The gate was locked. The gate was always locked. Had always been. If Marigold focused hard on the moment, it was like nothing had changed since the summer of 1981, the last time she had walked through this door. For her, that had been less than a year ago.
But staring at a locked, highly climbable gate wouldn't make that true, and the clock was ticking. If she was right, Alfred's failure to wildly manifest within range would set off a backup plan.
She would be collected. And then she would be driven further into the trap. The soldiers had seen enough to be afraid of doing so themselves- it was the lab techs all over again, poor little muppets - so Wesker would have to take matters into his own hands. A cold coil of anger settled in her stomach, and she held onto it like floating debris in a shipwrecked sea.
Marigold hauled herself up through the gap at the top of the gate. It almost invited a decently fit person to sneak in, which was likely the point. Dropping down, she turned - just in time to see a small light power up above the sign just inside the gate, attached to a smooth steel wall.
Alfred was keeping an eye on her, it seemed. She glanced around and located a camera above the gate, point inward at the finish line. There were a few others bordering the test area and pointing towards the gate itself, but this one she looked into, and nodded.
She stepped toward the sign, stamped with the same rules she'd come up for the Matilda all those years ago:
TESTING SITE:
Test is pass/fail to finish the course. Time to finish is recorded for posterity.
Candidate must complete 6 stations.
Candidates MAY use shortcuts to shave time off of their final score.
Shortcuts pass through color-coded points designated to each station: blue, white, red, yellow, green, pink.
Any new shortcut reached by a candidate may be approved by testing officer and marked on the course.
The sign was rustier than she remembered, but it was the same one- and missing a bolt at one corner. She reached over and pried back the aluminium sign with her hand, bending it to reveal a small cubby hole.
Just large enough for the five injectors inside, tightly wrapped in layers of plastic against the elements. Epipens had only just been licensed around that time, though she imagined that they'd have become more ubiquitous in her absence. Scott Harman had found a nice, dry emergency spot and wrapped five doses in saran wrap to tuck into an emergency hiding spot. "They'll last for years so long as they stay dry," he'd laughed.
She unwrapped one and popped the cap off, jamming it into her thigh. The effect was immediate; the medication might be old, but Alexander had specially formulated it for times when she had strained herself on this particular contraption, and required an immediate cooldown.
The situation here wasn't quite the same, but it lifted the fog in a more consistent way than adrenaline had been doing for her before. She breathed a sigh of relief and smiled to the camera, putting a finger to her lips. She bent the corner of the sign back down, just enough to obscure the little stash. She'd want to return here later.
The crows above had begun to settle around the yard, watching silently. At the starting line, she spotted a new feature- a pressure plate. On the far wall by the finish line, a digital scoreboard had been mounted. It was currently dark.
She looked back to the first camera, signing Alfred, can you read me?
The light above the sign dimmed, then flashed once.
Marigold smiled, and signed, Good. She glanced over by the little wall that had been installed for her sake. Even now, the damage she had done to it all those years ago, the impacts, were still visible.
The idea that had germinated in a shitty little car on the edge of Raccoon City could have real viability after all. And, without the medication suppressing her baser instincts, she'd be running it with at full capacity for the first time.
Marigold turned back to the camera and began signing rapidly, her movements growing steady and confident. The light would flash intermittently, a sign that the instruction, or point of the plan, was understood.
Finally, after a few moments, she turned on her heel towards the low wall and began to drag items from the pile beneath the scoreboard.
The crows were a peculiarity, Wesker thought as he moved with purpose to the last position Marigold's tracking signal had reported back.
Marigold had been wandering into an infested area rich with security cameras, not particularly mindful of being seen. The picture it would have painted for Alfred would have been perfect, even if the hood never came off. Something was coming for him, and he would be driven in his mania to engage with it. They would have been able to secure the man. He wouldn't be ready to give up information easily, not immediately, but everyone had their breaking point…a fact that his aunt seemed to have been keenly aware of, and intent on avoiding, in her dealings since her secret had been revealed.
Alfred had not emerged, and the crows were massing toward a walled-in testing ground on the edge of the military training ground. Marigold did not seem to be in any particular distress, but she had gone in that direction herself, and had remained in the area.
That training ground was what the USS had dubbed the Matilda. At the end of the Raccoon City excursion, Marigold had used her knowledge of that particular course to coax the ex-USS escort out of his cover position in order to take out the surveillance cameras so that she might freely remove the pack of hunters which had zeroed in on their position.
The crows had picked up the T-Virus infection from eating carrion, but the swarms were maintaining cohesion much longer than what had been observed in the lab, and in Raccoon City. He filed the thought away like an unexpected, yet minor observation in a laboratory experiment - something to return to, and pull apart later.
The fox had gone to ground, and he'd have to extract her in order to ensure Alfred got the message. A stronger message, this time. Alfred was likely the kind of idiot to play white knight in the right circumstances.
The gate was locked, but any soldier worth their salt would have a laughably easy time scaling it. Wesker didn't bother to break the lock. A few lights were on. This yard, with the very little upkeep it clearly had, seemed to run on some independent power source from the military facility. A generator? Whatever it was, it was older than the facility itself.
