Alexia regretted the day she'd ever spoken to Miranda and gotten herself involved in this rubbish. Or perhaps, she thought, this rubbish had begun in Antarctica, when she'd decided to play Wesker. And now Wesker was playing her—leveraging the chaos to keep her stalemated while he finalized whatever schemes he'd devised against Umbrella. It was likely. The good thing, however, was that Wesker's plays were slow, drawn-out affairs; she had observed as much in their chess games, back during her stint at the Arklay lab. She had plenty of time to devise a counter-strategy that would take him off the board.
But Miranda, right now, was her chief concern, and Alexia would worry about Wesker once that matter had been settled.
She was driving on a desolate back-road after her impatience to get home, and an accident involving a truck and a sedan, had forced her to turn off the highway at an unfamiliar exit. A nowhere of trees and creeks, and decrepit prefab houses peeking out from sprawls of rusting junk. The road was in rough shape, and probably hadn't seen a fresh coat of asphalt in decades; she had to keep steering around pot-holes to avoid bottoming out her car. It made her think of a PBS documentary she'd seen not long ago about America's poor: this area looked like that documentary, like ever low-income rural county quilted into a single ugly landscape.
"I can hear the bloody banjos," Alexia said aloud.
"Dad used to say this was where all the rednecks lived," Sherry said, staring out her window. "Everyone who didn't live in Raccoon or Arklay City was a redneck." She shook her head, then added, "He was a really judgmental guy."
"William wasn't known for his pleasantness," Alexia agreed, recalling very well Birkin's surly demeanor, and his predisposition to sling the words yokel and redneck around to describe most of the people who lived in Arklay County. Not that Alexia disagreed with him; it was one of the rare things she had actually agreed with William on, and it was an observation she found constantly reinforced every time she stopped somewhere and saw a fat man in camouflage gear, or a John Deere hat. "We're in the bloody sticks," she said.
She drove on, passing a tumbledown Stagla gas-station, a hand-written OPEN sign in the door; a junkyard which, she realized after a few moments, was actually someone's front-yard; a FOR SALE sign at the end of a muddy road that looked as if it had been there for the last twenty years, the letters faded, the sign yellowed with age. Dusk settled over the pines, bruising the sky deep, bloody purples and reds.
Her headlights flashed over a roadside cross studded with bicycle reflectors, the faded photograph of some woman who had died there smiling at her, on an unmarked curve in the road. Alexia slowed, coasting around the bend. And saw a pale woman just standing in the road, dressed in black, and she had six black wings. Pineland cults, she thought, jerking the wheel right. The car lurched and hydroplaned, fishtailed into a tree, the momentum throwing her head forward, slamming it into the wheel, or perhaps it had been the glass. She couldn't remember upon waking.
Her head pounded, blood dripping down the thin slope of her nose. The lack of T-Veronica continues to inconvenience me. Prodding her forehead experimentally, Alexia found it hurt deeply, and she checked herself in the mirror; a swollen bruise purpled on her forehead, bisected by a gash, where the rim of the wheel had struck her. Sherry was gone, and it was dark outside, the eyes of some small nocturnal animal shining in the headlights, then disappearing into the brush.
Taking a moment to gather herself, she grabbed the flashlight—Scott and Grayson had convinced her that it was a good idea to keep a flashlight in the car, and they had been right—from the glove-compartment, and climbed out of the car.
"Fuck," she said, swinging her flashlight over her surroundings, sketching out the gnarled boles of trees. "Goddamn it, Sherry, where are you."
Alexia found an access-road not far from the car, and started to walk it, stumbling in her high-heels along deep, permanent ruts and screes of gravel. She thought about the six-winged woman, and was reminded of an urban legend Grayson had once told her about the Jersey Devil, how it haunted the Pine Barrens in New Jersey, the Satan-spawn of some woman by the name of Leeds. She wondered if this winged woman was like that: a Leeds, or some devil-thing haunting the Arklay pines. But Alexia had always taken those sort of stories as seriously as she'd taken Birkin's research.
Still, out in the woods like this, alone, at night, walking along this eerie road, it was hard not to imagine evil things lurking in the darkness. A conclusion Alexia often found herself coming to, over and over again, was that America's countryside—the boondocks, as Grayson would say—was far more unsettling than England's, which bordered on the comically pastoral. America's countryside was wild and overgrown, and the Yanks, like the Japanese, had a ghost-story and urban legend for everything. And all those Hollywood movies about crazed rednecks and middle-of-nowhere-America didn't help matters either.
"Sherry, it's Dr. Ashford! Come out, please."
Nothing.
Alexia stopped, her flashlight reflecting off something obscured by a snarl of weeds. A crumpled, rusty chain-link fence festooned with razor-wire. After ascertaining the weeds weren't poison ivy or oak, or covered in thorns, she tore them away from the fence. The thing her flashlight had highlighted had been a reflective sign warning off trespassers:
PRIVATE PROPERTY.
NO ENTRY BEYOND THIS POINT.
VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED.
She returned to the access-road and walked on, calling Sherry's name, feeling, each time, a little more desperate than before by the answering silence.
