They moved out into the night, leaving the house dark behind them, as lonely and silent as a tomb.
Two
OcfoBER.3, 1998
TWILIGHT HAD SETTLED ACROSS THE MOUNtains, painting the jagged horizon in shades of purple dusk. The winding blacktop snaked through the gath-ering darkness, surrounded by shadowed hills that towered into the cloudless sky, stretching toward the first faint glimmerings of starlight.
Leon might have appreciated the majestic view a bit more if he wasn’t so goddamn late. He’d make it to his shift on time, sure, but he’d been hoping to get settled into the new apartment first, take a shower, get something to eat; as it was, he might have time to hit a drive-through on his way to the station. Changing into his uniform back at the last rest stop had saved him a couple of minutes, but basically he was screwed. Way to go, Officer Kennedy. First day on the job and you’ll be picking cheeseburger out of your teeth during roll call. Very professional.
His shift started at nine and it was already just after eight; Leon let his boot ride a little heavier on the gas, even as his Jeep whipped past a sign that told him he was half an hour away from Raccoon City. At least the road was clear; except for a couple of semis, he hadn’t seen anyone for what felt like hours. A nice change, considering the traffic tie-up just outside of New York that had cost him most of the afternoon. He’d actu-ally tried to call the night before to leave a message with the desk sergeant that he
might be late, but there’d been something wrong with the connection. Nothing but a busy signal.
What little furniture he had was already moved into a studio apartment in the working-class but basically decent Trask district of Raccoon City, there was a nice park not two blocks away, and it was only a five-minute drive to the station. No more gridlock, no more overcrowded slums or random acts of brutality. Assuming he could survive the embarrassment of showing up to his first shift as a full-blown officer of the law without having unpacked his bags, he was looking forward to living in the peaceful community. Raccoon is about as far removed from the Big Apple as you can get, thank you very much—well, except for the last few months. Those murders . . .
In spite of himself, he felt a tiny thrill at the thought. What had happened in Raccoon was horri-ble, of course, sickening—but the perps had never been caught and the investigation was really just getting started. And if Irons liked him, liked him as much as the heads of the academy had liked him, maybe Leon would get a chance to work on the case. Word had it that Chief Irons was kind of a prick, but Leon knew his training had been top-notch—even a prick would have to be a little impressed. He’d graduated in the top tenth, after all. And it wasn’t like he was a stranger to Raccoon City, since he’d spent most of his summers there as a kid, when his grand-parents were still alive. Back then, the RPD building had been a library and Umbrella was still several years away from turning the town into an actual city, but in most ways it was still the same quiet place he remembered from his childhood. Once the cannibal killers were finally put away, Raccoon would be ideal again—beautiful, clean, a white-collar community nestled in the mountains like a secret paradise. So I get settled in and a week or two passes, and Irons notices how well written my reports are, or sees how good I am on the target range. He asks me to take a look at the case files, just to familiarize myself with the details so I can do some footwork—and I see something that no one else has seen. A pattern, maybe, or a motive on more than one of the victims ... maybe I run across a witness report that reads wrong. No one else has caught it because they’ve lived with it for too long, and this rookie cop just comes along and cracks the case, not a month out of the academy and I—
Something ran in front of the Jeep.
“Jesus!”
Leon hit the brake and swerved, shocked out of his daydream as he struggled for control of the vehicle. The brakes locked and there was a screech of rubber that sounded like a scream. The Jeep half-turned to face the darkening trees that lined the road—and came to a stop on the shoulder, dying after a final lurching jolt.
Heart pounding and stomach in knots, Leon opened the window and craned his neck, scanning the shadows for the animal that had darted across the highway. He hadn’t hit it, but it had been close. Some kind of a dog, he didn’t get a clear look—a big one, anyway, a shepherd or maybe an oversized Dober-man, but it had looked wrong somehow. He’d only seen it for a split-second, a flash of glowing red eyes and lean, wolfish body. And there was something else, it had seemed kind of...
... slimy? No, trick of the light, or you were just so shit-scared that you saw it wrong. You’re okay and you didn’t hit it, that’s the important thing. “Jesus,” he said again, softer this time, feeling both relieved and suddenly quite angry as the adrenaline leaked out of his system. People who let their dogs run loose were idiots—claiming they wanted their pets to be free and then acting surprised when Fido got squashed by a car.
