Chapter Text
RESIDENT EVIL: TRIAGE
PART I
CHAPTER ONE: WHAT REMAINED (Prologue)
WARNING: this chapter contains graphic depictions of injury, zombification, family death, and suicidal ideation.
YOU
• ━━━━ •●• ━━━━ •
They said the bombing would stop it; the spread of the virus that wiped out most of Tall Oaks. On the television, before the power grid staggered and became less officiant, before the emergency channels looped the same measured assurances, officials standing against a backdrop of smoke whilst calling it containment, necessary… and the only option left.
From Hearthwood, you could see the heat rising over Tall Oaks like a bruise spreading across the sky. The windows rattled when the shockwave reached you, not enough to shatter, just enough to remind you how close you still were. Close enough to feel it, far enough to survive it. After that, the neighbourhood emptied itself in a kind of stunned choreography. Car doors slammed, engines coughed to life, half-packed vehicles lurched down streets that had once been slow and polite. Lawns were left mid-mow, front doors hung ajar, curtains fluttered in open windows.
No official order ever reached Hearthwood, it didn’t need to when panic did the job, but you didn’t leave.
Your mother couldn’t travel. The fever had taken hold days before the bombing, a wet cough that rattled in her lungs and left her breathless after only a few steps. The hospital lines were already collapsing when you tried to call. Your workplace was quickly closed to everyone, including their staff, including you. After the blast, there was no one answering at all.
Not the hospital.
Not the police department.
Not the fire station.
Even the governing body went quiet.
Your father stood in the kitchen, remote in hand, staring at the frozen image of a news anchor mid-sentence.
“We stay,” he said.
You looked at your mother in the doorway, pale and leaning on the frame, and you nodded.
After that, the kitchen was promptly turned into a command centre. Canned goods were stacked in careful rows along the table, bottled water counted and recounted, batteries sorted by size. Medical supplies were laid out with a precision that steadied your hands even when your pulse refused to cooperate.
You logged everything in a notebook you’d carried since nursing school. Dates, quantities, estimated use per day. You wrote like if the columns stayed straight, the world might too.
When your father boarded the windows, you wrapped his palm where the hammer slipped. When your mother’s coughing cracked the skin at the corners of her mouth, you dabbed ointment gently and pretended it was nothing more than a winter cold.
Outside, wanderers drifted through the quiet streets.
The infected.
The changed.
They didn’t roam in hordes. Not yet. Just enough to demand the rifle your father took when he went out.
You wore your Glock on your thigh. It was legal, registered, trained with at ranges that smelled of oil, metal, and paper. You had stood in clean lanes under fluorescent lights, aimed at silhouettes that never moved, never screamed, never bled.
After Tall Oaks, your father adjusted your stance more than once in the backyard.
“Relax your shoulder,” he’d say, stepping behind you, nudging your elbow.
“I am relaxed.” You’d counter.
“You’re braced.” He corrected, and this time you didn’t argue.
He would adjust your grip, tilt the barrel a degree, press your wrist down just slightly.
You never actually fired at anything alive - if the infected could still be considered living, he did that. When a stray infected wandered too close, it was his shot that cracked through the still air. You flinched at the sound, whereas he didn’t. You told yourself that was how it was supposed to be. You had taken an oath to aid life, not end it.
As the weeks passed, days blurred into something thin and stretched.
You rationed, you logged, you listened to the silence where neighbourhood noise used to be.
There were others who stayed. You saw them sometimes at a distance, across the street, near absent stores, moving quickly between buildings, faces drawn and guarded. A nod in passing. A lift of the chin. No one came close, not even if they required the assistance of someone proficient in medical aid. Everyone held tight to their own walls. Relied only on themselves.
Then one afternoon, your father left alone.
“Hardware store,” he said, slinging the rifle over his shoulder. “Won’t be long.”
You logged it mentally without looking up. He had gone out before, he always came back.
You were chopping vegetables when you heard the door open again later.
The hinge creaking, the scrape of boot on tile, and then-
The smell hit.
Something metallic, sweet, wrong. Almost Rancid.
You hand stilled as you turned.
Your father stood in the doorway, jacket still zipped against the late-autumn chill. Same height. Same shoulders. The familiar crease between his brows. But his eyes were wrong. They were flat, unfocused, bloodshot.
