Resident Evil. Retribution

by John Shirley

  THE OFFICIAL MOVIE NOVELIZATION

  RESIDENT EVIL: RETRIBUTION

  SCREENPLAY BY PAUL W. S. ANDERSON BASED ON CAPCOM’S VIDEOGAME RESIDENT EVIL NOVELIZATION BY JOHN SHIRLEY

  TITAN BOOKS

  RESIDENT EVIL: RETRIBUTION

  Print edition ISBN: 9781781163153

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781781163160

  Published by Titan Books A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd 144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition September 2012

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Resident Evil: Retribution © 2012 Constantin Film International GmbH and Davis Films/Impact Pictures (RE5) Inc.

  Motion Picture Artwork © 2012 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  Printed and bound in the United States.

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  DEDICATED TO FANS OF RESIDENT EVIL, IN ALL ITS MANIFESTATIONS

  RESIDENT EVIL: RETRIBUTION

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This novel is based on Mr. Paul W.S. Anderson’s script for Resident Evil: Retribution, which I had a lot of fun reading and adapting. Everything in the screenplay is dramatized in the novelization. All the dialogue in the script is found in the novel, too. Other dialogue, of course, has been invented for the novel. A novel requires legroom, and stretching out, and there are scenes and characters and even a subplot not found in the film—but they are all inspired by the screenplay; by settings, ideas, events and character-types found in the screenplay. And the film’s continuity is very much the overriding structure of this novelization.

  So far as I’m aware, nothing in the novel contradicts the film.

  And now… we have a dark journey to undertake together…

  PROLOGUE

  THE LONG, DARK JOURNEY

  1

  What has gone before.

  The mansion, in the Arklay Mountains…

  She wakes in the void—in a psychological void, with her memory a blank. She only knows she is naked, lying on the floor of a shower.

  And she is alone.

  She finds clothing, puts it on, and explores the dimly lit mansion—where no one seems to live. She feels as if she should know this place… but remembers nothing. It is as if she sees everything from outside of herself. Even her name is remote.

  She sees a picture of herself and a man, framed on a table. Is this my husband?

  Continuing to search, suddenly, she finds someone. Or he finds her. He’s investigating the Umbrella Corporation, she learns, while pretending to work for it.…

  Then the soldiers burst in, faces seeming inhuman in gas masks. They’re with the Corporation, they announce—the world’s most powerful and advanced pharmaceutical multinational. They take her at gunpoint, and she begins to learn the truth. She had been an important security operative for Umbrella, but something strange and ugly has gone down—a mass murder in the Hive.

  Something to which Alice may be relevant.

  Whoever she may be.

  The Hive is some distance away; a vast, underground facility located far below the nearest large town, Raccoon City. Almost an insectoid creation, in its design, it’s like a giant wasp nest in the ground but made of steel and plastic and fiberglass and watched over with security cameras. The monarch of this hive is the Red Queen: a computer with total control.

  A high-tech underground rail links the mansion to the Hive, and it’s on this train that Alice meets Spence. As dazed as she is, he’s at once familiar and unfamiliar to her.

  They reach the Hive, where an automatic laser defense system activates, operated by the Hive’s artificial intelligence, its central computer. Without warning it slices and dices most of the commandos— one of them ends up cubed. It occurs too quickly for them even to scream. Death, easy and instantaneous.

  Death is the new master of the Hive.

  It was the Red Queen who released the gas that suppressed Alice’s memories, to eliminate a potential threat without killing her. Never destroy a valuable asset—one that might be used again. But confined with a precious few survivors—Matt, Spence, and Rain—Alice slowly begins to know her past… her own part in bringing about the horror.

  Someone has deliberately released the Umbrella Corporation’s experimental T-virus into the air vents. The Red Queen sealed off the Hive, and used its control over the underground facility’s systems to kill those who would become infected. But it couldn’t stop the virus from spreading amongst the survivors…

  The T-virus kills—and then it resurrects. The dead have risen in the Hive; the dead walk again.

  Zombies? But old-school zombies are low-grade horrors compared to these Undead. These creatures are unspeakably vicious, at times capable of moving quickly, of forming deadly mandibles, of configuring into overgrown living-dead variants. The lab-developed T-virus has created the new Undead, hungry for human flesh—and capable of being genetically modified into something even worse.

  The Red Queen reveals this, and more.

  With her few surviving companions, Alice escapes and shuts down the Red Queen. In doing so, they unknowingly release the Undead into the Hive’s echoing corridors. A sickly young woman has become a rapacious monster, and one of the team, Rain, is bitten by her—and infected with the T-virus. Alice admired Rain for her courage, her individuality. But the virus eats its way into her brain, and all that’s left is for that brain to be destroyed.

