Chapter 1 - It Was A Dark And Stormy Night

It was a dark and stormy night.

In other words, it was just the perfect way for a horror story to begin.

For Raccoon City, though, the horror had begun 4 days ago, seemingly out of nowhere, and the violent rioters showed no signs that their aggression or complete lack of self-preservation had in any way waned. Even tonight, out on the streets, fires raged on despite the rain pouring down all around.

For the few foolish or unfortunate enough to leave the safety of their makeshift shelters and brave the risks of the outside, they'd consider themselves lucky if they were merely greeted with broken storefront windows, cleaned-out shops, and abandoned vehicles and streets. If they weren't, well... there were few eyewitnesses to what the rioters did to people they found, and even fewer who knew how or why they could do what they did. But rumors abounded still, and the remaining survivors mostly decided to stay holed up with their dwindling supplies. Surely, any day now, Chief Irons and the Raccoon Police Department would restore order. Surely, any day now, the army would decide to move in and take back the streets, and helicopters would land in their district to evacuate them. Surely, any day now, Umbrella would whip out a miracle cure or vaccine, the lockdown in place thanks to the radioactivity the government said was in the area would be lifted, and they'd be able to escape city. Even as hope dwindled like the number of remaining survivors, people still desperately clung on to it, and the belief that everything would be fine if they held out just a few more days.

Even though bad news usually spread faster than good news, there hadn't really been anyone left to actually report any accurate local news. Chief Irons had ordered basically all active duty personnel, including the SWAT teams, to suit up, grab all the weapons and ammo they could, and head out to confront the rioters. Nobody commented on the lack of STARS Team members; everyone knew they were still on mandatory unpaid leave after the Arklay Manor Incident, pending psychiatric evaluation. Chief Irons hadn't corrected their assumptions. In the same way, Chief Irons hadn't told them or the skeleton crew and civilians left behind that they weren't expected to return alive, or that they weren't cracking in the skulls of and stomping on mere rioters. By the time they'd wised up and stopped hesitating to blow the brains out of any "rioter" they saw, it was far too late. The massacre left the besieged police station undermanned, underarmed, and under-defended... just as Irons' paymasters in Umbrella had wanted.

Similarly, the military had abandoned evacuation efforts, instead focusing on enforcing the lockdown. The week promised nothing but inclement weather, but even if the prospect of flying through a storm handling dozens of panicked civilians hadn't been enough of a dealbreaker by itself, one too many choppers had crashed, as the civilians they'd been supposed to save had suddenly turned violent, and then turned on their rescuers. The brass couldn't explain it (except for the few who knew about William Birkin's whistleblowing), but they didn't need to. Their men and equipment were at risk by the very people they were supposed to save; that was more than enough to call off a mere PR stunt.

And even if Umbrella hadn't actually intended for an outbreak to occur again (Arklay had been Marcus' fault, and Raccoon could be blamed on Birkin and one jumpy trigger-happy Umbrella Security Service operative), they were never one to let a tragedy go to waste. Even as the Umbrella Biohazard Countermeasures Service deployed four platoons of trained mercenaries of dubious origins to assist local law enforcement in restoring order on the 26th, secret agents, codenamed "Monitors", sent and received encoded transmissions from much higher up. Only they knew that they were really there to observe the effect of Umbrella's pets against conventional forces, as well as clean up house and tie up loose ends. It wouldn't do, after all, for the world to learn of Umbrella's involvement in the outbreak. The fallout would be far worse than any good PR they could potentially get by publicly intervening, especially if William Birkin had managed to inform the US government of what NEST had really been doing.

Some Monitors in particular received directives to destroy Raccoon General Hospital; somehow, despite being overwhelmed by the sick and infected, some top researchers had actually managed to synthesize a vaccine for the T-Virus, even capable of actually curing a person of it if administered early enough into an infection. Umbrella had little interest in a vaccine or cure; that'd reduce the lethality of T, and thus make it less marketable! Fortunately, the staff had succumbed to the infection before they'd been able to mass-produce it, or go public with it. Most of the Monitors didn't question their directives; they'd been indoctrinated to be loyal to the company above all else. They just told the UBCS teams that the hospital was a hot zone, and a priority target. Collateral damage would be acceptable. Unfortunately, Umbrella had underestimated the true extent of the infection, not knowing that the city's drinking water itself was contaminated. Within 24 hours, the UBCS teams in the city reported heavy to catastrophic casualty rates, as they succumbed to either the sheer numbers of the undead, the mutated BOWs unleashed throughout the city, or infection from bites or exposure to the city's water.

It was a dark and stormy night, and unbeknownst to the scattered survivors of the City of the Dead, their last, best hopes had already been snuffed out and shattered.

For Jill Valentine, however, not all hope was lost. But then again, Jill Valentine had always been a different kind of girl.

Maybe one in a hundred had the brains that had gotten Jill top grades in the academy. Maybe one in a thousand had just the right combination of genetics and lifestyle to hold a candle to her figure and looks. Probably not even one in ten thousand could boast successfully going through Operator training in the US Army's Delta Forces.

