Resident Evil: The Mad Dog Of Edonia by EliasVane at Inkitt

001 - The Mad Dog Wakes

The room was not large, but it had found a way to look smaller.

Unfamiliar files lay piled across a filthy desk. A porn site glowed dimly on the screen of an aging laptop. Beer cans rolled underfoot, cigarette butts carpeted the floor, and the whole place smelled like stale smoke, cheap alcohol, and a man who had stopped caring whether morning came.

Adrian Voss stepped over the mess in his boots and followed a memory that did not belong to him into the bathroom.

The face in the mirror was his, not merely similar but identical. Familiar bone structure. Familiar eyes. But the hair had been cut shorter, the expression had gone colder, and the bare torso in the mirror belonged to a man who had survived ugly work. He was lean and hard without being bulky. The scars were worse. Some came from knives. Others from bullets.

He left the bathroom and picked up one of the documents scattered across the desk. It was written in English, filled with information about an armed escort detail.

"Right," he muttered. "Five days from now. Provide armed support for an outside security team escorting high-value cargo through the city to a handoff point in the outer district."

The information surfaced too quickly, supplied by memories that had no right being in his head.

Adrian dropped the file back onto the desk and pressed his fingers against his temple. Yesterday, he had finished a shift at a grill joint, gone home, showered, and collapsed into bed. Then he woke up here, on a peeling sofa, in a room that looked like a crime scene with rent due, wearing another man's body and carrying another man's memories.

"So I got dropped into another world."

His own calm bothered him more than the words did.

He should have been panicking. In his previous life, he had been a dropout scraping by at the bottom of the ladder, the kind of man who worked, slept, and tried not to think too hard about next month. He was not supposed to have this much composure after waking up in someone else's body.

He touched his face.

Was this the other Voss bleeding into him? The man's instincts, his memories, maybe even his personality?

The memories confirmed it: the former owner of this body had also been named Adrian Voss. A drunk, a gambler, a regular at every brothel willing to take his money, and a bastard with more blood on his hands than shame in his heart.

The land under his boots was the Republic of Edonia, an Eastern European country with a political situation held together by rust, threats, and bad luck. The town was called Loplers. Calling it a town felt generous. Loplers and the districts around it were carved up between government troops, local factions, gangs, and men with enough guns to call themselves whatever they wanted.

Somehow, the whole mess had settled into a balance.

A rotten one, but still a balance.

In the world he remembered, Eastern Europe had at least limped toward stability. Here, the map had gone wrong somewhere. He turned the problem over in his head until the largest point of divergence surfaced.

Raccoon City.

In September 1998, a biohazard outbreak had engulfed the American city of Raccoon City on an unprecedented scale. To contain it, the U.S. government authorized a sterilization strike in early October, wiping the city and everything inside it off the map.

The corporation responsible for the disaster, Umbrella Corporation, collapsed in the years that followed.

Umbrella was gone. Umbrella's legacy was not.

Its research, weapons, samples, and monsters had leaked into the black market, sketching new maps of hell across the planet.

He let out a humorless laugh.

"You've got to be kidding me. I woke up in Resident Evil?"

Of all the vicious jokes the universe could have played, this one had taste. Resident Evil had been one of his favorite series before he woke up here. He knew the games. He knew the story. He knew too many names that should never be real.

Apparently, God or whatever passed for one had decided he should try the live-action version.

In his old life, he had been a working stiff and a media addict. Games, shows, whatever filled the hours after work. He had dropped out, argued with his father, and been shoved out the door with a few thousand in cash and one final piece of parental wisdom:

"If you're not going to school, I'm not feeding you."

That had been that.

He had rented a place, made it through a brutal first month by sheer stubbornness, and eventually built something that could almost be called a life.

Then he had woken up here.

Never mind the monsters in Resident Evil. Never mind the heroes who fought those monsters and somehow hit even harder. His current problem was already enough to make his head hurt. This was not the quiet, ordinary world he had come from. This was Edonia, and Loplers was a den of armed predators.

Honest men did not last here.

Unfortunately, the previous Adrian Voss had not been an honest man. He had spent whatever he earned, drank whatever he could buy, and lived like tomorrow was a rumor. Which meant the man currently standing in his filthy office had almost nothing in reserve.

The only thing that could solve his immediate money problem was the convoy job five days from now.

His phone buzzed in his pocket.

Adrian pulled it out on reflex.

One message waited on the screen.

$100,000 has been deposited. The remaining balance will be paid upon completion.

Well.

That explained a few things.

