Annette separated liquids into beakers, put them through the centrifuge, extracted something from that and added it to something else. It, as far as Grayson was concerned, was magic. He thought about the alchemists of antiquity, sweating over their alembics, trying to find the thing that was the Philosophers Stone.
He read a crumbling paperback of The Shining, the stamp declaring it as property of the Raccoon Public Library still inside its cover. "Whose books?" he asked, kicking his feet up on William's desk.
"Ours," Annette said, turning the knobs on her microscrope and squinting at something in the lens. "We bought a box of books at a library book sale. Mostly for Sherry. We wanted her to read more."
"How'd that work out?"
"Not great," Annette said. "She likes The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Outsiders. Things like that. I brought those books down here with the intention of reading them to pass the time, but never got around to it."
Grayson nodded. He was trying to read, but it was as if words weren't on the page at all, a lorem ipsum of figments. He imagined the words as tiny bubbles, then, floating away from him, their meaning far beyond the stretch of his arms, his grasp. "I like beat poetry," he remarked.
"Beat poetry is purple-prose by drug addicts," Annette said, still turning the knobs, still squinting at the thing in the lens.
"Alexia said something like that. She called it 'word-soup'."
"She wasn't wrong." Annette squeezed something out of a pipette, into a narrow glass tube, then unwrapped something from a packet of sterile plastic, and measured it out on a watch glass. "What sort of things did Alexia read?" she asked, conversationally.
"She loved her academic books. And when she wasn't reading academic books, she was reading depressing Russian literature. Tolstoy, Chekhov, Goncharov. Stuff like that."
"Not even surprised," Annette said.
"She liked Tolkien." He shut his mouth, swore he heard something knocking around inside the walls. Grayson put his book down and stared at the vents, slowly reaching for his shotgun. Was it another tongue-thing?
But nothing happened, and the sound, though Grayson couldn't be sure he'd actually heard anything at all, went away, and he wrote it off as bad nerves.
An hour or so passed, uneventfully.
The pieces of a modified flare-gun molded from blue plastic lay on Annette's desk like the pieces of a child's toy, and she started assembling the components. "I think I got it," she said, and slotted a cartridge in the gun's fat snub-nosed barrel. "Let's hope it works as intended."
"It better. It's all we got. You sure Sherry's gonna be okay?"
"Once William's out of the way, we'll go to her. She's in the security room, in the north visitor's lobby."
Grayson stood up, and he walked over to Annette and kissed her. "Guess we should find William, and get it over with it."
She turned to a laptop cased in heavy plastic. The screen displayed a crude wire-frame map of NEST, like those old vector arcade games from when he was a kid, and it looked like a giant hive. "Shit," she said, and pointed at the screen, at a section in the East Area. "See this dot." Grayson told her that he did. "That was the bug I put on William. It's not moving."
"That's… not good."
Annette used the touch-pad to scroll through security feeds of hallways brimming with zombies, hallways that were empty, labs where everything had been destroyed, and labs where everything was intact. "Nothing. I don't see him." She minimized that window, and brought up the map again. The dot didn't move, the cursor burning a steady red, like the light atop the Raccoon City Radio tower. "Shit, this is not fucking good," she muttered. "I can't track him without that bug."
"Something tells me we won't need to track Bill. He'll find us," Grayson said, and moved away from Annette and the computer.
"Or—" Annette stood up and grabbed the little flare-gun—"Sherry. We should go to Sherry."
He heard the doors to the laboratory open. "Cover me," Grayson told her. "And stay hidden."
Annette nodded.
Grayson went to see who—or what—it was, and saw Leon limping toward the cooler, where Annette kept the remaining sample of the G-Virus. "Leon," Grayson said, and stepped into the open. "Don't touch that."
Startled, Leon whipped around, his gun in one hand, pointed at Grayson, and the G-sample in his other hand. Leon looked like something a dog had chewed and spat out. The bandage around his shoulder was stained a rust-colored red. "Harman?" Leon said, and lowered his gun, licking his scabbed lips. "Harman, you're still alive? What the fuck are you doing in here? Where's Annette?"
"I don't know where Annette is," he lied. Grayson gestured at the sample with his shotgun. "You need to put that back, Leon." Grayson slowly moved toward him. "Gimme the sample, boot."
"No way. It's going to the FBI."
"Boot, there's no FBI."
"Yes, there is. Who's side are you on, Harman? You're a cop. You should be helping me."
"I'm not on anyone's side."
