Funeral Games – Chapter 21
They picked Jake up at a truck stop outside Philadelphia. It was still snowing, though more lightly now, and Jake was bundled up in a wool trench coat and scarf. It was more of a fall getup, not right for the weather, though it did look good on him, even Leon had to admit.
With a wrench of pity, Leon realized that Jake had dressed for the occasion. He, who had always been so straightforward and realistic, had chosen those impractical fall layers. Maybe it was because he thought it was what his father would want him to look like, or because it was how he wanted his father to see him when he laid eyes on him properly for the first time.
When Leon pulled up, Jake hung back cautiously until he was sure it was him, then he jogged across the snowy parking lot. His heavy military boots crunched on the ice, and the tails of his coat flapped in the wind, smacking against his thighs. He looked arrayed for battle, which may very well have been exactly how he was going into this.
Jake stopped by the driver's side door and Leon rolled down the window. "Thanks for coming."
"Nothing better to do," Jake said. He slipped in the back seat. "Just dodging calls from Sherry's bosses."
Leon started the engine. He felt Jake's eyes boring into the back of his neck, felt them clutching at him like drowning men scrabbling at a spar, trying to delay the moment when he would have to acknowledge Wesker's presence. Wesker seemed content to wait it out; he was looking out the window into the falling snow.
"You look like shit, Leon," Jake said, deliberately not acknowledging Wesker, who by this point also wasn't the freshest, if Leon was being totally honest.
"Yeah, I know." Leon sighed. He knew he had to put an end to this. Rip the bandage off in one pull and let the wound breathe a little. "Jake. This is—"
"Hey," Jake said, cutting him off. His eyes flicked momentarily to Wesker's arrogant profile, then immediately back to Leon.
"Hello," Wesker said icily.
"Look, Jake…" Leon paused. He'd felt a hitch in his back, a little twitch in his shoulder, as if something alive had shifted beneath the skin. He risked a glance in Wesker's direction, wondering if it was starting already. Wesker didn't even seem to notice.
"What am I looking at?" Jake was saying dryly. The snake-in-the-grass sensation in his shoulder had abated, and Leon marshaled himself back under control.
"Look," he said again. "I wouldn't have called you, but I really need your help. You've probably got plenty you want to say, but I need you to bite your tongue for the next 72 hours. Can you do that?"
"Yeah," Jake said. "I can do that. But, jesus, Leon. You're just lucky Sherry likes you so damn much."
"I am lucky," Leon said wearily. He pulled out of the truck stop and got on the I-70 and headed west. The feeling of something moving beneath his skin did not return, although he waited for it, all his senses attuned to that no-longer-painful spot on the back of his shoulder. Though the flesh itched like a broken bone healing inside a cast, whatever was inside him seemed to have fallen dormant for the time being.
Near the Ohio border, they stopped at a gas station. They'd left the snow behind and the sun was high and bright. Leon took a quick inventory of his bare feet, his torn and blood soaked clothing, and decided against getting out. He sent Jake to pay for the gas and buy coffee while he waited in the car.
Once Jake had disappeared inside, Leon turned to Wesker. He had hardly moved for the past hundred miles or so, which Leon had at first taken for a tantrum and ignored. But it had gone on long enough now, that he was starting to get a little creepy. He reached over and touched Wesker's wrist, and he stirred a little.
"You okay?" Leon said.
"Yes." Wesker turned to face him. Leon had gotten used to seeing him in the soft glow of the cabin's mood lighting. In direct sunlight, he seemed different: Paler than Leon had thought, with dark circles under his eyes and deep creases across his forehead. His eyes were still the same muddy purple, bereft of light and depth; Leon had been right about those. "I've been thinking."
"Anything you want to talk about?"
"No." Wesker frowned slightly, which made the lines on his forehead deepen. "Not yet."
"That's fine," Leon said. "Though I guess I don't have to tell you, I might not be here to listen forever."
