Code Name: EVE

A/N: Or… it will be a couple of months until you get your next chapter and… I will leave you hanging for a rather long time… This always happens when I get past 100 pages, I get lazy, or lose inspiration, or something. I dunno what happens exactly, but I’m sorry ^_^;

So, after this we have one more chapter and an epilogue. Here’s to hoping I finish a long fic for once -_-



When they all woke up in the morning, Krauser had finished moving the internal memory from the broken cellphone to one with a working screen. There were pictures of--most likely--the ex-owner’s friends, the stage, milling crowds, nothing too weird. In the video, however, as the ball dropped, Leon spotted what looked like a plaga tentacle waving above the crowd. The person with the phone seemed to notice it, too, because the camera darted away from the ball to zoom in on it. Any screaming that might have been going on in that area was drowned out by the cheering partygoers, but as more plaga tentacles burst into the air, chaos took over.



“There!” Ashley pointed at the tiny screen.



“What?” Heather asked.



“I saw them, go back!” She grabbed the phone from Jack, rewound it, and then paused. In the background, blurry and small, she could see her parents being ushered away by their body guards.



“What part of the square is that?” Leon took the phone to examine it. They went back outside with the intention of confining their combined efforts to one area. He didn’t know how much good it was going to accomplish, because they’d already searched it, but it was all they could do at the moment.



Ashley spied a glint of metal that she hadn’t noticed the day before. She drew away from the group to investigate it, and found out it was her mother’s favorite pin. As she was about to call the others over, a shadow behind her made her turn around. It was a man in a black suit that had seen much better days. He looked vaguely familiar, but…



“Miss Graham?”



“Yes…?” She shied away a tiny bit.



“It’s agent Thomas. You don’t remember me? Are you all right?”



Ashley’s jaw dropped. “Oh! I’m sorry, I’m- I’m a little confused… What are you doing here?”



“I was here with your parents the night everything went to hell. We’ve been hiding out in the Chrysler building waiting for help to get through.”



“They’re alive?” Her unease evaporated, replaced by excitement and hope.



“Alive and well,” the agent smiled. “I’ll take you right to them, they’ll be thrilled to see you.”



Ashley’s eyes lit up. “Hang on a minute.” She ran back toward her colony. “Guys! Guys, I found them!”



Heather and Leon appeared at the mouth of the street first, followed shortly by the other two. Leon eyed the stranger suspiciously. “Where are they?”



Ashley pointed at the secret service agent. “He said they’ve been hiding out in the Chrysler building.”



Ari made eye-contact with Jack and shrugged. “I don’t think he’s lying, but…” Ari whispered, trailing off with an uncertain glance at the figure standing twenty feet away.



“What do you mean ‘but?’ He’s been with my family since my dad took office.”



“He could be infected,” Heather hissed, trying to keep her voice low enough that he wouldn’t hear if he was infected.



“He’s not acting like he’s infected,” Ashley hissed back.



“None of us ‘act like we’re infected’ either,” Jack pointed out.



“I’m not stupid, I can tell whether or not he’s a plaga as well as any of you, and he’s not.”



“He doesn’t have to be a rival plaga to hurt us,” Heather said.



“She’s right, Ash,” Leon said, almost apologetically. “Those kind people evacuating the uninfected civilians treated me like crap.”



“But he’s only one human, we could take him if something goes wrong, and he does know where my parents are, right?”



Suddenly, the desperate golden eyes were trained on Ari. He shot another look at Jack and then said, “Yes… he does…” The ‘but’ went unsaid, though it was still there.



Ashley turned her sad puppy look on Jack. “Please, can’t we give him a minute? Follow him until Ari can get a better reading off of him or something?” The large man still paused, eyes flicking to the others. She tried a different tactic. “It’s the only lead we have, isn’t it better than nothing?”



“Ashley,” Jack put a hand on her shoulder. “I can’t lead my colony into a questionable situation if most of them are uncomfortable with it. You know how the decision making works.”



“But-”



“We know where they are, we can go there on our own time on our own terms, okay?”



“So what do we do about-”



“Down!” Leon grabbed Ashley and Heather and pulled them to the ground, Jack following suit with Ari. A bullet whizzed past them from a window somewhere above them and took a chip out of the pavement. They scattered as more shooters joined in, and Leon wound up curled alone behind a mailbox. None of them had any ammo. The trio hadn’t been able to find any last night.



