Nemesis - By S. D. Perry Page 0,3

angrily, aware that she wanted to believe that more than anything. No one would listen - not the home office, not Chief Irons, not the press. If they'd listened, if they'd believed...

Strange, that all of it had happened only six weeks ago; it felt like years. The city officials and the local papers had enjoyed a field day with the S.T.A.R.S.'s reputation - six dead, the rest babbling fantastic stories about a secret laboratory, about monsters and zombies and an Umbrella conspiracy. They had been suspended and ridiculed, but worst of all, nothing had been done to prevent the spread of the virus. She and the others had only been able to hope that the destruction of the spill site had put an end to the immediate danger. In the weeks following, so much had happened. They'd uncovered the truth about the S.T.A.R.S., that Umbrella - technically, White Umbrella, the division in charge of bioweapons research - was either bribing or blackmailing key members nationally in order to con-tinue their research unimpeded. They'd learned that several of Raccoon City's council members were on the Umbrella payroll, and that Umbrella probably had more than one research facility experimenting with man-made diseases. Their search for information about Trent, the stranger who'd contacted her before the dis-astrous mission as "a friend to the S.T.A.R.S.," had turned up nothing, but they'd come up with some ex-tremely interesting background stuff on Chief Irons: it seemed that the chief had been in hot water at one point about a possible rape, and that Umbrella knew about it and had helped him get his position anyway. Perhaps most difficult of all, their team had been forced to split up, to make hard decisions about what needed to be done and about their own responsibilities to the truth. Jill smiled faintly; the one thing she could feel good about in all of this was that at least her friends had made it out. Rebecca Chambers had joined up with an-other small group of S.T.A.R.S. dissidents who were checking out rumors of other Umbrella laboratories. Brad Vickers, true to his cowardly nature, had skipped town to avoid Umbrella's wrath. Chris Redfield was al-ready in Europe, scoping out the company's headquar-ters and waiting for Barry Burton and Rebecca's team to join him... and for Jill, who was going to wrap up her investigation of Umbrella's local offices before hooking up with the others. Except five days ago, something terrible had hap-pened in Raccoon. It was still happening, unfolding like some poisonous flower, and the only hope now was to wait for someone outside to take notice. When the first few cases had been reported, no one had connected them with the S.T.A.R.S. stories about the Spencer estate. Several people had been attacked in the late spring and early summer - surely the work of some deranged killer, after all; the RPD would catch him in no time. It wasn't until the Raccoon Police De-partment had put up roadblocks on Umbrella orders, three days earlier, that people had started paying atten-tion. Jill didn't know how they were managing to keep people out of the city, but they were - nothing shipped in, no mail service, and the outside lines were cut. Citi-zens trying to leave town were turned back, told noth-ing about why. It all seemed so surreal now, those first hours after Jill had found out about the attacks, about the block-ades. She'd gone to the RPD building to see Chief Irons, but he had refused to talk to her. Jill had known that some of the cops would listen, that not everyone was as blind or corrupt as Irons - but even with the bizarre nature of the assaults they'd witnessed, they hadn't been ready to accept the truth. And who could blame them? "Listen up, officers -

- Umbrella, the company that's responsible for building up our fair city, has been experimenting with a de-signer virus in their own backyard. They've been breeding and growing unnatural creatures in secret laboratories, then injecting them with something that makes them incredibly strong and extremely violent. When humans are exposed to this stuff, they become zombies, for lack of a better term. Flesh-eating, mind-less, decaying-on-the-hoof zombies, who feel no pain and try to eat other people. They're not really dead, but they're pretty close. So, let's work together, okay? Let's go out there and start mowing down unarmed cit-izens in the streets, your friends and