Upon arriving at the infirmary, they found Steve, dead. His body was cold and rigid, stretched out on the stained cot. He looked like he was sleeping.
"One minute he was talking," Claire said, without looking at them, staring at Steve's body, "and then he wasn't. Gone." She wiped her eyes with the heel of her palm, sniffled. Then Claire looked up, scowled at him with hard eyes. She shoved him. "How could let you Alexia do this?" she demanded loudly, and shoved him again, nearly sent him on his ass. "How could you let her kill him? Because of Alfred? Alfred deserved what he got, Grayson! He killed people, tortured them. He was no better than Irons. No better…"
Rationally, Grayson knew Claire was right, that Alfred had been a bad person; but irrationally, in the emotional pit of him, he'd loved Alfred like a brother because he'd grown up with him, had seen all of his highs and his lows, had drunk cheap beer on a Miami beach with him in 1985, watching the sunset on the water, while Margaritaville played on the jukebox in the dive they'd stumbled out of….
And he'd seen Alfred kill people, too—pulled the trigger on his pistol as casually as someone flipped a light-switch. Then the person was gone in a spray of blood, and Alfred was walking away to pour himself a drink, leaving Grayson to clean the mess.
He became aware, then, of the pistol in his waistband, the plastic grip slanted across his back. He thought about giving it to Claire; but then he thought about Alexia, and the thought passed. "You mind giving us a moment?" Grayson asked, looking over his shoulder at Jill and Chris, neither of them looking very pleased at the idea.
"Only 'cause you pulled our asses outta trouble. But I hear anythin' goin' down, Harman, nice time's over," Chris said, and he went out of the room with Jill and shut the door behind them.
Grayson looked at Claire. "Look," he said, and hesitated. What was he going to say? I'm sorry I did nothing to stop Alexia from killing Steve, Claire. Honest mistake. "I know whatever I say won't bring back Steve, and maybe you'll never forgive me—I wouldn't blame you—but I wasn't there when Alexia infected him." But he couldn't honestly say that he cared very much that Alexia had; Steve had killed Alfred, at the end of the day, even if Alfred had deserved it. "I didn't find out until it was too late." He went quiet, listening to the hum of the fluorescent lights. One kept flickering. Then, "She was hell-bent on killing him, and when Alexia's hell-bent on something, she'll do whatever it takes to make it happen. She's tunnel-visioned."
"Then she's gotta die," Claire said, tears rimming her eyes, clinging to her eyelashes like drops of dew. "Grayson, she's fucking insane," she continued, almost pleadingly. "If you let Alexia out into the world—you said it yourself! She's tunnel-visioned. She's dangerous." She pointed at Steve's corpse, her lips peeling back, baring teeth. "She killed a seventeen-year-old kid, Grayson," she said icily."Look at him. Look at what your fucking friend did to him."
Grayson looked. He felt, then, an intense pang of remorse; but it went away, the muzzle-flash of Steve's gun going off in his head, the bullet piercing Alfred's lung—the sound of Alfred choking on his own blood, and then a wet death-rattle.
"What do you want me to do, Claire?" he asked. "Bring him back to life?"
"I can't believe Annette ever wanted Sherry with you," she said, as if she'd just seen, in that moment, a monster.
Before Grayson could reply, Steve stirred on the bed with a groan, sat up like a puppet jerked on its strings. A sensation like ice trickling down his spine. Steve looked at them, his neck popping. "Run," Grayson said to Claire, without thinking. "Now."
Steve mumbled out, "Claire," in a guttural voice, and then he screamed and bridged backward, clawing at his eyes as if they were burning in his skull. And kept clawing until his fingers were soaked with blood, and he no longer had eyes.
Claire gasped, covered her mouth, stumbling backward and tripping over her own feet.
Steve's back heaved, then burst. Four long appendages, like spider legs made of sinew and tendons tipped with sharp bone, sprouted from his back. Steve moved liked a stop-motion puppet, as if his limbs were no longer his own, and he was fighting for control of them. Another scream, this one practically shattering Grayson's ear-drums, and Steve's chest blew open, ribs cracking like brittle porcelain, exposing his heart, which had enlarged to three times its size; it was beating out of control, as if forever teetering on the brink of exploding.
