Fic: Resident Evil; Down the Line (Chapter 3)
Down the Line
Games!verse, Post RE5. Eventual Billy/Rebecca fic. Chapter 3 of ?
A new variation on the T-Virus threatens the world in a way no other strain has, prompting the BSAA to send one of their own to South America to investigate.
This is the ORIGINAL version of chapter 3.
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2
"You can't call me that," Billy hissed in her ear, his muscular arms wrapped tightly around her shoulders. Rebecca, her heart pounding, was very much aware of the small movements his head made as he shook it from side to side. "You can't use my real name."
Of course, she thought, wincing. Of course she couldn't use his real name. Billy Coen was dead. She'd made sure of that herself.
Presently, Rebecca felt his grip loosen, and Billy took a step away from her. Uneasy, she shifted her weight, adjusting her gaze so her focus was on one of the signs hanging behind Billy's left ear. Forcing what she hoped was an easy but apologetic smile, she asked in a low voice, "What should I call you then?"
"Hernandez will do," Billy replied. He pushed a hand through his hair, forced an uneven smile of his own, and looked around the busy airport. "It's how most people know me around here."
Rebecca was willing her heart to slow down when something occurred to her: with no photo and no physical description to speak of in the Alliance's file, she actually had no way of knowing that Billy was the man she was supposed to be meeting here. This could all just be some crazy coincidence.
So she asked, by way of confirmation, "Not Rodriguez?"
"No." Billy shook his head. "I use that one down south more. When we reach the Market you'll have to start calling me that instead." He suddenly motioned to the bags at her feet. "Is that everything you brought with you?"
He was tense. His tone was short, clipped, and he hadn't really stopped looking around.
"Yeah," Rebecca said, stooping to pick up the duffel bag she'd dropped in shock when Billy had grabbed her. She also readjusted the strap to her laptop bag, shifting it so it fell across her chest more comfortably. "We travel light in the Alliance."
Billy nodded as he looked back over his shoulder, but the gesture didn't feel sincere. It was more like he was instinctively bobbing his head along because he'd heard her voice and wanted to look like he'd been listening.
Again, Rebecca shifted her weight. Billy was really tense. And that was making her nervous. It was almost like being back in the mansion again - how many times had she watched him for cues, hoping his body language would fill her in on whatever she might be missing?
She glanced around, eyes flitting quickly over face after face, wondering if any of the people here - the mostly smiling, happy, tourist-y people - were a bona-fide threat. They didn't look it, but then, neither did Wesker.
And she still remembered how well that had turned out.
"Here," Billy said, taking her duffel from her. "I'll get that."
"Thank you," Rebecca began, but her voice turned into a startled squeak when Billy suddenly seized one of her hands with his free one and entwined his fingers in hers.
"Gotta keep up pretenses, dollface," he told her, flashing a much more relaxed and much more characteristic grin. "And let's get the hell outta here. They aren't zombies, here, but I'll be damned if I'm not having flashbacks."
Billy led Rebecca through the sunny parking lot to a Jeep covered almost entirely in mud. Only a few areas, somehow spared their own thick coating of dried, caked-on muck, were clean enough to tell that the Jeep was supposed to be black. Billy yanked open the trunk and put Rebecca's bags inside. He motioned for her to climb into the Jeep with a jerk of his head.
"You go off-roading a lot?" she asked as she climbed into the passenger seat, mentally cringing at how stiff the words sounded to her ears. Her hand was still warm from being in his. She swallowed a hard, nervous lump in her throat and shook her hand as though attempting to dry it off. In truth she was just trying to get the giddy tingles she felt to go away.
"Sort of."
Rebecca glanced at Billy, watching out of the corner of her eye as he plopped himself into the driver's seat and stuffed the key into the ignition before quickly turning to look out the window at the bright, almost cloudless blue sky. Had he always been this cagey with her? As she recalled it, they had been nothing less than comrades in arms by the end of that long night. She had trusted him with her life, and she thought he trusted her.
Could ten years really do that much?