Either the old Voss had known the advance was coming and spent every last cent on purpose, or he had simply been the sort of lunatic who trusted future blood money to solve present stupidity.

He could not guess what a dead man had been thinking.

He shrugged out of habit and looked around the room that barely qualified as an office.

"Filthy bastard."

He spent the whole afternoon cleaning.

Cigarette butts and beer cans went into trash bags. Files were stacked neatly on the corner of the desk. He closed the porn tabs, put on music, stripped the bed, threw the sheets and dirty clothes into the washing machine, and finally turned his attention to the storage room.

When he opened the door, even the emotional numbness that came with the other man's memories could not stop him from drawing a slow breath.

Boxes of ammunition. Random gear. A mismatched row of handguns in varying states of repair. Two AR-15s hanging on the wall.

His heart gave a single hard thud.

These were not airsoft toys hidden in a closet. They were real.

He took down one of the rifles. The body had been painted white, though years of scratches and wear had turned the finish into something older and meaner. Red letters had been painted along the side.

God has mercy. I don't.

For the first time that day, he wondered what kind of life this world's version of him had actually lived.

He cleaned every weapon, checked the gear, put it all back in order, and mopped the storage room floor. When he was done, he pulled back the curtains and opened the windows. Cold air rushed inside, cutting through smoke and rot like a blade.

"Now that," Adrian said, stepping outside bare-chested and stretching his shoulders, "feels better."

The money had arrived. The office was clean. Night had settled in. His stomach reminded him that food was no longer optional.

Time to get something to eat.

Loplers at night was special in the same way a loaded gun on a church altar was special.

People walked the streets openly armed. Women worked the corners beneath bad neon, dressed to be seen and paid to be touched. Police officers lounged in the alleys beside gangsters, laughing like the difference between law and crime had been misplaced years ago.

'Absurd.'

Then the other man's memories corrected him.

'No. Not absurd.'

'Normal.'

"Voss!"

A woman on the curb called out to him with a bright, practiced smile.

"Coming by tonight, sweetheart? I've got a few new toys ready. You'd love them."

Therese licked her lips, eyes gleaming under the streetlight.

Adrian remembered her name fast enough to keep his face under control. He lifted a hand and waved her off.

"Not tonight. I'm broke."

"Aw, shame." Therese sighed like he had wounded her personally. "And here I was hoping you'd be the first to try the new one. Come see me when you have money again, all right?"

Her fingers traced lightly down her cleavage before she blew him a kiss.

Adrian opened his mouth to answer, but a bald man with tattoos crawling up his neck moved in beside her. He pulled Therese against him with one thick arm and laughed.

"What's so good about that mutt? I'm the one paying tonight."

Therese laughed along, then looked back at Adrian.

"Sorry, Voss. I've got a customer. Another time, okay?"

She winked once more and disappeared into the building with the bald man.

In his old world, he had been a virgin.

The man who had owned this body before him had apparently paid his way through most of this street.

The contradiction left him with a deeply uncomfortable feeling. He had memories that said he knew those women. His own mind insisted he did not. It was a nasty little paradox, somewhere between experience and secondhand evidence.

Schrödinger's body count.

"Forget it."

He cleared the thought out of his head and let the body's memory guide him toward the restaurant the previous Voss had frequented.

The owner greeted him the moment he walked in.

"Well, look who it is. Voss. Been a while. Jamber said you were dead."

Adrian searched the borrowed memories, found Jamber, and sat down at a table. His finger drummed against the tabletop as he ordered with the easy familiarity of the body's old habits.

"A large steak. Cold beer. And tell Jamber if he keeps running his mouth, I'll rip his tongue out."

The owner snorted.

A little while later, a huge plate of steak landed in front of him. A big mug of beer followed. Then came the price.

"Put it on my tab," Adrian said. "The bank's closed. I'll bring cash tomorrow."

"Shit." The owner jabbed a thumb toward the shotgun hanging behind the counter. "Only you get to say that. Anybody else tries it, I'd feed him buckshot."

Adrian took a long drink of cold beer.

"Thanks."

The owner, already turning away, stopped so abruptly that Adrian noticed.

He looked back with wide eyes.

Adrian shifted under the stare.

"What?"

"Nothing." The owner studied him for another second. "You just seem... different today. Good mood?"

"No. Your imagination."

He cut off a small piece of steak and put it in his mouth.

His expression changed at once.

"Ha!" The owner grinned. "Extra fruit glaze, just how you like it. Pretty good, right?"

He forced his taste buds not to riot, set down his knife and fork, and stared at the glossy, brightly colored steak as if it might explain itself.