Chapter 20
All around him, people were crying. Crisp gray tents were erected in long rows to serve as makeshift shelters, but almost no one had taken shelter yet. Everyone was seated at long tables, attended by physicians in white masks, underneath tall flood lights that lit up the entire field. An army of counselors, assistants, doctors, and administrators ran around in a flurry of movement. Everyone was talking, sobbing, shouting, whispering, and there were others who remained eerily silent, unable to put their thoughts into words.
Damascus Kelly stood in the middle of the maelstrom of bodies, eyes darting all around, trying to take it all in, a calm figure out of place in a madhouse. Mixed in with the physicians and counselors were UBCF agents conspicuously armed with pistols. Like Kelly, they stayed well out of the way, keeping their eyes on the survivors.
Fifty-two people from Raccoon City were here, but it was just the smallest of the three recovery camps located twenty miles from the edge of the city. Fifty-two, when the camp was able to hold over 500. The other two camps were equally under capacity, once again reminding him of just how few made it out of the city alive. There was still the slim chance someone else might make it out, but so far they had less than 300 people total.
As Kelly walked through the camp, he caught bits and pieces of conversation, only a small part of the full story. As the survivors poured out their experiences with the counselors, Kelly caught just a few fragments of the full picture.
“There were so many of them,” one woman whimpered, her face streaked with tears, her hands unable to stop shaking. “My husband ... he fought them so I could escape with our son. But little Danny ... he was so scared. He ... he ran off and they ... they got him too ...”
Another survivor, a young man no older than 21, sat motionless in his seat, hands folded in his lap, his black t-shirt ripped open. “I had to shoot him,” he said, his voice flat and robotic. “They bit him and I knew he was going to turn into one of them. He begged me not to shoot him, but I shot him right in the head.”
“How could this happen?” one older woman shrieked, her dirty brunette hair a tangle on her head. “Those people were sick! You have to do something about this!”
Kelly crossed his arms and listened to another survivor, this one an older gentleman wearing a business suit. He was slumped over the table, his face in his hands. “I don’t know what happened to Frank and the others. Maybe they made it out too, but I doubt it. The building was surrounded. I had a chance to get out, so I took it. They would have done the same thing, I’m sure of it.”
One woman, an attractive blonde wearing cut-off jean shorts and a red shirt, was shaking uncontrollably, the counselor holding one hand on her shoulder. “And I just left him there!” she cried. “But I had no choice! He was crazy! He heard someone shooting and he wanted to go check it out! And he ... he got out of the truck and I just drove away without him!” She descended into sobs, shaking her head in denial.
“You have to send more soldiers in!” another survivor shouted. “She might still be alive! Don’t you understand?! Maybe they didn’t get inside! She probably locked herself in the basement, so she’s probably still alive!”
Kelly shook his head almost imperceptibly and walked along the rows, listening to more survivors tell their stories. But at the bottom of it, all their stories were basically the same. Moments of terrified bravery surrounded by acts of terrible cowardice. Kelly learned one fact above anything else; the only way that these people survived was by abandoning those close to them. Men and women abandoning their spouses, their children, their parents. Almost all of them were rescued alone. They were all loners, the last person standing, the only one out of their group to be rescued.
“I didn’t have any choice!” they cried again and again. Kelly heard infinite variations of it from all the survivors. All of them managed to survive by sacrificing the life of someone else, and all of them claimed that they had no choice.
Kelly supposed they were right. There were undoubtedly many people in the city who resisted the urge to surrender to their fear, who acted bravely and nobly to save the lives of the people around them. And all of them probably died because of it. There was no room for heroes in Raccoon City.
But one thing was even more certain. Kelly’s last lingering doubts about the future of the city faded away as he listened to their tales. Whatever thoughts he stubbornly held about possibly salvaging this disaster and containing the infection were washed away under the onslaught of their eye-witness accounts. If he harbored any doubts about using the Final Decontamination, listening to these people removed those doubts completely.
Of course, he heard all this from Nicholai and the other UBCF Commanders already. But their reports were short, rational, and specific, and they were not able to truly describe the absolute nightmare that was going on in the city. The stories of the survivors gave a human face to the disaster, an emotional element that was missing from the UBCF reports.