He glanced around to take in the space. Another camera-rich environment. Sparsely lit, though that was more than enough for him to see the twisted landscape of metal arranged in an obstacle course designed to mangle as much as measure performance. The Umbrella board had officially voted to decommission the use of the Matilda three years earlier as an official test; they'd had too many people wash out. Had they continued to allow recruits into the field a little more bloodied, perhaps Raccoon City's recovery operations might have gone a little smoother. Veterans like HUNK and Zinoviev had cut their teeth on this, after all.
There was a set of rules posted under a light by the gate, and the steel girders were dotted with the six colours of the various stations to clear. These must have been the skip points. If what Bradley had said in the van was true, it was a rare few that managed to cut their time using even one of these, in a quest for glory.
Which meant that most of these skip points had been set by Marigold herself. The little training range behind the manor in Devon hadn't even begun to tell the full story.
The woman in question was standing over by a low wall installed twenty feet past the Matilda's finish line. She seemed to be inspecting something on it. Something had impacted the bricks hard over time, and more than once. A few bricks had been locked loose from about three feet from the ground, and Marigold was looking at the crevasse in some fascination. She turned and looked up at the Matilda.
There's something up there, she said in a distant tone - the patches were still holding firm, but she was beginning to work out the game then. A pity.
Wesker stepped towards her, slowly. "You know this place?" He said out loud. Marigold didn't answer, only looked to the wall again where two of the crows had settled in. For infected, they were shockingly docile. Marigold drifted a little closer to them, and they hopped closer to inspect the strange human just below. The smaller of the pair actually hopped down onto her arm. "Pretty bird?" It croaked out slowly, looking expectant.
"That's true," Marigold solemnly agreed. The far-away quality of her voice, and the ethereal strangeness of the tableau gave the scene the cast of a dark fairytale. Wesker considered, then: "They spotted your niece down on the other side of the island. Do you not-"
My niece is dead. Everyone knows that, she responded sharply, and it took some work for him not to wince. The crow took flight to the top of the wall again, a safe distance. She glanced down at the wall again looking suddenly nervous. Not…there's something here. She started backing away from the wall as if it had stung her. I need to check. I need a minute. Don't follow.
She backed past Wesker- he'd stopped his advance just then- and spun on her heel to sprint towards the start point in the track. Her foot came down on a steel plate at the start line and she was sprinting down the track towards the first station, a climbing wall within a nest of barbed wire and welded rebar.
He didn't get a chance to follow her path visually. As she had sprung off the plate, it had activated several bright lights around the finish line, which he had been facing. This time he flinched back and put an arm over his eyes, taking several seconds to allow his eyes to adjust. When he could see again, he spotted a digital scoreboard on the back wall, keeping time on the current run and listing the most recent, and the top five scores. No names were attached to these. Presumably, word got around when someone managed a particularly impressive time.
The hormones and exposure had been suppressing her higher functions of late, leading to something once of the executives had dubbed 'Hunter mode.' If this place triggered some deep instinct, he'd have to ride it out. The top time- the one Bradley had been so put out about- was displayed on the board in glowing red numbers: 2:05. The closest humanly-achieved one (probably HUNK) was 3:14.
Wesker didn't realize he'd drifted forward until a croak came very near his left ear. "Birrrrd?" The same crow questioned him, hopeful. It made no move to attack, although the lights had caused a strangle fluttering sound all around him, suggesting that he had not been the only one startled in the dark. He'd heard flocks would mimic the speech of humans known to be a source of food sometimes. The speech had a slight rhotic burr to it that Marigold sometimes allowed to slip out of her upper-class Received Pronunciation accent. Had the exposure allowed them to retain old memories?
The timer read forty-six seconds - he'd have another moment to investigate before she returned. It was another variable, another piece of the puzzle when it came to just what Marigold had been doing within the company in those thirteen years of flying under the radar.
Something was sticking out of the small hole in the wall.
Wesker bent to take a look, eyeing the birds above warily. there were four of them now, curious but still calm. Critical mass, a small alarmed voice warned at the back of his mind. He pushed the thought away - he still had a bit over a minute to deal with what came next - and reached to fish out what appeared to be an early modified epinephrine injector, the kind injected into the thigh in the event of an allergic reaction. The label shed a bit more light - it was a derivative of some common serum, but with a twist- the words asteraecae s. rosaceae were printed below, was appended to the end of the title, suggesting a component derived from one or several common flowers.
Or it would if he weren't aware that Progenitor originated from a plant in the common Asteraceae family*.* Marigold had mentioned roses earlier, in that half-aware state. There was a puzzle here to unravel.
On either side of Albert Wesker, going from the wall to the finish line, long pieces of construction rebar had been driven into the sand, and scattered to either side of the path. A soft veil settled over his perception, drawing his eye to the puzzle left out for him, and occasionally to the seconds slipping away on the board beside him.
Behind him, additional lights had begun to power on. Had he turned at that moment, his dark-adapted vision would have had difficulty picking any detail of his surroundings beyond those lights for several minutes. Certainly, he'd have difficulty picking the dozens, perhaps hundreds of gleaming eyes watching silently, perched on the metal detritus around the yard.
The swarm had fully arrived, and only awaited a trigger. The timer read 1:34, and ticked quietly on.
High above, Marigold - the gleam of her own eyes easily obscured by those of the crows, began to straighten from a crouch upon a steel girder. She reached a hand out to touch the faded pink paint of the last skip point she'd locked in on this course.
One last run. She'd have to make it count.
It was time to finish this.