Resident Evil. Retribution

THE OFFICIAL MOVIE NOVELIZATION

SCREENPLAY BY PAUL W. S. ANDERSON BASED ON CAPCOM’S VIDEOGAME RESIDENT EVIL NOVELIZATION BY JOHN SHIRLEY

TITAN BOOKS

RESIDENT EVIL: RETRIBUTION

Print edition ISBN: 9781781163153

E-book edition ISBN: 9781781163160

Published by Titan Books A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd 144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition September 2012

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Resident Evil: Retribution © 2012 Constantin Film International GmbH and Davis Films/Impact Pictures (RE5) Inc.

Motion Picture Artwork © 2012 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States.

DEDICATED TO FANS OF RESIDENT EVIL, IN ALL ITS MANIFESTATIONS

Author’s Note

Prologue

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Acknowledgments

About the Author

This novel is based on Mr. Paul W.S. Anderson’s script for
Resident Evil: Retribution,
which I had a lot of fun reading and adapting. Everything in the screenplay is dramatized in the novelization. All the dialogue in the script is found in the novel, too. Other dialogue, of course, has been invented for the novel. A novel requires legroom, and stretching out, and there are scenes and characters and even a subplot not found in the film—but they are all
inspired
by the screenplay; by settings, ideas, events and character-types found in the screenplay. And the film’s continuity is very much the overriding structure of this novelization.

So far as I’m aware, nothing in the novel contradicts the film.

And now… we have a dark journey to undertake together…

What has gone before.

The mansion, in the Arklay Mountains…

She wakes in the void—in a psychological void, with her memory a blank. She only knows she is naked, lying on the floor of a shower.

And she is alone.

She finds clothing, puts it on, and explores the dimly lit mansion—where no one seems to live. She feels as if she should
know
this place… but remembers nothing. It is as if she sees everything from
outside
of herself. Even her name is remote.

She sees a picture of herself and a man, framed on a table.
Is this my husband?

Continuing to search, suddenly, she finds someone. Or he finds her. He’s investigating the Umbrella Corporation, she learns, while pretending to work for it.…

Then the soldiers burst in, faces seeming inhuman in gas masks. They’re with the Corporation, they announce—the world’s most powerful and advanced pharmaceutical multinational. They take her at gunpoint, and she begins to learn the truth. She had been an important security operative for Umbrella, but something strange and ugly has gone down—a mass murder in the
Hive.

Something to which Alice may be relevant.

Whoever she may be.

The Hive is some distance away; a vast, underground facility located far below the nearest large town, Raccoon City. Almost an insectoid creation, in its design, it’s like a giant wasp nest in the ground but made of steel and plastic and fiberglass and watched over with security cameras. The monarch of this hive is the Red Queen: a computer with total control.

A high-tech underground rail links the mansion to the Hive, and it’s on this train that Alice meets Spence. As dazed as she is, he’s at once familiar and unfamiliar to her.

They reach the Hive, where an automatic laser defense system activates, operated by the Hive’s artificial intelligence, its central computer. Without warning it slices and dices most of the commandos— one of them ends up
cubed.
It occurs too quickly for them even to scream. Death, easy and instantaneous.

Death is the new master of the Hive.

It was the Red Queen who released the gas that suppressed Alice’s memories, to eliminate a potential threat without killing her.
Never destroy a valuable asset—one that might be used again.
But confined with a precious few survivors—Matt, Spence, and Rain—Alice slowly begins to know her past… her own part in bringing about the horror.

Someone has deliberately released the Umbrella Corporation’s experimental
T-virus
into the air vents. The Red Queen sealed off the Hive, and used its control over the underground facility’s systems to kill those who would become infected. But it couldn’t stop the virus from spreading amongst the survivors…

The T-virus kills—and then it resurrects.
The dead have risen
in the Hive; the dead walk again.

Zombies?
But old-school zombies are low-grade horrors compared to these Undead. These creatures are unspeakably vicious, at times capable of moving quickly, of forming deadly mandibles, of configuring into overgrown living-dead variants. The lab-developed T-virus has created the new Undead, hungry for human flesh—and capable of being genetically modified into something even worse.

The Red Queen reveals this, and more.

With her few surviving companions, Alice escapes and shuts down the Red Queen. In doing so, they unknowingly release the Undead into the Hive’s echoing corridors. A sickly young woman has become a rapacious monster, and one of the team, Rain, is bitten by her—and infected with the T-virus. Alice admired Rain for her courage, her individuality. But the virus eats its way into her brain, and all that’s left is for that brain to be destroyed.

A bullet to the brain, a hatchet, a knife: destroy the brain, cut the brainstem, it’s the only way to stop the Undead. Shooting them in the heart doesn’t work. It’s not easy to kill what has already died.