"You'll be fine," Wesker replied. "You're healthy and strong."
"That sounds like a promise. I thought doctors didn't make promises like that."
"You watch too many television dramas," Wesker snorted. "You'll be all right. You're going to live. Nothing dies unless I say so."
Leon shivered. "Guess you've got it all figured out."
"Let me look at it."
Leon turned around so Wesker could get to his shoulder. His hands were as clinical as he remembered: gentle but not comforting, professional but lacking utterly in human warmth. "It's not serious," Wesker said. "It's nothing."
After a moment, he added, "Does it hurt much?"
"No," Leon told him. "It itches like crazy, though. What does it look like? Some kind of rash?"
Wesker hesitated before he replied. "Not a rash. It's similar to an abscess."
Leon scowled. That was a gross word for a gross phenomenon, and Leon knew he probably should have let the matter drop. He needed a clear head if he was going to get them to Colorado. Jake had been behaving himself so far, but Leon knew as well as anyone the dammed-up torrent of rage he was carrying around inside. It wouldn't take much to set him off the way things were going.
It was better this way, Leon thought; better not to know what was going on inside him so he could focus on what was happening without. But there had been that moment of hesitation when he had asked Wesker about the wound, that slight tremor to his voice that he wouldn't have caught if he hadn't spent the last 48 hours practically sitting in the man's lap.
If Wesker was nervous, then Leon knew he probably ought to have been terrified.
"Don't bullshit me," Leon said. "Just tell me if there's something I need to know."
Wesker didn't say anything right away. He smoothed the tatters of Leon shirt back down, then pressed his hand flat against his spine. Awkwardly, he slid it upward to cup Leon's shoulder. In the full sunlight, Leon could see a dusting of faint brown spots, indicating age, on the back of Wesker's hand. For some reason that Leon could not articulate, they were fascinating and precious to him. He raised his own hand, and pressed the palm over Wesker's long fingers.
"It's spreading more quickly than I had anticipated," Wesker said. "But it is under control. You are healthy and strong, and you will fight. You'll fight to the very last."
"You got that right," Leon said, but he wasn't sure that was going to be enough. He started to ask, but it was at that moment that the backdoor of the car banged open.
Jake got halfway in before he spat, "What the fuck?"
Leon sighed and dropped his hand away from Wesker's, who was in no hurry to let him go in turn.
"I think I'm going to fucking puke—" Jake grumbled as he slid into the car, but he abruptly broke off when he saw Leon's shoulder. "Hey, Leon?" he said.
"Yeah, I know," Leon replied. "But we've got it handled."
"I've seen something like that before," Jake said, eyeing them suspiciously. "A couple of times."
"Wesker says he can take care of it." Leon glanced over his shoulder, briefly taking in Wesker's still profile, somehow more handsome now that Leon had found the fine lines and flaws in it. "I trust him."
"Suit yourself," Jake said. "It's your life. I got a gun in my backpack, just so you know. He has a habit of not taking care of things when he should."
"I trust you too," Leon replied evenly. "I know you'll do what needs to be done."
Jake fished a plastic bag of beef jerky out of the sack of supplies he'd bought inside. He tore it open and savagely chewed a piece as Leon started the car.
"Worst road trip ever," Jake sighed as they made for the highway.
It was in the great flat belt of land just past Kansas City that Leon started having trouble seeing the highway.
He had driven all through the day without much trouble aside from the occasional hiccup or twitch on his right side. His shoulder kept trying to creep up, contorting itself into a shrug. The itching had spread across his back, and then stopped. Now there was only the dull ache deep inside and the occasional bead of tepid liquid rolling down his back.
Other than that, he felt surprisingly good. He'd driven for about fifteen straight hours by his estimation and he wasn't tired. He wasn't even hungry, though he'd had no appetite all day and the last time he'd been able to choke down a little water was before they'd hit Dayton.
