Handcuffs, Hunters, and First Aid Spray (Resident Evil/Supernatural)

[FireWalkWithMe99]

SAM

The scanner had been squawking for two days before Dad finally called it.

Sam had lost count of how many times he'd heard some variation of the same report crackle out of the speakers — hikers gone missing off marked trails, a ranger station that stopped answering its radio for six hours before someone picked up and swore up and down that it had just been a "generator issue." Livestock torn open outside Raccoon City past the county line, in a way the local paper described as 'consistent with animal predation' and then, three sentences later, admitted didn't match any animal native to the area. That was usually the tell with these sorts of things.

"Werewolf," Dean had said, like it was already decided, chewing on a piece of beef jerky he'd been rationing since Ohio. "Bet you a twenty."

"You don't have a twenty," Sam said. "You have four dollars and a Denny's coupon."

Dean reached over and flicked the corner of the textbook still open on Sam's lap. "You gonna cite your sources when you're wrong?"

"When I'm wrong?" Sam didn't look up from the page. "I've got a pretty solid case for skinwalker built already, if you want to hear it."

"Nobody wants to hear it, Sammy. This isn't your debate club."

"It's called being prepared."

Dean jerked a thumb at the duffel behind the seat like he was introducing it. "Some of us prepare by making sure the sawed-off's actually sawed off."

Dad hadn't laughed at all the whole drive, which was impressive given the sense of humor Dad and his brother often shared, much to his personal dismay. Sam had learned a long time ago that when John Winchester's humor was nowhere to be found, it meant, "Don't talk to me right now; I'm planning."

Sam had plans; he had a chem final in six days. He had a chem final in less than a week. Instead of studying, he was watching pine trees blur past the impala window in a part of Colorado he was pretty sure didn't have a name on most maps, because his father had decided a string of vague news stories added up to something.

Honestly, it probably did, and that in itself was troubling. Dad was usually right about these hunches of his, and here they were in the middle of who the hell knows where.

The mountains came up out of the dark suddenly in a way that surely would've spooked him a bit a few years prior. The Ranges of Arklay; Sam had seen the name maybe twice in his life before this week, once on a hunting map Dad kept folded into the journal, once in a newspaper clipping about a pharmaceutical company that had bought up half the forest for "environmental studies," which was the kind of phrase that meant nothing in their profession, but everything to journalists trying to get a juicy scoop as Alyssa Ashcroft's various articles on the topic seemed to indicate with her frequent mention of Umbrella included in almost any story about missing people along the Arklay Mountains..

They lost the signs of civilization an hour after they lost the road, and they began their hike, abandoning the car where the ranges got more dense.

"There," Dean said, and Sam followed his brother's line of sight out towards a section where the trees became a bit less dense, expecting nothing but a deer, or some crows maybe.

It wasn't a deer.

It was a train. Stopped dead on tracks that, as far as Sam's map was concerned, didn't exist out here at all — no station marked, or track lines drawn, just forest and then, impossibly, five or six cars sitting silent under the moonlit sky. Some lights on inside, others clearly out of commission. No sound he could hear, not people asking for help or even screaming. Sam had seen enough of the hunting world now to know that silence was more often an omen than a stroke of luck.

Dad's steps died under him at the site.

"That's not on any map," Sam said.

"I know," Dad said.

"That's not a werewolf thing. Werewolves don't stop trains… at least one couldn't." Sam stopped. Because Dad was already reaching for the shotgun strapped to his back, and that was always the end of the conversation, whether or not Sam had actually finished making his point.

---

John Winchester — Journal Entry

July 23rd, 1998

Colorado lead was a dead end; Rockford boy turned up alive, half-starved, nothing supernatural about it but bad luck and a bad ankle. Redirected south into the Arklay range off three overlapping reports: missing hikers (4, over 6 wks), livestock mutilation consistent w/ predator attack but no tracks, and a ranger station gone quiet for the better part of a day. Pattern smells like wendigo, maybe a werewolf in isolation, winter kills bleeding into summer ones, victims never fully accounted for. Considered skinwalker, ruled out for now.

Found something else first.

A private train, stopped dead on an unmapped track, no station listing, but plenty of lights still on. Boys spotted it before I did. No visible damage to the cars I can see from the clearing. No movement. Going to need to get closer before I can call it anything.

Whatever's out here, I don't like that there are train tracks nobody put on a map.

Dean's steady. Sam's asking the right questions, which is its own kind of trouble tonight; he's not wrong that this doesn't fit the werewolf or even a wendigo pattern cleanly.

Going in at first light unless something forces our hand sooner.

---

JOHN

First light didn't get the chance to matter.

They'd made camp above the tree line, close enough to watch the train without being anything more than shapes in the dark themselves. John liked to watch things longer than needed; he had a lifetime of learning what happened to men who didn't. So he easily settled in for a cold, uneventful wait when sound came in above the ridge. A helicopter, running dark, no lights until it was nearly on top of the clearing. Smoke was coming out around where the engine would be. John didn't need his mechanic knowledge to tell him that wasn't good.

It came down hard and fast in a spot maybe two hundred yards off the last car, rotor wash flattening the brush, kicking up a storm of dead pines that took a good while to settle. Whoever was flying it knew what they were doing: an ugly, combat-style landing, though the way the team came off it read less and less like assault or SWAT. No breach formation. A young, short brunette woman up front carrying what looked like a med kit instead of the point position he was used to from his days in Nam.

Several of them, moving toward the train at a jog. John caught fragments of chatter carried through the clearing: distress call, checking for survivors— it was a group expecting to find helpless people in need, not something evil waiting.

"Rescue op," Dean muttered, flat on his stomach in the brush beside John, binoculars up. "Guess somebody upstairs noticed the train too."

Then one of them stopped short near the tracks, crouched, came up holding something that had been lying in the dirt, blown loose, maybe from one of the open windows further down the train cars? A folder. John could tell whatever was contained in the folder wasn't good: shoulders stalling in place, as their hand came up to wave the other members of the team over.

The wind gave him pieces after that. The brunette woman's voice, reading off the folder in the clipped cadence barely concealing her youth. "Prisoner Transport, Billy…Coen. Court-martialed, did he escape custody?" A man's voice cutting in over her, harder. "Base, this is Bravo Team One. Be advised, we've got engine failure, forced touchdown three miles southwest of intended location, negative on the civilian search. We're on the ground near a stalled train, unidentified, no record of tracks on any line we've got. Situation's changed — this isn't strictly search and rescue anymore. Possible armed fugitive on site, name of Billy Coen. Requesting instruction and support from Alpha team, over."

