Chapter 6
The room was long, white, and sterile, like a cafeteria in a hospital. There were two long tables surrounded by cheap plastic chairs, and bright white fluorescent lights that glinted harshly off the formica tabletops. An air-conditioning system hummed somewhere nearby, the droning sound mingling with the muffled chatter of the two security guards out in the hallway.
Jill Valentine sat with her hands in her lap, her hair hanging down limply along the sides of her face, staring wearily at the newspaper the guards left on the table for her. She read the huge headline on the front page and the first few lines of text beneath it, but that was all she needed to see. She did not reach out to pick the paper up, unwilling to read the entire article.
Tragedy in Raccoon City
President Orders Nuclear Strike – Worst Biological Disaster in History
Jill was dressed in the plain white t-shirt and gray pair of pajama pants that they had given her the night before. Her own clothes probably wound up in an incinerator. Her small room, where she slept the night, was about the size of a jail cell and contained little more than a bed and a table. So far, the two security guards were the only people she’d seen since they took her here, and neither of them had much to say to her.
She could not shake the feeling that this place was a mental institution, and she was its newest resident. At least someone took the care to have a doctor examine her leg. She now wore an elastic knee brace, the kind athletes used, and was also given some pain pills. The swelling was down on her injured knee, although she still walked with a limp.
Another voice could be heard in the hall, and then the door opened. A young man marched into the room, motioning briefly to the guards as the doors closed after him. He looked in his mid-20s, barely older than Jill herself, and wore black loafers, wrinkle-free black pants, and a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the collar unbuttoned, as if to demonstrate how busy and overworked he was. A red and white octagon shape adorned the key card hanging from his belt, the symbol of the Umbrella Corporation.
He walked over to Jill and pulled out a chair, setting down a stapled stack of papers. He took a seat across from her and leaned back comfortably, giving Jill a casual, indifferent glance.
“My name is Alex Carlisle,” he said. “I was sent here to talk to you. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”
“Sorry,” Jill said, not moving. “I’m busy right now.”
“Is that so?” Carlisle asked, glancing at the newspaper. “Reading up on current events? If you like, we can get a television in here and put the news on. There’s been nonstop coverage on every station all day so far.”
Jill swallowed with some difficulty and said, “I don’t even know what time it is. There’s no clocks in here.”
Carlisle looked at his watch. “It’s five-thirty. We figured we’d let you sleep as long as you wanted. You were pretty tired last night.”
Jill expected some half-hearted, insincere platitude like “I can’t imagine what you went through” or “It must have been terrible for you” or “You’re very lucky to have survived,” but Carlisle didn’t seem the type to bother with platitudes. His clumsy attempt to look hassled, the rolled-up sleeves and the collar, and his slick, corporate haircut marked him as some ambitious middle-manager. Just another faceless paper-pusher, some low-ranking executive wannabe sent here to give Jill meaningless reassurances and try to boss her around.
“Where am I?” Jill asked suddenly.
“An Umbrella facility south of Atlanta,” Carlisle answered. “I thought they would have told you that.”
“They didn’t tell me anything. They still haven’t told me anything.”
Carlisle shrugged. “Like I said, you were pretty tired.”
After the traumatic “decontamination” process they subjected her to, Jill wanted nothing more than to crawl into a dark place and cry. The chemicals felt like they were melting her skin off, and the crowd of silent watchers in oversized hazard suits made her feel like she was in some kind of nightmarish science fiction movie. She would rather go back into the city and face the zombies than go through a dehumanizing ordeal like that again.
“Is there anything else you want to know?” Carlisle prompted, knowing full well that there were a million things Jill wanted to ask.
“What am I doing here?”
“Well, we had to bring you somewhere. We have a few other facilities like this, where we’ve taken the other survivors for observation and recovery.”
“Are there other survivors here in this building?”
“Just you and Carlos Oliviera.”
Jill hadn’t seen Carlos since they’d been separated after landing the helicopter. After the pain of decontamination and mysterious transport here, she almost forgot about him.
“Where is he?”
“Upstairs,” Carlisle said vaguely. “I talked to him earlier, before you got up.”
“Is he okay?”
