As they made their way to the communications office, Claire said to him, "You know, I just realized something, Gray."
Grayson looked at her, raising an eyebrow. "Yeah?"
Claire eyed him warily. "Why is Wesker looking for a dead woman?"
He affected an air of nonchalance, and said, "Because he doesn't know she's dead." Grayson shrugged. "Like Steve said, it was Alfred on Rockfort, not Alexia. Wesker got bad intel."
That answer seemed to satisfy Claire. She swung her gaze forward just as a zombie in a tattered parka stumbled around a corner and heaved itself toward them, dragging its entrails and a snapped ankle (Grayson could see the jagged splinters of fibula poking through its skin) across the concrete. Claire raised her gun and fired, with the sort of practiced ease which came only from having shot countless zombies before. The thing toppled backward in a spray of blood, spasming on the concrete as the last microns of T-Virus burned through its system and fizzled out.
"I hate how they fucking twitch like that," said Steve, and he fired one more round into its skull for good measure, splattering the contents in a soupy nimbus on the floor. "Heh," he said, "now you're dead, you motherfucker."
"I already got it," said Claire.
"I'm just double-checking your work," replied Steve, grinning.
Claire snorted. "My hero."
"Do either of you know if there are any other survivors?" asked Grayson, as they resumed the long walk to the communications office, which was on the other side of the facility, on the uppermost level of the mineshaft, down the hall from the cafeteria. "Other than those guys were holed up in the barracks."
"Don't think so," said Steve, and shook his head. "That we know of, anyway. Why?"
"Looking for a guy," said Grayson. "Donald McNally."
"Name doesn't ring any bells," said Claire. "But it's not like we had a chance to really get to know anyone. We were the only survivors on our plane, and the people we did run into are dead now." She regarded him questioningly, and asked, "He a friend of yours?"
"He took something," said Grayson. He peered at her, then said, "You sure you haven't seen him? Hard to miss. Scottish guy with graying red hair, almost as big as me. Thickest brogue you ever heard."
"Sorry," said Claire, with an apologetic look.
Grayson sighed.
Since the facility was running tepid on power, they avoided the elevators (the last thing Grayson wanted was for them to get stuck) and mounted the stairs instead, and climbed the grueling eight flights to the topmost level of the mineshaft. By the time they hit the final landing, Grayson's legs were throbbing, and Steve and Claire looked as if they were two pants away from keeling over. "Goddamn, I'm outta shape," wheezed Steve, doubling over with a cringe, his hands on his knees.
"You're malnourished," said Claire, sympathetically. She put her hand on Steve's shoulder. "Once you get some more food in you, you'll be okay. You're running on fumes right now."
"We'll pass the cafeteria on the way to the communications office," said Grayson. "We'll find him something to eat." He looked at Claire, then asked, "What about you?"
"I'm in better shape than poor Steve," said Claire. "I was only on Rockfort for a day or two before it got attacked."
They swung by the cafeteria and scavenged whatever food they could (thankfully, most of it was still good, since the facility felt like the inside of a refrigerator, even with a CITB heating and half-powering the place), then made their way to the communications office, careful to avoid the clusters of hyphae tufting the cracks in the concrete. The hyphae didn't react to their movement, not even the slightest bristle, which meant, Grayson assumed, Alexia was still asleep, and was, therefore, oblivious to any feedback she might have gotten, and that was good to know.
The communications officer, a woman named Hannah Bozarth, was sitting at the comms station when they entered, but she'd been dead for a while. He put a bullet in Hannah's head, just to be on the safe side, and pried the satphone, the casing still sticky with her blood, out of her rigor-mortised fingers. "It's almost dead," he warned, handing the phone to Claire. "Better hope you can get a call out. Weather's been shitty, and it's possible the antennae could have been damaged by the planes or the blackout." He craned his neck to see what numbers she was punching in. "Who're you trying to reach anyway?"
Steve sat down in a chair on the far side of the room, scarfing down his third bag of chips and his second peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. "She wants to call her brother," he said, washing down a mouthful of food with a swig of bottled water. "You know," he added, with a burp, "as a failsafe or whatever."
"What's the point if you're both gonna take one of the trucks over to Casey?" asked Grayson, looking at them. Then he said, "You'd just be putting your brother in harm's way."
Claire didn't answer him right away, swearing under her breath about bad connections and shitty weather each time she dialed her brother's number on the satphone and got nothing but interference. "Steve just told you," she said, finally. "Failsafe. You said yourself that the trucks could be frozen, and the ones that worked, maybe they were already taken. Or we can't find the keys. Or whatever." Claire dialed again, cursed and almost chucked the satphone across the room—but stopped herself when she realized this would probably be the first and only chance she'd have to call her brother, and dialed again.
"Well, even if you can't get a message entirely through, those satphones are programmed to send out GPS coordinates," said Grayson. "Hopefully your brother is home and paying attention."
"Chris is paying attention. He knows I'm missing."
"How can you be sure?"
"Because he hasn't heard from me, and he knows what I was doing in Europe. Duh."
"And he didn't stop you?"