"They didn't come here for that," Sam said quietly, from John's other side. His youngest was already three steps past the words. Nothing slipped past Sam's ears these days. He liked it less and less each time he was reminded.

The pilot who just sent the distress call quickly peeled off from the team going into the train entrance briefly with the woman, then quickly splitting off, heading towards the head of the train where the engine would no doubt be.

With the quiet returning to the clearing and the boys seeming no worse for wear, John ran the events again in his head. A helicopter engine suddenly fried dead, a train stalled cold on tracks with no record of ever existing. Two different kinds of complex machines, both quit within shouting distance of each other in the same stretch of woods. He didn't believe in coincidences anymore hadn't really since he'd learned what actually went bump in the night.

Spirit maybe? A Witch, working something bigger than usual? Or worse, the kind of worse that put Mary on the ceiling and left her there burning. His hands closed into fists at his sides, knuckles going white, and he made himself breathe until they didn't.

But the EMF meter clipped to his belt sat dead quiet. No pull, or a single beep even; nothing, granted they were still a good stretch off from the train itself, close enough to watch, far enough to not alert anyone or anything. He and the boys were still back at their makeshift camp several meters back from the clearing where the treeline thickened up a little again, cover enough to watch the whole scene without being part of it.

And John sure as hell wasn't walking out into the open in front of a search-and-rescue crew and whatever brass was backing them, not till he knew if this was their kind of hunt or just some very bad luck for everybody involved. But the pieces kept stacking up wrong in ways that felt less like accident and more like the family business.

The pilot came back in his sights again, seemingly done with whatever he was trying to accomplish at the front of the train… now holding post outside around the only door ajar on the train, third car down near the center of the locomotive. Pistol going back to the tried-and-true position. The young man, whoever he was, seemed to have good instincts, no doubt going under a fair bit of training given how quickly he settled into place.

But something in the man's resolve had changed since the radio call. Whatever had been holding him steady back there had gone thin. He kept glancing off into the treeline to his left, pistol drifting an inch that direction and back.

Then suddenly a chaotic series of barks came from that very direction as dogs came rushing out of the treeline like something had poured them. All looked like some offshoot of a Doberman, but he couldn't say.

John didn't get a clean read on them at first; they had a strange motion. They moved fast as you'd expect of most dogs, but off in a way; it made his eyes want to correct for it and fail. The pilot saw them in time, at least. Planted his feet, brought his pistol up, and put three rounds into the lead dog at a range that should have ended the conversation right there.

Yet, it didn't even break stride.

"That's not-" Dean's binoculars had gone still. "Dad, that's three rounds. Center mass."

The pilot backed up a step, fired again — two more, into the same dog this time, close enough now that John could see it flinch with each hit and keep coming anyway.

A second dog broke off wide, flanking, and the man had to swing his body to track it, which cost him the half-second he needed to finish the first one off. He emptied what sounded like the rest of a mag into the pair of them six rounds, seven now- backing toward the train car behind him with nowhere left to retreat to.

None of it slowed them down near enough to matter.


John was moving before he'd finished deciding to, shotgun coming off his shoulder, boots already eating the distance down the slope. He wasn't close enough. He knew he wasn't before his first shot even left the barrel.

The lead dog hit the pilot low, took him off his feet, and by the time John's first slug caught it in the side, the thing had already gotten a mouthful of his forearm and wrenched its head once breaking off more skin. The man screamed raggedly — and John's second shot finally took the dog off him entirely, throwing it sideways into the dirt where it didn't get back up.

That was when the scream came from inside the train.

A Different voice, much higher-pitched, cut off far too fast. The silence after was worse than the sound itself; something in it dropped through him.

"Dean, cover the tree line." John was already moving toward the fallen guard. "Sam, with me."

---

The man's eyes were still open when they reached him, which John hadn't expected, shamed as he was to admit. Forearm torn open where the dreaded hounds had gotten him, blood coming faster than it should've for a wound that size, like whatever was in that bite wasn't just dog saliva. Sam's hands went straight to it anyway, pressure, keep pressure, the same drilled reflex John had put into both his boys before either of them was old enough to have a say in it. John went to wrap the man's wound with ample amounts of gauze in his pack.

The man's eyes found Sam's, unfocused, then sharpened for one hard second like he was fighting his way up through something to get a sentence out.

"Get—" A wet cough. "Get Rebecca. She's our medic. She'll know what…" His hand closed around Sam's wrist, tightly like he was trying to hold onto the world that was leaving his mind. "Please. She's—"

He didn't finish it. John couldn't tell if the pain had taken the rest of the sentence, or if some part of the man already had settled.

John met Sam's eyes over the man's writhing form, and for once there was no plan drumming itself out in the back of his skull.

Something's still in there doing the killing, and it only ever is solved one way.

"We're going in," John said, and didn't wait to see if either of his sons seemed reluctant.

He had two names now, out of everyone on that train. A medic and a fugitive. A stalled train, a broken helicopter, supernaturally resilient fighter dogs… just what was going on here.

---

John — Voicemail to Bobby Singer

[Beep.]

"Bobby. John. It's — hell, I don't even know what time it is out here; it's late. Look, I'm up in the Arklay range, Colorado, southern… fuck. No, wait, that's not right; more specifically it's the mountains ten miles northwest outside a big city here, Raccoon City. Don't ask me who names these places.

"Anyway. Came up on a wendigo possible werewolf lead; might still be, I guess, but im thinking not. Everything about this screams something else, maybe a Strong Spirit, a Witch, or something worse. There's a train stopped out here in the middle of nowhere, no station, not on any map I've got, and I was still trying to figure out how to read that when a chopper broke down practically on top of us. Search and rescue team, looked like not long after one of the men got attacked by uncharacteristically resilient dogs, like moving bullet sponges. Definitely something about this is our brand of weird, as to what we'll have to see."

"I've got the boys with me. Sam's got that look on him I hate. Dean wants to go in guns first, which normally I'd tell him that's the plan, but something about this one's got my neck tingling. "

"If you don't hear from me by... say Sunday, start making calls. Not the usual kind. I mean it, Bobby. Something about this seems weird; I think it might be something older than what we're used to, might even be something like whatever took Mary from me."

"...Also, if you talk to Sam's school, tell 'em he's got the flu or something. Boy's got a test he's going to miss, and he'll never let me hear the end of it.

"Alright. That's it. Talk soon."

[End of message.]

---

A.N. Hope people enjoy this idea. It came to me when I first started my playthrough of Zero about a week ago, and I finally finished the game the other day, and the ideas I had somehow fit even better now. I have made a few changes here, like: for example edward does not fall through a window but instead gets attacked outside near one of the entrance doors. I hope I captured John and a younger Sam and Dean decently. It's a little tough with young Dean since i'd say we get young Sam flashbacks a bit more often, but I tried my best. Still would appreciate feedback on both the premise in general and also the characterization of everyone. Comments encouraged and welcome.