“He’s fine. We gave him medical attention as well. He had some broken ribs and some bruises but he’ll be fine. You can talk to him later.”
Jill waited for a few moments, glancing around the empty room but not moving in her chair. She remained hunched over, her hair hanging down, her hands in her lap.
“Am I a prisoner here?” she asked finally.
A slow grin touched Carlisle’s lips but he quickly covered it up. “Of course not, Miss Valentine. I think it would be best if you stayed here a couple of days to fully recover from what happened, but you’re free to leave at any time if you wish to.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Why would we want to keep you here?”
“I know too much. I know what really happened. I know about your lab in the mountains, and the outbreak there, and about everything else. You can’t let me leave,” Jill said, feeling hopeless. She shook her head defeatedly.
“Don’t be so dramatic,” Carlisle said with an annoyed wave of his hand. “We don’t care what you know. It doesn’t make any difference at this point. If you want to leave, go ahead and leave. I’m certainly not going to stop you.”
Jill lifted her head up and tried to stare him down, but he returned her gaze with a calm, worry-free look on his face. He propped one leg up on his knee and rested his arm over the back of the chair, seemingly as comfortable as if he was sitting in his own living room.
“And when I go right to the media and tell them what I know?” Jill asked, trying to keep her voice low to keep from screaming at him.
“And why would you do something like that?”
“Why …?” Jill felt the wind being knocked out of her, and slumped farther back into her chair, stunned at Carlisle’s completely indifferent attitude.
“Are you out of your mind?” she snapped. “Do you think I’m going to keep this a secret? That I’ll be an … an accomplice to everything that Umbrella has done? Do you really think I’ll be silent? That I’ll just disappear, and let you … let you get away with this?”
Carlisle narrowed his eyes just a fraction, although Jill couldn’t tell if he was angry, thoughtful, or just confused. The man’s face was unreadable, and Jill began to wonder if he was just some random manager after all.
Slowly, Carlisle reached out and put his hand against the newspaper, and slid it across the surface of the table until it was right in front of her. He stared at her without speaking, as if daring her to look down at it.
“I saw the headline,” she said. “I didn’t have to read the rest.”
“Maybe you should have,” he said coldly. “If you read the entire story, you would know that Umbrella already took full responsibility for the disaster.”
For a moment, Jill thought she had misheard him. She just stared open-mouthed, unable to even come up with a response. She found herself looking down at the paper headline again, as if seeking verification.
“You mean Umbrella … they admitted that
they’re to blame?” she finally managed to whisper.
“An entire city was destroyed last night, Miss Valentine,” Carlisle said. “We don’t even have an estimate yet for the number of people that were killed in the outbreak, but the population was over one-hundred-thousand, so that’s a minimum figure. An entire city was wiped completely off the map. How could Umbrella, or anyone else for that matter, possibly cover it up? The government couldn’t keep a lid on something like this. Umbrella had no choice but to take responsibility for it.”
“But …” Jill said. “If this is an Umbrella facility, then what am I doing here? If Umbrella took the blame, then aren’t they getting shut down or something? I mean, I should be in the protective custody of the police, not sitting here talking to you.”
“Umbrella has admitted that the outbreak was their fault,” Carlisle explained. “And in doing so, they have been tasked with cleaning up after the disaster. Umbrella has taken over the entire rescue effort and all investigations into the causes of the outbreak. They will also be in charge of dealing with the remains of the city, as soon as it’s safe to do so. Everyone already knows that Umbrella is to blame, so it’s only right that they should be the ones to deal with the aftermath. By now the entire world knows what happened, so exactly what is it that you want to keep Umbrella from getting away with?”
Jill shook her head. “No, this can’t be right. Umbrella could never tell people the truth about what happened. If Umbrella ever admitted the truth, there’s no way anyone would let them be in charge of anything.”
“I said they admitted it was their fault,” Carlisle said evasively. “They revealed that one of their research centers accidentally exposed their employees to an extremely contagious pathogen which was then transmitted to the city.”
He paused then, letting Jill fill in the blanks.
“So they aren’t really taking responsibility after all, are they?” Jill said softly. “It’s just another cover-up, isn’t it? They aren’t telling the truth about what happened.”
