The Mansion Incident

Chapter Thirty-Four

After finding Rebecca, Chris hoped that maybe he would get lucky once more and find more members of the team. He could not believe his eyes when he not only found Barry, but Jill with him as well. He laughed in surprise and relief when Barry hugged him, too stunned to stop Barry from picking him up in an overjoyed bear hug. He dropped Chris back to his feet and tried to compose himself, a wide smile still on his bearded face.

“God, Chris. Boy is it good to see you.”

“Same here, buddy,” Chris said, smacking Barry on the shoulder.

Rebecca appeared beside Chris and waved meekly at Barry. “Hi, there,” she said. Barry laughed and embraced Rebecca in his big arms as well. Rebecca giggled and pushed Barry away before he smothered her. “I’m happy to see you too, Barry,” she said.

Jill approached them, still shaking her head in disbelief. “How in the world did you get away from the dogs?” she asked, her voice low, as if she was only talking to herself. “I saw one of them knock you to the ground.”

“I shot it,” Chris said simply. “The other dogs went after you guys. I ran around to the side of the mansion and came in another way.”

“I don’t believe it,” Jill said, amazed.

Chris shrugged. “Believe it, baby.”

“I knew you couldn’t be dead,” Barry said, gripping Chris’s shoulder as if touching him to make sure he was real. “I just knew it. I knew you must have escaped.”

“It wasn’t easy,” Chris clarified. “Once I got into the mansion, I ran into some problems, if you know what I mean.”

“We ran into problems of our own,” Barry said, his voice more calm now.

There was a long pause as they all looked at each other, momentarily silenced by the thoughts of what they had seen so far that night. Chris didn’t know what problems Barry and Jill encountered, but he could not help but notice the large slash on the front of Barry’s vest. He ran into more than just zombies as well. There was a splatter of dried blood on the front of Jill’s uniform, and the exhausted look on her face told Chris all he needed to know.

Chris understood why Jill was so shocked to see him. After all, in those terrifying moments when they were chased by the skinless dogs, she saw him fall down with one of the dogs on top of him. He could not blame her for believing the dogs killed him the same way they killed Joseph. But she looked at him with more than just surprise. There was a strange hint of fear, maybe even suspicion, in her tired eyes. But Jill looked the worst out of all of them, so Chris was willing to disregard it. She looked on the verge of a complete breakdown.

Barry’s reaction kind of surprised him, though. Barry really did not seem surprised to find out Chris survived, he was just overjoyed to find him. It was almost like he knew that Chris was alive and was intentionally looking for him.

Rebecca broke the quiet introspection. “Have you seen anyone else in Bravo?” she asked, her voice low but hopeful. It was a foolish question, of course, but Chris knew why she asked it. If Barry and Jill found any Bravo members alive, they would be with them. But Rebecca needed to know for sure.

“We found Kenneth,” Barry said. “I’m sorry, Rebecca. We got there too late.”

“Edward, too,” Jill said. She seemed about to say something else, but then stopped.

Chris nodded sadly. “I saw Edward too. And I found Forest as well.” Like Jill, he did not bother to explain the details. He already told Rebecca everything, and he didn’t think Barry or Jill really wanted to know.

Rebecca held her breath as they told her, and she let it out in a long sigh. “Okay, what about Richard or Enrico? I haven’t seen anyone from Bravo since right after our helicopter crashed.”

Jill looked at Barry uncomfortably, and there was another long pause. Finally Barry nodded, and said, “Go ahead, Jill. You can tell them.” He glanced at Chris and then turned away.

“We found Enrico,” Jill said hesitantly. She tried to look Chris and Rebecca in the eye, but her gaze kept dropping to the floor. “He was alive when we found him, but he was ... he’d been shot. Someone shot him, and ...”

“What?” Chris asked. “What are you talking about?”

Jill closed her eyes tightly and whispered, “He was murdered right in front of me, Chris. I was right there, and he ... he said ...”

Rebecca’s hand lifted to her mouth and her eyes seemed to grow to twice their size, glistening with tears. Chris could not believe what he was hearing, but he touched Jill’s arm to urge her to continue.

“What did he say, Jill?”

Jill took a breath and looked up at Chris, that strange look still in her eyes. But then her face softened, and the suspicious look disappeared. “He said ... that there was a traitor.”

At first, Chris did not seem to comprehend. Traitor? What was Jill talking about? He almost could not form the words himself. “A traitor?”

“Someone murdered him. Someone that he knew. And then they killed him before he could tell me who it was.”