Jill Valentine effortlessly combined all three into a single package that could just as easily steal a man's heart with a wink as rip it out of his chest within three seconds.

That one in a billion combination had only just been enough to see her through the Arklay Mansion Incident, where her nightmare had begun over two months ago.

The reports of monster sightings hadn't stopped with the mansion's destruction, and she still had nightmares of the packs of decaying rabid dogs, birds, and people she'd had to put down as they'd tried to take chunks out of her, to say nothing of the other grotesque mutated creatures, the tyrant, or the giant snake that had almost killed her. And speaking of giant snakes...

Wesker's betrayal had been a great shock to the remaining STARS members, and Valentine knew that the only reason they'd eventually made a memorial for him (there wasn't any body left to find, between being ripped apart by the tyrant and blown up by the mansion's self-destruct sequence) was so that they could piss on it. Even so, though, their outrage could at least mollified by the fact that Wesker had apparently also been planning on betraying Umbrella and revealing what they'd done, and he'd at least had the courtesy to die, leaving behind only the memory of the man they'd all thought he'd been.

Chief Irons, though, had no such circumstances on his side, and all the pent-up fury and frustration that had been building up since the mansion had all been released in one very loud go when he'd refused to let them investigate Umbrella. Chris, naturally, had been the loudest, nearly shouting the roof off, and Jill had learned in the army that sometimes you had to earn respect by shouting the ears off of disobedient pricks before ripping their heads off and chewing them out (metaphorically speaking, of course), but none of them would have suspected that Barry's experience in shouting over jet engines had been eclipsed by sweet little meek rookie, Rebecca Chambers. Little Becca, who'd only made it in because of her stellar grades, medical experience, and Wesker's personal recommendation, originally hadn't seemed like natural STARS material between being small enough to fit in a suitcase, and having that rare combination of talkativeness and intellect that reminded you of a university lecturer in the few seconds before you fell asleep. But even if the shy pixie hadn't earned Jill's respect by having been the a survivor of the STARS Bravo Team, surviving in the mansion longer than the rest of them, and saving Chris's life when he also got bitten by that damn giant snake, she'd definitely earned it by having a pair of lungs larger than Chief Irons'.

In the end, though, their combined outrage, accounts, experience, and righteous fury had failed to convince Irons to investigate his largest donor, and he'd in a fit of pettiness disbanded the STARS unit entirely and put them on unpaid leave. He'd also tried to have them watched, but the STARS teams were too well-respected by rank-and-file RPD, and they'd been notified of the unwanted surveillance almost immediately. Chris, being Chris, had immediately picked a fight with one of Irons' loyalists, before using the ensuing suspension to leave for Europe and further his investigation. At least he'd had enough brains to tip off the FBI to investigate Irons for potential corruption, as well as take Chambers with him; smart as he may have been, he wasn't the intellectual type, and the most subtle he got was hitting someone from behind with a sledgehammer, rather than from the front.

Chris really hadn't taken the Mansion Incident well; the Redfield siblings were big on family ties, only having each other left, and she knew he'd begun seeing the STARS members like the big extended family he'd never had. In that family, Wesker had been like his big brother, a wise mentor figure that he could rely on; he took Wesker's betrayal hard and personal. More than that, though, she couldn't help but wonder if he saw his sister in every zombie he put down, wondering what he'd do if anything like the Mansion Incident happened to her. To cope, to deal with the trauma, he'd adopted a workout routine once he'd been discharged from the hospital that could only be described as "self-destructively masochistic"; he'd always been buff, but when she'd seen him off at the airport his biceps had been bigger than Rebecca's head. Jill only hoped Rebecca would be able to soothe him and calm his reckless hot-headedness down while she wasn't there...

But at least he was coping; that she didn't need to worry about. Chris had never lacked for determination; frustration only seemed to serve as fuel for his drive. Jill, on the other hand, hadn't been coping well, between all but losing her job and being effectively under house arrest. Sure, she'd framed it as a chance to gather information locally, so that Chris and Rebecca could focus on France and Barry on relocating his family to Canada, and sure, she'd actually managed to dig up a fair bit of dirt on Irons and Umbrella. None of that changed the fact that she was stuck in Raccoon City, alone, going stir-crazy, with no one to talk to about what she'd been through. "Nightmares" had been putting it lightly; there'd been more than one night she'd woken up screaming, drenched in a cold sweat, having dreamt of being ripped apart or slowly turning.

And that had been before whatever had happened in the Mansion had suddenly taken over the whole city! She'd been more than savvy enough to figure out what was going on between her first-hand experiences and seeing the few grainy pictures of the "rioters" in the news, and not for the first time she questioned the wisdom in hunkering down. She knew it would have been much smarter to have simply fled the city, once it all began 4 days ago.

