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It was one of the regularly scheduled ones.
At least he wasn’t surprised and knew he was dreaming.
But that awareness, he bitterly acknowledged long ago, didn’t stop the dreams. Only one thing really did but he didn’t drink himself asleep anymore.
Hurrah for sobriety.
So he would sit here and have one of the dreams he’d been having for decades. Eventually he’d wake up. But until then, he was right back to where it all started; back to the place he wondered if he ever actually left.
Raccoon City.
Like always in this particular dream, he was sitting on the top of a cruiser parked facing Ennerdale street. It was dusk, the night was fading away. He was in front of the RPD station gates, which were not twisted and torn but clean and strong. His blue patrol officer’s uniform was crisp and fresh. No blood, guts, soot or monster ichor on it. His bulletproof vest and impact pads were shiny and new, just off the inventory shelf, never been worn. The H&K VP70 bolstered on his right hip was freshly oiled and had never been fired anywhere but the academy range.
There were no bloody bandages on him. He hadn’t been bitten, slashed, shot, burned or thrown against anything. His head was throbbing though and his mouth was desert dry. Too much hooch in his motel room; he could still taste the cheap whiskey and vomit in the back of his throat. Why the hell had he gotten drunk the night before he started his dream job? Oh yeah; he broke up with the girl he’d been seeing. Leon remembered being depressed about it.
‘Of course, that was just the excuse. Every addict has endless supply of them. You needed to drink and there was always a reason to open a bottle. You can blame Raccoon City and Umbrella for most of the bad shit in your life but not for this particular virus. No, you carried the Kennedy Curse long before you drove into the city.’
He was a handsome young man. The newly-minted police officer had fine light brown hair styled in a mop-top. Leon had ice-blue eyes that made the ladies sigh and a sculpted model’s face that made them sigh again. He was tall and had a toned swimmer’s build. The words pretty boy, feminine and even twink had been bandied about since he hit puberty. He had learned to fight at the drop of a hat upon hearing such taunts while in the group home, then at high school and later at the academy.
The sun was starting to rise. Red and orange fingers of light was peeking over the concrete and glass skyline. The air was cold and crisp, it wasn’t heavy with smoke and chemicals. It wasn’t filled with moans, snarls, screams and gunfire. The streets were calm and silent.
But he wasn’t alone.
Hundreds of thousands of eyes; red and bleeding, were staring at him. All around the cruiser; men, women and children standing shoulder to shoulder. Packed together on the street, the crowd stretching out in every direction, as far as the eye could see. Their flesh was torn, their clothes filthy and their skin was gray. They were soulless but alive.
The infected.
Not just the citizens of Raccoon City who succumbed to the T-Virus either. Plenty of out-of-towners too. Villagers from the Javier outbreak, the Spanish victims of the Las Plagas parasites, the dead from Harvardville, Pittsburgh, Shanghai, Eastern Slav, J'avo victims, A-Virus infected and many more. They were endless. Most of the dead had no connection to Umbrella, Tricell, Neo Umbrella, Los Ilumniados or any other company, cult or terrorist group. They were just victims.
People he had failed to save.
They didn’t attack him. Rotting hands with filth-encrusted nails didn’t drag him off the car roof. Mutated limbs didn’t rip him to shreds. Mouths with broken teeth, fangs or leech-like suckers didn’t devour his flesh. No……they just stared at the kid whose uniform felt too tight. Leon whispered into the urban silence.
“I’m sorry. I wished I could have done something. Helped you, saved you, stopped the bastards who did this to you. But I didn’t and I’m sorry.”
No response to his apology. They never responded, they always just stared at him with filmy, empty eyes. A whistling sound broke the silence. Leon looked up into the sky and saw a streak of light descending onto the city. The government’s thermobaric missile; coming to stop the spread of the infection and kill them all.
Leon was glad he didn’t escape this time. He just wanted this all to end.
