Author's note: Don McNally is an original character from ' The Antarctica Incident. We'll be seeing more of him.

Moments earlier…

Marigold jumped down from the roof of the building, letting go of the mental 'lead' she'd been pulling the Tyrant away by. With any luck, it would keep going in that direction to whatever other targets it had.

Overhead a murder of crows had begun to coalesce, wheeling and screaming. The virus had even made its way into them.

The soft haze settled back down over her as her heart rate slowed, as the adrenaline receded. There was a strange sense of something familiar. It felt almost like when she had 'reached' out to Kate in Raccoon City…except this was a muddied sense of an awareness that she could only observe, but not connect to. Not infected. That subtle paralimbic mutation that would have brought on wasn't a part of this. But exposed, somehow.

It felt like the roses. That strange, mutated breed of roses which had grown out of her out clumsiness when Poppy had tried to shoo her out of the house and find something to occupy herself with, back in 1970. A small, stony ruin across the moor, back near the woods had been the perfect little refuge back in the day. She'd accidentally infected the roses with her virus - back when she was more virulent, she supposed, as Alexander had never explained why he'd later decided to lift distancing rules in the his own house after several years.

The virus that had originated in the original Sonnetroppe blooms had been a fragile thing, in its own way. Through the filter of her blood, this variant grew aggressively within the little shelter of the ruin. Enough so that she had managed to bring Alexander samples to transplant and study. If nothing else, it reduced their dependence on Bailey's operation should their access to the mother virus be cut off.

Those roses were likely what had trained her senses to perceive the virus in the first place, if she had to guess. This felt like them, but more…

Oh.

This felt like it had when one of the local youths back home would sneak into the garden, looking for a 'secret' place to smoke and sit with their friends. Incidents like that had sparked her requests to Alexander to study the plants, in order to develop emergency medication to keep at the house; the roses had subtle hunger to them, and the toxins they emitted would ensnare the unwary.

Oh.

Bubbling under it was a growing anxiety that did not originate with her. This was more of a frantic mania, barely holding it together.

There was a very, very short list of people who had access to both this place and the transplanted second garden in the Antarctica lab.

Oh, she so very much wanted to be wrong about this, but ignoring her instinct had cost her too much in the past.

A zombie wandered too close to her and she startled, snapping from her reverie to swat the creature away. She wasn't metering her strength, and the thing crashed into the nearest wall, then began to struggle back to its feet.

Oh, god, they were everywhere. Marigold took a steadying breath to center herself and pushed lightly. They began to give her a little more space. It was enough to let her find her breath again and push her hood back to let herself be cooled by the night air. The patch on the back of her shoulder itched, so she reached back under her collar to peel it from her skin. She wanted to chuck the thing into the dirt. Pragmatism won out - she really didn't know what they'd been giving her, not exactly - and she tucked the cursed little thing into her pocket, even as that distant sense of anxiety sharpened -

Someone was watching her.

Marigold looked around, senses sharpening, fighting her way back up through the haze. She couldn't afford to falter now, not in this moment. A surveillance camera was affixed to a post by the side of the path, its red light blinking. That distant anxiety began to hit a fever pitch -

This is what they wanted, she realized. Alfred would see her and rush out, only to be caught. What would happen next…

He'd try to protect his sister's secret. He'd refuse to negotiate.

He'd die.

Her signs were loose and unsteady, but it was a language she and the twins had grown in fluency in as a group. They were a little better at it than her, she remembered, using it as a secret language between themselves and the other boy who had grown up alongside them.

Crow?

The distant sense of anxiety stilled. It was Alfred. It was like watching a deer freeze out in the open, still deciding whether it should take flight. Running now would almost certainly doom him. Crow, don't come. It's a trap.

Marigold raised her wrist to show the maglocked tracker binding her, tapping it for emphasis. Wesker would be tracking her. If Alfred failed to take the bait immediately, Wesker would undoubtedly roust her from whatever hiding spot she found in order to smoke Alfred out. She looked sharply back at the camera. She took a breath, then said it again, her movements sharpening. It is a trap.

Wait. Watch.

It's a trap I can break.

Steve Burnside and Claire Redfield found cover at the edge of the airfield, and took a moment to catch their breath. "It looks clear," Steve offered.

Claire's face was grim. "That usually doesn't mean much. At least we have keys, but it feels like an ambush. I'd rather not run straight through until we have to."

Steve frowned, but he'd finally learned to trust Claire's instincts. She was the one who knew how these fuckers operated, anyhow. "Did you know that guy back there? WIth the sunglasses. He seemed to know you."

Claire sighed. "I think he worked with my brother. You know, in STARS? He turned on them." She frowned. "I heard that he died. My brother saw the body and everything."

"Moved pretty fucking fast for a dead guy," Steve replied.

Somewhere in the course of their escape, Claire had begun to learn the subtle line between Steve's snarky jabs and his attempts at camaraderie. She nodded with a wry smirk. "Lucky us, he got distracted, I guess. I think I need to warn my brother once we're off this rock. I feel like we've wandered into the middle of a war."

