The concrete here was scorched, littered with anatomical jigsaw pieces, and the burnt husks of dead ants. A man, his arm and part of his torso blown apart, lay on the ground, the splintered ends of his ribcage splayed like battered fingers, as if presenting the meat inside. Grayson supposed that was what was left of the Rockfort guard, and his encounter with the ant-zombie. He looked away, reflexively, feeling like a voyeur; the man couldn't get any nakeder than that, like this open thing, and Grayson wanted to give him some privacy, some dignity in death.
"The barracks is just up here," said Claire, and she pulled him along through the carnage, through the blood and the gristle, and something squelched under his shoe, but Grayson didn't look to see what it was; he didn't have to. He knew what brains felt like.
Steve was sitting by the kerosene heater, his parka hung on the backrest of the fold-out chair upon which he sat. He was fiddling with a gun, dressed in dark green-gray fatigues that were too big for him, probably liberated from some locker somewhere, or off a Rockfort guard who no longer needed them; but he wore his tattered prisoner's shirt over the fatigues, his detainee number stamped across the back (Grayson knew those shirts well from the times he'd accompanied Alfred into the prison compound). He looked half-starved, his sickly pale skin mottled with bruises and cuts—some old, some new.
He looked up, dark crescents under his eyes. A fringe of red hair hung limply in his eyes. His gaze was haunted, distant, like a soldier who had seen too much shit. He licked his chapped lips, then said, "You're the butler, the new one. Heard about you." The kid had a vague Canuck accent, which, for some reason, Grayson hadn't expected.
"Heard about me?"
Steve nodded, staring at him with those empty eyes. He raised his gun, pointing it at him. He mouthed pow, then lowered it, furnishing him with a smile like a dog's snarl. "Yeah," he said, rubbing his nose with the calloused heel of his palm, "I heard about you. From the other prisoners."
"Didn't realize I was that well-known," he said, letting Claire help him down onto a bed, the uncomfortable coil-springs squeaking their complaints. His shoulder nagged him.
"You know your fucking buddy, Alfred, killed my dad?" Steve's voice was flat, tired.
Grayson thought about Alfred's slaughterhouse under the clinic, and wondered, idly, what sort of torture Steve's father had been subjected to, down there. "I'm sorry," he said, finally.
Steve turned his head, working up a gob of phlegm and lobbing it halfway across the room. His skinny knee bobbed up and down, impatiently. Then he looked at him again, and there was pain and hate and anger in his eyes, and he said, bitterly, "That all you gotta say? Sorry ain't gonna bring my dad back."
"Look, I hate Alfred as much as you do," said Claire. "But it was the virus that got your dad, Steve."
"A virus that woulda never killed my dad if Alfred had just left us the fuck alone."
"Your dad stole company data," said Grayson, bluntly. "He made the bed you're lying in. You didn't help things either. You decrypted that data."
"They killed my mom, asshole!" cried Steve, heaving himself up from the chair with so much force that it toppled over with a clang and rattle. "What did my mom do to deserve having her brains splattered all over our living-room by Umbrella's fucking gestapo?"
"Grayson, that was fucking uncalled for," said Claire, glaring at him. She bulwarked herself between the two of them, a demarcation between hostile forces, and said, "Look, can we just chill out for a second? Please." When neither of them moved to throttle the other, Claire slid her attention to Steve. "We gotta tell Grayson what's happened."
"He's on their side, Claire," said Steve, coldly. "What if Alfred sent him to spy on us? He could be leading Alfred to us right now."
"Grayson's an old friend, Steve," said Claire. "We met in Raccoon City. He helped me out. He wouldn't do something like that." She looked at Grayson, beseechingly. "Right?"
"I wouldn't," he said, honestly.
"My ass," spat Steve. Then he stood there, awkward—a battered kid who had lost all hope in people, but who wanted, deep down, to trust there was someone else out there who cared.
"Claire's a friend," said Grayson. "I'm here to help."
The room got real quiet. Steve righted his chair, then sagged down onto it, the aluminum creaking. "Were you really in Raccoon City?" he asked, and wiped his nose on the back of his wrist. "Like Claire isn't just bullshitting me so I play nice with you."
"I was there," said Grayson.
"I saw it on the news, back home," said Steve. "Before they grabbed me. Looked bad."
"It was."
Steve nodded, idly scraping the rubber, gore-caked sole of his boot on the concrete, smearing a little red there. He put his gun down in his lap, ran his hands back through his red shag of hair.
Grayson took out his wallet and opened it, slipping the photograph of himself, Annette, and Sherry from the plastic sleeve. He handed it to Steve. Steve looked at it, unsure of what to make of it. Then Grayson said, "You see that woman? Her name was Annette Birkin. She was my fiancee." He didn't want to call Annette his girlfriend; they'd planned to get married once her divorce from William had been settled, and that was how he wanted to remember her, as the woman he was going to marry. "I lost her in Raccoon City," he told Steve. "Also because of Umbrella. She worked for them, but Annette wasn't a bad person."
"She made the bed," said Steve, sourly. "That's what you said, right?"
"That is what I said," agreed Grayson, with a resigned sigh.
Steve studied the photo for a moment longer, then handed it back. "She's pretty for an older chick," he said, mildly. "Was that your daughter?"
"That's Sherry," said Claire. "I mentioned her to you."
Grayson carefully stowed the photograph inside his wallet again, and said to Steve, "She is my daughter, far as I'm concerned."
"Funny way of showing it," said Steve, snorting back a noseful of snot. "She ain't with you."