Leon frowned. His cheeks were smudged with dirt. "You weren't where Ada and I left you. I couldn't get through to you on the radio. What's going on, Harman?" The rookie had this look on his face which suggested he wasn't in any mood to hear anything but the honest-to-God truth. "Did Annette convince you to help her? Harman, she shot me. She shot a cop. You should have my goddamn back."
"That bullet was meant for Ada."
"Ada? She's trying to help. She's gonna expose Umbrella."
"Ada's not gonna do anything except take the virus, and leave you out to dry, Kennedy." He held out his hand. "Give me the sample, boot. It can't leave the lab. It needs to be destroyed."
Leon pointed his gun at Grayson and backed away, toward the door, and the things that looked like glowing warheads. "I can't believe you," the rookie said, and he sounded genuinely disappointed. "You're a cop, Harman. A fucking cop. And you're helping Umbrella?" The door whirred open, automatically, when Leon triggered the motion sensors, and decontam was priming. "I thought you'd have my back. Annette Birkin killed thousands of innocent people, Harman. Those zombies? It's her fault."
"It's not her fault," Grayson countered.
"Bullshit. This is what Lieutenant Branagh died for? What Clancy died for?"
"How do you know them?"
"Does it matter?" Leon said, and fired a warning shot, and hit one of the tanks. The glass was laminated; it spider-webbed, but did not shatter. The thing inside the tank bobbed, but didn't seem to be alive. "That's a warning shot, Harman. Try to take this sample from me, I won't miss the next time. Good men died protecting this city, and you're here helping Umbrella, shitting all over their sacrifice."
"What happened in Raccoon City wasn't Annette's fault."
But Leon was gone.
Grayson heard a loud crash, then, and a deep, guttural roar. Annette rushed past him, through decontam, and she was gone too. "Annette!" Grayson yelled, and ran after her.
The room outside the laboratory was a sort of antechamber. A bridge spanned the antechamber, and below it were several bioreactors. William had crashed through the ceiling, and had nearly killed Leon; but Annette, after declaring William was hers, shot one P-Epsilon cartridge at G, loaded another, shot again, and then a third, final time.
The acid seemed to work; William slowed, then sagged heavily to the ground and did not get up, raw-pink skin bubbling, sloughing off in gelatinous gobbets, revealing a mutant reticulum of bones underneath.
Leon panted and sweated, and pointed his gun at William, standing well away from the body. When he was sure G wouldn't get up, he lowered his gun and sighed with relief. Then he moved closer, crouching beside G, looking at it like a hunter evaluating a deer carcass.
He looked up at Annette. "You called this thing 'William'," he said to her. "Why?"
Annette licked her lips and said, "It shouldn't have been like this. It's Umbrella's fault—this whole mess."
"You're Umbrella, too," Leon said, reasonably. "You're telling me you weren't involved in this?" He sniffed and wiped his cheek on the back of his hand, smearing the dirt even more.
"Yes." And then Annette shouted, "But we never meant for this to happen!"
"Then tell me everything," Leon said, and stood up, walking over to Annette and staring at her. "Right from the start."
Annette told him everything—about the USS, about William and Umbrella, and how Grayson fit into everything, and why he was helping her—and when she was finished, silence hung in the air.
"So you made this monster?" Leon asked, and pointed at G.
"We made the G-Virus, but we never intended this to—"
Leon cut her off. "You can spin it any way you want. You're still responsible."
Before Grayson even realized what was happening, G moved, wrapped its enormous claw around Annette, and squeezed, and he heard every bone in her torso give way with a loud crunch.
Then G flung Annette into the wall like a doll, and she slid down it, trailing blood. And somehow, she was still breathing.
"Annette!" Grayson screamed, so loudly that the sound scraped his throat, and he hurried to her. Blood soaked her lab coat, and he could see the tips of her ribs protruding from her skin.
"Help me up," she murmured. Blood pooled in the corners of her mouth, in the cracks between her teeth.
"You need to stay right there," he said. "What do you need?"
"I need you to help me up," she said, and coughed spasmodically, spattering his face with blood, her chin. Her lips were so red that it almost looked as if she was wearing lipstick.
Grayson didn't want to move her, but he did. She stumbled to a control panel and slapped the button with her palm, and the lights in the antechamber flashed red, an alarm yowled, and the bridge, where Leon and G were fighting, began to lower with a pneumatic hiss.
"What're you doing?" Leon shouted to Annette.
"We can't let him get away!"