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Best of Intentions: In Too Deep (ch. 17)
🕑 Added 2025-02-17 15:54:06 +0000 UTC“Rude?! What the- what did you just do?!” Jill shouted at me as I took a breath, keeping an eye on Carlos. He was mean mugging me pretty hard, understandably, but he wasn't taking the shot. Probably because he was surrounded by people he knew would be willing to pull on him if he did. If we were alone, I imagine that would change. But we weren't and that was to my advantage, even if it did have me committing murder in front of some cops.
Damn. I probably should have been nicer to the President. I was probably going to need a pardon from him by the end of this mess.
“Sorry, sorry -- but I had to,” I said, holstering my gun. “He worked for Tricell and he had orders to stir the pot to collect data. That, and to make sure that Umbrella crashed and burned because of this outbreak.” I said, and it hurt just a little how Jill was looking at me now. Like I had betrayed some expectation that she had of me. It felt unfair, but it wasn't. Not really. In the end, I had just murdered a man in cold blood and all she had was my word that he was a bad guy.
That was the issue with metaknowledge. You could hardly explain why you knew the things that you did.
More interestingly, Ada's reaction was more telling than she realized. She kept her expression aloof, but there was a certain tension that entered her posture. A tension that told me that she was ready to fight or flee. I already knew she wasn't with the FBI, but I wasn't exactly clear on who Ada worked for. I couldn't exactly trust anything from the movies anymore, but she allegedly had some connection to Albert Wesker.
Who had some connection to Umbrella or Tricell. Probably. Too much was in the air to make any kind of actionable conclusion, but so far, everything that I saw in the third game was actionable metaknowledge. Which is why Nicholai had to go. Ada was in the ‘wait and see’ phase to decide if she was more trouble than she was worth.
The little I knew about her made her a bit of a gray area. Working for the bad guys, yet she'd help Leon Kennedy in a pinch because they were playing the longest game of ‘will they, won't they?’
Where was I going with this?
Nowhere.
It was just a tangent to distract me from the fact that I had killed a man in cold blood because of what he might do.
“The risks are too high for that,” I continued. “All it takes is one mistake and this situation slides the wrong way. And this asshole,” I said, kicking the corpse's feet, “Was going to lube up that slippery slope. Now, I'm sure that was very shocking, but we have a job to do. There is a literal horde of zombies coming this way and unless we're ready, all we've done is shuffle a problem around.”
Jill clenched her jaw and I could tell she wasn't exactly happy with me at the moment, but she couldn't really argue. So, she just offered a curt nod and walked away. Chris offered me a thin smile, “Sorry, Rude. I read the warning but…” he trailed off, and I understood.
“I don't expect anyone to kill anyone just because I said so,” I reassured him, looking down at Nicholai's corpse as blood spread from the tunnel through his forehead. “But he was just too dangerous to play ‘wait and see’ with. By the time he gave us a reason, we'd be paying for it.” There were just too many ways for Nicholai to mess this up for us.
He could destroy the sanctuaries that we’d built at the Police HQ and Central Station. He could sabotage the evacuation process. He could destroy the barricades of one of the Red Zones and all those undead would be back on the streets complicating everything. Keeping him alive was just too risky. If it was just my life, I could shrug my shoulders and accept the added risk. But the lives of everyone left in the city?
I made the call, and I kinda really hated that I was the one who had to make it.
Chris seemed like he believed me. His partner didn't seem to, but I had absolutely no idea who he was, so I didn't really care that much. Ada, however, spoke up, “If he was who you say he was, then he could have been useful. I could have used him in building my case.”
Chris glanced her way, “And you are?”
“Ada Wong with the FBI. And don't worry -- all of this is falling under the Good Samaritan act. A very liberal interpretation of it,” she amended, glancing at the body and then at me. I could tell she was recalculating her estimation of me. I don't think I’d struck her as the kind of person who could kill like that. “So, extend a little trust my way, would you?”
