Chris Redfield - The Gallery

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Your body aches. The numbness of the cold is fading. You expect to find yourself lying in a mangled heap in the cockpit of your Harrier, only you can tell immediately that isn’t where you are. Your arms are stretched out on either side of you, like you’re crucified, only you’re fairly sure you aren’t staked to anything. Instead, your wrists and elbows have been strapped to a metal rail and you are dangling several feet from the floor.

You try to twist free, but the bonds are too strong. To make matters worse, you remember this place, and the importance of the bar you are tied to. This is the gallery from the Spencer Estate, a place you saw destroyed in the self-destruct of the lab beneath it many years ago. But the memory of that place is burned indelibly into your mind. You’ll never forget. That means that the rail running around the ceiling of the room is electrified. Knowing your enemies, the shock will likely be fatal.

Across from you, your STARS issue combat knife has been wedged deep into the wall. Only its handle protrudes. Someone has carved into the stone, the words: “They have died for your sins.”

You take in the portraits lining the walls before you. Before, they told the story of an aging man from his birth to his death. Now, you see the face of Jill Valentine in those paintings. Before you, she is as you remember her, young and vibrant, fresh-faced and ready to take on the world at your side. Further along, you see her middle-aged, grim and embittered, her face contorted by swollen, black vessels beneath her skin. She is sitting in a cell, glaring out. Glaring at you.

You can’t bring yourself to look at the last image.

[R.E.S.]

The first thing that he was aware of was an intense agony in both of his arms, and a piercing migraine in his frontal lobe. One that hurt like a sonofabitch—the kind of headache that made you question whether or not your skull had been straight-up cracked in two. There was a pressure building in his battered rib-cage as well, and he couldn’t quite be sure if his legs were just numb or simply gone. Although there was a part of himself that faintly registered that he probably should be in a hellova lot of pain right about now, there was a certain “wrongness” to his body’s position and the entire environment around him which seemed to make the hairs on the back of his neck prickle and stand on end. What was it? What was it that he should remember? Something important. Groaning softly, Chris’ head jerked slightly from its bowed position as he stirred into consciousness. Trying to flex his sore arms, he found that they remained tightly affixed out to either side of him. Why couldn’t he move them? What was happening, exactly? Cracking open his eyes, and trying to blink away the swimming sensation behind them, the world slowly came into focus.

“What? Where…?” Chris coughed, muttering gruffly from between cracked, dry lips. His voice sounded hoarse and far-away to his own ringing ears.

Brain fighting to comprehend, Chris took in his surroundings in a thick haze. Lowlights, black oak, hanging portraits, U-shaped corridor, gallery—mansion. The Mansion! Suddenly that groggy feeling vanished and a cold ice-like panic threatened to settle into his stomach as the severity of the situation sunk in. That seemed to snap everything into place: Oh, SHIT.

No, no this was all wrong. Impossible, totally impossible. Impossible and wrong.

He was supposed to be in the cockpit of his jet, supposed to be on his way home, supposed to be… but then—the crash! Memories of going down, airship screaming, the frigid blue racing up to meet him, and then a distinct blackness all around him flashed behind the brunette’s eyes as he vividly recalled what he was fairly certain should have been his last moments. Chris wasn’t sure that he believed in a God anymore, but fuck, if he really was dead, there was only one place that this could be: Hell. Pure and simple.

Forcing away the notion, Chris flexed his arms again (which seemed to be supporting his entire weight), curling his hands into fists, and he found some sense of feeling in his dangling legs. Ok, so he wasn’t dead, but that certainly didn’t explain how he got here, and quite frankly, he wasn’t entirely sure that he should be relieved with this discovery—there was a cryptic inscription gouged into the wall in front of him, probably with the S.T.A.R.S. regulation combat knife that had been plunged until the hilt into the stone just above it;

“They have died for your sins.”

For the first time Chris’ eyes ventured down to actually study the paintings laid out before him. Oh. Oh god, no.

Jill.