The Jeep had come to a stop just a few feet away from a road sign that read RACCOON CITY 10; he could just make out the lettering in the growing shadows. Leon glanced at his watch; he still had almost
half an hour to get to the station, plenty of time—but for some reason, he simply sat for a moment, closing his eyes and breathing deeply. Cool pine-scented air breezed across his face; the deserted stretch of road seeming almost unnaturally quiet—as if the landscape was holding its breath, waiting. Now that his heart had resumed a more normal pace, he was surprised to find that he still felt unsettled, even anxious.
The murders in Raccoon. Weren’t a few of those people killed by animal attack? Wild dogs, or some-thing? Maybe that wasn’t someone’s pet dog at all. A disturbing thought—and even more disturbing was the sudden feeling he had that the dog was still close by, maybe watching him from the darkness in the trees.
Welcome to Raccoon City, Officer Kennedy. Watch out for things that may be watching you. . . .
“Don’t be an asshole,” Leon mumbled to himself, and felt a little better at the sound of his no-nonsense adult tone of voice. He often wondered if he would ever outgrow his imagination.
Daydreaming like a kid about catching bad guys, then inventing killer dog-monsters lurking in the woods—let’s try to act our age, eh, Leon? You’re a cop, for God’s sake, a grownup....
He started the engine and backed onto the road, ignoring the strange sense of unease that had some-how managed to take hold of him in spite of his mind’s chiding voice. He had a new job and a nice apartment in a nice little up-and-coming city; he was competent, bright, and decent-looking; as long as he kept his creativity glands in check, everything would be fine.
“And I’m on my way,” he said to himself, forcing a grin that felt out of place but suddenly necessary to his peace of mind. He was on his way to Raccoon City, to a promising new life—there was nothing to be uneasy about, nothing at all.. ..
Claire was exhausted, both physically and emotion-ally, and the fact that her butt had been aching for the last couple of hours wasn’t helping matters much. The thrum of the Harley’s engine seemed to have settled deep into her bones, a physical counterpoint to the butterflies in her stomach—and of course, the worst of it seemed to emanate from her extremely sore and overheated ass. Plus, it was getting dark and like an idiot she wasn’t wearing her leathers; Chris would be totally pissed.
He’s going to yell his head off, and I won’t even care. God, Chris, please be there to scream at me for being such an idiot. . . .
The Harley buzzed along the dark road, the sound of the engine echoing back at her from the sloping hills and shadow-laden trees. She took the corners carefully, very aware of how deserted the winding highway was; if she took a spill, it could be a long time before anyone happened by.
Like it would matter. Take a spill without your gear on, they’ll be scraping pieces of you off the asphalt with a squeegee.
It was stupid, she knew it was stupid to have left in such a godawful hurry that she couldn’t be bothered to suit up—but something had happened to Chris. Hell, something may have happened to the entire city. Over the past couple of weeks, the growing suspicion that her brother was in trouble had become a cer-tainty—and the calls she’d made that morning had cinched it for her.
Nobody home. Nobody home anywhere. Like Rac-coon moved and forgot to leave a forwarding address. It was definitely creepy, although she could give a shit about Raccoon. What mattered was that Chris was there, and if something bad had happened to him—
She couldn’t, wouldn’t think that way. Chris was all she had left. Their father had been killed on his construction job when they were both still kids, and when their mother had died in a car crash three years ago, Chris had done his best to take on a parental role. Even though he was only a few years older, he’d helped her pick a college, find a decent therapist—he even sent her a little money each month beyond what the insurance policies paid out, what he called “walk-ing around cash.” And on top of all that, he called her every couple of weeks like clockwork.
Except he hadn’t called at all in the last month and a half, and hadn’t returned any of her calls. She’d tried to convince herself that she was silly to worry—maybe he’d finally met a girl, or something had turned up on the S.T.A.R. S. suspension thing, whatever that was all about. But after three unanswered letters and days of waiting for the phone to ring, she’d finally put in a call to the RPD that very afternoon, hoping against hope that someone there might know what was going on. She’d gotten a busy signal. Sitting in her dorm room, listening to that soulless mechanical bleat, she’d started to worry for real. Even a small city like Raccoon had a voice-mail answering system set up to field calls. The rational part of her mind told her not to panic, that a downed line was nothing to get freaky about—but already, her emo-tional self was screaming foul. She’d gone through her address book with trembling hands, dialing the few numbers she had for friends of his, people or places he’d told her to call if there was ever an emergency and he wasn’t at home—Barry Burton, Emmy’s Din-er, some cop she’d never met named David Ford. She even tried Billy Rabbitson’s number, although Chris had told her that he’d disappeared a few months earlier. And with the exception of an overloaded answering machine at David Ford’s house, she’d gotten nothing but busy signals.
