September 29th. Mizoil Gas Station & Bar, outskirts of Raccoon City. 2:00 am
The ice in the whiskey glass had melted completely, diluting the cheap liquor into a watery, lukewarm, and sad mixture that perfectly matched Leon S. Kennedy's mood. The glass was fogged up from the humidity of the stuffy room, and Leon stared at it as if the swirling liquid could suck him out of his own reality.
The roadside bar, a creaking wooden structure with flickering neons called Mizoil, was almost empty at that hour of the morning. The only noise was the squeak of a ceiling fan spinning lazily, the rhythmic snoring of a trucker asleep at the bar, and the dry echo of billiard balls clacking in the back, where a couple of locals tried to ignore that the outside world existed under a cloud of stale tobacco smoke that refused to dissipate. The neon light of a "Pilsner" beer sign dyed the place a sickly blue hue, giving everything a ghostly and artificial look.
Leon twirled the glass between his fingers, feeling the remaining cold of the glass against his palms. His thoughts were a spiral of regrets. He had spent the last few years preparing to be the best, to make a difference, but along the way, he had forgotten how to keep his own life together.
"Another round, officer," he muttered, his voice hoarse from disuse. Although he wasn't wearing a uniform, something in his posture—back too straight, shoulders tense—screamed his profession. He wore his favorite brown leather jacket and worn jeans, but the shiny R.P.D. badge rested on the passenger seat of his Jeep Wrangler, parked in the light rain that was starting to fall outside.
The bartender, a man with a weathered face and more tattoos on his arms than teeth in his mouth, served him without asking, sliding the bottle of bourbon over with professional familiarity.
"Long night, huh, kid? You look like someone who just lost their dog, their wallet, or the girl. And by the look in your eyes, I bet it's the latter."
Leon took a long drink, feeling the burn of the alcohol going down his throat like a necessary balm.
"The girl," Leon corrected, setting the glass down with a sharp thud. "And technically, I didn't lose her. She left me with a note on the kitchen table. Said my sense of duty was 'suffocating,' that I was always thinking about the academy or work. Can you believe it? I try to be someone people can rely on, and she calls it a flaw."
"Women..." snorted the trucker, lifting his head from his arms just long enough to spit out the words. "They never understand that some men are built to carry the weight of the world. Hey, change the channel, Jerry. Stop playing that depressing jukebox music. Put on the city news."
The bartender grumbled something about difficult clientele but reached for the remote and changed the channel on the small tube TV hanging in the upper corner of the bar. The screen immediately showed a breaking news report, with the red "URGENT" ticker flashing with annoying insistence.
"...federal authorities have expanded the search perimeter for the highly dangerous fugitive known as John Wick, the alleged mastermind behind what they have termed the massacre at Raccoon City Elementary School a little over forty-eight hours ago. Although initial reports from local police are confused and contradictory, unofficial sources and amateur recordings suggest a massive shootout of unprecedented magnitude involving military-grade weapons and professional assault tactics..."
Leon looked up, his protective instinct cutting through the fog of alcohol like a ray of light. He forgot his whiskey for a moment.
"John Wick..." he muttered to himself. "That name has been on every radio broadcast since I left the state."
"They say he's a monster from the old days, a guy who feels no pain," commented one of the pool players, Jimmy, leaning on his cue with a look of genuine horror. "I heard on the Arklay radio station that he walked into that school and just started shooting everything that moved. They even said he killed kids. What kind of sick psychopath does something like that?"
"Don't believe everything the TV spits out, Jimmy," replied his playing partner, an older man in a baseball cap. "My cousin lives near the financial district in Raccoon. He says the city is under siege. That there are private corporate military everywhere, roadblocks on every bridge... and that guy Wick didn't kill any kids. He says he took out an entire unit of armed guys who were trying to kidnap someone. They say it was a high-level settling of scores, like those gang wars in Chicago."
"Gangs or not, if that maniac turned a school into a battlefield, I hope they fry him in the electric chair before Monday," Jimmy declared, hitting the cue ball with excessive force, making it jump off the table.
Leon frowned, analyzing the information with the methodology that had been instilled in him. During his intense months of training at the police academy, his instructors always reminded him that "the first casualty of any crisis is the truth." He had learned to read between the lines in practice reports, and he knew that when official information was that inconsistent—shifting from terrorist to lone madman and then to gang hitman—it usually indicated one of two things: either law enforcement was losing absolute control of the situation, or corporate interests were sweeping something much darker under the rug. But the simple idea of civilians caught in the middle, of children in danger... that was something that turned his stomach. It was the reason he had graduated with honors: to stop guys like that.
