Summary: William Birkin and Albert Wesker make progress in the investigation of the T-virus. Albert Wesker wants to investigate Umbrella Pharmaceuticals and its founders on his own.
I
A grotesque figure crashed against the glass, bile dripping from its mouth. Its spittle clung to the bulletproof mirror like putrid leeches. William did not turn away from the disgust. He'd gotten used to it. It was his job. The influx of human guinea pigs had soared. Neither William nor Albert knew where they came from, but they were from Raccoon City. Albert found out when he happened upon the wallet of one of the test subjects. A driver's licence and some food stamps. Inside was a five-dollar buck and a tiny transparent bag with traces of heroin. Albert burned the wallet. They said nothing. There was a complicit vow of silence between them about what they had seen and done.
William sometimes had nightmares. He had gone from dreams of space travel to dreams of being trapped in the creature's foul-smelling cell. The creature screamed "mother" "mother" as it mutilated his body and tore off his face...
He asked the guard to install a television with a VHS player in his modest room. He used it to burn up his meagre spare hours watching Star Trek on loop. Nostalgia had become his first source of entertainment and happiness. The second was wandering around the gardens of the mansion. He was not yet allowed to enter the house, but he had glimpsed its inhabitants through the windows. He didn't know who they were, although his intuition told him not to bother finding out.
For he didn't want to be the creature. He didn't want to be a guinea pig. He hadn't been born to end up 'like that'.
Cynically, he had joked with Albert about the resemblance of the infected to zombies. Also about what a viral Armageddon would be like. William joked to avoid any sense of responsibility and to dehumanise the anonymous victims. Albert would laugh at him, which reinforced the satisfaction. By turning the television up to maximum volume and mocking, he also forgot his parents. The parents who had taken care of him, who had accepted his bizarre choices, who had defended him against his aggressors…
The convulsive cries of the guinea pigs choked the saturated atmosphere of the laboratory. Three in all. Albert had revealed to him that it was Marcus who was responsible for selecting the subjects for Arklay. That amused him. The generous professor; and that he was contributing with his gifts to his best pupil being outdone.
The Alpha strain of the T-virus they were developing at Arklay had a 90% mortality rate. If you were infected, you died. Nothing else. He liked that, he told himself, because it made him look important. One problem: his low infection rate. Anyway, Spencer sent him a note congratulating him and urging him to start developing the beta strain, which would be created by merging the Alpha strain with Ebola. Spencer gave him the go-ahead to present his Ebola research as a doctoral dissertation; in fact, Spencer had awarded Albert and him a financial endowment with which they enrolled in the same distance-learning PhD programme at Yale. William planned to submit his thesis in 1980.
And so it was. At sixteen, he no longer felt like a teenager. He was an adult with an intermittent acne problem. He had to behave the way he thought an adult should behave, or the way the adults around him behaved.
And because he was the chief.
II
He was smoking a cigarette, leaning against a tombstone frozen by the icy wind. There was no body beneath his feet. He stared at the heavy wooden door that led from the garden-cemetery to the main building. He knew it was open because he had checked it himself.
In early autumn, he turned the knob and entered. From a staircase he entered a huge two-storey lobby. He randomly chose the double door on his right. Through the leaf, however, he heard two low voices and a very high voice, like a girl's. Fearful of being discovered, Albert retraced his steps at a brisk pace and stepped back out into the garden-cemetery.
No one noticed.
He took a puff.
He wanted to know what was really going on there. A mansion in the woods... A secret laboratory... Biological weapons... Experimental viruses... The creature...
His interest in research had begun to pale in comparison to the shadowy network that underpinned the structure of the company itself.
It was not like the military, where the nature of classified information could be predicted. In this mansion, however, where there was no higher government than that of private interests, secrecy changed masks as easily as they disposed of guinea pigs.
A puff.
The director had left the premises. Spencer and the administrator were in charge.
William did not share his interest. He was alone.
Puff.
On his days off he would go to Raccoon City.
To look around.