When things started to go south, they went all at once. The road that had seemed so sturdy all day suddenly turned to water before him. It swam in the headlights, and blurred, and finally shrank to a tiny pinpoint in a sea of black static. Leon's hand went slack on the wheel and the car started to drift. The tires hit the rumble strip on the side of the road, and the sound seemed very far away indeed. Leon was slow to place it, too slow…
All at once, a hand closed around the steering wheel and guided the car back onto the blacktop. Leon blinked a few times, coming to his senses. He felt nauseous, but it wasn't because he'd almost pitched them all off the road and into a corn field. That barely registered at all, in fact. He just felt sick, as if someone had introduced about a quart of acid to his stomach.
His pulse pounding in his ears, Leon lifted his foot off the gas and eased the car over onto the shoulder. Jake kept his hand on the wheel the entire time, leaning over the center console from the backseat to do it.
"My turn to drive," he said.
"Yeah," Leon rasped. His tongue felt as if it had grown huge and heavy, and his voice sounded ridiculous to own ears. "Sorry. I don't know what happened. I just lost—"
Jake wasn't listening. He'd already hopped out of the car. Leon glanced at Wesker, who was watching him steadily, not looking towards Jake at all. In just the little glow that came from the dome light, it was impossible to make out his expression. Leon felt that he had a lot to say to him; if nothing else, he owed him an explanation or an excuse for the past 48 hours.
Nothing specific came to mind, though.
Jake pulled open the door on Leon's side. He waited there, stiffly, not even offering Leon a hand to help him out, though Leon had to admit he was pretty shaky. On the third try he managed to boost himself out of the driver's seat. He stumbled into the back while Jake took the front.
"You left slime all over the seat up here," he said.
"Just a little blood," Leon replied.
"It's not blood," Jake snapped. He pushed the seat back viciously to accommodate his longer legs. "Whatever. Just get some rest. Lay on a blanket or something."
Leon wasn't listening. His pulse throbbed in his ears like an immense pressure pounding on the inside of his skull. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes and lay down across the seat and focused on his breathing.
Up front, Jake started the car and pulled off the shoulder. Blinkers and everything. What a good boy he was, he thought, not without some measure of disgust. Wesker wasn't looking at him, but Jake could feel him paying attention. In that moment, Jake hated him as much as he ever had, and he was more desperate to impress him than ever before.
After a while, Leon quieted down in the backseat. Jake hoped that he was asleep and not feeling much, since he'd clearly been feeling plenty earlier. Without the pained hiss of his breathing to break up the monotony, an awkward silence fell over the car. Jake flipped the radio on with a fumbling, nervous hand. There wasn't much up or down the dial, just a high-and-lonesome voice singing Go Rest High on That Mountain against a backdrop of a bunch of static.
They went around a curve and then even that was lost.
"Aksinya," Wesker said abruptly. "Aksinya Mueller is your mother."
Jake flinched at the first word as if anticipating a blow. He was ashamed when he realized it was only his mother's name.
"Was," he said. He shifted his grip on the steering wheel and wondered if he was going to puke. He felt like he'd just reached the top of the first high hill of a roller coaster and the cart had paused for a second so he could see all the jolts and jerks he was going to have to get through before the ride was over. "She iwas/i my mother."
Wesker hesitated for a moment, then he said, "I see."
"It was some kind of auto-immune thing," Jake said. "And it hurt a lot. It moved so slow, it took her years to die. By then, she'd been dying for almost as long as I'd been alive."
"I had no idea," Wesker mused. He seemed to be comparing what Jake had said to some vast library of medical literature he kept filed away in his head.
"Now you do," Jake said harshly. "So what are you going to do about it?"
"You have my condolences."
"I don't want them," Jake said. "I just want a goddamn payday. All the back payments for all the pain you caused us because you couldn't keep your dick in your pants. That's why Leon and I came looking for you in the first place. I made him come, because I thought you were dead. I wanted to find your bloated corpse and drag it back with me and finally get some of that money you've been sitting on for all these years."
