September 29 — Early Morning
The road into Raccoon City was empty.
Not late-night empty — the kind of empty that didn't have an explanation. Leon had been driving for three hours and he'd passed maybe four other vehicles, all of them on the shoulder, all of them dark. No drivers visible. No hazard lights. Just cars that had stopped and stayed stopped, positioned wrong in the way that said whatever had made them stop hadn't been planned.
He told himself it was nothing. Road construction, maybe. An incident that had closed the route and he'd missed the detour signs. There were explanations.
He didn't fully believe any of them but he held onto them anyway because his head hurt and he was already three hours late for his first day and the last thing he needed on top of all of that was something he didn't have a category for.
The city appeared through the windshield as a glow first — orange, low on the horizon, spread too wide to be normal lighting. He'd told himself that was nothing too, for about forty minutes, before it became impossible to tell himself that anymore.
Something was burning.
A lot of something.
He drove toward it anyway because there was nowhere else to go and because that was where he was supposed to be.
The gas station appeared on the right side of the road about two miles from the city limits — a BP, fluorescent lights still running, the kind of place that never actually closed. He needed gas. He needed water and something that wasn't the inside of his own car and two minutes where he wasn't moving toward something that looked increasingly wrong.
He pulled in.
The forecourt was empty. One pump had its nozzle hanging out, the hose stretched toward a car that was still sitting at the adjacent pump with the driver's door open. The engine was off. Nobody in it.
Leon sat in his car for a moment and looked at it.
Then he got out.
The night air smelled wrong. Not just exhaust and asphalt — something underneath that, something he couldn't identify and didn't want to think about too hard. He started the pump on his tank and looked at the open car while it ran. Keys still in the ignition. A coffee cup in the cupholder, still upright. Phone face-down on the passenger seat.
Not a crash. Not an emergency stop.
Just stopped.
He topped off his tank and went inside.
The interior of the station was lit but wrong — one of the overhead panels flickering at the far end of the store, the rest casting a flat white light over the shelves that hadn't been restocked in a while and the counter where the register was open and the cash drawer was sitting out and there was a soft drink on the edge of the counter that had tipped over at some point and soaked into the mat below it and dried there.
Nobody behind the counter.
Leon stood in the doorway for a moment.
"Hello?"
His voice came out less professional than he'd intended. He cleared his throat.
"RPD. Is anyone—"
A sound from the back of the store. Behind the door marked STAFF ONLY that was slightly ajar, a dim light coming through the gap.
He put his hand on the weapon at his hip — not drawing it, just touching it, the way they'd trained him — and moved toward the counter.
The headache wasn't helping. He'd had two glasses of water in the last three hours and his mouth tasted like last night and his eyes felt like they'd been installed slightly too tight in his skull and none of that was relevant right now but it was present, running underneath everything, making the edges of things slightly less sharp than he needed them to be.
He pushed the staff door open with his foot.
The stockroom was small and badly lit — a single bulb, no shade, the kind of light that made everything look slightly more wrong than it was. Metal shelving along the walls, boxes stacked unevenly, a desk in the corner with paperwork on it that had been there long enough to curl at the edges.
The man was on the floor near the desk.
On his side, facing away from Leon, one arm stretched out. He was wearing the station uniform — the green polo, the name tag — and he wasn't moving but his back was rising and falling, slowly, unevenly, so he was breathing.
"Sir." Leon crossed to him and crouched. "Sir, I'm with the RPD. Are you—"
He put a hand on the man's shoulder.
The man moved.
Not the way a person waking up moves — the way something reorienting toward a sound moves, the head coming around first and the body following with a delay that was wrong, deeply wrong, the eyes finding him and the eyes being nothing he had a reference for.
Leon stood up and took a step back and his hand was on his weapon and he hadn't made the decision to put it there.
"Sir — stay down, I need you to—"
The man got up. Not struggling to his feet the way someone injured gets up — just rising, the movement economical and wrong, and turned toward him with a fixed attention that had nothing in it Leon recognized as human awareness.