Just because he probably could get shot and survive, didn’t mean he wanted to get shot. It hurt like hell. Jack and Ari hunched behind a dumpster in the mouth of an alley. Across the sidewalk from him and a few feet to the left, he could see Leon. After a pause, Leon jumped up and dove to join them. “Where are the girls?” Jack hissed, looking around. He could sense them, but he couldn’t find them. The sound of a car behind them made the trio whip around. At the other end, a car driven by the secret service agent stopped. Inside in the back seat, Ashley pounded on the glass and waved at them. “Oh, hell…” Jack muttered.



Leon looked out into the other street and saw that the enemy hosts were flooding into the street, waving assorted blunt objects. The shooters were still in the windows, every gun pointed at their position. They should have been able to sense them earlier, but Leon didn’t have time to figure that out. “It’s all we’ve got, come on.” Ari followed Leon of his own accord, but Leon had to drag Krauser by the arm. Since when did blood thirsty Jack freeze up in a fight or flight situation?



Jack met the agent’s eyes through the driver’s side window. Things slowed down around him, and not in the same way they did when he simply moved quickly. Men in sunglasses were bad. It stirred his nerves somewhere in the mental box where he kept things locked. Even when Wesker had first approached him, they’d had a conversation about… about… But then the bug surged up, pouncing on the lid of the box and slamming it shut. No time. Heather and Ashley were already in the car, he couldn’t leave them there alone. He felt his legs move. Didn’t move them, just felt them move. He couldn’t tell if the plaga was doing it or if he was doing it, but he didn’t care.



As soon as they were all squeezed into the car, agent Thomas sped off toward the Chrysler building. The woman Ashley told him was called Heather watched him out of the corner of one eye the whole time. The agent could feel it burning into the side of his head. He shouldn’t have let her sit up front. It made him nervous, and it would be hard to hide that.



“Run what you were doing here by me one more time,” Heather said.



“Like I told Miss Graham, we were in the city when the trouble started, and we haven’t been able to get out.”



“Let’s try again. What were you doing here today? You just happened to come outside and happened to find us?”



“What’s with all the questions? I’m trying to help you.”



“Then humor us,” Jack answered from the back.



“The plagas have been talking about you over the radios all day. We’ve been listening in on them to follow their movements.”



“They have radios?” Leon raised an eyebrow.



“Not the plagas themselves, the people who are controlling them. They have speakers all over the city, broadcasting different sounds.”



“What sounds?” Heather asked.



“Oh, you don’t hear them?” Thomas asked.



Something was wrong. The man was nervous, which Ari could understand, but he was still telling half truths. “Who is controlling them?”



“We never heard any names.”



A look from Ari, and Jack ordered, “Stop the car.”



“What? Why-”



The agent got cut off when Jack dove across Leon and Ashley to put a knife to his throat. The car swerved when he grabbed him, but that didn’t faze Krauser. “Stop the car now.”



“Fine.” The agent punched the break hard. Krauser lost his balance and fell forward between the seats. Thomas flinched, but it shouldn’t have damaged the man too much. Instead of worrying about that, he punched a button on the dash board. They’d wanted to get them inside the building first, but it looked like he was going to have to go to plan B. The gas that poured out of the vents was more concentrated than he had expected it to be…



The horn blared as the agent slumped against it. Leon pulled his shirt up over his nose and mouth. On either side of him, Ashley and Ari were fighting with the doors. Jack struggled in the small space to straighten himself out, but the gas was affecting all of them. Leon tried to help with the doors, but his eyes watered too much to see. His body’s responses to the commands from his brain were sluggish and heavy. He toppled over like the driver.



XXX



Wesker sat in his chair, his back to the wall of computer screens this time. The specimen in front of him was much more intriguing than anything they could show him at the moment. The mercenaries had been reluctant to leave their leader alone with the matriarch—restrained though it was—but Wesker could handle Krauser if the man did manage to escape. Speed? Strength? Wesker possessed both, with a superior intellect on top. No, the possibility of confronting an angry plaga didn’t faze him in the least. He watched Krauser rouse from the drug induced sleep, snapping to attention when he realized several metal restraints fastened him to the upright gurney. Both of his arms were encased in and held down by thick metal sleeves to inhibit his ability to transform. Thus far, Wesker had only noted the ability to be present in Krauser’s left arm, but there was no need to take chances. “Don’t bother struggling.”



Jack stopped, sizing up the man in front of him. The sunglasses had always unnerved him, more-so than the inhuman eyes. He was never sure why, but he covered his discomfort by scowling. “Wesker… Why am I surprised?”



“I’m certainly surprised to see you, alive. I would have thought you’d been buried in rubble for the past two years. Imagine my disappointment when I realized the extent of your true value.” Wesker stood up and moved to stand a couple feet away from Krauser, eyes sweeping over him distastefully. “And to think the scapegoat would be the one to blindly stumble in and grab the correct plaga.”