I snorted at that before I could help myself, making Ada cock an eyebrow in my direction. Well, if she was going to play it like that… “Umbrella is exclusively run by morons, and they've been running laps around the government. It's like seeing the fastest quadriplegic outrun an infant with whooping cough. You want some trust? Earn it.”
Ada offered a thin smile at that, accepting the rebuke for what it was before she went to go do exactly that. Once she was out of earshot, I said to Chris. “Keep an eye on her. I'm not sure what her game is, but she's no Fed.”
Chris held my gaze for a moment before cocking his head to the corpse. So, I elaborated. “I was certain about him. Her, not so much. I just know that this whole thing is a golden opportunity for Umbrella to make a mess of things, and if I trust Umbrella to do anything, it's make a mess.”
To that, Chris snorted in agreement and tapped me on the shoulder before moving on. Carlos lingered, his gaze heavy, but he followed Chris when he walked by. After that, I let out a small breath that I had been holding. There was no small part of me that wanted to crawl in the nearest vehicle and just sleep the rest of the day away, but there was no time for that.
We had an odd forty minutes before a horde got here and we were going to be cutting it close. Too close for comfort, but like everything so far, I’d learned to thrive in the nonexistent margin for error.
The idea was pretty simple, truth be told. We were just building a ramp to funnel the zombies somewhere that they couldn't get out of. The fire truck ladders were a great starting point there as they were far more durable than one would expect for safety reasons. Of course, they weren't rated for a couple hundred shambling bodies shuffling along their length, which was why the most important thing we had to build were the supports.
Everything else was important, sure -- blocking off the roads, and securing the funnel after blowing out the walls with a pair of breach charges, but they were rather pointless if the ramp collapsed. I did some napkin math on the way over to decide that a thirty degree angle would work best, which would have the ladders at about their max length. Which meant that, structurally speaking, the midpoint was the main concern rather than the fulcrum at the fire truck.
Wedge supports were welded onto the ladders, securing them while larger pillars were put in place to support the end of the ladders. After that, secure the paneling and railing so the zombies could walk up without sliding off. From there, they would walk up, move through the funnel, then fall into the stadium.
The work was done fast -- I was genuinely surprised at how many volunteers we were getting for our more long-term projects. I figured that the moment an exit was cleared, I'd be fighting to keep them from trampling each other on the way out. And, sure, there were still plenty that were willing to if it meant being first on the train, but we still had hundreds of volunteers. Enough that I could afford to split hairs and divide them up.
A lot of them were some rough necks that had experience with welding or construction. They moved with a practiced urgency, knowing that time was of the essence but not so much that they risked botching anything. So, the lot of us ran around working as fast as we could while someone called out the time. All the while the air sirens rapidly began to grow louder as they drew closer. That certainly put a pep in people's steps as they moved even faster to get things done before they arrived.
The construction was assembled quickly. It was actually kind of incredible to witness, in all honesty. Before there was an open way leading up to the stadium, and within thirty odd minutes, it was closed off. The open areas barricaded with cars that were further reinforced with sheet metal to act as a wall. The ramp leading up to the second stage of the stadium was widened to make sure that the dead wouldn't just get pressed into a corner. The ramp was the natural pushing point, so they'd all go that way.
And to make sure of it, the stadium's speaker system got hooked up to the radio, so the noise would draw them in.
We finished just as the horde began to round a corner and shuffle towards us. And if the sound of the sirens put a pep in their step, the sight of the oncoming horde lit a oxy-acetylene torch under everyone's asses as people rushed the last few nuts and bolts. I couldn't blame them either -- there was nothing quite like seeing hundreds, thousands even, of undead stumbling your way. They bounced off the grating that had just been set up, some being out right crushed by the sheer weight of their own numbers. I found myself rushing inside of the stadium to get a better look at the outcome, while everyone else scrambled to get as far away from the danger zone as possible.
The zombies were a ruthless mass of momentum, I saw. If one wasn't moving fast enough, or tripped, then it was trampled underfoot by every zombie that came afterward. It ensured that they could only move in one direction, though.
