I strongly suggest that you read "Resident Evil Legends: Part One" before you read this. While the plot of this story details the events of Resident Evil Zero, and therefore many readers will be familiar with the plot and characters, the motivations and backgrounds of some characters (Wesker and Birkin, primarily) will become much more clear if you read the first part before you read this. But it is only a suggestion.
This story is already finished, and I will update chapters once or twice a week until it is all posted here. I posted Part One all at once and barely got any reviews, so I am posting Part Two a chapter at a time, hopefully so more people see it and read it. Hopefully, more people will read Part One as well.
However, keep in mind that Part One was 23 chapters, totalling about 137 pages. Part Two is Part One ended at Chapter 23, so I begin Part Two at Chapter 24. Read and (hopefully) enjoy.
24
Rebecca Chambers was twenty-two years old, but she looked no older than eighteen. She had a sweet face with soft, innocent brown eyes, and straight reddish-brown hair cut short so that it did not extend below her ears. She sat nervously with her hands in her lap, dressed in a casual but businesslike blue blouse and knee-length skirt. It looked out of place on someone who appeared to be so young.
Wesker, sitting at the desk in front of her, set her transfer papers down and sighed wearily, leaning back in the uncomfortable wooden desk chair. He wore a wrinkled gray button-down shirt with visible sweat stains under the arms. His police badge hung from his belt. And, as always, his mirrored sunglasses were on his face.
"You just graduated the Police Academy," he said.
Rebecca nodded vigorously. "Yes, just last month, sir."
"And you're applying for a position with a S.T.A.R.S. unit? Don't you think you're a bit inexperienced for such an assignment?"
"No, sir. I am totally ready for this."
Wesker noted that she said "totally" like an airheaded high school cheerleader. He had half a mind to deny her transfer on the spot. But she graduated third in her class at the Academy, and was qualified and trained as a primary first-aid specialist, which the S.T.A.R.S. teams did not currently have. And besides, she was undeniably cute, and Wesker was in no mood to argue. For all he knew, she would start crying if he turned her down, and there was no way he wanted to deal with that.
"Talk to Enrico Marini," he said. "He's the leader of the Bravo team. If he's willing to let you join, then it's okay by me."
"Thank you so much," Rebecca said. "You are totally not going to regret this."
There was that "totally" again. Wesker knew he was probably making a mistake, because he knew Enrico would accept the girl right off the bat. He was the kind of leader who appreciated eagerness and enthusiasm toward the job. Someone like Rebecca was sure to impress him with her youthful energy, if nothing else. Wesker, on the other hand, was more interested in experience and natural skill. Rebecca looked like she'd be more at home teaching a class of first-graders than breaking a door down and engaging in a shoot-out with violent criminals.
In his ten years with the Raccoon City Police Department, Wesker had quickly climbed the ranks, in accordance with his original deal with Chief Irons. Thankfully for both of them, no one could complain about Wesker's rapid promotion, since he had proved himself one of the most capable officers on the force, which was ironic, since he was the only one of them not to graduate (or even attend) the Police Academy. His papers were all clumsy forgeries, but Irons lived up to his part of the arrangement and passed them without a hitch. And now, after ten years, Irons was still the Chief of police and Wesker was head of the Raccoon City S.T.A.R.S. Alpha team.
S.T.A.R.S. stood for Special Tactics And Rescue Squad. It was essentially a more advanced version of a S.W.A.T. team, but the members were equally trained for search-and-rescue missions as well as urban infiltration and combat scenarios, which conventional S.W.A.T. teams were specially trained for. The Raccoon City S.T.A.R.S. teams performed missions across the state and were a very recognizable and highly regarded part of the RCPD. There were two teams, Alpha and Bravo, and each had six members.
Wesker lifted his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes. He was exhausted, physically and mentally, and if he didn't get some sleep soon he would just pass out at his desk. He'd been up for almost thirty hours, after spending all morning in the labs and now all evening here at the police station. And it was only nine-thirty.
He did not like to think of it as a double life, or a secret life. Granted, one half of his life was a secret from everyone involved in the other half, but Wesker didn't think of it that way. He simply had one very complicated, very complex life. By day he was the ranking senior researcher at the Umbrella Arklay laboratory, and by night he was the ranking commander of a special unit of police officers in the RCPD. Both jobs, both lives, were highly stressful and demanding, but for years Wesker had successfully kept them going, meeting all the responsibilities and obligations of both with no one in the RCPD the wiser.
The phone rang, jarring him from his half-asleep introspection. He picked it up and set it against his ear, slouching in his chair. "Wesker here. What is it?"
"This is Spencer. Get to the lab right away."
"I can't just run off."
"Just leave early for the night. Give them some excuse, I don't care what. You've got to get over here as soon as you can."
"Why?"
"It's the hunters. One of them got loose from the tanks. They have it barricaded in the west observation lab, but it killed one of your boys."
"Can't you handle this yourself?" Wesker said angrily. "I haven't slept since last night. You don't need me there. Have them tranquilize it or something."