Of course it can, she thought, eyes falling onto her hand again. It still felt a little tingly, and she wrinkled her nose at it. And you've no reason to believe it wouldn't. You were together for all of, what, twelve hours? Fifteen? And you haven't seen him since.
You weren't even sure he was alive until ten minutes ago.
That last thought stung. There was nothing she could have done about it, of course, as they'd parted ways with no way of knowing just what their futures had in store for them, but that didn't stop her stomach from balling up in guilt.
Rodriguez had been the Alliance's main supplier of virus samples for at least the last six years. She'd lost track of how many times Graves had gone south to see him within the first eight months.
But it meant that she had been this close to him all of this time and she'd never known it.
Rebecca stole another glance at Billy. In many ways, he hadn't changed at all. He still looked exactly the way she remembered. He still had that same face, the same tilt to his head when he spoke, the same way of somehow noticing everything - even things he seemed to pay no attention to at all.
In other ways, though, this was not the man she knew. They'd both been jumpy - in the train, in the training facility, even in the forest after they'd escaped - but now it seemed like that state of heightened alertness and adrenaline and fear were a part of his daily routine.
She wanted to say something. She really did - they'd only spent the last forty-five minutes driving in complete silence. She had so many questions she wanted to ask him. How he got here, how he'd started working for the Alliance, how he'd managed to get by for all these years. She wanted to ask him about his life, what he'd been doing, how much things had changed for him since they'd parted ways.
But she didn't know where to start, or even how to start. And there were some questions that she knew she couldn't ask him.
Like if he had a family. Or a girlfriend.
She looked at her hand again. It wasn't warm anymore, not with his heat, anyway. But she could still feel his palm against it, and she wondered if he remembered that that was the hand he'd grabbed when he pulled her out of that hole in the floor, after the damn monkeys had gotten her.
She hadn't forgotten, though she hadn't thought about it lately, either. Not since she'd joined up with the B.S.A.A., anyway - and even that was a few years ago.
"How did you start working for the Alliance?" Rebecca suddenly asked, turning her head to look at Billy. The words were out of her mouth almost as soon as she thought them. It felt better to be talking about something than sitting there in silence.
A moment of silence followed - just long enough for Rebecca to wonder if she'd hit a nerve. But then Billy chuckled and said, "Luck. Lots of luck."
"That doesn't tell me anything." Rebecca shot Billy a look. "I really am curious."
Billy dropped one hand off the steering wheel and scratched at the side of his jaw with it. "You know Colonel Graves?"
"The Alliance's Assistant Director?" Rebecca replied, a note of incredulity in her voice. "Yes…?"
"Graves and I go way back. He was one of my first commanding officers - did you know that? We met when I was still in basic training. After I got here, I wanted to check up on the guy - he was a good man, and I wanted to see if he was still doing all right. So I knew he'd joined up with the Alliance and when one of your agents started tailing me when I was in Cozumel years back, I offered him - and the Alliance - a deal: You guys could work with me or I'd let every dealer on the Yucatán know they had feelers down here. Your agents are damn easy to spot, but they aren't a pack of fools, so I told him to give Graves a call and he'd vouch for me."
"How did you know Graves had started working for the Alliance?"
"It's not that hard to keep tabs on somebody." Billy shrugged. "There are people all over the place who do just that. Some of them work for people I know. Wasn't too hard to ask for a favor."
"You told a member of the cartels about your connections to Graves?"
Billy sighed and shook his head. "These guys are like mercenaries, but without the killing. They only care about the bottom line. So they don't ask questions about why you want something done - it's not good for business." He shrugged again. "Better for them if they get caught, too."
Rebecca's brows knit tightly together and she shook her head slowly from side to side. "How did Graves to know it was you?"
"After they gave me the death sentence, Graves came to visit me. He told me he was going to get me out, file appeals, do something to keep me alive. He knew the story that came out at that trial was a bunch of shit, and wanted to stall long enough to get the truth out. But there wasn't really anything he could do about it. America needed someone to blame and wanted someone to die. I just got the short straw, and I knew it. So I told him, yeah, he'd still see me around - if he believed in ghosts.