“Where’s my colony?” Jack growled.



“They’re alive, and well enough.”



“If you touch any one of them…”



“You’re in no position to make threats. You may be remarkably durable, but you can’t be invincible.” As if to make his point, Wesker picked up the knife they’d taken from Krauser when they’d searched and disarmed him. He ran a leather-gloved thumb along the blade.



Jack, however, remained unfazed. “What do you want?”



“Eve. We’re looking for Eve,” Wesker smirked. “There’s an investor in Africa who’s very interested in las plagas. Unfortunately, the two samples we reclaimed from Ms. Wong—the ones we up until recently believed to be the only two left in the world—were both male. We made a few attempts to create an artificial matriarch, but we couldn’t do it without an egg cell to start from.”



While Wesker talked, Krauser subtly tested the restraints around his arms to see if it was something he could break. “Looks like you figured something out. Why would you want me?”



“We used the ovum from a tapeworm to fill in the missing cells. Las plagas’ ability to regenerate from a single piece made reproduction by fragmentation viable for a while. Unfortunately, the plaga DNA begins to degrade after a period of time, taking the host with it, and it happens faster with each successive generation.” Wesker walked up and tapped Krauser on the chest with the blade as he spoke, “But now that you’re alive, everything can fall into place. The plagas that escaped will die off over time, and I get five, new, healthy specimens.”



Those last words sent a bolt of protective rage through the plaga, and Jack jerked forward against the restraints, snarling. Wesker stiffened, tightening his grip on the knife, and didn’t budge from his spot. “We will kill you,” Jack hissed. The restraint around his left arm constricted. “As long as we are alive, we will kill you.” He could feel the pulse in his arm as it tried to change, straining against the cuff until the metal squealed.



He couldn’t change quickly enough, however, and Wesker was faster. As soon has he’d taken notice of the plaga’s reaction, he raised the knife and buried it in Krauser’s left shoulder. As long as Krauser continued to live, the state in which he was living didn’t matter. Putting her host in danger would cause the plaga to abandon her attempts at retaliation and turn inward to save herself and her home from destruction. Or so Wesker believed, based on his observation of Krauser’s fight with Ada. Had Ada really believed Wesker wasn’t keeping a close eye on her? Stupid woman, but she had suffered her punishment for stealing—or at least attempting as such—the samples. Though Krauser’s thievery had actually turned out in Wesker’s favor, the soldier was no less overdue for some retribution. And if Wesker’s theory didn’t work, he knew an alternate way to control the man, at least the human part of him. The first stab had only served to further anger the plaga, but Wesker didn’t give up right away. He cut Krauser again, and then hit him…



XXX



“I told you to bring me the female.”



“We didn’t know which one you meant so we brought-”



“The female plaga, you nitwit! Not the female hosts!”



“Oh. Uh… I don’t know if we can bring him out yet. There was a problem-”



“If her host gives you any trouble, just tell him…” He trailed of into a whisper.



The voices sounded too loud. It annoyed Ashley. She was trying to sleep. How could she sleep with those three men going on like… Her eyes opened and flicked around. It was a hospital room… or a lab… Something like that. She tried to sit up, but something across her chest and upper arms brought her up short. She looked down to see that she was strapped to a metal table. More like shackled than strapped. No matter how much she struggled, she couldn’t budge them.



Dr. Shangwitz glared after the exiting soldiers and then turned back to the current specimens. The president’s daughter was awake. “I’ve researched your kind, I know the limits of your strength.”



Ashley jumped and turned her head to stare at the speaker. It was the only part of her body she could move. “Where are we?”



“Under the city. The rest shouldn’t concern you.”



As he spoke, the doctor—scientist, whoever he was—moved to a blind spot somewhere behind her head. She forced herself to lie still, breathing carefully. “What do you want?” Maybe if she gave him what he wanted, she could get some leverage somewhere. It worked with Jack.



“You may be a male, but that doesn’t make your genes completely useless.”



When he returned to her line of sight, he wore rubber gloves and held a disturbingly long needle in the air. Ashley’s eyes widened as they wandered its length. He leaned over her face and his black ponytail fell over his shoulder.



“There are two ways I’ve found to extract the plaga DNA from a host. Three months out of the year, trace amounts of plaga sperm leak out through a host’s semen or vaginal fluid, as the case may be.” The scientist smirked as her nose wrinkled in disgust. “That three month period begins in the fall, we’re quite clear of it. It’s a pity, really, the first method is much more fun.” He straightened back up. “I think after I stick you with this, you’ll be hoping that I wait for the alternative in the future.”