It took a long minute for the first of the zombies to make it up the ramp, but they shuffled along, guided by tall railing that made sure they didn't topple over the sides. That was fine, the zombies heading up, but it really grew tense when the undead started arriving en masse. Over the low groans and scraping feet, I could hear the metal squeaking and groaning under a weight it wasn't meant to handle.
My heart was hammering at my ribs like they owed it money -- every time the ramp shuddered, my heart would fall to my boots with the expectation that it was going to collapse. Yet, each time that expectation was proven wrong as the supports held. The undead forced their way up, carried by the momentum of those behind them. Which had me looking into the stadium itself to see that the undead were flopping off the second stage and landing inside the lower stadium.
There, several points were set up to aid in their disbursement to make sure that the pile didn't get big enough that they could climb their way out. The zombies fell a good ten to fifteen feet, eating shit before they got up to start chasing whatever caught their attention next -- a speaker in one of the corners, an intercom on the baseball field itself, or just something random.
The entire process was shockingly fast, I discovered, when after only around five minutes, the stream of undead started to taper off until they stopped falling inside completely. It took a minute longer for it to sink in, though, as I realized that we had contained a thousand off zombies in the stadium.
A slow shaky breath escaped me as I grabbed hold of the railing, hearing sounds of cheering coming from the other side. “This is more stressful than fighting giant monsters,” I decided. I think I felt more exhausted now than I did getting in the ring with that G-Virus infected Tyrant.
“Rude,” I heard Jill call out before I was nearly brained with a soda. “Your harebrained scheme worked,” she noted, looking through the window of the VIP area alongside me.
“For now,” I corrected. “Still plenty of time for things to go horribly wrong.”
“Maybe, but let's just take the win while we can, okay?” Jill said as I cracked open the can of soda and let overly sweet carbonated syrup wash over my tongue. It was both disgusting and refreshing at the same time. There was a beat of silence as Jill cracked open her can as well. I knew the question was coming even before she asked. “How did you know?”
I had a lot of prepared excuses for this moment. I knew I would need them because, eventually, I was going to run into a situation where I had to act on metaknowledge without an explanation on how I knew what I did. That being said, most of them were completely invalidated by Alice not existing, but… maybe I could use that.
“Alice Abernathy,” I replied, leaning against the railing. “She was another science experiment of Umbrella -- they're obsessed with the idea of taking the next big leap on human evolution, and… well, a blind squirrel will find a nut eventually. That was Alice -- they used the virus to unlock her brain, giving her psychic powers.”
Jill's lips parted like she couldn't tell if I was bullshitting her or not. So, I clarified. “I'm being serious. They had a success story. Admittedly, it was by total accident, but that's about what I expected from Umbrella.” I said before elaborating. “She could read minds, communicate via telepathy, and kill someone by thinking really hard at them.”
“You're serious. Psionics?” Jill stressed and I offered a shrug. It wasn't true. And I did feel a little bad about lying. But, the lie had its uses. Like, I could only imagine what Ada, who was currently eavesdropping on the other side of a door, would do with the completely made up information.
“I'm serious. As far as I know, they used her to sniff out traitors, and that's how I got Nicholai’s name and his general orders.” I continued to craft the lie. “But, now I'm not entirely sure if it was Umbrella or not that created her. I think she might be like me -- an offshoot of some discontinued research, because I couldn't find any mention of her in the Hive. So, either she wasn't there in the first place, or they completely scrubbed her existence.” And now Umbrella was going to get in a tizzy thinking that they had a secret project that could read people's minds that was so secret that they couldn't find her anymore.
“The plan was for her to take care of most of that -- people like Nicholai. And Umbrella’s top brass. She’d just think their way, and their brains would explode.” I said, miming the action.
“Huh,” Jill said, leaning on the railing next to me. “Psionics.” She repeated to herself, and it spoke to how crazy our lives were that she wrapped her around the idea pretty easily.
