Funeral Games – Chapter 12

They passed the Umbrella base on the way to the landing site, so at least there were no surprises there. At Leon's urging, the pilot took them down a little, but they were still too high up to make out any of the details. Jake got the impression that there wasn't much to see anyway.

The base amounted to just three buildings, all of them pretty small and none particularly well maintained. A field of solar panels stared out from the roof of the largest one, looking murky and cataracted beneath the flat Arctic sun.

Jake thought it made for a pretty eerie scene. He looked around at Leon for confirmation that it was fucking spooky down there, but Leon wasn't even paying attention. He was up in the jump seat behind the navigator, his head twisted around awkwardly so he could talk to the pilots.

The plane belonged to a Russian couple, Irina and Tanya. According to Leon, they were the only ones willing to make the flight this late in the year, at least without asking a lot of questions Jake didn't particularly want to answer.

At first, he had thought it seemed like a pretty shady set-up, but Jake soon discovered that the women were professionals. They didn't make any uncomfortable inquiries, or any inquiries at all that weren't related to payment and the timely delivery of it. They had the discretion of career mercenaries, but Jake had the feeling that it came less from a sense of honor towards two people they must have instantly perceived as being in the same line of work and more because they didn't really give a shit what anyone's business in Antarctica was.

They must have seen the old Umbrella base before, and indeed they even seemed to be navigating by it, but they didn't express any interest in ever finding out what it was doing down there.

Jake liked that about them. He hoped they lasted a long time out here, or somewhere else not too different, beyond the reach of convention.

Irina brought them down on a glacier, and Tanya lowered a set of stairs out of the door, the bottom three steps disappearing into the drifted snow.

"We'll wait," she said. Her English was spoken with a hint of a British accent rather than a Slavic one. "There's no need to rush. But don't be late, either."

Not for the first time, Jake had the feeling that this wasn't the brightest idea he'd ever had. Even Leon wasn't doing much to assure him, not with the hood of his neon orange parka cinched around his face and a pair of pink goggles strapped over his eyes. While Jake looked on, he climbed down out of the plane and sunk in to the snow up to his knees.

"Shit," Leon said.

"Forget something?" Tanya came out of the back of the plane carrying two sets of snowshoes. "We'll add the rental fee to your final bill," she said, and thrust a pair into Jake's arms with barely suppressed irritation.

"Thanks," Jake said, embarrassed.

"Go out now," Tanya said. "You're letting the cold air in."

Jake jumped down. The frozen crust on top of the snow cracked when he landed on it, and the sound was like a squeaky cough. This wasn't the nice fluffy Winter Wonderland snow that Jake remembered from his childhood. It wasn't even the gray slushy snow of DC. It was dry and hard, giving only with reluctance when Jake tried to pull his boots free. The sun, too, was like no sun he'd ever seen before. It hung high and bright in a blue, cloudless sky, but it might as well have been painted there for all the warmth it gave off. Though it shown with an incandescent whiteness, it evinced no heat at all.

Leon hopped over to where Jake was standing, pulling one of the snowshoes on as he went. "Never thought I'd visit a place like this."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Jake said.

"It's beautiful." Leon grinned. Jake could tell by the way the muffler around his mouth bunched up.

He didn't bother to answer. Stepping down hard on one of the plane's pontoons, he finished hauling himself out of the snow so he could strap the snowshoes on.

When he finished, Leon was already moving. Jake hurried to catch up with him, and when he did Leon said, "Can you believe this fresh air? Imagine what the stars must look like out here."

After that, Jake hung back a little. Leon was the navigator anyway. He had a little travel GPS, but he used a compass mostly. Jake thought he seemed to be getting a kick out of it. Probably not much call for Boy Scout shit like that anymore, not even in Leon's line of work.

Finding the Umbrella base was up to him, but getting back wasn't going to be a problem as far as Jake could tell. When he looked back the way he had come, he saw two pairs of footprints, stretching back as far as the eye could see, like tracks on the lunar surface. The wind was blowing pretty hard, but not enough to disturb the hard-packed snow. Occasionally it threw up a cloud of tiny ice crystals into the air, scattering them around like glitter, but that was about the extent of what it could do.

He wasn't sure how long they walked. The sun didn't seem to move in the sky, and the landscape changed so little that they might have traveled a thousand miles or ten feet. Eventually, they came to the top of a high drift and the Umbrella base lay in the valley below them like a crouching black spider on a white web.

Leon stopped and Jake came up next to him. Even from all the way up here, it was easy to see that the base had been maintained. The runway was clear and there was paths shoveled in the snow.