A tired and defeated twenty-one-year-old closed his eyes as the infected, the city and he were enveloped by heat and light that took all the pain away.
****
A forty-nine-year-old man opened his eyes in the darkness of their bedroom. He was very calm and still despite the nightmare. But was it a nightmare? Leon S. Kennedy had collected a vast catalogue of nightmares in the twenty-eight years since Raccoon City. Most of them featured sewers, tunnels, caves, darkness. He was always sweating and wounded, trying to reload his weapons as he fight off the most horrific creatures imaginable. He always died screaming and in pain as they tore him asunder.
But the silent crowd dream? It didn’t make him soak the sheets with sweat. It didn’t make him bit back a scream as he awoke and it didn’t make him reach instinctively for the Sig Sauer P320 under his pillow.
It just made him feel defeated and sad.
And it made him want a fucking drink.
Yeah…...he preferred the gory combat death nightmares to this.
Despite any types of dream banging in his head; his automatic situational awareness check swept the bedroom as soon as his eyes opened. Windows and door still locked and closed. Pistol under his pillow and the grip of the MSBG 500 shotgun was in reach under the bed. The home security icon on his phone in the bedside charger station was glowing green. Everything was normal and secure.
But he was alone in the bed. His hand reached out and touched her indent in the mattress. The sheets were damp from sweat.
That was not normal.
Someone else was having bad dreams too and she handled hers in a different way.
Leon sat up in the darkness and swept the blanket off his nude form. He swung his feet on to the wooden floor and gave his eyesight a moment to adjust to the darkness, he looked to his right and saw what he expected to see. A sliver of light under the door to the big walk-in closet. It had been one of the reasons they chose this particular Georgetown row house for their home.
The man who rose off the bed was a far cry from the boy in the dream. No longer a lanky six-footer; he had packed on about twenty-five pounds of muscle over the years. His combat experiences taught that being strong and tough was just as important as being quick and agile.
His frame was thick with corded muscle and looked like he had been carved from a rough chunk of marble. His skin was dappled with the souvenirs of a soldier’s trade. Bullet scars, knife slashes and burns. But also of of the nature of the enemies he fought; marks from teeth, claws and toxic chemicals.
That handsome face that made women sigh (still did, to the satisfaction of his middle-aged ego) had matured a bit. It was broader, more filled out and he had crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes. His stubble was coming in snow-capped nowadays and there were tendrils of gray creeping into his brown hair.
Which made sense, he was turning fifty next year.
It was amazing to him, not the passage of time, the fact he was still alive. Leon had beaten the odds so many times and he still wasn’t sure why. But he kept going, he had a job to do and a mission to fulfill. No matter how much it hurt sometimes. He didn’t get to lay down.
He made a promise.
He would stay alive and keep her safe. That been his vow a long time before they made it official in a different way.
For better or for worse.
Leon moved as silently as a cat across the room despite his bulk and the darkness. He memorized the layout of every home in their home and he knew every spot where the floor squeaked. He didn’t need to be stealthy at the moment; there was no danger and she had undoubtedly clocked him the moment he sat up in bed.
But being in survival mode was a reflex neither of them could ever break.
The closet door opened quietly and he blinked as he stepped under the overhead lights. It was long, narrow L-shaped room. Plenty of space for his and hers clothing and accessories. Well….mostly his. Leon was a bit a of fashion hound and she didn’t really care so about sixty percent of the shelves were all his gear. He smiled a little as he walked past a rack of leather coats and jackets that she teased him about not being able to part with.
He knew where she’d be. Around the corner at the base of the L-shape, as hidden she could get. Leon made a left turn to face a rack of formal wear neither of them used much in sealed plastic garment bags. He reached out and pushed them to the side. Sitting with her back to the wall and her arms on her knees was Sherry Birkin. He looked down at his wife.
“Nightmares?” the fellow Raccoon City survivor lifted her head off her forearms and sighed as she looked up at her husband.
