Funeral Games – Chapter 25

For all that Wesker had dreaded being dragged back into that sterile lab where they would complete the disassembly of his body, he had not thought himself so fatalistic that he had given it up as an inevitability. However, when he did find himself back in that stainless steel tomb, his first thoughts were not of surprise, nor of terror, nor even of wonder as to how they had managed to take him so peacefully, stealing over him in his sleep, like death.

All of those emotions came later, in due time, but not before a flood of acceptance – even relief – had broken over him. It had all been a dream, a phantom of his fragmented mind, which had been cut to ribbons by Uroborous and reassembled haphazardly, with its neural pathways misaligned. Pieced back together so indiscriminately that it had conjured up a vision of rescue, safe haven, even affection. All those things he neither needed nor deserved.

The cure he had made, the way he had felt – the way Leon had made him feel – it had all been a lie he had told himself. Only the cold embrace of the laboratory had ever been real, and that was as it should be. Better to die, debased and forgotten beneath the earth, than to come so late in life, a groveling penitent, to realize all he had missed.

Gradually, his head cleared. His eyes were still slow to focus and he had vertigo, almost exactly as if her were unpleasantly drunk. Limited as he was, he was able to take account of his situation.

He was seated in a stiff and uncomfortable stainless steel chair, a piece of furniture created solely to hold up to any kind of abuse that a captive might hurl at it. His wrists were affixed to the arms with thick leather straps, and another leather belt was looped around his ankles, holding his legs in place.

Wesker shifted, testing the bonds. They bit into his skin, chafing against old bruises. His gaze drifted slowly over his surroundings, though in truth there wasn't much to see: A white tile floor, steel paneling on the walls, a large pane of one-way glass that he was on the wrong side of.

Opposite him, perhaps two yards away, was a second straight-backed chair, the mirror of his own. This one was empty, and the leather straps hung down from the arms like dead things.

It was not the base in Antarctica, but for all its lack of warmth or identity it may as well have been. It might have been any one of a hundred such facilities dotted across the globe, even one of his own. Surely some of those makeshift workspaces he had cobbled together - in cheap old warehouses or cheap new office buildings - during his long years of wandering had been found and repurposed by now. Even those parts of him would still be useful to someone.

As his eyes roamed around the featureless room, slowly relearning their function, Wesker could not shake the idea that he was forgetting something. Perhaps he had only forgotten to panic. Indeed, he felt strangely calm, though he knew what had happened and what must inevitably happen next. His mind knew, but it was slow to transmute that information into an appropriate physical reaction.

Then, all at once, he knew. And the knowing was enough to make him struggle for the first time. He jerked against the leather straps in an attempt to pull himself upright. They flung him back, almost hard enough to knock the wind out of him. Hard enough, at any rate, to make his voice sound quite small and pitiful when he choked out, "Leon?"

He felt ashamed that he had called out to him, but Wesker still waited a moment in silent anticipation, waiting for Leon to speak to him from some hidden corner of the room. As if not even the many tendrils of Wesker's many enemies could be enough to tear them apart.

The only reply that came back to him was the echo of his own voice off the steel walls, more pleading and pitiful with each repetition. Of course Leon wasn't there. They had never wanted him.

He was probably dead by now. Or, perhaps, by some miracle, he had been spared. Wesker had no idea how he had gotten here, and in fact he could remember very little after retiring to his old room in the mansion with Leon. Some fast-acting and thorough drug must have been used to render him unconscious, though Wesker had not the slightest idea how it might have been administered.

But if that were the case, then was it not also possible that Leon had simply been left behind, unmolested, to sleep it off? Wesker liked that explanation, and he held fast to it. He remembered entirely too well his experience with Jessica and Raymond. They had been sloppy in many ways, but consummate professionals where it mattered the most. Whether this had been orchestrated by one of them or by some other bit of mercenary flotsam cast up on the shores of this latest war, they would have known better than to kill a government agent if it could be avoided.

It might have been nothing more than a pleasant fiction, but in truth worrying about Leon was a comfort to him somehow. Better to think of what had happened to Leon than what was sure to happen to himself. Wesker was alone now, but he wouldn't be for long. They would come for him in good time, with their knives drawn.

A shudder convulsed his body. He felt his chest tightening, an iron-gauntleted hand squeezing the life out of him. His blood was throbbing so hard in his ears, that he almost missed the sound of a door in the wall behind him sliding open. He heard someone come in, though, the soft tap of a woman in high heels, moving gracefully.

