Rebecca Chambers: Game Over?!

For this picture I'm doing something a little different... I wrote a fanfic to go along with it!  Enjoy the double-dose of Resident Evil action! Will Rebecca surive???

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    The Raccoon City Police Department's STARS unit fought an uphill battle. A shortage of personnel, an indifferent public, and an indignant police department made bringing the Umbrella Corporation to justice almost impossible.

    Their battles now were fought from behind a desk or over a phone. Their enemies were politicians, reporters, and the news media. Umbrella accused them of slander and threatened to sue. Talk shows and tabloids mocked them. The newspaper called them crackpots and conspiracy theorists. They received angry letters from concerned citizens telling them to “think of the children”.

    And they thought dealing with BOWs was rough.

    But the Special Tactics and Rescue Service never faltered, especially not after what they experienced and sacrificed in the Arklay Mountains that dark summer night.

    One morning they got a call from a postal worker whose story and character were sketchy but whose route was close enough to the mountains that they couldn't ignore it. The Perkins's farm, he said. Been a week and no one's got the mail, he said. At first he thought the Perkins were on vacation, but then one day he saw something large moving around near the barn. Like a big snail. Or a slug. He couldn't rightly say. It was unnatural, whatever it was. He didn't trust the RPD. Didn't trust Umbrella. Didn't trust the government. Didn't particularly trust STARS, even. But he said he knew Barry back in high school, so he figured he'd pass the word along.

    Rebecca Chambers volunteered to investigate. The majority of STARS's combat specialists had been killed, and Rebecca felt she needed more field experience if she was to best serve the unit. Besides, the way she was treated bothered her.

    Everyone loved her. Everyone. Even Wesker had a thing for her (back when he was still alive). She was everyone's baby sister. That cute girl. The little darling of the RPD. Even the people who disliked STARS loved her. They said she was an innocent bystander caught up with weirdos. Instead of hate letters and complaints, she received fan mail. Umbrella had even offered her a job!

    It didn't make sense. She worked as hard as anyone to become a member of STARS. She fought the BOWs tooth and nail, and dammit, she deserved to be as distrusted and despised as the rest of them.

    Why was she left out again?

    It drove her crazy.

    Barry Burton, the senior officer now in command of STARS following the deaths of Albert Wesker and Enrico Marini, was reluctant to give her the assignment. Not that he didn't have faith in her. Surviving a mansion full of zombies and biogentically engineered horrors was amazing on its own, but to survive two instances of it in a single night? On her first mission? Rebecca had more experience than any of them when it came to dealing with the BOW threat, and there was nothing left for her to prove as far as he was concerned.

    However, Rebecca carried an obvious chip on her shoulder. She had a tendency to over compensate, and was a relentlessly competitive overachiever. Her consuming desire to prove herself and her insistence on doing things on her own made Barry fear she would put herself in undue risk. Chris told him how close she had come to getting killed by a hunter in the Spencer Mansion and he wondered how much luck the girl had left in her. No matter how skilled you are, eventually the odds will turn against you.

    After briefly considering Rebecca for the job, he refused and gave the assignment to Jill instead. Rebecca's heart sunk. She didn't argue and went back to her corner of the STARS office and brooded. She picked up a medical journal and pretended to read it. Barry wouldn't put her on an assignment because she didn't have experience, but she couldn't get experience because Barry wouldn't put her on an assignment. A catch-22. It didn't seem fair.

    Jill, however, was on Rebecca's side and let Barry know it in a grand display of patented Valentine melodrama. She all but flipped over his desk. It didn't take her long to get him to change his mind, though he gave Rebecca very specific instructions: she was to report back immediately upon observing any sign of a BOW, and she was not to engage unless in a life or death situation.

    Rebecca drove to the airport and met up with Brad Vickers, who had been spending less time at HQ with STARS and more time with the RPD aviation team at the hangar. The RPD had four helicopters and three of them were undergoing maintenance except for the one Dooley and Dewey had flown for the Bravo Team that night in the Arklay Mountains. Rebecca didn't normally give into superstition, but the thought of riding in that particular helicopter again made her anxious. Even the smell of the seats brought back vivid memories of the night where life turned upside down.

    Brad flew Rebecca to the Perkins's farm. He had less combat experience than she did, and was perfectly fine with that. He saw the Tyrant blasted to pieces by a rocket from the safety of a helicopter back at the Spencer Mansion, and that was as close as he intended to get to a BOW ever again.

    The two of them tried spotting the creature from the air, but it was nowhere to be found. Brad landed the helicopter in a field. Rebecca hopped out and walked to the farmhouse. A sedan and a rusty pickup sat in the driveway. A week's worth of mail and newspapers clogged the mailbox. The porch light was on. She could hear the clamorous uproar of a game show through one of the open windows.
    
