"Our mutual friend had some interesting information regarding Alexia," said Wesker to Alpha Unit's captain.
The captain, whose name Albert could never quite remember but thought it might have been O'Connor, regarded him blandly. "Orders still standing, sir?" he asked.
"You are to extract the contact," said Albert, measuredly. The Alpha Captain saluted, and Albert watched him go. He turned to the captain of Beta Unit, whose name Albert didn't know at all or could have even begun to guess, and said, "When you find Dr. Ashford, she is to be taken alive. We won't make the same mistake Umbrella did with William Birkin. This is not a Nestwrecker."
"Sir," acknowledged the Beta Captain, with a salute. He and his unit went in the opposite direction of Alpha, vanished through a pair of white-painted fire doors.
Albert stared up at the mangled plane jutting through the atrium's wall, its nose dusted in snow and dripping with icicles. One of Rockfort's planes. It had been here for a while—a day or so, he guessed.
He jumped and swung himself up onto the nose, and peered through the shattered windscreen. Bodies littered the cockpit, buried under thin shrouds of snow. None of them looked infected; they'd died from the crash, not from exposure to the T-Virus.
His radio crackled. Wesker dangled his legs over the nose, the concrete floor a fifteen foot drop below him. "Sir," said an urgent voice. "This is Beta Unit—" the captain stopped as if distracted, and Wesker heard a burst of automatic fire. A man screamed, and something that didn't sound entirely human howled. "Sir, the situation has escalated and gone fubar," said Beta Captain, with a sudden, fierce panic. "There's a BOW on the loose. I repeat—fuck!" The line abruptly fizzled into silence.
Snow tumbled down around him, dusting his shoulders, and the wind rattled the plane, made it creak and moan as if it were in pain.
Wesker thumbed his radio. "Gamma Unit, this is Albert Wesker." He waited for an affirmative before continuing. Then he said, "Mission parameters have changed. An unidentified BOW is on the loose." His tone was clinical, robotic. "Dr. Ashford is now your priority. Beta is gone." He took his thumb off the radio and dug his BlackBerry out of the zippered pocket on his Kevlar vest. An automatic SOS message had been generated and sent by Beta's tracker, with their last known location. "I suppose," he said, leaping down from the plane and landing with the preciseness of a cat, "I should investigate." He moved unhurriedly, at an easy stroll. "Oh, Alexia, what secrets are you keeping?" Wesker paused, smiling to himself. "Other," he added, "than the fact you're alive."
"You really trust that fuckin' asshole?" asked Steve, once Grayson had left. "He lied to us, Claire. He knew the bitch was alive."
Claire sighed. She wasn't sure what to think. On one hand, she didn't think Grayson had kept Alexia a secret because he'd had malicious intentions. On the other hand, she couldn't entirely dismiss it either—the man was completely whipped by the Ashfords, and from what she'd observed in that brief encounter with Alexia, Alexia had a firm grip on Grayson's collar. "I dunno," was what she eventually settled on, looking at Steve. "I don't think he wants to hurt anyone."
"But what if that crazy bitch tells him to hurt someone?"
She considered that, biting her bottom lip. Then Claire said, "I dunno, okay? I dunno what you want me to tell you."
"That your buddy ain't leadin' us into some kinda trap, for starters," he said.
Claire furrowed her brow. "Annette's death really fucked him up," she said. "I mean, he saw her die. He was there in the room with her. Saw her all… smashed up." She grimaced, busying herself with her gun, ejecting the clip to check her ammo—fine—then slapping the magazine back in. She did that over and over again, because it was something to do with her hands. "That kinda thing would mess anyone up. Maybe Alexia's manipulating him, taking advantage of his shaky mental state?"
"You kiddin'?" Steve said, and stared at her as if she'd just announced she'd shit her pants. "You ain't seen the way that fucker was lookin' at Alexia? That dude is in it deep. He was staring at Alexia like I used to stare at Paige Mathers in homeroom."
"Weirdo," she chuckled. Then Claire frowned, really thought about it. Steve was right. "Makes you wonder if he was only dating Annette because she kinda looked like Alexia." She shook her head, then said, "No, wait. That's a shitty thing to say." Claire holstered her gun once she'd gotten tired of fiddling with the clip. "He loved her. When Annette died, Gray was inconsolable."
"Seemed fuckin' consoled to me," said Steve, scrunching his nose. "Bet they fucked. Him and Alexia, I mean."
"Steve, come on."
"You think weird mutant chicks can have babies?" he asked, raising his eyebrows. Some weirdo interest of his had been piqued, and he continued ruminating: "And if they can, what do you think Alexia's kids would look like? Bet some Cronenberg shit. Like ants with baby heads, or somethin'." He blinked in astonishment, then said, "Whoah, that would make a sick album cover."
"Steve," said Claire, snapping her fingers at him, "focus."
"Don't snap your fingers at me. I ain't a goddamn dog."
"Sorry," she said, and sighed.
Steve fiddled with his earring, a thin steel barbell punched through his upper ear. "It's cool."
"How's your wrist?"
"Still kinda hurts, but the painkillers are helpin'."
Claire sat down beside him on the cot, delicately lifting his wrist to inspect the gauze. There was a faint blot of blood on it. "What the fuck did she have in her hand that burned you?" she asked, looking at him.
