In the street, a woman screamed and ran. She made it two steps before a zombie landed on her back. Sharp teeth ripped through human flesh. Blood was spilled on the not so quite street.

She wasn’t the only victim. All over the city, all over the world, men and women were dying from the zombie onslaught. The infection, which should have been a result of the incident in Racoon City, somehow reached all over the planet in just hours. Every country was hit almost simultaneously, giving no time for the governments to react.

None of the voyagers knew this, but their presence in Racoon City and what they did to the Umbrella outpost outside the city was reported to the Umbrella High Command. As someone who wanted to manually create an apocalypse, Wesker would do anything to make sure things won’t go wrong because of a few mercenaries.

He was a loyal follower of Doctor Isaacs, and he needed the apocalypse to go on according to the plan. If this plan worked, he would be the right hand man of the most powerful figure on the planet. If the plan failed, he would be punished for what he did. Conspiring to end the world was enough to get him a one way ticket to hell. Best case scenario, he would be forced into hiding. He couldn’t afford to lose this.

Sending mercenaries, including the Sanitation Team and the Hound mercenary corps, to Hive was just a part of the cover story Umbrella had in mind. Not every member of Umbrella was a determined loyalist who was ok with exterminating most of the population. Most of them were just ordinary human beings. They could be gradually changed and convinced to join Umbrella, eventually, but if he was to tell them what his plan really was, there would be resentment.

What the Umbrella High Command had in mind was to tell the survivors this story: Umbrella was developing Bioweapons. Fine. So what? Did Browning get punished for developing machine guns? The only one responsible for all the deaths the zombie outbreak lead to was the spy who infiltrated the Hive and broke the first syringe of t-virus. Granted, Spence was hired by Umbrella High Command, even though he himself didn’t know it, but the general employees didn’t need to know that.

This story didn’t really clear Umbrella of its sins, but at least the common people could tell themselves a story that they were on the good, innocent side. Even if just half of the employees believed the story, it was enough to maintain the authority of the Umbrella High Command. When the only power left in this world was Umbrella, desertion and rebellion didn’t seem so tempting.

That was not a bad plan, but the plan went wrong when Major Cain of Racoon City reported losing contact with one of the teams deployed at the entrance to the Hive. If the zombies got them, then Wesker wouldn’t mind, but reports said two of the mercenaries exited the facility and started slaughtering the guards.

This was bad. The fact that the mercenaries went out of control meant they might have went to the government already. In fact, the US government might be sending a team to the Umbrella Headquarter already. Umbrella was powerful and t-virus was menacing, but if the entire country reacted and cut the infection off from the root...zombies were powerful in great numbers. A couple dozen undead stood no chance against the government machine.

Wesker acted quickly. The best defense was a good offense. Within a single order, all the Umbrella bases around the world were tasked with retreating into the underground base and deploying t-virus onto the world above.

Few hesitated. The leaders of the bases were absolutely loyal to the cause, and the men they sent the deliver the virus were the most determined.

This sped up the infection, especially when most of the major military bases were targeted. Umbrella utilized spies they inserted into the bases and spread t-virus in their water sources. Not all of the spies was successful, but most were. When the undead started growling, the military struggled in protecting themselves. The thought of sending forces to protect the civilians was...optimistic.

The city Jean was in was a city of 200,000. Just like every other city in the world, they were unprepared when the undead made their move. The police forces included around 1500 men. That seemed a lot, but only half that number were combatants. The couple hundred men simply couldn’t protect a thousand times that number of civilians. In fact, they could barely even protect themselves. Whenever someone fired a gun and killed a zombie, every zombie wandering around in a two hundred meter radius would make their charge toward the sound. At first the police didn’t know zombies were sensitive to sound, and the rapid gunshots successfully brought an army of zombies toward their location.

As more and more of the city fell, more civilians were turned to zombies. As the fighting continued and the ammo count fell, the zombie count only increased. At first the police formed a defensive position in front of the police station with police cars and barricades and held their ground. Several hundred guns sealed the roads shut and temporarily protected the innocents that were lucky enough to get behind the defense lines in time. Yet that changed quickly when a higher power joined the battlefield.

Ten lickers ravaged through the men with a speed ordinary human beings couldn’t even see, much less fire upon. They got behind the defensive barricades and started plowing through the ranged units with incredible accuracy. In most universes, whether it was Starcraft or Resident Evil, ranged human units weren’t the best at melee. With pistols and rifles and Kevlar suits, the police department was slaughtered at the claws and tongues of the lickers.

More importantly, the lickers attracted all the firing and allowed the slower, more vulnerable zombies to pour over the barricades. Completely surrounded and overran, both the police and the civilians had no way out. Some fought back while others fled, but in the end, they all met the same fate.

When the gunshots and the screams died, several hundred more undead in police uniform joined the army of the dead.

In the blood stained police station, the 911 cell kept on ringing.