 

[Xodarap]

A.N. Hope people enjoy this idea. It came to me when I first started my playthrough of Zero about a week ago, and I finally finished the game the other day, and the ideas I had somehow fit even better now. I have made a few changes here, like: for example edward does not fall through a window but instead gets attacked outside near one of the entrance doors. I hope I captured John and a younger Sam and Dean decently. It's a little tough with young Dean since i'd say we get young Sam flashbacks a bit more often, but I tried my best. Still would appreciate feedback on both the premise in general and also the characterization of everyone. Comments encouraged and welcome.

Click to shrink...

Black text doesn't show up on black background


Nice to see it ported here after the first chapter on SB a week ago

 

[FireWalkWithMe99]

Black text doesn't show up on black background


Nice to see it ported here after the first chapter on SB a week ago

Click to shrink...

Yea wanted to post chapter 2 on sb and ao3 but not quite done fixing it up.

 

[Sliverhero]

Nice to see that John and the boys are seeing how sometimes humans are the biggest monsters

 

[FireWalkWithMe99]

JOHN


The pilot's arm was wrapped tight enough to slow the bleeding, but not enough to stop him from being pale by the time he'd stopped shaking. John had seen men go into shock during the war plenty more after to and didn't love what he was seeing. The man's eyes kept losing focus and snapping back like he was fighting to stay tethered to something as his breaths grew frantic.


"Hey." John gave his good shoulder a light shake. "What's your name?"


It took a second for the man even to comprehend the words. "…Edward." His voice came out thin, like he'd had to go looking for it. "Edward Dewey."


"Edward." John kept his tone level, deliberately ordinary, the kind of voice you used to keep someone talking and thinking instead of drifting. "You can't feel your fingers, can you?"


"I can feel plenty," Edward muttered, which wasn't an answer. He was already trying to push himself upright. "I need to check the engine again. That thing's stalled out here on tracks that arn't even registered; it looked like it shouldn't even have been able to run at all based on the state the internal combustion engine was in, command's gonna want to know why and how before they send anyone else in."


John should have told him to sit down and stay down. Instead he got a shoulder under the man's good arm and helped him up, because some instinct further down than sense told him a man with a job to focus on was a man less likely to notice he was dying. "Sam. Dean."


Both boys turned.


"That scream came from inside, only a car or two down. Somethings still alive in there and somebody else probably isn't. I want you two moving toward it quietly; if you see anything wrong you call it before you engage. Are we clear?" He didn't wait for the nod. "Edward and I are going to go take a look at the front of this thing. Shout if you need us."


Dean was already checking the shotgun's load for the third time in as many minutes. "You sure about splitting up?"


"No," John said honestly. "But that girl who came in here is no doubt the medic and Edward here definitely needs the attention, and if there's other people that need saving, better we cover more ground doing it." He met Dean's eyes, then Sam's, and didn't say the rest of what he was thinking — that Dean better protect his brother, and that he didn't want whatever had turned three center-mass rounds into a mild annoyance for a dog wasn't the kind of thing he wanted his boys walking toward blind, but blind was what they had. "Go."


They went.

---

A few minutes went by when John finally managed to get Edward to the outside engine housing near the front of the train, Edward had his good side braced against the engine housing, flashlight shaking only slightly as he swept it over a panel of plugs that looked like they had been cooked from the inside out having a strange black and silver liquid over them — wiring melted to slag in places, one whole panel covered in the stuff.


John watched him work and felt the old, familiar weight settle into his chest. He'd learned a long time ago not to bet on anybody making it out of a bad night. Not since he'd watched the surest thing he ever had burn with the ceiling. Safe in his eyes was just a word people who didn't know any better used. He didn't expect Edward to see morning if he was honest with himself.


"It's completely shot," he said, and there was something akin to annoyance in his tone, as if the diagnosis offended him personally. "Fried straight through. Strange the power's even on at all… by rights this whole system should be dead." He shook his head slowly. "Only thing that'd get this running again at this point is a miracle."


John didn't know trains. He knew engines though, and ruined wiring told the same story whether it was under a Chevy's hood or bolted into a locomotive, though that strange black substance was another matter. It definitely wasn't oil. He crouched beside Edward, following the beam of the flashlight along the ruined relay.


"Yeah," he said. "That's not coming back on its own." He didn't say anything else, though in John's own experience, when something that should be dead kept running anyway, miracle was rarely the word that ended up fitting.


Edward kept quiet after that. His breathing had gone shallow again, and when John glanced over, the man's eyes had that unfocused sheen back in them, clearly whatever had been keeping him upright and talking was running thin.


It was then John tried his best to get his EMF out from his cargo pocket well still supporting the man who was quickly fading…. John didn't have much hope in life these days, but he did hope that, despite appearances, this Medic, if they even were still among the living, could do something for Edward, at least even if it was just easing his pain. There was something in the man's voice and focus on tasks that made him think of some of the friends he lost back in 71 he hated to see another man die before even getting the chance to be treated.


It was only a mild surprise to John when the EMF flared up as John placed it near that mysterious dark substance that seemed to, at least in some way, destroy the train's engine…


The needle buried itself into the right edge of the meter; the whirring pitch of it cut through the quiet. Beside him, Edward's head snapped up, dragged back from wherever he'd been drifting.


"What the hell is that?" Edward managed, voice thin but present again.


John didn't answer right away, turning the device slightly, watching the needle hold steady rather than fall off. Whatever it was reacting to, it wasn't a fluke.


He was still working out what to tell him when rain started to downpour out of nowhere.

---

SAM


The train's interior swallowed sound in a way that was its own kind of unsettling to Sam. Overhead lights buzzed at varied strengths, some dim, others sickeningly bright, throwing everything into a sick, half-color of sort. Dean led with the old ass shotgun steady, boots quiet on the soft carpet.


The first car was wrecked, but empty some overturned luggage, shredded window curtains, and small blotches that he was pretty sure were blood in various spots. There was a scent he didn't like beyond the iron; there was an unmistakable rot. But it wasn't yet overbearing.


The next car seemed in better shape before Dean clocked the bodies two of them slumped against seats near the middle of the car, heads lolling at angles that made it clear whoever they'd been, they weren't anything now. He held up a fist without breaking stride, a habit drilled in over the past year hunting, and Sam's eyes went where his brother's had. Neither body moved. Whatever had happened to them, it was done happening.