“Jesus ...”

Barry turned back toward them, his smile completely gone now. “Yeah, it looks like someone on the police force is a traitor. Whoever it was, they killed Enrico and escaped through some hidden door or something. Jill didn’t get a good look at them.” He said it calmly, as if reading it off a police report, but Chris could sense the repressed emotion seeping into the words. Barry was holding it together far better than Chris would have.

“I think it goes farther than that,” Chris said. “I think this whole mission was a set up. We were led right into a trap.”

“What do you mean?” Jill asked, staring up at him.

“I mean that this lab, this whole place, is way too big to have been a secret.” He tried to quickly sum up the ideas lingering in the back of his head. “Think of all the construction that must have been done to build this place. That’s a lot of workers, and they must have been legally allowed to build here. That means the Zoning Board knew about it. And this place has to be connected to the Raccoon City utilities. Electricity, water, heat, all of them. That means people on the Utility Commission knew about it.”

“That doesn’t mean we were set up,” Barry said, but the look on his face made it clear that he agreed with Chris’s line of reasoning.

“But it has to go farther than that. All the illegal experiments that must have gone on here could not have been kept secret for long. Umbrella must have bribed the officials in Raccoon City to keep this place under wraps. And that means that at some level, the police department must have been compromised. There’s no way they could protect this place without having some control over the police.”

“Irons,” Barry muttered.

Chris nodded. “You have to admit, he acted pretty strangely about this whole thing. I don’t know exactly, but I think he must have known something was going to happen. That’s why he shut himself away and didn’t tell us anything.”

“But he let us go,” Jill said. “If he wanted to keep this place a secret, he would have refused ...”

“He didn’t have a choice,” Chris said. “Bravo was gone for 24 hours. He had to okay the mission.”

“But why would he let Bravo go in the first place?” Barry asked.

Rebecca spoke up suddenly. “Because we weren’t sent to the mansion or the lab. We were sent to investigate a train accident.”

“What?” Barry, Jill, and Chris all seemed to say at once.

Rebecca looked at them strangely, and then said, “The call. We were sent to check out a train mayday. That’s what the actual call was about. The train just happened to be close to the mansion, and that’s how we found it.”

“That’s not what Wesker told us,” Chris said. “He said the call was from a government agency asking for help. It was supposed to be some kind of undercover mission.”

“That’s just what Irons must have told him,” Jill said. “He was confused about the whole thing too, remember?”

“That doesn’t make sense, either,” Barry said. “Why tell Bravo it was a train, and then tell us it was some secret government location?”

“There was a train accident, though,” Rebecca said, trying not to get sidetracked. “But when I got there, it was already full of zombies. Somehow, the people all got infected.”

“You told me about the train,” Chris said. “But I didn’t know that’s what you were actually sent to investigate. How could the whole train have been infected, though?”

“They were all infected at once,” Rebecca said. “Something got into the train and killed everyone in a few minutes. I don’t think I can even explain how it must have happened. But someone must have hit the emergency stop.”

“So maybe it’s just a coincidence,” Barry said. “Irons must have figured out afterward that the train was right next to the mansion. That’s why he lied to us about Bravo’s call. But why ...”

Jill put her hands to her head and shook it. “This is too confusing for me,” she said. “I don’t understand it. My brain is just too fried right now.”

“Listen,” Rebecca said. “What I’m trying to say is that whoever made the emergency call must have known about the zombies. There was no one on the train alive to make the call. So that means that they sent us there, knowing that we’d discover the zombies.”

“But who could have done that?” Barry asked.

“Someone who worked for Umbrella,” Rebecca said. “That’s the only possibility. Someone who worked here and knew about the infection. But whoever it was called us directly, because Enrico took the call himself. They didn’t call Chief Irons, they called us.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Chris said. “Because that would mean ...”

“They wanted to expose it,” Rebecca said. “Or maybe try to fight it off. We were brought in to fight the zombies, I’m sure of it. But our helicopter crashed, and we couldn’t radio in.”

“Wait a minute,” Chris said. “You never did call in, did you?”

“No, the radio was broken in the crash.”

Jill lifted her head back up. “But Wesker said you called in through a private band. He said you arrived and were being briefed by whatever agency called you there.”

“No,” Rebecca repeated. “We never called in.”

“But Wesker said he talked to Bravo himself ...” Jill said, her voice trailing off. For a few moments, she just looked from Rebecca to Barry and then back to Rebecca.