"This is your project. When things go wrong, you are held accountable."
"Then kill it for all I care," Wesker shot back. "We have more in the growth tanks. This isn't just my project, Spencer, this is everyone's project. You can't be calling me every time some crisis falls in your lap."
"We have a dead man here, Wesker."
"He isn't the first."
"Those hunters are dangerous," Spencer said. "And you authorized their development. I did not put off retirement to clean up your messes."
"I'm busy," Wesker said forcefully. "I'll be there in the morning, so keep things under control until I get there. Goodbye."
"Don't you hang up on me –" Spencer said, but Wesker didn't hear the rest of the sentence. He slammed the phone down in it's cradle and then unplugged the phone wire from the back. He slumped more in the chair and took a deep breath.
Things at the lab, for weeks now, were getting progressively more and more out of hand, and Spencer was no help at all. If Wesker didn't know better, he'd think the old man was going senile, or at least going soft. But as impossible as it seemed, Spencer was merely in over his head. In the ten years since Wesker adopted two lives, Spencer had slowly lost control of the lab. He no longer ran the Arklay facility with an iron hand, and as a result, Wesker became the one getting elected to handle all the problems the lab faced. That, combined with his increased responsibilities in the S.T.A.R.S. team, was what made his life so difficult. He was overworked, to put it lightly.
There was another knock on his door. His work, it seemed, was never done. He considered telling whoever it was to go away, but he couldn't. Instead, he reluctantly told whoever it was to come in.
The door opened to reveal a six-foot-three giant of a man with short brown hair and a scruffy beard. Barry Burton, the Alpha team's weapon's expert and resident marksman. He wore a plain white t-shirt with a red vest over it, dirty blue jeans, and black motorcycle gloves. He sat down in the chair opposite Wesker and it creaked alarmingly under his weight.
"How's it going, Wesker?" he asked.
"Rough. I just want to go to bed," Wesker replied honestly.
"There's not much going on tonight. Take off and get some sleep. You look like you need it."
Wesker shook his head. "No, I have to wait for the daily reports to show up. Chris and Jill still haven't turned one in. And I'm waiting for a call from forensics."
Barry glanced down at the phone. "You'd better plug it in then."
Wesker, having already forgotten about the call from Spencer, looked confused. Wearily, he plugged the phone line back in. "Weird. I wonder how that happened."
Barry chuckled under his breath. "Man, do you look beat."
"That obvious?"
"Looks like you haven't slept in a week."
Wesker shrugged and slumped back into the chair. He decided that it was a good thing his chair was so uncomfortable; if it was a comfortable chair he'd have fallen asleep in it by now. "I slept this week, just not that much."
"Why don't you just call it a day? Tell forensics to leave a message, have Chris and Jill slide their reports under the door."
"No sense in leaving early. Might as well get it done today and start fresh tomorrow."
Barry smirked and shook his head. "Man, sometimes I just don't understand what makes you tick. You come here and work yourself to death, and don't have anyone at home waiting for you."
Wesker smiled, mentally preparing himself for Barry's daily "You should be married and have kids by now" speech. Barry was a huge family man himself, and would gladly show you the pictures in his wallet if you gave him half a chance, and he took it on himself to constantly berate those who chose not to participate in the traditional nuclear family. Wesker, the perpetual loner, was first on his list.
"Gonna tell me again now I need to find myself a wife?" he asked cynically, trying not to sound angry about it.
"You're not a complete person," Barry said, sounding like a pop psychologist, which was funny because he more closely resembled a lumberjack. "You need another person in your life, before it's too late. You work all these long hours to make up for the fact that you don't have someone to share your life with."
Wesker laughed at that. "Barry, where do you come up with this stuff?"
"Just look at me," Barry said confidently. "Or Enrico, or even Ken. We're well-rounded because we have healthy family lives and healthy professional lives. You don't have a healthy family life, so you make up for it by working yourself into an early grave."
"You're exaggerating."
"Am I? Take a look in the mirror, buddy. You look like a walking zombie."
"I'm a busy guy," Wesker said, spreading his hands. "I don't have time to go looking for a girlfriend."
"What about that peach that just left your office?"
"Who?" When Wesker realized he was referring to Rebecca Chambers, he laughed out loud. "She's a new transfer who wants to join S.T.A.R.S. We don't have a space for her on Alpha, so I sent her to Enrico. I think she's a bit young for me."
"How old was she? Twenty?"
"Twenty-two."
"Well, you're not that much older."
"I'm thirty-four," Wesker said, feeling older even as he said it. "Twelve years older."
Barry could not come up with a comeback to that. He shook his head, and Wesker could sense real disappointment in his reaction. "Thirty-two years old and still single. What am I gonna do with you?"
"Nothing," Wesker said. "Nothing at all."
There was another knock on the door, and it opened promptly. Chris Redfield, Alpha team's strategic coordinator, poked his head in.
"Hey, Barry. Hey, Wesker. I got my daily report here, and Jill's too."
"Hand them over."