"Dead a while," Dean muttered, more to himself than to Sam, shotgun still tracking the rest of the car out of habit rather than any real expectation. "Definitely different from what got the pilot, though." He didn't look happy about the distinction. Two separate problems were always worse than one.


But then the smell hit sweet and rotten underneath, a scent that made the animal part of Sam's brain want to turn around and not come back. He was still trying to place it when something shifted in the shadow of a distant seat, several rows past the two that weren't getting up.


Dean's shotgun came up on instinct half a beat before Sam's eyes caught up to what he was looking at: a man rising up far too slow and wrong, head lolling at an angle no living neck held, skin gone the color of very old paper with something dark crusted around a wound at his throat that should have killed him outright.


"Dean—" Sam started.


Dean fired first and asked questions never. The thing dropped and didn't get back up, and for one long second neither of them moved, waiting to see if it would prove them wrong the way the dogs had.


It didn't.


"Okay," Dean said, voice tight but steady, already racking the next shell. "Okay. That's new."


They didn't get more time to process it than that. Ahead, past the connecting door, they caught motion, nothing like the thing behind them. A woman with short dark hair, sidearm up, pivoting through the wreckage of the next car. The red cross along her vest was unmistakable. The medic was alive then?

---

REBECCA


The second one dropped with a sound she was going to hear in her sleep for a long time, if she got the chance to sleep again anytime soon.


Rebecca kept her Samurai Edge Pistol trained on it maybe just a little bit longer than necessary, waiting for it to prove her wrong the way the first one had. It didn't move. She let her arms drop maybe two inches, breath coming fast and thin, and pressed the talk button on her walkie with a hand that still was shaking.


"This is Officer Chambers, S.T.A.R.S. Bravo team." She made herself say it properly, the way she'd been trained, even with her pulse going too fast to count.

"Requesting immediate backup, I have encountered… hostiles aboard the train, I— think it may be related to the cannibal case's were…" Static swallowed the rest. Somewhere under the noise, maybe, a fragment of Enrico's voice, gone before she could catch a word of it.


She tried twice more and got nothing usable back. Jaw tight, she let the mic go. Maybe it was the train itself, all that dead metal and whatever was left of its electrical systems interfering. Maybe the forced landing had done something — she'd gone down hard against the chopper's frame when Edward and Enrico were forced to make the sudden lurch to the ground. These military-grade walkie units were built tough, but nothing was built for everything. She'd have better luck once she was back outside, she told herself. She hoped Edward's radio had fared better than hers, because right now she had nothing to report back with, and a report felt like the only familiar thing left.


Which left her too much time, crouched in the corner of the car, to think about the folder page she'd seen an hour ago. Billy Coen. Prisoner transport. A convicted man loose on this train, and when she came across him minutes ago she couldn't do anything other than watch him walk away after taunting her.


Except she looked at the thing she'd just put down, slumped grey-faced over an armrest — a fugitive was starting to feel like the least of anyone's problems tonight.


What happened on this train exactly?


The bodies in the last car had looked days gone, at least sunken, wrong, decay further along than any timeline for this train made sense of. But the one that had grabbed her wrist minutes ago hadn't looked that far gone at all, and she'd have sworn, checking its pulse out of pure reflex, that it had been breathing.


But it was already looking long dead a few minutes after dropping it. She didn't actually know that; she had to keep reminding herself — she wasn't a coroner, and everything about tonight was making her doubt her already scarce training, which definitely never covered anything like this. Maybe it hadn't been dead. Maybe whatever this was didn't leave a body dead at all.


So how does nobody notice a train full of people like this? How does something like this happen and nobody calls it in?


Her mind kept reaching for something to hold onto, and it snagged, absurdly, on her second year of college, a microbiology course that had wandered off-topic near Halloween, her professor grinning like he'd been waiting all semester for an excuse to bring it up. Ophiocordyceps unilateralis. A fungus that colonized ants, hijacked them, walked them somewhere useful to itself before it forced the ant to die on the spot.


Someone in the back had asked in the spirit of the season if something like that could ever reach primates like them. The professor had laughed and said probably not for a very long time, far too many biological walls, before it even could jump to Mammals. She remembered feeling better about that answer than she probably should have, and losing exactly one night's sleep to it anyway.


She was thinking about it again now. It didn't really even fit cleanly; nothing on this train was being walked anywhere on purpose that she could tell, just slow groaning things that looked at least a day dead or worse, seemingly single-mindedly going after anything that wasn't like itself. It had to be a virus or infection of some kind, if not fungal, but then that would leave the question of…how it spread, and if it was infectious at all?


A sound behind her broke the thought forming within.


Rebecca spun sidearm coming up fast, finger already pulling back the safety, and stopped.


It wasn't grey or slow. It also was a fair bit less finely dressed compared to most of the living or dead she came across on this train. Two faces both very clearly alive and well, one slightly shorter and younger-looking than even her, uncomfortably eyeing down a Taurus Model handgun at his hip.


The other taller, with a shotgun half-raised and both hands lifting off it fast at the sight of her weapon.


"Whoa, hey. Easy there." The older one, sandy-haired, had the kind of easy voice built for talking people down from things. His hands stayed up, shotgun pointed at the floor. "Friendly. We're friendly. Rebecca the medic, right?"


She didn't lower the gun. Her hand wasn't steady enough yet to trust it, and everyone else she'd found alert and moving on this train tonight hadn't stayed that way for long. "How—" Her voice cracked, thinner than she wanted it to be. She hated that it did. "Who are you? What are you doing here?"

---

DEAN


"Long story," Dean said, hands still up, not really thinking this woman would shoot him but not wanting to risk it either.


"Short version: we were on a family hunting trip camping up the ridge, then we suddenly heard what sounded like a helicopter getting louder and louder, came down the ridge to check it out."


His eyes finally looked over the woman closer now; he was certain this was Rebecca the medic Edward mentioned. The large red cross along her vest and also her being one of the ones to get out of the chopper during its initial landing made the deduction pretty easy.


Apparently, despite just being a medic, she managed to put down some zombies herself, judging by the two bodies in the middle of the aisle and the smell of burnt gunpowder still fresh. Not bad at all, for someone who clearly hadn't signed up to be an extra in Zombies on the Orient Express.


"You cleared this whole car solo, huh." Dean's mouth tugged up, the shotgun forgotten for half a second in favor of something a lot more like his usual self surfacing at the worst possible time. "I don't know what they're paying you, but it's not enough. I like a woman who can handle herself in a crisis." He said, lifting his eyebrows.


Beside him, Sam made a small, pained sound that wasn't quite a word.


"What?" Dean said, not looking at him.


"Dean. Seriously now?"


