"Block Ten should be through here," Claire said, folding Rodrigo's map and sliding it into the back-pocket of her jeans. She could hear at least half a dozen zombies groaning and shuffling around on the other side of the gate.

The gate was a thick slab of metal framed in a wall of water-stained concrete, at the end of a narrow alley between the grimy, wet brickwork of barracks. Sparks erupted from the fraying wires of a keypad mounted on the door; someone had smashed it, the keys lying on the ground like broken teeth. "No gettin' through it as is," Steve remarked, hawking and spitting a gob of phlegm into a puddle. He put his hands on his hips, looking up at the top of the concrete wall. A spool of rusting barbed wire bristled up there, chunks of bloody flesh gumming the barbs. "Someone hopped it, smashed the keypad to keep the zombies in there." Steve looked behind him, then said, "Probably went into one of the barracks and bled to death."

"Maybe we should—"

"We're here to look for my dad," Steve said, staring at her, streaks of grime on his face like camouflage paint. "Whoever hopped the fence, he's dead and an asshole anyway."

"You're an asshole, too, but you didn't deserve Rockfort," Claire countered, grinning. She looked around, then said, "Hoist me up."

"You're kiddin'. You want tetanus? 'Cause that's how you get tetanus."

"Tetanus would be the least of my problems. Anyway, not over the wall, dumbass," Claire said, pointing up. "Onto the roof of the barracks. Come on, help me up. I'm smaller than you."

Steve created a stirrup with his hands, and Claire stuck her foot in it, clambering onto the shingled roof of the barracks. She leaned over the side of the building, seeing a handful of zombies milling around, and a few misshapen, bloody lumps of what had once been guards—but now were pulled pork and sloppy joes. "Counting about seven zombies!" Claire called to Steve. "Nothing too crazy."

"Any sign of people?" Steve called back.

Claire scanned the ground again, seeing nobody. "No," she said. "Not seeing anyone."

"Help me up!"

She hooked her arm around a cluster of flue pipes, leaning over the side and sticking out her hand. Steve climbed up onto a stack of pallets and crates, and jumped, missed, and then jumped again, this time catching her hand. Claire pulled, digging her feet into the asphalt shingles, tightening her arm around the flues. Steve wriggled onto the roof with a grunt, then stood up. "You're heavier than you look, asshole," Claire said, grinning and letting go of the flues. "Can I have my hand back, please?"

He blinked, released her hand. "Yeah," he said. "Sorry."

The razor wire was about three or four feet across, and the drop about twenty. "We're not gonna make that jump without either landing on the fucking razor wire, or somehow managing to clear it but breaking our legs." Claire frowned, then said, "Think the only way we're getting over is to open that door somehow."

"Maybe we can find a crowbar or something in the barracks," Steve suggested, helpfully. "The guards would have tools and shit like that. In case the electronic locks were disabled and they needed to get through a door, pronto. I know some of the doors get real rusty, too. All the rain."

"Probably our best bet," Claire agreed, making her way over to the edge of the roof. Getting down, she found, was easier than getting up. Gripping the edge, she lowered herself toward the ground, then dropped, and Steve did the same.

A loud crash came from the barracks. Claire took out her gun and opened the door.

Peering inside, she saw someone had knocked over a table, shattered a television on the worn floorboards. A humped shadow lay beside the overturned table—a man, Claire realized, in ragged prison clothes, the tattered fabric stained with old blood the color of rust—motionless, his legs shredded to the bone. They'd found the fence-hopper, she decided, fingering the trigger.

It was hot inside the barracks, and smelled of unwashed laundry and stale beer, and underneath that, of sweat and rot. The dark shapes of furniture cluttered the room, a wedge of sodium light, from a strip above the doorway, spilled across the floorboards, and the glow of the lampposts filtered through the sooty, fly-specked windows.

The man groaned, pulled himself to his feet. Dead. His eyes were like the glaucous eyes of deep-sea fish. He hadn't died that long ago, however, that much she could tell; decomposition hadn't fully settled in yet. Claire could still make out the details of his face: middle-aged, his features lined with stress and worry, set slightly asymmetrical. Bell's Palsy, she guessed, or the by-product of a stroke.

"Dad," she heard Steve say, behind her.

