“What?” Elliot froze, not reacting for a moment.
“When?
He was saying before that he was getting ready to leave Raccoon City.
He didn’t make it in time?” Elliot’s eyes widened.
Hearing a familiar name and news of his death so suddenly, he found it hard to believe.
Elliot and Brad had been friends, but later Brad Vickers passed the selection process and joined S.T.A.R.S., so the two of them had far fewer chances to see each other during work hours.
Even so, they had still kept in touch in private.
Elliot and Brad would occasionally go out for drinks together and complain about the things that were weighing on them.
Later, after the Mansion Incident, the S.T.A.R.S.
team was ostracized by Raccoon Police Department Chief Brian Irons.
Most people inside the station avoided interacting with the surviving members of S.T.A.R.S.
too much, wanting to stay out of trouble.
Even so, Elliot had kept in private contact with Brad and given him quite a bit of support, including passing along certain information from inside the station.
At the time, Elliot had remained skeptical about the undead Brad talked about.
He did not really believe such things could exist.
But once the Raccoon City biohazard broke out, Elliot finally understood just how much help all those things he had treated like campfire stories had actually been.
Just one line Brad had once told him:
“You have to go for the head.
Only if you smash their heads properly will they stay down.”
That one sentence had let Elliot survive the initial outbreak and save David when he was cornered by zombies.
So compared to venting his anger on David, Elliot felt Brad’s death was far more important.
“I don’t know the exact details myself.
By the time I saw Brad again, he was already one of them.” Marvin spoke in a low voice.
In truth, during those few minutes when Luo Guang had been fixing the antenna and then returning to Marvin, Marvin himself had also run into something unexpected.
The camera at the front entrance to the main hall had captured a figure in a yellow warning vest, covered in blood and barely able to stand, staggering toward the main doors.
Marvin did not know how the man had gotten past the outer wall, but if he had managed it, then he was probably still alive.
With that thought, Marvin unlocked the front doors and stepped outside.
The moment he did, he saw the man’s face clearly.
It was Brad Vickers, his former colleague, the former S.T.A.R.S.
member.
Brad’s face was bluish, his eyes lifeless, and when he saw Marvin, there was not the slightest emotional response in them.
Marvin had seen that look before.
He frowned and decisively drew his gun, aiming it at Brad.
Just like the question Luo Guang had asked not long after meeting him:
When faced with a former colleague, a friend, could Marvin pull the trigger without hesitation?
When he was alone, Marvin had thought about that question too, constantly trying to steel himself for it.
“I’m…
not…
a coward…” Brad muttered in broken fragments, a few halting words escaping his mouth.
Marvin only caught the last few words.
“Brad!?
You still—” Could Brad still be conscious?
Marvin thought in shock.
But before he could finish, Brad reacted to Marvin’s voice and reached both hands toward him.
Clack.
Marvin heard something hit the ground.
Then he also heard the growling sound coming from Brad’s mouth.
Bang.
A gunshot rang out.
A wisp of smoke slowly rose from the barrel of the silver Python revolver in Marvin’s hand, like Brad’s soul drifting on its way to heaven.
…
While Marvin had pulled Elliot away from David and was off to one side telling him about Brad—on the other side, David, still badly shaken after seeing the Licker and nearly getting punched in the face by Elliot, was staring nervously at the two men talking in low voices in the distance.
Luo Guang noticed David’s hands were still trembling, as well as the MP5 he had set aside.
Luo Guang walked toward him without lowering his footsteps.
David was like a startled bird now.
Any sudden, unusual movement might scare him half to death.
Hearing Luo Guang’s footsteps, David looked up at him.
There was not the slightest anger in Luo Guang’s eyes.
To say he was not angry at all would be a lie.
But the thing that angered Luo Guang was not that David had failed to save Elliot.
It was that while running, David had blocked Luo Guang’s line of fire and forced him back into the reception room, which kept him from helping Elliot immediately.
Being afraid of death was human nature.
And after snapping out of the overconfidence brought on by becoming stronger through evolution, Luo Guang understood that he, too, feared death.
He no longer had even the slightest desire to recklessly charge a Licker head-on.
Lin had objectively dragged him down earlier too, true, but there was one thing she had done right: she had not screamed and attracted more zombies—or something far worse than zombies.