She glanced up from the phone. "You should know better than anyone that once I've made up my mind about something, there's no talking me outta it."
Grayson chuckled. "To be fair, I didn't know you that long."
"Yeah, well, surviving a zombie outbreak together has a way of making a friend you made just the night before into a friend you've known your whole life." Claire smiled. "You're not a bad guy, Gray. You're just the executioner."
He couldn't help but smile at that.
"I don't get it," said Steve, patting his stomach and slouching contentedly in the chair. "What's an executioner got to do with anything?" He licked a blob of grape jelly off his lip, then kicked his boot-heels, rolling his chair across the room. But he'd kicked too hard, and the chair swiveled sharply and almost went sideways, but Steve managed to catch himself before he pitched headlong into the carpet.
"Don't worry about it," said Grayson. "It was just a metaphor. And stop rolling the chair."
"Suck my nuts," said Steve, and he rolled again, back to where he'd been sitting before, and he spun the chair.
"How old are you exactly?"
"Seventeen," said Steve.
"That," said Grayson, as if he'd finally found the answer to some unanswerable question, "explains everything."
"And what're you?" asked Steve, still spinning his chair around. "Like forty?"
"Twenty-nine," said Grayson. "I'll be thirty in January."
"Jesus," said Steve, peering at him, "you're fucking old, dude." He propelled himself over with a kick, and the chair squeaked to a stop beside him. He gave a shit-eating grin. "Bet you need viagra to get it up, huh?"
"Kid," said Grayson, "I've had more sex in the last four years than you'll have in your lifetime."
"Bet they were ugly bitches," said Steve, doing that thing all teenagers did, that rankling thing, when they wanted to get under someone's—especially an adult's—skin.
"You saw Annette," he said. "She wasn't ugly. Easy ten."
"Sure, if you're into soccer moms drive a hatchback to the local grocery store for chicken and Shake 'n Bake."
"That's so specific that I feel like you're talking from experience," said Grayson.
"Yeah, that was my mom."
"To be fair," said Grayson, mildly, "whenever Annette did find time to cook, which was usually never, it usually was Shake 'n Bake chicken—sometimes with instant rice—or we got takeout. Then she ate my cooking and never ate Shake 'n Bake chicken and instant rice again."
"What about takeout?"
"We still ate that. Takeout's great."
"What I wouldn't do for a large pepperoni pizza," said Steve.
"Fuck yeah, gotta signal!" exclaimed Claire, from the other side of the room. She put the phone to her ear, beaming. "Bro? It's Claire. No, those GPS coords are not shitting you. I'm in Antarctica. Long story." She paced around, her boots muffled by the ugly gray nylon carpet, the sort of carpet which seemed ubiquitous in offices and public buildings across the world. "I just wanted you to know I'm—" she jarred to a halt, blinking in surprise—"Chris? Chris, you there?" Claire listened, and when Chris assumedly didn't answer, laid the satphone down before she was, undoubtedly, tempted to hurl it into the wall and smash it into pieces.
"At least he's got the coordinates," said Grayson, trying to make Claire feel better.
"God, I hope those fucking trucks work," she said, as if she hadn't heard him.
"Worst happens," said Grayson, "you could always catch a flight with me."
"You mean with Umbrella," said Claire. "Fat chance."
"No fucking way," agreed Steve.
"Better than dying here," said Grayson, shrugging. "Rockfort's been blown to shit. Where would they send you?"
"They wouldn't send us anywhere. They'd shoot us," said Claire. Then she looked at him and said, "What makes you think Umbrella would come back for you anyway? No offense, Gray, but you're just the help." She looked at Hannah Bozarth's corpse; the insides of her skull had cooled to a puddle of dark, sticky gelatin on the carpet. "You're just like her," she said. "Just another body."
"But there's a chance they'd come for Alfred," said Grayson, reasonably. "He's the reason the U.S.S and U.B.C.S are so effective. He designed their training regimens himself, and he's a damn good strategist. He's the reason Umbrella's managed to hedge their competition and dominate the market so effectively. Makes him a valuable asset, if an inconvenient one."
"Why inconvenient?" asked Claire.
"Other than the liability his mental health presents? He's Edward Ashford's grandson." Grayson sucked his teeth, then said, "Meaning, other than Spencer, Alfred's the only other guy in Umbrella with a legitimate claim to the company. That's why Spencer threw him on Rockfort. Out of sight, out of mind. They only acknowledge Alfred when they start chivvying him to develop stratagems, and when that's done, he's packed away and forgotten about until the next time they need to undermine the Chinese pharmas, or some obscenely wealthy venture capitalist looking to dump money into TriCell or WilPharma—two of Umbrella's biggest competitors, if you didn't know."
"Fuck that," said Steve, acidly. "Alfred's gonna die, man. I ain't letting it go."
"I'm not gonna just stand by and let you kill him," said Grayson, matter-of-factly.
"Then I guess I'll have to shoot you."
"I guess so," he agreed.
"Knock it off," said Claire, like a mom who was tired of listening to her kids squabbling over a toy. Then, "We need to get down to the garage. Gray, can you show us where it is?"