He stared at her for a moment, and if she were in the mood for that sort of thing right now, Claire would have made fun of his blush. "That's the thing," Steve said, finally rediscovering his ability to talk. "She didn't have nothin' in her hand from what I could see. When she clamped my wrist, I didn't feel nothin' at first—then it started burnin' real bad. Like super bad. Like burned-my-wrist-on-a-hot-pan kinda bad." Steve looked down at the gauze taped around his wrist. "There was red shit on her hand. It… looked like blood. But I ain't seen any cuts or whatever."
"For once," said Claire, restoring Steve's hand to his lap, "I'd really like to just not have to deal with crazy Umbrella shit."
"It was a DFWM move."
"What the fuck's a DFWM move?"
"A don't-fuck-with-me move," said Steve, helpfully. "See, I did a stint in juvy—long story, but it involved a car—and there were two kinds of moves. DFWMs were when you wanted to show the other kids you weren't someone they should fuck with."
"And the other move?"
"The kind that lands you a murder charge, and a transfer to a state prison," said Steve.
"I thought you were Canadian," she said, puzzled.
"I am," said Steve. "But people can move, Claire. Duh. Dad was workin' for Umbrella, and he got a promotion, so we moved to Arklay City from Calgary. He was the sysadmin at their bioresearch center there."
"Just think," said Claire, "if your dad had moved you guys just sixty miles to the south, you could've died in Raccoon City."
"I had an aunt that lived in Raccoon City," he said. "She wasn't there when shit went down. She was on vacation in Hawaii. Taught physics at Raccoon University, but now that it's gone, she's teaching at its sister school, Arklay University." Steve frowned suddenly and looked away, hitching his legs up and gazing into the middle-distance. "I'd like to see my aunt again," he told her, hugging his knees. "I wonder if we're ever gonna get outta here." Steve heaved a sigh, and muttered, "Man, I could use a smoke."
"Didn't realize you smoked," said Claire.
"Gonna nag me 'bout it?"
"No," said Claire, "it's not my lungs I'm ruining." She put her hand on his shoulder, and said, "We're gonna get out of here, Steve. We just… gotta hang in there. Trust me, my brother is a force to be reckoned with." She smiled. "He used to be S.T.A.R.S. He'll come."
"Those guys are pretty hardcore," said Steve. "My cousin tried out for S.T.A.R.S, but failed the test both times. Told me she'd get it on the third, because third's the charm." He rubbed at an eye with the point of his knuckle, and sniffed. "Was the last thing she said to me before Umbrella ruined our fuckin' lives. She was a cop at the RPD, a couple years older than me. We were close."
Claire tried not to think about how his cousin could have been among the many zombies she'd shot in the precinct. She knew she wasn't a murderer—it had been self-defense, and could you even murder something that wasn't technically human anymore?—but it made her feel like a murderer every time she was reminded that those things had been real people once, with real lives and real families. "I'm sorry," she said, and meant it.
Steve nodded. "Thanks," he said, and he looked at her in his periphery. "But it's not just me. Umbrella's taken somethin' from everyone here. It took my family. It took Annette and Sherry from Grayson, and maybe even Alexia, 'cause I'm pretty sure she ain't exactly human—and maybe that's what it took from her too, her humanity."
"It didn't take anything from me," said Claire, feeling a weird sense of shame. "Not exactly."
"Sure it did," said Steve, and when Claire asked him what he meant, he said, "Umbrella took away your peace of mind. It took away your normal. And it probably took a bit of your sanity, too. Nobody sees the sorta shit we've seen without losing a little piece of themselves. You can tell yourself all the bullshit you want, that it's not like that and you were one of the strong ones, but that's all it is. Bullshit."
The power was out in most of the facility, Wesker observed; it was running entirely on the graces of compensatory power, and he wondered how long that compensatory power would hold before it became too cold, too inhospitable, or before the fuel ran out. Not that it mattered. Albert could see just fine in the dark, and the less lights, the better. His primary concern was the cold; he could certainly survive temperatures most people would find intolerable and borderline fatal, but even he had a freezing point, and if things continued to trend downward, it wouldn't be long before he met it.
Wesker rounded a corner. A tactical flashlight lay on the ground, blood glittering like liquid ruby in the light. Pieces of Beta Unit were scattered around the corridor like birdseed. He toed aside someone's arm, a leg, a head.
He found the captain slumped against the wall, his head smashed into a pulp of gristle and bone, still clutching his radio. It sputtered several times, then fizzled out. A blood trail led to a mangled door on the far side of the corridor. The door lay crumpled on the ground, as if something had beaten it from the inside until it had managed to free it from the gaskets of the doorframe.
Just a few feet inside the room, which appeared to be a laboratory, lay another body, a gaping hole where the man's face used to be. Something had skewered and dragged the sorry bastard before finally freeing whatever it had hooked the man with, and it had left him here to rot; but not before helping itself to a few sizeable bites, all the way down to the bone.
"Perhaps a hunter?" he ventured aloud, absently twirling his S.T.A.R.S knife between his thumb and finger. Wesker never cared much for guns; they were too impersonal. He liked to feel his kills.
Wesker peered into the laboratory, hurled his knife with a hard flick of his wrist. The blade thudded into the zombie's throat, and it toppled with a moan. He walked over, freed his knife with a squelch, and stomped the thing's head, its skull splattering under his boot-heel. "Opportunist," he said to the dead thing.
He walked on.
