Part of the reason Raccoon City was such an ideal location for Umbrella’s biological laboratories was its relative seclusion from outlying populated areas. It was nestled comfortably among scenic hills and valleys and surrounded completely by the Arklay Mountains woodland, much of it protected national forest. The city was compact and rather dense, considering the few square miles it occupied, and there was no urban sprawl.
Only three roads went in or out of the city and none of them qualified as a major highway. The city was in effect rather cut off from the rest of the world, which was a fortunate characteristic as far as Umbrella was concerned. They knew what might happen if some contagious toxin escaped from one of the labs and made preparations to ensure that possible infection would be minimal at best. Raccoon City was relatively small and would be easy to contain in the event of a biological hazard.
Not that they seriously entertained the idea of a biological hazard ever occurring. But it was always better to be prepared, just in case. Even if the preparations were totally inadequate and difficult to implement.
The virus was loose. The chemical treatment plant was a total loss. Against Wesker’s better judgment, he allowed a second group of commandos to enter the plant with orders to shoot on sight. They were told in advance that second-stage hosts were loose, so they knew the risks. The team leader had a video camera attached to his helmet. Through it, Wesker watched them progress through the plant, recording everything to watch again later. He watched in silent horror as they came upon their first zombie, one of the commandos from the previous group, its eyes milky white, its face ripped and torn, its clothing drenched in sticky blood. They killed it without incident, and then another, and then two more. They managed to kill six zombies before something went wrong.
They encountered another zombie, but Wesker didn’t get a good look at it before the men opened fire, and suddenly panic broke loose. They started screaming in terror and shooting, and the video camera jerked wildly in every direction, indistinct black shapes blurring all around. Wesker could only watch in disbelief as the commandos screamed for their lives, as if they had been ambushed by an entire army of zombies. It was all over in less than a minute. He tried to imagine what could have killed them all in such a short time. Was there a hunter loose in the treatment plant as well? Or something even worse?
When the shooting stopped, Wesker found himself staring into the screen, which now showed an awkward view of a dirty ceiling lined with pipes. Spencer was nowhere to be found, so he was in charge all by himself, trying to keep from getting sick, desperately thinking of some way to salvage the oncoming catastrophe.
And then the man appeared. The mystery man who started this whole disaster. Wesker glanced at screen as he walked toward the camera, his body upside down through the camera’s crooked angle. He looked familiar, but Wesker could not place him. Long black hair, dark eyes, wearing ragged clothes, his age hard to determine due to his dirty appearance. He was somewhere between twenty and forty, but Wesker couldn’t pin it down better than that. Even when he stood directly in front of the camera, the poor lighting and his long hair made it hard to see his face, as if it was always stuck in a permanent shadow. He knelt in front of the camera, looked directly into it, and reached out. A second later the screen turned to snow.
Wesker called Spencer in his office. “We have the intruder on tape.”
“What about the strongarms?”
“Dead, just like the others. Come down here and watch the tape.”
“I’d rather not. I’m busy with something. Patch it up here and I’ll watch it in my office.”
Wesker plugged the recorder into the lab’s closed-circuit television system, flipped some switches, and played the video. “Okay, it should be playing on channel six.”
“Got it.”
Once more, Wesker sat through the video, smoking another cigarette. The team leader died and fell, his camera pointing up at the ceiling. And then the man appeared, looked into the camera, and shut it off. End of video.
“Well?” Wesker said into the phone. “What do you think?”
There was no response.
“Spencer? Did you watch the tape?”
Again, nothing. Wesker hung up the phone and re-dialed Spencer’s office, letting it ring five times with no answer before hanging up in frustration. He didn’t have the patience to deal with Spencer. There were more important things to worry about.
Like how he was going to survive this disaster.
He left the security office and went down the hall to the elevator. The lab was completely silent except for the sound of his footsteps echoing down the empty white corridors. He rode the elevator up to the main level and went to his private office, closing the door behind him.