  A bullet to the brain, a hatchet, a knife: destroy the brain, cut the brainstem, it’s the only way to stop the Undead. Shooting them in the heart doesn’t work. It’s not easy to kill what has already died.

  There is a cure for the virus, they learn, if it can be administered soon enough. Alice and Matt find it… And Spence, the man who’d once been Alice’s lover, steals the cure. It’s worth billions, and Spence was the one who released the virus in the Hive—to create panic, cover his tracks, and destroy those who would stop him.

  But there are other black experiments in the Hive, including a virus-borne variant—a crawling, p
owerful monster with swollen brain tissue where its eyes should be, and a tongue that is a weapon in itself. Released by the Red Queen to finish her dirty work, the Licker lurks, stalks, and strikes.

  And that’s what takes revenge on Spence. After he leaves the rest to die, the Licker corners him, “tears him a new one”… and then it comes after Alice and her friends.

  They escape, tricking the creature into destruction, only to run headlong into Umbrella operatives. Matt is taken away for something called the Nemesis Project. And Alice? Her they strap to a table, in another facility. For another experiment entirely.

  But there is still the Hive, swarming with the Undead. Another Umbrella biohazard is sent into these stumbling, ravenous creatures, only to be overwhelmed—trampled and ripped, recruited… to become more of the Undead. And the team left the door open.

  The Undead are released into Raccoon City, where with tooth and claw, they reproduce through an orgy of sheer violence.

  Somehow Alice wakes in the lab, emerging from her sedative-laden sleep. Someone has awakened her, given her a chance. She finds a way out of the locked laboratory, makes her way to the street…

  Where she finds a world ravaged by the apocalypse.

  2

  Raccoon City seems empty but for the Undead. Alice sees nothing but wreckage and fire everywhere. But she knows there must be other survivors out there.

  She finds a shotgun in a police car, loads it and strikes off, determined to locate them.

  Alice never once falters, for she knows what she is capable of doing. A lab experiment has given her incredible physical powers, agility, to enhance her already impressive skills.

  Yet she is captured by Umbrella, and faced with a monster called Nemesis, a hideous super soldier both repellent, and pitiful. To her horror she recognizes what was once her fellow survivor and closest companion. This monster is Matt. He lives just long enough to help her escape.

  Horror follows upon horror: cities disfigured, a demented world roamed by the ceaselessly hungry Undead; ruins where flocks of crows feed upon the carcasses and mutate into flying horrors, where only a few survivors huddle in endless terror, behind locked doors. All seems hopeless.

  Until one day, a radio transmission calls out to survivors, telling them that something called Arcadia is free from infection. Arcadia offers food and water. Make your way to Arcadia…

  Alice discovers some of these survivors, led by the heroic Claire Redfield, and tells them about Arcadia. But the Umbrella Corporation is watching, like a malignant sky god, from its own spy satellite. Umbrella’s researchers try to modify the Undead, to make them controllable slaves, and it tests them as controlled violence sent against Alice and her new friends.

  Only a handful survive—including the inspiring Claire, the woman who leads this small cadre of humans across the American Southwest, in search of a haven.

  But they’re running out of food, and supplies.

  Alice helps them steal an Umbrella chopper so they can fly to Alaska, and Arcadia. But she stays behind—to get at the full truth about the Umbrella Corporation.

  With the Earth in the throes of apocalypse, there is no cash except as trash—or as ammunition, since Alice uses coins instead of conventional shot in her shotgun shells. The Umbrella Corporation now deals in another kind of acquisition, the kind that Genghis Khan coveted: goods, property, and people. Umbrella’s troopers simply take whatever the corporate overlords need. It acquires goods, and instead of employees, it has mind-controlled slaves.

  Not so different from the old days of corporate culture, at that.

  Alice’s journey lays open more dark revelations— including an army of herself, for hundreds of adult-sized copies of Alice have been created. She liberates the clones and—with them—makes her way to Tokyo, where the worldwide plague has spiraled madly out of control. There Alice penetrates a huge Umbrella facility run by the man named Wesker. Scores of “Alices,” each of them fast, powerful, and heavily armed, slaughter Umbrella’s henchmen, showing no mercy.

  But Wesker himself is transformed into something more than human. He’s fast, too fast… and he injects her with a serum that suppresses her powers.

  Suddenly… she is just a human being again. And the facility is destroyed, along with the clones.

  3

  Alice finds Claire in Alaska, and then locates a few others, including Claire’s brother Chris, sequestered in a besieged Los Angeles prison. They fight their way to Arcadia—which turns out to be a ship.