The fear that he had felt before paled in comparison to this. No. No, there was no way. There was no fucking way. She was safe, safe back home and—mind games; this was just a fucking mind game. It had to be a mind game. That thought alone swept away the fear and instead brought about in him a rage broiling just beneath the surface. There was only one sick fuck who could pull off something like this. WESKER!

Looking away from the paintings, scowling fiercely at the message his old “Captain” must have left for him, Chris could feel the words baiting him like a challenge, taunting him, daring him to just give up. ‘Sins’ huh? Wesker could go and fuck himself. For now, the portraits would have to be forgotten. He had to figure out a way to escape first. The rest could wait.

The straps holding him up didn’t offer him any kind of give, and being suspended in such a like-manner was deadly in and of its own right, even without the bar; Crucifixion was a particularly wretched way to die, because you essentially just suffocated on top of yourself—human arms weren’t meant to be held up like that. Took only a couple of hours, if he recalled right, which meant that he hadn’t been here for very long at all. That also meant that Wesker was probably still somewhere near-by. When he got his hands on that bastard…! Chris bit off the tirade there, however. Wouldn’t help him much right now, while he was still strung up as though on a cross.

The idea of being ‘crucified’ was oddly ironic for Chris, along with the message; Christopher. “Bearer of Christ”. Oh yeah, Wesker was so damn funny. Why not just give him a crown of plated thorns and call it a day?

Whatever. He had to get out of here, before the undead or a B.O.W. or what-the-hell-ever caught sent of him and burst the door down—or worse, before the blonde decided to come back and change his mind about leaving Chris there alive. He knew that he couldn’t exactly wait for the cavalry to arrive. More times than not, he WAS the cavalry.

Although Chris couldn’t exactly unlock the straps around his wrists and elbows on his own, there was always the possibility that he could just break one of his arms. He’d have to break his wrist too though, and once the one arm was free, what was he going to try and do with the other? He figured that his own body-weight alone would probably snap the other arm clean off. A more than grim notion. The pain in his chest just kept building however, and he knew that he had to do something quick. He gathered that his ribs might have been bruised if not broken by the way that they were screaming at him, and a plane-crash sure as hell would account for that, but the added pressure was definitely not helping.

’Ok, think Chris, think.’ he instructed of himself, searching for a second option available to him. Although prospects looked pretty dark, the fact that he was there and not dead, the fact that there was such an intricately designed, and personal, puzzle lying out before him all alluded to the fact that there was something much bigger at play here. Wesker wouldn’t go through all of this trouble for nothing. So what did he have to work with here? There wasn’t much available to him, only his knife, assuming that he could reach it. Without thinking on it too much more, Chris began kicking his feet to try and wake them up, and once he got his feeling back he flexed his boots against the wall behind him, trying to get enough leverage to kick them out and reach the wall opposite. It was an interesting feat, but rock-climbing recreationally in his youth and then all of his military training meant that the task was hardly impossible. He managed to get both feet up and around the handle, working it out of the rock despite the fact that his boots made the action more than just a little clumsy. With luck, patience, and skill he could theoretically dislodge the knife and catch it between his knees, find a way to work it up into his mouth and then—‘then what, genius? Use it to whittle your own arms off? You’re back to square one.’

But even as Chris thought it, the knife in question slid free and he heard a very loud and confirming ‘CLICK’ in the otherwise silent gallery room.

'Oh sh—‘

The bands holding Chris’ wrists and arms in place snapped open the second that his bowie was no longer an inserted piece of the stone and mortar.

“GAH! NNgh, ow, fuck…” Chris muttered sourly against the hardwood floors, biting back on other curses. Well, if his ribs weren’t bruised before, he figured that at least one of them was by now. Surprised by the sudden release of whatever mechanism was holding him, he’d been totally unprepared for it when the straps that were holding him up suddenly set him free, which had essentially meant he’d fallen the distance of about eight feet or so flat on his face and chest; he’d tried to catch himself, but Chris was no cat, and his semi-numb legs hadn’t been ready to break his fall. Grumbling darkly and rubbing at his wrists, Chris plucked himself up from a tangled heap on the ground, being sure to scoop up the combat knife as he went. Testing his arms he found that everything seemed to be in working condition, and gently pushing at his solar plexus he was relieved that at least nothing was broken. He could manage well enough.