Wesker did not turn around to look. He would not look, he decided, or speak. And he would try very, very hard not to scream. Then, at least, they would know his contempt for them.

The woman paused behind him. She kept perfectly still for almost half a minute. Though Wesker could not see her, it seemed that he could feel her presence. She held herself straight, as if balancing a stack of books on her head. Her hands were at her sides, not hanging loosely, but knotted into fists.

She didn't speak, and her silence seemed to draw all the air out of the room, turning it into a sealed vacuum perfectly calibrated for the two of them. It was like being in a bathysphere that had been pressurized for its long trip to the bottom of the sea. All forces internal and external were held in balance, until the first crack appeared in the surface.

"I had heard you were awake," the woman said at last. Her voice was very soft, low, with a rough edge as if she had long ago swallowed something that had stuck in her throat.

It made Wesker's heart beat faster, but he didn't know why until the woman said, "Brother."

Wesker tensed, as if he had been struck. For the first time since awakening, he felt the old terrors welling up within him. He had not known until that moment how much danger he was really in.

The woman came around so he could see her, taking each step slowly and deliberately, placing the heel of one foot directly in front of the toe of the other as if she were walking on a wire. She was wearing an immaculate white suit, not a speck of dirt on cuffs or lapels. The blouse underneath was buttoned up all the way to the throat, which, along with the tight bun of scraped-back hair, made her look rather severe and unsparing.

All about her was just as Wesker remembered. She had aged, yes. Aged, perhaps, even more mercilessly than he had, but that only made her more familiar, as if no time at all had passed between them.

"What happened to your hand?" Alex asked, not without gentleness.

Wesker shook his head. "I thought—" he said. He broke off abruptly, unable to go on.

"I was dead," Alex said. It was not a question, nor was it meant as a rhetorical continuation of his statement. "So you heard, and so I was. Dead, as you were."

Wesker did not reply, though he forced herself to meet her eyes. He wanted very badly to look away, out of something like shame.

"But I suppose we both had things left to do," Alex went on, undeterred by Wesker's silence. She was a great talker, he remembered, as long as the circumstances were right. Request her presence at one of their father's interminable dinner parties and she would be as meek and quiet as a dove, but once she was in the presence of someone she respected and loved, she would unspool a great torrent of florid and fantastical talk.

It had always been Wesker that she had loved the most.

"I was there," she continued. "At the volcano. I brought you out and carried you away, though there was so little of you left."

"You were in Antarctica too," Wesker said. "Weren't you?"

Alex folded her arms and leaned back on her heels, looking down her nose. Though it was a rather scornful gesture, Wesker recognized it at once as one she only employed when she was unsure of what to do next.

"I was," she said at last, drawing the words out as if fishing about for an excuse, or hoping he would make one for her. "It had to be you, brother. There could be no other."

Wesker's fingers tightened on the arm of the chair. It made his wounded hand ache. "More like father every day."

"Don't say that," Alex said. "You don't mean it."

"What should I say instead?"

"That you are proud of me?" Alex suggested. "I think that you must be."

"Why?" Wesker said. "Because you spent twenty years in exile? Walled up in your private convent, tinkering with a single strain of the T-virus? Am I to be impressed? I suppose that you will tell me it's nearly complete."

"It is."

"I've heard that before."

Alex frowned a little. "Listen, brother. We both know that I was always the better scientist, the more rigorous mind. But you were the one who took action. Once you had decided your course, you were always swift and sure. I envied you that. Now I have made up my mind to take some decisive action as well."

"And what is that? Kidnapping and torture?"

"You would have done the same."

"Not to you." Wesker heard the strange tremor in his voice, but he was powerless to bring it back under control. "You were the one who left, Alex. You walked away. I assumed you wanted nothing to do with that corporate merger our father called a family, so I let you be for all those years. But I would never have done to you what was done to me in that lab. You know this, and neither of us is fooled by trying to pretend otherwise."

Alex was quiet for a moment, then she sighed. She stepped forward and touched his cheek. It was awkward, hesitant contact, but Wesker let her turn his face up to hers.

"That's because I'm nothing like you," she said. "I always knew that. For all our competition growing up, I knew even then that I was but a child playing doctor compared to you. Because of what's inside you, brother, and what you do to those viruses in your blood. All that comes in contact with you must inevitably be changed."

"Have I changed you as well?" Wesker asked. "Made a fratricide of you?"

