Disclaimer: Anything not immediately recognizable as a registered trademark of Capcom's is probably mine. Anything you do recognize as Capcom's I'm simply borrowing. I seek no monetary gain from this. I wrote it simply for fun (and because I really like these characters).

Summary: A new variation on the T-Virus threatens the world in a way no other strain has, prompting the BSAA to send one of their own to South America to investigate. Billy/Rebecca Reunion, Post RE5.

Rating: T (mostly for swearing.)

Author's Note: Many thousands of thanks to cannedcoelcanth for betaing this for me. Without her, I probably never would've gotten to posting again. 3

Chapter 1:

The sun beat hard against his legs, slowly cooking them under his dark jeans. Guillermo Rodriguez shifted, trying to find a spot of shade to hide them in. The movement sent trickles of sweat rolling down his back.

This had better be worth it, he thought, shifting again and looking around the open-air bar. He hoped to find and flag down the bar's owner, but Vargas was nowhere to be found.

Figures. Well. Rodriguez was just going to have to do this completely sober, then. He could do that. Pig, for all his habits, neuroses, and his particular distaste for personal hygiene, was hardly the biggest challenge he'd ever faced.

Rodriguez suppressed a small chuckle at that and leaned forward, propping his elbows on the table. "Okay," he said. "What've you got?"

Across the table from him, Pig wrung his chubby hands and swept his dark eyes around the bar. In halting, broken English, he replied, "Something special. Something very, very special."

Rodriguez rolled his eyes. If there was one thing he hated on the Market, it was the dealers' tendency to upsell and exaggerate the quality of their products. For everyone else, that probably worked. Rodriguez didn't care. The T-Virus was the T-Virus, and he wanted it. "Pig, to you, everything is special."

"It is!" Pig insisted, his voice going high and shrill. He flinched and glanced nervously around the bar again. Dropping his voice and switching to Spanish, Pig added, "It is, señor, I promise it is! It's very special!"

"Pig, I don't care how special it is. I just want to know what it is." Rodriguez jabbed a finger at Pig and went on, "For all I know, you're trying to sell me some Kool-Aid in a cute little vial and some hoaxed footage proving the lunar landing never happened."

That did it.

Pig clamped his mouth shut, screwed his face up, and leveled Rodriguez with a glare. The two men stared at each other for a few long minutes before Pig threw up his hands, bent over, and fiddled around with the briefcase he'd set under the table at the beginning of their meeting. When he rose again, he set a small vial down on the table. "It's called T-Loki."

Rodriguez grinned. That's more like it. No lies, no hooks, no cheesy sales pitch, just the straight and honest exchange of goods and services. Gingerly, he reached out and touched the vial with a finger. It was cool to the touch and more than three-quarters full of a dark liquid that left a greenish-blue residue on the glass. Surprisingly enough, most of the T-virus samples Rodriguez had encountered over the past ten years were colored – some purple, some pink, some blue. He'd even had one that was dark yellow and glowed, for one reason or another, bright orange under black light.

Touching the glass again, Rodriguez said, "T-Loki, huh? What the hell kind of name is T-Loki?" From somewhere on the other end of the bar a cheer went up, followed by a chorus of hearty laughs. "Where did you get it?"

Pig's gaze darted over the Market again. Quickly – too quickly – he replied, "Dealer in Cozumel."

"When?"

"Day ago," Pig replied.

Rodriguez raised an eyebrow. "And you're already pawning it?"

"That's business."

Rodriguez snorted softly to himself. Pig was lying. That wasn't business. Not for Pig, a steadfast creature of habit who never sold a virus within a week of acquiring it…unless the virus was hot. But Rodriguez also doubted he'd be able to get much more information out of Pig, and in ways he didn't want it. He'd known people who'd killed for samples of the T-Virus before. Pig had never seemed like the type, but it had never done Rodriguez any good to assume his peers were incapable of going down that dark road. "All right. How much?"

Pig suddenly grinned. He grinned so wide and broad the laugh lines nearly swallowed his beady little eyes. Between the shade and their natural darkness, they looked black.

Like a shark's.

"For you, my friend, I'll make a special deal."

