Resident Evil: Resurrection

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When the broken window on the front door was fixed, he sat down on the tailgate and the truck creaked quietly. Carlos lifted his head, looking down the length of the truck bed, and at the cab, before up at the sky. The metal of their vehicle was cold, and groaned loudly upon each small movement he made. That newcomer was right, it was going to snow tonight. His breath swirled about him in soft misty curls as he opened the metal case and touched his fingers to the cold barrel of the device that had brought him back to this world. Carlos closed his hand, the tips of his fingers now chilled from touching such icy metal. What would happen to him if the gun stopped working? When would he no longer need this tool as a crutch, or would that day ever come? His gaze lifted up to the cabin, and across its face higher up to the balcony before the kitchen, where light was shining warmly out of the glass doors.



Out here, in the cold of dead night, this was where he would still be if Alice hadn’t… hadn’t… suffered for so long, painstakingly and tirelessly seeking to bring him back to what he once was. Carlos had not been given an explanation for why she’d chosen him, it was left to his own imagination, but he wasn’t so conceited or confident to believe that she’d done it because of any ghosts of a relationship they might have had before his death. He believed with a good deal of certainty that Alice would have done the same for Claire, or LJ, or any reanimated corpse she found out in the desert… she just happened to find him. He picked the gun up then and loaded it with a vial, but then closed the metal case and stood, walking towards the cabin. He couldn’t do anything right now, the vials were frozen solid, and to pull the trigger likely would destroy the one device keeping him from wishing he could devour Alice’s throat rather than kiss it.



“Whoa. Dude needs a jacket and a warm fire,” Hung said point-blank as Carlos walked past the kitchen to get to the bedrooms.



He heard the groan of a chair being pushed across the kitchen tiles, and the little hairs all over his body prickled and tingled as they stood upright when he felt Alice’s warm hand on his arm. “Carlos?” she implored.



Lifting his head, he looked at her questioningly. “Yes?”



Was that relief in her face? A frown etched into his features as he looked into her eyes, seeing the fear there, and he had to wonder why she was looking at him that way. Reaching out with the arm she was still touching, he pushed the bathroom door open and saw his reflection in the dimly lit mirror. His lips were blue, his skin was pallid, and his eyes had a slight milky glaze over them. A tremor ran down his spine as he saw exactly why she had said his name with such fear; he looked like one of them. It did not escape him, either, that she smelled particularly good right now, and not in the womanly sense… but more in the living, warm meat sense. “Get out,” he said evenly.



“But -”



“Out!” He barked. Carlos pushed her out of the bathroom a little too roughly and the door slammed shut behind him, leaving her out in the hallway staring at the grain patterns in the wood of the door and only hearing him shuffle about in the bathroom.



His hands curled around the edge of the sink as he continued to stare at himself in the weak light of the two flickering candles at the edge of the mirror. He was a horror. This was the face Alice had seen every day for who knows how long, and the face she had endured while trying to cure him. These were the hands that had strangled her, and that… that was the mouth that had bitten into her throat in the exact place he’d been kissing her minutes ago. Those were the soulless eyes that had stared at her as she chained him up and experimented upon him.



If Carlos was a man of a rasher nature, he would have thrown a punch at the mirror, shattering it, but at very least some moderate strands of reason and peacekeeping were still in place and he did no such thing. Instead, he opened the case yet again, and took the gun out, resting it on the edge of the sink. After some searching he couldn’t find the plug for the drain so he clogged the sink’s pipe with a hand towel before filling it with hot water and finally dipping the gun into the water. Carefully he brought it to rest on the bottom of the sink, and Carlos stood very still as he stared at the warming gun, and the blood inside those twin coils within the vial. Without that blood, he was certain now that he would return to being a monster. Without her blood, he was nothing.



“I’ve become a parasite,” he said quietly, as his eyes closed and his head lowered. He was no better than those very same things they had spent years of their lives slaughtering, only he could speak, reason and learn. Either he followed Alice around for the rest of his days, or he returned to being one of them.



Carlos’ hand plunged into the water and he took the gun out, pressing it to his arm while it still dripped onto the carpet and his shoes, and he pulled the trigger.



Alice pressed both hands to the door as she heard the all too familiar sound of the transfusion gun, and she closed her eyes, resting her forehead against the door as well. She’d turned Carlos into something quite possibly worse than a lifeless killing machine. Now, he had a soul again, and a heart and mind… now he would suffer for the rest of his life in a constant state of anxiety and strain, never knowing if or when he might revert back to being a monster. He could hurt anybody he stayed with, he could revert and kill them without a second thought… he could accidentally forget to take his injection and roll over one night to try and feast on the soft flesh of the nearest living creature. He was a true monster. “Carlos,” Alice whispered against the door, “I’m sorry.” She winced as she heard his anticipated roar of pain while her blood sluiced through his veins, searing the feral parts of the infection out of him once more. Two doses was too much… one dose obviously wasn’t enough. There was no solution to this without more experiments, torture, pain… without risking what tatters of a life he had back.



“Is there something you need to be telling me about the big scary army mofo?” Hung asked, startling Alice into turning around and looking at him like she’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t be. “He didn’t look right when he came in.”



“He’s sick,” Alice said immediately. “He just has to take medicine once or twice a day to feel better, and it’s painful. It’s nothing to worry about. He’s fine, perfectly fine. He won’t hurt you.”



Hung didn’t remember asking if the badass army dude was going to hurt him. This hot chick declaring without being asked that he wouldn’t hurt Hung told the former athlete that sick boy in the bathroom behind her probably would hurt him, and badly. “Uh huh,” Hung said quietly. This was both none of his business and nothing he wanted to mess around with; it was obviously a touchy subject. “Well I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me.”



She nodded, and when Hung was gone, Alice felt a shadow loom over her from behind. She didn’t have to turn around to know Carlos was standing directly behind her.



“You lied,” he said in a gravelly voice, his pitch deep and grim. Somehow, his slight accent seemed thicker to her right now… much more pronounced in his state of pain and despair.



“We all lie sometimes,” Alice whispered. “Sometimes its necessary.”



There was a long pause before Carlos uttered, “Do me one favor. If you’re ever going to lie to me, do it before you kill me.”



Her heart hammered in her chest as she dared not turn around, afraid of what she might see in his face… or worse, what she wouldn’t see in his face. “I’m not going to kill you Carlos.”



“I said do it before you kill me,” he pressed darkly. “Not now.”



She lifted her head and stared away from her into the distance, but not at anything in this house as pain contorted her face. “I’m not -”



“You will.” He said it with a finality that left her unable to say anything more.



Hung lifted his head when his two hosts came back into the kitchen and informed him that they were turning in for the night. He noted that they didn’t say much of anything at all, not to him or each other, and he also noted that they each went to separate bedrooms, that last note getting a triple underline in his mind. Either they’d just had a lover’s quarrel, or she was fair game. Whatever kind of relationship those two had it hadn’t really been defined, but when he’d come into this place it had felt like two interrupted lovers. Now, it felt more like a military bunker in a losing battle.



He got up, stretched, and looked at the table. Hung picked up two more hunks of sausage and a bowl of rice, carrying them with him down to the living room on the main floor, where he made camp on the couch and continued to eat, leaving those two upstairs to have their silence war. Whatever was going on, he wasn’t fool enough to try and interfere… and that besides, when the army dude had come into the house, he’d looked like one of those monsters. He walked around and talked normally enough, even afterwards, but it still gave Hung the willies something awful, and he didn’t trust that guy.











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