They'd finally found time to breathe—and Jill, consequently, found time to inspect the thing that had fallen out of McNally's pocket.
"It's a thumbdrive," said Chris, turning the small slab of black plastic between his fingers, furrowing his brow. He worried his lip in thought, then looked at her. "What're the chances it's got somethin' worthwhile on it, Jill?"
"Chances are slim," said Jill, heaving a sigh. "It's probably got fucking maintenance stuff on it, or something. Maybe McNally's porn stash? Who fucking knows." She shook her head, plucked the little drive from his fingers. "We don't have time to test it out. Just gotta focus on getting back to Florencia."
"We're just gonna leave," said Chris, the muscle in his jaw twitching. "Just like that."
"We completed our mission," said Jill, glancing at Claire. Claire had been mostly silent since that whole foul thing with Steve. The kid's death had hit her hard; Jill knew that Claire, even without her saying so, blamed herself for that situation. But Claire had been like that for as long as Jill had known her: always scapegoating herself, telling herself that if she'd just done something a little different, been a little more prescient, the bad things wouldn't have happened. Jill knew that feeling too well; she still blamed herself for that shit-show in the Spencer Mansion, even if she knew, rationally, that the deaths of her teammates hadn't been her fault—it had been Wesker's. Even so, her old captain had always been a master of misdirection when it came to shunting blame. "We got your sister," resumed Jill, looking back at Chris. "That's what we came to do. We're done here, partner. The facility's gonna go up, so the Ashfords aren't our problem anymore."
"Jill—fuck, you know I can't just leave it. Not like this."
"It's over, Chris," said Jill, and she squeezed his shoulder in a gesture of consolation.
"No," said Claire, "it isn't."
Jill looked back at the younger Redfield, rolled her eyes. "No," she said, already knowing what Claire wanted to say, wanted to do—and Jill wanted to cut her off before she did anything stupid, "that's exactly how Steve wound up dead. He went after Alfred." She frowned, then said, "Look, Claire. I'm not trying to be a bitch, but—"
"We can't let Alexia get away with this. Let Alfred get away with this," interrupted Claire, her lip trembling. She stared at her with the wet-pink eyes of someone who'd started crying hard, and had never stopped.
"Goober," soothed Chris, squeezing his sister's hand, "you know I'd normally take your side, and I wanna see the Ashfords pay much as you do. But Jill's right—we have to go while we can. Alexia's not gonna get outta here alive. None of them are."
"Not even Grayson," said Jill.
"Gray didn't deserve this," said Claire.
"Grayson did this to himself," said Chris, matter-of-factly. "Put himself in this situation. You invite bad company, you invite bad situations. Didn't I always tell you that while you were growin' up?" Chris searched Claire's face, his gaze steady and unblinking. Then, "You can't save everyone, sis. And if Alexia did that to Steve, I don't even wanna imagine what she'd do to you."
Jill snorted. "Probably use a crank to pull out her organs." She mimed turning a crank, and at the looks the Redfields gave her, she added, "This medieval torture I saw in a book once." She shrugged, grimacing a little. "The fucking English, man," she said. "The shit they used to do to people, you would not believe."
Pocketing the thumbdrive, Jill promised herself that she'd check it out as soon as they were safely back in Puntas Arenas, sequestered in some internet cafe, away from Umbrella and its psychos. And if the thing was encrypted, Jill only hoped Tyrell had taught Carlos a few more neat computer tricks—otherwise she'd need to get in touch with Rebecca, and that could take time now that Chambers was on the lecture circuit. "Let's get moving," said Jill, and she walked, her breath steaming in the air, a thin sheet of dark ice tinkling under her boots.
Navigating the facility wasn't as difficult now. With everything going on, most of the zombies were either dead, or so starved and rigid from the Antarctic cold that they just milled around like dumb, half-frozen cattle. The biggest issue, Jill decided, were the ants; although she and her buddies had thinned them out with those molotovs, there were still plenty left. But what relieved Jill was that, thanks to a lack of viable corpses (most were either in pieces or too frozen to be of any use), the ants had nothing to nest in, which meant no ant-zombies; and as long as she and the group kept away from the swarms, the ants remained mostly indifferent to their presence.
Her opinion that things were getting better, however, did a nosedive when they arrived in the hangar, where Chris, despite ripping a long, jagged rut into the fuselage upon landing on the icy tarmac, had managed to negotiate a landing without any further accidents. But this, Jill thought, wasn't an accident. This was sabotage.
What was left of the red bush-plane was a charred husk. Someone had blown the fuel tank, and Florencia lay in a mangled heap, pieces of her scattered around the hangar or out in the snowdrifts. Jill wanted to scream, but willed herself not to. Now wasn't the time to panic, she told herself. Wesker had gotten here in that unmarked black plane, and he needed to use it to leave. It was still out there; but Jill couldn't see it. Whiteout conditions had washed away the Antarctica horizon, and out there, it looked like a void, a nowhere place. They wouldn't be able to reach the plane in conditions like these, she knew, and there was no telling when the weather would clear up.
"Jill," said Claire, and she pulled something from a zombie's head, showed her.
It was Wesker's S.T.A.R.S knife. "Motherfucker," was all Jill managed to say.
Grayson couldn't move his arm; it felt stiff and heavy, like someone had glued a chunk of lead to his body that was roughly the size and shape of his arm. The crystals were slowly spreading, germinating into grayish-black clusters under his skin that budded, blooming like jagged glass flowers. He wanted to panic, but at present, he had a far more immediate problem: Marigold. Alexia couldn't hold her down any longer, and Marigold had flung her niece aside as if she weighed nothing at all, then coiled up her body like a cat ready to pounce. She lunged at him, and Grayson swayed to the side, saw her crash into a corpse-heap, splattering rancid gore. He took the opportunity, that brief loss of Marigold's momentum and predatory focus, to sprint for Alexia, hauling her up with his good hand.
"We need to run," she told him, and they did, Alfred right behind them.
But Marigold moved fast , and Grayson found himself pitched forward, something mean and strong pinning him to the rank, bloody concrete. He tried to reach out to the Mold, and for a moment, he was able to connect just long enough to summon a cluster of hyphae and whip Marigold off him, and across the room; then his link to the Mold evaporated, and it no longer acknowledged his fiats.
By some miracle, however, Alexia was able to connect to the Mold, and with the hyphae he'd summoned, she managed to pin her aunt down, but said something about her connection being slippery. "I don't know how long I can hold her down," said Alexia.
"Can you hold her long enough for us to get outta the BOW wing?" he asked. Grayson jerked his chin toward his stiff, useless arm. "I'm kinda gimpy right now." He swore under his breath, then said, "Goddammit, just had to be my fucking right arm."
"I think I can. It's certainly easier than holding her down myself," said Alexia, wrinkling her nose. She looked at his arm, concerned. When she reached out a hand to touch it, Grayson pulled it away. "Dunno if it's infectious," he said.
"I don't think it is," said Alexia. "At any rate," she said, after a moment, "I have a means to treat it, thanks to some goodies my aunt left me in one of the labs." She glanced toward the snarling thing that had been Marigold, tangled in a net of hyphae. She frowned.
"She's not gonna stay like that, is she?" asked Grayson.
"I don't think so," said Alexia. "It's—never mind it. Let's simply focus on getting out of here."
Alfred darted a look between them, and looked as if he wanted to say something. But he said nothing.
They left Edward's lab. Someone was waiting for them on the other side of the crumpled door.
"And here I thought I'd never find you, Alexia," said Albert Wesker, stepping into the shaky glare of a work-light, regarding them blandly from behind the dark lenses of his sunglasses. "Oh happy day."