Meanwhile, Ada apparently heard enough because she stopped eavesdropping. Thank you, Passive Perception.
The moment was ruined, however, when my radio crackled to life and I heard Raymond's tightly controlled panicked voice speak through it. “Rude, this is Raymond. We have a situation -- code red.”
Jill was immediately at attention while I clocked the radio off my belt, “What happened?”
“There has been a containment breach in Red Zones Alpha, Delta, Gamma, and Havoc. Reports that explosives were used -- they were sabotaged,” Raymond informed me and I swallowed a sigh.
Seriously. What a bunch of assholes. “That sounds like about what I expected Umbrella to do,” I said as I began walking. I looked at the map in my memory and started to formulate a plan. “Fall back to positions A through F -- their goal is to kill the highway.” I stated as Jill ran on ahead to spread the word and prepare for action.
The outbreak was getting mopped up too cleanly for Umbrella. That was what I was afraid of. I sincerely doubted that they wanted to risk the world by letting the outbreak go unchecked, but having it squared away in a couple of days was also against their interests. Not only would that deny them data to refine their horrible experiments, it also denied them time to cover their tracks. So, they were taking steps to inject a bit of chaos into things to slow our roll.
Meanwhile, I expected that the Umbrella black ops teams would be doing a handful of things. Initiating the self-destruct sequence in the Hives was a good bet. Capturing or killing certain assets was another.
Assets like myself or Annette.
Which just made things so much more complicated than they needed to be, but I could handle overcomplicated situations.
Leaving the stadium, I saw that the groups were all formed up. I also caught sight of a man that I recognized -- Mikhail Viktor. The Platoon leader of the Umbrella ops unit, and he was currently sending a fierce scowl in my direction. “You killed one of my men,” Mikhail said, a low growl in his voice.
Mikhail was a pretty solid guy in the game I played. Prioritized civilians, went out like a total badass, and protected his men. Eventually, he would have suspected Nicholai of getting most of the Platoon killed, but that event hadn't happened yet.
“He wasn't one of your men,” I replied, looking at his men assembled. “He worked for your competitor. That being said, another Umbrella black ops unit just blew a couple holes in some Red Zones, so it could be more accurate to say that I'm about to start killing your men if you had any awareness of their mission.”
Mikhail's lips thinned and he didn't seem as surprised as I thought he would, but he was certainly pained to hear the news. “We are meant to be the only special operations unit in the city. If there are any others, I have no knowledge of them. Are you certain that they are part of Umbrella?”
I was about ninety percent sure. It could be Tricell who were stirring the pot though. From the sounds of it, they had been hitting the same stupid juice as Umbrella.
“For the most part, I am. I'll be honest with you -- I don't trust you. But, I'm going to give you a chance to earn some trust,” I told him and Mikhail tilted his head my way. The anger my killing Nicholai was taking a back seat -- I think my absolute confidence in what I was saying was more convincing than anything I actually said. “Four Red Zones have been compromised, but we can salvage the situation if we act quickly.”
“What do you…” he trailed off when I jabbed a thumb over my shoulder at the stadium. His brow creased, mulling it over for a moment before speaking. “The ramp barely held as it is. Adding four of your Red Zones together… that is several thousand zombies. It won't hold.”
“Which is why we're going to have to thin the horde a bit and buy the crew some time to beef up the supports,” I answered easily. “We're going to break up into squads that'll lead the hordes down main streets to converge on the highway that's already been prepared as a funnel. We keep them chasing us with gunfire, and in the process shave off a few hundred from their number, with another few hundred that are going to get bled off during the chase because stragglers are going to go their own way. But, if we do this right, we can put another few thousand corpses away.”
“This will take a lot of nerve,” Mikhail voiced.
“Can your men handle it?” I asked, making it clear I wasn't the one I was worried about.
“They can handle it,” Mikhail agreed with a small nod. “Tell us where you want us.”
