Escape From Raccoon City

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Chapter Five

“So what do you know about all this?” Jill asked she jogged down the street. So far, she and Carlos had traveled about twenty blocks without any problems, keeping to the middle of the street and avoiding any suspicious areas. They passed through a residential neighborhood, and Jill expected zombies to jump out from behind every bush, every fence, and every parked car, but so far they had not encountered anything. They were still a long ways from the city park, though.

“About what?” Carlos asked. “You mean how the city got infected?”

“Yeah, what have they told you?”

“They don’t tell us much. They just said there was a biological contamination. I didn’t know anything at all until we were on the chopper on our way into the city. They just dropped us in here and told us to look for survivors.”

“Well, you know that Umbrella is responsible for this, don’t you?”

Carlos shrugged. “Well, yeah. I kind of figured that.”

“Doesn’t that bother you? I mean, you work for them, don’t you?”

Carlos laughed shortly and glanced down another street, catching a glimpse of a few zombies standing in the middle of the avenue halfway down the street. He raised his gun briefly, but didn’t bother to take aim. “I’m just a soldier, lady. I don’t know anything about Umbrella. All I know is that they wanted to hire me to be a soldier, so I took the job.”

“So it doesn’t bother you at all?” Jill asked, an edge to her voice.

“Hey, I didn’t have anything to do with this,” Carlos said defensively. “My job is to protect people, all right? I’m not a scientist, I don’t know anything about what Umbrella does in their labs and stuff. I’m just a soldier.”

“And you work for them,” Jill said insistently. “You work for the exact same people who did all of this! Thousands of people are dead here, Carlos, and Umbrella is to blame for it. And you don’t even care? You just work for them anyway?”

Carlos stopped in the middle of an intersection and put his hands on his hips, shaking his head and looking around as he caught his breath. “You wanna say something to me?” he asked, annoyed. “Go ahead and just say it, all right?”

“I’m sorry. I’m not trying to blame you for this,” Jill said carefully. “But Umbrella’s responsible for this whole disaster, and if you work for them, then you’re a part of the problem too. Don’t just say that it’s not your fault. You knew that Umbrella caused this disaster, so you know what they’re capable of.”

“So what do you expect me to do?” Carlos asked. “I can’t control what Umbrella does, I can’t stop them from doing bad things.”

“But you still work for them! If you just ignore the illegal things Umbrella does, then you might as well be letting it happen!”

“Oh, is that how it is?” Carlos asked mockingly, coming forward. “I’m just letting this all happen, huh? Well, what about you? You’re a cop, right?”

“Yes. What does that have to do with anything?”

“What would you do if you found out that some of the other cops you work with were breaking the law? Like they were corrupt cops or something. What would you do?”

“I’d report them,” Jill said forcefully. “I’d tell my superiors, I’d tell everyone. I’d make sure that any officers breaking the law were caught.”

“But you wouldn’t stop being a cop, right? You wouldn’t just quit working there, would you? Just because some of the people you work with were doing bad things doesn’t mean you have to stop working there.”

“Well, no, but that’s not the same thing.”

“It’s exactly the same thing,” Carlos said, pointing at her. “If you know that your company is doing bad things, then you just work even harder to make it right. You don’t just give up. You don’t quit being a cop because some other cops are corrupt. And I’m not gonna stop being a soldier just cause some scientists broke the law.”

He lowered his arm and took a deep breath. Jill said nothing, realizing that in his own way, Carlos had a point. She suddenly felt bad for yelling at him, for accusing him of being party to the crimes committed by his employers. But she couldn’t reconcile that with the fact that he still willingly worked for them. Surely, he couldn’t compare himself to a clean cop in a corrupt precinct, because he wasn’t telling the truth about Umbrella, he wasn’t trying to reveal their crimes to the public.

“I’m just trying to do the right thing,” he said, as if to himself. He gazed down the dark street, the barrel of his gun resting on the ground. “If I quit working for them, they’d just replace me with someone else. And nothing I could say would change anything. You think I could just talk to a newspaper about Umbrella and everything would be okay? You really think people haven’t done that already?”

