Aftermath

<--Previous Chapter|Next Chapter-->

Epilogue – Six Months Later

The small tourist village of Kavos was nestled on the southernmost corner of the island of Corfu, off the western coast of Greece. It was a popular vacation spot for European and American travelers, one of many on the island, and less crowded in peak season than the capital of Corfu or the other cities on the northern side of the island. Kavos stretched along the southeastern coast close to the beach, a gallery of expensive hotels and fancy nightclubs. Arranged along the narrow streets were cafes and outdoor restaurants offering authentic Greek cuisine, gift stores and souvenir shops, and public markets and swimming pools within view of the ocean.

A distinguished-looking gentleman in a white suit sat in a metal chair outside a cafe, his wide-brimmed white hat blocking the bright midday sun. He propped a newspaper up in his lap and sipped his tea, his eyes hidden behind large gold-colored sunglasses. He had a narrow, pinched face and a thin, elderly frame. He walked with a thick mahogany cane, the kind that could easily be used as a weapon if need be.

The newspaper was in English, and the front page detailed various worldwide news events; a new round of political unrest in Iran, a powerful earthquake in a remote part of Chile, a continuation of the genocide in Africa, a sex scandal involving a politician in Tokyo, the death by drug overdose of a popular musician in France. And more coverage of the nuclear explosion that destroyed the small town called Raccoon City in the United States.

The old man scanned the article carefully, although there was not much new information. It had been six months since the sudden epidemic infected the entire city in less than a day, and in a desperate attempt to contain the devastating spread of the disease, the United States government chose to destroy the entire city with a nuclear missile. The current death toll stood at 126,500 civilian casualties, but no one would ever know exactly how many people died. The article was nothing but an update on how the cleanup was going, with the remains of the city having been razed to the ground almost a month prior. There was currently much debate on what to do with the land; to try to rebuild the city, to turn the entire area into a memorial shrine, or to simply let it return to nature.

Worldwide opinion on the disaster was understandably mixed. Some felt that the nuclear event was karmic payback for the United States using nuclear weapons on Japan over 50 years before. Many questioned the President’s decision, wondering of the epidemic was truly as bad as was claimed, although the numerous witness accounts certainly painted a dire picture. While some called for the American President to be removed from office, so far the public supported him, mostly due in part to his emotional public appearances after the event and his impassioned addresses to the nation begging for their understanding.

But even beyond those who were critical of the use of nuclear weapons, a significant opinion remained that perhaps even that was not enough, that even a nuclear strike had not completely removed all traces of the disease. What if the disease was still there, ready to infect people once again?

The waiter came over with a pitcher of tea and said, “A refill, Mr. Worthington?”

The old man glanced up and shook his head. “No, that’s okay. I’m finished here,” he said in a tired voice. He handed the waiter some cash to pay for his lunch, and then tucked the newspaper under his arm and walked out of the cafe and onto the street.

Adjusting his sunglasses with one hand, he walked slowly down the sidewalk, his cane tapping on the cobblestones. He wasn’t a tourist like most of the people who visited the island, although he was not truly a local either. He had been living in Kavos for five months, and the locals were already becoming accustomed to seeing his bright white suits as he strolled down the winding lanes and narrow streets, his cane tapping along, announcing his presence.

He said his name was Basil Worthington, which sounded British, although the man’s accent was purely American. He claimed to have worked in banking most of his life and that he was currently retired, and he certainly had enough money to convince anyone of his upper class background. Foreigners rarely took up residence in small tourist towns like Kavos, so Basil Worthington was an oddity among the people there. But he took long walks along the beach, ate his meals in local restaurants, and spent most of his time observing the beautiful scenery and apparently enjoying his retirement. He even charmed a few of the older local women, and rumors abounded about which ones had been sharing his bed.

He walked up a twisty street a few miles from the beach and looked back over his shoulder, taking a long glance down the street. He sighed to himself and continued on, his cane clacking down like a hammer. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped sweat from his forehead.

His bungalow apartment was in a somewhat cheaper section of town, far from the hotels and clubs that catered to the tourists. Most of the people who lived out here worked in the service industry, employed as waiters or clerks or bartenders or cooks at one of the businesses along the beachfront. But there were also a fair number of fishermen and farmers and schoolteachers and policemen, and Worthington’s apartment was indistinguishable from half a dozen others along the street. Despite his apparent wealth, he chose a less-extravagant residence.