"Looks like somebody's home," Leon said. "They left the porch light on for us."

"What should we do?"

"Honestly, we should probably head back to the plane," Leon said. "We should forget we were ever here."

"Yeah," Jake replied. He felt some big, bitter emotion welling up inside, but he wasn't completely convinced that it was disappointment.

Leon shrugged. "On the other hand, they must know that we're here by now and no one's shot at us yet. Maybe we should just go knock on the front door."

"Sure," Jake said.

Leon unslung his backpack and crouched down. He rummaged inside for a second, and when he straightened up again he was holding a pair of pistols. The big padded gloves they were both wearing made their hands too awkward to shoot anything accurately, but maybe Leon had brought the guns more for reassurance, or because it had felt like something he ought to do.

He passed the larger of the two over to Jake. The metal was so cold it burned his skin through his gloves.

"Don't go crazy with that thing," Leon said.

They hiked down the side of the drift. All was still in the valley below them, and all quiet except for the bellowing of Jake's breath inside his muffler and the crunch of their shoes as they broke through the ice with each step. The largest building in the compound seemed better maintained than the others. Though the snow was piled up high on the windward side, it was mostly cleared from around the door.

No one came out to stop them; nothing moved within or without.

Leon cracked the hatch on the exterior of the base, a cloud billowed out and engulfed them. It was a lot warmer inside, and when Jake stepped through the door his goggles fogged up instantly. The heat was on, and when Jake peeled off his frozen muffler the difference in temperature made his skin sting.

He glanced at Leon. They were thinking the same thing.

Jake's long dormant killer instincts had kicked in so smoothly and subtly that he almost hadn't noticed they were back. He knew they were not being watched. There was no one else here, alive, dead, or otherwise.

Leon glanced at his watch. "We've got a couple of hours to kill," he said. "Let's take a look around."

They got the lay of the land pretty quick. The base was hardly sprawling, and far from crammed with secrets. One wing housed the barracks and some single rooms. Most of the beds were stripped down to the springs, but some of them were made up. Blankets and pillows had been left behind, but no personal effects. In the kitchen, clean dishes had been left on the drying rack, but everything else had been neatly put away. They'd had a skeleton crew here until recently. They were gone now, but they hadn't left in a hurry.

"Did they take off because of us?" Jake said, feeling like it was a stupid question with an obvious answer, but not sure if it was obvious because it was yes, or because it was no.

Leon shrugged. "Chris said this was the place."

In the other wing of the compound, there was a small observatory, as well as a disused sample room with the cabinets cleaned out and the empty spots in them still neatly labeled. It was pretty innocuous stuff, a nice little Potemkin village the Umbrella people had set up for the sake of appearances. Everything was coated with a thick layer of dust, and a lot of it looked like it had long since succumbed to the cold.

Only one door at the end of the hall seemed new. It was sealed with a keypad lock, but a new strip of duct tape had been pasted on the wall above it, the code printed on it in neat block capitals. It was the kind of set up that normally would have sent Jake high-tailing it in the opposite direction even under the most auspicious of circumstances, but this time he stayed where he was.

Leon was watching him, but he made no move to interfere. This was Jake's show, as far as he was concerned.

Jake had been in charge of men's lives before, and he always made it a rule to play things conservatively. He didn't want to get anyone killed. They were just mercenaries; they punched the clock, they got paid, and no one was in any hurry to stick his neck out.

This time it was different, though. They were further off the grid than Jake had ever been, but he wasn't scared. Neither was Leon, if the way he held himself, without a single bead of sweat on his rugged brow or a single furrow on his handsome, impassive face was any indication. Though maybe Leon had long ago forgotten how to be afraid of death, or at least learned to lock it away until late at night, when no one could see him paralyzed into wakefulness, buried in a bottle, where those old terrors could not impose on anyone else.

The question this time was not whether finding out what was behind that door was worth the risk, but whether or not Jake really wanted to find out. Whether or not he really had the balls to see it through to the end. It had never been like that before, a matter of want instead of need.

In a sudden fit of anger, Jake stabbed in the code on the keypad. The door unlatched and slid back.

Too late now, Jake thought vindictively. His blood was hot with a familiar rage, one that had been cooled by all those months of domesticity. He had almost forgotten how it felt, like a fire that never went out.

The door opened into a flight of stairs that descended past the foundation of the base, into a network of subterranean hallways beneath the permafrost. In a couple of places, the steel paneling on the walls had buckled beneath the relentless expansion of the icy soil.

