WELCOME TO RACCOON CITY
Chapter 1: The Sign
The sign was white and green. It looked clean enough but someone had spray-painted DEAD over the population number. Below that it said "Home of Umbrella." She stood in front of it in her Godzilla onesie - faded green, complete with a spiky tail that dragged on the pavement. Charms, her blue-tongued skink, was perched on her head like a very scaly, very plushie, very opinionated hat.
Zara stared at the sign for a full forty-three seconds. She counted, because she always counted and felt something twitch behind her eye.
"Raccoon City," Zara announced. "That's where the tournament sent us, Charms."
She looked at "Home of Umbrella."
Charms hissed. "I know! But maybe it's giant," she said. "Like a communal umbrella. A town umbrella. Everyone shelters under it when it rains." She looked at the smoke rising from three different parts of the city. "Probably not using it right now though."
She looked back at Raccoon City.
"Why raccoon," she said. "Was the umbrella for raccoons?" she tried. "Like, somebody saw a raccoon getting rained on and felt bad about it, and they made it a little umbrella, and the raccoon was so grateful that they named the whole city-" She stopped.
Charms made a very small sound.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. I'm letting it go."
She did not let it go. She stood there for another four seconds thinking about it.
"I just think," she said finally, to nobody, to the sign, to the concept of municipal naming conventions, "that if you're going to be Home of Umbrella, you should probably also be Home of Something That Explains The Raccoons. For context."
She fussed. "And the sign's crooked."
The lizard flicked his tongue at the sign. Then at Zara. Then at the sign again.
"Yes we're in a hurry," Zara retorted. "But I have to fix it."
Her left hand dropped the white grocery bag. She hopped the guardrail, stomped through knee-high dead grass, and grabbed the sign post with both hands. She heaved. It groaned. She heaved harder. The metal shrieked, gave two inches, then settled into a new position that was, by her estimate, much easier to look at.
"Better," she decided. From inside the city, something rumbled. Several somethings, actually. This sign wasn't the only thing she was going to fix tonight.
She pulled a crumpled, hand-drawn tournament map from her onesie pocket. It had been given to her three days ago by - huh? Why can't she remember. Well whoever or whatever they are, she remembered them saying "good luck finding your team" in a tone that actually meant "good riddance, you rude little absolute goblin."
The map had a red X on it. The red X was, as far as she could tell, on top of Raccoon City, which was - she squinted at the map, then at the skyline of smoke - currently on fire in multiple places.
"Okay. They're here somewhere." She tucked the map away. "Probably hiding. Tournament jitters. I get it. I'd hide too, if I'd never met me. After I find my team, I want to find that umbrella," she said, with total sincerity. "Just to see it. And also I want to find the raccoons. To understand."
Charms made a sound that was not s hiss and not quite a sigh, but occupied a special space between the two that he reserved exclusively for Zara's plans.
"You're not being helpful," she told him. Charms did not respond. He was a lizard.
She walked past the sign.
Chapter 2: Explorations
The first thing she noticed was the smell. Like gasoline mixed with rot and wet fur. Mothra would hate this place. But Hedora would love it. The sudden pang in her chest told her she missed her family, and she really missed her mom. (Her mom would be angry that Zara took her place in the tournament. But she'll understand once Zara gets her wish.)
"Okay, that's blarkbeep," she said, pulling her hood down further and staring at the mess. "Totally schwum." That's space talk for gross. She paused at the corner of what used to be a pharmacy. No food inside, just a bunch of red and green herbs. (Vegetables. Yuck!) The windows were smashed. Something like a person missing its lower half was dragging itself across the intersection.
Zara watched it for a moment. The street was an absolute disaster zone - overturned cars, corpses, broken glass, newspapers, random bullet clips everywhere!. An entire fire hydrant was gushing water into the gutter. A bunch of crows were eating a dead dog.
Zara nodded slowly, the way someone nods when they're absorbing a lot of information and deciding to deal with it one item at a time.
"My teammates," she said, "are going to think I did this if I let them find this place looking like this."
She spent the next hour tidying.