"When I was talking with that agent, I had him call up Graves then and there, and ask him if he believed in ghosts. It was all I really needed to do." Billy snorted, then laughed. "I was lucky - Graves remembered what I'd said. Asked to talk to me. Confirmed it was me, then pushed everything through. He's the only reason why there aren't photos of me in that file of yours." Billy laughed again, staring out onto the dirt road stretching out for miles before them, as though looking back on those moments. Then he shook his head, turned to her, and asked, "What about you? When did you join the Alliance?"
"Me? Uh… Four years ago in June. I joined about the same time Barry - one of other S.T.A.R.S. members - did."
"All of your old team with the Alliance now?"
"Yeah."
"How many…?"
"Just…just four of us, including me. Brad made it out of the forest, too, but died in Raccoon that September." Rebecca paused, then added, "I suppose I could count Wesker, too. He did make it out."
Billy nodded, and Rebecca wondered how much of this was going right over his head. It didn't seem like he'd been keeping tabs on her - if he had been, she doubted he'd have looked quite so surprised to see her in the airport.
She couldn't decide if that bothered her at all.
After three long hours of driving over increasingly unkempt, pothole-ridden roads, while dark, angry-looking storm clouds appeared on the horizon behind and to their left, Billy finally turned the Jeep off the pavement entirely. The dirt road he started the Jeep down was, surprisingly, a smoother ride than the road had been. And after another good half-hour or so, Rebecca found she could just make out the blocky shapes of a town in the distance - past the miles and miles of crops that lined either side of the road.
"Pretty outta the way," she commented.
"It's safer this way."
"I'll bet."
It wasn't long before they finally reached the outskirts of the Market and Rebecca could see just how small this place was. She could see the end of the main street, where the jungles were creeping in on the buildings closest to it, before they even passed the first building.
And between the first squarish, stucco building and the last there were dozens of colorful awnings and small wooden-supported stalls, all of them basically marred from sight by throngs of people - mostly men, but Rebecca could definitely see women scattered here and there.
"This is the Mercado Negro?" she asked, cocking an eyebrow.
"Don't be fooled," Billy said. "This is just the set-up in case a lost tourist wanders by." He leaned in a little closer to Rebecca and began discreetly pointing things out to her. "The chickens, for instance - that's code for small arms. The jewelry stalls you see over there are drugs, and the fruit salesmen…they sell fake IDs and other papers."
"You're serious."
"Yep." Billy shrugged. "This is the Mercado Negro, dollface. What, were you expecting them to have all of their illegal, dangerous contraband sitting out where anyone could see it? The code protects them…and sometimes provides them with a slightly more honest way of making a living."
"People buy chicken where they buy their guns?"
"Arms dealers have to eat, too."
"I get that, really. This place is just…" Rebecca looked out the window again. No one so much as batted an eye as they drove down the street. They looked at the Jeep only, it seemed, to see how far they had to move to get out of the way. "It's nothing like I would've expected. At all."
"That's about how I felt when I first moved here. Don't worry - you get used to it. After a while, it's not so bad." Billy pointed again, this time to a small, open-air bar on the corner of the main street and a back alley. "Vargas makes the best catfish I've ever had. I'll have to take you there while you're here."
Rebecca blanched, but tried not to let Billy see. She didn't mind fish. Sometimes she even liked it quite a bit. Catfish was the once exception. "Where does he get the catfish?"
"Outta the river. It's only about a mile into the forest.
"Oh."
"It's pretty nice," Billy told her as he turned right down another dirt track leading out and away from the Market. "Don't really wanna go swimming in it though."
"Piranhas?"
"Actually, no. Leeches."
Rebecca shuddered.
"Exactly."
If she had to describe the building they had reached after another twenty-minute drive, she had only one good phrase: nuclear fallout shelter.
"This is it?" She asked, looking from the concrete block to Billy and back again as she slid painfully out of the Jeep. "This is where you live?"
Billy, who was apparently not bothered in the slightest by the constant bumping and rocking of the Jeep along this road, only shrugged as he walked around to the back to get Rebecca's bags. "It looks worse from the outside. It's not so bad inside. Gotta lot of nice upgrades and renovations to it."