Next he felt it important to know what equipment he had on him: gun was missing, that was obvious right off the bat, grenades too, but he still had his leg holster, tactical vest, utility vests, and hip packs. Fishing around inside of them, he wasn’t surprised to find his magazines were gone too. Cigs, no lighter. Fuck. Family photograph; seemed a little water-logged and crinkled. Fuck. And... frantically Chris padded down the front of his shirt and was relieved to find the small metal band tucked into his front pocket was still there. A part of Chris wished that he’d had more concealed weaponry on hand, because he couldn’t imagine that Wesker had bothered to strip him down too far in his attempts to disarm him, but the idea of Wesker having his hands on him at all was pretty much the most unappealing thing that he could think about and so he stopped that train before it even got started. Instead he just sheathed his knife. Well, now for the puzzle.

Chris went to the front of the room and noted the wall plaque; yep, the same as before “from cradle to grave”. That stirred the whisperings of a fear in the back of Chris’ mind that he didn’t want to acknowledge, so instead he promptly put it away. No. He had to find out where he was and what was going on—what was happening. There was no way that this was the original Spencer Estate, but many of the facilities that he had been to since had looked almost identical. It was like Spencer had been rich and paranoid enough to have ridiculous mansion after ridiculous mansion erected in his name and then become too unimaginative to use a different floor plan. Whatever the case, Chris figured that he must be in another “Spencer mansion wanna-be” and that was all the better for him. He knew these puzzles, or most of them at any rate, and the variations were never completely beyond his scope.

The two paintings on this side of the wall were of an infant and a young brunette woman, a woman that Chris wouldn’t have known until her early 20s. How Wesker had gotten a baby photo and then middle-school aged picture of Jill to blow up into paintings, Chris certainly didn’t know, but it just solidified in his mind the notion that this was just a mind game entirely devised to fuck with him. Chris wasn’t having any of it. He pushed the little buttons beneath each portrait in order, child, teen, young woman, m... middle aged and… Chris certainly couldn’t look at the last image. He didn’t even want to know. Looking away Chris felt along the wall with deft fingers for the little button in question. When he felt weight give beneath the pad of his index and middle fingers and heard it click, he moved away. While before there had been a final painting hanging on the wall to his immediate left with a button for him to have to press, there was nothing more for him this time and instead the wall, like something out of a dream, merely slid up and out of his way in order to reveal the cemetery. There, glittering like a piece of candy in the faint candle light was not a “death mask” but rather a discarded M.O. disk with an equally mysterious (but far-less cryptic) message: “Play Me.”

The words were written in obsessively-neat handwriting, each letter superfluously legible and neatly printed with a steady, compulsive hand. Yup. DEFINITELY Wesker.

Looking up for the first time, however, Chris did notice something else that was different than before. Startlingly different, actually. Rather than miscellaneously dotted carriers up and roaming about, Chris was greeted with a variable gore fest. Blood and entrails speckled the field, and one undead gentleman was propped up in a position similar to the one that he was now rather personally familiar with; only this poor soul’s pants were down. WELL. Either Albert fucking Wesker had finally flipped his fucking lid or THIS was somebody else’s idea of a good time. That somebody else might have been whoever it was that was now spewing profanities and curses at (what he gathered was) the mansion’s back door. Kind of hard to tell given the over-growth and thick iron bars that effectively blocked his view, but it was good to know at least he wasn’t the only one with a mouth. Whoever it was, they were definitely a woman, and they were definitely alive. That was good news, right?

“HELLO? Is somebody there?” Chris called out, raising his voice in an attempt to get their attention.