Your gun was on your thigh, but you didn’t reach for it. Because he still looked like him. That was the problem. He looked too much like himself for you to act immediately.
His mouth opened slightly, jaw working as if testing something unfamiliar. Then he moved, fast. Too fast. There was an erratic energy in his joints that propelled him forward.
Your grip tightened around the knife in hand.
You didn’t remember crossing the space between you. Only the resistance when steel met flesh, the jolt up your arm, the grunt that was not quite his. You kicked him back, leaving the knife where it struck his chest, stumbling away, heart slamming against your ribs.
He didn’t fall. He lunged.
Your training snapped into place like a switch thrown, as if survival instinct had finally kicked in, overriding familial sentiment.
Gun out, arms locked, you fired.
The sound in the kitchen was deafening. Final.
The bullet struck just above the bridge of his nose. He dropped, then. And the silence after pressed in from every side.
You stood there, gun lowering inch by inch, staring at the body on the tile you had mopped that morning. You did not scream, the surge in your veins left no space for sound. Instead, you moved.
You shovelled dirt in the backyard until your palms blistered and split. The earth was stubborn, packed tight, resistant. Which was cruel, really, under the circumstances.
You didn’t cry, you couldn’t allow the reprieve when there was work to do, and you didn’t look at the house while you covered him with soil.
Then when it was done- when he was finally at rest, you simply thanked him. For standing between you and the world for as long as he could. For every shot he had taken so you never had to. For the lessons. For the steadiness. For loving you well.
When you re-entered the house and your mother called from her bed asking what had happened, you stood at the bottom of the stairs and told her it was an accident. That there wasn’t nothing to be concerned about.
“Gun went off while I was cleaning it.”
You kept your gaze steady despite the ache building behind your ribs. She believed you, or perhaps she chose to. Then, you returned to the kitchen.
The blood had already begun to darken. It clung to the grout between the tiles, crept along the seams of the cabinets, flecked the edge of the countertop where you had once stood and chopped vegetables without thinking about mortality.
You filled the sink, because there was a small mercy in water still being available. The pipes groaned faintly in protest, but they held. Clear water spilled from the tap, unbothered by the way the world had split open beyond the walls. For a moment, the sound of it almost felt ordinary. You stood there watching the water in the basin rise, hands braced on porcelain, and wondered how long even this would last.
Then, you looked down at your hands. Blood had settled into the fine lines of your palms, beneath your nails, and across your knuckles. When you submerged them, the water ran pink almost immediately. You washed your hands carefully, methodically, as though this were a clinical task. Thumbs, palms, between fingers, under nails. You rinsed, then rinsed again, but the memory did not rinse with it.
That’s when you refilled the basin and took to scrubbing the kitchen. You dipped a cloth into the water, wrung it out, and then you scrubbed.
The floor first, followed by the cabinets, and then the thin line where the cabinets met tile, where blood had tried to settle into permanence. There was a strange comfort in the rhythm. Rinse, wring, scrub. Repeat. If you could erase the evidence, perhaps you could contain the moment. Reduce it to something clinical. A task completed. You pressed harder than you needed to, your knuckles burned, your palms began to sting- all whilst the scent of detergent replaced the metallic edge in the air.
Still you scrubbed. You scrubbed until the copper smell faded, until the floor reflected light again, and further still until the cabinets no longer held flecks of blood. The kitchen returned to itself inch by inch. White tiles, clean grout, unremarkable wood. As though nothing irreversible had occurred here.
You changed out of the torn, stained clothes and folded them without looking at the places where fabric had stiffened.
When you finally turned off the tap, the silence that followed felt heavier than the gunshot had. The water had washed away the blood, but it had not washed away the knowledge. You dried your hands carefully. Between each finger, under each nail. Only then did you let yourself stop.
You braced your hands on the countertop, your shoulders bowed, and for a moment the house was so quiet it rang.
Only then… did you allowed it. Not a scream, not a collapse, just the slow burn of tears slipping down your face and falling soundlessly to the place you had just scrubbed clean. You did not wail, you did not bargain, you simply stood there and felt the weight of what you had done. Of what you had had to do. And when the tears slowed, you straightened.
Because there was still work to be done to keep you and your mother alive.
A week passed… then another. You sought and logged supplies, you avoided the backyard, whilst your mother’s condition worsened.