Compared to Spencer’s lavish office at the mansion, Wesker’s was as bare as a prison cell. It had a single black leather couch against one wall, bookcases loosely stocked with folders and binders against the other, and a white metal desk across from the door. No carpet, nothing hanging on the walls. A small television sat on an end table beside the desk. The desk had a lamp, a computer, and an ashtray. Wesker lit a cigarette and put the ashtray to good use.
The virus was out in the open. The most destructive biological disease known to man, and it was out in the open. How did it happen? The chemical plant was rarely used anymore, and everything sent there was decontaminated by fire. No samples of the virus were stored there, nothing else from the labs went there except dead host animals. How could the virus get loose? Had a trace somehow remained intact on one of the burned corpses? And even if it had, how could that account for such a sudden infection? The security guards didn’t even deal directly with the waste materials.
And who was that man? How did he get into the plant in the first place, and even more importantly, how had he avoided the virus for so long? Why wasn’t he infected? By the look of his filthy clothes, Wesker guessed he was a homeless man that somehow snuck into the plant by some forgotten rear entrance, but that was unlikely.
His appearance bothered Wesker. The way he looked, the way he was dressed. Wesker puffed on his cigarette absentmindedly and turned on the television, switching it to channel six, where the video was still running.
The man wore some filthy long overshirt, gray or black in places and moldy green in others. He had an equally dirty shirt on under it, and tattered, greasy pants that could have been any color. It was the clothes that bothered Wesker the most. They weren’t just dirty, they were positively disgusting, as if the man had found them rotting in a sewer before putting them on.
Wesker’s eyes popped wide open. It wasn’t an overshirt, it was a lab coat. A lab coat so filthy it was no longer white. Wesker dialed Spencer’s number once more and let it ring five times before hanging up. Why wasn’t Spencer answering the stupid phone?
Wesker shut off the television and crushed the cigarette in the ashtray. Something was going on here that he didn’t understand. Spencer was ignoring his calls on purpose, but why? Who was the man in the filthy lab coat? How had the virus escaped into the treatment plant? Just what was going on here?
He left his office and went right up to the mansion, entering through one of the concealed elevators. He could almost see what was happening, as if it was right on the edge of his peripheral vision, but he was too tired and too stressed out to think clearly. There was more to this than just some homeless man breaking into the plant and the virus getting loose, but Wesker couldn’t quite piece it together. It was right in front of him, but he couldn’t see it all at once.
It was still too early for Spencer’s secretary to be at work. Wesker went right to Spencer’s door and knocked loudly. There was no answer, so he just opened the door and entered.
The room was empty. Spencer was gone.
Wesker stood in the doorway for a few long moments, hands hanging at his sides. Spencer had been in his office when Wesker calle
d to tell him to watch the video. That had not been longer than fifteen minutes ago. The lights were off in the office now, and Wesker sensed that Spencer had not just run out. He’d been gone for a little while.
Wesker walked up to the desk. The drawers were all pulled out, their contents scattered across the floor. Pens, envelopes, assorted papers, staples, paper clips. The desk chair was pushed back against the window, as if Spencer had pushed himself away from the desk and gotten up in a hurry. And emptied out his desk. And then left without telling Wesker where he was going.
The top of the desk was empty except for a single sheet of paper. Wesker picked it up and read it, his breath coming slow even as his heart began beating faster.
Wesker –
I gave you some advice once, a long time ago. I suggest you take it now. The game is over. Get away while you still have a chance.
– Spencer
Wesker dropped the note and watched it flutter to the floor. He saw the events unfold in his mind’s eye. Spencer watched the video and immediately realized the ramifications, and then rapidly packed his briefcase and ran for it, pausing just long enough to write his little note. He probably left the room before the tape was even over. He didn’t need to see the whole thing to recognize the horror of it.
Wesker chuckled softly and took a seat on the edge of the desk. Gradually, his sense of humor gave way and his chuckle transformed into a full-fledged laugh and then into an outright insane cackle. His stomach hurt, he laughed so hard. And then slowly, he forced himself to stop, reaching a finger underneath his sunglasses to wipe away the tears that formed at the corners of his eyes.