Eventually, Alexia found herself in front of a water-stained slab of concrete built into a hillside, inset with a heavy bunker-door. It looked like a fallout shelter, the sort the Americans had built during the Cold War for whole families to live in had Russia decided to drop bombs on their heads. But Russia had never dropped those bombs, and the shelters had, for the most part, been abandoned and forgotten, or repurposed for military use.
The door was rusted shut, or perhaps simply too heavy for her to budge without the benefit of the T-Veronica. Had Sherry, Alexia wondered, found another way in? But why would Sherry be hiding in a place like this? If anything, it seemed more logical Sherry would have hidden herself near the car. Then again, Alexia thought, Sherry had survived Raccoon City, and had learned a degree of fearlessness from that experience that most people would never know.
Something rustled in the brush. Alexia pulled her gun from the shoulder-rig concealed underneath her blazer, waiting.
"Don't shoot, Dr. Ashford," Sherry said, stumbling toward her. The soles of her shoes were caked with mud, and she'd torn part of the sleeve on her jacket. Tiny scratches scored her legs. A cut crusted above her right eye.
"Sherry," she said, relieved. Alexia put her gun away.
"I'm sorry I ran," Sherry said. "That woman tried kidnapping me. I had to hide." She pointed at the abandoned shelter and said, "I saw her go in there, I think."
Alexia glanced at the door, half expecting it to suddenly heave and fly off its hinges. "We need to go," she said, and took Sherry's hand. "No telling when that woman is going to come up for air, and I'd rather not be around for it. Not without a plan, anyway. Are you hurt?"
Sherry shook her head. "I'm okay," she said, and looked at her. "Are you?"
She touched her forehead, gingerly, and flinched from the pain. She nodded. "I'll be all right," Alexia said.
They walked back down the access-road, back to the car which, now, was only nominally a car. Someone had reduced it to a flaming pile of twisted metal and glass. The reek of burnt fuel hung thickly in the air. Alexia shoved Sherry away just as the car groaned and exploded into a cloud of flames. Then, once they'd recomposed themselves, they started the long march to the nearest gas-station, that Stagla Alexia had seen a few miles back. She couldn't call Grayson and tell him where they were; she'd left her phone in the car, and Sherry had dropped hers somewhere in the woods.
"I wish I had my phone," Sherry said as they walked along a dark, lonely stretch of road. Ramshackle houses peered out from the trees like voyeurs, and, though some had lights, they looked abandoned, the sort of places serial killers stored the bodies of their victims.
"I'll get you another one," Alexia said. "Besides," she continued, trying to ignore the nagging ache in her calves, feet, and thighs, "I doubt you'd get reception out here." She tried taking off her heels to walk, but the asphalt was rough and hurt her feet, so she put them back on and simply suffered.
"How far is the gas-station?" Sherry asked.
"I'm not sure," Alexia replied, honestly. "I just know it's in this direction. It's like following a river to the sea. Follow the road, you'll find civilization. Eventually."
They walked without saying anything for an indefinite stretch of time. Somewhere, an owl hooted, and insects chirruped noisily in the trees. Then Sherry said, "This reminds me of Raccoon City." And, to Alexia's surprise, she was smiling, as if the memory were a genuinely pleasant one.
"This reminds you of zombies? God, you're weird like your father."
"Not what I meant," Sherry said, walking alongside her. She didn't seem bothered at all by the walking, and Alexia envied her for that. "When me, Leon, and Claire got out of Raccoon City, we had to walk for a really long time. And it was pretty hot for September. I think dad used to call that kind of weather an Indian Summer. It was brutal."
"And that makes you smile?" Alexia said, staring at her.
"No, the walking sucked. But I was walking with Claire and Leon, and that makes me smile."
Alexia started to wonder if, perhaps, she'd been a little hasty in wanting to kill Claire Redfield back in Antarctica. The girl couldn't have been all that bad if Sherry liked her so much. Even so, Claire hadn't stopped Burnside from killing Alfred, and for that, Alexia couldn't forgive her, and that was why Redfield needed to die. But, perhaps for Sherry's sake, she wouldn't put too much effort into hunting down Redfield, once this business with Miranda, Wesker, and the Raccoon Trials had blown over. She would, after all, be too busy managing Umbrella to worry about some college girl.
"You have that look on your face," Sherry pointed out. "The one you always get when I talk about Claire."
"I'm not making any faces."
"Yes, you are. You just don't realize it, Dr. Ashford."
"I was simply thinking," Alexia said, and shrugged. "Nothing more."
"That's not your thinking face," Sherry said. "Your thinking face looks different."
"Do I have a face for every mood? More importantly, are you keeping a bloody record of them, or something?"
"Yes to your first question, no to the second. I just pay attention," Sherry said, pushing her hands into the pockets of her torn coat. "Dad talked about you a lot, and now you're here. You're interesting."
"Interesting?" Alexia said, raising an eyebrow.
Sherry nodded. "You're like a robot who's trying to learn how to be human," she said.
Alexia frowned. If Sherry thought that, she couldn't help but wonder if Grayson saw her as some kind of robot, too. And would Veronica think that as well when she was old enough to take notice? It bothered her more than it should have. "So you walked for a long time after Raccoon City?" she asked, shifting the subject. "How long?"