Besides, Luo Guang and Lin had been little more than strangers who happened to cross paths.
Elliot and David, on the other hand, had been together ever since the outbreak began in Raccoon City.
Even before the outbreak, they had been coworkers—maybe even friends.
Making mistakes was only human.
What mattered to Luo Guang was how someone handled them afterward.
If Lin had been a police officer, then Luo Guang was certain she would have been far more competent than the David in front of him.
Unlike the system, which judged whether someone was dead weight based on physical ability, Luo Guang cared far more about what kind of person that someone was.
That was something he had learned in the place called the workplace before he transmigrated here.
Aside from acting skills, there had been another important skill: reading people.
“What is it?” David asked in a trembling voice.
Standing in front of him without saying anything, staring at him like that, Luo Guang made David so nervous that he felt like prey under the eyes of a predator.
Luo Guang bent down, brought his face closer, and said in a flat voice:
“Nothing.”
While David’s attention was fixed on his handsome face, Luo Guang simply reached down and took the fully loaded MP5 lying beside him.
“Wait—”
Only after Luo Guang had stepped back did David realize the MP5 was already in Luo Guang’s hands.
Under the system’s guidance, Luo Guang was already quickly familiarizing himself with the MP5’s reload method and fire selector.
He removed the magazine, confirmed it was full, then turned his head toward David after hearing him speak and asked:
“Is there a problem?
You’re not using it anyway.”
Perhaps it was because Luo Guang’s air of absolute determination toward the new weapon was too overwhelming, or perhaps David was simply too shaken to resist, but in the end David still shrank back and replied timidly:
“No, go ahead.”
“Thanks.”
Luo Guang shoved the magazine back into the MP5, then walked toward Marvin and Elliot, intending to tell them not to talk for so long and to keep working on the rescue situation.
“Marvin—”
But as he approached, he vaguely heard a familiar name.
“What were you saying about Brad?”
Since plenty of people in foreign countries shared the same first names, Luo Guang was not immediately sure whether they were talking about the Brad from S.T.A.R.S.
“Brad Vickers.
A member of S.T.A.R.S.,” Marvin explained.
“Oh.
The Brad from S.T.A.R.S.
What happened to him?” As he spoke, Luo Guang pulled the Glock 17 out from inside his black jacket, waved it a little, then slid it back in.
“This gun was a gift from him, actually.”
“Luo…
you knew Brad Vickers?” Marvin asked in some surprise.
If Luo had known an ordinary patrol cop, that would have been one thing.
But S.T.A.R.S.
members did not exactly make regular appearances around the station.
And Luo Guang had just said that Brad had given him the Glock 17.
Giving someone a gun was not exactly common.
The most normal scenario would be something like parents giving a gun to their child after they came of age.
And clearly, Luo and Brad did not look like they shared any blood relation.
“Yeah.”
Luo Guang then told Marvin and Elliot how he had met Jill, gone with her to the safe house Brad had set up, and later gotten separated from Brad.
“I see.”
Marvin nodded.
So Luo Guang really did know two members of S.T.A.R.S.
In that case, a lot of the information Luo Guang had about zombies and other monsters probably came from Brad and Jill.
“Luo, you said Brad stayed behind alone to cover your escape against a terrifying monster that could shrug off small-caliber weapons?” Elliot asked after Luo Guang finished.
There was something about that that felt odd to him.
“Yes.” Luo Guang’s tone was certain.
“But from what I knew of Brad…
he wasn’t exactly a brave man.” Since Luo Guang had just saved his life, Elliot phrased his doubt as tactfully as he could.
It was true that Brad had gone out into the Arklay Mountains and managed to bring Jill and the other survivors back alive.
But there had always been rumors that at the very beginning, Brad had abandoned his teammates and flown back to Raccoon City alone.
On top of that, when the two of them drank together later, Brad himself had mentioned that incident once.
“Being afraid of death is normal.” Luo Guang understood what Elliot meant.
His eyes also flicked toward David, who had crept over closer, and his voice grew slightly louder as he said bluntly, “But that was in the past.”
Come to think of it, after reuniting with Jill, the two of them had barely had time to talk. This story is hosted at g.com.
He had never even asked her what had happened with Brad.
He had not expected that by the time he heard about Brad again, the man would already be dead.