  Arcadia is something else, as well—it’s a trap. The Umbrella Corporation needs healthy specimens for its experiments. So a friendly radio transmission lures them from around the world, to the gigantic cargo ship.

  ARCADIA…

  There, Alice and friends free the human cargo from suspended animation, take control of the ship, and manage to destroy Wesker. The world is still thronged with the living dead, but for the moment, the Arcadia is free.

  Until the black ops commandos of the Umbrella Corporation approach, flying in a flock of black choppers, descending like rapacious, unliving crows…

  MY NAME IS ALICE…

  I worked for the Umbrella Corporation, in a secret high-tech facility called the Hive. It was a laboratory, developing experimental viral weaponry. There was an incident, a virus escaped, and everybody died. Trouble was… they didn’t stay dead.

  This was the start of an apocalypse that would sweep the entire world.

  A last handful of survivors sought safety on a ship called Arcadia. We thought it was a safe haven.

  We thought it was free from infection. But we were wrong.

  Once again, the Umbrella Corporation had deceived us. And once again, my friends and I found ourselves fighting for our lives.

  My name is Alice. And this is my story…

  …the story of how I died.

  1

  It was a sunny, tranquil day at sea on the tanker Arcadia, off the coast of California. A lovely day, really. Occasionally a bit of fog caressed the white caps of the blue waves, and then drifted away. Could have been quite restful, a day like this, if the Arcadia were a yacht, in the days before the world started dying; before humanity started eating itself alive.

  Alice was standing near the aft on the steady metal deck of the Arcadia, reveling in the cool breeze. She watched as a group of figures—freed experimental subjects, all dressed in white—milled about on the deck of the enormous, retrofitted tanker ship, trying to reorient themselves to this new reality.

  She could imagine what they were thinking—all but hear their voices in her head.

  “I heard the radio transmission—that there was safety in Arcadia—no infection, no Undead to attack me—that there was food and shelter. Finally I found the ship.

  “The men in black commando togs grabbed me, slapped the mechanical scarab onto me, and then… nothing. Nothing else till I woke in the high-tech hold of the ship, in a tube… like an insect on display in a bottle.

  “The woman—Alice—led me out into the open air… But what now? The Undead are still out there.

  “What happens now?”

  What now, indeed.

  They had taken this ship—for the time being. She and Chris and Claire had killed Albert Wesker—and Wesker had been the most powerful individual in Umbrella, as far as she knew, now that Lord Spencer was gone. Maybe Wesker’s death would keep them safe for a while, throw the enemy into disarray.

  If Wesker is really dead…

  How could she doubt it? She’d riddled his body with bullet holes. She’d left his corpse limp, bleeding out on the deck of a hold, far below. No, he was dead.

  He had to be.

  The breeze sighed in the superstructure of the converted tanker. Test subjects murmured to one another, milling and talking, gazing at the horizon. The waves whispered against the hull of the big ship. In the distance, on the shore, she could make out some of the Los Angeles skyline—or what remained of it. Downtown Santa Monica was charred, smok
ing, many of the buildings just skeletons of girders. But it wasn’t deserted. There were still throngs of Undead plague victims, crowding the streets, savaging anything that moved—except, oddly, one another. They craved fresher meat than that.

  First thing to do, Alice figured, would be to get up to the Arcadia’s bridge and work out how to safely pilot the ship. Maybe it was so computerized it could almost pilot itself. If it was fueled up, it could take them anywhere in the world.

  Like—where?

  An island, she was thinking. Catalina, maybe, an island twenty-two miles off the coast of Los Angeles. Catalina itself was less than twenty-three miles long, eight wide. There would be Undead there, sure, but not that many. She could take a team out, methodically sweep the Undead from the island. Exterminate them… like they were insects.

  Except that the Undead used to be people. Men, women, grandmothers and grandfathers, children— even children were Undead. Alice often wondered, could there be a spark of humanity left in the Undead who roamed the streets, moaning and growling, dripping bloody saliva?

  She’d never seen the slightest hint of it. The Undead seemed more mindless than rabid wolves. Probably all vestiges of human feeling—perhaps even the soul— departed the victim’s body when they died. And once reanimated, they were soulless things, caricatures of human beings.

  Still, that spark had glimmered in what was left of Matt, though he’d been transformed into a different kind of monster. Turned into a hideous super soldier by Umbrella researchers using a variant of the T-virus.

  If there was anything human left in the Undead, it was helpless, she supposed. That tiny speck of inward humanity had been hijacked by the virus; at best, it was forever along for the ride. And it must suffer terribly in there, trapped inside a monster.

  So if she exterminated them, she was doing them a favor.

  Keep telling yourself that, Alice.