At least Don had been kind enough to only have locked the elevator. Don had taken Alexia's keycard, and with Alfred on Rockfort, Grayson was stuck down here with the ants, and with a corpse that was no longer where it was supposed to be. The only thing left of Peter was his insecticide rig, but Grayson left it alone out of respect for his new roommates.
Grayson showered in Alexia's private bathroom (he would have found a full-blown bathroom in an office weird if it had been anyone else's, but Alexia had spent so much time down here that a full-blown bathroom had been a necessary investment), and washed his clothes in the sink. He took inventory of his food: with very strict rationing, Grayson would have enough to eat until the end of December (he'd also found a stash of granola bars, and a tin of assorted "biscuits" Alexia had squirreled away), and he had all the water he could need, provided nothing—fingers crossed—happened to the plumbing.
A cursory look at the event-viewer (he'd learned so many things about computers from Alexia's manual, and it made him feel like that hacker kid off War Games) revealed Don had downloaded a directory's worth of data onto an external device, and when Grayson navigated to that directory, DATA NOT FOUND flashed on the screen. No error code. The data was just gone. His guess was that the directory corruption had been the by-product of a power-surge, or because Don had fucked something up (this was an old TUI system, so syntax and other errors were easy to make) during the retrieval process. But that also might mean the data Don had managed to steal was useless, which was a comforting thought.
He'd checked the camfeeds—his only window into the outside world—but couldn't find Don on any of them. But Grayson knew the asshole couldn't have left Antarctica; the next transport out wasn't until February, the end of the Antarctic summer season.
Despite the fact he was pretty much imprisoned, Grayson was beginning to, in some weird way, enjoy the simplicity of his new routine. Safeguarding Alexia gave him real purpose, kept him focused on something other than the bottle and the things that had happened in Raccoon City. And the slight hope of her returning was better than none at all, and was something for him to look forward to. But if Alexia was dead, Grayson at least found solace in knowing that he would eventually die too, and neither of them would be alone in the end.
Time passed, and his only way of knowing that was by watching the camfeeds. The camfeeds were his clocks, and Grayson counted (or, he supposed, estimated) the hours by the amount of people on-screen. When there were a lot of people, that meant it was the day-shift; when there was hardly anyone at all, that was night-shift; when there were people packed into the bar like sardines, that meant it was the weekend. He never saw Don in any of those feeds, but he supposed Don, as the head of Maintenance, would know where the cameras were, and how to avoid them. He probably knew the entire facility like the back of his hand, he'd been here for so long.
Nosferatu had been pretty quiet lately; whatever it was, it went through long periods of silence interspersed with loud, intense bursts of noise. Grayson liked to imagine that, whoever it was (he was pretty sure it was a someone, not a something), they, like a child throwing a tantrum and getting no attention for it, eventually bawled themselves to sleep.
Grayson wondered what date it was. The steady creep of Christmas paraphernalia throughout the facility suggested either the end of November, or sometime in December. He was pretty sure Thanksgiving had already passed; he'd observed the researchers picking at trays of turkey and stuffing not too long ago. And if Christmas had already come and went, he hadn't noticed.
He looked over at Alexia, in her tank, and asked, "Why the hell couldn't you have set your alarm for Christmas?"
Alexia, of course, didn't answer.
Grayson was jolted awake by the sound of something huge smashing into the facility. The lights flickered, then went out everywhere but the stasis room (Alexia's dedicated generator was a godsend, and Grayson would be forever thankful for her foresight and ability to plan). Right before the lights had gone out, he glimpsed planes on the external camfeeds: huge green planes like the ones hangared on Rockfort. The first had crashed into the snow, the second and third had managed to skid on the runway (the third lost part of its wing and its entire landing gear in the process), while the fourth barreled into the dome of the main atrium in an explosion of glass and ferroconcrete.
The facility's auxiliary power came on, running at half-power. The camfeeds came back online. He saw new people: gray prison jumpsuits, and the others wore Kevlar. The facility personnel were freaking out.
On another feed, the one of the main atrium, Grayson saw a familiar auburn ponytail, one he thought he would never see again. Claire Redfield pushed her way out of the plane wreck and dropped down to the concrete. A thin teenage boy with a shag of red hair came scrambling out after her.
Then, behind him, the tank beeped.