Wesker was quiet for a long time. Jake wasn't sure if he meant to speak again, and he was just starting to get used to the silence when Wesker said, "There is no money. There hasn't been for a long time."
"Bullshit."
"It's the truth. I sold off a good deal of shares of Umbrella stock before the company went bankrupt, and I had my patrimony to draw from. But I spent both long ago. I've been a charity case for years."
"You're lying…" Jake started to say. But he couldn't get any further than that. He knew it wasn't a goddamn lie. All at once, he felt a hot pressure in his throat, and his eyes got cloudy. Christ, it had been a long time since he'd cried over anything, much less spilt milk.
It wasn't the money exactly. The money had been a promise he had made to himself, a guarantee that everything would work out all right. His new life, Sherry, the tenuous hope of the world that he had saved; the money was to have been a down payment on all these things. It would have finally made him worthy of them. Without it, he was afraid that he might, at any moment, be thrown back through the years and over the miles. He might go to sleep one night in Sherry's comfortable bed, but wake up on the floor of a hovel in Edonia, with his belly empty, the stove cold, and the sound of a ceaseless wet cough ringing in his ears.
The money had turned out to be as much of a ghost as the man. His mother had maintained that Wesker would come for them one day. Right up until the end, she had been sure of it. Though by then she no longer seemed to think he was a good man, she was convinced that he would do the honorable and decent thing.
Wesker was here now, just as she had foretold, but he hadn't come to bail Jake out. Here was a very different man from the sturdy, steely-minded genius his mother had described. He looked uncertain, tired, faded by suffering and years. And just as the promise of his inheritance had been dashed, Jake felt the image of his father he had been carrying around in his mind for all those years begin to splinter and break apart.
"She thought you were a great man," Jake said, his voice barely a whisper. A couple of tears slid down his cheeks, one from each eye. It was dark, and he didn't think Wesker had seen them. "I guess she had to believe that, because if you were great than she could think a little bit better of everyone else. Including herself, and me."
"Let go of the past," Wesker said. "I didn't know of your existence, nor of her illness. You may blame me for that if you like. But think how much worse the situation might have been if I had known. My father's company intended for years to turn me into a test subject when I had outlived my usefulness. Imagine what they might have done to someone who shared my blood but not my research. You were at least safe in your ignorance."
Wesker pressed a hand to his chest, as if he could feel the cursed blood they shared coiling in his breast like a viper. For a second, Jake thought he might be able to feel it too.
"Old news," he said hoarsely. "They got me already."
"Oh?"
"In Lianshang," Jake told him. "Actually, I guess you missed that one. It was a bad scene, but it sorted itself out in the end. Got a nice little vaccine out of it."
He felt Wesker's eyes on him, studying him. "Then you know what you are?"
"Yeah," Jake said. "I know who I am. Do you?"
"A great man. At least, one who was very nearly great."
"Close don't count," Jake said. "Sorry to tell you."
Wesker's lips gave a strange twitch. He seemed to be attempting to smile.
Jake drove in silence for a few miles, not daring to look anywhere but the road unwinding directly before him. His heart was pounding and his mouth tasted coppery. He felt like he had just run for his life or tussled with someone who was earnestly trying to kill him. The brief conversation he'd had with Wesker kept replaying itself in his mind, and even the disappointment of losing out on his inheritance was eclipsed by the terror of knowing that he had actually talked with his father.
They passed through an oasis of light: a row of streetlamps illuminating an exit that led to a truck stop marooned on the prairie. After they had passed it and the dark closed in on them once more, Jake said, "Listen. About Leon…"
"He can be saved," Wesker said. "I wouldn't be here if I was not sure that he could be saved."
"But it's bad," Jake murmured. "That thing on his back…"
"How long did it take them to synthesize a vaccine from your natural antibody?"
"Six months."
"I can do the same in six hours," Wesker replied. "And so I say that he can be saved."