“Yeah….you too, I’m assuming. Aren’t we a pair?”
Leon couldn’t disagree with that.
They had always been a matched set.
For better or for worse.
****
Sherry Birkin had also come long way since Raccoon City. Her parents had been Umbrella scientists. Her mother, Annette had been a brilliant virologist who assisted her husband and Sherry’s father, William. He had been a genius who discovered the G-Virus after being one of the main researchers behind the T-Virus.
The Birkin family was Umbrella royalty and had their own secret lab in Raccoon City, studying and weaponizing the G-Virus. But that relationship soured and the Birkins planned to sell their research to the American government after it been completed. Umbrella discovered their plans and reacted with extreme prejudice. They sent an USS kill team into the laboratory to retrieve the G-Virus samples and to take William Birkin into custody.
It went badly.
Mortally wounded in a firefight by the Umbrella mercs, William injected himself with the G-Virus and became a mutated monster that slaughtered the soldiers but in the sewer battle; the T-Virus samples were trampled on and the rats in the underground became infected and they spread the contamination to the city’s drinking water.
And so it began.
Annette would die later, filled with regret while William rampaged as a constantly evolving freak until finally defeated by Claire and him as they made their escape from the doomed city with Sherry.
Sherry.
A twelve-year-old girl trapped in hell. Even before the world fell apart, Sherry was a lonely and neglected kid. Her parents always choose their work over her. When the city began to fall apart, Sherry got a call from her mother who refused to leave her lab to tell her to make her own way to the police station.
A call.
That was all Sherry got.
But she got there and it was already all falling apart. The infected were killing everyone and she had to fend for herself. She survived for days among the monsters and the insane by hiding in vents, closets and any safe place she could find; no weapons, no adults helping her. Alone.
A twelve-year-old kid.
Sherry survived her infected father hunting her, Chief Irons (who proved that some didn’t need the T-Virus to be monsters) and even being infected by the G-Virus itself and then she helped Claire and him survive. Leon had been close to suicide in those dark days but the mission of helping Ada and saving Sherry had kept him alive. The girl had even been smiling and holding his and Claire’s hands as they walked away from the burning city together.
She was the bravest person he’d ever known.
But the nightmare didn’t end for either of them. Scooped up into government custody; she was kept in the custody of Derek Simmons because Wesker and his allies were still after her for the G-antibodies in her blood and the government wanted to study her for their own purposes.
And Leon? He got a choice, of sorts. He knew too much to be cut loose and he’d survived fighting the B.O.W.s so he was also too valuable to kill. So the men in black gave him a choice; if he played ball and did as he was told, they would keep Sherry safe from all the people who wanted to kill or dissect her.
What choice did he have?
He had made a promise.
So he was given to United States Strategic Command and put on their anti-Umbrella team. Sherry was given as close to a normal life under government protection as she was ever going to get. He stayed in touch her the best he could but Claire was always way better at that. Leon had his own battles and demons to fight over those years as she grew up on her own.
Sherry was no wilting flower despite the horrific trauma she endured. As she grew up and learned about the world; she came to the same conclusion that he did. Bio-terrorism was threat to everyone and had to be defeated. After Wesker was finally killed by Chris; she got her freedom and a chance to get in the fight. Sherry joined the Division of Security Operations. Just in time to battle creatures created by the new C-Virus. Which had been created in part through the study of her own G-Virus affected blood.
That was only the start of it. She had to fight the monsters, conspiracies and betrayals just like he did. Sherry was captured by Neo Umbrella and experimented on for six months in a hidden lab but she and Muller fought their way free. Leon ran into her in China while he was tracking down Simmons. He had been awestruck by what an impressive young woman she’d become.
They made more of an effort to stay in touch after that. They were both DSO lifers at that point. They bonded again as friends and that probably saved his life. She was the one who convinced him to go to treatment after his last binge nearly killed him. Leon stood by her side as she dealt with all the therapy and recovery she needed from the China mission and every horror show that came after.
