Chapter 1 : Wrong Body, Right War
The ceiling was wrong.
I knew this before my eyes fully opened, before my brain caught up with my body. The water stain above my bed—the one shaped like a boot print—wasn't there. Instead, white plaster stretched flat and featureless. My breath caught. The air tasted different. Stale. Industrial.
I tried to sit up. My arms moved wrong. Too heavy. Too strong. The muscles responded faster than expected, and I nearly threw myself off the mattress.
Not my bed. Not my room. Not my body.
My hands—these hands—pressed against the sheets. Calloused differently. The knuckles sat at unfamiliar angles. A small scar ran across the left thumb that I'd never earned.
I swung my legs over the side. The floor was cold concrete, not the worn carpet of my apartment in Virginia. Bare feet slapped against it as I lurched toward what looked like a bathroom.
The mirror hung crooked above a rust-stained sink. I didn't want to look. My stomach told me something was very, very wrong.
I looked anyway.
A stranger stared back. Late twenties. Dark brown hair, military short. Jaw harder than mine had been. Small scar above the left eyebrow—a white line cutting through dark stubble. The eyes were brown, but they sat differently in the skull than my eyes had. More alert. More dangerous.
Dog tags clinked against my chest when I moved. I grabbed them with shaking fingers.
MARCUS COLE HARRISON UMBRELLA SECURITY DIVISION BLOOD TYPE: O NEG
My legs gave out. I caught myself on the sink, fingers white against porcelain.
Marcus Cole Harrison. Umbrella. Security Division.
Umbrella.
The word detonated in my skull like a flashbang. Resident Evil. The Hive. The T-Virus. Raccoon City.
This was impossible. I remembered dying. The rappelling exercise at Fort Benning. The anchor point failing. The harness snapping free. Eight stories of empty air and the ground rushing up like a fist.
Then nothing.
Then this.
I splashed water on my face. Cold and real. The stranger in the mirror mimicked my movements perfectly.
Thomas Harrison had been an Army Ranger. Eight years active duty. Two tours in Afghanistan, one in Iraq. He'd survived firefights, IEDs, and a knife fight with a Taliban commander in a mud hut outside Kandahar. He'd died because a goddamn carabiner clip corroded in the Georgia humidity.
Now he was someone else. Someone named Marcus.
I gripped the sink until my knuckles ached. The body responded differently than my old one—more power, less effort. This form had been trained hard. Or maybe something else was at work.
Focus. Assess. Adapt.
That was Ranger doctrine. That was how you survived.
I left the bathroom and took stock of the apartment. Small. Efficient. The furniture looked like it came from a catalog marketed to single military men with no taste. Gun safe in the corner—the good kind, biometric lock. A calendar hung on the wall by the kitchenette.
September 22, 2002.
My stomach dropped through the floor.
September 22nd meant September 23rd was tomorrow. Tomorrow was when the Hive incident began. Tomorrow was when the Red Queen activated her nerve gas defense system and killed everyone in the underground research facility. Tomorrow was when the T-Virus escaped and started the end of the world.
I had twenty-four hours.
The apartment searched quickly. Umbrella credentials in a wallet on the nightstand—Marcus Harrison, Security Contractor, Clearance Level 4. That meant Hive access. Three hundred and forty dollars in cash. A Beretta M9 in the gun safe with two full magazines. Tactical knife with a four-inch blade. Keys to this apartment and what looked like a Ford sedan.
I dressed in clothes from the closet. They fit like they'd been tailored for this body—because they had been. Black tactical pants. Gray t-shirt. Boots that had been broken in by someone else's feet.
The Beretta went into a hip holster. The knife clipped to my belt. The credentials went in my pocket along with the cash and keys.
In the kitchenette, I found instant coffee. The kind that came in packets and tasted like regret. I made three cups and drank them staring out the grimy window.
Raccoon City spread out below. Ordinary. Mundane. Office buildings and traffic lights and people walking to work who had no idea what was about to happen. Somewhere beneath those streets, the Hive waited. Somewhere down there, a team of Umbrella commandos was preparing to answer a distress call that would get most of them killed.
I knew their names. Rain Ocampo. J.D. Salinas. Commander One. Chad Kaplan. Alice Abernathy, though she wouldn't remember who she was. Matt Addison, pretending to be someone he wasn't.
I knew what was coming. The zombies. The Lickers. The Red Queen's laser corridor. The timer. The nerve gas antidote. The escape that left most of them dead.
The coffee burned my tongue. Good. The pain was grounding.
What happened to the real Marcus Harrison?
The thought came unbidden. This body had belonged to someone. A man with a job and a life and probably people who cared about him. Now he was gone and I was wearing his skin like a suit.
No answers presented themselves. The apartment offered no clues about Marcus's personality beyond "military background" and "works for evil corporation." No photos. No letters. No evidence he'd been anything more than a soldier following orders.
Maybe that made this easier. Maybe it didn't matter.
I tested the body. Fifty pushups came without effort. I barely felt winded. In my old form, fifty would have been work—not hard work, but work. This was nothing. The muscles responded faster, recovered quicker.
Maybe Marcus had been an exceptional athlete. Maybe Umbrella had done something to their security contractors. Maybe the universe had given me a gift along with this impossible second chance.
Or maybe I was losing my mind and none of this was real.
I checked the Beretta. Clean. Oiled. Well-maintained. Whoever Marcus had been, he'd taken care of his weapons. I racked the slide, chambered a round, and reset the safety.
Twenty-four hours.
That was my window. Twenty-four hours to gather supplies, verify that this reality matched the movies I'd watched, and figure out how to survive an apocalypse that killed millions.
The sensible thing would be to run. Steal Marcus's car, drive as far as possible from Raccoon City, and never look back.
But I remembered the Umbrella commandos. Rain with her dark humor and her refusal to quit. One with his calculated professionalism. Kaplan, terrified but still doing his job. They walked into the Hive not knowing what waited.
They died.
Most of them died, anyway.
I holstered the Beretta and grabbed my keys.
I'd survived two combat deployments in a body that wasn't enhanced by anything except training and luck. This body was better. Faster. Stronger. And I knew what was coming.
The T-Virus had taken Raccoon City by surprise. It had taken the world by surprise. But it wouldn't surprise me.
I opened the door to Marcus Harrison's apartment for the last time. The sun was rising over a doomed city, and I had work to do.
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