He had no idea what a relief it was to hear those words.
…
The preparations for this could hardly be called preparations, in all honesty. It was something of a mad rush to contain a breach before it could get any worse. It couldn't be understated how dangerous a horde of undead was. Zombies were relentless, and their weight of numbers was a powerful thing. If we didn't do this fast and right, then worst case scenario? The highway becomes flooded with corpses. In the still-bad-but-not-as-much case? The undead got back onto the streets in force, which would make everything more complicated.
Or, we dumped them in the stadium to be killed off at our leisure. Best case.
So, what we had to do was coordinate and remain calm. Timing, more than anything else, was key here. Only there would be no practice runs. That, and Mikhail was right.
It took a lot of nerve to stand before an unending sea of the living dead and slowly back up one foot at a time.
“In position,” I said, Dakka, Jill, Ada, and Kevin at my sides as we slowly backed up. Chris was back at the stadium with Annette and her daughter. Just in case. The Red Zone spilled out into one of the main roads, and by the time we arrived, the zombies were just milling about as they waited for something to catch their attention. And we were about to give them something.
I heard a click in my earpiece that indicated that the other three teams were also in position.
With nothing else left to do, I had Dakka open fire as I took aim with my Arcane Firearm. The first of the zombies immediately dropped down, but it was the rifle fire from the others that alerted them to us. Almost like they had a hive mind, their heads snapped in our direction, and they started shambling forward. Meanwhile, we started walking backward. One step at a time, as we presented a wall of gunfire.
Ammo, for them, had to be used somewhat conservatively. They couldn't just spray and pray like I could, which meant that the corpses had to be close enough to ensure a headshot. Best range for that?
About ten feet away.
It was very different from facing down some bioengineered monster. A Tyrant felt like an unstoppable force of nature, and there was this lingering fear of getting hit even once because that was all it would take. This was a very different kind of fear because, while the undead weren't particularly dangerous on their own, when they were hounding you like this? With them simply trampling over their own fallen, and it felt like for every one that you killed, ten more took their place?
The horde felt like a genuine force of nature as we were forced to slowly retreat, maintaining our discipline and never flinching even when the undead seemed to surge forward when they felt like we were almost in grasping distance. Dakka helped keep them at bay, but maintaining that distance was nerve-wracking. All because of the timing.
“Baxter Street is clear. Heading on to Anderson,” I informed over the radio as we began to bank with the horde, taking them down another street.
“Smith Street in three, heading to Jefferson,” Mikhail replied and the others rattled off their locations and positions. I could see it in my head -- thankfully, like most American cities, Raccoon City was built on a grid, which made it ‘easy’ to coordinate something like this. The blocks were of even length, so I could calculate how long it would take to guide each horde down them, and with that, I could time when and where we would merge them.
The timing was key. If we fucked that up, then we could end up surrounded by the undead. And that was something that weighed heavily on me as we slowly made our way back to the stadium. Because it meant that this was the perfect time for Umbrella to screw us.
Time seemed to warp as seconds became minutes, and those minutes felt like hours. Something similar happened to distance too, as it felt like we had walked miles, only to discover that we had only walked to the end of a street. The only means of gauging our progress were the check-ins with the other teams, and finding comfort that I wasn’t quite as bad at math as I feared since we seemed to be right on schedule for the first of the mergings.
If facing down a never-ending horde of corpses was nerve-wracking, then looking to your right to find another never-ending horde of corpses was downright terrifying. I saw Mikhail beat a hasty retreat with his team after giving me a thumbs up. “We shall circle around and do clean up! Good luck,” he said, his voice filtering through my radio. I offered a nod, only realizing then that I was drenched in a cold sweat.
The two hordes merged slowly, the second one mixing with the first as it just forced itself into the empty space. We wouldn’t get all of the zombies, but we didn’t need to. Just getting most of them would be a success.
