Jill hurried toward the elevator, fingering the keycard she'd gotten off Steve in her pocket. She planned to find the kid; she just needed some help, because Jill wasn't stupid enough to fight Alexia Ashford by herself. The Spencer Estate and Raccoon City had taught her a lot about herself, and what they had taught her, foremost, was that dealing with bioweapons was not a one-person job. It wasn't, she'd also learned, even a twelve-person job, so she wasn't feeling too great about hers and the Redfields' odds. But she couldn't just leave Steve to die; he was only a kid, and what kind of cop would she be, leaving a kid to die.

Stepping into the elevator, Jill fed the keycard to the lift's slot and thumbed the UP button. The lift lurched, hummed up its cables. She slumped against the wall, rubbing her face, exhaustion settling behind her eyes like bags of wet sand. "Goddammit," she said to herself, and heaved a sigh. "Goddammit," she continued, looking up at the fluorescent panels, "I hope you're gonna be okay, kid. Just hang in there."

The elevator stopped, and as Jill stepped out, someone grabbed her and slammed her up against the wall, hard. She went to pull her gun, but as soon as she did, it was wrenched from her hand and thrown aside, nearly tearing her arm from its socket. She didn't recognize her attacker. A huge man with red hair and a beard, his muscles swollen to an unnatural size, skin so red she thought he'd burst.

"Is Ashford down there?" demanded the man in a guttural voice, tinged with something that might have been a Scottish accent. His blue eyes practically bulged from their sockets, the sclerae webbed with veins, some of which had burst into subconjunctival hemorrhages. " Need her ," the man growled, spittle glistening on his lips, almost sounding scared.

Jill kicked the man in the face, not hard enough to hurt him but enough to surprise him, and when he dropped her, she scooped up her gun and sprinted. She doubted bullets would do much to that behemoth anyway, so she just ran, deciding to conserve her ammunition for when she and the Redfields went to rescue Steve. The huge man lumbered after her, and as Jill swung around the corner, she crashed into someone, but it felt like hitting a concrete wall at full-sprint.

Wesker, however, didn't seem fazed at all by the collision, or interested in her at all. He tossed her aside like a ragdoll. "I'll find you later, Jill," he said, and he walked past her without another word, toward the mutant bodybuilder. "I know what you did, Don," was all Jill heard Wesker say before she was out of earshot.

When Jill figured she was out of the frying pan and nowhere near a fire, she stopped to catch her breath, her heart punching at her rib-cage like a fist. Here, in this part of the facility, it was dark, and she could hear the slow shuffle of zombies somewhere ahead of her. But she'd rather deal with zombies than Bane and Ra's Al Ghul, her former captain who she'd seen die in the mansion incident after a tyrant had speared him through the chest. "Why," she panted to herself, "does nobody stay fucking dead anymore? Goddammit, Wesker."


The mansion had a basement, but nobody, as far as Grayson could remember, had ever really gone down there; and it was in that basement Alexia had stashed Steve. Grayson followed her down into the chilly gloom, trying to reason with her.

"Lex," he pleaded, for the hundredth time, "he's just a kid."

Alexia, predictably, ignored him.

The basement smelled like old, wet concrete, and the air had curdled into something unpleasant and moist from years of poor ventilation and neglect. Alexia unlocked a rusting door with a key, and stepped inside. An ancient CHP system chugged and rattled in the room, and here, the air reeked of diesel, reminded Grayson of a gas-station. Steve was huddled in the corner of the room, bound up in hyphae. He stared blankly at them, his gaze hollow and tired. The skin beneath his eyes was an unhealthy pale, and the wounds he'd weathered from the glass looked angry and puckered.

"Fuck off, you crazy bitch," said Steve, but the fire in his voice had gone away, and he sounded tired and done with the world.

Alexia struck Steve, hard, across the face, and he hissed in pain.

"Lex, come on—"

"Get off it," snapped Alexia, looking at him. Then she turned to Steve, and said, her tone pitching low and dangerous, "You broke into my home, you little cretin, and shot at my brother." She seized Steve by the jaw, and he yowled. She lifted his head, made him look her in the eyes.

Steve hocked and spat, and a glob of yellowish-green phlegm caught Alexia's cheek. This sent her into a rage, and she banged his head against the wall with a loud, visceral thud that made Grayson wince. Dazed and hurting, Steve's eyes rolled slightly into his head. Then he said in a small, weak voice, "Fuck you." Alexia would have smashed his head into the wall again, but Grayson pulled her back, and she clawed angrily at him like a pissed-off cat.