Her skin took on a waxy pallor, her breath shortened, each inhale thin and strained - as though the air itself had grown heavier, the cough deepened, settling somewhere low in her chest where it rattled stubbornly and refused to loosen. You told her it was the fever, but you had listened to lungs before. You had heard that sound in hospital corridors under fluorescent lights and antiseptic air. Fluid, fibrosis, something occupying space that breath was meant to fill. Something that would come to take her too.
You never said it aloud, not to her, not even to yourself… because saying it would have made it real, and reality was already full of enough horrors. She had been dying before the outbreak. Slowly… quietly… unfairly. The virus simply changed the shape of it, because now a hospital wasn’t accessible, and an ambulance would not be coming.
You left one morning for a quick supply sweep. It was routine, ordinary, well thought out. You had chosen the pharmacy two streets over. It was small, once family-run, already half-looted but not stripped clean. You moved quickly through the aisles, scanning shelves with the same detached focus you used in hospital wards. Medical supplies, you hoped. Anything that might ease the brunt of your mother’s condition.
You found cough suppressants scattered across the floor, blister packs crushed beneath footprints. You pocketed what you could salvage. In the back storage room, behind a fallen rack of seasonal displays, you found an unopened box of oxygen tubing. Not a tank, those had gone long ago, but tubing felt like possibility anyway. You took saline, gauze, two inhalers that may or may not still hold enough pressure to matter. You told yourself they might and put them in your pack.
You moved through the streets with your head down and your steps measured. There were wandering infected, but fewer than before. One drifted at the corner, turning in slow circles as though confused by the quiet. You did not fire, and slipped past instead. You had grown efficient at that. You had to, because it was just you now to rely on now.
When you turned onto your street, the world looked unchanged. By the new standards of it, at least. Lawns had grown unruly, grass bending heavy under neglect. Cars remained where they had been abandoned, windows dusted with ash from the distant blast. Curtains still hung in the windows of houses that no longer held breath. Your house stood exactly as you’d left it. Except-
The front door.
It was open. Not wide, not broken from the outside by force. Just… unlatched, from the inside. An inch of wrongness in a home that had held itself tight for almost two months.
Your pulse did not spike. It slowed. Your hand moved to your gun without conscious thought. You approached at an angle, eyes scanning the porch, the boarded windows, the thin shadow between door and frame.
You did not call out. Instead, you slipped inside. Slowly… with caution.
The air smelled stale. Familiar.
You checked the ground floor came first. The living room and then the kitchen. They were both clear, the back door remained closed, the quiet was so complete you could hear the soft rasp of your own breath against fabric.
You moved for the stairs next. The second step creaked under your weight and you froze, every muscle locking. You counted to three… then to five. When nothing moved, you continued.
Your bedroom was empty, and exactly as you had left it.
The bathroom looked undisturbed, and the small study adjacent to it untouched.
Relief began to creep into your posture, tentative and fragile as you closed yet another door. Maybe she had only wandered downstairs, and perhaps simply looked outside before returning to bed…
…but you knew denial when it took root.
The door should have been too far to reach in her condition.
You arrived at the final door, her door, and eased it open slowly with the barrel of your gun leading the way.
Impact knocked you back before you could even perceive what had happened. You hit the floor hard enough that your teeth clicked together, the air driven from your lungs in a violent rush, as a weight crashed down on top of you, pinning your shoulders.
It all happened too quick.
Hands clawed, tearing fabric. Then Teeth found skin through cotton, where pain bloomed sharp and hot just above your collarbone. You shoved upward with everything you had, twisted your hips, created space. Then, you fired once.
The bullet struck shoulder. The body recoiled, enough-
Enough for you to see her.
Your mother.
Her face was distorted by something that had hollowed her from within. Her mouth moved without purpose, jaw grinding against its socket as though it had been forced into a shape it was never meant to hold. It sagged, dislocated. Blood glazed her teeth and tracked from her mouth to her chin in uneven lines.
You hesitated. Gods, you hesitated. For a fractured second you saw her as she had been only hours before. Thin, coughing, asking for water.
You fired again. Forcing down the sentiment that ached beneath your ribs.
The second shot was cleaner, the sound echoed through the hallway and died against the walls, the bullet struck her left eye. There was a sharp crack as bone gave way. The force snapped her head back against the wall, dark matter spraying in a brief, violent arc before gravity reclaimed it. Her jaw spasmed once, twice… the dislocated hinge snapping shut with a wet click, and then everything in her went slack.