Not all of it - she wasn't a miracle worker - but she found a broom in an overturned shop (she ate a slightly-squashed protein bar she also found there, and half a bag of chips, and a candy bar, and some crackers, and a jar of peanut butter that she just ate with her fingers) and she swept the main street intersection into something approaching presentable. She turned off the fire hydrants and then dumped all the corpses into a dumpster. Fortunately, somehow had come by and shot most of them already.
She stood back and assessed. Better. Definitely better.
She found a piece of cardboard and pulled out her purple marker. She made a sign that said:
HEY TEAMMATES - I WAS HERE. WENT TO EXPLORE. - Z then as an added precaution. I DIDN'T MAKE THIS MESS. I AM CLEANING IT. HELP YOURSELF TO SOME CHIPS.
She propped it against the pharmacy wall, weighed down with a chunk of rubble so it wouldn't blow away. Behind the sign, she placed half a bag of chips.
She found a second piece of cardboard and made an arrow sign pointing down the main road and wrote:
I WENT THIS WAY - Z
Charms watched all of this from her shoulder with an aura of laziness.
"Good first impression," Zara decided.
She went to find food.
Chapter 3: Umbrella
The laboratory was underground, accessed through a parking garage that Zara had entered because she thought it might have a vending machine. She was always hungry.
She heard voices - crisp, corporate, slightly ominous - and did what any sensible monster would do: she crouched behind a concrete pillar and listened.
"...containment breach on sublevel four is secured. The T-virus propagation has exceeded all-"
"Sir, the board wants a full report by morning-"
"The board," a third voice said, the kind of voice that wore expensive shoes and had never apologized for anything, "can wait. We're so close-"
Zara crept closer.
The Umbrella people were in white lab coats and black uniforms, clustered around a bank of monitors. The screens showed the city - her city, the one she'd just tidied - in various states of chaos. There were maps. There were graphs. There was a doctor in the corner doing something with a very large syringe, poking it into a stitched up corpse.
She looked at the monitors. She looked at the maps. She thought about all the dead people she passed on the way here, and the shambling things in the streets, and the newspaper headlines.
"Oh," she said, very quietly, to Charms. "Oh, they made the zombie people."
Charms flicked his tongue.
"That's so rude," she whispered. She didn't know any of the zombies, but she was certain they didn't choose to be like that. Just like she didn't choose to be a kaiju. They had lives. Family. Friends. Charms prodded her wet cheek with his tail and made a small noise. "And they call me a monster." She would do something about them once she finds her teammates.
She spent the next twenty minutes crouched in the shadows taking notes in a small notebook she kept in her onesie pocket for tournament strategy purposes. Her notes read:
Umbrella Corps = made the virus (RUDE)
T-virus = turns ppl into zombies
Sublevel 4 = bad, but maybe bounty?
Tall scary man in coat keeps saying "I'm so close" - suspect he is the villain
There is no food down here
Check the cafeteria???
She found the cafeteria. It had been abandoned mid-meal. She ate three bread rolls, a bowl of soup that was cold but fine (it had dead flies in it), and an entire plate of what she thought were potatoes. Charms ate some bugs he found under the table with smug satisfaction. She probably should have left after the cafeteria. That would have been the smart thing. Get the notes, get the food, get out. Instead she lingered, because there was a corridor she hadn't checked yet and it had a promising-looking door at the end of it, and in Zara's experience promising-looking doors usually led to either very useful things or very interesting things, and either way it seemed worth investigating.
The signed said server room. The door had a keypad and a light.
She stared at the keypad. The keypad stared back.
"Okay," she whispered to Charms. "What do we know about evil corporations."
Charms said nothing.
"They're lazy," she decided. "Evil and lazy. It's always something obvious." She tried 1234.
Red light.
She tried 4321.
The light flashed green.
"HA," she said, at full volume, and then immediately clapped both hands over her mouth.
Nothing happened. The corridor stayed quiet.
Was it really that easy? She exhaled. Pushed the door open with one finger, very slowly, very carefully, leaning in to peek-
The alarm was not quiet.
It was, in fact, extraordinarily loud - a full-facility shriek that bounced off every concrete wall in the sublevel - and it was accompanied by red lighting that snapped on and made everything look extremely disorienting. She heard rushed footsteps behind her.
"Oh, come on," Zara said.
Charms gripped her shoulder very tightly.
