9. The Butterfly Queen
He had plenty of things to do and plenty of things to say before he died. But he knew his time was coming soon. He could feel it in the way his chest rose and sagged with each painful breath, and in the way each step spurred pain up through his entire body. Still, he walked onward, the Grim Reaper trailing him behind through the city streets. He had a lot to do and not enough time. That was the problem with life, there was never enough time. He knew this and it pained him. He hadn't felt pain for decades, but this had pained him and left bitterness.
He knew he hadn't wasted his life, though. He was relatively happy with where his life had taken him and the choices he had made. He didn't regret a thing. Regret was not becoming of him. It was weakness and he was not weak. He was strong. He likened himself to Atlas holding up the world several times in his recent diaries, only instead of the world, he was holding up Umbrella Corporation.
Sometimes, late at night, when the air breathed through his office window and the moonlight hit the mirrored walls and illuminated the entire room in ghastly bright light, he thought of those he had killed and those he had betrayed in lieu of sleep. Most of them were nameless, and he felt nothing of their deaths. In the attack on Rockfort Island, an attempt to gain access to Alexia Ashford's mutant sample of the virus, he had killed thousands. His only distinct distaste of his actions there was his failure to kill Chris Redfield. He didn't hate Chris Redfield, in truth; he admired Chris distantly for his crusades and his beliefs. It was just a pity they were nothing like his. It was a pity he was on the wrong side. It was a pity his last dying effort would be to kill the man and realize Ada Wong's full potential.
For the first time in years, he felt genuinely tired. Looking out the car's window, he saw the nation's capital in the distance and this sight made him even more tired as he realized what he had before him. It was the final lap of a long race; a too long race. He hadn't slept for over six years, since his injection of the virus into his system which was his own way of sugar coating his mutation into a half-tyrant, half-man. With the virus in his blood, he didn't need sleep. He was more efficient this way, and until a few months ago, he hadn't ever noticed the absence of sleep. But now, looking in the mirror, his own reflection staring back at him and the city lights twinkling in the distance, he was aching and bone-tired.
This was how he knew he was dying. He was feeling human again and he was dying.
In a twisted way, he was dying from what had initially saved him. When he had nearly died in the mansion, the T-Virus he put into his system had stopped his death. It had brought him back from the brink of death. For years, he had given himself shots of the virus to maintain his life, sacrificing a little more of his humanity with each syringe. As the years went by, the dosage increased, and now the truth was becoming evident as his body ate itself alive: he had not been a candidate to become a tyrant, and as such, his mutation would be catastrophic when it peaked. He was not one of the few humans that took to their becoming peacefully. He was not one of the few humans who had anything to become, really; he was not a Nemesis, and he would never be anything close. While he had delayed it for years, he was finally decaying into a form of zombie. A superhuman no more.
And it was peaking, the decay was, and he was feeling human again now in the weakness and weariness. No dose of the virus could save him, he knew, as the clock ticked fast and time slid from his open hands like grains of sand on a beach. It almost made him frantic. It had been why he had concocted this exploration into Washington, D.C. It had been why he had done everything he had done in the past few months. Desperation to assert his plans into motion before he was no longer.
The car stopped abruptly, and the door opened to a neon-lit gas station. Ada Wong slipped in next to him, putting a metal briefcase on the floor. She was soaked with rain. Wesker glowered at her, suppressing the joy he had that she had shown up after all; he was right about her, he knew. Yes, he was right about her and she would work for his purposes. She was safe, in her own way. "Has the government agent figured out the subject's location, is he in pursuit?"
"No," she said. "Leon's with Claire Redfield." She shifted in the leather seat and shut the door. "You know, if you'd told me you were coming, I wouldn't have hijacked a car. I wouldn't have had to kill a man thirty minutes ago."
Wesker laughed flatly, duly noting her referral to the agent informally, almost fondly. "I wanted to see if you were soft, dear heart. It was just a test. Don't take it so hard. My only regret is I couldn't witness it myself."
Ada only looked disgusted at him and somehow out of her element, with her hair dripping wet and plastered to her pale face. "I'm not soft," she said firmly. "I never was soft."
"Good to know," he deadpanned, thinking about how half of him had expected her to be contacting Leon Kennedy already and how the other half knew she wouldn't make the same mistake twice. Then he took the briefcase from the floor as the car started again and opened it. He looked through the contents briefly and then went back to looking out the window. He could smell Steve Burnside now, in the wind. The scent was acrid and violent. Wesker could sense the youth's confusion and anger. He could also smell others infected; others whose infections were just beginning. It was going as planned and it would all be over before the sun finished rising.
Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Ada's lips were pursed, as if she wanted to ask a question. Several minutes later, she finally did. "Are we killing Steve Burnside?"
"In due time," he replied. He could smell the boy even stronger now, and he rolled the window down a crack, inhaling deeply. He could smell the infection in Burnside's blood and the others. They were growing in numbers.
