RESIDENT EVIL 4: A RITUAL NIGHTMARE
a violent sound in a dead sky. Below, Raccoon City wasn’t a city anymore. It was a scar, a wound on the earth that had been cauterized by fire and then left to fester in the two decades of silence that followed. The official maps showed a permanent quarantine zone, a sterile circle of nothingness. Leon knew better.
He’d been here before. The last time, he was a kid. A rookie cop with a fresh uniform, a cheap hangover, and a heart full of a naive duty that had been systematically beaten, clawed, and shot out of him. Tonight, he was Leon S. Kennedy, government agent. He wore tactical gear, not a police blues uniform. In his hand wasn't a standard-issue pistol, but a custom-matted Sentinel Nine. The boy was gone. Only the memory of his terror remained.
“Two hours, Kennedy,” the pilot’s voice crackled in his ear. “No more. The radiation spikes are unpredictable.”
“Understood,” Leon replied, his voice a low gravel. He didn’t need the reminder. This whole op was off the books, a ghost hunt for a ghost. Intelligence suggested a high-level Umbrella data cache, a physical ledger, had survived the destruction in the sub-basement of the city hall. A ledger that could name names, connect the old guard to the new corporations that now wore Umbrella’s skin. A final piece of closure.
He landed soft as a cat in the skeletal remains of the city square. The air hit him first. Not the rot of the dead he remembered, but something worse: the cloying scent of wet ash, chemical sterilizer, and ancient, petrified decay. The silence was the next blow. It was an active, physical thing. Not the quiet of an empty town, but the vacuum of a tomb.
His boots crunched on glass and pulverized concrete as he moved. Skeletal fingers of buildings reached for a moon like a chipped bone. He passed the wreckage of an ambulance, its red paint flaked away to rust, a long-frozen scream of a medic still trapped inside. He didn't flinch. He’d seen worse in Spain, in China, in the dark places between. But here, the monsters had faces he remembered.
He cut through an alley that vomited him out onto the street in front of the R.P.D. building. His old station. His tomb. The front doors were hanging off their hinges, gaping like a mouth. He remembered bursting through them, desperate, the screams of the dying echoing in the marble halls.
Now, there was nothing.
He slipped inside, his tactical light cutting a sharp white beam through the gloom. The main hall was a cathedral of ruin. The statue of the goddess of justice was defiled, her scales torn, her sightless eyes staring into a darkness far older than the collapse of this building. He swept his light across the floor. There. The faint, dark brown stain he’d knelt in, trying to tie a tourniquet on a dying officer whose name he never even learned.
He wasn’t the rookie anymore. He didn't feel the icy spike of panic. He felt… the echo of it. A phantom limb of fear. He moved with a predatory grace his younger self would have envied, past the shuttered S.T.A.R.S. office, towards the back. He remembered the secret passage in the main hall, the one that led down to the holding cells. A shortcut.
As he approached the painting that concealed it, a sound scraped at the edge of his hearing. A wet, dragging noise. From the ceiling.
His light snapped up.
It was a Licker. But it wasn't the fresh, ravenous creature he’d first encountered. This thing was ancient. Its skin, once a vibrant, angry red, was now a leathery, dried-out purple, pulled tight over its ribs. The muscle was exposed and desiccated. Its claw, where it scraped the ceiling, left not a gouge, but a trail of fine, chalky dust. It had survived here for twenty years, a relic of the nightmare, feeding on rats and decay, mutating in the sterile silence. It was the king of this dead kingdom.
The Licker’s exposed brain-tissue twitched, its long, serpentine tongue tasting the air. It sensed him, a new warm thing in its cold domain. It dropped, landing with a sound like a bag of wet gravel.
Twenty years ago, the rookie would have screamed. He would have fumbled with his gun, backed away, tripped over his own feet.
The agent didn’t blink.
It lunged, faster than a striking snake. Leon sidestepped, the air from its passage whipping his hair. He didn't raise his gun. Not yet. He spun, bringing his leg up in a roundhouse kick that was pure, brutal muscle memory. It connected with the creature’s jaw with a sickening crunch. The Licker staggered, a hiss of surprise escaping its exposed throat.
It came at him again, a whirlwind of claws. He parried, blocked, dove under its sweeping arm. This wasn't a frantic fight for survival. This was a dance. A brutal, final choreography. He saw the opening as the creature reared up, its tongue lashing out. He ducked, the whip-like appendage cracking against the wall where his head had been.
He drew his pistol.
Three shots. Not the panicked spray of a rookie, but the concise, professional execution of a veteran. Two in the brain-sac, one where the heart should be. The Licker shuddered, a final, terrible spasm wracking its withered body, and then collapsed into a heap of leathery skin and dried bone.
Leon stood over it, the smell of cordite filling his lungs. He looked at his reflection in a shard of broken mirror on the wall. For a fleeting second, he saw two faces superimposed. The terrified boy, wide-eyed and pale. And the weary man, jaw set, eyes cold as steel. He gave a curt, almost imperceptible nod to the boy. We made it.
He found the ledger where the intel said it would be, locked in a lead-lined safe in the sub-basement, untouched by the missile that had erased the world above. Tucking it into his pack, he began the exfiltration.
As he emerged back onto the street, the first hint of dawn was staining the eastern horizon grey. The chopper was already kicking up dust, its landing lights sweeping across the desolation. He was the last living thing to walk these streets. The lone survivor of a city that had already died.