It was only a needle, it couldn’t be that bad. Ashley breathed carefully and squeezed her eyes shut as he pushed her shirt up. There was a prick about three inches above her belly button and she felt the needle slide into her flesh, a nauseating but tolerable sensation. When it hit and punctured the plaga, however, the thing panicked and started kicking. Its panic made Ashley panic and the internal movement hurt. Impulsively, she tried to lash out, but of course she couldn’t. After several minutes of extreme discomfort, the sensations stopped and she peeked through one eye. The syringe was filled with a mucky green liquid and the scientist seemed to have lost interest in her. In fact, he was preparing to perform the same procedure on Heather. There wasn’t anything she could do to stop him from here, but she did turn her attention back to escaping.



XXX



They’d moved him somewhere and dumped him on the floor, but he wasn’t very aware of anything besides that. Jack hurt all over, more than after that fight with Ada. It hurt to breathe and something metallic gurgled in his throat. The plaga wouldn’t let him move, wouldn’t let him think, putting all of their joint energy into stitching him back together. That changed as soon as he felt hands on him again, though. His eyes flew open and one hand grabbed for the nearest throat. He lacked the strength he thought he had, however, so his fingers only brushed skin as the intended victim slipped away. As they hauled him to his feet, he tried to kick the guy in front of him. They shouted things at him, but they only registered as nonsensical noise. His plaga was an injured, cornered animal, and it reacted as such.



One of the soldiers raised the cattle prod, but another made a gesture to stop him. This second soldier went around behind Krauser, grabbed his head, and leaned in to whisper in his ear.



Jack didn’t consciously hear the words, and his plaga didn’t understand them, but an image sliced through the blank wall of anger and pain. A young man’s face, screaming, half covered in blood, reflected in a black mirror. On top of that, a scream and a gun shot. His legs abruptly went numb, but the three men holding him kept him from falling. It was hot, stuffy, and blindingly bright green smothered him from all sides, scratching sensitive pink skin. He couldn’t breathe through the green, and blood cracked on his lips and melted on his tongue…



XXX



The cell was longer than it was wide, with metallic walls and a single door. There was some kind of sliding window in the top of the door, but it was closed. Leon didn’t know where Krauser or the girls were, but Ari was restrained next to him, slouched on the floor. Their hands were restrained behind them by basically a thick metal block with holes for their wrists. Bars ran up between their arms and their backs. Struggling proved fruitless, so Leon could only wait. Presently, he heard a commotion outside the door. As it got closer, he realized it was Heather, cursing and yelling.



“… through your eyes and scramble your brains, you bastards!”



Those were the only words he really made out before he heard an electric snap and she screamed, still angry but with the edge of pain this time. Four soldiers entered the room with Ashley and Heather, both in the thick metal cuffs. Leon heard Ari struggle to his feet beside him at the sight of Heather, but he stayed quiet.



Ashley tried to stay calm, more concerned with taking in her surroundings and finding a way to escape than with antagonizing her captors. When she saw Ari and Leon, she asked, “Where’s Jack?”



“Shut up,” one of the soldiers said.



Ashley twisted to look at Ari. “Is he okay?”



“I said shut up.” The soldier shoved her up against the pole on the other side of Leon and fastened her hands behind it. It took all four of them, but they secured Heather in the next slot over.



Heather hurled threats and curses after their retreating forms until the door clanged shut. Growling with frustration when the cuffs didn’t yield to her yanking, she threw herself forward hard. They clanked against the pole, bringing her up short and hurting her wrists. She sank to her knees, panting to catch her breath and calm down.



Ari leaned forward to see around Leon and Ashley. “You okay, sweetheart?”



“No,” Heather snapped, glaring at the ground. The shocks had given her a headache, and her stomach still hurt from the plaga’s panicked thrashing. Her face softened as she looked up and gave Ari an apologetic look. “I mean, yeah, I will be, but…” She met eyes with Ashley. Leon and Ari didn’t know the true extent of the shit they’d just gotten into, at least not yet. Sure, they probably knew that they were in danger, but after what had happened to her and Ashley a few minutes ago, Heather didn’t like coming here to find Jack missing.



“Do you know where we are?” Leon asked.



Ashley shook her head. “Somewhere under New York. That’s all he… this scientist or doctor or something… would tell me.”



Leon groaned inwardly. Out of one lab and into another, and he had a feeling no one at this lab had any part of his wellbeing in mind. “What did he do?”