She ran.
Chapter 4: Heroes
On the third day she noticed she wasn't the only loner in the city. There were other people sneaking through Raccoon City. Other people, all operating independently, with the energy of someone who was convinced they were the main character and had no idea there was a girl in a dinosaur costume eating their way through the city.
She found the first one in a parking garage on the second day: a pretty woman in a red dress who moved like she was angry at everyone and kept muttering into a radio about the virus.
Zara followed her for a while, purely for entertainment.
The woman in red was a great shot and also, Zara noticed, absolutely zero awareness of being tailed.
At one point Zara was literally four feet behind her eating crackers - crunch crunch crunch - and the woman didn't turn around once. She found that at specific angles they can't see her at all. It was as if they were restricted by some sort of camera. They also paused every time they entered a new room.
"Weirdos," Zara whispered, dusting off crumbs off her onesie.
She left a sign at the parking garage:
TEAMMATE CHECK-IN POINT 2. STILL NOT FOUND YOU. THINGS ARE HAPPENING. COME FIND ME. - Z.
She found the second person, a man who looked like a cop, who was also sneaking around and also did not notice her. She followed him for an afternoon while he made his way through what remained of the police station. She tidied the lobby while he was in the evidence room. She found a donut on one of the desks and ate it. She watched from the vents as the cop-man encountered an Umbrella researcher and engaged in a deeply tense conversation. In the middle of their conversation the man, for no reason at all, did a backflip.
Zara found it impressive. She'll remember that for the tournament. She had her notebook out and wrote:
Do a cool backflip to avoid enemy attacks.
Her teammates are going to be so impressed.
Chapter 5: The Big Roar
She was, she had decided, going to find her teammates without transforming.
This was a matter of principle.
The tournament rules didn't say she had to find them in human form, but Zara had decided, somewhere between the pharmacy and the Umbrella cafeteria, that she was going to handle this whole situation as a normal person.
She didn't need to transform.
She was fine. Although it did make navigating through zombies harder. (The zombie dogs were horrible and had taken a chunk off her onesie's tail.)
Charms gave her a concerned look. She told him he was projecting.
On the fifth day, she set up a proper welcome area.
It was in the central plaza - she'd chosen it strategically, visible from multiple entry points, cleared of debris, with her signs creating a trail system throughout the surrounding blocks. She'd found some battery-powered lanterns in a camping supply shop and arranged them nicely, alongside a radio playing tunes. She'd located a mostly-intact bench and dragged it into position. She'd found a tarp in a hardware store and rigged it overhead in case of rain, because presentation matters. And in front of it all, a giant banner that said:
WELCOME TEAMMATES! LET'S WIN TOGETHER!
She stood back and looked at it. It looked genuinely welcoming. There was even a stack of non-perishable food she'd curated for teammates: canned beans, crackers, three chocolate bars, soup packets, a jar of mixed nuts that she had only eaten some of.
"Okay," she said, with deep satisfaction, hands on hips, tail dragging on the clean-swept plaza stones. "Okay. This is a good first impression."
Charms settled on her shoulder and looked at the plaza and looked at her. He nodded in approval and she grinned brightly.
Then he heard a zombie moan somewhere in the distance.
"They're not coming here," she said. "This is a nice area."
They came to the nice area.
Of course they came to the nice area - it had lanterns - and they came in numbers, shambling out of three different side streets simultaneously like the universe had decided that Zara had been too comfortable for too long.
She counted them.
She counted more of them.
She sighed with her entire body.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. We're going to handle this calmly." She rolled her sleeves up. "I've watched those hero people deal with these guys for four days. I know how this works. You just-" She dodged a lunging zombie with a backflip that was, frankly, pretty good. "-you stay calm and-" She grabbed a lantern and held it up as a deterrent, which did not work. "-you use your environment and-"
There were a lot of them.
There were really, really a lot of them.
And they were getting in!
One zombie knocked over a lantern. Another stumbled directly into the food stack. A third walked through the carefully arranged sign pointing toward the teammate check-in points and Zara watched the cardboard crumple under its feet and something in her went very, very quiet.
"That," she said, "was my gorram sign."
Then she heard it. The helicopters.