"I hope they catch that bastard soon," Leon muttered, feeling a pang of rage and a renewed sense of duty. "Raccoon City is going to need officers with cool heads if they have subjects of that caliber loose on the streets. It's chaos waiting to explode."
"What that city needs is a miracle or a thirty-foot wall, kid," joked the bartender, though his laughter didn't reach his eyes. "You should go get some rest already. You've got the face of someone who's going to have an unforgettable first day of work, and not in a good way."
Leon sighed and checked his wristwatch, a sturdy steel piece. The fluorescent hands glowed with cruel clarity in the gloom of the bar.
2:10 A.M.
"Shit..." Leon whispered, running a hand through his brown hair in a gesture of pure frustration. "I'm supposed to be at the front entrance of the Raccoon City police station at 10:00 A.M. It's my official introduction, my first day with the badge."
"Well, you've got plenty of time if you don't keep staring at the bottom of the glass," the trucker laughed, scratching his graying beard. "Raccoon is a little over an hour from here if you don't get distracted by the deer on the road. If you leave now, you'll get there before they put the coffee on at the office."
Leon pulled a couple of crumpled bills from his pocket and left them on the bar, along with a generous tip. He knew he wasn't in any condition to drive for an hour and then face his new boss, Chief Irons, about whom he hadn't heard great things.
"You're right, but I can't show up looking like this or with this breath. I need to sleep off this hangover or they'll take my badge before giving me the keys to the patrol car."
He got up from the stool, feeling a slight sway in his balance which he corrected immediately with the discipline typical of his training. He adjusted his jacket, feeling the comforting weight of his wallet and keys.
"Do you have any rooms free at the motel next door?" he asked the bartender, pointing toward the adjacent structure visible through the window.
"There's always room for an officer, rookie, even if it is one who still smells like the academy and bourbon," the man replied, reaching under the bar and tossing him a heavy key with a worn red plastic keychain. "Room 12. It's right behind the gas pumps. Try not to oversleep past noon; the maid has a bad temper with those who stay past checkout."
"Thanks for the drink. And for the heads-up about the city," said Leon, nodding politely.
He stepped out into the cold, damp air of the early morning. The Jeep waited for him under the moonlight, silver and silent. Leon opened the back door only to grab his duffel bag and then walked toward the row of peeling doors of the Mizoil motel. The place had an air of abandonment that at any other time would have made him suspicious, but right now he just wanted a flat surface where he could close his eyes.
He entered Room 12. It smelled of a stale mix of pine disinfectant and years of tobacco smoke impregnated in the curtains. It was small, with an old TV and a bed whose mattress sagged in the middle, but to Leon, it was a palace. He collapsed onto the rough bedspread without even taking off his hiking boots, staring at the moisture-stained ceiling while listening to the rain beat rhythmically against the windowpane.
Before exhaustion and alcohol overcame him completely, Leon reached out to the nightstand, grabbed his phone, and set a series of alarms with almost obsessive precision. He knew his career depended on these next few hours.
7:00 AM. 7:15 AM. 7:30 AM.
"Can't be late... first day... new city..." he repeated in a whisper that trailed off as his eyelids grew heavier. "Tomorrow everything will be different. A new life."
He closed his eyes, falling into a deep, heavy sleep, completely oblivious to the distant sirens that began to wail in the direction of the city. He had no way of knowing that while he sought brief refuge in that roadside motel, the world he knew was being devoured by flames and cannibalism. He didn't know that the barricades the bartender mentioned would be deserted by the time he woke up, and that the supposed "chemical spills" would have taken the form of a biological nightmare that no police academy could have taught him to fight.
Leon S. Kennedy slept, gaining the strength he would need for the longest and most terrifying night of his existence. A night where paths would cross with urban legends like John Wick and where he would discover that, sometimes, setting five alarms is the only difference between surviving to see the sunrise or becoming a forgotten statistic in the fall of Raccoon City.
September 29th. 7:04 P.M.
A sepulchral silence filled Room 12, interrupted only by the electric buzz of a fly rhythmically hitting the ceiling lamp that flickered with a yellowish light. Suddenly, one last ray of twilight orange light, dying and heavy, managed to filter through a slit in the frayed curtains, hitting Leon's eyelids directly with the precision of a laser.
