Start the Violence
((time-has-no-meaninged to the first week of December))
"I don't think you're supposed to be here," Arthur Bromwell says.
Claire shrugs. She's sitting in an armchair in the corner of Bromwell's bedroom, one leg folded over the other, dressed in her STARS coverall and tactical vest. The only reason Bromwell didn't hear her the moment he came into the room is because she wasn't moving.
She leans forward into the light, so Bromwell can see how she looks. She's dusty and sooty, like she stopped off here on her way back from fighting the Great Chicago Fire. Her bangs and the end of her ponytail are crisp and caramelized from heat. Her eyes stick out like half-moons.
"Do I look like someone who cares about 'supposed to' right now, Mr. Bromwell?" she says quietly.
"What do you want?" Bromwell puts his bathrobe back on, and sits down at his bedroom desk.
"Tell me about dieback," Claire says.
Yoko was nice enough not to make Claire feel like too much of an idiot. Bromwell's hard drive had had a few encrypted files on it, but none of it was really interesting. The good stuff was sitting in the root directory, in hidden folders, like no one but Bromwell had ever been allowed to see it. It was, according to Yoko, the kind of thing people who didn't know anything about computers did when they wanted to hide files.
Claire thanked Yoko for her time, then read through the data on the day after Thanksgiving. She printed most of it out and tacked it up on the walls of the room that she'd claimed as her "office" on the STARS base, backing it up with occasional satellite photos or files from the Umbrella archives.
Bromwell had been an Umbrella stockholder at one point. That wasn't a big deal. What was a big deal was that he owned an amazing amount of desert property on the California-Nevada border, out in the middle of nowhere.
She left a message on Chris's desk saying where she'd went and what she'd taken with her, then took a flight into Vegas. Three hours in a rental car later, Claire was looking at Bromwell's property.
It took two hours of searching and a metal detector to turn anything up, then an hour of digging through hard-packed desert sand. Claire's shovel hit something hard and hollow shortly thereafter. She paused to drink the last of the case of water she'd brought with her, then fussed with the door for thirty minutes before finally, after losing what little patience she had, blowing the lock out with a quarter-ounce of plastique.
Bromwell rubbs his eyes with two fingers, then takes a half-full bottle of whiskey out of his desk drawer. He pours a finger's worth into an expensive-looking glass, and cradles it in both hands.
"Dieback is an old cold war plan," he says, looking at Claire. "It's the notion of reducing the human race to a manageable number, theoretically to preserve the viability of the race after a protracted nuclear exchange.
"One of the cold war-era weapons contracts that several different corporations had was to research ways of feasibly causing dieback."
His voice is flat. He's stating facts.
"Ways like the T-Virus?" Claire asks, unnecessarily.
Bromwell swallows some whiskey, then nods. "Biological weapons in general. The T-Virus in specific."
She thought it was a bomb shelter at first. The entryway was crude and old, but Claire recognized a decontamination chamber when she saw one. She'd been inside a few.
The lights didn't work, so she broke out a flashlight and held it backwards, pointing her SOCOM .45 over it the way she'd been taught. The air leaking out of the chamber smelled foul and stagnant.
A few steps in, she found a gasoline generator, complete with several drums of fuel next to it and a hand-pump. Claire left it alone and continued deeper inside.
It was too big to be a fallout shelter. She figured that out early on. It was also locked down tight, with big sturdy sixties-era locks that Claire could've picked with her fingernail.
The food stores were intact. Decades of food and fresh water were sitting on dusty shelves, alongside stacks of books: classic novels, self-improvement, a full set of 1986 encyclopedias. She cracked a faint smile on finding a copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, then shook her head and continued the search.
A little bit beyond the food stores, she picked the lock on a set of anodized steel lockers. Inside, for a moment, it looked like someone had taken a great deal of care to protect a set of camera parts. Claire set her flashlight down and removed the parts from the locker, and after a couple of minutes, she was able to puzzle it out. It took her a few seconds to reassemble a high-powered dart rifle from the equipment in the locker.
Behind the rifle parts, there was a small plastic case set on a shelf. It contained six empty tranquilizer darts with titanium tips, and six carefully-sealed medicine bottles. Claire held one of the bottles up to the light. The label, unsurprisingly, read ANTIVIRUS.
"It was perfect, really. The T-Virus is remarkably docile if you introduce the right strains in a controlled environment, and better yet, a very small dose can achieve megadeath in a very short timeframe. Simulations revealed the potential for a Raccoon City-level body count as early as the mid-eighties."
"It mutates," Claire says, "fast. You can't control it."
Bromwell looks at her with that same strange emotionless facial expression. "It wasn't a concern. Anyone who might be killed by a potential mutation, in the scenarios we worked up, would be under heavy guard by trained soldiers, a thousand miles from the contamination zone. Any T-Virus carrier would rot and fall apart from cellular stress well before they could reach the problematic area. It was all worked out."
"But you never wound up doing it."
Bromwell drinks some more whiskey. "We never wound up in a nuclear exchange. We didn't need it."
