File 1-1: Code Veronica X

by Q. Alias

[Rewrite] [Alternate Timeline] [WIP] Grayson Harman returns to Rockfort Island to resume his duties as the Ashford's butler, now that his father, Scott Harman, has effectively retired from the position. But Grayson finds that life, though it does go on, doesn't get any easier, and that trouble lingers like an unfriendly stranger. And then, Rockfort is attacked.

18. Intermission: Rock and Hard Place

David toggled through camera-feeds, tracking the man in sunglasses, smoking the butt of a cigarette he'd found in the watchman's ash-tray. Though the guy was definitely someone he wouldn't fuck with under normal circumstances, his present circumstances were anything but normal. That guy—he'd been listening on another line, and the man on the phone had called him Albert Wesker—was their only way out of this shithole.

"To think I was just a fucking sysadmin couple of months ago," David muttered. He flipped to another feed, a fug of smoke hanging around his head like a blue lenticular cloud. Albert Wesker was making his way through Block Six, with a couple of guys in tactical gear. Not USS, he was pretty sure. Steve wasn't among them.

He wondered if it was too much to hope that his son had weathered the prison; the guys he'd seen, they'd looked half-dead, all bones and sun-baked skin like one of those bog-bodies he'd seen in television documentaries. And Steve was only seventeen.

David didn't want to think about losing him too, not after he'd lost Donna, and so he stubbornly held on to hope. If he could just find that CD, the one full of his former employer's dirty little secrets, maybe he could convince Wesker to help him find Steve and get them off Rockfort. His older sister lived in Pennsylvania. They could rebuild their life, and he'd spend the rest of his making it up to Steve.

But where could the guards have put the disc?