"I'm not going to argue with you," Jake said. "I like Leon a lot. I mean, I'm not crazy about having him for a step-dad, if that's what you two are up to. But I guess you like Leon, too."
"I owe him," Wesker said. "I haven't forgotten how to repay a debt."
Jake glanced at him. Wesker's expression had darkened; he was uncomfortably tense. Jake knew that he had no way of ever knowing what had happened after he'd left Leon at the airstrip, or exactly what had gone on in Antarctica before they arrived. However, it was clear that some combination of the two had left Wesker deeply shaken.
He was changed, somehow. That much was obvious. Jake hadn't known the man before, and he'd had nothing but unfounded rumors of what he was like in life to go on. Still, you didn't have to be the guy's best friend to know that something profound had happened to him. He wore his own skin as if it were an uncomfortable disguise, with only those muddy haunted eyes serving as a clue to what lay beneath.
"I saw the files they kept on you in that lab," Jake said after a while. He hadn't wanted to bring the subject up yet, had wanted to save it as a surprise, perhaps to deploy at a moment when Wesker's guard was down and it could do some damage. He'd never had much patience for that kind of strategy, though. "I saw what they did. Even Leon doesn't know the details like I do."
"This body still feels pain," Wesker said quietly. He clenched his fists against his thighs, as if to remind himself of their strength. "I had forgotten. And, worse still, forgotten the forgetting." He was quiet again, this time for a long time.
"I didn't think that anyone would come," he admitted at last.
"What did they want with you?" Jake said. "At first I thought it had something to do with how you can heal. But it was too haphazard for that. It lacked that – what's it called? – scientific rigor. And then the way they left you for dead. They were doing something else, weren't they?"
"I've considered the same thing," Wesker admitted. "And I don't know what they wanted. Though I may have the opportunity to find out soon. They have not given up."
"Oh," Jake said. And then, "That sucks."
"They may hunt me down again very soon, or not for a long while. I don't know what kind of technology they have at their disposal. We can make it to Raccoon City, though. There's still a little time left."
Wesker sounded like he was set on that, and Jake wasn't about to argue. When he'd first called Jake, Leon at least might have mentioned that someone was after them. He also might have mentioned that he was about a hair's breath away from turning into some kind of abomination. Not much of a phone guy, that Leon.
"They don't want you," Wesker said, as if he had read Jake's thoughts. "Or him. They want me, and so if you are smart you'll be fine."
"Was Leon not smart, then?"
"No, he wasn't," Wesker said quietly. "He was very stupid indeed. I don't know why he does the things he does."
"You mean like, save your sorry ass? I don't know why he did that, either. I told him not to."
Wesker didn't seem hurt, or even surprised to hear that. In fact, he seemed not to be paying attention at all.
Jake sighed. "Leon's not that complicated. He does the things he does because he really wants to help people. There's no secret motive; he's honestly just that corny. He wants to save everyone because he thinks they're all as good and noble as he is."
Wesker got quiet again at that, mulling it over. The big, flat, dark prairie stretched out ahead of them, giving him plenty of time to break it down into digestible parts. After a while he said, "Pull over up here."
Jake might have argued or refused, just to be a pain the ass, but he didn't. He eased the car over on the shoulder and flipped on the hazard lights. Wesker got out, and moved around to the back seat. He slid in next to Leon, who roused a little.
"Are we there?" he asked blearily.
"Not yet," Wesker said. "But I've come to keep an eye on your condition."
"Thanks," Leon said. "I could use the company."
Jake didn't hear the rest. He started the engine and turned up the static on the radio. Then, he started driving. The tank was half-full and they'd hit Raccoon City around dawn. He wondered if Leon would actually last that long. Wesker seemed convinced that he could cure him, but Wesker's track record honestly wasn't great. He'd gotten more things wrong than right over the years.
Though Jake was pulling for him, he was nothing if not practical, and he was already resolved to kill Leon rather than let him become something he would never have wanted to be.