Claire sits back in the chair. "Is that why Martinson got killed? Because of dieback?"
"No." Bromwell refills his glass. He's talking faster now than he did at the start of the conversation, like having this talk at all is bursting a dam. "Not directly.
"After the Raccoon City disaster, the entire industry was... it was a mad time. Any one corporation engaged in T-Virus research was doing it with the government's implicit permission, but once Raccoon City was destroyed..." He makes an odd gesture, which probably makes more sense to him than to Claire. "...it was madness. We were all trying to cover up our involvement and make sure other companies couldn't. It was like a feud between nations. There were assassinations--"
"I've heard," Claire says. "Some of it, anyway. The Antarctica thing."
Bromwell nods. "Yes, you were there for that. I'd read a dossier on you, years ago..." He shakes his head. "Imagine an entire industry of that. You had to keep mercenaries and soldiers on the payroll to be in the game in the first place, but it all intensified after Raccoon City." Bromwell has another sip of his whiskey. "Now... anyone who's still alive is trying to stay that way, by making sure no one's left to say that he was ever involved. That was Martinson.
"That was you, this evening."
Claire closed the Nevada bunker up after phoning its location in to Chris, then decided to just drive the rest of the way to Los Angeles. Her gear was in the trunk, and she was thinking the time had come to have another conversation with Bromwell.
It was late evening by the time she was approaching the city. Before she went to find a hotel, Claire called into the base again, getting Chris's voicemail, and left a message saying what she'd found and where she was, just before pulling into a gas station.
She shrugged into her shoulder holster on reflex before getting out of the car, then hooked her STARS ID card into a laminated window on her belt and put her jacket on over the holster. There was no reason for it, besides having had it drummed repeatedly into her skull not to go anywhere unarmed at any time.
Just the same, she got some odd sidelong looks as she walked through the gas station. After using the restroom, she was pulling a bottle of water out of the cooler when something made her look up.
Claire realized several things at once. One was that there were three black SUVs parked outside the gas station; another was that she'd had several black SUVs near her on the highway since she'd hit the California border. She hadn't thought anything of it--SUVs in California, who'd've fucking thought it--until now. She'd been too busy thinking about the case.
They all opened up, spitting out men in ski masks, holding shotguns and nine-millimeter pistols, twelve in all, and Claire knew the moment she saw them what was going on. Half of them were looking straight at her, after all.
The one in the lead kicked the doors open and fired a shell into the ceiling, yelling "THIS IS A ROBBERY!"
"Sure it is," Claire said quietly, and slid down behind one of the shelves.
"I don't think you're supposed to be here," Arthur Bromwell says.
Claire shrugs. She's sitting in an armchair in the corner of Bromwell's bedroom, one leg folded over the other, dressed in her STARS coverall and tactical vest. The only reason Bromwell didn't hear her the moment he came into the room is because she wasn't moving.
She leans forward into the light, so Bromwell can see how she looks. She's dusty and sooty, like she stopped off here on her way back from fighting the Great Chicago Fire. Her bangs and the end of her ponytail are crisp and caramelized from heat. Her eyes stick out like half-moons.
"Do I look like someone who cares about 'supposed to' right now, Mr. Bromwell?" she says quietly.
"What do you want?" Bromwell puts his bathrobe back on, and sits down at his bedroom desk.
"Tell me about dieback," Claire says.
Yoko was nice enough not to make Claire feel like too much of an idiot. Bromwell's hard drive had had a few encrypted files on it, but none of it was really interesting. The good stuff was sitting in the root directory, in hidden folders, like no one but Bromwell had ever been allowed to see it. It was, according to Yoko, the kind of thing people who didn't know anything about computers did when they wanted to hide files.
Claire thanked Yoko for her time, then read through the data on the day after Thanksgiving. She printed most of it out and tacked it up on the walls of the room that she'd claimed as her "office" on the STARS base, backing it up with occasional satellite photos or files from the Umbrella archives.
Bromwell had been an Umbrella stockholder at one point. That wasn't a big deal. What was a big deal was that he owned an amazing amount of desert property on the California-Nevada border, out in the middle of nowhere.
She left a message on Chris's desk saying where she'd went and what she'd taken with her, then took a flight into Vegas. Three hours in a rental car later, Claire was looking at Bromwell's property.
It took two hours of searching and a metal detector to turn anything up, then an hour of digging through hard-packed desert sand. Claire's shovel hit something hard and hollow shortly thereafter. She paused to drink the last of the case of water she'd brought with her, then fussed with the door for thirty minutes before finally, after losing what little patience she had, blowing the lock out with a quarter-ounce of plastique.
Bromwell rubbs his eyes with two fingers, then takes a half-full bottle of whiskey out of his desk drawer. He pours a finger's worth into an expensive-looking glass, and cradles it in both hands.
"Dieback is an old cold war plan," he says, looking at Claire. "It's the notion of reducing the human race to a manageable number, theoretically to preserve the viability of the race after a protracted nuclear exchange.