But she'd made arrangements with Chris and Rebecca, and she didn't know if they'd suddenly call her in the middle of the night one day, needing a crucial piece of evidence only she had or could retrieve! And that was assuming everything was going well, and Umbrella Europe didn't discover their investigation and intervene in such a way she'd need to bail them out! As worried as she was for her life, she worried more about the other STARS members and their new objective; they had to make sure another Arklay Mansion Incident or whatever had happened in Raccoon City never happened again. No, no, for now she'd stick to the plan; she had more than enough supplies to last til the end of the month. And if she received no news by then, she'd gather up what she had and bug out, before calling Chris with a pre-prepared one use phone to let him know where he'd be able to contact her next.

But, for now, she washed her face, making sure not to turn the tap on too much lest she be heard, before going over what she had, hoping the new awakening would let her brain see new connections she'd somehow missed before. For now, she enjoyed the peace of the thunderstorm raging outside. Sure, if she listened closely, she'd have been able to make out screams, moans, howls, and gunfire in the distance. But if she didn't, the storm would hide the noise, and for a brief moment she could pretend like the world outside was normal, wasn't ending. For Jill, it's a brief respite from her nightmares.

It was a dark and stormy night, and for some, the nightmare began a long time ago. For others, it would begin tomorrow night, as a rookie cop prepares to disregard his instructions in favor of his oath to serve and protect his new city, and a college girl who's seen the news finishes packing and prepares to ride halfway across the country, disregarding her only remaining family's message and instruction to verify his safety personally. Regardless, tonight would not be the night a new horror emerges, as one small change occurred fifty hours ago and five hundred miles away.

-UMBRELLA EUROPE STAGING GROUNDS, FRANCE, 26TH OF SEPTEMBER 1998-

"What do you mean, "no"?! You have explicit orders to-"

"I know what my orders are, friend!" The pilot shouted back at the demanding doctor in the hazmat suit, refusing to budge. His Russian accent betrayed his origins, as he continued by quoting his orders to the letter: "Ensure safe delivery of the package directly to the hot zone, yes?"

"So why are you refusing to fly?!" The doctor shouted back, getting frustrated. This was the perfect chance to prove himself, his research, to the company and the world, and it was being held back by one obstinate Russian chopper pilot.

"I'm telling you, I can't do it now! The weather over the area is too turbulent and stormy; it's too risky for me to deliver it in the chopper!" Kamirov shamelessly lied. While it was true that his French Puma was a lot less armoured and sturdy when compared to the Soviet-built Hinds he used to fly, he'd been trained (and hired) to perform in basically any weather, while under heavy anti-aircraft fire. But he was willing to bet the most the Biopreparat egghead shouting at him knew about flying was the first-class seats in corporate jetliners he enjoyed, and indeed doubt visibly crossed his hazmat suit's visor as he wavered, before rallying (though much less surely): "Well, we need to get it to Raccoon before the sedatives wear off! There's only a small window of opportunity before the Yanks finally get things under control, and Corporate wants us to prove ourselves no matter what!"

"Yes, yes, and you can explain to Corporate if we lose your precious lab experiment because lightning strikes the rotors and fries the systems." Kamirov waved away his counter-arguments with disdain, though personally he doubted that whatever they had in the crate would even notice being struck by lightning. But still, the seed of doubt was planted, and the Biopreparat guy took out his phone and made a few calls, before hanging up and snapping: "All right, we'll do it your way. Deliver it to Umbrella Warehouse Gamma, 20 kilometers north of Raccoon; we'll drive him in with the Hunters. And make it snappy; Corporate doesn't want any more delays."

Kamirov didn't trust his voice, so he merely nodded at the man and wordlessly turned on the engines. Internally, though, he was praying, to a God he hadn't believed in for a long time. He'd owed Captain Mikhail Viktor his life, ever since he'd gotten him out of the Soviet Army in Russian Prison and into this far more comfortable life as a UBCS mercenary, and when he'd overbeard they were being sent in to Raccoon, well...

He may not have been able to stop Umbrella from shipping their lab experiment into Raccoon for a little test run, but he would delay it for as long as he could get away with. He could only pray that the time he bought was enough for UBCS to finish their mission and be extracted.

Author's Note: I got bored after finishing up my Skyrim story, and one day merely decided to write for the heck of it. I didn't have any concrete story to write, nor any intention of publishing whatever came out unless it was up to standard (it never is) or so hilariously bad I thought someone could get a chuckle or two out of it. So, after some random brainstorming and online videos, my mind finally latched on to this random "What If" concept. From there, I just put my fingers to the keyboard as a monkey to a typewriter and slapped the keys until my spark's finally extinguished.

I'm well-aware that this concept is a "classic", to put it kindly. Or to be blunt, it's been done to death, a thousand times over, with a hundred different original twists and spins to make them unique. I've got no intention of competing or replacing; imitation's merely the sincerest form of flattery.

Also, sorry if any of the information is inaccurate (besides, you know, the key changes to the story). I've never actually played any of the original Resident Evil games or the remakes yet, nor have I read most of the stories here... I'm going solely off cutscenes, gameplay videos, and the wiki. Pacing's also all over the place, and this is just the exposition dump prologue for god's sake. Well, then again, even if I wanted to jump on the band wagon I'd be a month late.