[Queen of Cunts]

She had thrown every ounce of her considerable weight against that door and it hadn’t even budged. Usually, she was very good at making things open, or at least break, but this one wasn’t working properly. She was forced to conclude that it wasn’t a door, but actually a metal wall that was part of the larger, concrete wall. Which meant that it was a liar and a cheater and she won by default.

Of course, that still meant she was locked out.

To make matters worse, she could hear Burke on the other side, and it didn’t seem like he was having much better luck than she was. He was probably going to have a conniption if they couldn’t get it open soon, which might have been worth waiting for, since then she could watch his brains dribble out of his nose. In a loving way.

“Nope, it’s fucked. I’ll have to find another way,” she called, loud enough for him to hear, and knowing his reaction wouldn’t be delight. Something moved over in the corner of the cemetery. Someone started calling, maybe to her. “Just a moment.”

Telling Burke “just a moment” was usually a good way to get punched, so she was probably on a promise for when they met up again. Still, if there was something else in the cemetery maybe it would solve their locked door problem quicker.

She approached the fence from the top of the stairs. From her elevated position, there was probably only a couple of feet worth of fence between her and the other side. There was someone down below, but with the metal railings and the ivy covering everything, it wasn’t easy to tell who it was.

She wondered if it was the person who’d brought her here in the first place, finally coming to play.

She leaned backwards over the fence, her back curling around its top. Her hair hung down below her like a cascade of fire. She managed to get right over the top and keep her feet planted firmly on the floor on the other side.

He was a soldier. He was wearing fatigues, equipment harnesses, just like she had been before she’d been taken. Before some cunt had nicked them. Dick. But he didn’t smell like a soldier. No blood, no dirt, no rotten stink from zombies, no gunpowder discharge. Instead, he smelt like coolant and preservative. He smelled like a BOW fresh from the hatchery.

She grinned. Maybe it was some kind of human BOW. She’d heard rumours. Never substantiated though. The most human they got was a Tyrant and those couldn’t pass for a second.

“Hi,” she said, grinning lasciviously, “do you work for Umbrella?”

It was a trick question.

[R.E.S.]

To say that Chris was surprised would have been a mild understatement when a young woman with ginger-red hair and a rather study-looking frame maneuvered herself into his area the cemetery, doing a rather impressive somersault/backflip-hybrid over the menacing iron bars before dropping herself the few final feet onto her massive, tree-trunk legs. Bewildered was a little more like it.

Why had he never thought of that, exactly? Probably because he wasn’t ninja. Not that he was aware of. Actually, if the truth be told he could be a little clumsy, and rustling up keys had the more pragmatic solution at the time. There were always keys when it came to Umbrella. Puzzles and keys. Apparently the whole cloak-and-dagger routine never got old.

He took the woman in slowly, from her fiery locks to her powerful emerald eyes to the wicked scar across her face, held together by a rather amateurish patchwork job, needle and wire—but the woman interrupted him with her question before he could study her further, her words cutting straight through to him: Do you work for Umbrella?

Woah woah woah, back up the train here. What?

Chris knit his thick brows together, face drawing taught with an intense and obvious amount of disdain for the idea.

“No. Absolutely not. NEVER.” He stated bitterly, his hatred for the white-and-red corporate giant anything but masked. He didn’t say it, but the meaning was clear: I’d rather DIE. The very notion alone was just as much a kick to the gut as it was a punch to his balls.

The gunman couldn’t help but notice her green and black uniform—or more specifically, the hauntingly familiar semi-circular patch stitched to the upper-left sleeve of her hunter-green button-down.

“Wait, you’re with S.T.A.R.S.?” Chris asked, his eyes flickering up to meet hers. Unconsciously, his right hand moved to touch the same location on his opposite shoulder. Even though he hadn’t worn the emblem for years, he could still feel its weight there, as though it had been branded onto his skin. It seemed like a lifetime ago now, but he had once sported insignia with so much pride and honor—something which had made his ex-Captain’s betrayal all the more poignant. After what the man had done, after Raccoon City division being suspended, Chris had never gone back. Never been able to. He’d formed a liberation front instead, because the idea of joining S.T.A.R.S. anywhere else just seemed too painful, too naive, and being called “crazy” didn’t exactly suit his pallet.

