Alexia smiled like a skull. "I'm afraid," she said, her fingers tightening around the pry-bar, "that's not going to happen, Miranda."
"You're hardly going to stop me, Dr. Ashford."
She moved quick: wound up like a batter and slugged Miranda upside the head with the crowbar, metal thudding against bone, jimmy-teeth scraping along the curve of her skull. As Miranda reeled, Alexia drove the crowbar home, Miranda's flesh yielding with a shiver, and she leaned into her, hard, and twisted.
Miranda swatted her aside like a fly, then gripped the bar and jimmied it free, tossing it. It clattered across the concrete and rolled underneath a fume hood.
"You're wasting your time, Dr. Ashford," Miranda said, and her hand started to change into a black claw, and six wings—no, Alexia corrected herself, it's eight—unfurled from Miranda's back and snapped taut, like a predatory bird making itself appear larger, more threatening.
Alexia pulled her gun and shot Miranda three times: twice in the chest, once in the head. None of the bullets fazed her. Panicking, Alexia emptied the rest of the clip into Miranda, but Miranda just smiled and flexed her claw, and the empty casings clattered to the floor, glinting in the candlelight.
"I told you it's pointless," Miranda said.
Scrambling to her feet, Alexia caught Miranda's backhand on the jaw and stumbled sideways, caught herself on the edge of a slate-topped table cluttered with grimy beakers and flasks. Miranda stepped toward her, and Alexia felt something give way inside her, flames igniting on her fingertips, the butane fumes giving the air teeth. She threw her head back and laughed.
"Now I get it," Alexia said, filing the revelation away for later. She threw the flames at Miranda, and Miranda retaliated with a swipe of her claw, tips raking across Alexia's forearm. Blood dripped from the four ragged furrows in her skin, and Alexia laughed again, louder this time, as the blood flared into white-hot flames, and the fire began to spread and consume the room. She regretted the papers would burn with the laboratory, but sometimes sacrifices were inevitable in the pursuit of redress.
"This isn't over," Alexia heard Miranda say as she fled the conflagration.
The hallucinations had fucked with her sense of direction, and Alexia couldn't remember where the exit was. So she just ran, and hoped a back-door would materialize before the whole lab went up in smoke.
As they drove past a tumbledown Stagla and its lone, graffitied phone-booth, Jill saw the smoke, the flashing whirl of cop and firetruck lights.
One report said an unattended bonfire had started the fire, another said it had been the work of an arsonist, but nobody could agree on which it was. Jill turned the radio on; the host said emergency services had managed to contain the fire, but Misery Road was closed until the authorities said otherwise.
Jill switched it off. "Arson and bonfires my ass," she said.
"Ain't that Detective Kinney?" Chris asked.
She watched Kinney smoke a cigarette while the tow-guy hitched a fancy-looking car to his truck. Too fancy, Jill decided, for a backwater town like Misery. "Yeah, that's him. Shit," she said. "Umbrella. This has Ashford all over it. Who else in Arklay County would drive a fucking Rolls-Royce?"
"Someone who wants to get robbed by junkies, or doesn't know shit 'bout cars," Chris said, sipping coffee from a jazz-print Styrofoam cup. "Rolls-Royces are fuckin' junk. It's the toy-poodle of cars. Kind you buy when you wanna flaunt your fuck-you money."
Jill snorted. "Sounds like Ashford," she said, and stepped out of the car.
Kinney looked even more wrung-out than before, as if he'd aged ten years and slept for none of them in the three weeks since Jill had last seen him. He flicked his cigarette butt to the asphalt, grinding it under the toe of a battered oxford.
"This ain't a PABS matter." Kinney sounded hoarse and hangdog, his voice like the scrape of sandpaper. He conjured another smoke in his nicotine-stained fingers, lit it, squinting at them from under heavy eyebrows. He always squinted, as if the sun were perpetually in his eyes. "Beat it," he added, waving them off with his cigarette, trailing blue tendrils of smoke.
"You're not gonna shut us out," Jill said.
Kinney wasn't much taller than her, and he was a lanky guy, his windbreaker too big for his scrawny arms and shoulders. He stared hard at her, then asked, in an equally hard voice, "You deaf?"