"There's no need to be melodramatic," Alex said. "You would have died a dozen times before now, a burnt offering upon the pyre of scientific progress. I'm merely helping you along."

"You can't think I'm just going to sit idly by and let you put that cocktail of yours in me, do you?"

"Oh, brother. You misunderstand. It's already been done."

Wesker's heart hammered in his chest. He saw Alex lift her chin slightly, and he wondered if she could hear it.

"T-Phobos lies dormant in the system indefinitely," she went on. "Until the moment its host feels most profound terror. Hopeless, helpless fear from which there is no escape or respite save to become something beyond fear. I thought we might get there Antarctica. After all, I know everything about you, brother, including what you fear the most.

"I remember how much father used to get under your skin with his insinuations and gestures towards what a good test subject you would make. That certainly kept you up nights, didn't it? And I admit, I'm surprised it didn't do the trick. Childhood terrors always run the deepest. You were made of sterner stuff, though."

"Those imbeciles you got to run your little house of horrors didn't exactly inspire fear."

"Those two?" Alex smiled. "I picked them up after Teragregia, a couple of strays looking for a home. They're insufferable, but they have their uses. I'd have done the work myself, but I didn't want you to know. Honestly, I half think you would have found some way to sabotage the experiment just to spite me."

"We're talking about my body here," Wesker said.

"A publicly traded commodity, since the day you were born."

"We're talking about my life."

"A life which you squandered," Alex said. "Which you would continue to squander if I gave you the chance. You know, I watched you after you left Antarctica as well. How quickly you took to that man. So smug and self-assured that you would be able to reinvent yourself again, that this time it would stick."

"I never thought that," Wesker said quietly. "I never believed that."

"But you wanted to," Alex said. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself. A grown man like you, thinking that he could cram himself back into that Pandora's Box that burst open in Raccoon City." Her eyes narrowed suddenly. "And with someone like that. How could you?"

Wesker felt a cold dread steal over him. Deep in his breast something stirred, the faint beating of dark wings. They fluttered once and then were still, but he knew now that something was there. It might have been Alex's designer T-virus, dormant as she had said but coaxed into the first throes of life by a thought that had just occurred to him.

"Alex," he asked, taking care to keep his voice even, steely. No good would come of her knowing what had unsettled him. "Where is Leon now?"

She did not laugh, though for a moment she looked as if she wanted to. Instead, she stroked his cheek, drawing her strong delicate fingers up his jaw to his hairline. "It took you so long to ask about him. You ought to consider why that is."

"I don't know where you got these notions about us, but they're ill-conceived. You're mistaken."

"No, you are the one who is mistaken. You have been mistaken. Those tears you shed over him, that precious blood you passed from your veins to his. Those were the mistakes."

"How could you know such things?" Wesker snapped, shaking his head fiercely.

"I saw everything, brother," Alex all but whispered. "And I know you better than you know yourself."

That much, at least, Wesker could not dispute. With some reluctance, he turned his face up so he could look her in the eye. Her irises were blue, but not reminiscent of Wesker's own. They were darker, almost indigo. And besides, Wesker reminded himself, his own had not been that color in a long time.

"Is he still alive?" he asked quietly.

"Alive, yes," Alex said. She seemed thoughtful for a second. Even, to Wesker's estimation, a little sad. "He must be quite the man to have conquered that unassailable heart of yours."

"You don't understand…" It seemed a weak and pitiful protest, and Wesker looked away, suddenly embarrassed.

"I don't," Alex said. "But it seems almost a shame that he must die like this."

Wesker's eyes snapped back to her. Again, he felt the fluttering of wings, as if he were caging a bird behind his ribs.

She went on, "You had your chance and now you have lost it. You were too proud to give in to despair and fear. Now I must find something else that frightens you. And indeed, it seems I have."

She turned away from him. The instant her gaze was no longer on him, he felt as if he had been freed from the basilisk's stare and he could move freely once again. He began to work at his trapped wrists. Some of his immense and terrible strength must remain, he thought. It would have to be enough.

He tugged at his right hand, chafing the stump of his amputated finger against the stiff leather. It sent a jolt of pain up his arm, almost to the elbow. The wound opened up and blood began to flow.

Alex drew a phone out of her blazer and touched the screen once, briefly. Almost at once, a panel in the smooth steel wall slid open and a creature shuffled in as if it had been waiting in the wings for its cue.