Rodriguez didn't leave the Market in a hurry, though Pig did. He'd darted off almost as soon as everything finished changing hands, disappearing into the maze of low, mud brick and stucco structures that made up most of the Market. Rodriguez watched him go, wondering if maybe the something special about the virus tucked safely under Rodriguez's side of the table was not what it could do, but how desperately the guys Pig had gotten it from were going to want it back.

For his part, Rodriguez had finally managed to flag Vargas down and had gotten himself a drink. He milked it, taking slow, even sips, quietly delaying his walk home in the heat. While he drank, he mulled his plans for the rest of the day. He'd call Graves – his Alliance contact – as soon as he got home and got the virus put away. Tell the old man he had another sample to send their way and kindly ask for his reimbursement and fees. After that, well. Maybe he'd throw a little caution to the wind and have a look into that dealer in Cozumel, try and find out why Pig had seemed so desperate to get the T-Loki sample off his hands and into someone else's.

He drew a hand down his face. Suicide, that's what that was. In the market, you didn't go after the source. You dealt. You bought and sold and you didn't ask questions that weren't really important. The Alliance, though not a terrible threat, hung over everyone's heads like a dark cloud. Anyone caught sniffing around…well, those stupid enough to do so usually had connections to the cops or the Alliance, and the consequences for those poor bastards were usually pretty dire.

But Rodriguez…had different motives than most guys out here. He already felt he was living on borrowed time, for one, so maybe it was time to cash in, throw the Alliance a bone, and go out feeling like he'd done as much good as any man could. And hey, maybe this time the Alliance could get in there and stop an outbreak before it happened.

Yeah, he thought. And Pig will sprout wings and fly.

Rodriguez swirled the bronze liquid around in the glass. Sometimes he felt like a sleaze, working as an honest dealer while secretly taking money from the BSAA. Everyone on the Market suspected the Alliance had insiders, but no one suspected him. Not with his, ah, exemplary record with the cartels. Even if they did suspect him, no one dared accuse him. He still had friends back in the cartels.

Downing the last of his drink, he slapped a few bucks down on the table, pinning them under his class. It was time to go home, time to finish taking care of the last bits of his business for the day.

Then maybe he'd grab a nap and beat out the last of this dreadful heat.

Rodriguez's place was a low-slung, single-story concrete building he affectionately called the bunker. It was almost three miles away from town, down a muddy track barely wide enough for his Jeep to pass through. He kept a careful eye on his surroundings as he walked back along the track, skirting the deeper puddles as best he could.

He didn't expect anyone to follow him – all the dealers in town knew where he lived already, just like he already knew where all of them lived. Besides, it was Market custom to leave other dealers well enough alone as long as your business with them hadn't gone sour.

Even so, it never, ever hurt to be wary. That, at least, was one piece of advice Rodriguez had gladly taken from his last employer. The rest – mostly about getting rid of bodies and blood – he generally chose to ignore.

When he reached the bunker, Rodriguez slipped around the side, to where the front door was hidden behind a series of vines and some plant with leaves that stuck fast to his pants whenever the humidity was bad. He took a few minutes to pry every leaf and leaf-part clinging to his jeans and his long sleeves before unlocked the door and ducking inside.

The bunker was cool and dark, as always. While he personally would have preferred a design that allowed for a little more natural light, having few windows kept the heat and his enemies out better than anything else.

Rodriguez quickly crossed the threshold and into the bunker, heading towards a closet at the back. In the floor there, carefully hidden, was the door that led to the basement. He opened it and slipped inside, flicking on a lights witch as he descended the stairs.

The fluorescent lights slowly flickered on, rattling and popping angrily at him. They needed replacing at some point soon, but for now still managed to chug along even if they did give the whole joint a strobe effect.

Along the back wall of the basement were four small vats cold storage, courtesy of the BSAA. He tried not to think about where they got the money to get him these things as he strode across the floor to the vats, gently the briefcase on a cheap card table he kept by the vats for this purpose.

When he opened the briefcase, manila folders thick with paper spilled out, tumbling to the floor. Rodriguez swore, rolling his eyes before dropping to his knees and gathering up the paperwork. Most of the pages were full of graphs and charts, and the others were packed full of the dullest, most boring jargon he'd ever encountered. Still, he skimmed each page as he put them back in their folders, his eyes glazing over before he'd even hit the bottom of each one.