Down here, too, all was quiet. Jake checked one of the rooms at random. It was cramped with a couple of steel tables, the walls lined with shelves cluttered with scientific glassware, computer equipment, boxes of old files. A film of hoarfrost covered everything like mold. It was significantly colder down here under the surface, a fact which Jake only realized when he moved to zip up his parka and found his fingers stiff and numb.

He tried another door, and found another disused lab. This one was almost completely empty, but back in one corner was a large tank full of murky formaldehyde. Floating in the cloudy amber was a Tyrant BOA. It was missing its right arm and its left leg, the wounds trailing wisps of tissue that looked translucent in the liquid. Its eyes were milky white in death.

Jake tapped on the glass with his finger. Behind him, he heard Leon shift on his feet and take in a sharp breath that wasn't quite a gasp. "Careful with that thing," he said.

At the sound of his voice, Jake turned around and looked at him as if realizing for the first time that he wasn't alone here. "Everyone's gone," he said. "My dad must be gone by now too."

"Let's keep looking," Leon said. "We still have a little time before we have to head back. Chris said-"

"Chris doesn't know shit," Jake snapped, his voice louder than he had thought it would be, loud enough to startle him. "I mean, he seriously doesn't know what he's talking about."

Leon's brows contracted in sympathy. "He knows a few things."

"Fine," Jake said. "Let's keep looking. See if I care."

"Just one more place," Leon said. "There's a room down here I want to check out."

Jake followed him. Leon glanced back once or twice to make sure he was there. He seemed pretty grateful for the company, and not a little worried that it might be abruptly withdrawn. The room he was talking about was at the end of the hall. A row of transparent plastic panels provided a glimpse into a surveillance room, banked with monitors. There was an interior door, and beside that a pane of one-way glass. The light hit it all wrong, and it was impossible to make out much of the room beyond, just a single hunched form, crowded with shadows.

Leon opened the door to the surveillance room, and Jake noticed that his hand had slipped down to his hip where his pistol rested and he had thumbed open the clasp holding the hood guard closed. Jake didn't think he even knew that he had done it.

Once inside, a quiet humming broke the silence. One of the computers had been left on. Jake jiggled the mouses next to the monitors lined up on the desk and eventually one glowed to life. It went right to the desktop, without prompting for a password. Jake figured that whoever had been here until recently had counted on the isolation to protect their data.

The desktop was taken up by a row of folders, labeled Phase 1 through Phase 14. Jake clicked on Phase 4, and it opened a series of x-ray images. Jake checked a few of them at random. They all showed a right femur, broken cleanly in the first image and progressing through the stages of healing in the ones that followed. Jake had thought that the numbers assigned to each image were dates, but now he wasn't so sure. If they were, than it had taken the break only a week and a half to knit back together. In a follow-up x-ray taken two weeks later, there was not even any scoring on the bone to indicate there had once been an injury.

Jake's stomach flopped over. He felt like he was going to puke, but he opened another folder.

Phase 7 contained x-rays of a broken hand, the fingers shattered into slivers of bone. That one had taken three weeks to heal. In Phase 9, a collapsed lung, shriveled and choked with fluid in the first image, whole and healthy in the last, taken nine days later.

The folder labeled Phase 13 was a little different. It was full of photographs rather than x-ray images. Jake couldn't tell from the thumbnails what he was looking at, so he clicked the first picture to expand it. It was a shot of a man's abdomen, hips to ribcage. The soft part beneath his navel had been carved open in a surgical smile, a piece of plastic kitchen wrap stretched over it to keep the bulging intestines from spilling out.

Jake jerked back. He felt his stomach clench and tasted bile in the back of his mouth but he managed to keep his lunch down.

"Leon…" he rasped, but Leon wasn't there. He had gone ahead, through the door into the interior laboratory. Jake closed the photo on the screen and went after him, trying to tell himself that he wasn't hurrying.

The room was empty except for a steel table, the kind with gutters, used for autopsies. A white sheet had been pulled over the table, and beneath it the contours of a still form could be made out. The sheet was covered in streaks the color of rust, and in the center was a circle of bright red, still damp and shiny under the fluorescent lights.

The floor felt uneven under Jake's feet. He looked down. The tiles were all slanted inward, culminating in a large drain in the center of the floor. A ribbon of red swirled around the mouth of the drain, not enough to run down.

Leon had his gun out. He held it at his shoulder, almost like an extension of his arm. Jake kept his holstered. He didn't know why, but he wasn't jumpy at all, and he would have felt like a fool if he drew now.