"A day or two," Sherry said. "We didn't see the missiles hit the city. We watched it on a TV instead, in a motel." She looked at the ground. "It's funny," she said, in a tone that suggested it hadn't been funny at all. "The first thing I thought when the missiles hit? I thought, 'I wonder if they landed near my house.' I thought I'd feel more sad, watching Raccoon City blow up. I grew up there, after all. But I didn't feel sad, not exactly. I was just glad I wasn't there anymore, that I was still alive. Thanks to Claire."
"Claire really means a lot to you," Alexia said, and paused, thinking.
"That's your thinking face," Sherry said.
They finally reached the Stagla, only to find that it was closed, and had been for years. The OPEN sign sat in the dusty door-glass, a sad relic of a by-gone era. Thankfully, there was a phone-booth on the lot that was still operational. A smell of grubby plastic lingered unpleasantly inside the booth, and underneath that, something which vaguely reminded her of overripe bananas. Someone had torn several pages out of the phone-book, which had been current fifteen years ago, and there were crude doodles, mostly sexual in nature, graffitied on the glass.
She fed her change to the slot and punched her phone-number. Grayson picked up on the first ring.
Words unspooled from his mouth: "Are you okay? Is Sherry with you? Where are you?"
"Calm down," Alexia said, watching Sherry through the glass. "Sherry's with me, and she's fine. But we had a bit of an accident, darling. I need you to pick us up."
"Where?"
"I'm not sure," she said, and leaned against the glass, absently winding the telephone wire around her finger. "It's an old Stagla gas-station. Bloody middle of nowhere, this place."
"I think I know the place," Grayson said. "On Misery Road."
"This road is bloody called Misery? How fitting," she said.
"If you're at the gas-station, I take it you're calling from the booth out front? Thing's been sitting there since the 70s. Guess nobody out there owns a cellphone, if it's still in biz."
"Likely not. But yes, that's where I am," she said.
"I'll be there in an hour. Don't move," he said, and hung up.
Grayson showed up in forty minutes, and Alexia had never been happier to see him. She pushed her head through the driver-side window and kissed him, then went around and got into the passenger seat. Sherry climbed into the back and fell asleep.
As they drove back to Arklay City, Alexia told him everything that had happened. "You've had a rough night. Also, that's a nasty fucking bruise on your forehead," he said, once she'd finished speaking. "Gonna clean that up when we get home."
"That's what you're focused on?" Alexia asked. "My head?"
"You sure you saw a woman out there?" Grayson asked, looking at her, the dashboard lights reflected in his sunglasses. "Maybe you just hit your head too hard."
"I saw her before I hit the tree," Alexia reminded him. "Sherry saw her, too, Grayson. I didn't imagine it."
"Maybe it was some kind of mass hysteria thing? Like Dancing Mania," he said, and shrugged. "You were gonna crash, so you guys panicked and collectively hallucinated some weird grim-reaper."
"She saw the exact same woman I did," Alexia argued. "Six wings, Grayson. Dressed in black."
Grayson worked his mouth in thought, glanced at the mirror, at Sherry sleeping in the backseat. He scratched the thick line of his eyebrow, and said, "Okay, so there's some kinda winged woman running around the Arklays." A thoughtful hush fell over him, shot through with the hiss of tires on slick asphalt. Then, "Maybe some kinda bioweapon? Maybe the feds missed something when they were cleaning up Raccoon City?" He ran a hand back through his hair, the other on the wheel. "The T-Virus spread around the city via rats, right? Maybe some of those rats got loose in the sewers, infected someone, and that person mutated into some weird monstrosity with wings. Sewer-lines crisscross the county. It's possible."
"I don't think the T-Virus would result in a mutation like that," Alexia said. "In the Arklay laboratory, a few of the T-Virus specimens would undergo a process dubbed V-Act, which turned them into crimson-heads or lickers. But I've never heard of the V-Act process giving someone bloody wings."
"I fucking hate lickers," Grayson said.
"Yes, I recall you mentioning your struggle with some lickers in NEST 1," Alexia said, coolly. "When you were kindly recapping your affair with Annette Birkin, among your many other interesting experiences in Raccoon City."
"Get off it, Lex," Grayson said, and sighed. "She's dead. Let it go."
"Fine." Alexia folded her arms across her chest, stared out the window.
"What the fuck's a crimson-head, anyway?" he asked suddenly.
"A very mean zombie," Alexia replied.
A few moments of silence passed, and then he said, "What if it's not the T-Virus?"
Alexia looked at him. "Elaborate, please."
"I saw some salvaged footage from NEST. William mutated into some huge monster with these wing-like limbs on his back."
"I don't think it's the G-Virus," Alexia said. "They were black wings, like a crow's. Six of them."
"Or you thought you'd seen six black wings?" Grayson suggested, without looking at her. "It was getting dark when you saw this woman, Lex, and you were about to crash. Panic skews perspective. Believe me, I'm speaking from experience."
Alexia frowned. She knew what she'd seen. Or, maybe, she reconsidered, she thought she knew what she'd seen.