Alfred had served in the RAF before he'd joined Umbrella, and flew them in his personal jet to Antarctica. It said a lot about his life, Grayson decided, that flying in Alfred's personal jet wasn't something that he considered noteworthy or strange. Just another one of Alfred's toys, he thought, like the tin Langensaltza soldiers Alfred had loved as a kid, or that fucking Panzer tank he'd bought on a whim and had parked outside the training facility, where it had sat collecting rust since 1994.
He sat in the co-pilot's chair behind Alfred. The flight and G-suit Alfred had squeezed him into was tight in all the wrong places, and so was his helmet; but Grayson blamed that more or less on his size, and not Alfred's inability to measure.
Below them, twenty-four hour sunlight glittered on the ice, and a sudden wave of nostalgia washed over him, of child-him staring through a porthole and waiting anxiously to land at the base in an Umbrella plane. Alfred brought the plane down, and said, over the mic built into their helmets, his voice crackling like a bad electrical signal, "Might be a bit bumpy."
The plane landed on a strip of salted tarmac, turbulence shaking the cockpit and bouncing the plane on its wheels. He glimpsed escarpments of ice through a haze of snow, and a tundra that stretched out on all sides to nowhere.
The jet slowed as Alfred's fingers flipped switches and pressed buttons, and then came to a stop, sliding into the darkness of a hangar. The hangar doors shuttered behind them, and Grayson knew the thermal systems would be kicking on right about now. Alfred undid his harness, then reached over and undid his. The windshield creaked up on pneumatic struts, the smell of concrete and fresh acrylic paint wafting from the hangar.
Grayson pulled off his helmet and smoothed down his sweaty hair, then climbed out of the plane after Alfred. "Alexia's alive?" he asked. Why else, he thought, would Alfred bring them all the way to Antarctica? "Albert was serious?"
Alfred took off his own helmet and didn't answer. He was looking at something. Grayson looked too, and saw other planes parked in the hangar—they were planes from Rockfort. "We best we be on our guard," Alfred said, unzipping his flight and G-suit, and Grayson did the same. He double-backed to the jet and retrieved his unloaded bolt-action, and his ammo belt, from the cockpit.
Grayson noticed something in the window of one of the planes, a man. Rodrigo, but he wasn't moving. "Captain Raval's dead," he said.
Alfred looked. "Good," he said, holstering the rifle in its leather sling, then cinching the belt around his waist. "I never liked him."
Before Grayson could reply, a gunshot cracked, and Alfred crumpled, blood pooling underneath him. There was a hole in his chest, and he was gasping for air, his breath coming out as a ragged, wet wheeze. He'd been shot in the lung; Grayson had heard that kind of breathing before, in Raccoon City.
Steve stepped out from the shadow of a plane, gun pointed. He wore a bulky parka, the Umbrella logo emblazoned on the breast-pocket, and a thick-knitted toque.
Grayson pulled his own gun, and said, the rage shaking his voice, "You made a big fucking mistake, kid." He fingered the trigger. "Where's Claire?"
"Don't worry 'bout it," Steve said. "She's safe."
Alfred gasped, the air bubbling in his throat, blood pearling in the corners of his mouth and spilling over his chin as he tried and failed to take in air. The pool of blood grew steadily bigger. Grayson decided he'd worry about Steve later. Right now, Alfred was his priority. But as he went to pick Alfred up, Alfred was already dead.
Grayson suddenly felt very alone in the world, numb to his core.
"I did everyone a favor," Steve said.
"Leave," Grayson said, after a long silence.
Steve could have shot him, and he probably wanted to; but for some reason he didn't. He put the gun away and left without another word. Grayson heard the echo of his footsteps receding, the faint thunk of a metallic door, and then all was silent.
Grayson lay down on the concrete beside Alfred's corpse, suddenly very tired, and he slept.
He woke some time later, his cheek coming away from the concrete sticky with blood, hearing a sudden bang. Alfred's corpse lay cold and stiff beside him.
Something wrapped around his ankle, eel-like and bristling with sharp spurs that tore into his flesh, and it yanked him across the hangar. He clawed at the concrete until his fingers bled, and Alfred's corpse was a hundred yards away, and drifting farther away still. Then he was banging through a door, trawled down a hallway where the walls were papered in print-outs and Umbrella posters, past the HR offices, and then whipped around a corner, catching his arm on it, feeling the concrete scrape off a patch of epidermis.
He yelled for help. The thing around his ankle flung him up, then smashed him against the floor as if it meant to silence him. Twisting around, Grayson saw the thing: a long tentacle of some enormous prehistoric variant of sundew. Fumbling for his gun, he tried to point and shoot, but the thing whipped him against the wall and his shot missed. He'd banged his head, too, and felt dazed, the pain reverberating down his spine.
The rest of his journey into the depths of the Antarctica facility was a blur of concrete and expansion-grate, and the spongy cortex of an immense ant-hive upon which fat, winged ants flitted and scuttled. The thing around his ankle released him, and he skidded across a tiled floor and came to a stop. It was cold like a meat-locker. A honeycomb of CRT monitors glowed above him, each one displaying some sort of data-feed. Then the tentacle-thing slithered around his ankle again and plucked him off the floor, and he dangled in the air like a human mistletoe, the blood rushing to his head.
"I'm surprised the poison didn't kill you," a woman said, the accent distinctly English, of the high-brow and academic kind. "Were you the one who released the T-Virus here?"
He came face-to-face with Alexia, his eyes meeting the pale blue of hers. She was a woman now, her face a thing of sharp, aristocratic angles. Her nose was long and thin, her lips pink and soft. Hot tears stung his eyes, and all Grayson wanted was to hug her and never let go. But there was no recognition in Alexia's eyes.
"Don't you fucking recognize me?" he asked.
Behind her stood an open pod, like that unit she'd frozen the piglet in all those years ago, and it was cabled to stacks of old computers, a frayed ganglia of rubber cables and an oxygen mask dangling inside it. Alexia was naked, her breasts blue-veined, the nipples small and pale pink, skin glistening with a liquid that smelled of antiseptics and conjured in his mind images of hospitals. "No," she said, finally. "Should I? Are you with the boy and girl?"
"Alexia, it's me," he pleaded. "Grayson Harman. Remember?"
Her expression was unreadable. "Prove it," she said, finally.
"In my blazer, in the lining pocket, you'll find your diary," Grayson said, beginning to feel a little light-headed from the blood pooling in his skull. "In the right pocket of my pants," he continued, "you'll find the dragonfly barrette dad bought you, the one I'd picked out and gave you after your graduation ceremony. You kissed me on the cheek. You were ten, I was twelve."
Alexia found both items, marveling. The tentacle released him, and he thudded on the floor, and it retreated through a crack in the tile. She leafed through her diary, her hair brown with wet and hanging about her face like lengths of twine, and paced back and forth, her bare feet slapping on the tile. Then Alexia looked at him, squatted on the toes of her feet, and kissed him with tongue, her slender fingers tangling in his hair. And he kissed her back, and didn't stop.