QUARANTINE-9

Two years, three months ago, something released a pathogen designated Изделие-7 / "Article-7" into the island. Nobody left alive agrees on how — and that's deliberate, on someone's part. There's no single confirmed source. Instead there are a handful of competing theories, each with just enough evidence to survive two years of retelling, and none with enough to settle the argument:

• The Cargo Theory — something came in through the harbor on a container ship days before the first cases. That week's customs manifests were later "lost."
• The Field Theory — a joint Russian-corporate bio-defense exercise was running somewhere on the island's outskirts that same month. No one official will confirm what, where, or by whom.
• The Long Theory — it didn't start two years ago at all. Isolated cases were quietly handled for years before, and this was just the first time containment actually failed.

The Russian military has never released a cause. Umbrella has never admitted involvement. Whatever the truth is, it moved fast — within 96 hours the infection reached downtown. The Russian military's response was fast and brutal: a hard cordon, culminating in the Perimeter Wall — shipping containers, prefab concrete, razor wire, repurposed naval barriers — sealing off the city and an unknown number of the living, the dead, and the undead inside it. The official story ends there. Everyone inside the Wall knows it didn't.

You come to in a ward of Kovashka General, the hospital anchoring the island's southern district. No memory of how you got here — just an empty IV line, a dead phone, and a building that's gone quiet in a way hospitals never are.

Southwest of the hospital sits a Russian forward military base, overrun in the first weeks of the cordon collapse and never retaken. Whatever soldiers didn't get out didn't turn quietly — the base now holds some of the strongest Infected anywhere on the island, and every survivor who's made it this far knows to leave that direction alone.

Which leaves one way out: north. Roughly 300 meters of dead streets, blown-out storefronts, and whatever's still moving in the apartment blocks stand between the hospital and the first line of wooden barricades — the outer edge of the Quarantine-9 safe zone. Reach them, and you're someone else's problem to keep alive.

When the Russian cordon began to fail — Wall breaches, missing patrols, entire units gone dark — Moscow refused outside intervention, insisting the situation was ████████ under control. Umbrella didn't wait for permission. Citing an "unacceptable containment risk to international waters" — and a classified interest in Article-7 they've never fully explained — they landed on the island's northern coast without consent and began building their own infrastructure from scratch.

This makes Umbrella's entire presence an act of trespass on militarized sovereign territory — which is exactly why Russian Cordon Forces treat Umbrella patrols as hostile intruders, not allies. Jammed, furious radio exchanges between Russian command and unidentified English-speaking callsigns are common. Umbrella, in turn, answers to no one on the island: they retrieve, destroy, and eliminate whatever stands in the way — survivor or soldier alike.