He climbed aboard, not looking back as the R.P.D. building shrank below him. He was leaving Raccoon City for the second time. The first time, he had escaped with his life, but carrying its horror. This time, he was leaving with a piece of its soul, a cold, hard truth that would no doubt lead to more horror, more nightmares, in more cities, for more years.
The living were long gone. All that was left were the ghosts. And him.
The helicopter lifted him from the tomb, the rhythmic thump-thump-thump of its rotors a violent heartbeat against the sky’s necrosis. Leon didn't watch Raccoon City disappear. He didn't need to. The city was in his lungs, in the pack on his lap, in the faint tremor that had finally started in his left hand. The adrenaline was a receding tide, leaving behind the cold, familiar debris of exhaustion.
On the secured comms, a voice, stripped of all personality by encryption, spoke. “Agent Kennedy. Confirm package acquisition.”
“Package acquired,” Leon rasped, patting the lead-lined case. The ledger felt heavy, not just with physical weight, but with the weight of every life Raccoon had consumed. “It’s the devil’s receipt book.”
“Understood. Return to base. Debriefing is immediate.”
The call ended. Silence returned, but it was different now. It wasn't the vacuum of the city, but the sterile, pressurized quiet of the mission. He closed his eyes, and for a moment, the wet, scraping sound of the Licker's claws on the ceiling was the only thing he could hear. He’d put the monster down, but the ghost was still riding shotgun.
The debriefing took place in a clean, white hell six stories beneath the Washington D.C. suburbs. Fluorescent lights hummed, casting a sterile glow on polished steel and hardened glass. The air smelled of recycled oxygen and electronics. It was the antithesis of Raccoon City, yet Leon felt the same sense of entrapment. This was just a cleaner, more sophisticated cage.
His handler, a sharp-featured woman named Ingrid who ran the division with the efficiency of a field surgeon, wasted no time. The ledger was placed on a containment table, its vellum pages and precise, archaic ink an anachronism in the digital age.
“Initial analysis confirms the intel,” she said, her eyes scanning a holographic display flickering to life above the table. “Financial records, project blueprints, and… personnel lists.” She gestured, and names scrolled across the screen in a cold, blue light. Most were ghosts, old-guard Umbrella scientists and executives long since presumed dead or vanished.
Leon’s eyes scanned the list, a graveyard of bastards. He felt nothing. No satisfaction, no vengeance. It was just data.
“The real prize, however, is this,” Ingrid said, tapping a command. A new file opened, designation highlighted in red: Project: Azazel.
“Azazel?” Leon asked, the name tasting like ash.
“A deep-black program initiated months before the city’s sterilization,” she explained. She pulled up a schematic. It wasn’t a weapon. It was a map. A network. A blueprint for a new world order, built quietly from the ashes of the old. “It wasn’t about creating a biological weapon. It was about weaponizing the fear of one. A plan to use the Raccoon City incident as a catalyst for a global security paradigm shift. Corporations allied with certain political and military figures to offer ‘bio-contingency services’ at a premium. They create the problem, then sell the cure.”
Leon felt a chill that had nothing to do with the room’s temperature. It was the same sickness he felt in the R.P.D. building, the echo of a conspiracy that was too big, too evil to comprehend. Umbrella hadn't just been selling viruses; it had been selling control.
“This is just a theory,” Leon said, his voice low. “A conspiracy map.”
“It was,” Ingrid corrected him. She zoomed the map in, highlighting a central node, a name circled in stark black. “Until we cross-referenced the financials from the ledger with current defense contracts and political donations. The architect of Project: Azazel. The man who took Umbrella’s vision and made it… palatable.”
Leon leaned forward, his breath catching in his throat. The name on the screen wasn't a rogue scientist or a corporate shark. It was a man who had shaken his hand. A man who had pinned a medal on his chest for his “heroism” during the Harvardville Incident.
General Michael Candland.
The head of the Department of Domestic Security, a public face of the nation’s bio-defense, a man who’d built his career on hunting the very monsters he’d helped to empower.
The room seemed to tilt. The ghosts of Raccoon weren't just in his head anymore. They were walking the halls of power. They were giving press conferences. The infection hadn't died in the fire. It had mutated, learned to wear a suit and tie, and smile for the cameras.
“He’s untouchable,” Leon said, the words tasting like defeat. “He’s a hero.”
“He was,” Ingrid replied, her expression grim. “The ledger makes him a liar. It gives us threads. Threads that lead to off-shore accounts, dummy corporations, and a private security firm called ‘Blue Shield’ that operates with an alarming level of impunity. Candland is the spider in the web. We can’t burn the web without getting to him.”
Leon stared at the General’s face on the screen. The confident, patriotic stare. He saw the faces of the cops in the R.P.D., the citizens in the streets, the terrified girl he’d led out of the city. He saw the ancient Licker, a king of a dead kingdom, and realized its reign was never over. A new king had simply taken the throne.
He thought of the rookie he’d left behind in the R.P.D. hall, the boy who just wanted to do his duty. This mission wasn't for closure. It never was. It was a reminder that the duty never ends.
“I want a new designation,” Leon said, his voice turning to steel. “No more off-the-books ghost hunts. Put me back on active duty. Give me Blue Shield.”
Ingrid studied him, a flicker of something like respect in her eyes. She gave a sharp nod. “Welcome back to the fight, Agent Kennedy.”
As he walked out of the sterile white room and into the long, featureless corridor, Leon looked at his reflection in the darkened glass of an observation window. He didn’t see the rookie this time. He didn’t see the weary agent. He saw a hunter, staring back at a new kind of monster. The ghosts of Raccoon City were not behind him. They were all around him, hiding in plain sight. And his hunt was just beginning.