"Oh my God," Claire gasped, stumbling to her feet, her hands fumbling for the gun in her leather leg-rig. She fired three shots: the bullets staggered Steve, but did not kill him—blood spurted from his wounds to the erratic rhythm of his heartbeat, sizzling on whatever it touched, bursting into flames that spread like a gasoline fire.
Grayson grabbed Claire and pushed her out of the room, felt something stab him through the leg, and he hit the floor. He gritted his teeth, tried to haul himself over the threshold; but Steve had him pinned, and the fire was hot, made him sweat.
The sharp thing slid from his leg with a squelch, blood gushing from a severed femoral. His leg went numb and limp and cold, and as Grayson continued to lose blood by the pint, he felt more sluggish, tired, and the fire was so hot…
Steve loomed over him. Grayson rolled onto his back, stared into the bloody sockets that were once Steve's eyes, and he pulled the gun from his waistband, feeling his consciousness slipping away from him like a warm blanket on a chilly night.
Grayson pulled the trigger, or at least he thought he had, before one of those appendages stabbed him through the heart and killed him.
The last thing Claire saw of Grayson Harman was Steve spearing him in the chest, and then a sudden explosion of fire that engulfed the wing. An alarm went off, and the sprinklers activated, the tile slick under her boots as she skidded down the hallway without looking back. Chris and Jill joined her, and the three of them ran without asking questions, without talk of any kind.
She heard a roar that might have been Steve, but they kept going, whipping around corners, ducking past zombies. Bulkheads were coming down to contain the fire, and an automated voice droned that employees should proceed along their established fire-routes. With all this noise, Alexia would for sure know now that Grayson was dead, which meant she'd be coming for them, full force.
And then there was Sherry… But Claire wasn't trying to think about Sherry right now. Sherry still thought Grayson had died in Raccoon City. That was good enough.
When they'd finally found a quiet spot to catch their breath, Jill said, "I can't believe he's dead."
"Callous as it sounds, if Harman hadn't slowed Steve down, we'd all be goners," Chris said, wiping his face on the back of his wrist. "We can cry about things later," he continued, looking between Jill and her. "Alexia's gonna know Harman's dead, all those fuckin' alarms. And if we don't get our asses to that plane, she'll fuckin' destroy it, and then we'll be sittin' ducks for her."
"Assuming Wesker didn't fly out of here before she could," Jill said.
Claire looked at her. "You okay, Jill?"
"Yeah," Jill said, hollowly. "Grayson did it to himself. You fuck with psychos, you get fucked." She moved ahead of them. "Come on," she said, "we got to reach that plane."
When the fire alarms had gone off, Alexia reconnoitered the facility with her plants to find whatever had triggered them. She'd thought it had been Wesker, and that the body she'd found in the hospital ward had been his. But she'd been wrong. So wrong.
She'd managed to pull the corpse out of the fire before the bulkheads came shuttering down to contain the flames, and when it arrived in the foyer, Alexia felt her entire world screech to a halt, come crashing down on her head.
She'd never been an emotional person, but the sadness she felt now was so profound and intense that she felt physically ill from it—and, for the first time in her life, she felt utterly helpless, like a child. She cried in lurching sobs, cradling his head in her lap, stroking the charred skin of what had once been Grayson's forehead.
"This wasn't how it was supposed to bloody be," Alexia cried, hugging the hunk of burnt meat that had once been her lover, her childhood friend. Her only friend. He felt like a thing made of glass in her arms, something that would flake and crumble away if she hugged too tightly.
This hadn't been part of her Long Game. This variable had never even crossed her mind, because she'd never dared imagine it. And now, Grayson was gone, just like Alfred.
A deep, bitter anger rose inside her.
She looked down at Grayson's face, almost unrecognizable in its current state. "I'm going to make them pay," Alexia told him. And then the anger became heartache again, and she said, "But right now, I simply want to be with you, Grayson."