Chris reached into one of his cargo pockets and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. He unfolded it and sighed. “I thought this was just a coincidence or something. I found it in one of the offices in the mansion.” He handed the note to Barry, who held it so Jill could see.

“Wesker,” Jill said, reading the name at the top.

Rebecca, as if suddenly remembering something important, quickly took some sheets of paper out of her pocket. “I found this as well,” she said, holding it out. It was the list of names from the chemical treatment plant, with the name “A. Wesker” at the bottom.

“But ... but how?” Jill managed to ask. “How could he be involved?”

“I don’t think he’s just involved,” Chris said. “I found that note in a huge, fancy office that belonged to some guy named Spencer. He must have been a major supervisor here, and he wrote that note specifically for Wesker. And left it in his office for Wesker to find. That means he knew Wesker personally, and it means that Wesker must have been at the mansion before we ever came here.”

“And this sheet is pretty old,” Rebecca said. “I found it with a bunch of old files and things in an abandoned store room. It’s probably from the eighties, at least.”

“Maybe it’s just someone with the same last name?” Jill suggested, not very seriously.

“Maybe, I guess. But it’s the same first initial too, and ‘Wesker’ isn’t a very common last name.”

Chris looked at Barry, who said nothing for a few minutes. Chris knew that if Barry disagreed with their conclusions, he would say so. Barry was not the kind of person to hold back his opinions. But he said nothing now. He just stared at the pieces of paper with a cold, harsh expression on his face.

He could overlook one coincidence, maybe even two. But there were too many inconsistencies and coincidences here to ignore.

“So what do you think?” he asked Barry.

There was a short pause, as if the rest of them were waiting to hear Barry’s opinion before forming their own. Jill clearly did not want to accept the fact that Wesker was a traitor, but she looked anxiously at Barry, waiting for confirmation or dismissal.

Barry’s voice was flat and robotic. “I think you’re right,” he said.

“But he’s been with S.T.A.R.S. for years,” Jill said. “You’ve known him for like ten years, Barry.”

“I’ve worked with him for years, that’s true,” Barry corrected slowly. “But I don’t think I’ve ever really known him. I don’t think any of us really know him.”

Jill still didn’t want to accept it. Chris understood how she felt, because he felt it as well. He worked side by side with Wesker for years. He respected and trusted him not only as a fellow police officer, but as a commander as well. Wesker went headfirst into danger with the rest of them on dozens of drug busts and murder investigations and rescue missions throughout the years. He even probably saved Chris’s life once or twice in that time. Wesker was his partner, his comrade, his commander, his leader.

But was he Chris’s friend? Did Wesker, who lacked humor, empathy, and even emotion most of the time, have any actual friends in the entire police force? Chris knew that every officer in the force respected Wesker, even begrudgingly, but he doubted that any of them would call Wesker their friend. Above all, Wesker was a successful commander because he treated everyone completely equally. That is, he treated them all with a professional detachment that bordered on actual contempt. It was hard to be friends with someone like that.

Chris knew nothing about Wesker as a person, and no one else on the S.T.A.R.S. did either. They knew he was single, but that was it. He never came to any company parties or to the Alpha’s weekly card game. If anyone asked him a question about himself, he gave a vague, noncommittal answer. Family life, personal politics, religion, interests and hobbies, all of them were subjects that remained practically off-limits. Wesker always worked very hard to keep his entire life outside the police station a complete secret.

When Chris looked at Wesker in that light, he was surprised that no one suspected him of treachery or betrayal long ago. Given his secretive behavior and cold demeanor, he was the only person capable of pulling off such deception for so long.

“I think it’s time we should get out of here,” Rebecca said, once again breaking their introspective silence. “I know a way out of the labs. I can lead us right to the exit.”

“Where does the exit lead?” Barry asked.

“To some little recreation area,” Rebecca said.

“Was there a road or anything? Some way we can get back to Raccoon?”

Rebecca shook her head regrettably. “No, the only road I found leads to the industrial site I came from.”

Barry seemed somehow pleased by this information. He took out a large, folded up sheet of paper. “I found this map,” he explained. “Jill and I were heading to an elevator when we ran into you guys. It says it’s an emergency elevator. I’m guessing it should take us right to some kind of road out of here.”

“Does the elevator work?” Rebecca asked.

“I don’t see why not,” Barry said. “But if not, then we can use the other exit. We might as well try this one first to see where it goes.”

“Sounds good to me,” Chris said.

Barry folded the map back up. “Then let’s get going.”

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