60
Annette opened her eyes and gasped in the dark. She sat up and pressed a hand against her heart, feeling it pound in her chest. She'd had a nightmare.
"Where are you, Will?" she whispered in the darkness.
She got out of bed and shuffled to the master bathroom, the edge of her long white night gown swishing across the floor behind her. She flipped the light on and blinked away the brightness as she opened the medicine cabinet. The bottle of sleeping pills was almost empty, but she only needed one.
In her dream, she had been in her living room, talking to her parents. In reality, she had not talked to her parents in almost two years, and they had never visited her home, but she suspected that her dream uncovered some unconscious wish. Her parents had asked her a question about her job, and she could not think of an answer that was not a convenient lie. Then the doorbell rang, and she went to the door quickly, as if waiting for someone. When she opened the door, her husband was standing on the porch, dressed in his white lab coat as always. But his eyes glowed black and bright red blood gushed from his mouth. He came into the house and killed her parents, tearing their throats out with his teeth, and then he came for her. She screamed and screamed, and then awoke.
As she popped the sleeping pill into her mouth, she tried to block the vision of the undead Birkin, but it was burned into her mind. It was not the first time she had dreamed such a thing, and she knew it would not be the last. She took a drink of water to wash the pill down.
Sherry was sleeping over a friend's house, so Annette did not have to drive her to school tomorrow. She could let the sleeping pill knock her out and stay in bed until noon for all she cared. Birkin would not be home by then, and even if he was, he wouldn't care.
The rare times he was home, he was too tired to do much of anything. In fact, the sole reason he ever came home was to rest. Sometimes she could engage him in conversation if she worked at it, and sometimes he would play with Sherry or help with her homework. But usually, he collapsed into a chair and zoned out until Annette dragged him to bed, where he would pass out for twelve hours. Needless to say, their marital relations had suffered along with every other aspect of their marriage.
But as accustomed to Birkin's obsession as Annette was, she knew that something bad was happening. He had called her earlier that evening to tell her he would not be home, which was certainly not an uncommon event, but the call had somehow unnerved Annette. She could tell that he was hiding something. The fact that he wasn't at the lab in town was enough to alert her that something was wrong.
If he wasn't at the regular lab, then he could only be at the Spencer lab out in the mountains. Combined with the mysterious phone call from Wesker the day before, it was easy to figure out. But why would he be at the other lab? He hadn't done any work there in years, and she knew he resented Wesker for reasons he never really bothered to explain. But Wesker must have contacted him and asked him to some to the Spencer lab to help him with something. But what?
Annette went back to bed and wrapped herself in expensive silk sheets. With all the money Birkin made, she could afford things like that. But even with silk sheets, a queen-size bed was a lonely place for one person. Annette would have liked to have Birkin sleeping next to her, at least a few times a week. But even that was too much to ask. He would run to the Spencer lab to help Wesker at the drop of a hat, but despite all the nagging and outright begging by his own wife, he would not come home more than once or twice a week.
Annette fell asleep alone and did not dream.