"One of the cold war-era weapons contracts that several different corporations had was to research ways of feasibly causing dieback."
His voice is flat. He's stating facts.
"Ways like the T-Virus?" Claire asks, unnecessarily.
Bromwell swallows some whiskey, then nods. "Biological weapons in general. The T-Virus in specific."
She thought it was a bomb shelter at first. The entryway was crude and old, but Claire recognized a decontamination chamber when she saw one. She'd been inside a few.
The lights didn't work, so she broke out a flashlight and held it backwards, pointing her SOCOM .45 over it the way she'd been taught. The air leaking out of the chamber smelled foul and stagnant.
A few steps in, she found a gasoline generator, complete with several drums of fuel next to it and a hand-pump. Claire left it alone and continued deeper inside.
It was too big to be a fallout shelter. She figured that out early on. It was also locked down tight, with big sturdy sixties-era locks that Claire could've picked with her fingernail.
The food stores were intact. Decades of food and fresh water were sitting on dusty shelves, alongside stacks of books: classic novels, self-improvement, a full set of 1986 encyclopedias. She cracked a faint smile on finding a copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, then shook her head and continued the search.
A little bit beyond the food stores, she picked the lock on a set of anodized steel lockers. Inside, for a moment, it looked like someone had taken a great deal of care to protect a set of camera parts. Claire set her flashlight down and removed the parts from the locker, and after a couple of minutes, she was able to puzzle it out. It took her a few seconds to reassemble a high-powered dart rifle from the equipment in the locker.
Behind the rifle parts, there was a small plastic case set on a shelf. It contained six empty tranquilizer darts with titanium tips, and six carefully-sealed medicine bottles. Claire held one of the bottles up to the light. The label, unsurprisingly, read ANTIVIRUS.
"It was perfect, really. The T-Virus is remarkably docile if you introduce the right strains in a controlled environment, and better yet, a very small dose can achieve megadeath in a very short timeframe. Simulations revealed the potential for a Raccoon City-level body count as early as the mid-eighties."
"It mutates," Claire says, "fast. You can't control it."
Bromwell looks at her with that same strange emotionless facial expression. "It wasn't a concern. Anyone who might be killed by a potential mutation, in the scenarios we worked up, would be under heavy guard by trained soldiers, a thousand miles from the contamination zone. Any T-Virus carrier would rot and fall apart from cellular stress well before they could reach the problematic area. It was all worked out."
"But you never wound up doing it."
Bromwell drinks some more whiskey. "We never wound up in a nuclear exchange. We didn't need it."
Claire sits back in the chair. "Is that why Martinson got killed? Because of dieback?"
"No." Bromwell refills his glass. He's talking faster now than he did at the start of the conversation, like having this talk at all is bursting a dam. "Not directly.
"After the Raccoon City disaster, the entire industry was... it was a mad time. Any one corporation engaged in T-Virus research was doing it with the government's implicit permission, but once Raccoon City was destroyed..." He makes an odd gesture, which probably makes more sense to him than to Claire. "...it was madness. We were all trying to cover up our involvement and make sure other companies couldn't. It was like a feud between nations. There were assassinations--"
"I've heard," Claire says. "Some of it, anyway. The Antarctica thing."
Bromwell nods. "Yes, you were there for that. I'd read a dossier on you, years ago..." He shakes his head. "Imagine an entire industry of that. You had to keep mercenaries and soldiers on the payroll to be in the game in the first place, but it all intensified after Raccoon City." Bromwell has another sip of his whiskey. "Now... anyone who's still alive is trying to stay that way, by making sure no one's left to say that he was ever involved. That was Martinson.
"That was you, this evening."
Claire closed the Nevada bunker up after phoning its location in to Chris, then decided to just drive the rest of the way to Los Angeles. Her gear was in the trunk, and she was thinking the time had come to have another conversation with Bromwell.
It was late evening by the time she was approaching the city. Before she went to find a hotel, Claire called into the base again, getting Chris's voicemail, and left a message saying what she'd found and where she was, just before pulling into a gas station.
She shrugged into her shoulder holster on reflex before getting out of the car, then hooked her STARS ID card into a laminated window on her belt and put her jacket on over the holster. There was no reason for it, besides having had it drummed repeatedly into her skull not to go anywhere unarmed at any time.
Just the same, she got some odd sidelong looks as she walked through the gas station. After using the restroom, she was pulling a bottle of water out of the cooler when something made her look up.
Claire realized several things at once. One was that there were three black SUVs parked outside the gas station; another was that she'd had several black SUVs near her on the highway since she'd hit the California border. She hadn't thought anything of it--SUVs in California, who'd've fucking thought it--until now. She'd been too busy thinking about the case.
They all opened up, spitting out men in ski masks, holding shotguns and nine-millimeter pistols, twelve in all, and Claire knew the moment she saw them what was going on. Half of them were looking straight at her, after all.
The one in the lead kicked the doors open and fired a shell into the ceiling, yelling "THIS IS A ROBBERY!"
"Sure it is," Claire said quietly, and slid down behind one of the shelves.