"Stop it," he hissed, steel in his voice.

She rounded on him and said, "I'm beginning to think you're a traitor to my family, Grayson."

"Don't be fucking stupid," he spat, and when Alexia went to strike him, he caught her by the wrist and twisted, but not hard enough to break anything. He just wanted her to calm the fuck down. Alexia relaxed, and when he was sure she was done, he let her wrist go—but kept his arm looped around her waist like a mancatcher, just in case. "He's only seventeen," said Grayson, and paused. He wiped the spit off her cheek, then said, "Look, I'm still your guy. I love you, you know I do. But what I don't love is this crazy shit you keep doing."

"Dude, there's no goddamn point talkin' to her," said Steve, regaining some composure, and some of his old momentum. "She's fuckin' crazy, and you're fuckin' crazy for wantin' to fuck her. I don't care how hot she is. This bitch is the sorta bitch cut your dick off and pickle it in a jar."

"Kid, I'm up to my goddamn ears in crazy," said Grayson. "I exist in a fucking constant state of crazy. Shut up. I'm trying to help you." His eyes strayed to the hyphae restraining Steve, and he wondered.

Alexia must have sensed what he was wondering, and she said, "Go on, try it. " Her tone was that of some schoolyard bully telling him to hit her, and it made Grayson think of his Eton days, and Neil Barrowclough. "But I have control now, and I'm not going to slip up again."

Forget that idea, I guess, he said to himself, in his head. "Lex, seriously," he said, staring at her, "what's the point of torturing him? He's got nothing. No useful intel, research—nothing."

"He's going to be my warning," said Alexia, icily.


Jill finished putting down the last zombie in the hallway when a familiar voice said, "I thought I heard gunshots. Holy shit, Jill." Chris Redfield lowered his gun, hurrying over, Claire right on his heels.

"Goddamn, I'm happy to see you both," said Jill, grinning. But the grin slipped from her face, and she gestured in the direction she'd come from. "We need to go back," she said, and wiped the sweat from her forehead with the sleeve of her jacket. "Like right now."

"Go where?" asked Claire. "Jill, you look like shit."

"We need to go back to the mansion," said Jill. "Come on."

"The mansion," said Chris, knitting his eyebrows. "Jill, you hit your head or something?"

"Not that mansion," she said, and shook her head. "Alexia's. She's got Steve."

She led them back the way she'd come. The facility was laid out in such a way that it was easy to navigate, or maybe Jill had just become so accustomed to Umbrella facilities that she instinctively knew her way around them. Back at the intersection, Jill didn't see Wesker, or the hulking man-thing who'd attacked her. The restricted-access lift, the one which would have taken them down to the mansion, was destroyed. Jill leaned between the crumpled doors and peered down into the shaft. The cables, which had once been attached to the elevator, dangled like dead snakes. Wires sparked, and a cold draft, carrying with it thick clouds of smoke, blew up into her eyes, made them water. Fire crackled among the rubble at the bottom of the shaft.

"Did Wesker do this?" asked Jill aloud, and she swore and slammed her palms against the wall so hard that her hands hurt. "Fuck, goddammit," she said, and clenched her fists. "Steve, goddammit." Jill shut her eyes for a moment to compose herself, then drew back from the shaft and said to Chris and Claire, "We need to find another way down."

"Wait, wait, wait. Hold on," said Chris, staring at her with an inscrutable look. "Wesker?"

"He's here," said Jill, frowning. "Ran into him when I stepped outta the shaft, along with—I don't know, might've been a guy once." Then she told them about her encounter, and Claire and Chris listened, their expressions unreadable.

"So some guy was juiced up on something, and he attacked you," said Chris, once she'd finished. "And then you ran into Wesker when you tried to make a break for it."

"Yeah," said Jill. "I think the big guy might've done this," and she gestured at the elevator. "Elevator probably couldn't handle all that bulk."

"Even a small residential elevator can handle a couple hundred pounds," argued Chris.

"He was big, Chris. Huge," said Jill. "Or maybe Wesker sabotaged it so we couldn't follow? I don't know. I don't fucking care. We need to find Steve before Alexia kills him."

"She's right," said Claire. She glanced over her shoulder, frowned. "But we got company."

Jill looked. Ants had found the zombies she'd killed, and they stared hungrily at them with their chitin-glittering sockets. "Shit," was all she said.