CLASSIFIED 13-0280: C. Redfield
Spencer Mansion
Incident — Alpha Team
REPORTING OFFICER: CPL. CHRIS REDFIELD · ALPHA TEAM · S.T.A.R.S.
INCIDENT DATE: JULY 24, 1998 · LOCATION: ARKLAY MOUNTAINS, OUTSKIRTS OF RACCOON CITY
REPORT STATUS: SUBMITTED UNDER DURESS — POST-INCIDENT
PAGES: 01 OF 01
CLEARANCE: RESTRICTED
What Led Us to the Mansion
Prior to the mansion incident, S.T.A.R.S. Bravo Team was dispatched to the Arklay Mountains to investigate a series of gruesome murders reported in the area surrounding the Spencer Estate. Bravo Team went dark within hours of deployment. No radio contact. No distress beacon. Nothing. That silence was a louder alarm than anything I had heard in my years on the force.
Alpha Team — myself, Albert Wesker, Barry Burton, Jill Valentine, and Joseph Frost — was scrambled as a search and rescue. Our helicopter pilot Brad Vickers dropped us into a clearing near the forest. Within moments, Joseph was attacked and dismembered by what appeared to be a pack of feral, decomposing dogs. He was dead before any of us could raise a weapon. Brad panicked and pulled the chopper out, leaving us stranded. We ran. The only shelter was the mansion ahead. We had no choice but to enter.
What greeted us inside was not shelter. It was a slaughterhouse with doors.
How I Lost My Team
FROST, JOSEPH — KIA WESKER, ALBERT — TRAITOR / MIA VALENTINE, JILL — SURVIVOR BURTON, BARRY — SURVIVOR
Joseph Frost died in the approach — I have already documented that above. Once inside, our team splintered almost immediately. The mansion’s labyrinthine layout separated us across multiple wings and floors. Barry Burton initially acted erratically under pressure — I later learned he was being coerced by Wesker, who held a threat over his family. Barry’s judgment was compromised, but he was not a willing traitor. He redeemed himself before the end.
Albert Wesker — our commanding officer, the man I trusted — was revealed as a double agent operating for Umbrella Corporation. He had orchestrated the entire Alpha Team deployment as a live combat test for the B.O.W.s inside the estate. He released the Tyrant, a T-002 model bioweapon, and was impaled by it. We left him for dead beneath the laboratory. I still feel the weight of that betrayal in my chest like shrapnel that never came out.
Jill Valentine survived by splitting routes with me. She encountered traps, crimson-headed zombies, and her own brushes with death multiple times. Her resilience was extraordinary. We escaped together in the end.
My Sister — Whereabouts Unknown
Throughout the events in the mansion, a persistent knot lived in the back of my mind alongside every tactical decision: Claire. My younger sister. She had been trying to reach me — leaving messages I had not received, travelling to Raccoon City precisely because she couldn’t get hold of me.
I had no way to contact her from inside the estate. Every radio in the mansion was either destroyed or compromised. I did not know whether she was safe, whether she had even arrived in Raccoon City yet, or whether Umbrella’s network of violence had already reached her. The thought that she might walk into this city alone while the T-virus festered beneath the streets made every locked door I encountered feel twice as heavy.
I made a silent promise in one of those safe rooms, with the typewriter ribbon in my hands and the distant sound of moaning in the corridor: I would get out. I would find her. Nothing would stop that. I did not know then that she would reach Raccoon City mere months later and face horrors that rival everything I witnessed in that mansion. But that is a report for another file.
Blocked Routes Through the Manor
The Spencer Estate was not merely a building — it was a puzzle engineered to contain, disorient, and exhaust. Entire wings were sealed by design or disaster. The following obstructions were documented during my traversal:
- West Wing Staircase, 2F: Collapsed under structural damage — likely caused by the early Tyrant containment breach. Impassable without the crank mechanism retrieved from the guard house.
- Dining Room Passage (1F East): Blocked by an overturned bookcase and what appeared to be a barricaded door — two Hunters were nesting beyond. Required the Gold Emblem to unlock the adjoining service corridor.
- Underground Laboratory Entrance: Sealed behind a retinal scanner and key card system. Required both a blue and red keycard obtained from separate wings of the estate. The elevator mechanism had also been deliberately disabled.
