When Jill finally came around, she wasn't, as he'd expected, happy to see him. "You took off," she said, indignant and visibly sick. "You're a fucking asshole, Grayson. A fucking asshole." The color still hadn't entirely returned to her cheeks, and she looked as if a sufficiently strong gust of wind would knock her over. She sat down on the pew and vomited explosively between her boots. "Shit," she said, and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand.

Carlos didn't say anything. Just sat there in the pews, a certain nervous tension emanating from him. Secondhand embarrassment, Grayson suspected. He was busy stripping his gun, cleaning the parts and putting it back together again.

"I did," Grayson said. "I left." And then he told her about Annette. Told her everything. Jill sat there in silence the whole time, expressionless, an inert animatronic in some amusement park church scene. When he'd finished his confession, he said, "I should have told you sooner. I'm sorry."

Finally, Jill spoke, slowly and precisely. "I should have fucking known," she said, self-flagellant. "I didn't wanna believe it. But you were always on your goddamn phone. Cutting out on me. Making excuses." She scowled at him. "You're a real piece of shit, Grayson. I should have listened to Rebecca, to Chris. They tried to warn me."

"I'm sorry."

"I'm sorry I wasted two fucking years on you, and the whole time, you were banging some Umbrella scientist behind my back. Helping them." She stood up.

"I can wait outside," Carlos chimed, from the back of the pews.

"I'm done," Jill told him, meeting his eyes, and her stare was intense and angry, and something deeper down, at the very bottom of it, that might have been hurt. "I'm finished with you, with your bullshit. I should have called it quits the day you'd abandoned me in Raccoon General, after the Arklay op. That should have told me everything I needed to know. And it did, but I didn't listen."

"Really, I can totally step outside."

"Carlos and I are getting out of Raccoon City, Grayson. You? You're on your own."

Grayson said nothing, because there was nothing he could say. He'd royally fucked up, and he knew that.

"He did help me get into Raccoon General," Carlos said. "Maybe we should at least help him get outta the city?"

"No," Jill said, and she stepped away. "My turn to walk away this time. Good luck, Grayson." And then she left.

"Harman," Carlos said, frowning. "She's just hurt, you know?" He glanced at the door, where Jill had gone, and then looked at him. "Look. I think the Raccoon City Radio tower is still functional. If you can make it there, you should be able to radio for help. There's comms equipment here, but it's dead. I tried contacting headquarters earlier, but got nothing. Just fuzz."

"Maybe I just don't care about getting out anymore," Grayson said, and sat down on the pew, staring at the enormous crucifix on the wall above the altar, smelling dead flowers, and the sweet, heady perfume of countless tourists, forever ingrained in the chapel-wood. "I'm tired of running around."

He heard something outside: a roar, a loud crash, the popping of a gun. S.T.A.R.S, came the familiar growl, and then silence. She'd led the man-thing away, Grayson decided. Outside. Carlos was already running to help Jill, and Grayson went with him, because it felt like the right thing to do.

The S.T.A.R.S monster had smashed a hole through the wall, and in the courtyard, the blades of grass and the pieces of windshield glittered wet in the rain, in the sodium vapors of the park lights. The monster was shirtless now, its rotting cheese torso bristling with intestinal-pink tentacles, like cilia, and weird metal apparatuses and tubes which looked as if they belonged on the underside of a car.

Carlos loped across the yard, rattling off a few shots, and Jill was trying her best to avoid the tentacles, side-stepping and ducking, an intricate dodge-dance she'd practiced countless times before. And though Grayson couldn't be sure, Jill seemed to be moving at a speed which seemed improbable for most humans. He'd heard the term cat-like reflexes before, but had never known an example of that until he'd seen Jill move.

The monster didn't notice him at all; predictably, it was only interested in Jill, and only occasionally shifted its attention to Carlos when he had sufficiently annoyed it. And then Jill and Carlos were running away, and the monster was right on their asses, and Grayson stood there, unsure of what to do. He wasn't a hero; a hero would have run after them, would have saved them from the monster, or had died trying. But if he was going to die, which was likely, he wanted to die as another nameless statistic on some fed's casualty report. Only heroes, he decided, should be remembered after their deaths.