A young boy was sitting out on the front steps of the apartment next door, fully engrossed in a handheld video game. Worthington walked past him and reached into his pocket to get his keys. The boy looked up and said, “Hey, some lady knocked on your door a little while ago.”

Worthington turned quickly and said, “What did she want?”

“I don’t know. She was really pretty, I thought she might be your girlfriend or something,” the kid said with a mischievous grin.

Worthington looked up at his front door, fumbling nervously with his keys in his pocket. His voice sounded strained. “Where did she go? Did she say anything to you?”

“No, she just knocked on the door and when you didn’t answer, she walked away.”

Worthington pursed his lips thoughtfully and let out a deep breath before walking to the door. “Thank you for telling me,” he said, sticking his key in the lock.

He opened the door slowly and crept inside, reaching into the inside pocket of his suit as the door closed. He yanked off his sunglasses, revealing a pair of dark, intense eyes. From his inside pocket, he pulled out a revolver and swallowed hard, looking down the small entrance foyer and into his living room. The apartment was sparsely furnished, but clean and orderly, with large windows along the back that looked out toward the hills to the west. The living room had a small table and a couple of chairs facing the small television on the opposite wall. Worthington stood motionless, hearing nothing but the sound of his own breath, as he took a cautious step forward, peering around the corner and into the rest of the living room, seeing no one there. His hand trembled as he held the revolver out in front of him.

Off to his left was the small kitchen and pantry, which was also empty. He braced himself and crossed the living room on the way to the two bedrooms in the back, which were empty as well. His breath coming more naturally, Worthington lowered his arm and returned to foyer, hanging his hat on the wall, and then walked into the kitchen to pour himself a drink. He set the pistol on the counter next to him and opened the refrigerator.

“Good morning, Spencer,” came a voice behind him.

Ozwell Spencer spun around, his heart hammering in his chest, grasping the edge of the counter with shaking hands. His eyes bugged out as he stared in shock at the man sitting casually in the living room, relaxing in one of the chairs, which now magically faced the kitchen. He had one arm resting comfortably on the back of the chair, and his other hand rested in his lap, holding a pistol aimed at Spencer.

“Wesker,” Spencer gasped.

Seated in the chair was Albert Wesker. He was dressed in plain gray slacks and a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. A silver watch was on his wrist and his signature black reflective sunglasses were on his face.

Wesker nodded briefly and then glanced around the small apartment, as if admiring the interior decorating. “It took a long time to find you,” he said casually. “You covered your tracks pretty well, I have to admit. But I’m afraid that you couldn’t hide forever.”

Spencer was too scared to speak, but he finally stuttered out, “I knew that one day they would send someone to find me. I didn’t think it would be you.”

“Who else?” Wesker said with a cunning smile. “After all, I have to pay you back for running out on me before. I was very disappointed in you, Spencer.”

“I warned you,” Spencer mumbled. “I told you what would happen.”

Wesker nodded again and moved the gun in his hand. Spencer glanced to the side and saw his own revolver sitting just beyond his reach, right on the counter a few feet away. He felt sweat dripping down the side of his face and nervously wiped his brow with the back of his hand.

“You did tell me,” Wesker admitted. “But I thought that you would at least have the courtesy to tell me yourself that you were leaving, instead of just writing a note and taking off without so much as a goodbye. You left me to deal with that whole disaster on my own.”

“But you’re here,” Spencer said. “So you must have made it out okay.”

“In a manner of speaking,” Wesker said cryptically.

“If you were smart, you would have left right after I did,” Spencer insisted.

“Oh, no,” Wesker said, “I stayed in the city right until the very end. William Birkin and I dealt with the incident at the lab, and then I stayed behind to try to help contain the outbreak when it reached the city. Sadly, I was not successful, as you certainly know by now.”

“I read the papers. Is William alive too?”

“No, he’s dead. There’s only me.”

For a few moments, neither of them said anything. Spencer dared not make a move for his gun, because Wesker was watching him too closely. But Wesker clearly was hesitant to pull the trigger, which was completely out of character for him, so Spencer hoped to stall him long enough to make his move. He didn’t particularly want to kill Wesker either, but if only one man was going to make it out of the apartment alive, Spencer wanted it to be him.

