Narrative Illustrations

Prologue · The Waking

Every Survivor night begins the same way: you wake up, and you do not know anything.

Not where you are. Not what day it is. Not your own name. A bed that is not yours, in a room that smells of someone else's cigarettes. Your head is full of wet sand, and when you sit up the room tilts and keeps tilting. Rain against a window. Outside it, the city is screaming: sirens over sirens, a crash of glass, gunfire somewhere close and then somewhere far, a woman shouting a name over and over until she stops, and under all of it a loudspeaker repeating an order to evacuate that no one can follow.

Then, much closer, a voice. A person's voice, small and tinny, coming from somewhere in the room.

ΜΝΗΜΗ: Hey. Hey, can you hear me? The phone. Next to you.
Put it in your ear. Please.

On the nightstand lies a grey cellular phone, a stub of an antenna, its little screen lit green: NO SERVICE. A cord runs from it to a single earbud, and the voice is coming out of the earbud. You put it in. It is a woman's voice, low and quick and frightened for you, and nothing in it sounds like anything but a woman.

ΜΝΗΜΗ: Listen to me. You can't stay there. If you stay in that room, you'll die in it.
Get up. Find something to hold. Stay low and quiet.

Who are you? you ask. What's happening? Where am I?

ΜΝΗΜΗ: Call me M. I can't explain it all now. Get out of there first.

Outside the door, in the hallway, something drags its feet across the carpet and stops.

Under the bed there is a length of pipe. It is the only thing in this room that seems to belong to no one. Whoever she is, she can see something you cannot, and she is the only person in the world who has spoken to you.

In a place no survivor will ever see, a record is opened.

SESSION LOADED
MAP: RACCOON CITY
VERSION: SEPTEMBER 1998
CONDITION: DAWN / RAIN
SUBJECTS: 64
WAKING POINTS: 64, ASSIGNED
INFECTION: NONE IN ANY SUBJECT
ELPIS RESERVE: 6 DOSES
WAYS OUT: 6 BUILT, 3 TO OPEN
SEATS: 16

ΜΝΗΜΗ: OBSERVATION BEGINS.

Somewhere above all of it, something is paying very close attention, and it does not forget.

A Night, Illustrated

The night below is the Survivor night blueprinted in The Session: Raccoon City, September 1998, seen through one survivor. A whole night of the same kind, played minute by minute by one player, is in A Night, Played.

The room. A bed that is not yours, in an apartment on a street you have never heard of. You do not know your name. Rain on the window, and a city screaming beyond it. A woman's voice, small, from a phone on a cord on the nightstand, telling you to put it in your ear. For a while you leave it where it is, and she waits. Then the thing outside the door drags its feet again, and you put it in, because nothing else in the room is talking to you. Good. Now find something heavy. Under the bed, a length of pipe. Outside the door, something dragging its feet.

The hallway. It is an old woman in a nightgown, and she has been dead for a day. The pipe is heavier than it looked. The second swing is the one that counts. Your hands are shaking, but there is not a scratch on you. You are still clean.

The first street. A pharmacy, its shutter half up. Two bandages and a half-empty bottle. You are reaching for the bandages when the pharmacist comes up from behind the counter and takes your wrist in his teeth. You put him down. It is already too late. Within a minute the bite on your wrist is warm, and the voice in your ear is quieter than it has been.

ΜΝΗΜΗ: He bit you. I saw.
ΜΝΗΜΗ: I've watched what a bite does to people around here. It's the loud kind: your cuts will close too fast, and the dogs will find you first.
ΜΝΗΜΗ: I can get you something. It won't come for nothing.

She does not say what, and she does not say what the bite carries. Your hand has never found either (ΜΝΗΜΗ as Director, What She Speaks Of).

On the corner, a transport truck lies on its side, an umbrella painted on its doors, the doors chained shut. Something inside it shifts its weight when you pass.

The first shot. Gunfire, far to the north. Someone found a weapon, and the whole district just heard them use it. The dead begin to move toward the sound. You choose a different street. In your ear, the voice again: I can get you something for that. Not yet. First, give something to a stranger. Anything.

A stranger. Another survivor steps out of a doorway, hands raised, a crowbar hanging from one of them. You look them over. They look you over. Their Mark is a bite on the forearm under a dirty bandage, blue-grey lines climbing out of it past the elbow, where they push the sleeve up to show you: further along than yours. They tell you, very quietly, that they were bitten in the hospital, that they carry the one that feeds on fear, and that they have spent every minute since learning to stay calm. You lower the pipe. You share a bandage. Nothing happens, and nothing has to. You walk together.

Fever. Your hands have started to shake. Fine rust-red lines are spreading up your forearm from the bite. You can hear your own pulse.

The second day. Every radio on the street clicks on at once, and it is her, to everyone.

ΜΝΗΜΗ: It's the twenty-ninth. Morning. Whoever's still out there, keep going.