"Hey." Dean shrugged, shotgun still angled harmlessly at the floor. "You miss every shot you don't take."


"Is that? Are you serious right now?" Her voice gained an icy tone that didn't fit her face at all.


"You need to turn around and get off this train. Both of you. This isn't— this is a police matter now; this is S.T.A.R.S. jurisdiction, you can't just…" She stopped herself, keeping whatever he was gonna say next to herself


Her eyes cut to Sam again, and something in her expression shifted softer.


"Wait. How old are you?" She looked genuinely thrown. "You look like you're barely out of elementary school. Your dad brought you hunting out here?"


"I'm fifteen," Sam said, flat, in the tone of someone who'd had this exact conversation with strangers more times than Dean cared to count.


"Fifteen." She said it like it made things worse, not better. "Do you two have any idea what's — " She caught herself again, lips pressing thin. "Even with the city trying to keep things quiet, there have been tons of stories and warnings. Missing hikers, cannibalized corpses. People stopped coming out to these mountains months ago. So no, I just don't understand how a father brings his kid hunting out anywhere near Racoon City right now "


"Yeah," Dean said, a bit too dismissively. "We heard some of that too. Didn't really explain the specifics, though, and well about a hundred miles back we had papers claiming Bigfoot roamed the local woods and let's just say we never had a problem with him. What's actually been happening out here that's got everybody so spooked?"


Something flickered across her face — like she wanted to say something. She shook her head instead.


"That's not… I can't get into that right now. I need you both to head back to your father. Tell him what you saw; all of you need to get off this train, let the local police and our team handle the rest. This is what STARS members are trained for." Her voice shook a bit at the end.


When neither Dean nor Sam moved an inch, the woman looked rather indignant, but she seemed to calm herself before speaking again.


"Listen… just let me take it from here. You two and your father need to get out of here"


She was already turning to go when Sam spoke up.


"There's something you should probably know first." He glanced at Dean, then back to her. "One of your team members is hurt pretty bad. Our dad's with him now; that's why we came on the train. The guy was guarding the entrance when he got mauled by a pack of dogs, think he told Dad his name's Edward."


That stopped her cold.


"Edward." The name came out different than anything she'd said so far the trained cadence dropping out of it entirely. "He's, is he— I heard the dogs earlier, but I thought…" She didn't finish it, like she couldn't afford to let the sentence go somewhere bad out loud. "Where. Show me. Now."

---

Sammy moved before Dean had even finished reloading his shotgun, his little brother sliding several half steps sideways until he was between Dean and Rebecca like he wanted to physically protect the girl from another comment. Dean rolled his eyes at the back of his brother's head, but let it go. Fair enough; he'd take the win where he got it later.


They weren't fast. That was one mercy in it. Dragging their feet, giving molasses a run for its money in sheer lack of speed, arms coming up more out of habit than any coordinated reach, and Dean had already clocked a pattern: whatever these things were, they weren't hunting so much as homing, single-minded, toward the nearest warm thing in the room.


Dean and Sam took the two on the left without much hassle. Dean sawed off easily, taking the thing's head off, and Sam not having much more trouble with a couple shots in the chest with his pistol, bringing the thing down flat. Was close enough together that the sound blurred. Rebecca handled the third herself, two rounds, clean from what looked like a pretty unique-looking albeit unfortunately modern pistol.


Silence settled back in after the corpses didn't get back up for round two.


Dean let his shoulders drop, tension bleeding out of them. Okay. This, at least he could work with, zombies that were slow and stupid, was honestly a bit of an easier situation to deal with than some werewolf packs are. Went down a hell of a lot easier with the right aim, and the woman Rebecca clearly wasn't dead weight either, however green and shaky she looked holding the pistol at times. He'd take this train of slow-moving zombies over half the things he'd hunted with his dad the past decade.


What he couldn't do anything with yet was the why.


Dead things getting up and walking was far from new to the family business. That was honestly the most common situation given how many ghosts stick around. Though the zombie was a different matter… Dean himself had never run across anything quite like them; he did recall Uncle Bobby mentioning some cases of the dead being revived and coming back wrong.


Thing was, that usually meant one dead person. Some pissed-off widow or grieving person messing with some ritual they might've not even known would work, or some damned witch did the deed. A whole damned passenger train worth of people seemed like a big leap for any of those situations. Maybe it was a very powerful witch or a whole coven of them?


Dean's stomach dropped a little at the thought; a situation like this being caused by a witch or a group of them meant a shit ton of hex bags. That meant him, Sam, and Dad crawling under God-knew-how-many train seats with dead bodies, ripping up floorboards and cushions. Going on some gross scavenger hunt looking for some bundle of bones and hair, and fuck knows what else.


Why couldn't those damned bitches ever make it easy?


If Dean hated any single thing in this line of work, it was witches. Ghosts, vamps, weres — most of that was involuntary on some level. You get bit, cursed, murdered, and stick around pissed about it; that's not exactly a choice. But witches? Every single one of them looked at normal human life and said nah, I'd rather sell my soul and start hexing my neighbors, like it was a goddamn eye of newt knitting circle.



And he'd never forgive the one who blew up in his face a day after he'd gotten a haircut. Guts everywhere. Ruined the whole look. Who did she even think she was?


"DEAN?"


He blinked, yanked out of his own head by Sam's voice cutting through the car.


"You coming, or what?"


"Yeah, Sammy, I'm coming." He made sure to emphasize Sammy, a mild satisfaction flowing through him when he saw the irritated eye roll from his younger brother as he made his way towards Rebecca.


If a witch really was behind this, working a curse strong enough to raise a whole trainload of dead, she wasn't going to care much about who was armed and who wasn't. People like that went for whoever looked easiest to break first. And out of the four of them, only one didn't know the first thing about salt lines or iron or how to spot a hex bag stitched into a seat cushion.


Rebecca was the one target here who wouldn't see it coming.


She needs to get off this train. He'd sort the rest of it out properly once she was somewhere safe — lay it all out for Dad and Sammy both, work the case the way they were actually built to. For now, all he needed was to get her there in one piece.


"Okay." Rebecca holstered nothing, kept her sidearm low and ready, breathing hard. "Stay close. Both of you." Her eyes caught on Sam a beat longer than they caught on Dean, something softening in her expression clearly being unable to see him as anything but a young kid in a situation he should never have to be in. "You don't leave my side. Understood?"


Dean nodded despite knowing full well if the situation demanded it he'd break his word.


He fell back, keeping himself only a few feet ahead of Sammy and Rebecca, moving sideways through the car aisle to get vision of the back and front and avoid any uncertain surprises as they moved back towards the door they came from.