Not the distant, incidental kind she'd been ignoring for four days. These were more direct, searchlights cutting hard white beams across the plaza, and beneath the rotors she could hear something else - boots and thunderous marching. Umbrella soldiers poured in from the east end of the plaza in full tactical gear, and they weren't alone. Ahead of them, herded forward like livestock, came things that used to be people but had been made into something worse. Bigger. The heads were smooth and pale as boiled eggs, the mouths stretched wide around teeth that were way too sharp and far too large. They moved with horrible, lurching purpose - not wandering like the regular zombies, but directed, funneled toward her by the soldiers behind them like weapons being aimed.
"Ta ma de!" she growled. That was a space word. A bad space word. Her mom would've scolded her.
Zara backed up until she hit an overturned table and crouched behind it. She made herself small.
"Okay what do I do?" Charms just shrugged.
Then the tank rolled around the corner.
It was a very large tank.And on top of it, coat whipping in the rotor wash from the helicopters above, stood the tall man with the expensive shoes. The one from the monitoring room. The "I'm so close" man. He had a radio in one hand and an expression that suggested he had been waiting a very long time to stand dramatically on top of a tank, and was savoring it.
"WE HAVE YOU SURROUNDED! COME OUT NOW!" His voice boomed.
"..."
She stayed quiet. Maybe they'll go away?
He said something into the radio. The bald-headed things lurched forward faster.
The helicopters swung around and opened fire - not at the zombies, at her, at the plaza, at everything, chunks of cobblestone erupting around the overturned table as Zara pressed herself flat and covered her head with both arms and Charms made a noise she had never heard him make before.
"Okay," she said, and her voice came out strange and far away, because something was happening in her chest that had nothing to do with the helicopters.
She'd seen this before.
Not here. Not Raccoon City. A different city, a different sky. She remembered looking up at buildings and finding them small. She remembered the specific sensation of a city under her feet. They were trampling. It was a rampage. Kong was smashing. She remembered her mom beside her, vast and cosmic and terrible and laughing, saying: Come on, little star, show them what you can do...
Zara pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes.
She didn't want to do this again. She never wanted to do this again.
The table she was hiding behind shuddered as something massive slammed into it from the other side - one of the big ones, the bald-headed things, and she could hear it, and she could hear the soldiers shouting coordinates to the helicopters, and she could hear the tank still rolling, unhurried and inevitable, and she could hear the regular zombies still swarming from the other three streets and she thought, with great clarity:
They really did ruin the welcome area.
She looked at Charms. He was tucked against her collarbone, which was where he went when things were very serious, and he looked back at her with his ancient black beady eyes and he was, she realized, completely unbothered. He had always known. He had always just been waiting for her to catch up.
She took a breath.
"I just want it noted," she said, to Charms, to Raccoon City, to the universe, to her mom somewhere out there, "that I was handling it. I cleaned the whole plaza. I made signs. This is completely excessive and I want that on the record."
The table exploded.
Zara was already moving.
She walked, three steps into the open center of the plaza, into the searchlights, into the absolute convergence of soldiers and helicopters and zombies and one very dramatic man on a tank, bullets whizzed passed her head, some bounced off her scales, and as she looked up at the sky, she let go.
The transformation took less than a second.
The light came first - something punched out of her like a detonation, crystal-violet energy and deep space-cold. The crystalline structures erupted from her shoulders and spine like a crown of mountains, and she rose, and rose, and rose, and Raccoon City, which had survived a great many things in the past week, now had something in its plaza that had come from considerably further away than a laboratory.
The helicopters scattered.
The soldiers stopped marching.
Even the zombies stumbled.
Space Godzilla looked down at the plaza. At the ruined lanterns. At the trampled signs. At the scattered food stack. At the overturned bench. At the cobblestones cracked by helicopter fire.
She looked at the man on the tank.
The man on the tank did not move, because he was the kind of man who believed that staying still looked powerful. But his hand had tightened on the radio.
"Sir," his assistant stammered. "Should we-"
"Get me everything we have on that!" he yelled. "Everything."
"...y-yes, sir!"
"FIRE!!"
She took a breath that pulled the air from half a city block.
She opened her massive maw. The crystal structures along her spine blazed white.
Destruction.