With an untrembling hand, Leon reached out and took hold of the soiled sheet. He pulled it down, past an overlong and matted mane of golden hair; a high and regal brow, now furrowed with deep lines; eyes the color of twin bruises, open and unseeing, the sclera shot through with red.

That was all Jake needed to see to recognize his father, and more than enough to know that the man was dead.

"Jesus…" he muttered. He wanted to turn away, but for some reason he didn't.

Leon pulled the sheet down further, uncovering Wesker's upper body. There was a fresh bullet hole in his chest, but it hadn't bled much. It had probably been put there after he was dead, insurance that he would stay that way. Leon must have noticed the same thing, because his attention went to the IV line in the bend of Wesker's elbow. The skin all around the insertion point was red and raw, and Jake could see the veins under Wesker's pale skin, a roadmap of black and purple.

Poison, Jake thought, and then a bullet through the heart to make sure that it stuck. They had done a thorough job, and, whatever else Wesker had been, he was free now. He had longed for immortality, and then he had almost found it. In the basement of an inconsequential laboratory, prodded by needles and tubes. Cut and mauled on a whim, to see how far his body could be pushed before it broke.

Jake let out his breath in a sharp exhalation. He felt like he had been holding it for a long time.

Leon glanced back at him, probably making sure he was okay. Then he lifted one of the lower corners of the sheet, where it was bloodiest, uncovering Wesker's leg.

A section of skin on his thigh had been peeled away, down to the raw muscle underneath. The wound looked livid, but surgically clean. The neat edges had a knitted look where the skin had started to grow back.

"What were they doing here?" Leon said. He sounded weird, Jake thought. In fact, he sounded fucking pissed.

"They were interested in the Uroborous virus," Jake replied. Leon hadn't seen the photos, and maybe that was just as well. Wesker was dead now, but he'd been alive when they'd done that to him. "They were interested in how fast he healed."

Leon squeezed his eyes shut momentarily. He shoved his pistol back in the holster as if he were disappointed that he had come too late to use it on someone. "All right," he said, passing a hand back through his hair. "We'll take the body with us. The BSAA is going to want it, but we'll get a death certificate out of it at least. You'll get what you came for."

He pulled the sheet back down over Wesker's ruined leg, tucking the corner under in preparation to wrap up the body.

"You have everything handled?" Jake asked, hanging back.

"Do I have everything with your father handled?" Leon said. "Yeah, I pretty much got it."

Jake shrunk back. Leon had never spoken to him like that before, not even when Jake knew, on reflection, he'd been acting like a pretty insufferable little shit.

Leon pulled off one of his gloves with his teeth and started to fumble with the IV embedded in Wesker's elbow. It was taped in there pretty good, but eventually Leon got it loose and he pulled the needle free. A little bubble of blackish blood formed at the site of the puncture. Leon was working fast now, unhesitant and unblinking in the face of death. He unbuckled the shackles on Wesker's wrists and tucked his arms in close to his body. Then he leaned over him to pull the sheet up.

That was where he hesitated.

"Did you hear that?" he whispered.

"I didn't hear anything," Jake said. But then he did.

A wet rattle came from somewhere deep in Wesker's body, the sound of old technology stirring reluctantly to life. The corpse moved; its ribs ballooned outward and its throat hitched a few times in rapid succession.

It took Jake a second to realize that it was struggling to breathe.

Jake took a slow step back. He kept his eyes on Leon the whole time, so he knew that he didn't move away at all. Instead, he reached out, very slowly, and touched Wesker's lank hair with his fingers.

The corpse's eyes rolled to the whites. Its blue lips peeled back. It made a sound that was halfway between a gasp and a cough, and then it was gasping and coughing. Neat nails scrabbled along the edge of the table, looking for something to hold on to.

Wesker lurched over on his side and vomited a torrent of black clots onto the tile floor. A gout of blood leapt from the gunshot wound in his chest.

"Shit!" Jake heard himself say, and he fumbled for the gun at his hip. His hands were shaking, all the blood rapidly retreating to his heart. He lost his hold. The pistol fell to the floor and went off, but Jake barely heard it over the howling in his head.

The bullet went wild, punching a hole in the far wall.

"Goddamnit!" Leon shouted. "Go wait outside!"

Jake didn't have to be told twice. He stumbled back, and flung the door back into the surveillance room open so hard he almost knocked if off its hinges. The last thing he wanted to do was look over his shoulder, but at the last second he did.

Leon was bent over the autopsy table, bent over the body that was no longer a corpse. Wesker's hands were knotted in the front of Leon's coat. His fingers pallid, brittle, but not without strength.