Vera Cortez

Vera Maria Alejandra Cortez was a Planetary Security detective and devout Unitologist on the Aegis VII colony, paired with the security officer Sergeant Abraham Neumann. As the Marker's influence spread through the settlement she was drawn into a mass suicide, and her body was later seen fused into the Necromorph Corruption inside the colony's communications needle.

Early life and career#

Vera Cortez was born on Earth to a poor family in the Central American sector, the youngest of five sisters. When she was twelve her father was killed by street muggers, and her mother turned to Unitology for comfort. Before long the whole family was devout, and Vera remained a believer from then on.

She joined the local police as soon as she was old enough, but she met so much sexual harassment and gender discrimination on the job that she quit and moved to the American Republic, finding work as a private security guard. Bored by the isolation of that work, she applied to the Concordance Extraction Corporation and was taken on as a standard security officer in P-Sec. Her diligence and persistence carried her to the rank of detective within a few years, and she was fiercely proud of having earned the position through merit, tolerating no disrespect from the many veteran former police officers in P-Sec. In private she credited her success to her Unitologist faith, but while she never denied her beliefs she did not advertise them either, and most of her colleagues had no idea she was devout. She and her partner, Sergeant Abraham Neumann, were friends and made an effective team across two colonies despite his prejudice against Unitology before they were posted to Aegis VII.

The second Aegis VII incident#

When Cortez began to suffer insomnia, Neumann was forced to cover her shifts. After he confronted her about her lateness and the two argued, she threw him out of her apartment. Soon afterward she joined a small prayer group near Marker 3A led by Deakin Abbott. Around the same time Neumann and Dr. Tom Sciarello went to investigate the Red Marker. Neumann was furious to find Cortez in the prayer group and tried to take her in for a psychiatric evaluation, but Abbott and Natalia Deshyanov's security group warned him off and told him to leave.

Death#

It soon became clear that Cortez had been completely swept up by Abbott's sermons. Even as Neumann tried to dissuade her, she and fifty-one other people, Abbott included, committed mass suicide in Union Square, interpreting the screech made when the Marker was removed as the voice of God. Her corpse was moved with the other victims to the colony's morgue. Presumably after the planet crack, the Necromorph biomass made its way into the morgue and infected and reanimated the bodies, most of which traveled to the main communications needle and formed an organic blanket over it. When Neumann and Marla Janssen later entered the needle, they found a massive wall of Corruption, and to Neumann's horror he recognized one of the faces still visible in it as Cortez.