There
is
a cure for the virus, they learn, if it can be administered soon enough. Alice and Matt find it… And Spence, the man who’d once been Alice’s lover, steals the cure. It’s worth billions, and Spence was the one who released the virus in the Hive—to create panic, cover his tracks, and destroy those who would stop him.

But there are other black experiments in the Hive, including a virus-borne variant—a crawling, powerful monster with swollen brain tissue where its eyes should be, and a tongue that is a weapon in itself. Released by the Red Queen to finish her dirty work,
the Licker
lurks, stalks, and strikes.

And that’s what takes revenge on Spence. After he leaves the rest to die, the Licker corners him, “tears him a new one”… and then it comes after Alice and her friends.

They escape, tricking the creature into destruction, only to run headlong into Umbrella operatives. Matt is taken away for something called the Nemesis Project. And Alice? Her they strap to a table, in another facility. For another experiment entirely.

But there is still the Hive, swarming with the Undead. Another Umbrella biohazard is sent into these stumbling, ravenous creatures, only to be overwhelmed—trampled and ripped, recruited… to become more of the Undead. And the team left the door open.

The Undead are released into Raccoon City, where with tooth and claw, they reproduce through an orgy of sheer violence.

Somehow Alice wakes in the lab, emerging from her sedative-laden sleep. Someone has awakened her, given her a chance. She finds a way out of the locked laboratory, makes her way to the street…

Where she finds a world ravaged by the apocalypse.

Raccoon City seems empty but for the Undead. Alice sees nothing but wreckage and fire everywhere. But she knows there must be other survivors out there.

She finds a shotgun in a police car, loads it and strikes off, determined to locate them.

Alice never once falters, for she knows what she is capable of doing. A lab experiment has given her incredible physical powers, agility, to enhance her already impressive skills.

Yet she is captured by Umbrella, and faced with a monster called Nemesis, a hideous super soldier both repellent, and pitiful. To her horror she recognizes what was once her fellow survivor and closest companion. This monster is Matt. He lives just long enough to help her escape.

Horror follows upon horror: cities disfigured, a demented world roamed by the ceaselessly hungry Undead; ruins where flocks of crows feed upon the carcasses and mutate into flying horrors, where only a few survivors huddle in endless terror, behind locked doors. All seems hopeless.

Until one day, a radio transmission calls out to survivors, telling them that something called Arcadia is free from infection.
Arcadia offers food and water. Make your way to Arcadia…

Alice discovers some of these survivors, led by the heroic Claire Redfield, and tells them about Arcadia. But the Umbrella Corporation is watching, like a malignant sky god, from its own spy satellite. Umbrella’s researchers try to modify the Undead, to make them controllable slaves, and it tests them as controlled violence sent against Alice and her new friends.

Only a handful survive—including the inspiring Claire, the woman who leads this small cadre of humans across the American Southwest, in search of a haven.

But they’re running out of food, and supplies.

Alice helps them steal an Umbrella chopper so they can fly to Alaska, and Arcadia. But she stays behind—to get at the full truth about the Umbrella Corporation.

With the Earth in the throes of apocalypse, there is no cash except as trash—or as ammunition, since Alice uses coins instead of conventional shot in her shotgun shells. The Umbrella Corporation now deals in another kind of acquisition, the kind that Genghis Khan coveted: goods, property, and people. Umbrella’s troopers simply
take
whatever the corporate overlords need. It acquires goods, and instead of employees, it has mind-controlled slaves.

Not so different from the old days of corporate culture, at that.

Alice’s journey lays open more dark revelations— including an army of
herself,
for hundreds of adult-sized copies of Alice have been created. She liberates the clones and—with them—makes her way to Tokyo, where the worldwide plague has spiraled madly out of control. There Alice penetrates a huge Umbrella facility run by the man named Wesker. Scores of “Alices,” each of them fast, powerful, and heavily armed, slaughter Umbrella’s henchmen, showing no mercy.

But Wesker himself is transformed into something more than human. He’s fast, too fast… and he injects her with a serum that suppresses her powers.

Suddenly… she is just a human being again. And the facility is destroyed, along with the clones.

Alice finds Claire in Alaska, and then locates a few others, including Claire’s brother Chris, sequestered in a besieged Los Angeles prison. They fight their way to Arcadia—which turns out to be a ship.

Arcadia
is something else, as well—it’s a trap. The Umbrella Corporation needs healthy specimens for its experiments. So a friendly radio transmission lures them from around the world, to the gigantic cargo ship.

ARCADIA…

There, Alice and friends free the human cargo from suspended animation, take control of the ship, and manage to destroy Wesker. The world is still thronged with the living dead, but for the moment, the
Arcadia
is free.

Until the black ops commandos of the Umbrella Corporation approach, flying in a flock of black choppers, descending like rapacious, unliving crows…