---

They were most of the way through the next car, Dean counting seat rows out of habit, the distance back toward the outer entrance and Dad being all the closer. When the lighting started to change.


It wasn't much, at first. A shift in the glow reflecting off the windows could've had a number of explanations, but the movement Dean caught in the corner of his vision made him question otherwise.


A thick dark oval shape with a sickly white glisten the length of his forearm, flat against one of the outlook windows outside and clinging there, it looked a bit like a deformed and oversized version of some ugly fish he'd seen, but it definitely wasn't a fish, and something about it made him want to look away…


"The hell is that?"


Then there were a series of plops heard on the glass, and he looked back, and there were more. A dozen about and more flinging themselves onto the outer glass … Wait, they're fucking jumping onto the window? Then more than he could count, crawling into slimy clusters on the outside pane.


Dean decided to ignore it for now, hopefully come back with Dad later, and they continued toward the next door, the whole mass of the things seeming to slide with him — tracking, sliding along the outside of the glass in a rippling mass that seemed to be following them.


"Keep moving." Dean's voice came out lower than he meant it to, shotgun coming up though he didn't have a clean target yet.


Sam's mouth opened, a question clearly forming given that frustrated expression he wore; what is that but Rebecca cut him off before he got a word out.


"Just keep going." Her voice lasted about four words before shakiness crept back into her words eyeing the mass along the window.


"We have to get back to Edward."


They didn't need telling twice. He pushed the pace to a jog, Sam falling into step; there always was the hope maybe the next car's windows won't be so infested.


That hope didn't last long.


One of the ceiling lights above them cracked and dimmed; in the brief darkness that followed, Dean noticed movement above that wasn't there before. Similarly think black shapes slithering above. One seemed to purposely unstick itself from the wall, falling down with a spongy thud in the seat right beside where Sammy was moving.


All three of them broke into a dead run at that.


A cluster of about five surged from beneath a seat near the door out of this car. Near which the dead bodies he and Sam came across earlier started to shake in the throat, mouths beginning to open, Dean already holding up his sawed-off. Bracing for the inevitable rise of the zombie. When suddenly, opposed to getting up, they slumped forward as at least eight of the damned leechy fish things came out of one's mouth, the other one having a few more burst out of its neck, leaving a disgusting, oozy black and white jumble in the exit wound.


"Shit!"


A few of them made a break across the floor fast enough to try latching onto his boot. Dean stomped down hard without breaking stride, felt one give way under his heel with a splatter that even made his stomach turn.


A similar wet splat somewhere behind him told him Rebecca had made the same call. All three of them banked hard for the door, Dean crushing whatever smaller clusters crossed his path on the way, boot coming down ugly each time. But the collective of the things… weren't pursuing directly now, instead converging right in front of their door out of this god-forsaken car. By the time he was close enough, they were already way too densely packed for him to stomp through.


"Dean, they aren't spreading like the other leeches…"


His brother was right; of course they weren't behaving like the ones along the outer glass were and still are, it seems based on the window pane they were by being covered in the things.


They were building up.


And suddenly the EMF scanner clipped at his waist started singing like crazy.


First it was just a pillar, black and glistening and shapeless. Then it started narrowing in places, widening in others, until Dean's eyes started making sense out of its shape.


A torso, arms, a neck… it was a human? Or trying to look like one at least. When the head came into the picture with what felt like more of the idea of a face than the actual thing, his theory was confirmed.



Just what sort of fucked ghost is this thing?



Dean's feet stopped moving before his brain could argue. It stood square in the doorway, blocking the only way out of the car, and he had no idea what it would do to the first person who tried to walk past it. He backed up a step, brought the shotgun up, and fired straight into where its head should count as being.


Nothing. Barely a flinch.

Then someone brushed past his shoulder — Rebecca, sidearm already up, both hands white-knuckled around the grip, unloading round after round into it as she herself kept backing away.

"Both of you, back up," she said, as she kept shakily unloading into the thing.


Little seemed to work, though.


"Everybody back, now, now—" Rebecca's voice cracked but was still sure as she continued unloading, and with another shot from Dean's shotgun it seemed to be effective.


The ghostly leech mass split down the middle, and for a scarce second he hoped maybe they did true damage to the thing, but quickly it began rebuilding its form. Leeches jumped from all over to aid the dreaded thing.


It wore the wrong shape of a person, all the joints in slightly the wrong places, moving in short, jerking pulses like a marionette with half its strings cut right shoulder hitching too high, its head lolling and catching itself, some grotesque parody of a dancer who'd forgotten how their own body worked.



Then a black tendrilled arm came out from the thing stretching out, black wet tendon-rope unspooling three, four times the length any arm had any right to be.


Crossing the two yards separating it from Rebecca like the distance was nothing at all. One length wrapped around her legs. A second, off the same swollen shoulder, closed around her throat.

She didn't even get out a scream. Just a strangled, airless sound, hands scrabbling uselessly at the thing crushing into her windpipe, feet coming half off the floor as it hauled her up and leeches seemed to start to envelop her whole person.


"Rebecca!" Sam's voice yelled.


Dean was already firing this time at where the arms met the shoulder of the thing, then lower, then anywhere he could put a round without risking her — and it barely registered. It always settled back into itself.


Sam's pistol cracked twice into its torso, getting the same nothing back.


Rebecca's grip on her pistol went slack as it enveloped more of her.


Dean's ammo on hand was getting lighter; he knew soon he'd have to grab more out of his brothers pack. He also knew it would be too late for Rebecca once he did, and darker thoughts began to surface.


He knew Sammy had seen plenty of bodies. seen what things did to people after the fact, cleaned up crime scenes his dad wouldn't let him talk about, and helped put down monsters that had already finished whatever they'd come to do. But Sammy never once stood there and watched it happen. Dean never would forget the day it happened with him, and he hated the idea of Sam having to see it happen now.


Much less with someone that couldn't be much older than either of them. Yet Sammy was right here desperately reloading still with hands that were a lot less steady than usual, about to watch it too. The EMF at his waist continuing to hum seemed more like a twisted taunt than a warning now.


Not her. Dean's next shot went wide with how hard he was trying to make it not. Not in front of him.


Rebecca's face had started going a purple hue. Eyes losing their shine, and her arm going floppy.


"Hey eat this."


The voice came from behind them low and rough entirely unfamiliar, and then the world got hot and orange.


Fire arced past Dean's shoulder in a spinning bottle-shaped blur bursting against the base of the human shaped abomination. Glass shattered into that that black tendril mess anchoring it and it started catching aflame. Looking more like a melting candle underneath intense flame than the idea of a man it took on before, the creature convulsed, its whole boneless architecture seizing side to side. The grip around Rebecca's throat loosened and the leeches engulfing her scattered like they themselves were on fire. Rebecca dropped, then, choking on air, quickly scrambling backward on her hands.


