that was fine. He propped a nitrogen tank up, pulling it free from a pile of viscera with a wince, then backed up and took out his handgun. It was easy to hear the flesh blob coming, the sound of many, many limbs all thwacking wetly against the floor (and probably absorbing G-spawn as it went) was loud.
It rolled into view. Rotated to look at him with furious eyes. Those eyes were—almost human, he thought. Almost.
“Let it snow,” Leon said, then shot the tank. Freezing cold nitrogen hissed out and the blob slowed, thrashed around in anger and terror. Did it feel the cold slowing it?
Leon gritted his teeth and ran back up the stairs, past the monster. A few tentacles and fingers sluggishly tried to latch on to his foot, but he shook them free and shot one out of the air before it could get any closer to him.
Back out the window, back onto the fourth floor via the way he came. There was a fire escape on the third floor, and he just needed to not disturb a bunch of flesh cocoons attached to the ceiling there.
Because this was Raccoon City, the moment he set foot on the third floor, all the cocoons burst, and blood-drenched zombies staggered up to their feet. They looked…wrong. Didn’t have the proportions he was expecting. Then Leon thought, uneasily, What happens when you stretch a baby like taffy? Probably this.
Sherry was going to be upset the G-Virus had found a fun new way to mutate. Again.
He racked his shotgun, then went through the monsters with the same professional, gritted-teeth manner he did with every other monster in this godforsaken hellscape of a city. “I’m not sticking around to get rolled up into a ball, thanks,” he informed the last one, before blasting its head off and booking it towards an open door.
Already, he could hear the flesh blob on its way, clambering down the stairs, following in his tracks. Leon glanced around and spotted a proximity mine in the corner, unarmed, beside what looked like a fallen assault rifle magazine.
He set that at the door, armed it, then went down the fire escape. He’d gotten back on the ground and halfway across the street when he heard an explosion, and a pained roar echoed through the landscape.
“Leon?” Sherry asked, worriedly.
“Got the detonator part,” said Leon, with a tired breath. “Managed not to get eaten by the flesh blob. We’re gonna have to come back here once Grace is safe, Sherry, this thing won’t stay down with what I have on me currently.” And he felt terrible, about letting this continue, letting whatever flickering remnants of humanity still remained inside it suffer even longer.
“Okay,” said Sherry. “I’ll talk to Claire, get the word out.”
“Thanks,” said Leon.
“And I’ll get you a grenade launcher too,” Sherry added.
More sardonically, Leon said, “Gee, thanks. All right, I’m headed back to base camp.”