He opened his eyes with a groan. There was no heroic action movie awakening, nor a smooth transition into consciousness. There was a thick, painful confusion, the metallic taste of copper in his mouth—typical of a night of excess—and a stabbing pressure in his temples that felt like an elephant was trying to balance on his head. His tongue felt like a piece of old sandpaper stuck to the roof of his mouth.
"What...?" he stammered with a broken voice, stretching his arm with agonizing slowness toward the laminated wood nightstand.
He grabbed the phone, expecting to see an avalanche of notifications or, at least, the time. The screen remained black, cold, and lifeless. Dead. In his alcoholic stupor of the early morning, he had completely forgotten to plug in the charger, and the five alarms set with such "police precision" had drained the battery in a silent, futile, and desperate battle against his stone-heavy sleep. Leon blinked several times, trying to focus his eyes on his wristwatch.
The fluorescent hands, impassive and cruel, did not lie.
"Seven... seven..." Leon sat up with a start, feeling the entire room do a somersault. Bile rose in his throat and he had to swallow hard not to throw up Jerry's bourbon on the bedspread. "Seven in the evening?! No, no, no, no! Damn my luck!"
He threw himself out of bed with the grace of a newborn deer, tripping over his own hiking boots that he was still wearing and that felt like blocks of lead. Panic turned out to be an excellent substitute for coffee, shooting his adrenaline to stratospheric levels. His first official day of work at the Raccoon Police Department had started more than nine hours ago. In his mind, he could already visualize with terrifying clarity the face of Chief Irons, that man everyone spoke of with respect and fear, breaking his newly issued badge in front of his nose and throwing it into a paper shredder while laughing at his absolute incompetence.
"Great, Leon. A standing ovation. The first officer in the history of the R.P.D. to be fired for no-show before having learned where the coffee maker is," he muttered to himself, stumbling toward the bathroom while banging his shoulder on the doorframe.
He stripped off his clothes with frantic, almost violent speed. He was soaked in a cold, sticky sweat with a slight aroma of distilled alcohol, a product of the hangover and the stale heat enclosed in that unventilated room. He turned the shower on full blast and got under the stream without waiting for it to warm up. The freezing water hit his skin like a thousand glass needles. The thermal shock tore a gasp from him and cut off his breath, but it served its purpose: to clear the dense fog from his brain.
"'Trust me, Leon, it'll be a great opportunity for a kid with your talent,' the recruiter told me with that used car salesman smile," he engaged in sarcasm through clenched teeth as he soaped up in a hurry, almost scrubbing his skin off. "'Raccoon City is a quiet town, ideal for building character,' they said. What they didn't mention in the brochure is that I was going to be the world-class idiot who oversleeps through the entire apocalypse of his own professional career. I can imagine the welcome speech: 'Welcome, Officer Kennedy, here is your toy badge and your immediate termination letter for being a total dormouse.'"
He got out of the shower in record time, drying himself halfway with a towel that scratched like esparto grass. He put on his clean blue shirt, adjusted his jeans, and threw the brown leather jacket over his shoulders with a desperate movement. He gathered his duffel bag, his useless phone, and the motel key. He didn't bother to comb his hair; the "disheveled by absolute panic style" would have to serve as his new brand image.
Upon leaving the room, he ran toward the bar intending to return the key and maybe order a strong coffee for the road, but he stopped dead in his tracks as he stepped onto the porch. The Mizoil bar was plunged into total darkness. The glass door, which had previously gleamed under the neons, was now ajar, with a crack crossing the glass from top to bottom, and there was no trace of Jerry, the trucker, or the light from the television.
"Jerry? Hello?" Leon called, but only got the whistling of the wind between the gas pumps as an answer, a sound that seemed like a wail. An old newspaper blew across the parking lot, brushing against his boots. "Great, even the bartender gave up on me and went home on vacation. I just hope he's not the one giving me the ticket for illegal parking."
He looked around with a growing unease he tried to ignore. The parking lot was strangely empty of life, but not of debris. A dense, almost solid silence surrounded everything, as if the world had decided to hold its breath. Leon frowned, feeling a chill run down his spine that had nothing to do with the cold shower water.
"They must have closed early," he reasoned to himself, trying to convince himself that everything had a logical explanation as he threw the key onto the reception counter, which was strangely sticky, and ran toward his Jeep Wrangler.
He got into the vehicle, turned the key, and the engine roared with a vitality he envied. The roar of the engine was the only comforting sound for miles.