- Aqua Ring Access: Flooded and electrically compromised. Neptune — a mutated shark variant — patrolled the tank. The drainage valve was located in a separate utility room accessible only after clearing the gallery puzzle.
- Chapel / Courtyard Gate: Locked with an emblem-based mechanism. Required the Armor Key and a series of statue repositioning in the courtyard to align the stone wolf figures and trigger the gate release.
- Guard House Exterior Bridge: Partially destroyed. Required Jill’s alternate route via the underground tunnel system while I navigated from the main estate side.
Enemies Engaged & Eliminated
Standard zombie engagement protocol: aim for centre mass to slow, then headshots to terminate. Ammunition conservation was critical — I began the incident with a SIG SAUER P226 and a combat knife, acquiring a M3 Shotgun from the mansion’s west corridor weapon locker and a Flamethrower from the underground lab research wing.
Cerberus units — reanimated Dobermans — required split-second response times. They attacked in pairs and could close ten metres before most operatives could re-aim. I learned to pre-position myself at doorways and corners. Two of them I killed with the knife alone when ammunition was near-critical. Hunters were the most persistent threat: their claws could decapitate in a single swipe and they could not be staggered by light fire. Shotgun at close range was the only reliable solution.
The Yawn — a mutant serpent of extraordinary scale — I encountered twice. The first time, I barely escaped with a bite wound and a near-fatal venom infection. The second encounter, I put it down permanently. The Plant 42 in the residence required chemical solution VX-16 mixed on site. The Neptunes I drained with the Aqua Ring valve before dispatching them on the exposed tank floor.
Secrets Discovered in the Rooms
Behind a false panel triggered by pressing a specific book spine in the library bookshelf adjacent to the study: a hidden cache containing Umbrella internal correspondence confirming the Arklay Research Facility had been operating on black-budget viral research since 1991. Spencer himself had authorized the weaponization of the Progenitor Virus strain. These documents prove Umbrella knew about the outbreak risk and proceeded regardless.
A melody etched into the lid of the grand piano, when played precisely, triggered a compartment beneath the instrument’s bench revealing a Jewelry Box containing a rare item used to access a weapons storage alcove. The mechanism suggested prior occupants — researchers possibly — had created these puzzles as private security measures independent of the mansion’s main lock system.
A gem-eyed tiger statue in the east gallery concealed a hidden compartment. When the correct coloured gem was placed in the eye socket, the mouth opened to reveal a Shell Reloader component. The same statue room contained researcher notes referencing Project Epsilon — an early precursor to what would become the Nemesis programme. The implications are deeply alarming.
A sealed cryo-chamber in the lowest level of the underground laboratory was still active, its occupant logged in the manifest as “T-002 — PRIMARY MODEL.” The Tyrant. Wesker released it deliberately as his final act of betrayal. The chamber’s access log showed it had been inspected by Wesker no fewer than seventeen times over a six-month period. He had been planning this moment for half a year.
Scattered pages of a handwritten diary belonging to the estate’s groundskeeper documented the progression of viral infection from the inside. The final entry — written in deteriorating handwriting — described the author’s hands beginning to rot while he was still writing. The diary served as a near-perfect timeline of T-virus infection rates and symptom progression. Submitted separately to RCPs forensic division.
Safe Rooms — Notes on Each
Certain rooms in the estate were — by fortune or design — free of hostile presence. The zombies never entered. Whether due to some residual sound-dampening architecture, sealed ventilation, or simple behavioural quirk of the infected, I cannot confirm. What I can confirm: those rooms saved my life. Each one had a TYPEWRITER — an antique machine that served as my means of documenting events in real time. Ink ribbons were scarce. Every entry was considered carefully.
First safe room encountered. Functioning typewriter, item chest. Wind-up music box on the mantelpiece — I left it alone. Strangely peaceful. I wrote my first report entry here with blood still drying on my jacket sleeve.
Smaller room off the guard house corridor. Ink ribbon found inside a dresser drawer. A photograph of several Umbrella researchers — smiling — pinned to the wall above the typewriter. I found that photograph more disturbing than anything I’d shot in the corridors.
Deep below the estate. Fluorescent lighting, humming machinery through the walls, a smell of antiseptic and something organic underneath it. Used the item chest here to consolidate remaining ammunition before the final approach to the Tyrant chamber. My last typewriter entry before the self-destruct sequence was activated.