Thankfully, Billy was right. Inside was much nicer - newer furniture, nice wood floors, air conditioning, a kitchen with stainless steel appliances… All of which looked terribly out of place the second Rebecca looked outside and up the muddy road that led to the Market.
It was also very dark.
"Not a big fan of natural sunlight, are you?"
"Can't afford it." Billy went over to the window and glanced outside before touching the wall and revealing a hidden panel with a keypad. He pressed a few keys, then slid the panel on the wall closed. "Windows are like giant welcome-mats, if you know what I mean."
"The Alliance did not pay for all of this."
"No. Half of it is from my savings. The other half… We'll call them gifts. Money I get from the Alliance goes into the viruses." He fell silent. "This virus," he said suddenly. "It's really bad. I didn't want to mention it on the drive in, but…"
"How bad?"
"Asymptomatic carriers kind of bad. I think one out of every eight is asymptomatic - they look completely healthy. As far as I know, the virus doesn't show up on most tests, either - like it knows how to hide itself."
Rebecca had stopped really hearing Billy after the first two words. Asymptomatic carriers.
In all of her nightmares, in all of the terrible dreams she'd had of the damage the new strains of the T-Virus could do, none had included asymptomatic carriers. And there was nothing - absolutely nothing - that she could think of right now that was worse than this.
If this virus got out, even in a population as small as the Mercado Negro's, which couldn't have more than seventy permanent residents, plus maybe fifty or so transient dealers, it could easily spread to the rest of the world in a matter of weeks. Assuming every one person in eight was, as Billy seemed to believe, completely asymptomatic. This whole place could fall to ruin, and all anyone would ever think of the ones left standing was that they were lucky little bastards. They'd be free to go about their business
"How is it spread?" she asked, not really sure she even wanted to know.
"Contact. Its incubation period seems to vary - the unluckiest turn in minutes. Rebecca…I only have one vial. And someone put a hell of a lot of money and time into researching it."
"There's got to be more," Rebecca finished. She looked at Billy, eyes wide, feeling a tremor of fear rattling through her bones. "There's got to be more."
Games!verse, Post RE5. Eventual Billy/Rebecca fic. Chapter 3 of ?
A new variation on the T-Virus threatens the world in a way no other strain has, prompting the BSAA to send one of their own to South America to investigate.
This is the ORIGINAL version of chapter 3.
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2
"You can't call me that," Billy hissed in her ear, his muscular arms wrapped tightly around her shoulders. Rebecca, her heart pounding, was very much aware of the small movements his head made as he shook it from side to side. "You can't use my real name."
Of course, she thought, wincing. Of course she couldn't use his real name. Billy Coen was dead. She'd made sure of that herself.
Presently, Rebecca felt his grip loosen, and Billy took a step away from her. Uneasy, she shifted her weight, adjusting her gaze so her focus was on one of the signs hanging behind Billy's left ear. Forcing what she hoped was an easy but apologetic smile, she asked in a low voice, "What should I call you then?"
"Hernandez will do," Billy replied. He pushed a hand through his hair, forced an uneven smile of his own, and looked around the busy airport. "It's how most people know me around here."
Rebecca was willing her heart to slow down when something occurred to her: with no photo and no physical description to speak of in the Alliance's file, she actually had no way of knowing that Billy was the man she was supposed to be meeting here. This could all just be some crazy coincidence.
So she asked, by way of confirmation, "Not Rodriguez?"
"No." Billy shook his head. "I use that one down south more. When we reach the Market you'll have to start calling me that instead." He suddenly motioned to the bags at her feet. "Is that everything you brought with you?"
He was tense. His tone was short, clipped, and he hadn't really stopped looking around.
"Yeah," Rebecca said, stooping to pick up the duffel bag she'd dropped in shock when Billy had grabbed her. She also readjusted the strap to her laptop bag, shifting it so it fell across her chest more comfortably. "We travel light in the Alliance."
Billy nodded as he looked back over his shoulder, but the gesture didn't feel sincere. It was more like he was instinctively bobbing his head along because he'd heard her voice and wanted to look like he'd been listening.