To prevent giving things time to go wrong, I had planned on the other two mergings to happen one after another. And it never got easier to handle each time I saw it. The timings weren't picture perfect, we had too much of a lead on the second one, while on the third, we had overcorrected. Yet, they were still within the margin of error, and within an hour or so, I found myself leading thousands of zombies down the highway.
At some point, I had even hit Level 11, but I couldn’t afford to have my attention falter even for a second it felt like, so I kept it at bay.
Things were going to plan, I saw as I glanced over my shoulder to see that the ramp had been further reinforced. The empty space was filled with cinderblocks while even more supports were added. I wouldn’t exactly say it looked rated for what we were asking of it, but so long as it gave out after the halfway point, I think we could call it a success. “Alright -- I can handle this here by myself. Please go secure my exit,” I called out to Jill and the others.
“You’re crazy, boss,” Kevin called out to me, face pale and covered in a sheen of nervous sweat. That being said, he didn’t need much more encouragement. Neither did Ada, I saw as she was waiting for that same call to beat feet. Jill was the only one to linger, glancing between me and the horde.
So, I reassured her with a grin that I hoped exuded more confidence than I felt. “Don’t worry. The hard part is over,” I said and Jill let out a small breath that was lost in the sea of noise that the horde made. She offered a small curt nod before she started following the others, leaving me to do the last part.
It was indescribable how much ambient noise the horde made. Their moans, groans, the sounds of them dragging their feet -- it was enough that I couldn’t assume that they’d even be able to hear the music coming from the stadium. Which meant the only way to make sure they found the opening was by making sure they had a reason to start funneling through it.
I felt the eyes on me as I neared the entrance, slowly shuffling back as I walked up the ramp’s steady incline. The railings were smeared with gore, and so was the floor. I had Dakka watching my back as I made sure I didn’t do something stupid like slip and fall my way to the horde. My exit was pretty clear, though -- they had busted out the VIP window to drop a rope ladder for me to grab hold of.
Giving myself a bit of a lead, I holstered my Arcane Firearm and had Dakka crawl along the walls. With a run and a jump, I leaped from the funnel and grabbed hold of the rope ladder. Despite knowing that I really shouldn’t, I looked down to see that there were an odd dozen undead that were milling about, attracted by the ladder and the sound of my echoing gunfire.
“Rude! Climb up!” Jill shouted from above, sticking her head out the window while Chris was busy pulling me up out of the danger zone as the undead began to fall through the tunnel, landing heavily beneath me.
I let out a small breath of relief and started to shuffle up the ladder, “See? Like I said, no problem,” I said, going to reach up to Jill’s offered hand to pull myself up.
Then, as if the universe had decided to punish me for my hubris, I felt a sharp pinch in my side. I almost would have ignored it if it wasn’t for how Jill’s eyes widened, an expression of horror on her face. Slowly, I looked down at my chest to see a red spot that was rapidly soaking through my sweater and it clicked what just happened.
I got shot.
‘Seriously. What a bunch of assholes,’ I thought to myself as my numb fingers failed to keep their grip, and I found myself starting to fall.
Comments
Sondre - Asumodeus
since time stops when he levels up, is it not better to just level up right away. You can also use the time to center yourself before finalizing your choices, so you get a "breather".
DJC (MagicLover2128)
Of course Murphy was waiting in the wings to F-up Rude’s Plan.
Sinnohan
Has enough time elapsed for him to do that again? I've kinda lost track of the timeline.
Simon Anoma
Three hours ago. Ch 16 was posted on FFN. I couldn’t wait, grabbed that subscription, and somehow this cliffhanger is EVEN WORSE. Fantastic story friend, I didn’t even recognize you as the person that wrote Risk it All!!! I loved it back in the day, I’m about to reread it as soon as I’m up to date on this
Devin Ranaldi
He got the healing word spell, but falling is bad. Oh wait misty step.
Real Fiend
Lmao cliffhanger
Blaine Hughes
My friend you double posted
Christopher the Mothman
Football announcer: And Rude goes down 10 yards from the end zone!!!