The safe rooms gave me something beyond supplies — they gave me seconds to be human again. To breathe. To think about Claire. To remember why I was still moving forward rather than curling against a wall and waiting for it all to end. In the worst darkness, those rooms were the only light that wasn’t on fire.
The Woman Under the Stairs — Ada Wong
I want to be precise about this, because the official account has a gap in it that I intend to fill with the truth, even if that truth reads more like something from a novel than a field report.
The Medical Storage Room was located beneath the east staircase — a low, vaulted space accessible via a half-height door marked with a red cross emblem that most operatives would have dismissed as a supply closet. I nearly missed it myself. A sound stopped me: not a groan, not the shuffling of infected feet, but something quieter. A sharp, controlled intake of breath. Someone conscious was in there, trying not to be heard.
I opened the door with my weapon raised. Inside, pressed into the far corner behind a toppled medicine shelf, was a woman. Late twenties, dark hair pulled back, dressed in a red qipao that was torn at the left shoulder and darkened with blood — hers, and not hers. She had fashioned a crude tourniquet from a length of bandage roll around her upper arm. Her eyes were sharp. Even trapped, even injured, her eyes were calculating. She was not a victim in the conventional sense. She was a professional caught in a bad situation.
She told me her name was Ada Wong. She gave me nothing else voluntarily. She said she had entered the mansion separately — through a service tunnel from the east perimeter — tracking a contact whose identity she declined to share. The contact was dead. She had been pinned in the storage room for what she estimated were six hours, unable to move without aggravating the arm wound and making enough noise to draw the cluster of infected she could hear in the corridor.
I cleared the corridor. Four zombies. Used the shotgun for three, the knife for the last one when shells ran dry. When I came back and opened that door again, she was already standing. She had re-tied the tourniquet properly and was holding a small calibre pistol that I had not seen her carrying before. She looked at me the way you look at someone you’re deciding whether to trust. I looked at her the same way.
We held that look for what was probably three seconds and felt considerably longer.
“You didn’t have to do that,” she said. I told her I wasn’t the type to walk past a closed door. She almost smiled. It didn’t quite arrive but it was close — a softening at the corner of her mouth, something genuine beneath the operational composure. For a moment the mansion ceased to exist. Just that dim medical room with the smell of antiseptic and old wood and two people breathing the same stale air, unexpectedly, improbably alive.
I handed her my spare ammunition. She took it without comment and chambered a round. Back to business. But the moment had existed. I’m putting it in the report because it happened, and because she may not have anyone else to document that she was there.
Escape — The EV Cable Solution
The self-destruct sequence — initiated from the underground laboratory control terminal after Wesker’s apparent death and the Tyrant encounter — gave us exactly three minutes to reach the surface and clear the structure. The primary exit route via the underground elevator had been inoperable since we arrived. The secondary stairwell was compromised by fire that had spread from the lab’s coolant rupture along the east corridor.
The helipad on the mansion roof was our only viable extraction point, but the external electric lift platform — designed to carry research equipment from the underground bay to the surface — had a dead power cell. The lift motor was intact. The power coupling was intact. We simply had no charge source.
Ada found it. In the corner of the underground vehicle bay, half-buried under a collapsed equipment rack, was a heavy-gauge EV charging cable — the kind used for Umbrella’s electric research utility vehicles. The bay still had two such vehicles, both dead, but the wall-mounted charging terminal had its own dedicated power draw from the facility’s backup generator circuit, which the self-destruct had not yet severed.
She connected the cable from the terminal to the lift’s external power input in under forty seconds. Her arm was still bleeding. Her hands did not shake. I covered the stairwell while she worked. When the lift hummed to life — that low electrical vibration underfoot — I have never felt relief hit so physically.
We rode it to the surface. Jill and Barry were already on the helipad. Brad Vickers, shamed into returning by radio contact, brought the helicopter in low. We had seconds to spare. The mansion detonated below us as we lifted off — a column of fire and architecture dissolving into smoke and early morning sky above the Arklay mountains.
Ada was gone by the time we touched down at a clearing two miles north. No trace, no goodbye. Just an empty seat and the faint smell of antiseptic on the headrest. I filed no report on her presence. This is the first written record. I do not know who she was working for. I do not know if I will see her again. I know she got out alive because she is exactly the kind of person who does.