"We're not leaving. We have orders," Jill said, and she showed him the fax, watermarked and signed by the NSA himself, Derek C. Simmons.
Kinney stared at the fax, grunted.
"Send everything you've got over to PABS," Chris said.
"Sure," Kinney said.
"What happened here?" Jill asked.
Kinney shrugged. "Arson. Kids broke into an old fallout shelter, burned the whole thing out."
"You realize it's a felony if you don't cooperate with us," Jill said.
"I am cooperating," Kinney said. "That's what we got. Arson." He blew a cloud of smoke. "Found some jerry-cans and matches. Pretty clear-cut. We'll send the report over to PABS, keep you updated."
"What about the plates on that Rolls-Royce? Who's it registered to?"
Kinney hesitated, then said, "Alexia Ashford. Vehicle was reported stolen. Kids who burned the shelter down jacked it. It'll all be in the report."
She and Chris walked away, and Jill said, "I don't buy any of this shit."
"Me neither," Chris agreed.
The cops and emergency crews were still sweeping the area, but they didn't stop them, either because Kinney had radioed ahead, or they figured she and Chris were cops. The shelter's door had been removed and cordoned off by a web of cop-tape, but they ignored it, headed inside. They started down a set of scorched concrete steps. The air reeked of chemical fumes and burnt plastics.
"Looks like a bomb went off in here," she said, thumbing on her flashlight. "Smells like it, too."
"You smell a lot of bombs in your lifetime?" Chris joked, swinging his flashlight on her and grinning behind the dusty beam.
"I used to be in bomb-disposal, back in Delta. Remember?"
"I keep forgettin' you were military."
"Unlike you, Mr. Chairforce."
Chris snorted a laugh. "Don't knock it. Haven't lived until you've pulled maneuvers in an F-15." He stopped suddenly, pointed his flashlight at something on the wall. "Check it out," he said.
Jill looked. Umbrella's logo stared right back at her.
Alexia had barely escaped Miranda, and now she was lost, hugging the wall and wandering train tunnels in the dark. She wondered how much longer her torch would last; she had spare batteries, but Alexia wasn't confident she'd find her way out of the tunnels before she burned through them.
The scenery seemed to loop: concrete tunnel, unfinished light fixtures and wirework, unlaid track, maintenance doors that always led to dead-ends. Rewind, replay.
Something moved ahead of her, and Alexia stopped, listened. It moaned, and she heard the slow shuffle of feet. Shining her torch, she saw the starved, desiccated figure of a zombie in scraps of plaid and denim, and it shambled toward her, clutching a chewed rat. She loaded her last clip, aimed, shot it in the head. It dropped with a plaintive wail. She'd gotten better at shooting; Alexia couldn't help but think how proud Alfred would have been.
The conditions down here were ideal for preservation, she knew, which meant there could be more undead milling around the tunnels. Alexia hoped that wasn't the case, but she'd be foolish to assume every zombie had been eliminated in Raccoon City, even with Umbrella's thorough clean-up protocol. Too many variables and potential vectors to rule out a possible resurgence. She'd have to stay vigilant, but she hoped to God the zombies could wait; between Miranda, Simmons, Spencer and everything else occupying the spaces in her life, the last thing she needed, that Umbrella needed, was another fucking T-Virus outbreak.
"And wouldn't that just be my fucking luck?" she said, aloud.
Time passed, and she didn't encounter any more zombies. Time seemed to dilate, and she walked and walked along the right-hand wall, her legs and feet aching. And either by some miracle, or by the T-Veronica pheromones which kept her in binary orbit with Grayson, Alexia found herself in familiar territory, climbing up onto the platform of her grandfather's unfinished train station and hugging her husband.
"Don't you fucking worry me like that again," Grayson said, gathering her up in his arms and kissing the top of her head. "I called the ACPD and reported your car stolen," he said. "It's been impounded."
"Why the bloody hell would you do that?" she asked, too tired to muster anything more than irritation.
"'Cause I know you too well, Lex. I was saving your ass."
"The ACPD is in Umbrella's pocket. How does impounding my car 'save my ass', dearest?"
"Simple. 'Cause I know Jill Valentine too well."