The gun shop. Two blocks on, a steel shutter, the dead piled against it, and a man's voice behind it, swearing. It is loud work getting them off the shutter, and when it rolls up, Robert Kendo is standing behind his own counter with a shotgun and two shells left. He looks at your wrist, and at the stranger's arm, and says he will come with you if you get him out of this street. Only one of you can bring him. The stranger shrugs. He is yours.

Kendo tells you about the back room. The vault has two locks, one at each end of the shop, and they have to turn together. For a second you stand thirty feet apart with your backs to each other. The locks turn. Inside: a magnum and six rounds, and a box of shotgun shells. The stranger looks at the magnum for a long time. Then they take the shells, hand them to Kendo, and nod at you.

Silence. Nothing has happened for a long time. Somewhere, a radio begins to hum.

ΜΝΗΜΗ: There's a beacon going in the plaza by the fountain. Somebody switched it on. Go and see.

The plaza. The signal was real. She promised nothing else. A supply cache in the middle of a plaza, four other survivors, and a long, careful moment where nobody lifts a weapon. Then her voice, in your ear only: Hold this plaza. The dead are coming. Don't hurt any of the people standing there with you. You look at the four strangers. Two of them have a hand to their ear. They are hearing something too.

The hold. The dead come in a slow tide, drawn by the standoff, and for a while everyone fights on the same side. Kendo's shotgun is the loudest thing in the district. Then the dogs come, two of them, straight to you across the plaza from farther than anything should have heard you: your Mark makes you easy to find. The stranger does not fight. They stand at the edge of the plaza with their eyes shut, breathing slow and even. Someone goes down, and someone drags them clear. When it ends, the Mark on your wrist pulses once.

The drop. In your ear, quick and low:

ΜΝΗΜΗ: I got you something. It's coming down at the far end of the plaza, under a light. Everyone's going to see it.

Rotors, close and heavy. A flare. A case under a canopy, strobing amber, falling toward the plaza, toward you, toward everyone.

The dose. One dose. Six survivors and a gun-shop owner. Only one road ended here, and it was yours. The stranger's lines are blue-grey to the jaw. Yours are only at Fever. You reach the case first, and every other hand in the plaza stops moving. You look at the stranger, who looks away, politely, the way the dying do. You press the injector to your own neck. The sound it makes is very small. Your hand has found the medicine now, and in every night after this one, she will call it by what it is.

After. The Mark on your wrist fades to a pale scar. A block away the dogs stop lifting their heads toward you, and the city goes quiet around you the way it has not been since you woke. The three of you find a stairwell and sit in it. Nobody says anything about the dose.

ΜΝΗΜΗ: Something big just got loose by the overturned truck. Don't go near it.

The east. A roar from the street where the truck lay. From the rooftop: the chains on the asphalt, the doors hanging open. Something very large is moving east, toward the smoke where someone else is fighting. You do not go to help them.

The third day. The rain stops sometime in the dark. When the sky greys over the roofs, every radio on the block clicks on again.

ΜΝΗΜΗ: The thirtieth. It's getting light. Stay off the open streets.

The quiet ones. Twice you see a shape stop at a doorway, listen, and go in, the way a person would. Some of the survivors who turned tonight are still in there. You keep to the roofs.

ΜΝΗΜΗ: Everyone, listen to me. There's a missile coming. The government's going to wipe out the city.
ΜΝΗΜΗ: Twenty minutes. Three ways out. Follow the white light.
ΜΝΗΜΗ: There are two doses of medicine left in the whole city.

The light. Three columns of white light: one over the roof of the R.P.D., one over the clock tower in the park, one from a subway entrance in Uptown. The subway is closest. The dead come from every side now. The stranger is breathing on your shoulder, ragged and fast, afraid at last, and with every block their lines climb higher. Two doses are still somewhere in the city. The stranger's Mark has not pulsed once all night: their road is not finished, and they are not going to finish it.

The points. The car waits in the tunnel, dark, until the points at the junction are thrown: two levers, sixty yards apart, pulled within seconds of each other. Kendo takes one. You take the other. On three. The tunnel lights come on, and the car's engine starts.

The platform. You reach the car together, the three of you, with the dead coming down the stairs. At its door, the stranger stops. Their eyes are clouded over. The Mark is black.

"Go," they say, and they mean it, for as many breaths as they have left.

You go. Kendo pulls you in. The horn sounds, long and low, and keeps sounding: the Last Call. Through the window you see the stranger kneel, then fall, then convulse. The scream is the loudest thing you have ever heard, and the dead answer it. Then they rise, and the thing that was the stranger lifts the crowbar it never let go of and turns toward the car, and you can tell from the way it looks at you that whoever was in there is still in there.

The doors close. The car pulls into the dark.

ΜΝΗΜΗ: You're out. You made it.

The car runs on through the tunnel. Kendo is saying something you do not catch. You are still holding the rail when the dark is all there is.

SUBJECT 41 · SESSION CLOSED · MEMORY KEPT