“Well,” Carlisle said, “obviously the specific details of the infection are not being released to the public.”
“Oh yes, they are,” Jill said. “Because I’m going to tell everyone. Umbrella won’t get away with this. I swear to God, I’ll scream it from the rooftops. Everyone will know the truth.”
“These people are dead,” Carlisle said suddenly, raising his voice. He stabbed his finger at the newspaper, emphasizing each word. “By this time tomorrow, there are going to be a thousand families across the country grieving for the loss of their loved ones, and you want to make it worse for them? Don’t you think what’s happened already is bad enough? Do you actually think anyone out there wants to hear what you have to say?”
“People need to know the truth!” Jill shouted.
“No, they don’t!” Carlisle shouted back. “Not this truth! People don’t want to know about what actually happened, and neither do you!”
Jill was taken aback momentarily, and tried to respond, “I don’t know what you –”
“You know exactly what I mean,” Carlisle said harshly. “The things you saw, the things you had to do. Do you really want those memories? You would forget about them all if you could.” His voice softened for a moment, and he added, “And no one would blame you for wanting to forget, because the things you saw are things that no one should ever have to see.”
Jill’s voice was less than whisper, her eyes tightly closed. “It’s not the same. Just because it’s horrible doesn’t mean people don’t deserve to know about it.”
“I’m not talking about what people deserve,” Carlisle said, speaking calmly again. “I’m talking about what they want and what’s best for them. The story we told them is bad enough already. The victims’ families are going to have a hard time dealing with what we’ve already told them. The complete truth is simply too much.”
When Jill said nothing, Carlisle leaned forward. “Think about the families, Miss Valentine. It’s horrible enough that they have to imagine their loved ones dying of some mysterious disease without understanding why it happened. Why would you want to make their suffering even worse?”
“Don’t play the guilt card with me,” Jill warned. “I’m not the one who killed a hundred thousand people. I don’t have anything to be guilty about.”
“Is that so?” Carlisle asked. “How many infected people did you kill before you escaped the city, Miss Valentine?”
The question was so vile and repugnant, and asked with such casual disregard for good taste and decency, that Jill was unable to speak. Carlisle stared her down, cruel and emotionless, lacking even the smallest bit of compassion or feeling. Jill was suddenly afraid of him.
“Are you going to go on television and admit to the public that you personally shot and killed infected people during the outbreak? Is that the truth that you want to reveal to the world?”
“They … they were ...” Jill tried to stammer. But she couldn’t say what they were, it was as if the very words could not be spoken out loud.
“I know what they were,” Carlisle said. “And if I was in your place, I would have done the exact same thing. But that’s not my point. My point is that the rest of the world believes that the infected people in Raccoon City were still alive. They may have acted crazy and violent, but they were still living people. That is the story the rest of the world believes.”
“The other survivors know ...”
“The other survivors have already accepted our explanation of the outbreak,” Carlisle interrupted her quickly. “Many of them didn’t witness the kinds of things you did, Miss Valentine. Some of them only encountered two or three infected people before they were rescued, so they were willing to accept our story. Many of the other survivors were rather traumatized by what they’d seen, and they were more than happy to believe what we told them.”
“You see,” he continued, “they didn’t want to know the truth. Despite witnessing the events first-hand, almost all the survivors were ready to believe that the infected people they saw were not actually zombies, they just were acting that way because of the disease. They wanted to believe that, you understand? The truth would have been too much for them. It was better to tell them a lie that they can live with, then tell them the truth that they can’t.”
Jill had nothing to say, so she remained silent. She knew he was telling the truth, as much as she hated herself for it. She saw it herself in the city; some people refused to believe that the infected people were zombies, despite seeing it with their own eyes. How many people called the zombies “crazy people” at first? None of the others knew what she knew about the infection, so they would not have immediately come to the same conclusion she did. How many people saw zombies and refused to believe it, right up until their own death? How many people were luckier than her and managed to hide safely until their rescue, not realizing or even suspecting the truth of the infection?