“What do you mean?” Jill asked.

“Umbrella is too big,” Carlos said. “I’ve been all over the world. And Umbrella is everywhere. There are places in the world where Umbrella owns the government. Did you know that? You think a company that big and powerful is gonna let some punk like me get in their way? I could tell a newspaper everything I know, and it wouldn’t change a thing. They’d pay the newspaper to bury the story. Or they’d pay the government to ignore it. Nobody would listen.”

“But that doesn’t mean you have to just accept it,” Jill said. “If you don’t believe in what Umbrella does, then you shouldn’t be working for them.”

“But what would that accomplish?” Carlos asked. “Umbrella would still do whatever they want, and I’d be out of a job.”

Jill shook her head, trying to explain. But as she thought about it, she found that none of her arguments really held water. In a way, Carlos’ comparison with Jill’s work as a police officer was an apt one. If Jill encountered corruption in the police force, she would not quit her job either, because if she quit, then she truly would be letting it happen. If she really wanted to stop it, she would have to keep working.

“There are lots of good people that work for Umbrella,” Carlos said. “Mikhail was a good person.”

“Yes,” Jill said. “He was. I didn’t know him very well, but I believe you.”

“You see what I mean, then?” Carlos asked. “If Umbrella breaks the law, if they do bad things, then good people have to keep working there. They have to ...” he fumbled with his words, his English slipping.

“They have to try to limit the damage that Umbrella does,” Jill answered for him. She understood what Carlos meant now, even if she didn’t completely agree with it.

“Yes. If all the good people quit, then no one would ever try to fix the problems. If there were no good people, they wouldn’t have even sent us here to rescue anyone.”

“Okay,” Jill said. “Maybe you’re right. But I think we’ll talk about this again later.”

“Sure thing,” Carlos said. “If we make it out of here alive.”

A zombie shuffled out from behind a nearby house, attracted by their voices. It was an overweight man wearing a pair of bloody sweatpants and no shirt. Chunks of flesh were missing from his chest and stomach. He was too far away to be a threat to them, but Carlos raised his rifle and sighed as he took aim.

Jill put her hand on the gun. “Don’t bother. We might need the ammo later.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” He looked over her shoulder and his expression hardened. “There’s another one,” he said.

Jill turned to see another zombie coming toward them. It was a child, a young girl wearing a frilly pink dress. She wore one pink shoe, her other foot bare. She gaped at them, most of her left cheek torn away, spattering blood down the front of her dress. Her blonde hair was dotted with gore as well.

Jill looked at the girl and felt nauseous. She had seen a few zombie children today, but she hadn’t really looked closely at any of them. She hadn’t taken the time to think about it.

The girl looked like her parents had just finished dressing her for kindergarten. Jill wondered what had happened, her stomach turning as she thought about it. The girl’s parents probably turned first and then attacked their own child. Jill couldn’t even imagine what the girl’s final moments must have been like.

Carlos looked at Jill, and then raised his gun. This time Jill didn’t stop him, and he pulled the trigger. The gun boomed loudly, the sound a sudden shock in the unnatural silence of the empty street. The back of the girl’s head blew out with a crack, and her limp body tumbled to the sidewalk.

“We should keep moving,” Jill said softly.

“When we first came here today, I tried to save a little kid,” Carlos said. “He was in the very first house I checked out. His parents were infected, so I shot them. But when I tried to take the kid out of the house, there were more zombies outside, you know? There were too many of them, and the kid ran away from me cause he was scared. I didn’t have time to go back for him.”

“It’s okay,” Jill said, knowing that it was a lie.

“He’s probably a zombie now. I tried to save him, I mean I wanted to, but I ... I wasn’t able to. He ran away from me.”

“I’ve tried to save people too,” Jill said, putting her hand on his arm. “And I wasn’t able to save them either. You’re not the only one.”

“I know. But he was just a little kid.”

Together, they walked off down the middle of the street, a half dozen zombies slowly wandering after them, but Jill and Carlos kept ahead of them and continued to make their way through the city on their way to the park.

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