"Aren't we on a mission of containment? Don't we want to contain the subject's rampage before dawn?"
"The government agent has already contacted his friends at the White House. I think he's learning how few of them there are now, however. I think he's learning that money makes the world go round, and no one cares about vigilantes at the end of the day." Wesker smiled his creepy smile and tapped his fingers against the glass. The car sped on through the rain slicked roads, through the heart of Washington D.C. and toward the water. "This was never about containment, the government has known for weeks about this upcoming 'attack.'"
Her eyes grew wide with disbelief. "You told me it—"
"I tell you a lot of things, Ada. Did it ever occur to you that I might be prone to lie as much as you do? That I knew what the Plagas would do with the T-Veronica virus? That this mission I sent you on was under false pretenses? That something more was going on?"
She stared coldly. Of course she had figured it, led by her initial distrust of Wesker, but she hadn't fathomed it. She hadn't realized it. And now he was telling her as if he were talking about the weather that she was being manipulated by him, and had been completely unaware. She didn't know why, and she suddenly felt hopelessly lost. He was once again several steps ahead of her, and she was running to catch up.
Still, imagining that the government was supporting Umbrella was disheartening at least. She wondered if he'd bought out the Graham administration, or if they'd been bought out before Raccoon City was nuked; if that had been a ruse to instill false comfort in S.T.A.R.s members and survivors. She wondered how much it cost to buy the heart of democracy from the United State's chest, still beating and bloody.
Wesker continued, speaking softly: "You underestimate me time and time again. You underestimate me and you underestimate Umbrella. You don't understand your own place on the chessboard. You don't know if you're a pawn or the queen, and you play blind-folded."
"So why not kill me?"
"You have your uses," he replied then reached out to stroke her face. She turned away. "Do you know what chess piece is the best piece?"
Ada shook her head. She thought it was the queen, but she didn't want to say the wrong answer. She was feeling expendable, a beautiful butterfly caught in a spider's web; she felt that if she missed his point, if she answered incorrectly, he might devour her whole with his garish, gruesome teeth. Wesker's smile went away in her silent negation. "There isn't one. It's about how it's played." He didn't offer an explanation. "Still, you must ask yourself, what piece are you, Ada? Jack Krauser was a pawn, are you a pawn too? Or are you something more? A queen, perhaps?"
She didn't know what he was searching for and he didn't tell her. Instead Wesker told the driver it would be another ten blocks west, to the abandoned warehouse by the river and Ada listened tensely. He didn't say another word for the rest of the ride. In his silence, he was thinking about loyalties and the lines they walked daily. He crossed Umbrella for his own profit, and now he rose the company from the ashes created by fires he set in the first place.
At the heart of it, that was the answer to Ada Wong's question. Wesker didn't tell her this, but it was the answer to why he didn't kill her. This was why he gave her this mission. It was also why he allowed her the one in Spain, knowing of her selfish reasons and foolish intentions. It was because of his past, how he had betrayed people and set Umbrella ablaze. He had walked the line too closely and edged over into the gray area at times. He had made mistakes. He had stabbed nearly everyone in the back with a serrated blade.
And he was going to teach her how to overcome those mistakes and he was going to sharpen her own blade for her. He was going to give the company to her. He had decided this as he had thrown her into the mirror in his office, full of rage for her betrayal yet oddly enraptured with it and the way the red fabric of her dress had soaked up most of the blood from her cuts. Yes, it was then that he had decided that he was going to teach her to be his predecessor. Shortly after, in briefing her of the fake mission, he also decided he was going to kill Chris Redfield. These were the two things Albert Wesker was going to do before he died. They were too much, almost—oh god, his bones ached, his heart ached, he felt sick lifting his head—but they were necessary. They needed to be completed before he could cave to the virus and its endless demands.
He would show Ada Wong exactly what piece she was. He was going to show her that they were carved from the same wood.
He was going to show her exactly how to walk that line.
Meanwhile, a few miles away, as the rain came down heavily on the rooftops of the city and the sun prepared to make its slow ascent into the sky, Leon Kennedy hung up angrily on Ingrid Hunnigan as she told him that she was sorry, but there was no evidence of any attack or creature, and he had no authorization to request government back-up in such a situation.
The US government had been bought out. But when he told Claire Redfield this, she had only stared blankly into his eyes before telling him they had to find her brother immediately, that there was no more time. "His tracker's signal," she said, gushing with concern, "it went out while you were on the phone, Leon. Chris is in trouble."
Note: Writer's block unblocked, and finally an update. Hopefully no one missed me!! Sorry for the delay, but I made about ten different chapters and hated them all until this one came to me. I hope you like this chapter, and if you're a bit confused, that's okay, because the forthcoming chapters will reveal more. Reviews appreciated, as always. :