Brushing off the sheer anger he felt at the mere mention of Umbrella’s name, as well as any underlying sadness at a past that was so far beyond him now, Chris forced himself to smile and offer the woman his hand.

“Chris Redfield.” He said brightly, genuinely hoping for hers in return. Should he have said ‘Captain’, he wondered? Somehow lording the position over others had never felt right, and what was the point? B.I.O. wasn’t an official military chain; just a group of survivors, what difference did it make, what they called themselves? They had no real authority behind it. So, Chris Redfield it was. Just Chris. The brunette stopped however when he noticed the woman’s freshly-wounded hands, concern creasing his weathered features.

“Hey, are you alright?”

The injury looked like it hurt, and it was newer than the gouge to the side of her face. That was for sure.

“You’re not infected, are you?” he asked evenly, again his own gaze rising to meet hers.

Specks of blood and guts and putrid flesh still clung to her strapping, lusty form—as if the overwhelming scent of acrid rot didn’t give her away as the one responsible for the massacre not but thirty feet away—but for the first time Chris realized that she didn’t have any weapons that he could take particular note of, and that just left her open, bare, still-bleeding hands.

[Queen of Cunts]

And just like that, all the menace vanished from her expression, and her smile was genuine, if a little lopsided. It was pretty clear to her that Chris Redfield hated Umbrella, and that was good enough for her. Anything else didn’t matter. There was a note of genuine disgust in his voice that was difficult to fake. More than that, there was a certain look that people got when they’d been fucked over by the Company. She wondered what they’d done to him.

Either way, it was safe to say that he wasn’t the one who’d put her here. That mystery still needed solving. It was unlikely that they’d both been placed here by the same person. Too convenient. The truth was usually more complicated and annoying than that.

Still, the one thing they all had in common was that they were all manly men. Except Jonathan. So that was her first theory shot.

“I’m alright,” she announced, wiggling blood-encrusted fingers at him, “just couldn’t clap for a little while, and now I can again. Hooray!”

She banged her palms together to demonstrate, spattering the front of his outfit with gore. The impact gave her a sharp thrill of pain in both hands and she suppressed a groan. She had company. Time to keep it in her pants.

Still, he was lucky. Last week she’d introduced herself to new people, and Burke, by biting them.

“I am a Shak, and a Star,” she confirmed, then grunted and gave him her best theatrical pout, “but I’m on babysitting duty at the moment. It’s like being only half a Star. This all looks pretty interesting though. Don’t think I’d have ever ended up in a palace if I didn’t have a rescue a princess. Named Jonathan. Still, some cunt’s gonna be donating me his bollocks for a necklace, I’ll tell you that much.”

She thrust a finger under his nose.

“One moment!”

She turned back to the door, scanning the fence for some way to climb back up. Unfortunately, it was a lot higher from here. She was about to ask if she could stand on Chris’s shoulders, and then realised that there was another, better way. She cupped her hands around her mouth.

“Hey, Burke! I’ve made a friend! We’re coming to save you, so stay right there! And keep girl pants there with you!”

With that, she gave her attention back to Chris.

“Forward march!” she commanded, pointing in the direction she hadn’t come, and giving his rump a slap for good measure.

[R.E.S.]

The red-haired woman’s reactions were bouncy and slightly erratic, and for just a moment Chris found himself confused again.

‘A Shak and a S.T.A.R.?’ Oh. Was that her name then? Shak? He’d have to guess so, because next thing she was talking about babysitting duty and then some cunt—by which he gathered that she meant Wesker. Who else?—donating his balls for a jewelry piece. Amusing as the idea was, Chris still frowned slightly at the spatter of zombie bits that now lined the front of his tactical. Not that he wasn’t used to back-spatter, but he had no clue how long he had been ‘out of commission’ for, and his last boosters had been well over a week prior-to his little memory lapse. T had a habit of changing from its current strain into something new every few months, like any other virus (or so Rebecca said), and if it had been that long he certainly didn’t want to risk it. Probably not, since his ribs were still so tender, but now that he had been down off of the electrical rod for a few minutes they were beginning to hurt less and less. Wait a minute, he had crashed, hadn’t he…? Now that he thought about it he wasn’t quite so sure and—that was when Shak stuffed a finger beneath his nose. Chris instinctively backed up a step.

