Alexia drove past the tumbledown Stagla, and the ancient phone-booth. Misery Road lived up to its name in the dark: there were several blind curves, deep pot-holes, barely any street-lights.
If there's a road to Hell, this, she thought, is that road.
The grave-marker studded with bicycle reflectors glowed in her headlights, and she pulled onto the shoulder of the road, dirt grumbling under the wheels of her car. Alexia grabbed the torch, got out of the car and rounded back to the boot. She took the pry-bar from inside it, thunked it shut.
Alexia started down the access road. She'd traded her high-heels for Keds, and could walk the rutted dirt without stumbling over herself. The shelter stood at the end of the road, as forgotten and dark as she'd left it. Under her blazer, she found the weight of the gun comforting.
Wedging the pry-bar between the concrete and the door, Alexia levered it open; the door budged a little, rust scraping against concrete, then gave with a hard lurch. She pushed the door open, her muscles straining with the effort, and squeezed inside.
Her torch flashed over wet concrete, flaking Latex paint on the surface that might have once been directions: arrows and letters to shepherd people to where they needed to go. Stalactites of some black ichor bristled on the low ceiling, and the waterlines, cables, and pipes snaking along the walls made the tunnel feel even smaller, as if it was squeezing in around her. As Alexia descended into the bowels of the shelter, she saw pinpricks of candlelight. Wax caked the floor, collected along the feet of the walls in hard, yellowish lumps. Alexia snorted. Did you rob a bloody Yankee Candle, Miranda?
The shelter wasn't as large as she'd expected, which made her think it had been privately built, not government-funded. And as she explored, it became more apparent to Alexia that it wasn't a fallout shelter at all; it was a laboratory, a small one. The equipment inside it, what remained of it anyway, looked dated, perhaps late 50s or the early 60s. On the wall, so faded that it looked like a cave-painting now, was an early iteration of the Umbrella logo.
"This must have been one of Umbrella's prototypical labs," she said aloud, shining her torch over the walls. She paused, something black and oily collecting in the corner of the ceiling, glistening in the torchlight. It gave off a scent reminiscent of wet, spoiled mushrooms.
Alexia realized, then, that the whole floor was covered in the stuff, in ropes and puddles of it, and she backed away from the filth, bumping into something solid. Something solid, she realized, that breathed and pushed her away, nearly pitched her forward into the slick, black mess. Whipping around, she saw, despite the fact he was dead, Alfred in his blood-stained jacket, his face a bloody, gnawed ruin, like a skull covered in thin scraps of raw meat. His lips were skinned away, mouth set in a permanent grin of perfect teeth and glittering wet gums.
"I never liked you, Alexia," he gurgled, his one good eye glaring at her. As he spoke, blood spurted from the mangled flesh of his jugular, soaking his once-white cravat in arterial blood. "I just told myself I did, because it made it easier to live in your shadow, to cope with the fact I was a failure, an unwanted by-product."
"You're dead," Alexia said, her throat tightening around a hot lump of fear and bad nerves.
"Am I, Alexia?" asked Alfred, stumbling toward her. "I'm your twin. We're the same person. Tell me, was the love I told myself I felt for you love, or just masturbation?"
"You're dead," she repeated.
"Not as long as you live," Alfred said. A wet, nauseating laugh bubbled up from his throat, and he said, "Cut your hair and put on a suit, and nobody could tell the difference."
Then Alfred was gone, and as Alexia turned, sweating, she walked right into Grayson. "You're supposed to be with the girls," she said, slowly backing away.
Grayson wasn't wearing his sunglasses, his eyes glowing like pinpricks of hellfire in the darkness, and he wore a black suit she didn't remember him owning. His hair was pomaded, combed back. "Maybe Wesker's right," he said. "He and I, we're the same guy. Twins, even. Just look at me. Don't I look like him?"
"You hate Albert," she said.
He ignored her, walked closer. "There's no room for you anymore, Lex," Grayson said, very dispassionately. "You're just getting in our fucking way."
"I'm hallucinating," Alexia said, not to him, but as a reminder to herself. That was one of the traits, she knew from her research, of the mutamycete. "The mutamycete," she said. "That's what this black rubbish is, and this is all in my head."
As she spoke those words, Grayson vanished, and she was alone again, standing in the middle of a candlelit hallway. Just remember, the things you see aren't real, she told herself. You'll see things, but they're not real.