The game was over, indeed. Right now, the infection was contained and localized in the treatment plant, but that would not last long. Soon, maybe in hours, but certainly in a day or two, the virus would get loose and spread like a wildfire. The man in the video would see to that, Wesker was sure of it.
The man in the video. Wesker shook his head in disbelief, but he saw it with his own eyes and the sheer impossibility of it made it hard for him to even accept it as reality. But reality it was. The lab coat, the face many years younger than the last time Wesker had seen it. He didn’t even want to speculate how it had occurred, or why it had taken so long to surface, but there was no doubt about that man’s identity.
And to think, he had been dead for more than fourteen years.
Wesker stood up and stalked out of the office. Maybe he should follow Spencer’s advice and get out as fast as he could. Take whatever money he could scrape together, transfer as much information from the computers as he could onto disks, and get out of there before the entire thing came crashing down upon him. He didn’t have long, and he had to act now.
But he passed the front doors and walked back to the elevator. No, he was not like Spencer. He was not going to just cut and run, and abandon the research he spent his entire adult life pursuing. It was going to come down hard, but Wesker was not prepared to jump ship just yet, when he had no assurance that there was a life raft waiting for him.
If he ran now, what could he do? What could he hope to accomplish? He’d be running for the rest of his life, and all of his work at the labs would be erased from existence, destroyed or lost when the labs became infested with the walking dead. When the virus spread, it would infect everyone. The lab, the mansion, all of Raccoon City, eventually the entire world would be infected.
Could he just run away from that? Wesker got to his office and collapsed into his chair. If he ran to save his own skin, where could he go where the virus would not reach? If he escaped without telling anyone, he was essentially leaving them to their fate. Running from a deadly outbreak without giving anyone a fair warning of the extreme danger they were in. Could he do that? Wesker had not been born with an overly active conscience, but the thought of running away and letting all of Raccoon City become infected was more than he could handle.
He had to do something. He was the only one who could sort out this madness, the only person in the world capable of setting it right.
But it was already too late to save anything. He knew that. The virus was in the open and there was nothing he could do to contain it. All he could really hope for was to somehow limit the rate of infection, control it somehow. Prevent it from getting out of hand too fast. He couldn’t stop it, but maybe he could slow it down.
He had to accept the inevitable. Aside from dropping a bomb on the treatment plant, there was no way to keep it from spreading. It would spread from the plant to the surrounding woods and then to the main Arklay lab. The man in the video would make sure it spread. And if he didn’t, then the zombies and any animal they came in contact with would do the job just as well.
What if Wesker just called the National Guard? Evacuated the entire lab and sent in the Army to destroy the place? It would save countless lives, those of both Umbrella employees and innocent civilians. He could just blow the whistle on the whole operation, let the world know a terrible plague had been unleashed, and just pray that they had the resources to handle it before it got out of hand. Maybe he could just do the selfless thing, just once.
And throw away his life’s work. If the police or anyone else ever found out about the experiments done at the lab, they would be finished. There were not even names for the multitude of crimes they would be accused and convicted of. Most of the genetic work they performed was extremely illegal, not to mention unethical and immoral and a host of others, as Wesker himself had known for a very long time. There were laws specifically made to prevent the kind of work they did. If he blew the whistle, he would spend the rest of his life rotting in prison. Coming forward to the authorities would be the only thing to save him from the death penalty.
He could save people, he could save all of Raccoon City, but doing so would throw away his own life in the process. If he brought in the authorities, they would find out about everything that was done there, and Wesker would burn for it in the end. He was in charge of the entire lab, he would be the one to ultimately be blamed for the whole thing.
And if his conscience prevented him from running away, it was his ambition that prevented him from calling for help. In the end, it would be the same thing. So he was stuck. He could not run and he could not call the cops. He had to stay there and handle it himself.
In the end, there was only one thing he could really do.