Luo Guang spoke as though recalling it, though in truth he was carefully thinking through his words.
After a while, he said:
“Jill ran back too, to face that monster together with Brad.
But by the time I saw Jill again later, Brad was already gone.
I asked about it, and from what I gathered, that monster had separated them.”
With Jill’s “testimony” backing it up, plus the fact that Luo Guang was Elliot’s savior and had helped Marvin fix the antenna, his words carried plenty of weight and trust with both of them.
“Brad really had changed.
He really did become brave,” Elliot murmured.
Thinking back to the look on Brad’s face and the way he had acted after deciding to investigate Umbrella, Elliot had definitely felt that something about Brad had changed.
He just had not realized it had changed that much.
“In that case…
Luo, when you came back from the west wing earlier, didn’t you ask me what had happened outside?” Marvin did not even wait for Luo Guang to say yes before continuing.
“I ran into Brad.”
“So that ‘saying goodbye’ you mentioned earlier…” The moment Marvin said that, Luo Guang understood.
Marvin briefly explained what had happened with Brad, then said in a low voice, “So now I’m planning to bury him.
“I know it’s not exactly appropriate at a time like this, and Brad had already been dismissed from the force.
But I still think he deserves to be buried like the other officers we laid to rest.”
At the beginning of the outbreak, many of the fallen officers’ bodies had been brought back and buried on the spot.
Later, as the situation became more dangerous, that stopped being possible.
But Brad was lying right there under the awning outside the front entrance, and the area was relatively safe, which was why Marvin had started thinking this way.
“I agree with Marvin,” Elliot cut in.
Before, when Marvin had pulled Elliot aside, it had not just been to calm him down.
He had also intended to ask Elliot’s opinion on this matter.
As for David—Marvin had seen exactly what David had done on the monitors.
There was no way Marvin wasn’t angry.
He needed a little time to cool down himself.
“Yeah.
Then let’s get moving.
We can leave the grave-digging to David too.
Consider it punishment for how he acted just now.”
When Luo Guang said that, his real intention was to take this chance to ease the tension between David and the others a little.
He was not doing it for David’s sake.
It was simply that this was far more practical than trying to smooth things over with words and tell Elliot and Marvin not to be angry at David anymore.
Elliot and Marvin exchanged a look, then both nodded.
The two of them accepted Luo Guang’s suggestion.
“David, come with us.”
Marvin held slightly more authority within the R.P.D.
than either Elliot or David, so it was best for the order to come from him.
Seeing that Elliot had calmed down and was no longer trying to punch him, David answered with a meek “Got it,” then followed Elliot and Marvin out through the main entrance.
Luo Guang brought up the rear.
First, he confirmed that the door would not automatically lock itself if it closed.
Then he found some heavy objects and wedged the door open.
Only after doing that did he follow after Marvin and the others.
Elliot and Marvin each took one side of Brad’s body and carried him toward a patch of grass.
David went ahead first to the place where the groundskeeper’s tools were kept, grabbed a shovel, and then started digging at the spot Marvin indicated.
He did so without a single word of complaint.
Because David knew that escaping Raccoon City safely on his own was basically impossible.
That was why he was now doing his best to curry favor with the furious Elliot and with Marvin, who outranked him.
Walking behind the others, Luo Guang noticed a small brown notebook lying on the ground.
It was still raining, and the pavement was dark gray-black, so Marvin and the others had not spotted it.
Luo Guang picked it up and looked.
It was Brad’s notebook.
He only skimmed it for two seconds before immediately walking back under the awning and stowing it inside his waterproof backpack.
“Luo,” Marvin called.
By then, Marvin had laid Brad’s body down and covered him with that yellow warning vest he used to like so much.
“What is it?” Luo Guang walked over.
“None of us really follow any religion,” Elliot said, “but we were thinking of holding a little ceremony for Brad all the same.
Since we all knew him, each of us should say a few words for him.”
“Mm.” Luo Guang gave a small nod.
He did not go back under the awning.
Instead, he stood there in the drizzle, watching David shovel one load of dirt after another under the gaze of three living men and one dead one.
It’s not really mandatory—I’ll eventually upload all the chapters here—but it helps a lot in supporting me and allows me to dedicate more time to it.