By the time she’d hung up, the worry had trans-formed into something close to panic. The trip to Raccoon City was only about six-and-a-half hours from the university. Claire’s roommate had borrowed her riding gear to go out with her new biker boyfriend, but Claire had an extra helmet—and with that feeling that was not quite panic spinning through her fright-ened thoughts, she had simply grabbed the helmet and gone.
Stupid, maybe. Impulsive, definitely. And if Chris is okay, we can laugh about how ridiculously paranoid I am ‘til the cows come home. But until I find out what’s going on, I won’t know a moment’s peace.
The last of the day’s light was draining from the strip of cloudless sky above, although a waxing, nearly full moon and the Softail’s headlight gave her enough light to see by—more than enough to see the small sign ahead on her left: RACCOON CITY 10.
Telling herself that Chris was fine, that if anything weird had happened in Raccoon, somebody would have checked it out by now, Claire forced her concen-tration back to handling the heavy bike. It would be full dark soon, but she’d be in Raccoon before it was too dark to ride safely.
Whether or not Raccoon City would be safe, she’d find out soon enough.
THREE
LEON REACHED THE OUTSKIRTS OF TOWN with twenty minutes to spare, but decided that a hot dinner was going to have to wait. From his previous visits to the station, he knew that there were a couple of vending machines he could hit up for something to tide him over. The thought of stale candy and peanuts didn’t sit well on his growling stomach, but it was his own damned fault for not taking New York traffic into account.
The drive into the city proper did a lot to soothe his still rattled nerves; he passed the few small farms
that lay east of town, the fairgrounds and storage sheds, and finally the truck stop that marked the separation of rural Raccoon from urban. Something about know-ing that he was going to be patrolling those back roads before long, keeping them safe, gave him a surprising sense of well-being and not a little pride. The early autumn air from the open window was pleasantly brisk, and the rising moon bathed everything he saw in a silvery glow. He wasn’t going to be late after all; within the hour, he’d officially become one of Rac-coon’s finest.
As Leon turned the Jeep down Bybee, heading for one of the main north-south streets that would take him to the RPD building, he got his first hint that something was very wrong. In the first few blocks, he was mildly surprised; by the fifth, he found himself slipping toward a state of shock. It wasn’t just strange, it was ... well, it was impossible.
Bybee was the first real city street, coming from the east, where buildings outnumbered empty lots.
There were several espresso bars and cheap diners, as well as a bargain movie theater that never seemed to run anything but horror movies and sexy comedies—and was therefore the most popular hangout for the youth of Raccoon. There were even a few genetically hip taverns that served microbrew and hot rum drinks for the winter college-student ski crowd. At quarter to nine on a Saturday night, Bybee should have been teeming with life.
But of the mostly single or two-story brick shops and restaurants that lined the street, Leon saw that almost all were dark—and in the few that still boasted some light, it didn’t look like there was anyone inside. There were plenty of cars parked along the narrow street, and yet not one person that he could see; Bybee, the hangout for cruising teens and college students, was totally deserted.
Where the hell is everybody?
His mind grasped for answers as he crept down the silent street, searching desperately for a reason—and for some way to alleviate the sweaty anxiety that had once again settled over him. Maybe there was some kind of an event going on, a church function, like a spaghetti feed. Or perhaps Raccoon had decided to take up Oktoberfest and tonight was the big kickoff. Yeah, but everybody at the same time? It’d have to be one hell of a party.
It was then that Leon realized he also hadn’t seen a single car on the road since he’d had the scare with the dog ten miles out of town. Not one. And with that thoroughly unsettling realization came the next—less dramatic, but distinctly more immediate.
Something smelled bad. In fact, something smelled like shit.
Jeez, dead skunk. And apparently it threw up on itself before dying.
He’d already slowed the Jeep to a crawl and had planned to take a left on Powell, just a block ahead—but that horrible smell and the total absence of life were giving him a serious case of the creeps. Maybe he should stop and check things out, look around for some sign of—