“Stuck this big needle into my stomach and took some blood, but he threatened to…” Ashley trailed off. She didn’t know exactly what the doctor had been insinuating, but she had no intention of sticking around to find out if they were going to molest her—or the others, for that matter. Not to mention the rough treatment they’d showed Heather on the way to the cell. “We need to get out of here.”



“No shit,” Heather said, still twisting her hands in the restraints.



Ari twisted to look behind him, trying to see the restraints. Even with the flexibility, he couldn’t see them very well. Gritting his teeth, he leaned forward and stretched his arms out behind him. He raised them as much as he could, took a breath, and then pushed them farther. His shoulders popped out as they passed the limit of their rotation, and then popped back in as he raised his arms over his head. The cuffs clunked against the bar and he looked up at them. Tucking his thumb into his palm, he pulled a couple times, but he couldn’t get the block of metal to stay level and the angle of the hole was wrong. He braced them against the bar and tried pulling both sides at the same time, but the curved surface couldn’t keep it very steady, either.



Ashley worked her hands up over her head to examine the cuffs, too. There was a slot in one side of it, but she couldn’t find any way to release the lock. Lying back, she put her knees behind her head and tried to grab the block between her feet to hold it steady. One hand slipped free, and after flexing it to pop everything back into place, that free hand made the second much easier to release.



She joined Ari and held the block steady for him as he squeezed and twisted his hands out. For whatever reason, the plagas had reacted to their bodies differently. Instead of being inhumanly strong, they had become inhumanly malleable. They both went to see if they could get the other two loose, but that seemed to be a dead end. “What now?” Ari whispered.



“Is there anyone out there?” Leon nodded at the door.



“Maybe a couple. It’s easier for me to track las plagas,” Ari answered.



“If we opened the little window thing, I could push Ari through, but I don’t know how to handle the guards…” Ashley said.



“Knock one out, take his weapon, and use it to deal with any others,” Heather said.



“Ashley’s better for that,” Ari protested.



“You can squish down smaller than I can. My boobs might get stuck in the window.”



Ari took a breath and let it out slowly. “Okay. I will try.” He went to the door and quietly pried the little window open. There was a short hall with a barred gate at the end. Two armed men stood with their backs to it. Ari eased the window open--good thing humans can’t hear worth a darn--all the way. Ashley knelt down and he climbed up on her shoulders to push himself through to the waist, watching the guards upside-down. Sitting on the edge of the window, he slid out to hook his knees over the edge, and then fell back to hang upside-down. His eyes stayed glued on the guards as Ashley help him control his descent to the floor. They didn’t turn around.



Acutely aware of every noise vibration, he crouched down against a wall and snuck up on the nearest guard. They were absorbed in a conversation with each other. He could feel the rumbling tone of their voices in the pit of his stomach. They still radiated a sense of calm, too, so they must not have been aware of the colony’s activities, either. He could feel that the plaga knew exactly how to handle this, so despite his distaste for its more violent urges, Ari let go. Zeroing in on the closest weapon—a tazer of some kind—and the closest neck, Ari lunged and reached through the bars. His arm latched around the first guard’s neck as he pulled the tazer gun out of the uniform holster and shot the other guard. The first one struggled and tried to hit him, but couldn’t aim properly through the security gate. He went down, too, unconscious from lack of oxygen. Ari squeezed through the gaps in the gate and mumbled an apology as he searched for something that could be a key.



The other three were waiting quietly when the cell door opened. Ashley had returned to her spot between Leon and Heather, and had put her hands behind her back, so no one would know she’d escaped if Ari got caught. The silhouette in the doorframe, however, was Ari, and he held a plastic card. He slid it in the slots on both of the remaining restraints, and they popped open. “Now… now what?”



Even after everything that had happened in the last two days, committing violent acts first hand still made Ari uncomfortable. Endearing. Heather put an arm around him. “We find Jack, and Ashley’s parents if they’re even here, and we blow this popsicle stand, possibly literally.” When Ari gave her a look, she added, “We can’t let them spread the other colony outside the city. That wouldn’t be good for anyone…”



“She has a good point,” Leon said thoughtfully. Then again, Raccoon City was a disaster he wouldn’t have liked repeated. “I’m not even convinced that Ashley’s parents are here. He could have been lying about the Chrysler Building, or we could be somewhere far away from there.”



“I’m really sorry,” Ashley mumbled. “I got excited…”



Leon patted Ashley on the back. “It’ll be fine. We get whatever weapons we can off the guards out there, find Jack, and then see what information we can dig up. Come on.” Quick and cautious, the group made their way into the hall, and Ari slipped through the gate again to unlock it from the other side.