Again, Rebecca shifted her weight. Billy was really tense. And that was making her nervous. It was almost like being back in the mansion again - how many times had she watched him for cues, hoping his body language would fill her in on whatever she might be missing?
She glanced around, eyes flitting quickly over face after face, wondering if any of the people here - the mostly smiling, happy, tourist-y people - were a bona-fide threat. They didn't look it, but then, neither did Wesker.
And she still remembered how well that had turned out.
"Here," Billy said, taking her duffel from her. "I'll get that."
"Thank you," Rebecca began, but her voice turned into a startled squeak when Billy suddenly seized one of her hands with his free one and entwined his fingers in hers.
"Gotta keep up pretenses, dollface," he told her, flashing a much more relaxed and much more characteristic grin. "And let's get the hell outta here. They aren't zombies, here, but I'll be damned if I'm not having flashbacks."
Billy led Rebecca through the sunny parking lot to a Jeep covered almost entirely in mud. Only a few areas, somehow spared their own thick coating of dried, caked-on muck, were clean enough to tell that the Jeep was supposed to be black. Billy yanked open the trunk and put Rebecca's bags inside. He motioned for her to climb into the Jeep with a jerk of his head.
"You go off-roading a lot?" she asked as she climbed into the passenger seat, mentally cringing at how stiff the words sounded to her ears. Her hand was still warm from being in his. She swallowed a hard, nervous lump in her throat and shook her hand as though attempting to dry it off. In truth she was just trying to get the giddy tingles she felt to go away.
"Sort of."
Rebecca glanced at Billy, watching out of the corner of her eye as he plopped himself into the driver's seat and stuffed the key into the ignition before quickly turning to look out the window at the bright, almost cloudless blue sky. Had he always been this cagey with her? As she recalled it, they had been nothing less than comrades in arms by the end of that long night. She had trusted him with her life, and she thought he trusted her.
Could ten years really do that much?
Of course it can, she thought, eyes falling onto her hand again. It still felt a little tingly, and she wrinkled her nose at it. And you've no reason to believe it wouldn't. You were together for all of, what, twelve hours? Fifteen? And you haven't seen him since.
You weren't even sure he was alive until ten minutes ago.
That last thought stung. There was nothing she could have done about it, of course, as they'd parted ways with no way of knowing just what their futures had in store for them, but that didn't stop her stomach from balling up in guilt.
Rodriguez had been the Alliance's main supplier of virus samples for at least the last six years. She'd lost track of how many times Graves had gone south to see him within the first eight months.
But it meant that she had been this close to him all of this time and she'd never known it.
Rebecca stole another glance at Billy. In many ways, he hadn't changed at all. He still looked exactly the way she remembered. He still had that same face, the same tilt to his head when he spoke, the same way of somehow noticing everything - even things he seemed to pay no attention to at all.
In other ways, though, this was not the man she knew. They'd both been jumpy - in the train, in the training facility, even in the forest after they'd escaped - but now it seemed like that state of heightened alertness and adrenaline and fear were a part of his daily routine.
She wanted to say something. She really did - they'd only spent the last forty-five minutes driving in complete silence. She had so many questions she wanted to ask him. How he got here, how he'd started working for the Alliance, how he'd managed to get by for all these years. She wanted to ask him about his life, what he'd been doing, how much things had changed for him since they'd parted ways.
But she didn't know where to start, or even how to start. And there were some questions that she knew she couldn't ask him.
Like if he had a family. Or a girlfriend.
She looked at her hand again. It wasn't warm anymore, not with his heat, anyway. But she could still feel his palm against it, and she wondered if he remembered that that was the hand he'd grabbed when he pulled her out of that hole in the floor, after the damn monkeys had gotten her.
She hadn't forgotten, though she hadn't thought about it lately, either. Not since she'd joined up with the B.S.A.A., anyway - and even that was a few years ago.
"How did you start working for the Alliance?" Rebecca suddenly asked, turning her head to look at Billy. The words were out of her mouth almost as soon as she thought them. It felt better to be talking about something than sitting there in silence.