Along the line…...something changed between them.
Leon was never great at relationships. Too closed off and distant for most. His only long-term one was with Ada Wong; a spy-for-hire who would disappear for months or years at time before dropping back into his life again. Exciting at first but it old as he got older. As for Sherry; she tried with Wesker's son of all people but they only lasted a couple of years. He wasn’t the type to commit to a cause and Sherry was the mission through and through.
One day six years ago, they were having dinner and laughing about some training ground scuffle they had observed that day and something clicked for Leon. He was laughing, relaxed and happy around her……and she was a smart, brave and beautiful woman. Leon realized he didn’t want the dinner or the evening to end.
Sherry had been thinking the same lines because they ended up at her apartment. They made another promise to each other that night as they started to do what they both worried was a huge mistake. No matter what; they would always have each other’s backs. Friends or lovers; that would never change. Both of them decided to see where this new connection was going to go with no expectations.
They got married a year later.
It was small, informal ceremony. Neither of them had a family and few friends. Claire did double duty as best woman and maid of honor.
Leon and Sherry discovered there was still some happiness to be found in the world. It wasn’t perfect because life wasn’t perfect and neither of them were but he happier than he’d ever been. The fight became worth fighting again.
****
There were a lot of nights like this. For both of them. Leon grunted and sat down in front of her. Close, but not touching. Sometimes she didn’t want to be touched in moments like this. So he waited to see what she wanted to do. Talk or sit here silently for the rest of the night. Anything she needed, she would get.
Sherry was as naked as him. She was slim and muscled, about five-foot-five and well-rounded in all the right places. Her silky blonde hair was kept short and shaggy and she had a beautiful face. Regal nose, dancing blue eyes, pink lips and high cheekbones. Unlike him, no scars marred her soft skin. The G-antibodies had given her a superhuman regeneration ability. She had been shot, stabbed, experimented on in terrible ways but you’d never know it by looking at her body.
You also would never guess that she was forty years old. Her aging had stopped because of those antibodies. She looked about twenty. It was running gag at DSO for new agents or analysts to mistake her for an intern. The eggheads in the labs thought she might Iive past a hundred and fifty years or even longer.
She hated talking about that. Especially since he was getting older. They both knew if even if nothing ate or killed him, he’d still be gone long before she was. It was one of unspoken things in their marriage that weighed on them both.
But that wasn’t what tonight was about.
Leon and his wife could be very different people. But they shared nightmares and other things. Like always being prepared. Her pistol, a 9mm Triple Shot, was sitting at her side. Sherry was comfortable nude but never when she was unarmed.
Nor was she uncomfortable under his steady gaze. She looked right back him, no red in her orbs, she hadn’t been crying this time. Sherry was just tired and sad from whatever nocturnal trip she had taken. She clicked her tongue and spoke after a couple minutes.
“It’s almost never China or any mission since. Or about any horrible monster but the first the first one, you know?”
He did. Neither of them would ever really leave Raccoon and he knew the dream she had and what she would say about it. But he just nodded and let her tell the tale anyway.
“The tunnels under the police station. God, I can still smell the blood and shit. It’s so dark and I’m so small and scared. There’s a monster chasing me. Fanged, clawed, wet and pulsating. It’s jibbering my name over and over in a parody of my father’s voice. I knew it was him of course.”
Sherry’s mouth twisted, the nails on her left hand dug into her right forearm hard enough to leave red marks he knew be gone in seconds and she looked up at him bitterly.
“First time in my whole life he ever wanted anything to do with me. Isn’t that nice? Spent my whole life childhood begging for his attention and boy, did I get it that week.”
She had healed from a metal rod through the stomach once. But this wound? There was nothing the G-Virus could do about it.
“And this time; Claire doesn’t show up and save me. Dad runs me down, corners me and shoves one of those tendrils down my throat. He impregnates me and all I do is lay there on the metal floor and it feel the embryo grow inside me. Feel it start to rip me apart…oh god, Leon!”