    Rebecca knocked on the door and rang the doorbell several times. No one answered. She checked the door and found it unlocked. She stuck her head in enough to announce who she was to the people inside, but there was no answer. She went into the foyer and took her wallet out of her pocket and flashed her badge. Then she repeated, stressing, loudly, that she was a member of STARS. Most of the lights in the house were on and plates of food sat on the kitchen table. She called out again. Louder this time, trying to shout over the TV booming in the living room. She went upstairs and called out again. She heard another TV coming from the bedroom. The Weather Channel droning out the local forecast for Raccoon City. A heat advisory was in effect for the weekend. Humid. Highs in the nineties.

    Rebecca found the bedroom closet doors open and clothes scattered on the floor under the dresser. A breeze came through the open window and rippled the curtains. She put her badge away and looked outside. An empty sea of pastureland stretched to the horizon and bled into the deep blue ridge of the Arklay Mountains. Those mountains. The sight of them made her sick to her stomach. She shuddered. She heard a dog barking somewhere in the direction of the barn.

    She checked the rest of the upper floor and then went downstairs and walked out onto the front porch. The rapidity of the barking increased. She followed the noise and saw an old hound barking at the open barn door. The animal shot her a glance as she approached, but immediately fixed its gaze back to the doorway and continued its alarm.

    From her distance, Rebecca couldn't get a fix on exactly what had the old hound so stressed. The hard black shadows cast by the high sun blanketed almost everything inside the barn. She could just make out the green of a John Deere, but that was it.

    When she got closer, she could see something moving in the barn. Not cows. Not horses. The old hound started growling and Rebecca put her hand on her pistol. She heard something inside breathing heavily, and a large bloated creature lurched slowly out from the darkness of the barn into the light outside, crawling toward her. A massive ten foot long slug, with a charcoal colored shell and a cavernous, toothless mouth that looked like an enormous fleshy pink plunger. It had eight large arms with three fingers each, and it groaned and wheezed and made wet sucking sounds as it pulled itself miserably along the ground, leaving behind it a trail of mucous. It had barely emerged from the barn before it stopped moving and became still, as if it had fallen asleep.

    Rebecca and the old hound had backed off some distance while the beast was inching its way out of the barn. Once a few minutes had gone by without it moving, she came in for a closer inspection. She heard what sounded like snoring. Like someone slowly letting the air out of a whoopee cushion. She picked a shovel up off the ground and threw it at the thing. It bounced off the creature's shell but the creature didn't budge. She went in closer, not near enough to touch it but near enough to get a lecture from Barry if he ever found out.

    Rebecca leaned up against the barn and took out her two-way radio and contacted Brad. She described the BOW, and what she had seen in the house. He said he'd report into Barry and told her to get back to the helicopter before it did anything. Don't take any chances. That's what she was ordered to do, Brad said, reminding her for the fifth time since they left the airport.

    Rebecca rolled her eyes and turned the radio off. Suddenly, the slug wrenched up at a speed she would never have thought possible for something so large and threw itself toward her. She screamed and dove out of the way and the radio fell out of her hand. The slug charged her again. She crawled along the ground and managed to avoid it. The creature knocked over a pile of feed sacks sitting along the barn and as Rebecca tried scrambling to her feet she tripped over a rake and went face first into the side of a garbage can.
    
    The old hound snarled and barked, then ran when the monster rose up like a totem pole and roared and slapped the dirt with its large hands. A dog can only be so brave. Rebecca shoved the garbage can out of the way. She pulled out her gun and fired a shot into the creature. She only managed to hit its shell. It uttered a deep, foul whine and came at her again. She backed up quickly, then turned to run, but the creature had a burst of speed and managed to cut her off. She fired two more rounds, again hitting its shell. In a fury, the creature doubled its effort and lunged at her harder than before. Rebecca spun around and tried hopping over a fence, but one of the creature's heavy hands swatted her in the back, knocking her off the rail and exploding the wind out of her.

    She could barely breathe, but found enough strength to pick herself up. The creature crashed through the fence and rammed into her. She got up again and ran, her head spinning, little sparkles of light dancing in her eyes. The creature spit a white slime and it hit her in the leg. She slipped and fell, her leg had gone numb. She got up but she could no longer run. She tried hopping away, but within seconds the creature overtook her. It bumped into her and sent her sprawling to the ground.

    The BOW's mouth closed around Rebecca's legs, and she felt herself being sucked down into something wet. Her other leg soon went numb, then her waist. She thought she heard herself scream but she couldn't say for certain whether or not she did. She didn't know anything right now. She didn't think about anything important. She didn't see anything specific. She hammered the creature with her fists and fought and thrashed wildly like an animal. Her heart pounded in her ears and she swore and begged and cried and prayed and blasphemed in one single burst of energy.

    The creature lifted its head ponderously into the air, using gravity to assist in swallowing her. She dangled there like a puppet, gradually being pulled down into death. Then from out of the back of her mind, a cloud of calmness floated over her and she remembered something important. She had a gun.

