Calm Before The Storm

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Chapter Five

Dimly, through a foggy red haze of sleep and throbbing pain, Jill Valentine heard something banging. She drowsily tried to ignore it, but the steady banging continued, pulling her unwillingly out of sleep. As soon as she shifted her position on the couch and moved her head, a burst of agony went off inside it and she groaned loudly, wincing in pain. She lifted a trembling hand and gently placed it against her forehead. She blinked a few times to see sunlight seeping in between the closed curtains of her living room window.

“Jill?” a voice said nervously from the hallway. “Are you there?”

Jill grunted and swallowed a few times, her throat dry. Her mouth tasted awful and she frowned to herself at the foul taste. She blinked a few more times to clear her eyes, and she spied two bottles on the end table in front of her couch, one of them tipped over and empty. She reached out for the bottle, but her fingertips barely got a hold of it before it slipped out and rolled onto the floor.

“Jill? Are you okay?”

Jill managed, with much difficulty, to push herself up and take a sitting position on the couch. Her head reeled at the motion and she felt her stomach heave, but there was nothing inside it to throw up. She closed her eyes tightly and grimaced in pain, her head pounding heavily.

“Jill?” the voice called again, quieter.

“Mmmm ... Who is it?” she groaned, the effort making her head pound even more.

“It’s me. I mean, it’s Brad. Is it okay if I come in?”

What in the world was Brad doing at her apartment so early in the morning? Jill fumbled on the table for her watch and squinted to see what time it was. Four in the afternoon. She tried to wrap her head around that. She glanced at the bottles again and finally remembered what she had done the night before.

After coming home from the station, she turned off her phone and took a bottle of wine from her refrigerator. By the time she managed to drink the entire bottle, she decided that wine was not enough and pulled out a bottle of vodka as well. Looking at the bottle now, she could see that it was half-empty. She certainly did not remember drinking that much, but she must have passed out right on the couch and slept most of the day. That would also explain the blinding headache.

“Are you there, Jill?”

“Give me a minute,” Jill said. She managed to stand up and staggered to the bathroom, leaning against the wall for support. Her bladder felt like it was going to burst.

When she was finished using the bathroom, she rifled through her medicine cabinet to find some aspirin. She took a handful of them and walked carefully back out into the kitchen, trying to move her head and neck as little as possible. She poured a glass of water and downed the pills, but at this point she didn’t think they would do much good. If anything, the glass of water would do more for her headache than the aspirins.

When she finally got around to opening the door, Brad just looked at her sadly and nervously ran a hand through his hair. “Hey,” he said meekly. “You look like shit.”

“I feel like it too,” Jill said, her eyes squinted.

“I guess I woke you up.”

Jill nodded. “So what are you doing here? Is something the matter?”

Brad cleared his throat and glanced up and down the hallway. “Yeah, you could say that. Can I come in for a minute? I kind of want to talk to you.”

Jill considered telling him no, but didn’t have the heart. Brad, in a strange way, had been left out the night before. He had not experienced the nightmares that the rest of them had, and knew nothing of what they had gone through until they went to Irons’ office. And after that, none of them wanted to go into more details, and he seemed too afraid to ask. They had pretty much ignored Brad the entire time.

And Jill still didn’t want to talk to him, not now. She had a splitting headache and the last thing she wanted was to go over the events of the previous night again. But instead, she sighed and let the door swing open. Brad accepted the invitation and followed her back into the living room, closing the door after him.

“What do you want to talk about?” she asked, sitting back down on the couch. She cupped the water in her hands and took another drink. The lingering taste of vodka was still in her mouth, but the water helped.

Brad sat down on a chair facing the couch and his eyes immediately focused on the empty bottle of wine and the half-empty vodka. “I guess you did some drinking last night,” he said, not making eye contact.

“Yeah, just a little.”

“I guess I would have, too.”

Jill agreed, but she somehow doubted that Chris had gone home and immediately gotten himself completely wasted. So the thought of being in the same category as Brad did little to comfort her.

“If you just got up, I guess you don’t know what going on out there,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Did you check your answering machine?”

Jill shook her head and then regretted it when the pain flared. “No. No, I haven’t.”

“I bet it’s full. Mine was when I got up a few hours ago. Six messages from the newspaper, three from radio stations, eleven more from people at the department. They all want to know what happened last night.”

“The newspaper?”

“Of course. It was all over the news that Bravo never came back last night. Someone on the force told a reporter that only four survivors came back with Alpha. The whole city is up in arms about it. They want to know what happened. But I guess Irons wasn’t fooling around about keeping this quiet. The police department has not released any statement yet.”

Jill leaned back in the couch. “Oh, Jesus. Did you tell them anything?”

“No,” Brad said immediately. “I didn’t call anyone back at all. I haven’t even called my parents yet.”

“What did the papers say?”

“Just what I told you. They know that only four people came back, but I don’t even think they even know which four people. But they’re already starting to say all sorts of stuff.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, you know,” Brad said. “They don’t have any real information, so they’re just making stuff up. They said that all of us have been suspended and that the whole S.T.A.R.S. unit is now under investigation. They said that it was some kind of training mission that went wrong. They think the department is trying to cover something up. It’s like a huge scandal now, and we’re all in the middle of it.”