Guts on the tactical he could ignore; he could always throw it away later. Guts in his face though, that was something else entirely. He wasn’t immune like his new friend apparently was. You couldn’t rip a few ghouls apart with only your bare hands and expect to walk away unaffected. Not with hands like hers. Which either meant that she had some sort of immunity going for her (lucky), or that she was still in the whole denial faze. He’d watch for the signs, but he sincerely hoped that it was the former rather than the latter. Putting a bullet between somebody’s eyes never did get any easier.

Then Shak put her hands to her own face and yelled out to someone, who Chris assumed must have been on the other side of the mansion’s back-door. He could have told her that it was useless, because if this one was built anything like the others then sound actually didn’t carry very well, but with luck he could get her back to him soon. Assuming the floor plan was the same and that T-carriers were the worst of what they were working with, his knife would suit him just fine for the time being, because the foyer wasn’t too far. Hopefully they could catch whoever this “Burke” was before he got too far away from them.

Chris was about to say something to the effect of ‘Is he your partner? I can get you back to him in a jiff,’ when the junior S.T.A.R.S. officer felt prompt to turn him about and swat his behind.

For the slightest flash he felt both indignation and an embarrassed-surprise by her rather forward action. ‘Uh, excuse me,’ he contemplated briefly, ‘that isn’t yours.’ Because it wasn’t. That belonged to Jill Valentine. But instead, Chris just nodded, doing his best to shrug it off and soldier on. It really wasn’t a big deal, he just didn’t find it all that appropriate. He was much older than she was anyhow.

“Right.”

When they went back down the corridor, Chris reached out for the handle that he hadn’t tried yet only to pause; there were no crows in the gallery this time around, which he probably should have made note of before, but the bar was still in effect. He knew it: he’d been shackled to it for a reason. When he took a closer look, there seemed to be little electrical-rod connectors that ran immediately from the electrical railing to the door’s handle. After tangling with an Albanoid on Rockfort, Chris had quickly learned that being electrocuted was definitely not as awesome as it sounded. Motioning for Shak to pause and remain safely behind him, Chris slipped his tactical glove off of his hand and set his rubber boots apart, hoping to use them as a grounder, just in case, while he twisted the knob with said glove and—much to his relief, there was no immediate shock. But, when he pulled the door open, he heard the distinct snick of something electrical. Then the whole rod sparked with god knew how many volts. Shutting the door, Chris took note that the humming stopped immediately. Setting his lip into a hard line, he tried again for the same results. So. If someone had come into the room while he was still strung up like a macabre party decoration, he’d have been fucking toast. OH, yeah, that was cute. It did give Chris some very useful insight as to his surroundings, however: if Wesker’s game had been to see if Chris could get himself down before someone came into the room, and Shak was looking for her own company, that meant that they were not alone. There were other people here, alive. And that made the gunman wonder: how many, and what for?

Chris would be getting his answers very soon.

The courtyard had been distant enough from the main house and all of its horrors that it had muted the sounds of the skirmish which took place just across the hall from the gallery, and then a woman’s subsequent screaming and hysterics only a few doors down. Neither he nor Shak had heard anything. But as they entered the second hallway, Chris leading the way through a broad set of double-doors, the brunette soldier could clearly hear the high wavering voice of a woman who seemed to be in distress and a man’s low tone in an attempt to comfort her. So he had been right; there were other survivors.

Eagerly he rounded the corner—Chris had never been one to sit by when a woman was upset—and stopped when he just about barreled into the back of a man sporting the Umbrella Biohazard Countermeasure Service logo across the back of his broad tactical.