A moment of silence followed - just long enough for Rebecca to wonder if she'd hit a nerve. But then Billy chuckled and said, "Luck. Lots of luck."
"That doesn't tell me anything." Rebecca shot Billy a look. "I really am curious."
Billy dropped one hand off the steering wheel and scratched at the side of his jaw with it. "You know Colonel Graves?"
"The Alliance's Assistant Director?" Rebecca replied, a note of incredulity in her voice. "Yes…?"
"Graves and I go way back. He was one of my first commanding officers - did you know that? We met when I was still in basic training. After I got here, I wanted to check up on the guy - he was a good man, and I wanted to see if he was still doing all right. So I knew he'd joined up with the Alliance and when one of your agents started tailing me when I was in Cozumel years back, I offered him - and the Alliance - a deal: You guys could work with me or I'd let every dealer on the Yucatán know they had feelers down here. Your agents are damn easy to spot, but they aren't a pack of fools, so I told him to give Graves a call and he'd vouch for me."
"How did you know Graves had started working for the Alliance?"
"It's not that hard to keep tabs on somebody." Billy shrugged. "There are people all over the place who do just that. Some of them work for people I know. Wasn't too hard to ask for a favor."
"You told a member of the cartels about your connections to Graves?"
Billy sighed and shook his head. "These guys are like mercenaries, but without the killing. They only care about the bottom line. So they don't ask questions about why you want something done - it's not good for business." He shrugged again. "Better for them if they get caught, too."
Rebecca's brows knit tightly together and she shook her head slowly from side to side. "How did Graves to know it was you?"
"After they gave me the death sentence, Graves came to visit me. He told me he was going to get me out, file appeals, do something to keep me alive. He knew the story that came out at that trial was a bunch of shit, and wanted to stall long enough to get the truth out. But there wasn't really anything he could do about it. America needed someone to blame and wanted someone to die. I just got the short straw, and I knew it. So I told him, yeah, he'd still see me around - if he believed in ghosts.
"When I was talking with that agent, I had him call up Graves then and there, and ask him if he believed in ghosts. It was all I really needed to do." Billy snorted, then laughed. "I was lucky - Graves remembered what I'd said. Asked to talk to me. Confirmed it was me, then pushed everything through. He's the only reason why there aren't photos of me in that file of yours." Billy laughed again, staring out onto the dirt road stretching out for miles before them, as though looking back on those moments. Then he shook his head, turned to her, and asked, "What about you? When did you join the Alliance?"
"Me? Uh… Four years ago in June. I joined about the same time Barry - one of other S.T.A.R.S. members - did."
"All of your old team with the Alliance now?"
"Yeah."
"How many…?"
"Just…just four of us, including me. Brad made it out of the forest, too, but died in Raccoon that September." Rebecca paused, then added, "I suppose I could count Wesker, too. He did make it out."
Billy nodded, and Rebecca wondered how much of this was going right over his head. It didn't seem like he'd been keeping tabs on her - if he had been, she doubted he'd have looked quite so surprised to see her in the airport.
She couldn't decide if that bothered her at all.
After three long hours of driving over increasingly unkempt, pothole-ridden roads, while dark, angry-looking storm clouds appeared on the horizon behind and to their left, Billy finally turned the Jeep off the pavement entirely. The dirt road he started the Jeep down was, surprisingly, a smoother ride than the road had been. And after another good half-hour or so, Rebecca found she could just make out the blocky shapes of a town in the distance - past the miles and miles of crops that lined either side of the road.
"Pretty outta the way," she commented.
"It's safer this way."
"I'll bet."
It wasn't long before they finally reached the outskirts of the Market and Rebecca could see just how small this place was. She could see the end of the main street, where the jungles were creeping in on the buildings closest to it, before they even passed the first building.
And between the first squarish, stucco building and the last there were dozens of colorful awnings and small wooden-supported stalls, all of them basically marred from sight by throngs of people - mostly men, but Rebecca could definitely see women scattered here and there.
"This is the Mercado Negro?" she asked, cocking an eyebrow.
