GRAVEDIGGER ━━━ leon s. kennedy

one.

The last quarter of September in Raccoon City brought as a present the purifying smell of rain blessing the soil, Vera knew its name — petrichor, the kind neighbor lady Sarah Lakin who grew vegetables in her own apartment calls it as such, and Vera had no reason to doubt; her hands always smelled fresh and earthy with a permanent thin line of rich black soil underneath her nails, the taste of the dishes she brought over for monthly neighborhood get-togethers could be found absolutely nowhere else. All-organic is the name of the spell she said she cast as Vera was busy stuffing her mouth with peach cobbler, and her kind eyes sparkled with that magic she was talking about too. The eleven year old Vera was fascinated with the knowledge (and the peaches, before she had to be forced to take her insulin, that is).

The last time she saw Sarah, the woman's fingers were coated with blood, her usual neatly trimmed nails torn and gnawed on — nauseating smell of long-forgotten meat in a broken freezer oozed from her instead of the green freshness, her eyes milky and glazed over. All-organic products, in the end, did near to nothing for her flesh falling apart, unable to stick to her bones anymore.

The irony of her being vegan was not lost on the girl. She'd returned from death with the same primal hunger for raw meat as the others. Deep past the horrors of the apocalypse and dead men walking, somewhere beyond the point of acceptance and apathy, it was morbidly wrong to see the woman's own principles twisted like this as if it was hell's own punishment itself. Vera grimly wondered where she was searching for a bite of human flesh right now. If she's lucky, someone would have come along to put her out of her misery already.

The poor bastards she is trying to bury in the middle of a downpour are fortunate in that sense, if she dared to look at it from a half-full glass sort of perspective, at least. Marvin told her to close her heart to it and not think about how she knew every single person in the police station she opens a grave for, so she was trying to.

Unfortunately, she remembered. The names of all the poor souls she had to bury were etched into her soul.

Vera supposed she was desensitized to everything by now, the only scary truth remaining to her was how fast she ended up adapting to survive in such an extreme situation and lost her empathy in the process. Her body didn't want to wail and cry anymore, so it had turned that part in her off completely, as easy as turning the lights off. She was on autopilot, (unfeeling, insensitive, a hole in her very being in the shape of a grave where her heart is supposed to beat), having accepted there's not much she could do for anyone other than fulfill the final duty to their mortal remains. Handling the role of the gravedigger allowed more room for other officers to do their jobs, so she gladly had taken it. (To the bitter end.)

It's haunting now that she felt absolutely nothing, it didn't even seem real what she was doing right now. The man she all but had kicked in the hole, Jonathan Alberta, is a drunken father of two who regretted not being there emotionally for his children back in the day, she'd overheard when he was over at her old house with Marvin at dead of night one day, sobbing to his coworker about wanting to undo his mistakes, to undo how he treated them in the past. She had listened to him being such a proud dad about their achievements, his only humble complaint was wishing he'd been there in the commemorative photos, too, with big congratulatory bouquets in hand and their favorite chocolates (April loved Kit-Kat Senses, and Archie, Cadbury's Fuse) in full cartons as the prologue to the presents he wanted to give them..

He had wandered off in delirium chasing his supposed children the last he was sane, despite the fever and the infected wound, nobody could stop him from going off on his own, an elephant straying off its herd to die quietly.

When he came back, it had taken two bullets to the noggin to put him to rest. Around the time that happened, Vera hadn't given up on running around the station in order to fix the comm equipment until the last moment, she wasn't there to witness the carnage. It had broken her just the same, though. Marvin was of the same opinion it was for the better she didn't see him that way.