    Rebecca took aim and pointed the barrel at the creature's soft underbelly. She squeezed the trigger. A hollow-point bullet tore into the monster's guts. She squeezed the trigger two more times. Two more bullets ripped into the beast. It wheezed and blubbered and then toppled over and died.

    Rebecca gradually returned to herself, though her head felt like someone had parked a car in it. She was drenched with sweat and filthy dirty. She wasn't bleeding, at least not from her head or anywhere on her body she could see. The monster didn't have teeth so her legs were probably in one piece, even if she couldn't feel them.

    She heard Brad shouting at her. A few seconds later he was standing over her, holding a shotgun and asking her how she was. He sniffed incessantly. The country was hell on his allergies, he said.

    Brad wrapped his arms around her and tried pulling her out of the creature's mouth. He could only move her a few inches. Even dead, the monster had a grip on her. She was stuck like ketchup in a bottle, looking like some strange variety of a medusa. An amalgamation of a woman and a slug.

    She asked Brad to go to the barn and look for tools that could help pry her out, but he was concerned there might be another monster so he stayed with her. He had radioed for help before leaving the helicopter and was certain it wouldn't be long before someone arrived.

    After some complaining (as well as a flash or two of her big blue puppy dog eyes), she managed to inspire enough courage in Brad to convince him to go to the farmhouse and get her a wet washcloth and a glass of water, along with some Tylenol if they had any. When he got back with the stuff she told him to talk to her and to make sure she stayed awake. She had hit her head, but she wasn't sure how hard. Hard enough. She didn't remember blacking out, but she felt it was better to be safe than sorry.

    Less than an hour later an ambulance came. Chris Redfield had followed them in his jeep and he watched over her as some people whom she first took as EMTs started working to get her out of the creature's mouth. The EMTs carried with them cordless oscillating saws, laser scalpels, sonic scalpels, and all other manner of surgical cutting devices (she even saw a costotome). They had the efficiency of people who had done this kind of thing regularly and it made her suspicious. They were friendly, but they asked her the wrong kinds of medical questions, and their queries always turned away from her condition and toward her personal experience with the BOW. After they cut her free and stabilized her head, they put her on a stretcher and wheeled her up a ramp into the back of the ambulance, then drove her to a hospital.

    Brad left in the helicopter and Chris rode with Rebecca in the ambulance to make sure she got to the hospital safely. He had trouble trusting anyone outside of Jill and Rebecca these days. Even Barry concerned him, after what Jill told him happened in the Spencer Mansion. Sure, Barry came through in the end, but he had always been soft with Jill. Chris couldn't help but wonder if Barry would have done the same with him had circumstances been different.

    Chris wouldn't take any chances and didn't give strangers the benefit of the doubt. Everyone was Umbrella unless proven otherwise.

    When Rebecca arrived at the hospital feeling had returned to her waist and her legs, though she had a minor concussion. She was released from the hospital that same day, and Chris stayed with her for the twenty four hours after. During that time, her, Chris, and Chris's friend Marvin Branagh rode back to the Perkins's farm to get Chris's jeep. Marvin was one of the few RPD officers that still felt good about STARS. He was skeptical of their story, but he didn't give them the outright cold shoulder either. Rebecca thought he looked like and older version of Will Smith.

    They arrived at the Perkins's farm around two in the afternoon. Rebecca noticed that mail no longer clogged the mailbox, and the lights and the TV had been turned off. The windows were shut and the curtains were closed. Chris went to check the front door and found it locked. No sign of the BOW anywhere. The fence was repaired, and even the mucous left by the creature had been wiped up. Rebecca got out of the car and looked for the old hound but couldn't find him. The place was more eerie and still than before.

    Rebecca stared at the Arklay Mountains in the distance. There they were.

    She got in Chris's jeep and he drove her home.

    Police Chief Brian Irons used Rebecca as an excuse to finally disband the team, claiming fear for the unit's safety as his primary concern. Rebecca's injury, he said, was the final straw. In a matter of months STARS had lost over half its members. Now an eighteen year old girl had been hospitalized for no good reason. The story passing around the station was Barry had sent Rebecca on another “wild goose chase” and she had been attacked by a bear that had wandered down from the mountains.

    The team protested, but Chief Irons wouldn't hear it. He refused to discuss the matter in further detail with anyone from STARS and told them they had two weeks to get their stuff and leave.

    Everyone but Rebecca, that is. Chief Irons sent a fruit basket to Rebecca and a note saying that she could see him anytime about applying for a new position in the RPD. He wrote that he could think of a number of good uses for someone as mentally gifted (and young) as she was.

    She threw the fruit basket in the trash and tore up the note. Chief Irons made her skin crawl.

    The next day the newspaper featured an article announcing the disbanding of STARS, and a smaller separate article which stated that the Perkins had sold their farm for a nice profit and retired to Florida.