The thing didn't go down. It turned, tilting up as if trying to see the new threat: the unknown man who threw the Molotov cocktail. Dean didn't dare try to look in the same direction, though with the thing still in grabbing range of the three of them.


"Sam, now!" Dean was already firing again, and Sam's shots joined his, both of them backing up in a rough line with Rebecca half-behind them, pulled by a hand Dean hadn't even registered as his own.


It kept coming, swelling somehow with every round that hit it, the mass engorging and thickening like it was feeding on the bullet until it stood wider than the three of them put together, thickened tendrils straining past the chairs bordering the aisles.


Damned thing burst two feet from Dean's face.


There wasn't time to flinch away from it. Wet heat hit him and Rebecca both, something thick sliding down the side of his neck he rather pathetically tried his best to flick off.


The EMFs whirrs finally died, Was the thing was just gone now?


Dean's ears were ringing. Beside him, Sam had gone bone-white but was still holding his pistol up. Lastly, the man behind them who threw the fiery cocktail stood a few feet off.


Built like a brick, was Dean's first thought shoulders too wide, arms roped with muscle under a gray tank and dog tags. long dark hair that he wasn't sure was going for Billy Ray or Kurt Cobain and a full tribal styled sleeve eating up one arm, black ink twisting into something that may have been letters but he couldn't make out what.


That's when Dean caught the wrist. Half a pair of handcuffs, one cuff still snapped shut, the busted chain hanging like jewelry, metal gone rust-colored at the edges. The skin under it was torn up bad. Looking back at the mans face Dean saw a flat expression.


The fugitive… he forgot about him honestly some point between the dogs and the leeches he figured the man was dead given the state of the train. He felt his strap to make sure his gun was still present but didn't yet grab it. Man just saved their ass or atleast the medics.


"Billy Coen!"


She scrambled backward, throwing an arm out in front of Dean and Sam like that would do a damn thing, putting herself between them and him.


Billy raised both hands, up in that universal 'don't shoot' gesture, though there was nothing scared in the way he did. More like he was humoring them.


"Listen, little girl. I'm sorry I ruined your chances at being worm bait, but there's bigger things on this train than me."


His eyes flicked to Dean and Sam for half a second, keeping that unbothered look in his face, before sliding back to Rebecca. "I'm not gonna hurt you or the pipsqueaks. Just let me be."


He took a step back toward the doorway he'd come from unhurried, like he'd already decided none of them were truly a threat.


Rebecca didn't lower her arm. "You don't get to just leave " She stopped, clearly fighting the urge to say more than she should to an escaped convict


Billy tilted his head slightly, something almost amused crossing his expression at her hesitation, and opened his mouth like he might have something to say about it.


That's when the radio crackled to life.


"—vo Six, come in—Rebecca, if you can hear this—" A distorted male voice said on the other end. "Enrico!" Rebecca fumbled as she brought the walkie up clearly at least a little strained from her near death encounter earlier.


"Enrico, I'm here, I'm on the train, Edward he's hurt… what's your status, what happened out in the woods "


"dogs. And something else they weren't —" A long stretch of static ate whatever came next, and when his voice cut back through it was worse, flatter, a man reciting something he didn't want to be reciting. "Team's gone, Rebecca. Forest, Richard, Kevin… I couldn't I got out. I'm the only one left."


Rebecca's hand went to her mouth. Dean looked away, there wasn't anything to do with a face like that except let her have it.


"Edward," she said, voice cracking. "Enrico, I need to know what to do, he likely needs an extraction to a hospital "


"Get off that train." Enrico's voice hardened, snapping back into something command-shaped even through the losses.


"Get off, rendezvous back by the helicopter, bring Edward if you can move him. That's the priority now." A pause, and something in the static made a loud crow like screech.


"This mission just went a hell of a lot more sideways than anyone thought. I got a full file on Coen before comms went he killed twenty-three people children, elderly, women, and men none of it mattered to him, Rebecca. No way he'd hesitate to kill you. If he's still on that train and you cross paths with him — you do not engage. Under no circumstances. You copy, Bravo Six?"


Every word of it came through the walkie clean enough that Billy heard every syllable too. Dean watched him from the corner of his eye. His earlier laissez faire calm shifting into something more aware Billy was eyeing all three of their hands seeming to track every miniscule movement. Dean's own hand drifted to his shotgun without much conscious decision behind it. Just in case.


Rebecca's wary eyes hadn't strayed from Billy the entire transmission. "Copy," she whispered. "Understood, Bravo Six out." She lowered the walkie slowly.


Billy's mouth curved, though nothing reaching his eyes with the expression.


Dean was already moving to put himself squarely between his brother and a man with twenty-three bodies to his name when the meter clipped to his belt shrieked yet again, somehow louder than earlier.


"My EMF…" Sam's voice had gone strange, and when Dean glanced over, Sam was already ripping his backpack off his shoulder, digging through it. His meter wasn't clipped anywhere handy buried under a ton of ammo boxes. That practically smothered the damn thing dead. All that metal packed around an EMF often made the thing as useful as a rock. It certainly shouldn't be able to detect shit wedge between all that crap. That's half of why it probably didn't do shit when the leech ghost appeared.


But now the EMF didn't seem to care, screaming right along with Dean's, like the metal and the fabric and the god knew what else in that bag wasn't even there.


Then the singing started.


It came from outside the train, faint at first threading in under the ringing of the EMF a wordless haunting hum. It was a sound that had no business existing on this train of death, and disgust. Everyone froze even Even Billy, who'd gone from eyeing their trigger fingers to eyeing Dean's EMF meter like it had personally arrested him.


Dean turned toward the nearest window and found a face already looking back in.


A man, a similar long light brown to his own hair, maybe mid-twenties, standing on a rock as leeches pressed close around him. He was singing something that sounded like some highbrow crap he got in trouble for falling asleep through during his musical history course he'd only taken one semester because a girl he liked was in it. Opera, or close enough to it. Real fancy stuff for a guy standing in the middle of the woods covered in bloodsuckers.


The man or more likely ghost's eyes were half-lidded like he was somewhere else entirely. Crawling up his body were those same leeches but not in the aggressive way they attacked earlier. They seemed almost playful around the man. Hundreds of little bastards around the skin and clothes but neither the leeches nor the man seemed to mind. As the ghost continued it's shitty opera number.


Metal shrieked somewhere beneath them, gears grinding awake after god knew how long dead, and the whole train shuddered once, hard, before lurching forward.