“You know,” Wesker said conversationally. “There is one thing I’ve always been curious about. I just never had the time to really ask you about it. But now seems like a good time, since we have a few minutes before I have to leave.”

“What do you want to know?” Spencer asked carefully, keeping his eyes focused on the gun in Wesker’s hand.

“Well, it’s about that woman that we kept locked up in the lab. You remember Lisa, don’t you?” Wesker asked, then continued without letting Spencer respond. “For all those years, we kept her locked away, and I have to admit I always wondered why. She was of no real use to us from an experimental standpoint, since she was already infected. Any tests we performed on her would be rendered pointless since she was already a host for so many different strains.”

“If you say so,” Spencer said evasively, edging his hand along the counter, closer to his gun.

“But then I realized why you kept her around,” Wesker continued. “She had some kind of immunity to the Progenitor, some kind of defense against it. It occurred to me that all those other poor souls we infected were just attempts to find another person with an immunity. If we compared their results, we might just learn what they had in common, and maybe discover some kind of cure, or perhaps simply a treatment for infection.”

Spencer shrugged noncommittally. “Maybe we could have. I don’t see how that would be a bad thing, do you?”

“Of course not. But why didn’t we ever have any research in that field? We never devoted any serious study to figuring out why she was immune. You never even told Birkin about her, and she would have been a godsend for his lines of research.”

“We studied her for years,” Spencer said defensively, for a moment forgetting that Wesker was pointing a gun at him. “Before you joined Umbrella we spent a solid decade on it and we got exactly nowhere.”

“But you still kept Lisa around.”

“Why wouldn’t we? She was a valuable resource.”

“How old was Lisa?”

Spencer sputtered and shook his head. “What does that have to do with anything?” he said dismissively.

“Because she didn’t look a day over twenty-five,” Wesker said. “It was hard to tell, since she was so filthy and she wore her victim’s faces the way she did. But I spent enough time down there to tell, and she couldn’t have been that young, could she? She must have been older than that.”

“Well, I don’t … I don’t remember,” Spencer mumbled guiltily.

“You just said that you studied her for over a decade before I joined Umbrella. So unless you infected her when she was just a baby, she must have been at least, what, thirty-five? Forty?”

Spencer said nothing. He glared at Wesker, grinding his teeth, clutching the counter in his desire to reach for his gun.

Wesker continued. “What would happen if someone was immune to the Progenitor, but only to its negative side effects? If the healing properties could remain unchecked, it would make someone effectively immortal, wouldn’t it? That’s the real reason you kept Lisa around for so long. You wanted to see if the infection would stop her from getting old.”

“And what if I was? What difference does it make now?” Spencer spat bitterly.

“You never had the guts to test it yourself, did you? In all those years, you never even tried injected Lisa’s blood into a living host to see what would happen. You were never looking for a cure to the Progenitor, you were looking for a cure to mortality. But you always chickened out at the last moment.”

Sweat dripped down the sides of Spencer’s thin face, his body trembling with rage. “I knew what would happen!” he shouted. “We did test her blood on a living host! But I destroyed all the files long before you ever joined the company.”

“Is that so?” Wesker said, leaning forward in the chair, suddenly very interested. “What was so terrifying about the results that made you keep it a secret?”

“You think Lisa was dangerous?” Spencer croaked. “But she was nothing. She was controllable because she was insane. She was mentally deficient even when she was a child. But when we injected her blood into a new host, an intelligent adult host ...”

“What happened?” Wesker pressed eagerly.

“We created a real monster,” Spencer said, his voice barely audible. He stared at the floor as he spoke, the words pouring out. “The host inherited all of Lisa’s most powerful aspects: her strength, her endurance, her healing abilities. But it was stronger, even stronger than a Tyrant. And it was sane. Do you understand, Wesker? It could speak and think and sometimes it could almost pass for a normal person. But it wasn’t human anymore, it was like a monster in human skin. It had the speed and savagery of a Hunter, and the power and resilience of a Tyrant, and it was intelligent, more intelligent than any of us.”

“So what did you do with it?”

“We tried to destroy it, but the normal methods didn’t work. It’s healing abilities surpassed even Lisa’s. Fire wasn’t enough to kill it, acid wasn’t enough to destroy it. We didn’t dare try to transport it anywhere outside of the Arklay area, because the risk of it escaping was far too great. So we took it to the treatment plant and encased it in a block of molten steel. And then we buried it deep under the plant, so deep that it could never escape.”

