Marigold wasn't looking so good, but Grayson had stopped bothering to ask what was wrong, because nobody would tell him. It bothered him. It bothered him even more than the increasingly more frequent memory lapses, the slow, painful tug of the mutamycete at his sensorium—as if it were, layer by layer, peeling away his sanity, his understanding of what constituted reality. Everything just seemed like a half-blur now, a world slowly unfocusing….
"Here we are," said Marigold, as they came to a halt in front of the door to Alexander's old study. It was open. "Strange," she said, inspecting the study-side of the knob, the metal scratched around the keyhole, "someone's lock-picked it."
Jill, Grayson thought. She'd been his neighbor in Raccoon City, in the apartment two doors down from his. He'd once gone over there to hang out after a night at Jack's, and he'd commented on her set of practice pin-tumblers. She'd told him that lockpicking was a hobby of hers ("No, don't look at me like that," she'd said over beers, while they'd been sitting and chatting at her cluttered kitchen table. "I'm not some burglar. Perfectly legal hobby stuff. It's an art, Harman—I'm telling you").
Marigold looked at him. Aside from how wilted and put-upon she looked, there was something unsettling, he decided, in her eyes. She looked like a hungry predator. "You're certain?" she asked him, although Grayson knew it was a rhetorical question. A thin sheen of sweat slicked her face, and she was trembling. She licked her dry, cracked lips, and shivered.
Grayson stepped into the study. Since Alexander's death, the room had pretty much remained untouched. Sober papered walls and a glossy hardwood floor, and huge, austere bookcases crammed with books—the topics ranging from genetic theory to the philosophies of the ancient Greeks. An antique gas chandelier washed the room in soft, yellow light, and reminded Grayson, very specifically, of museums.
The wall behind Alexander's desk, a huge thing carved of dark chestnut, was half-open, stuck on its magnetic track. Beyond the wall, Grayson saw the darkness of an elevator shaft, felt a draft blowing up and into the study, carrying with it a pungent, overripe odor, like rancid meat.
"Someone was already bloody in here," remarked Alfred.
Grayson knew. He'd helped them.
Alexia said to Alfred, "Obviously, you idiot. If it wasn't any of us, then we can only deduce it was one of the others."
Alfred grimaced. "Yes, of course, dear sister."
"Thanks, Sherlock," said Grayson, blandly.
"Elementary, my dear Watson," replied Alexia, smiling slightly.
Squeezing through the gap between the false-wall and the real wall, Grayson leaned into the shaft, peering down into the darkness, the chilly draft cooling the sweat on his skin. The elevator, thankfully, was still intact. He backed up, recalled the lift. Its doors slid open, onto a dimly lit interior paneled in wood. Alexia said, "It's going to be a rather tight fit."
And tight it was. Grayson was the biggest person in the group, so it was especially cramped for him, and he found himself pushed into the corner, Alexia pressed up against him. Her hair smelled nice, he thought. Nicer than the faint but pervasive smell of cigars and Aramis that lingered in the elevator like the ghost of some 1960s old boy.
Marigold thumbed the DOWN button, and the elevator lurched, rumbled down its cables. She said, "I must warn you: it isn't pretty down here." She grimaced, then turned her head and coughed explosively into the sleeve of her fatigues. Grayson found himself wincing at some phantom pain in his sides, hearing that. The coughing sounded like it hurt.
As the lift stopped and the doors slid open, a gust of warm, rank air hit him like halitosis, made him gag. And underneath that stench was something putrid-sweet, and Grayson recognized that smell, because it had been everywhere in Raccoon City: death. But death didn't even begin to describe what lay beyond the doors of the elevator.
They stepped into what had once been Edward's laboratory, but now was a veritable slaughterhouse. Grayson skidded on something, and without even looking, he knew exactly what it was from the way it felt underfoot. Long, winding lengths of what had once been someone's guts lay unspooled across the floor, and half-eaten bodies hung from makeshift meat-hooks, their decomposition hastened by the belch of the thermal vents, which, Grayson supposed, were that hot because someone—he assumed Donald—had shunted the heat from more important places. Human remains were scattered around the place like discarded legos, puddling into brownish-red slurry.
"This makes your torture-room look like a cleanroom," said Grayson to Alfred.
Alfred gave him an indignant look. "Shut your gob, Harman." He toyed with the grip of his Walther, but at the look Alexia gave him, Alfred dropped his hand to his side and mumbled a half-hearted apology.
Marigold opened her mouth to speak, but suddenly doubled over, vomiting explosively between her boots. Sweating and shaking, she'd gone six shades paler in a span of seconds, like a woman snared in the throes of a violent heart-attack. Grayson approached her, wanting to steady Marigold on her feet, but she swatted him away and stumbled over a work-cart heaped with bodies: maintenance workers, HCF members, prisoners, Rockfort guards. The cart toppled with her, and the bodies spilled to the floor, some coming apart at the joints because their ligaments had been so thoroughly masticated that they could no longer hold them together. She fell into the pile, tried to wobble back onto her feet.
"Ma," said Grayson, putting his hand out, "come on, grab my hand."
She bared her teeth, made a noise like a rasp of icy wind blowing through a grate.
"Grayson," said Alfred, grabbing his arm and trying to pull him back, "we need to move. We need to move now. "
He did try to move, but Marigold moved faster. Inhumanly fast. So fast that Grayson had barely registered the movement. Her teeth sank into his forearm, clamped down hard. Grayson howled in pain, warm blood seeping through his sleeve. The white-hot agony that followed was something he couldn't even begin to describe as anything but perdition. He tried to shake her off, but Marigold refused to let go, biting down harder until Grayson swore he felt her teeth graze bone.
It took the combined effort of the twins to wrench Marigold off him and pin her to the floor, and she thrashed and howled and kicked at the air. She managed to throw Alfred off, but Alexia held her down, her arms shaking with the effort, with the strain, of keeping Marigold stationary. "I can't hold her down much longer," said Alexia, through gritted teeth, "and the hyphae aren't responding to me."
Grayson looked at his arm. Saw the white of his bone beneath a shredded layer of muscle.
The wound would not heal. Instead, it began to crystallize.