"Okay, Leon, focus. If you floor it and the engine doesn't explode, maybe you'll get there before the night shift change. You have to invent something convincing. Say you were stopped by a military security roadblock, or that... or that you stopped to help in a massive accident. Yes, that sounds very heroic and altruistic. 'I'm late because I was saving lives, Chief.' God, that sounds pathetic even in my head."
He accelerated aggressively, peeling out of the motel with a screech of tires that left a trail of white smoke. His mind was a hive of rehearsed excuses, humiliating apologies, and curses directed at the bourbon from the night before. He was so focused on his own disaster that he barely noticed the dark, thick stains on the asphalt near the entrance, nor the disturbing fact that there wasn't a single pair of headlights driving in the opposite direction on the interstate. In his head, only the tick-tock of an imaginary stopwatch existed, marking the end of his future.
However, fate, that entity with a twisted sense of humor, had one last joke prepared. He had barely covered about ten kilometers when the Jeep's fuel indicator began to flash with an orange, rhythmic, and mocking light.
"No! Not now, damn it!" he yelled, hitting the steering wheel with the palm of his hand. "Does this junk drink more than I do on my worst nights?! I could swear I filled the tank yesterday... or maybe that was another one of my alcoholic delusions."
He looked at the needle with desperation; it was dangerously close to the red "Empty" line. Leon let out a bitter laugh, a mixture of hysteria and resignation.
"Of course. It's the perfect ending. All that's missing is for a meteorite to fall on the hood or for a dinosaur to ask me for the time. It's the rookie of the year premium pack. 'Officer Kennedy, arrives nine hours late and gets stranded without gas in the middle of nowhere.' Tomorrow my name will be on the bulletin board... under the title 'What not to do with your life'."
In the distance, like a beacon of hope in a sea of shadows, he spotted the neon lights of another gas station, located right on the hazy limits of Raccoon City. It was a small, lonely gas station bathed in an unsettling gloom under the starless sky.
"Okay, mandatory pit stop," he told himself, turning the wheel with a suddenness that made the back of the Jeep skid slightly. "Quick gas, some junk food so my stomach stops protesting, and then... straight to the station. Straight to the slaughterhouse."
He parked in front of the pumps carelessly. The place seemed deserted of people, but the lights inside the store were on, casting long shadows on the pavement. Leon got out of the Jeep, feeling again that strange heaviness in the air, as if the oxygen were denser than normal. There were no crickets singing, no sound of distant city traffic. Only the rhythmic, metallic sound of an advertising sign banging against a light pole, a clack-clack-clack that made his hair stand on end.
He inserted the nozzle into the tank and locked the trigger so it would fill on its own.
"I need sugar. Lots of sugar and caffeine if I want to survive the sergeant's shouting without fainting," he muttered to himself, adjusting his leather jacket as he walked toward the glass door of the store.
He entered the establishment and the bell above the door rang with an echo that seemed too vibrant and prolonged for such a small space. The air conditioning was running at full power, creating an artificial cold that made his teeth chatter.
"Hello?" he called with a firm voice, trying to regain some of his police authority as he headed straight for the snack aisle. "Is anyone here? I need to pay for the gas on pump two and... basically everything that has fat, salt, and a distant expiration date."
He walked down the center aisle, reluctantly grabbing a couple of family-sized bags of potato chips and an energy bar that promised "extreme energy." His reflection in the glass door of the refrigerators returned the image of a guy who looked like he had survived a shipwreck in a sea of whiskey, not a night of rest in a motel. He had dark circles under his eyes and a paleness that worried him for an instant.
"Sir? Is anyone at the register?" he insisted, walking toward the main counter. He noticed that a phone was dangling by its cord behind the counter, emitting a continuous and monotonous busy signal beep.
Then, a metallic, ferrous, and strangely sweet smell began to infiltrate his nostrils, overpowering the scent of pine air freshener. Leon left the chips on the counter, and his hand, moved by a pure act of muscle memory and intensive training, instinctively went down to his right hip, looking for a gun holster he still didn't have permission to carry off-duty. His fingers only found the emptiness of his jeans.
"I don't like this at all," he whispered, completely forgetting his tardiness, his excuses, and his career. "Hello? Is anyone hurt back there?"
In the back, the door leading to the storage room and refrigerators was ajar, and a white light flickered rhythmically from inside. Leon Kennedy was about to discover, in the most brutal way possible, that in Raccoon City, arriving late for work was the greatest stroke of luck of his life. Because the officers who arrived on time for their shift that morning were no longer in any condition to worry about their professional careers; now they only worried about the taste of fresh human flesh.