She slid down the wall slowly, leaving a streak behind her as she sank, limbs folding in on themselves without intention.
Stillness settled in pieces.
You remained on the floor long after her body ceased, lungs heaving, ears ringing. The gun felt heavier than it ever had in your hand.
When you finally rose, you did not look at her face again. You could not afford to.
The soil in the backyard was softer the second time. It yielded to the shovel without the same stubborn resistance, as though the earth itself had already been disturbed enough to understand. You worked under the fading light, breath fogging faintly in the cooling air. You did not rush. You did not pause until you laid her to rest beside your father. For a moment, you looked at them both. The space between their shoulders, smaller now than it had been in life.
You swallowed.
“I’m sorry,” you said, and your voice caught on the second word. It was barely more than breath. It wasn’t loud, it wasn’t meant to be.
Sorry I couldn’t ease it.
Sorry I lied.
Sorry I hesitated.
The words conveyed more than the soil ever could.
You covered them both.
You did not scrub upstairs afterward. The difference registered somewhere distant in your mind. The first time, you had erased. This time, you simply allowed it all to exist.
In the kitchen you peeled your shirt away from your collar and found the evidence of the bite. The one that had caught you through fabric, rather than directly. The skin was broken in an uneven crescent, bruising already spread outward in deepening purples and blues.
You cleaned it with steady hands; saline first, then antiseptic. Then you stitched it yourself in the bathroom mirror, jaw clenched against the pull of needle through skin. You place gauze over it, secured it with medical tape. Then you returned to the kitchen and slid down the cabinet until you were sitting on tiles, back pressed to wood.
Both doors in sight, gun resting across your thigh. You would not be taken by surprise again.
You waited.
The house settled around you with small, ordinary sounds. A faint tick from the clock on the wall, and the distant hum of wind pressing against boarded windows.
You monitored yourself, clinically and regularly. Pulse… temperature… pupil dilation. You stopped eating, you limited water, you rationed yourself as carefully as you had rationed canned goods. Not because you were short of supplies, but because a part of you wanted it to take you, so that you could end it before it took your autonomy. You did not frame it as a wish. You framed it as inevitability. Your parents had been lost to it, surely it was your turn next. If this was the cost for what you did, then let it be complete.
Because you had not simply lost them… you had ended them with your own hands.
Days passed.
The fever never came, your mind remained your own, your reflection did not change.
You were still alive.
You were still yourself.
That was the hardest part; the unbearable cruelty of survival.
You stared at your face in the bathroom mirror and searched for something. Guilt made visible, perhaps. Some outward sign that what you had done had marked you permanently. There was nothing. Just you. Still breathing and Humanity still intact.
That was when you remembered your oath. Not the ceremony, not the applause, not the words recited under fluorescent lights. The meaning.
Preserve life where you can.
And if you were still breathing, then your life was something to use.
You moved with purpose then. Your legs trembled, not from infection, but from hunger. You had not eaten properly in days, you had not wanted to. You forced yourself to open one of the cans from the table. Something small and bland. You ate slowly, mechanically, each swallow deliberate. Your stomach protested at first, unaccustomed to the intrusion. Nauseated. You kept eating anyway.
When you were finished, you rose and wiped the countertop clean. Not because it was stained, or because it needed it, but because it was something you could restore to order.
You packed deliberately, after that. Canned goods, bottled water, medical supplies, the notebook. Tools that would optimise the odds survival, along with enough spare clothes and a couple of books to get you by for a time.
At the front entrance you slid the Glock into its holster on your thigh. Eleven rounds remained, with one full magazine containing fifteen to spare. You raised your other hand, and rested your fingers briefly against your shirt, across the bandage over your collarbone. Allowing yourself a single moment of reflection…
Then you opened the front door.
The street beyond lay still beneath a sky faintly smudged with the remnants of smoke from Tall Oaks. The air carried that distant, metallic tang that had never fully dissipated.
You did not turn back in favour of the backyard.
You did not say goodbye.
You stepped outside, carried by new purpose. And when you pulled the door closed behind you, the sound of it latching felt like something final.
Not an ending.
A decision.
You chose to live, not for yourself, but for whoever was left that needed you.