Raccoon General looked as if it had been besieged by chainsaws. Pieces of people lay around the lobby, and the walls looked like a Pollock painting done in shades of red.
Zombies fed on the dead like buzzards, rending and tearing gobbets of rotten meat from the corpses, and they were so preoccupied by feeding that they didn't even notice Carlos put his gun to their heads and shoot.
Two dead green things lay among the bodies, in front of the reception office, and they looked like a cross between a dinosaur and a gorilla, something that might have existed in some weird transitional post-Mesozoic period. "Barely managed to kill those fuckers," Carlos told him. "Almost took my head off, man. I wasn't gonna fuck around in here without back-up. Could be more of those things."
"So I'm your meat-shield," Grayson said dryly.
"Consider it recompense for being an asshole to Jill," Carlos said cheerily.
They cut through reception. More bodies in here, most of them mutilated beyond recognition of even their sex. Carlos went through a door, Grayson behind him, and they were in some kind of room that seemed to serve as both break-room and office, and he decided it was probably where the doctors came between calls to cat-nap, to research, or to have coffee.
Someone's half-eaten Chinese takeout was spread out over one of the desks in the middle of the room (there were three desks pushed together), and a greenish-blue mold was growing inside a greasy carton of chop suey.
"Over here," Carlos said.
They stepped into a narrow elevator labeled STAFF ONLY, and Carlos thumbed the down button on the panel, and they went down.
"How do you know the vaccine's down here?" Grayson asked. He stared at his reflection in the dull chrome paneling, and decided he looked like someone who had been buried alive in a landfill, and then had dug himself out of the trash and dirt with his bare hands. The elevator smelled of cigarettes and antiseptic, and of the sewers and his own stale sweat.
"This survivor I'd come across a day or so ago," Carlos said. "George Hamilton, I think? He mentioned it. He was a doctor here, one of the guys who'd worked on it."
The doors slid open. Grayson stepped into a hallway that reminded him, distinctly, of NEST, built in the same cost-effective, unimaginative mcmansion fashion that, he'd observed, was so endemic to Umbrella's laboratories. "There's a laboratory down here," he said, unsurprised.
"Guess so," Carlos said, and looked around, at the chrome-paneled walls, the tiled floors, the innocuous pastel paint-job of everything. Even the ubiquitous office ferns made an appearance. "Jesus, the suits really got their hands in everything, don't they?"
"Umbrella's owned Raccoon City for years," Grayson told him. "Not surprising they'd lease space from a hospital. Steady flow of patients, all suffering from all types of diseases and injuries. It's like an Umbrella scientist's wet dream."
Carlos snorted. "You know a lot about that, Harman?"
Grayson shrugged.
They walked down the narrow hallway and went through the only door that was there, at the end of it, and as Grayson had initially predicted, discovered it was, in fact, a small laboratory. Carlos boggled at the instruments and the machines, and Grayson didn't care about any of it, because he'd seen the cutting-edge of NEST. And he thought about Annette, and how much he loved her, and how her laboratory had been so much better than this shitty chem-kitchen...
"There's a guy over here," Carlos said. "UBCS. Bravo team, I think."
Grayson went over to Carlos. There was something written on the wall, in the man's blood: NIKO. A smudged hand-print streaked toward the ground, where the man had died, face-down, in a pool of his own blood. Someone had shot him; Grayson knew it had been Nikolai, and so did Carlos.
"That motherfucker," Carlos said.
Grayson didn't say anything; it was better not to.
"Keep your eyes peeled," Carlos told him, and they entered the next room.
This room was like Annette's laboratory—complete with specimen tanks and high-end biotech. Inside the tanks were more of those dinosaur-gorilla things, and Grayson didn't like that, a thin tube of laminated glass separating him from the monsters. Carlos slung his rifle over his shoulder and started leafing through a manual.
"What's that?" Grayson asked.
"Instructions on how to work the synthesizer," Carlos said, without looking up. "Seems pretty similar to the one I'd used."
"The one you'd used?"
"Before Umbrella scooped me up, I served in a guerrilla force in South America," Carlos explained. "Learned to mix chemicals and shit. Had this guy with us who was a scientist. We were gonna ransom him; he was kinda a big deal in the local government. He was making drugs for us, bombs—that kinda stuff—so we kept him, and I learned a lot from the guy. Then the government boys showed up, killed him and everyone else, and I wound up in prison."
"That's rough."
"You don't know nothing 'bout rough, gringo. Were you a child soldier?"
"No. I was raised alongside the Ashford twins. They treated me well."
"Yeah?" Carlos scoffed. "You get nice clothes? Expensive toys?"
"Sure," he said.
"Must've been nice," Carlos said, and walked over to a machine that looked part espresso machine, part centrifuge, part old-fashioned switchboard. He started flipping switches, turning levers and knobs. "Was it nice, gringo?"