The thing had been a female human once, but it was hideously deformed, mutated beyond anything Wesker had seen in all his work with Uroborous or anything else for that matter. Its flesh had a livid, raw appearance, as if it had been turned inside out. Though its left side still maintained a crude human shape, the right seemed to have all but melted.

The damage started at the woman's scalp and cascaded downward. The flesh of her face looked like it had been peeled or sloughed off in strips. Most of the muscle had eroded from around her eye, which looked like a pulpy black fruit balanced atop a stalk of bone. Below the neck, the damage was worse. Her whole torso made a sweeping turn to the side, as if the flesh and bone there had been pulled like clay, and ended in a twisted mandible where her arm had been.

She dragged one elephantine leg behind her, so for a moment it was difficult to see that she dragged something else as well. The whole hand on her left side was twisted around Leon's collar, and she towed him behind her so he slid bodily across the floor with each lurching step. He was unconscious, but, by Wesker's estimation, unhurt. At some point, someone had dressed him with neat fussiness in the blue suit Wesker had picked out for him.

With some difficulty, the creature maneuvered Leon's limp body into the empty chair. Manipulating the straps around his wrists and ankles seemed to cause it more problems still, but eventually it got them into place.

All through the macabre slapstick, Wesker had continued to work his trapped wrist. He did so automatically, almost unconsciously, for he had much to occupy his conscious mind. His eyes kept flicking from his sister's turned back, to Leon's peaceful face, to the corpus of the creature unlike any he had ever seen before.

Alex had been working hard, he had to admit. Though he could see little of the ruthless efficiency of the original T-virus, nor the sleek and compact beauty of Uroborous in what she had made.

Even after Leon was in place and the creature had retreated to the corner of the room where it sat lolling its bifurcated tongue like an overheated dog, Alex did not turn to face him. It had not occurred to Wesker until this moment that she might be deliberately putting it off.

She moved instead to stand over Leon, and she spent an inordinate amount of time scrutinizing his face. Then she turned abruptly on her heels and, taking those same careful tightrope-walker steps, glided over to one of the steel cabinets against the wall. She opened a drawer and took out some items that had been prepared beforehand.

The first of these was a syringe full of cloudy liquid. She set it on a small steel table, within easy reach. Though Wesker didn't want to look, he felt his eyes drawn towards it. He felt himself drawn towards it, and it to him in turn. It froze him in place; even the blood from his mangled hand stopped dripping.

"Uroborous," he murmured.

Alex turned back to him, startled. "How did you know that? Does it call to you still?"

"What is it doing here?"

"Consider it a last resort. I will use it." Alex nodded towards Leon. "On him."

Wesker's fists clenched.

"Does that frighten you?" Alex said. "It would frighten him, to know in those last moments of conscious thought what he was becoming. Of course, he's never seen it, has he? He only heard rumors of what Uroborous can do, whispers. You've seen it, though. Haven't you, brother?"

"I know what you're trying to do," Wesker said. "And it won't work. You don't frighten me."

"All right," Alex said mildly. "We'll see."

She reached back into the drawer and pulled out a stainless steel tray with a row of gleaming surgical instruments on it. Wesker had seen his share of arrangements like that before, and the sight of this one was enough to make his heart leap into his throat. But Alex did not turn towards him. Instead, she took them over to the chair where Leon was, unconscious and unaware.

Once her attention was no longer focused on him, he started to work at his bonds again. Each jerk of his right hand sent a jolt of pain up his arm, but he'd felt pain before and it was nothing novel now. The leather strap around his right wrist had begun to grow stiff as the blood on it dried. It loosened up again now as fresh blood soaked into it, making it supple and slick around his wrist.

Alex set the tray next to Leon's chair and arranged it with a surgeon's practiced hand. She brushed back a lock of hair that had come loose from her bun and picked up a scalpel off the tray.

Leon stirred. Perhaps his sense of self-preservation was trying to wake him, trying to alert him or something. Alex made a swift and decisive movement of her hand, half hidden behind her body.

A single piercing scream filled the room. Leon came awake screaming, was screaming before he was even fully awake. Alex moved slightly to the side, giving Wesker a glimpse of Leon's shoulder, with the handle of the scalpel wedged into the joint like the stamen in the center of a bloody flower.

"Leon," Wesker managed to get out. His voice was quickly growing thin and pinched by his constricting throat. "I'm here."