Grayson went back into St. Michael's and sat down in the chapel, and he waited there, and eventually he fell asleep and dreamed of Alexia, and she was a woman in that dream, lying in a casket full of ice, dead. And in that dream, Alexia became Annette, and Annette was dead, too. Except the casket was gone, and Annette lay on the ground instead, and she'd died with her eyes open, glassy and unseeing, like one of Chief Irons' taxidermy projects.

"Harman."

He opened his eyes. A very specific impression of dread lingered, from his dream.

Nikolai stood there. "Get up."

"How'd you find me?"

"Carlos. He tried to call headquarters. I expected to find him, not you."

"Just go, Nikolai."

"The city is going to be destroyed in the morning," Nikolai told him. "They greenlit the sterilization. They're going to drop missiles, Harman."

"Who?"

"The feds. Who else? Come."

Grayson followed Nikolai. A group of USS soldiers were in the lobby of St. Michael's. They were dismantling the UBCS equipment and carrying the pieces out the door. They left the bodies, destroyed non-essential equipment, recovered what was left of the arsenal crates, and loaded them into armored vehicles parked outside. They did this efficiently and quietly; Grayson imagined they must have diagrams in the USS manuals which, in painstaking detail, showed them the routines.

"Mr. Ashford wants you alive," Nikolai told him. "My primary objective is complete. You are the only thing left on the list, Mr. Harman."

"Annette's dead," he said, stupidly.

"I am sorry, Mr. Harman. Truly."

Grayson nodded. He followed Nikolai outside, up a ramp into one of the armored vehicles, and it was small and claustrophobic inside, and smelled of boot-leather. A group of USS guys were inside, and they said nothing to him. One offered him a cigarette, which Grayson accepted. But Nikolai told him not to smoke inside the tank, so he put it away, saving it for later.

Nikolai sat beside him. The ramp creaked up, and the vehicle shuttered. Dim red lights illuminated the interior. "It is a great shame neither of the Birkins survived. Brass isn't happy," he said to him.

"Did Sherry make it out?"

"She did," Nikolai said. "But the US government has taken an interest in her."

"But she was cured of the G-embryo?"

"Yes," Nikolai said. "It would seem so. That was the report HUNK forwarded." The tank rumbled, started bouncing along the streets of Raccoon City, which Grayson could see through slits that served as windows. It was noisy inside the vehicle; it rattled and jounced, and squeaked along on its rubber treads. Zombies wailed and banged uselessly on the sides of the vehicle, and then things crunched under the treads, made the vehicle bounce on its creaking suspension frame.

"Where are we going?"

"To the evac point," Nikolai told him. "We are leaving Raccoon City, Mr. Harman."

Grayson fiddled with the cigarette the USS guy had given him, in his pocket. He found the feel of the filter strangely comforting, familiar. "Before I go back to Alfred," he said, "I have two requests."

"What would those requests be, Mr. Harman?"

"I have something, a photograph, I want to give to a dead friend's wife and their daughter. They live in Arklay City. If you don't trust me, you can send one of your guys with me."

Nikolai worked his mouth in thought, his jaw audibly popping. "The second thing?" he asked.

"I want to see Sherry."

"It's more complicated than that, I'm afraid. The first thing is doable, yes. But Sherry Birkin is of great interest to the American government." Nikolai looked at him. "She will not be easily reached."

"Can't Umbrella pull some strings?"

"After this shit-show? No, Mr. Harman."

More zombies crunched under the vehicle's treads. Cars complained loudly as they were pushed out of the way. Nothing, it seemed, would stop the tank from reaching its destination, and Grayson wondered how differently things could have gone if the RPD had had vehicles like this. How many lives they could have saved if they'd just had some big fucking tanks.

"Do you know anything about Brian Irons?" Grayson asked. "Jill Valentine? Carlos Oliveira?"