Steve's father, his mind deteriorating lobe by lobe from the T-Virus, made no acknowledgment of Steve. He gurgled, blood bubbling in the corners of his mouth and dribbling onto his collar, and stretched out his hands.

Claire, though she wished it could have ended differently, pulled the trigger, and part of his father's head dissolved into a cloud of blood. The body rocked back on its heels, then toppled backward, convulsing on the floorboards as the last microns of the T-Virus burned out, stiffening into rigor-mortis.

She was reminded of her own father, then, lying in his casket. How he'd looked unrecognizable to child-her, a wax-figure simulacrum of her daddy. Claire put her gun away, feeling as if she'd just committed murder.

Steve dropped to his knees and cried like a child, tears streaking the grime on his face. "I blamed him for gettin' us in this mess, and he did, but… now—" his voice caught "–I can't even tell him how much that pissed me off. How much he fucked up."

Claire opened her mouth to say sorry, but then remembered sometimes it was better to say nothing at all, and so she didn't.

Steve touched the ruin of his father's head, his hand coming away sticky with blood. "This is all Alfred's fault," he said, bitterly, snorting back snot. "This is all that fucker's fault." He looked up at her and scowled, his eyes pink and rimmed with tears. "You still feel bad for that motherfucker?" he asked, through his teeth, his nose dripping. "You still think I should feel sorry for him?"

"I never said—"

"You never said it, but the fact you didn't lemme put a bullet in his head back there? That said enough." He wrapped his arms around his father and sat the corpse up, and gave an ugly, lurching sob. "You see this? You see my dad, Claire? Alfred did this." Steve stared, hard, at her, and then he laid his father back down. "First mom, now… now it's dad." Another sob escaped him, and he absently smoothed the wrinkles in his father's shirt. "Wait," and he sniffed noisily, taking something from the breast-pocket of the shirt: a CD. Steve stared at it, expressionless. "This," he said, "is what got us here."

"Steve?"

Steve looked at his father and said, shakily, angrily, "You weren't even lookin' for me, were you? You were lookin' for your fuckin' disc." He went to throw it.

Claire grabbed his arm and said, "If that's the data, don't." When she was sure Steve wouldn't chuck it, wouldn't destroy their only hope of fucking over Umbrella, she let go of him and said, "If you wanna really hurt Umbrella? We'll need that. You owe your dad that. We owe Raccoon City that."

Steve pushed the disc into her hands. "You take it," he said, and wiped his eyes and stood up. "I don't wanna fuckin' see that thing."

She nodded, slipped the disc into the lining pocket of her vest. "I know people who can do something with it." Jill would want to see it, she knew; she'd been waging war on Umbrella since the Mansion Incident, and had doubled-down on her mission after the Raccoon City Incident by building her case against Umbrella, by testifying against them in court. And if her brother came, as Claire knew he would, he'd want to see the data, too. "We should get back to Rodrigo," she told him. "There's nothing left for us here."

"No, there's somethin'," Steve said, thrusting a dirty finger in her face, a certain unhinged craziness in his eyes. "I'm gonna kill Alfred." He licked his chapped lips. "We don't leave until I do. Unless you or Rodrigo suddenly know how to fly planes."

"Steve, if we get this data to Jill, we can take Alfred to court over this. Him, and all the other assholes in charge."

"Who the fuck is Jill?"

"The only person who can do shit about Umbrella," Claire said.

"No deal," Steve said, and shook his head. "Alfred? Umbrella? They got money." He rubbed the pads of his thumb and finger together in the universal sign for cash. "M-o-n-e-y," he said, spelling it out slowly. "The get-outta-jail-free-and-do-whatever-you-want kind of money. They'll never see a fuckin' prison. The court shit's all pageantry. Gotta keep the public convinced that everyone's held to the same standards, you know?"

"Steve, if you kill Alfred, you think the Ashfords are just gonna be okay with that?"

"Alfred's the last of his shitty family," Steve said.

"Nobody is the last of their family," Claire countered, frowning. "From what I got, they're one of those European dynasty families like the fuckin' Rothschilds. Even if his sister's dead, he's probably got cousins, uncles, aunts, or whatever. And a family like that? Bound to have some relatives in the US government."

"I got nothin' left to lose," Steve said. "Alfred? He's gettin' a goddamn bullet, and so is that asshole butler."