"Antarctica's no place for kids," said Grayson. "I wanted her to have a life away from Umbrella, and I wasn't in a good headspace." He slid his gaze to Claire, then said, "Tell me about Sherry."
Claire did, and when she finished, she said, "So Sherry's with Leon, and they're with the feds. Some kinda program. I dunno the details, but they let me visit her, and I don't worry as much because Leon's there. She's been under the guardianship of a guy named Derek C. Simmons."
Grayson remembered Leon Kennedy from Raccoon City, the fresh-faced rookie cop whose first day at the RPD had been marked by the outbreak. Derek C. Simmons was a name he recognized but couldn't put a face to right away, but he was certain he was someone in the government, and that he'd seen him on TV. Grayson didn't like that Sherry was in the home of some crooked (and they were all crooked as far as he was concerned) Washington suit, and he wished he'd taken her with him. But taking her with him wouldn't have been much better, and might have even been worse; he was too close to Umbrella, too close to danger. Then, "And what happened on Rockfort?"
Claire told him.
Her story was pretty much the same as Alfred's—but when she mentioned Albert Wesker, Grayson put a hand up to stop her and said, "Albert Wesker was there."
"Yeah," she said, looking at him, "you know him?"
"Yeah," said Grayson. "Regrettably. I was under the impression the guy was dead."
"That's what my brother told me," she said. "Wesker's not human anymore, I know that for sure. No human moves like that."
Mutants everywhere. "Any idea why he attacked Rockfort? Maybe he mentioned something. Guy always loved a good monologue."
"Nope," said Claire, and shook her head. "Just beat the shit out of me because of his thing against my brother, and took off after getting a call."
"I got some theories," said Steve, and when they looked at him, waiting for him to go on, he said, "The guards talk a lot and think we don't hear them. Rockfort's the nerve-center of Umbrella's paramilitary, right? The U.S.S and U.B.C.S." He peered at Grayson as if waiting for confirmation, and Grayson nodded. "My guess," continued Steve, "is that a rival company hired those H.C.F clowns to cripple Umbrella. Without their paramilitary, they don't got much reach, or a way to police the black pharmaceuticals circuit so their little monopoly don't get jeopardized."
"Sounds like a pretty solid theory to me," said Grayson. "Losing Rockfort puts Umbrella at a serious disadvantage."
Steve nodded. "Also, I remember this Wesker guy mentioning Alexia. That's Alfred's twin sister if you dunno, and nobody was allowed to talk about her. Knew a guy who did, this guy named Robert Dorson—we called him Bob—and they dragged him screaming to the clinic." He looked at Grayson, almost accusingly. "You know about the clinic, right?"
"I do," he said.
"We never saw Bob again. No surprise," said Steve. "Anyway, I think Wesker was looking for her, but nobody's seen Alexia before. Either she don't exist, or she's somewhere else." He paused, then said, "Though I heard one of the oldheads say they'd seen her before, down at the Palace—that big administrative building looks like, well, a palace. He was a trusty who worked on the grounds around the place. Said he went inside to use the bathroom, and saw a woman staring him down from the casino balcony." He shook his head. "Fucking casino, can you believe it? So Alfred could entertain himself, maybe a couple of visitors, while the rest of us were dying. Anyway, it wasn't Alexia—it was Alfred, that fucking freak, dressed up like Alexia."
"Any idea what Wesker wants with Alexia?" he asked, darting a look between Claire and Steve.
Steve shrugged. "Not a clue."
"Who is Alexia exactly?" Claire asked him. "I get that she's Alfred's twin sister, but that's about it."
"She…" Grayson trailed off, deciding that, for now, it was best to speak of Alexia as if she were still gone. "She was a virologist with Umbrella, and my best friend growing up," he told Claire, clasping his hands between his knees. "She was a genius, but that word fails to really convey just how smart Alexia was. Maybe Wesker's employers want her for that reason. A brain like hers is a once-every-few-centuries kinda thing, and that makes it priceless." He stopped for a moment, and made a small, pointless adjustment to the knot in his tie. "But that'll be hard to do. She's been dead since 1983."
"Yeah," said Claire, "I remember reading that in Alfred's diary, back on Rockfort."
"So it's a wild goose chase," said Steve.
"Look," said Grayson, "there are some snow-trucks down in the garage, off the transport terminal. Umbrella's going to blow this facility at some point in the near future, so you guys gotta move." He frowned, then continued, "Problem is, the facility lost power for a while, so the trucks are probably frozen if they haven't already been taken, and there might not be enough juice to the block heaters. You'll need to get a small generator to hook up to some hot air blowers, if that turns out to be the case."
Claire stared at him as if trying to piece together something in her head, then asked, "Where would we go?"
"There's an Australian base about seven miles from here," said Grayson. "Casey, I think. But seven miles is going to be hard-going if the weather doesn't let up. In '81, we lost power here, and the personnel had to lug a back-up generator with some ski-doos from a kilometer away. It took six hours."
"So we wait for the weather to clear up," said Steve, shrugging.
"Assuming the base doesn't blow up by then?" said Grayson. "Could be a week, could be a couple of days. Could be more than that. Hard to say. All I got are estimates."
"Fuck," said Claire, rubbing at her face. She looked at him, and said, "You know I used to wanna visit Antarctica when I was a kid? Wish I could smack seven-year-old me for thinking that." Claire strode over to him, looked up into his face. "I got one other for you, Gray. Before we head down to the garage."
"Sure," he said.
"I need a satphone."