“Are you trying to say ...”

“Yes,” Spencer said. “It was still alive when we buried it. But even that creature wasn’t strong enough to break through ten feet of solid steel and dig its way out from under a hundred feet of earth.”

“Why didn’t you just keep it locked up like you did with Lisa?”

“You don’t understand,” Spencer said desperately. “It was too dangerous. It was too smart, it could have figured out a way to escape. It could talk and it could be so persuasive, in time it might have even tricked one of the researchers into letting it go. And we could not risk it ever escaping. If that thing ever escaped captivity, it was strong enough and smart enough and ruthless enough that it could have destroyed the world. Or maybe conquered it.”

“I think I’m beginning to understand,” Wesker said, a grim smile appearing on his face.

“So now what?” Spencer snapped, all the fight drained out of him. “I’ve told you my deepest hidden secret, so what are you going to do about it? Going to inform the Board of Directors? Or have they already offered you a position on it?”

“Oh, I’m afraid you’re mistaken,” Wesker said. “I’m no longer employed by Umbrella. In fact, Umbrella doesn’t even know that I’m still alive.”

Spencer gaped at him. “But how did you ...”

“Escape the city?” Wesker finished for him. “Well, you might say I had to take some very desperate measures. That’s why I wanted to ask you about Lisa. And I must say,” he said with a vicious smile, “the answers you’ve given me have been very reassuring indeed.”

“What are you talking about?” Spencer asked weakly.

Wesker slowly reached up and touched his sunglasses, and then slid them from his face, revealing his eyes to Spencer for the first time in their long history together.

But his eyes were no longer the soft blue that they had once been. The whites of his eyes now shone a bright yellow, with vertical pupils like those of a cat, the wide irises glimmering a menacing bloody red. And deep within the black pupils seemed to shine red as well, as if illuminated from within.

Spencer’s whole body seemed to shake in abject terror. “Oh my God ...” he gasped in horror, “Wesker … what have you done?”

He broke free from his paralyzation and grabbed the pistol off the counter in sheer panic, swinging it around and pulling the trigger. The bullet struck Wesker in the side of the face.

In the next moment, Wesker emptied five bullets into Spencer’s body. He slammed back against the counter and clutched at his bloody chest, the gun tumbling from his numb fingers, his face contorted into a mask of agony. He tried to grab the edge of the counter to remain standing, but he fell to the side, sliding his arm across the side of the sink, sweeping some dirty dishes off the counter as he fell. He collapsed to the floor, the dishes shattering beside him. His hands, coated with blood, reached out pleadingly, his eyes beginning to glaze over.

Wesker walked over to Spencer’s prone form and put two more bullets into the back of his head to finish the job. He then casually ran a hand across the side of his face, now completely healed and unharmed, and smoothed out his hair before returning his sunglasses to his face.

Ten seconds later, before the little boy next door even had time to run to Spencer’s apartment to investigate the shots, Wesker had run out through an open back window. Thirty seconds later, when the neighbors were calling the police, Wesker was already three blocks away, walking unhurriedly down the brightly lit street. His gun was tucked into the folded up newspaper he took from the apartment, and he casually dropped it into a trash bin eight blocks away.

Ada Wong was waiting for him in a white SUV parked in a gas station parking lot. She sipped her iced tea and adjusted her large amber-colored sunglasses as Wesker climbed inside.

“Are we finished here?” she asked.

“Yes,” Wesker said. “Take us to the airport.”

With the knowledge he learned from Spencer, Wesker was more eager than ever to get back to his lab. There were so many ideas to try out, so many projects to start, so much work to be done.

After almost twenty years of hard work and research, Wesker felt as if he had just scratched the surface. It was as if his entire life up until now was nothing but practice, and now his real work could finally begin. There was so much more to learn, so much more that he could accomplish, and now he realized that he had the time to do whatever he set his mind to.

No more limits, no more walls to block his research, no more pointless distractions, and no more physical deadlines. There was nothing in his way. He had all the time in the world. If he put his mind to it, there was nothing he could not achieve.

The world was never going to be the same.

The End of the Legends Series

<--Previous Chapter|Next Chapter-->

Return to Resident Evil Page

Return to Main Page