How many had died? Over 100,000? Numbers like that were just too large for the human mind to comprehend. Even the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima only killed 45,000. The T-virus outbreak was officially more devastating than an atomic bomb.
Kelly was reminded of the old adage, “One death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is just a statistic.” Right now, the residents of Raccoon City were only a statistic, their deaths a number to be manipulated, their combined tragedies added up to nothing but a footnote on an Umbrella incident report.
After he had heard enough, Kelly walked to the main control tent of the recovery camp, where tables were covered in maps and half a dozen computer technicians were keeping tabs on the remaining Umbrella assets in the city. There were a few more Umbrella administrators, but they stepped aside for Kelly, letting him pass. Although Kelly did not have any specific rank here, they all knew who he was and gave him plenty of room.
So, on to the next order of business. Reports had already been leaked to local news outlets, on Kelly’s authority. As usual, in cases like this, the best lie was something very close to the truth. So the official story was this:
A biological outbreak took place at one of Umbrella’s research facilities, which was of course true, if slightly misleading. Despite the highest levels of safety, a large number of employees were unknowingly infected with an incredibly contagious mutation of the Streptococcus bacteria. They unwittingly passed on the infection to hundreds of other people as soon as they left work, who passed it on to hundreds more. The infection had an incubation period of less than 24 hours, so the next morning, many of the infected people began showing symptoms.
Symptoms included massive bleeding and open sores very similar to the late stages of necrotizing fasciitis (more commonly known as flesh-eating bacteria). However, the most serious symptom was severe damage to the brain and the victim’s cognitive abilities, resulting in violent impulses, lack of communicative skills, and a general lack of awareness. The brain damage caused the victims to act very disoriented and to the violent impulses resulted in attacks such as biting.
There were holes in the official story, but they were minor inconsistencies and could be dealt with later. Some of the survivors would surely make contradicting claims, but they could be written off as misunderstandings, or the survivors merely remembering things wrong. Surely, a victim’s behavior might resemble that of a “zombie,” but Umbrella was counting on the fact that the public would not accept such ridiculous claims. Umbrella’s official version, despite the minor inconsistencies, was still much easier for the public to accept than the possibility that zombies might exist.
So Umbrella reacted swiftly, blocking off the city to prevent the infection from spreading, and sending in their countermeasure force to try and rescue as many people as possible. The fact that a huge number of UBCF troops died in the attempt would actually work in Umbrella’s favor. The public would see their deaths as noble sacrifices. The fact t
hat many of the UBCF soldiers had indeed acted heroically, according to the survivors, was an additional bonus.
The last part of the story would be the real test. That Umbrella, working in close partnership with the Centers for Disease Control, the World Health Organization, and the United States federal government, decided that the infection was impossible to contain. Every single uninfected survivor was rescued from the city (that part was crucial; no survivors could be left behind), and then the United States government regrettably decided to destroy the entire city to prevent the disease from spreading any farther.
Umbrella would take full responsibility for the disaster, and would lead the investigation in the aftermath of the incident. And in return for their dedicated work in resolving it, the government would protect them from lawsuits resulting from the infection. Of course, they would face severe financial penalties from the government itself, but those would pale in comparison to the amount that could be levied in class action lawsuits. Even if they were fined a billion dollars, it would be a fraction of what lawsuits could cost them. A billion dollar fine would be getting off easy.
Umbrella already had plans in place for just this kind of emergency, and their protections from the government were put into place years ago. All of Umbrella’s actions from this point on would be according to a very specific crisis schedule that was planned out and written down before Kelly even joined the company. Kelly wanted to meet the man who had the foresight to plan that far in advance, and wondered if that man would get any credit for his long-term thinking.
In fact, at this point, it was all out of Kelly’s hands. His decision-making responsibilities had ended hours ago, much to his relief. He was still on-site as a supervisor of sorts, but he no longer was responsible for anything important. And after the last couple of days, it felt great not being responsible for anything. If it all went wrong now, Kelly would not be to blame.
And once it was all over, Kelly was certain to be rewarded for his handling of the situation. He looked forward to his promotion.