“I don’t believe this,” Jill groaned. She leaned forward again and put her face in her hands.

“It’s all over the news. And I don’t think Irons is going to help us at all. There were two reporters outside my apartment when I left. I had to sneak out the back way so they didn’t see me. I half-expected there to be some here as well, but I guess they haven’t tracked down your address yet.”

“I can’t handle reporters,” Jill said weakly. “If they come here, I don’t know what I’ll do. I just can’t deal with that right now.”

“That’s one of the reasons I came over. Chris lives on the other side of town, and I don’t know where Rebecca lives. But they probably have the same problem. I tried to call as well, but no one answered their phone.”

Jill pushed her hair out of her face and looked longingly at the bottle of vodka sitting on the table so invitingly. Nothing would be better right now than just drinking some more. But instead, she picked up her glass of water and had some of that.

She set the glass back on the table. “What are we going to do?” she asked rhetorically.

“I don’t know,” Brad admitted. “We can’t just ignore them. If we do that, they’ll just repeat the worst rumors. And if we tell them we have no comment, they’ll take that as a confirmation that there’s some kind of investigation going on. No matter what we do, they’ll think we’re either guilty of something, or trying to hide something.”

“We have to call Irons.”

“I already tried and got nowhere. He’s not answering calls from us, either.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Jill said with a short laugh.

“Do you ...” Brad hesitated, and then said, “Do you think he was lying? About the FBI and all that stuff?”

It didn’t take Jill long to decide. “Yeah, I think he was. I thought he was lying last night, to be honest, but I was too tired and scared to disagree with him. It was too much for my brain to handle. All I wanted to do was come home and forget about everything.”

“If he’s lying, then we’re screwed,” Brad said. “I mean, what can we do? We can’t tell the newspaper the truth, can we?”

“Sure, if we want to get sent to a mental hospital,” Jill said. “They’d never believe what we have to say. It doesn’t even matter.”

“But what should we do?”

Jill reached for the glass of water again, but her hand went past it and she grabbed the neck of the vodka bottle instead. “I know what I’m going to do,” she said angrily, picking it up.

Brad reached out and put his hand on hers, pushing the bottle down. “Jill, please don’t. You can’t just drink this away, because it won’t go away. We have to find a way to deal with this.”

“This is my way of dealing with it,” Jill snapped, yanking the bottle toward her so fast that it splashed across her shirt. “And don’t you even try to stop me.”

“It won’t make anything better, Jill.”

“How do you know?” Jill said bitterly, clutching the bottle. “You weren’t even there, so don’t tell me what won’t make me feel better. This is the only thing that will make me feel better right now.”

“Maybe now it will, but what about later? What about when the reporters get here and start asking you questions? Do you really want to be drunk when that happens?”

“No, I want to be unconscious. They can’t ask me any questions if I’m passed out, now can they?”

“Don’t do this to yourself. Come on, give me the bottle,” Brad said, reaching toward her.

Jill shook her head furiously and pulled away from him. He stood up and reached across the table to grab the bottle out of her hand, and she batted his hand away. When he finally was able to grab the bottle, Jill jumped up and shoved him backward. He fell into his chair and the bottle slipped from both of their hands. It struck the edge of the table and the bottom shattered, spilling vodka all over the floor.

“Damn it!” Jill shrieked. “Look what you did!”

“Good!” Brad shouted back. “I just did you a favor!”

Jill stumbled around the table and grabbed him, pulling him up out of the chair. “Just get out of here! Get the hell out!”

“Fine!” Brad snapped, pushing Jill away and walking past her toward the door. “You want to just drink yourself to death? You want to just drown your problems in alcohol? Well, you be my guest.”

Jill staggered after him. “Don’t you dare judge me!” she cried. “You weren’t even there! You don’t know anything! You didn’t live through that nightmare! You don’t know what that was like!”

Brad stopped on his way to the door and spun back around. “Oh, you think just because you went through something traumatic, that means that you can drink your troubles away? Being an alcoholic is alright because you were scared?”

“You weren’t there!” Jill shouted again. “You didn’t see any of it!”

“I saw those dogs kill Joseph, and I saw those monsters when I picked you up, so don’t tell me that I didn’t see anything.”

“I watched Enrico die right in front me,” Jill said, her teeth clenched. Suddenly, she felt tears in her eyes. “And I was there with Barry, when we left him there to die. And I saw Edward right when he died. I had to see all of that, and I had to fight those zombies and everything else, so don’t tell me that what you went through even compares with what I went through.” She was crying now, tears dripping down her face at just the memory of what she had faced.

“You think I had it easy?” Brad asked. “Flying around in the helicopter all that time, you think I wasn’t scared? I was terrified, I was scared out of my mind. I thought you were all dead, and it was all because of me. All of it was my fault.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Jill said, wiping her face with the back of her hand. “You didn’t do anything, Brad. Wesker’s the one to blame for all of this, not you.”