Only one set of pages jumped out at him. Stapled together, he guessed they were a report detailing what the virus had done during trials. Most of it was standard T-virus – zombie humans, dogs, and cats, wild mutations in plants, insects, arachnids, amphibians, and reptiles, spread through contact with infected tissue – nothing he hadn't seen before.

But towards the bottom, in bolded text boxed in by the faint gray of copied highlighter, Rodriguez spotted two words: asymptomatic carriers.

He rocked back onto his heels. The words seemed familiar. He knew the term from somewhere, but could quite place it – and therefore didn't entirely know what it meant. He only knew that, for some reason, it made him think of Typhoid Fever.

Rodriguez tucked the report back into the file and set the whole stack aside before putting the virus away in the cryogenic storage containers. The hair on the back of his neck was standing up. Nothing about this was sitting well with him anymore.

As soon as the virus was put away, Rodriguez grabbed the report and headed back upstairs. The folder felt heavy in his hands, and he felt like the words asymptomatic carriers had been branded onto his brain. He knew he knew the term from somewhere. Since his memory was proving useless, his spotty internet connection and Wikipedia had to help fill him in.

Typhoid Fever was a deadly disease, at least for most of the unlucky people who caught it. But for some, the disease barely registered as a cold, and for others, it never registered at all. They could carry it and spread it, all without ever showing symptoms themselves. The most famous of these asymptomatic carriers was a woman called Typhoid Mary. She had been a healthy carrier for Typhoid Fever and had infected dozens of people before the health department tracked her down and locked her up.

Rodriguez looked at the report again. The words asymptomatic carrier were still there, still bound by that faded gray highlighter color. He frantically flipped through the pages in the report, trying to find out more and fast.

Rodriguez struggled to think. Typhoid Mary had infected people by cooking for them, transferring the bacteria from her hands into their desserts, which had always been her specialty. The T-Virus spread differently – as a blood borne pathogen, it spread through contact with infected tissue. T-Loki, according to the report, spread through contact, like earlier strains of the T-Virus, but not infected tissue. T-Loki spread like the common cold, through contact with infected surfaces. As long as the virus's incubation period…

Here Rodriguez set to flipping through the report again, dragging his finger down ever page as he searched frantically for that stupid number.

There. There it was. Towards the middle, at the top of the page, next to a diagram of a cell. Three hours. The incubation period for the T-Loki virus was three hours from initial infection to the first symptoms.

One healthy carrier…that would be all it would take. One healthy carrier and the virus could spread the world over in weeks, faster than anyone – the BSAA, the military, the CDC, anyone – could contain it.

With every progressive thought, Rodriguez felt a tighter knot form in his stomach. This was bad. This was very, very bad.

Call the B.S.A.A., Rodriguez told himself. Talk to Graves. Those were his options, weren't they? Call his contacts. Tell them he had a very dangerous sample in his possession and he needed someone to look at it right away – and no, he couldn't ship it to them. Not this time.

He pushed a hand through his dark hair.

If he couldn't ship it, he'd need someone to come down here and have a look at the virus. Graves…but Graves was no expert on viruses. He headed the BSAA's coordination with the military more than anything else. He was a bureaucrat, though at sixty-something with a decorated military career, Graves had earned the right to a desk and a job with fewer risks.

There is no other way.

Reaching around to his back pocket, Rodriguez pulled out his phone. He flipped it open and started dialing with one hand, eyes still locked on the report. He was reading it in more detail now, mouthing each word as he passed over it.

Then the phone began to vibrate in his hand. Rodriguez jumped, looking at the phone as though it were possessed.

The caller ID said Graves.

Rodriguez answered the call and pressed the phone to his ear, setting the report down on his couch in the same motion. "Yeah?" When Graves didn't say anything, he added, "Whaddya want?"

Given the timing, he expected Graves to ask him to keep an eye out for a specific T-Virus strain or to ask for some information or to warn him about some kind of raid – the usual deal.

But…well, that wasn't what happened.

In his rough commander's voice, a voice he used on his subordinates, a voice Rodriguez hadn't heard him use in well over a decade, Graves said, "It's been a long time, Lieutenant Coen."

Author's Note: Greetings, readers! This is a revised version of Down the Line Chapter one (as of April 9, 2012). For the original version of this chapter (if you're interested in comparing the old version with this one; I promise that this one is much higher quality than the last one) please see my livejournal (I have the same name there, arcanelegacy), under the tag "[fic] down the line".