"RPD, stay where—"
It moved at him faster than he'd expected something moving like that to move, and Leon's gun came out and he fired and the shot hit the shelving unit two feet to the left of where he'd been aiming and then the thing was on him and they went into the shelving and boxes came down around them and Leon got his forearm up between the snapping teeth and his face and pushed and couldn't get purchase and pushed again.
He got his gun against its chest and fired twice.
It went down.
Leon stood in the wreckage of the shelving unit with his gun up and his heart doing something he could feel in his throat and looked at what was on the floor.
He'd seen training footage. He'd read reports. He'd been briefed on escalating use of force and threat assessment and a dozen other things that had absolutely nothing to do with what had just happened.
He lowered the gun slightly.
"What the—"
"Behind you!"
He spun.
The second one came out of the bathroom doorway — he hadn't even seen the bathroom, hadn't checked, hadn't cleared the room like he'd been trained to because he'd been thinking about the first one — and it was already close, too close, and he fired twice more, one of them going wide into the wall and one of them hitting center mass and not stopping it and then it was on him too.
Something hit it from the side.
Hard. A metal shelving bar, swung with both hands, and the thing went sideways and hit the floor and Leon fired again, properly this time, and it stayed down.
He stood there breathing.
A girl was standing in the stockroom doorway with the shelving bar still in her hands, looking at him with an expression that was equal parts adrenaline and assessment.
She lowered the bar.
"You okay?"
"Yeah." He wasn't entirely sure that was true. "Yeah."
__________________________________________________________
They stood outside the gas station in the forecourt and Leon tried to put the last four minutes into some kind of order that made sense and couldn't.
More of them were coming out of the station now — through the door, around the side of the building, moving toward the light the way they all seemed to move toward things. Not fast. But there were four of them now and the forecourt wasn't that big.
"Car," he said.
They went.
He got the door open and got in and the keys were already in his hand this time, which was something, and the engine turned over on the first try, which was more than something. The girl was in the passenger seat before he'd fully registered it, and then he was reversing and the rear bumper caught something — the concrete pump island — and the impact rattled through the car and one of them put a hand flat on the hood as he went forward and then the forecourt was behind them and the road opened up.
He drove.
Neither of them spoke for a moment.
Leon looked in the rearview mirror at the station getting smaller — the lights still running, the figures still moving in the forecourt, everything completely ordinary looking from a distance except for the figures.
She broke the silence first.
"What the hell were those things?". Not a question. More like something she needed to say out loud. "Those people. What was wrong with them?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know?" She looked at him.
"You said RPD back there. And you don't know anything?"
"First day."
She stared at him. "Seriously."
"Yeah." A breath. "Not exactly how I pictured it." A beat. "They definitely skipped this part in training."
Something moved in her expression — not quite a laugh, but close enough to matter.
She turned back to the windshield. He could see her working through it — jaw tight, hands in her lap, the adrenaline looking for somewhere to go.
"I drove in two hours ago," she said. "It wasn't like this two hours ago. It was wrong but it wasn't — there weren't—" She stopped. Started again. "There were people on the street. Moving like that. I thought they were drunk or sick or—" She stopped again.
"Leon Kennedy. RPD." He kept his eyes on the road. "That's all I've got."
A beat.
"Claire Redfield." She said it like she was reminding herself. "I'm looking for my brother. Chris. Chris Redfield — do you know him? He was posted here, RPD, STARS unit—"
"I know of STARS."
"Is he — do you know if he's—"
"I don't know him personally." He glanced at her. "I just started."
She exhaled. Looked at the city ahead — the fires burning low on the horizon, already hours old.
"He stopped answering," she said. "Weeks ago. So I drove out." She said it like she was explaining it to herself as much as him. "I thought maybe—"
She didn't finish it.
He didn't push it.
"RPD," he said. "That's where I'm going. If there's anyone coordinating a response, that's where they'll be. If your brother made it anywhere he could reach—"
"Okay." She said it fast. Like she needed to stop thinking about the alternative.
"I mean it. It's the RPD, they'll have—"
"Okay, Leon." Not sharp. Just done. "I said okay."
He looked at the road ahead.
She went quiet. Just watched the city coming closer through the passenger window, and neither of them said anything else for a while.