“But I abandoned you,” Brad said desperately. “I left you all there, I just got scared and flew away and left you all to die. If I had stayed like I was supposed to, then none of it would have happened.”

“It would have happened anyway,” Jill insisted. “Wesker planned it all, don’t you see that? If you hadn’t flown away, then we’d probably all be dead right now.”

“What are you talking about?” Brad said, walking back towards her. “I left you there, I abandoned you. I mean, don’t you hate me for that?”

By now, Jill had forgotten all about the spilled vodka, or why she and Brad were arguing in the first place. It shocked her when she realized why Brad was so nervous and quiet the night before. It never even occurred to her that Brad blamed himself for the entire thing.

He must have thought that they hated him, she realized. He took their angry silence as reason to think that they blamed him for leaving them behind, that they held him somehow responsible for what had happened. Jill could see now that Brad was so overwhelmed with guilt that he believed that he was to blame. He spent hours and hours alone in the helicopter to convince himself that he was solely responsible, and when Jill and the others were short with him, he assumed the worst. And now, when Jill accused him of not being there and seeing the things she saw, he took that as another accusation, another reminder of his cowardice.

Jill took a deep breath and tried to calm down. She wiped her eyes again and shook her head. “I don’t hate you, Brad. Neither does Chris or Rebecca. None of this was your fault.”

“Do you really mean that?”

“Yes. I mean, we were mad at you, sure. When you flew away, we wanted to kill you. But if you hadn’t flown away like that, we’d all be dead.”

“How?” Brad asked. “I don’t understand.”

“Because Wesker wanted us to die,” Jill explained. “Don’t you get it? If you didn’t fly away to begin with, then you wouldn’t have been there to rescue me and Chris and Rebecca later on. Wesker would have led us all to the mansion anyway, so it wouldn’t have made any difference. If you hadn’t flown away, nothing would have changed, except that you would probably be dead right now, and the rest of us would have been killed by that monster, or by something else along the way. None of us would have made it out alive, because you wouldn’t have been there to save anyone.”

“Do you ... do you really believe that?” Brad asked hopefully.

“Of course I do,” Jill said. “None of us blamed you, and I’m sorry if you thought we did. We weren’t angry at you, we were angry at Wesker, angry at the whole terrible thing.”

“I thought you all hated me,” Brad said quietly, as if to himself.

Jill shrugged. “I just hate you because you broke that bottle.”

“We should probably clean that up, you know.”

Jill chuckled, and it felt strangely good to laugh at something. In the space of a few minutes she had run the entire gamut of emotions, from anger to sadness and now humor. She was so on the edge that it felt like she was always on the verge of screaming or crying. Her argument with Brad was already forgotten, just a momentary outburst. She guessed that he probably felt the same way.

She waved her hand dismissively in the direction of the living room. “To hell with it, I’ll clean it later. I guess it’s a good thing that it spilled. Now I don’t have anything to drink.”

“You can always go and buy some.”

“No, I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to leave the house. Not if I might be mobbed by reporters at any moment.”

“Yeah,” Brad said. “I’m going to try driving over to Chris’ place, but I’ll have to be careful if there are any reporters there.”

“We’ll have to come up with something eventually,” Jill said. “We can’t just hide from them forever.”

“I’ll ask Chris what he thinks. I think he might know what to do. Make sure you turn your phone back on, I’ll try to call you if I manage to talk to him.”

“Okay,” Jill said, and she escorted Brad to the door. “I’m sorry about yelling at you a few minutes ago. It’s just kind of hard, you know. Dealing with it, I mean. I didn’t mean to yell at you like that.”

“It’s alright,” Brad said honestly. “I shouldn’t have gotten so defensive. You’re right about it though. I didn’t go through all that, so I have no reason to judge. Just hearing about it last night made me sick to my stomach. I don’t know what I would have done if I had been there, I don’t think I could have lived through all that.”

“Be glad that you didn’t have to see it,” Jill said. “You were the lucky one.”

Brad said goodbye and went down the hallway to the stairs. Jill watched him go and then closed the door and locked it. She took a deep breath and pressed her back into the door, looking up at the ceiling.

She did want to just drink until she passed out again, but the vodka was all she had. Her head still hurt as well, but it wasn’t nearly as painful as before. She went to the kitchen and got some paper towels to soak up the spilled alcohol, and pressed the button on her answering machine. Like Brad had guessed, it was completely full.

The first five messages were from the local paper, asking for a comment on the events of the past two days. The next was from one of the officers at the station, asking if she was okay. The next was from a radio station, and then two more from the paper.

The next message was from Chris, which surprised her.

“Jill, this is Chris. You probably have your phone turned off, so you won’t get this message until later. I want to be the one to tell you myself, because it’s not in the paper yet. I don’t know how to say it, but Barry was right. Last night before we left him, he said Wesker threatened his family and that he thought they were already dead. He was right, Jill. They found Jenny and his daughters this morning at the house. They were murdered last night. I’m sorry, Jill. Please call me.”

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