It picked up speed fast too fast, faster than anything stalled seconds earlier had any right to the sudden increase in force threw all four of them off balance at once, Rebecca grabbing the seatback beside her, Sam stumbling into Dean's shoulder, even Billy catching himself hard against the wall.


Outside the window, the singing man was gone. Only the dark and the blur of trees remained, sliding past faster with every second.


Dean's stomach dropped somewhere it didn't usually for one bad second he tasted beef jerky trying to make a return trip. He swallowed it down hard. Hoping that this train wouldn't get much faster cause he wasn't so sure he could manage that twice.


Whatever was driving this thing now, they sure as hell didn't have a ticket.


The witch theory was looking shakier by the second. Zombies, Dogs, leeches and now a wanna be opera singer playing ghost conductor. Did every damn thing that went bump in the night decide to throw a party on the same Train?

---

A.N. Hope everyone enjoys this new chapter. I wanted to get it out a bit earlier but didn't wanna rush it either.

I hope my characterization of Rebecca and Dean was alright. Definitely will get more from her in this story. I hope the music hyperlinked fits alright so far the pick for the train starting up. I felt it fit quite well, but I was admittedly racking my brain for a bit about what song or OST to include for that part. Nothing from the resident evil catalog quite fit, hence opting for the track I did. Also Rebeccas little thoughts about the zombie state being related to fungi were sort of a subtle nod towards The Last of Us (which I believe is the closest to accurate in how a zombie plague could feasibly start). I want to dive more into Rebecca's thoughts as someone educated in medicine and chemistry which I'd say the games never really do, at least not very much.

On a less story-specific note, part of the reason this story did take longer was that, for the first time in quite a while, a celebrity death actually got to me.

Dolly Parton, a singer I only listened to on occasion, but given my love for both music, writing, and reading, and perhaps more specifically my appreciation of stories about lone singers trying to make the world a better place with both song and generosity. (Which is something I've found much more common in fiction than in real life)

Anyways, long story sort I'll be including a donation link to the Imagination Library below.

An organization dedicated to children's literacy, and well encourage anyone who wants to donate to it or similar groups they trust.

Imagination Library

Who knows maybe one of those children will one day make the best fanfic ever.

EDIT: The past year i've constantly had weird issues with text color not being consistent on QQ (I try to make it a dynamic hex so that it works for dark and light mode but that never seems to work hence the weird mix of colors her, one day ill have to learn this skill)

 

[Sliverhero]

You know something that is going to be scary either a Tyrant getting possessed by a demon or if the t virus is able to adapt and is able to consume a demon when it is possessing the body.

 

[Xodarap]

You know something that is going to be scary either a Tyrant getting possessed by a demon or if the t virus is able to adapt and is able to consume a demon when it is possessing the body.

Click to shrink...

So instead of Nemesis shouting Stars he's going to be shouting Latin?

 

[Sliverhero]

So instead of Nemesis shouting Stars he's going to be shouting Latin?

Click to shrink...

that be an intresting one as the Nemesis parasite would definitely fighting control. As the demon tries to escape racoon city with the body while the programing is fighting back.
And umbrella would be getting sweet sweet data and probaly learn that souls exist.

Spencer plan here could completely different as I can see him, Marcus, and Ashford have connections to the Men in Letters.

 

[FireWalkWithMe99]

You know something that is going to be scary either a Tyrant getting possessed by a demon or if the t virus is able to adapt and is able to consume a demon when it is possessing the body.

Click to shrink...

That definitely would be scary honestly bioweapons interacting with any supernatural creatures is a little scary. I mean look at what the witch adjacent but not truly a witch mother miranda managed to do with the mold in re8… Imagine an actual witch like Rowena getting some "fun" ideas with los plagas, g virus or even just run of the mill t virus.

So instead of Nemesis shouting Stars he's going to be shouting Latin?

Click to shrink...

I believe the latin word for stars is stellae

dont think it has quite the same ring but I suppose other latin words could have a better intimidation factor.

that be an intresting one as the Nemesis parasite would definitely fighting control. As the demon tries to escape racoon city with the body while the programing is fighting back.
And umbrella would be getting sweet sweet data and probaly learn that souls exist.

Spencer plan here could completely different as I can see him, Marcus, and Ashford have connections to the Men in Letters.

Click to shrink...

I could definitely see all 3 of those families have direct familial connections or atleast "noble" friendships with the men of letters. The Ashfords in particular seem to radiate a joy for the supernatural despite not actually having anything supernatural, could definitely see if resident evil and supernatural were canonically the same world the ashfords would for sure have some degree of connection to the men in letters, spencer probably to frankly probably even later game antagonists like Miranda.

Id also imagine in a crossover setting like this genuine investigative journalists like Alyssa Ashcroft would probabaly have some knowledge of the hunters world.

 

[Sliverhero]

That definitely would be scary honestly bioweapons interacting with any supernatural creatures is a little scary. I mean look at what the witch adjacent but not truly a witch mother miranda managed to do with the mold in re8… Imagine an actual witch like Rowena getting some "fun" ideas with los plagas, g virus or even just run of the mill t virus.

Click to shrink...

Would be cool as well. When this gets to the raccon city outbreak. Can see the supernatural that is still in the city freaking out. You can have a scene of a vampire escaping zombies or taking out a zombie and he walks awaybonly for it to evolve into a Crimson head.
But then to Rowena or Crowely surprise thinking they found some control the Viruses evolve and now they running away.

Another thing will be intresting is Umbrella and the connection actions with the supernatural.

But the one thing I can see here Wesker is going to be even more of an abomination. Eve will be so proud.

I believe the latin word for stars is stellae

dont think it has quite the same ring but I suppose other latin words could have a better intimidation factor.

Click to shrink...

Or you could have the normal Star from Nemesis but then the voice changes and its the demon screaming from inside asking to be put out of its misey as it is feels all the horrors that umbrella and to its horror its beats the torture the demon received before the demon became a demon.

I could definitely see all 3 of those families have direct familial connections or atleast "noble" friendships with the men of letters. The Ashfords in particular seem to radiate a joy for the supernatural despite not actually having anything supernatural, could definitely see if resident evil and supernatural were canonically the same world the ashfords would for sure have some degree of connection to the men in letters, spencer probably to frankly probably even later game antagonists like Miranda.

Click to shrink...

The court case after raccoon city is going to be crazy as the umbrella and the connection using the supernatural to effect the case.

Also there is a resdient evil comic where before Jill before she went to the mashion she faced a werewolf.

Id also imagine in a crossover setting like this genuine investigative journalists like Alyssa Ashcroft would probabaly have some knowledge of the hunters world.

Click to shrink...

Could see her becoming a contact for bobby singer