Carlisle was still talking, as if to himself. “Of course, if you still want to go on television and tell them everything, we won’t stop you. But no one’s going to believe a word you say. They’ll think you’re some lunatic crackpot with a personal vendetta against Umbrella, using this terrible tragedy for your own benefit. You’ll be vilified in the media. And if you admit how you killed infected people, you might as well be confessing to mass murder.”
“I can’t …” Jill whispered weakly. She felt like she wanted to cry, but there were no tears. Her whole body felt empty, like she was just a shell. “I just can’t … I won’t be able to live with myself if I don’t do something. I promised Barry … that I would make Umbrella pay for what they’ve done.”
“I don’t think you have to worry about that. Umbrella will certainly pay for it.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Jill said, frustrated. “I’m not talking about losing profit or losing business. I want the people responsible for t
his to go to jail!”
Carlisle picked up the stapled papers that he had brought with him and set them in his lap, flipping through the pages. “So would Umbrella,” he said, folding the sheets over to one of the pages in the middle. “Unfortunately, the people responsible are not here to answer for their crimes.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You might not believe this,” Carlisle said slowly, casually flipping through pages. “In fact, I’m willing to bet that you won’t. But the people in charge at Umbrella had no idea about the illegal activities going on in Raccoon City. The things that went on in the Arklay Lab were done without Umbrella’s knowledge.”
Jill stared at him. “Do you think I’m stupid?”
“I’m not talking about the scientific research. Umbrella is well aware of the virus that caused the outbreak, of course. They’ve been studying it for decades. I’m talking about the initial infection at the lab, the attempted cover-up, the involvement of your police unit, and the events following that. Umbrella had no knowledge that anything was wrong at the lab until you and the other surviving police officers returned to the city. They didn’t know about the outbreak until it was far too late to do anything about it. The people in charge at the Arklay Lab are the ones truly responsible for this, not Umbrella as a whole.”
“You’re right,” Jill said. “I don’t believe you.”
“Why not?”
“Because there’s no way they could have kept it a secret from their own bosses. Umbrella wouldn’t give them that much freedom, no company would let their employees have that much authority. Whoever was in charge there probably had to send daily reports or something to his boss, who had to send them to his boss, all the way up the ladder. Somebody up at the top is responsible for this, not some low-level manager.”
“Normally, you’d be right,” Carlisle admitted. “Most of Umbrella’s facilities are very strictly managed, due to the nature of their work. But the Arklay Lab was an exception, because the Director of Operations wasn’t a regular manager who had to report to his superiors. Actually, you could say that you’re half right. Someone at the top was responsible, except that he was in charge of the Arklay Lab and he acted completely on his own.”
Jill shook her head and would have laughed if she wasn’t so tired and depressed. She was almost amazed at how they wanted to twist the facts to fit some altered version of reality where they somehow deserved none of the blame. “So let me get this straight,” she said sarcastically. “The guy who did all of this just happened to be super high-up in the chain of command, and he just happened to have enough authority to keep everything from the other bosses at Umbrella, and he just happened to be in charge of one single lab in the middle of nowhere. Sure, I totally believe that.”
“Yes, and his name was Ozwell Spencer,” Carlisle said. “Do you recognize that name?”
Jill did recognize it, and it must have shown on her face, because Carlisle merely smiled briefly and held up the stack of papers slightly. “This is a typed transcript of your short debriefing last night, before they brought you here. We didn’t have time to get into detail with the questioning, and besides, you were in no mood to be interrogated after your escape from the city. But you gave us enough information to work with. You didn’t mention Dr. Spencer at all, which makes sense because we’re pretty sure he was gone from the lab long before you got there. But you’ve heard the name before, haven’t you?”
Jill thought back, and then nodded. She remembered the name.
“We found a note,” she said, thinking back. It was right before they encountered Wesker for the last time, back in the lab. It seemed like a lifetime ago, and she struggled to even remember the details now. “Chris found it, not me. It was a note for Wesker, and it was one of the reasons we suspected he was involved in Umbrella. But it was signed by someone named Spencer. We guessed that maybe he was in charge, because Chris said he had a big office in the mansion.”