Leon's eyes rolled wildly in their sockets, settling momentarily on Alex, on the wound in his shoulder, on the creature that waited patiently in the corner of the room, then at last circling back to settling on Wesker's face. "What's happening?" he wheezed. "Wesker, what-?"

He had no chance to finish. Alex reached across his body and jerked the scalpel out. Leon cried out again, his head slamming back against the chair with a hollow thud.

"Wait…" Wesker started to say, but he didn't know who he was talking to. Alex couldn't hear him, and Leon didn't seem to be listening.

Wesker jerked hard on his trapped wrists. The left one was still caught firmly, but the right gave a little. The blood had made the leather of the strap pliable and slick, and the missing finger made the span of his hand slightly less broad. Not enough to pull free, but almost.

Though his eyes were fixed on the chair in front of him, he forced himself to look through it, to somehow not see that Alex had continued to cut. Leon was still making pained noises, sounds without words or hope of respite, but Wesker forced himself to ignore that as well.

He was scared, Alex had been right about that. And if she had been right about the virus as well - one that came awake when the host was in the grips of terror – he would have to steel himself to keep from waking it. For Alex had been right about one more thing as well. She had known that everything that was in him and all that passed through him became somehow, inevitably changed. Whatever she had infected him with would become tainted, terrible.

Yes, she had known that even before he had.

At some point, Leon passed out and fell silent. Then he woke up again with a moan that tore at Wesker's insides like talons. He no longer tried to speak to him; it would only be wasted breath. Alex was still cutting, cutting with a slow and steady hand that did not waver no matter how much Leon writhed. A pool of blood was beginning to form around her feet.

Wesker jerked back on his right hand. Most of it slipped through the leather strap, but it caught at the widest part, with the stump of his finger wedged against the leather. A jolt of agony shot up his arm. Then he pulled again and his hand slipped free.

His hand dropped to his side and his head fell back. A strange bitter taste flooded the back of his throat, and a tide of static rose in his head, humming in his ears. It was beyond hurt, beyond exhaustion. It felt like something rising inside him, lifting him out of himself.

It would have been easy to give into it, to let it sweep him aside as Uroborous once had. Bear him up and carry him out of the reach of human pain and weakness and terror. The way it had always been meant to be for him.

Wesker felt he was on the verge of something, that his toes were up against the edge of a precipice, and all he needed to do was let himself fall. He had fallen before. There was nothing easier than that…

With a groan, Wesker pulled himself back. The precipice was still there, within his breast, opening wider, but he had forced himself to step back from it, at least for the moment. His hand throbbed, but he made himself move, to unbuckle the strap around his left wrist and then the one around his ankles.

He stood up, his limbs prickled with pins and needles and he stumbled momentarily then found his balance. Leon was still making pained noises, but a good deal more quietly now. His voice had become harsh and rough, as if his throat had been rubbed raw by the barbs of his screams.

The creature in the corner had seen Wesker get to his feet and it put up the alarm, a horrific animal howl that seemed to fill the entire room, as if the chamber itself had become a giant, malformed throat vibrating around him.

The creature rushed at him, and Wesker moved as well. Two steps brought him to the table where Alex had left the sample of Uroborous. He scooped up the syringe, weighting it in his hand. It would not take him this time, that much he was certain of. The serpent he had suckled at his breast would not want him now, not after all he had endured. It would reject his ravaged body like it had so many others.

He no longer cared. Even a monster could take revenge.

They were all watching him now. Alex had half-turned so she could see him. The scalpel was in her hand and a bemused expression was on her face. Leon, too, had lifted his head, though it was only willpower that kept it there. His arm from the shoulder to the middle of his bicep was a mass of raw flesh, all the skin flayed away.

Wesker thought that he must be beyond understanding, so deep in shock that Alex and Wesker and everything else passed as shades before his rapidly darkening vision. But then his body convulsed, just once, and his eyes met Wesker's for a moment, focusing on him, seeing him. He would see the change, too, when it came.

It was only then, in that instant, that he felt the fear Alex had spoken of. It finished tearing open the chasm in his chest and then it rose up out of it to fill him, leaving room for nothing else.

Wesker was aware that there were tears in his eyes. The kind of tears that came as a last resort, born from agony and terror against which there was no other defense.

He gripped the syringe in one hand and squeezed it. The glass shattered, cutting into his palm. His flesh burned as the virus began to seep into the breaks in his skin. He felt it burning, burning as it moved up his arm and towards his heart.