Now she needs him. Sherry shudders and moans, opening up her arms and reaching out for him. He doesn’t hesitate or say a word. Leon leans forward and wrapped his arms around her body as she wraps hers around his neck. He pulls his wife into his lap and hugs her as she buries her face into his neck and tries not to cry. Sherry doesn’t like crying; especially over her father or mother.
It's hard to feel so helpless when someone you love is scared or in pain. Sometimes all you could do is hold them while they ride it out. Leon rubbed her back and felt the tension slowly leave her muscles as she sagged against him.
“They’re never going to stop, are they? The nightmares.”
That defeated and resigned tone hit him harder than the Tyrant ever did. With anyone else, he’d would be ‘Leon Kennedy’. All ice and one-liners. Tell them to buck up, keep fighting and that problems were always solvable. But not with her, he sworn to always be honest with her.
“No, they don’t. But there’s something you need to remember.”
Sherry turned her head and looked up at him.
“What?” he smiled, the same reassuring smile he gave her in Raccoon City all those years ago.
“You aren’t alone. I’m always going be here when you wake up.”
She blinked, reached up and cupped the side of his face. Her thumb rubbed his cheek and Leon leaned into it.
“I know. Thanks for reminding me.”
Sherry angled her head up and kissed her husband softly on the lips. Just a quick and intimate peck. It filled him with warmth and strength, he’d fight the whole world for this woman. Then she put her head on his shoulder.
“Take me back to bed, please.”
Out in the world, she was the legendary survivor Sherry Birkin, superhuman and super intelligent operator who commanded her own field team and kept the respect and attention of everyone from grunts to presidents. But alone with him, she could be soft and ask for help and protection.
And Leon would always give it to her.
He put an arm under her knees and scooped her up into a bridal carry. Sherry leaned over and plucked her pistol off the floor as he stood. Leon walked out of the closet with his wife in his arms. She hit the light switch with the gun barrel. He put Sherry back on the bed and laid down beside her. She scooched in close as he drew the covers over them.
Sherry pressed her chest against his as he wrapped an arm around her shoulders. Leon kissed her forehead as she locked a leg around his hip. She whispered in the dark.
“For better or for worse, huh?”
“Lots more in the better column by my count. I’m just lucky you put up with me.”
“Well……you do hog the bathroom mirror in the mornings. It can be annoying.”
“Gotta look good for the prettiest special agent in D.C.”
She giggled softly and rubbed her heel against the back of his calf.
“I was the lucky one. Not only did the strongest and coolest girl I’d ever seen come and save me; she brought a freaking Backstreet Boy along with her. The cutest boy I’ve ever seen.”
Leon burst out with a full belly laugh. He was never going to escape the damn ‘pretty boy' thing.
“Please, N'Sync. I always thought I had a Justin Timberlake vibe going on.”
Sherry laughed into his chest and then kissed the underside of his chin, rubbing her nose against his scruff.
“You still are, you know. The cutest boy I’ve ever seen.”
Damned if he wasn’t blushing in the dark like a kid who caught the eye of the hottest girl in school.
“Keep talking like that and we might not get back to sleep, Mrs. Birkin.”
“Maybe I don’t want to, Mr. Kennedy. Come a little closer Leon, enough of the damn nightmares. Let’s make a good memory together instead.”
Her hand reached down between them to his crotch and squeezed. Leon suddenly wasn’t tired at all.
The bed creaked as he rolled on top of her and she sighed again, with delight this time, as he began to touch her. They both forgot about nightmares for a little bit. They weren’t surprising anymore, but they both could tough them put and after all, nightmares end.
But they also begin.
There was a small black blotch on the inside of Leon’s right wrist, about the size of a pinhead. And one under Sherry’s silver wedding band that she hadn’t noticed yet.
For them, another nightmare was going to start very soon.