And Alexia did see things. She saw William Birkin smoking a cigarette in one of the doorways, watching her, as rumpled and sleep-starved as he'd always looked. "You're a trip, Ashford," he said, and took a long drag off his cigarette, the cherry-glow lighting up his dog-tired features and catching in his eyes. He blew a cloud of smoke, and said, "But you know what makes me feel good? Knowing that meathead fucked my wife. Not because I'm some kinda cuckold, but because it's satisfying, knowing Grayson shit on you as much as Annette shit on me."
She seethed and bristled, silently, ignoring Birkin. He was just a buzzing fly, a midge, an invisible hair that kept tickling her skin. An irritating little thing that was there to piss her off, but ultimately beneath her attention.
"And then," Birkin continued, hounding after her as he'd often done in Arklay, "the asshole sleeps with that cop. I bet that really pissed you off. Don't blame you. You've seen Jill Valentine." She could hear the grin in his voice as he said, "Tight little body, that Jill Valentine. Then there's you. Soft, pale as fuckin' ghost. You're not even a real woman, not really. You're a vat-job, Ashford." The acrid tang of cigarette smoke wafted toward her, made her eyes water. Or, she reconsidered, maybe it wasn't the cigarette smoke at all. "You're a freaky bug-woman. You burn the meathead's dick with your transudate, leave his mouth all red from your spit. Or you did, before you lost control of T-Veronica. How's that workin' out?"
Alexia knew it was pointless to talk to a hallucination, but she said, "Piss off, William."
William was gone, and now Alexia stood in the middle of a room. Someone, probably Miranda, had set up of a makeshift laboratory in the room. On the wall, above a workspace cluttered with handwritten papers and radiographs, Alexia saw pictures and newspaper clippings. Some were more recent: newspaper clippings about her, about Umbrella, about the Raccoon Trials, photographs of her leaving the Umbrella building, of Grayson helping her into cars. Others were older: photographs of scientists in horn-rimmed glasses and white coats, all of them sporting the fashion of the late 1950s; yellowing newspaper clippings announcing the founding of the Umbrella Corporation; faded newspaper and magazine articles about Spencer and Marcus, how they were rising stars in the pharmaceutical industry. But none of the articles talked about her grandfather beyond a cursory mention. According to Scott, he'd been a very private man, and only ever gave a handful of interviews, mostly to promote Umbrella.
She found a manila folder among the scree of papers and radiographs. PROJECT WESKER was printed on the tag, and CLASSIFIED was stamped on the folder in faded red. Alexia opened it. A young Albert Wesker, maybe three-years-old, stared back at her, solemn and pale, and beside him stood a younger Scott. The photograph, in Scott's careful, old-fashioned penmanship, was dated 1963. She put it back, found another photograph from a few years later, dated 1969. In it was Miranda, and she was holding a baby boy. Now Alexia understood. The photograph came with a typewritten print-out detailing Dr. Scott Harman's continuation of Project Darwin, which he re-branded as Origin, and how the boy was the first and only successful recipient of the Origin mycovirus.
"Origin started here," said a woman's voice, and Alexia turned to see Miranda standing in the doorway of the room. "Before Edward moved the project to an undisclosed location." She paused, adding, "Not so undisclosed now. Scott's there."
"You're Grayson's—" Alexia couldn't even finish that sentence, the reality of it all too big of a mouthful to swallow.
"Technically his mother, yes," Miranda said, as casually as someone commenting on a meal, or a television program. "He was a means to an end in my work to revive Eva. I wanted to study the Origin mycovirus and its effects, to see if he would be a suitable host. He would not." She strolled closer, as unhurriedly as someone perusing the aisles of a store, and continued, "Both Origin and the megamycete modify the host on a genetic level." She waved her hand in a dismissive gesture. "Plainly put," said Miranda, "had I given him the cadou, it would have resulted in an infinite feedback loop. One makes a change, and then the other corrects that change, and so on, so forth. And the Progenitor introduced a whole host of other problems. You've heard of Lisa Trevor, undoubtedly."
"Is that why you're after Sherry and Veronica?" Alexia asked. "To be 'vessels', whatever that bloody well means, for Eva."
"I'm more interested in Veronica, truthfully," said Miranda. "I thought about using you, Dr. Ashford, but your T-Veronica poses quite the problem. And frankly," and Miranda wrinkled her nose, looked her up and down, "you're a little too old, I think. Ideally, I'd like Eva's vessel to be a child. An infant, to be precise."
"You've done all of this to get to my daughter?"
"And I would have had her, had Grayson not interrupted me, and had Sherry not alerted the police." She smiled without warmth. "But yes," she continued, "I want your daughter, Dr. Ashford. And I need you out of the way."