The sound of crows was coming back, and Claire glanced up. They were wheeling and swarming up above them, but they paid the survivors no mind. Their foci seemed to be a forty-foot wall on the edge of the facility. Some sort of construction had been started there, and for some reason, left unfinished.

Steve followed her gaze. "I saw that on the map. It's an old training course. They don't use it so much anymore, but the guards would talk about the really good USS guys who'd managed to finish it. Tetanus shots all around, but it was a big deal." Steve wiped blood from his nose. "Whatever's drawing them there is behind a lot of rusty girders. Definitely not our problem."

Claire let her gaze linger a moment longer. Something like that was usually the prelude to something really bad breaking out, but…no. Steve's sense of self-preservation was on the money here. Those soldiers had stirred something up. They, or Umbrella, could deal with it.

All they could do now was avoid becoming collateral damage. And this weird little calm before a storm was likely what they needed to do so, and escape.

Claire took a deep breath and nodded to Steve. "Let's get out of here."

December 27, 1998 - A jerry-rigged control room in the Antarctica facility

Don McNally, a broad, muscular bearded man in his late fifties with hair more gray than red these days, watched the radar in the makeshift command center he had sequestered for his own use over the past two months- ever since access to the BOW level had all but fallen into his hands. Spencer had assigned him to keep an eye on the place back in the late seventies, and he'd made a niche for himself as a competent engineering hand down in maintenance, who knew when to step out of the way. As a Monitor, it wasn't his job to be a damned hero. His job was to watch, and wait for the moment when Oswell Spencer decided what to do with the bloody place.

When Grayson Harmon had come back - fifteen years had turned the skinny lad into a goddamned linebacker - it had seemed like a sort of shift change. Scott Harmon, the sour old git, had finally had enough of Ashford's bullshit - gotten too old for it, at any rate. His son had managed to claw his way out of the wreckage of Raccoon City, only to come back here.

Familiarity was a hell of a drug, sometimes. He'd been a lonely kid with a healthy dose of "fuck-you energy" completely typical of a teenager, and had been utterly guileless back in the day. Raccoon City had hollowed him out, but he was just as susceptible to the "friendly Scotsman" bit as ever.

Don had a skeleton key to the BOW wing, and had made himself a cozy little nest to keep an eye on the facility since the late young Doctor Ashford had choked on her own ambitions, following the rest of her kin into the dark. Alfred, for some fucking reason, had clung to familiarity and grown steadily crazier by the year. Grayson had seen the writing on the wall and gotten the fuck out, as far as Don could tell, at the tender age of fifteen, proving that in a house full of geniuses, the tender little meathead had more sense than the rest of them combined. He'd heard that both boys had been shipped back to England for schooling for a time, but only the little sadist had come back.

But now Grayson was back, and the ghosts of puppy love had turned him into a better skeleton key than anything he could have made himself. Alexia Ashford's old keycard - full access to the facility - was stowed safely in his vest pocket. Back in November, he had accompanied the man down to a stasis chamber and got a shock: Alexia Ashford lay comatose, sleeping within the hibernaculum in the center of the room in a tangle of wires, and the liquified pEpislion fluid - his primary goal at the time - which seemed to be keeping her both sedated, and probably alive.

Her T-Veronica work hadn't crashed and burned quite as hard as Alfred had let on, then. No wonder the little cunt had never shut the place down. It was clear that Grayson himself had never been let in on the big secret.

Don had brought Grayson food, some beer, and a little extra reading material. The man had been so adamant against leaving the lass again, braindead as she very likely was, that he'd hardly seemed to notice being locked in down there with a few rations until the deed had been done.

He'd been down there for almost two months now.

Shame, really. The Antarctica facility was a grim place, and the lad had been good for a drink and a laugh after a long shift.

Planes and boats had been coming in for the last few days. The radio had reported a dustup on Rockfort Island. Alfred had thrown everything he'd had at an invading force - some rival outfit, it seemed. One that operated with the same sort of deep intel he had, with deeper pockets to back it up.

He wondered how Zinoviev was doing these days. The Russian had done a tour with him to learn the ropes of Monitor work, years ago. The last he'd been in touch with the mad lad was a few days before Raccoon City. Zinoviev had taken a hard look at the situation and had just entertained a 'most interesting sales pitch' to something incredibly lucrative. The man had gone silent since the event…but really, that meant almost nothing.

Someone big was hitting Umbrella's paramilitary operation. From the radio reports, they'd released more than bullets. If the guards were stupid enough to let them in (and they almost certainly were), then this facility was running on borrowed time.

The time to jump ship had come, Don mused to himself as he reached for the radio. The real trick would be to keep Oswell Spencer's finger off the trigger before his ride could come to collect.

Patting the keycard once again, Don thought he might just have an idea to hold the old man's attention.