Chris gave them to Barry, who set them on Wesker's desk, and closed the door after him. Wesker set the papers on the edge of his desk without reading them. "Now why can't you do that?" he asked Barry. "Why can't you just pop in, give me your work, and leave again? Every day you come in and preach to me."
"Cause I'm worried about you, man. It ain't right seeing someone like you working yourself to the bone every day and not having anyone to go home to. If I didn't have Jenny and the girls, I would be empty inside."
"I guess that's the difference between us," Wesker said, trying not to sound too scornful. "I don't need other people in my life to be happy. I can do just fine without anyone." He stood up and took his jacket off the filing cabinet behind him. "I will, however, take your advice and leave early. If I stay awake much longer, I'll fall asleep on the drive home."
They walked out of Wesker's office and he locked the door. He wished Barry a good night and left the S.T.A.R.S. office area. The forensics call would just have to wait until the next day.
Barry gave him a hard time about it, but unfortunately, Barry only knew half the story. If he understood what Wesker's life was really like, he would praise him for not having a nervous breakdown right off the bat. If Wesker had to handle working in the labs all day, working at the police station all night, and dealing with a family on top of all that, he would collapse under the strain in less than a week. There was no room for a personal life when his professional life took up eighteen hours or more of his day. After working all day, he had nothing left to give a significant other. No woman in her right mind would put up with his insane work schedule for more than a few days. Wesker had long ago resigned himself to being single the rest of his life.
He left the police station and walked around back to the parking lot. Night had already fallen, and the street lamps cast long shadows across the bare cement. Wesker approached his car and looked around. No one was in sight. Black, wrought-iron fences surrounded the parking lot, the kind of fences that would look more appropriate lining the grounds of a cemetery or a haunted house. Distantly, he heard the sounds of urban Raccoon City penetrate the twilight silence, car engines, people talking, faint music coming from somewhere. He opened the door to his car and got in.
Although he desperately wanted to go home and sleep for twelve hours, the lab called to him. As much as he hated and argued with Spencer for calling him every time something went wrong, he could not dismiss his responsibilities there. He was the research project manager, after all. The lab – the entire lab – was his personal working area, and he could not just ignore problems when they occurred, expecting someone else to clean up after him. Deep down, Wesker was an obsessive perfectionist regarding his work. If there were complications, he wanted to handle them himself rather than let someone else possibly make them worse. He had to know that everything was under control and running the way he wanted it to. Basically, he didn't trust anyone else to take care of it.
As he headed out of town and toward the lab, he tried to prepare himself for the scene that he would probably find once he got there. Spencer told him they had one hunter loose, and one scientist dead. That was nothing new, though. Four scientists had died in the past two years due to one of the experiments getting loose or due to virus contamination. It was a dangerous place to work, and they just weren't being careful enough.
The hunters had always been a problem, since they first began growing them in the stasis tanks. They were the most uncontrollable, most brutally violent creatures Wesker had ever experimented with. He likened them to the Velociraptors in "Jurassic Park," extremely efficient and single-mindedly brutal killers. And to think, they all started out as harmless frogs.
When the pure T-virus was exposed to living creatures, it mutated them. In the case of humans, it turned them into Tyrants, the walking albino tanks. But other animals mutated in different ways. Some of them disgusting, most of them totally useless. The testing labs looked like circus freak shows, with different animals transformed into hideous beasts shambling around behind metal bars and unbreakable glass.
Frogs, however, grew to many times their normal size, until they were almost as large as dogs. Their limbs extended disproportionately, so that they began walking around like gorillas, and their features changed so that they looked less like frogs and more like regular lizards. They grew long claws and razor-like teeth, and were the most bloodthirsty monsters the scientists had ever seen. And that was before they began breeding.
Even though Marcus was long dead, his work lived on. Letting the mutated creatures breed became standard procedure, and with each new generation, the mutations deepened. The hunters got larger and faster, until some of them measured five feet high. And as they grew in size, they became more agile and unbelievably strong. They could jump over seven feet high if given the chance, and their claws, long and sharp as knife blades, could cleanly decapitate a man with one swipe. But unlike the other T-virus experiments such as the Tyrants, who were almost immune to physical damage, the hunters' strength and speed did not make them immune to harm. One shotgun blast could drop them fairly quickly. And once dead, they somehow stayed that way.
The hunters were not the only advanced mutation developed at the lab. They also had the lickers and the stingers, which were both just as dangerous. The hunters just had a habit of escaping more often.
When Wesker pulled into the lab parking lot at the side of the mansion, he found Spencer standing there impatiently, his arms crossed, slightly shivering against the chilly night air. Wesker got out of his car and entered the mansion nonchalantly, Spencer hot on his heels.
"I'd better be getting overtime for this," he said.
"I pay you a salary," Spencer said, reasonably calm despite his anger and his time spent waiting outside. "Working late is part of your job."
Wesker laughed, but not at the comment. He realized that Barry had been wrong the whole time. Wesker most certainly did have someone waiting for him when he came home from work. He had Ozwell Spencer.