"Don't be fooled," Billy said. "This is just the set-up in case a lost tourist wanders by." He leaned in a little closer to Rebecca and began discreetly pointing things out to her. "The chickens, for instance - that's code for small arms. The jewelry stalls you see over there are drugs, and the fruit salesmen…they sell fake IDs and other papers."
"You're serious."
"Yep." Billy shrugged. "This is the Mercado Negro, dollface. What, were you expecting them to have all of their illegal, dangerous contraband sitting out where anyone could see it? The code protects them…and sometimes provides them with a slightly more honest way of making a living."
"People buy chicken where they buy their guns?"
"Arms dealers have to eat, too."
"I get that, really. This place is just…" Rebecca looked out the window again. No one so much as batted an eye as they drove down the street. They looked at the Jeep only, it seemed, to see how far they had to move to get out of the way. "It's nothing like I would've expected. At all."
"That's about how I felt when I first moved here. Don't worry - you get used to it. After a while, it's not so bad." Billy pointed again, this time to a small, open-air bar on the corner of the main street and a back alley. "Vargas makes the best catfish I've ever had. I'll have to take you there while you're here."
Rebecca blanched, but tried not to let Billy see. She didn't mind fish. Sometimes she even liked it quite a bit. Catfish was the once exception. "Where does he get the catfish?"
"Outta the river. It's only about a mile into the forest.
"Oh."
"It's pretty nice," Billy told her as he turned right down another dirt track leading out and away from the Market. "Don't really wanna go swimming in it though."
"Piranhas?"
"Actually, no. Leeches."
Rebecca shuddered.
"Exactly."
If she had to describe the building they had reached after another twenty-minute drive, she had only one good phrase: nuclear fallout shelter.
"This is it?" She asked, looking from the concrete block to Billy and back again as she slid painfully out of the Jeep. "This is where you live?"
Billy, who was apparently not bothered in the slightest by the constant bumping and rocking of the Jeep along this road, only shrugged as he walked around to the back to get Rebecca's bags. "It looks worse from the outside. It's not so bad inside. Gotta lot of nice upgrades and renovations to it."
Thankfully, Billy was right. Inside was much nicer - newer furniture, nice wood floors, air conditioning, a kitchen with stainless steel appliances… All of which looked terribly out of place the second Rebecca looked outside and up the muddy road that led to the Market.
It was also very dark.
"Not a big fan of natural sunlight, are you?"
"Can't afford it." Billy went over to the window and glanced outside before touching the wall and revealing a hidden panel with a keypad. He pressed a few keys, then slid the panel on the wall closed. "Windows are like giant welcome-mats, if you know what I mean."
"The Alliance did not pay for all of this."
"No. Half of it is from my savings. The other half… We'll call them gifts. Money I get from the Alliance goes into the viruses." He fell silent. "This virus," he said suddenly. "It's really bad. I didn't want to mention it on the drive in, but…"
"How bad?"
"Asymptomatic carriers kind of bad. I think one out of every eight is asymptomatic - they look completely healthy. As far as I know, the virus doesn't show up on most tests, either - like it knows how to hide itself."
Rebecca had stopped really hearing Billy after the first two words. Asymptomatic carriers.
In all of her nightmares, in all of the terrible dreams she'd had of the damage the new strains of the T-Virus could do, none had included asymptomatic carriers. And there was nothing - absolutely nothing - that she could think of right now that was worse than this.
If this virus got out, even in a population as small as the Mercado Negro's, which couldn't have more than seventy permanent residents, plus maybe fifty or so transient dealers, it could easily spread to the rest of the world in a matter of weeks. Assuming every one person in eight was, as Billy seemed to believe, completely asymptomatic. This whole place could fall to ruin, and all anyone would ever think of the ones left standing was that they were lucky little bastards. They'd be free to go about their business
"How is it spread?" she asked, not really sure she even wanted to know.
"Contact. Its incubation period seems to vary - the unluckiest turn in minutes. Rebecca…I only have one vial. And someone put a hell of a lot of money and time into researching it."
"There's got to be more," Rebecca finished. She looked at Billy, eyes wide, feeling a tremor of fear rattling through her bones. "There's got to be more."