"Brian Irons is dead. My men found his body and positively identified it," Nikolai said. "Jill Valentine and Carlos Oliveira were last seen at the disposal plant in the industrial zone. Beyond that? I do not know."

"Leon Kennedy? Ada Wong?"

"Leon Kennedy escaped the city," Nikolai said, scratching his cheek. "On an Umbrella train, no less. He was with Sherry Birkin, and a woman named Claire Redfield. We pulled security feeds from the train and were able to identify them. As for Ada Wong? I do not know this name. But it is likely she is dead."

The vehicle eventually came to a stop.

They made their way down the ramp. Several helicopters, each one black, each one painted with the Umbrella logo, waited for them in the grass, their rotors whirring, kicking up water and blades of grass. They were on the outskirts of Raccoon City, beyond an abandoned military checkpoint, and as Grayson looked at the familiar skyline and knew it would be the last time he would see it, he felt, deep down inside him, something unpleasant and sad, and oddly bittersweet.

A few days after Raccoon City was destroyed by a payload of nuclear-tipped missiles, Grayson was thoroughly cross-examined by the Umbrella Investigation Committee, and when he'd demonstrated he knew nothing of particular interest regarding William Birkin's G-Virus research, was driven to Arklay City by a contingent of USS guys dressed like spooks, in a spook SUV.

He walked up the stairs of a concrete stoop of a pretty brownstone in the affluent part of town, and knocked on the door. A dark-skinned woman, dressed in a red pantsuit, answered the door and asked him who he was. Grayson reached into his pocket and took out the photograph of Marvin and his daughter, and handed it to the woman. "My name's Grayson Harman. He was my FTO in the Raccoon City Police Department," he explained, watching her expression slowly collapse. "I'm sorry. Marvin was a good man."

"I know Raccoon City—but I'd hoped, you know?" She took the photograph and started to cry. "I'd hoped he'd gotten out, and just hadn't had the chance to contact us. Oh, Marvin."

"He saved lives," Grayson said. "He was a hero."

"That was my Marvin. Always putting others before him. That's why—I'm sorry, but I need to make arrangements. I need… I need to go, figure out how I'm going to break this to Keira. She loved her daddy. I'm sorry, Mr. Harman." She closed the door.

Grayson walked back down the steps, to the car, and the Umbrella spooks didn't say a word to him as they drove him to the airport, and he was glad for the silence. He lit the cigarette the USS guy had given him, now stale, and cracked the window.

Grayson played calculatingly and offensively this time, and Alexia couldn't believe it when he'd checkmated her, and neither could he. Dumb luck, he thought. He'd just gotten lucky. Even so, winning felt good.

"In your face!" he laughed, jumping up from his seat and nearly flipping the table over. "In your goddamn face, Alexia! I beat you at chess! I beat you at chess, you snobby, arrogant, beautiful woman!" Then Grayson kissed her, hungrily and deeply, and her saliva burned his lips.

"Am I interrupting, Dr. Ashford?"

Grayson peeled his mouth off Alexia's, and turned around, slow, like someone had caught him in the middle of a burglary.

Nikolai stood there, dressed in heavy-duty arctic gear, the kind used by the scientists who lived in Antarctica, and the people who climbed Mount Everest. The Umbrella logo was embroidered above his breast-pocket, and on his goggled balaclava. "My men are waiting outside," he said. "You are lucky your algorithmic key worked, Dr. Ashford. These old electronic systems are so unpredictable in this cold."

"You would bloody know about that, you old Soviet," Alexia shot back, but she was smiling.

"It is so strange seeing you like this," Nikolai said, gesturing at her. "Last I saw you, you were a little girl. This big." He held his hand level with his waist. "I never thought you would get so tall."

"I had an impressive growth spurt," Alexia said, and shrugged.

Nikolai laughed his pebbly laugh, and said, "Hurry up and get your arctic gear, Dr. Ashford. You and Mr. Harman. Mr. Spencer is waiting."

"Spencer's here?"

"Not here, no. But he is waiting in his home, in Europe, to hear from you, Dr. Ashford. There is a lot to discuss."