The 0714 Files: File #1 Inferno (Remake 2)

Chapter 56

"If you're going to decide to shoot me, decide it after listening to the last tape," her voice is in my head. Repeating the things she said I didn't want to admit as I heard them, and I don't want to admit now, that they made me pity her. May have for even a fraction of a second swayed my ironclad thoughts on her...

I hid in the server room from that thing, the door requiring an ID bracelet to get in. I'm unable to forget how she stared at me, her eyes looking the same way they did on those steps back in August. So unhappy, torn apart, and devastated in ways I didn't know then, and only know part of now. Then they tore away, "GO!" she screamed at me and willingly took that thing on and lured it into the control room after her.

Goddammit Kennedy. Admit to yourself you're wrong, because if she was truly cold-blooded, she wouldn't have done that. Not after giving away that I know her past affiliation with Umbrella which I could see the pure revolt on her face when I insinuated that maybe she's trying to steal G to get back in and out of danger.

"Umbrella tried to kill me, and if you're so set on me being a heartless murderer. You should be able to tell by now that my survival was something that doesn't happen. Not for them." Exactly what she'd said on her tapes, but I'd discarded it the first time I heard it.

Now as I put the fifth tape into the recorder, and I pocket the third, I brace myself for what I'm going to hear.

"I can't do this anymore. I can't keep going on... there's no point. Why? I have no food, no water. I'm so hungry and thirsty..." her voice raspy through the speakers, as if straining to hold back tears, "Nobody's going to save me. Not Umbrella, certainly not the government... I've had no faith in them since the day I was kidnapped..." Ada had implied there's corruption in the government, that the point of her operation in this city is collecting evidence so that when the time came to accuse and arrest. So the F.B.I would be prepared.

"Sounds like the government," those were the perplexing words Madeleine had grumbled to herself on that elevator just before finding Annette for the first time tonight. Is this what she meant? No wonder she feels that way about them. Feels abandoned and forgotten by the people we're taught to trust the most in this country. Being kidnapped and believing that company had people in our government... I'd have no trust in those people either.

"This end... it's fitting in a way," and that's when I start hearing it. A repeating noise of something quiet, but just audible enough to catch it. The soft scraping of two objects together. "I'm probably going to die of dehydration at this point. Trapped in a city of people I'd come to care for. Trapped in a station full of the bodies of my friends, and co-workers... I looked in that hallway with John. And seeing what I'd allowed to happen... it broke me."

"And gone through things that broke me," she'd said. She broke during this outbreak? Stress can do that to a person, drive them to insanity and become irrational, but with her. I know it goes deeper than that. Her past, the murders, S.T.A.R.S. and the mansion, now this... How much can a person take?

"I've been seeing things all day. People I used to know. Rita, Marvin... I could hear their words so clear, their touch was so real. I thought... I thought they were. Until I blinked, and they were gone. Poof. Like a puff of fucking smoke, and there I was, staring at the spot they'd been standing a second ago. Knowing I'm crazy and saw a hallucination."

Then our meeting for the first time tonight makes sense all this time later. Grant. She'd been screaming that name, how he can't be real and everyone died. Was she... was she seeing me as somebody from the station? No wonder she was scared and ran. I had no clue...