Grayson said nothing. He stared at the things in the tanks instead.
"The Ashfords really didn't treat you like a slave?"
"No," he said. "They were good to my dad and I. My dad's sick. Alfred's been paying for all his medical expenses."
"What's wrong with your dad?" Carlos leaned over and looked at some kind of feed on a small CRT monitor.
"Heart cancer. It's extremely rare," Grayson said. "Alfred thinks the chemotherapy is exacerbating it, so he's been exploring experimental treatments. Umbrella's got some amazing clinical trials going on right now." He frowned.
"Sorry to hear it," Carlos said. "How's your old man doing?"
"Last I heard, not so good."
"Sorry, man." Carlos flipped another switch, then took a moment to review the manual. "Change of subject: Jill. How'd that happen?"
"She used to frequent this bar I'd worked at, before I went to the RPD," Grayon said. "She asked me out. Repeatedly. I turned her down the first few times."
"Why the hell would you turn a woman like Jill down? You're lucky, amigo. She's gorgeous, smart, capable."
"I was going through some things," Grayson said, scratching his cheek. His stubble was coming through, thick and coarse. "Wasn't ready for a relationship." He didn't mention Annette; it was something Grayson wanted to tell Jill himself, once she was better.
Carlos took something from the centrifuge part of the synthesizer. "Bingo," he said, and held up a little phial containing something violently red. "Got the vaccine. Jill's gonna be okay."
"Let me guess," Alexia interjected. "The Hunter Betas escaped the tanks."
"Wow, way to ruin the story, Alexia."
"What's to ruin? It's predictable. The whole thing plays out like a B-movie."
"To be fair, my entire fucking life is a B-movie," Grayson pointed out, riffling through the pages of The King's Game: Strategy and Diligence, more precisely the chapter on The Bird's Opening (also, the book informed him, known as The Dutch Attack, and he imagined a movie of alien Dutchwomen descending from the heavens to wreak havoc on some small 1950s farmtown). "My best friend—you—is a genetically-engineered clone of a woman who died in the early 19th century. And I survived my very own Night of the Living Dead, and its sequel, The Thing: Mutant Boogaloo."
Alexia smiled. But her smiles weren't warm things; they were things she'd practiced and committed to motor-memory, a polite reflex. "I have no idea what 'mutant boogaloo' means," she said, through her smiling teeth.
"You. You're the mutant boogaloo."
She sighed. "Colloquialisms aren't my strong suit, but whatever you say, Grayson." Alexia looked at his book. "Aren't you finished with that yet? I'd like to get back to our game."
"Like I said, I made a promise to myself."
Alexia sighed again, traced the thin, pale line of her eyebrow with her finger. "Is it always going to be like this, Grayson?"
"Like what?"
"Us. Butting heads."
He turned a page, the paper rustling crisply.
"You can't hold this against me forever, Grayson."
"You 'die' for fifteen years, and then you suddenly appear again and demand that I pretend everything's okay. That those fifteen years weren't spent mourning you." Grayson looked at her, and her face was unreadable. "Then I move on, and you hold that over my head. Annette's only been dead for three months, Alexia. You were dead for fifteen years. And now?" He straightened up in his chair and stared across the table at her. "Now I'm not even sure how much of you is human anymore. If you can even be considered human anymore. You know when we kiss, your saliva actually burns me? Burns me, Alexia. Kisses shouldn't be painful. And when we have sex? It's actually kinda painful, to be honest. Whatever chemical's in your body now, it's not good, and it's gotten into your, uh… fluids." Grayson coughed, once, and said, "I don't wanna have this conversation anymore."
There was a flicker of something sad in her eyes, and then it was gone. "You'll simply have to acclimate," she said haughtily. "Besides," she continued, watching him with her pale, pale eyes, "you're not exactly human anymore. You might look it, but on the genetic level? You're a mutant, too."
"Can we stop talking about it? Please? The story. Let's get back to that."
"Grayson," Alexia said, and she, right then, sounded hurt, and it caught him by surprise because Alexia rarely ever sounded hurt. She didn't like to be vulnerable; she'd told him that once, and she'd also told him that was why she didn't like crying. "Regardless of what's happened to us, my feelings for you haven't changed. That's why this Annette thing has me narky. I don't care about Jill. But Annette? I shouldn't feel like I'm in a bloody competition with a dead woman, Grayson."
He didn't know what to say, so he didn't say anything.
"What can I do to make amends, Grayson?"
"You wanna help me?"
"I do."
"When we're outta here? Help me find Sherry. The Ashfords have connections, right? Alfred—" Grayson stopped, not wanting to think about that right now, because he had enough death on his mind—"mentioned you have cousins in the US government, right?"
"Very distant cousins," Alexia said.
"It's a start."