Carlisle nodded. “Ozwell Spencer is one of the founders of the modern Umbrella Corporation. If you don’t believe me, there’ss plenty of information out there to prove it. He was a pretty important man in the company, and he had complete control of the lab complexes in and around Raccoon City because he personally supervised their construction. At one time he was on the Board of Directors, but he chose to be Director of the Arklay Lab because it gave him more direct control over the work that was done there.”
Jill was silent for a few moments, and said, “So Spencer is the one responsible for this?”
“We think so,” Carlisle said. “Unfortunately, Spencer’s whereabouts are currently unknown.”
“You mean …?”
“Yes, we think Spencer is still alive. We suspect that he left the lab not long after the initial outbreak, but we have no idea where he went. In any case, he was not at the lab when you and your team arrived there.”
Jill tried to remember exactly what the note said. She couldn’t remember the exact words, as she only read it once. But she remembered the basic message. It told Wesker to get away, to leave the lab. At the time, the content of the message was not important to her, because she was still so stunned that Wesker was involved. But now, it seemed to make sense with what Carlisle was telling her. But the last thing she wanted was to take his word for anything.
She wanted to be defiant, she wanted to be hostile, she wanted to be combative and argumentative. She wanted to spit in his face and tell him to go to Hell. But she just didn’t have the energy to fight anymore. She had been forced to fight too much already, and now that the fighting was over, she had no desire to start it up again. It drained her, physically and emotionally. And Carlisle was doing such a painfully good job at twisting her emotions and dashing her hopes that she didn’t want to argue with him anymore, out of fear that he might drop another bombshell that would leave her staggered.
She thought that she was ready for them. She knew that Umbrella would send someone to try to soften her up, either with threats or promises. She knew that they would lie and twist the truth and try to convince her that everything was fine and that she should just go along with it. And she thought she was ready for them.
But Carlisle was like a shark smelling blood in the water. He didn’t bother to make vague promises or insincere pleas for understanding, or even resort to outright threats. He sensed Jill’s weakness and attacked her where he knew it would hurt her most: her fear and her guilt. And when she was wounded and defenseless, he attacked her credibility and then shot down what she thought she knew about the infection in the first place. She had no reason to believe anything he told her, but somehow she knew it must be true.
If they wanted to silence her, they could murder her in cold blood right now and no one would ever know. She could be just another victim of the outbreak for all they cared. And everything Carlisle said about the media and the public was true, as much as she hated to admit it. Deep down, she knew that it was already too late to try to get people to learn the truth. The official story from Umbrella was close enough to the truth that no one would think to doubt it, especially since it already cast Umbrella in such a terrible light. If Jill tried to reveal the actual truth, then the media would surely cast her as some fringe conspiracy theorist if they acknowledged her at all. No one would believe her, because the truth was too terrible to contemplate.
“So that’s it,” she whispered to herself. “Nothing I do now matters. And everything that happened … Barry and Enrico and all the others … their deaths were for nothing. The only thing I wanted to do was escape the city so I could … so I could expose Umbrella. And now I can’t even do that.”
“Sometimes,” Carlisle said, “terrible things happen for no reason. They’re just accidents. No one’s to blame, and no one’s truly at fault. Sometimes, the world just isn’t fair. Maybe this was one of those times.”
“I can’t believe that,” Jill replied. “
I can’t believe that all of this was just an accident.”
Carlisle shrugged slightly, not trying to argue with her. “It might have been,” he suggested. “The truth is, we don’t know what started the infection. We know it didn’t start at the lab, so it must have spread there from somewhere else. But where and how is still a mystery. That’s why we want to find Dr. Spencer. But we don’t even know that he’s still alive, he could have been killed during the outbreak.”
Jill tried to consider his words, but they contradicted everything she believed. Could it really have been some huge mistake, a monumental accident? Maybe at the very beginning it was, maybe when the first person got infected with the disease, maybe that was an accident.
But everything that followed was no accident. Sending the S.T.A.R.S. units to the mansion was no accident, letting the disease spread to the city without warning anyone was no accident, destroying the city was no accident.
When Jill remained silent for several minutes, Carlisle said, “If you’re still in the mood to talk, I have some questions for you.”
“About what?” Jill asked wearily.
Carlisle set the papers down. “About a man named Albert Wesker.”