Chapter 18
“We need to talk,” Birkin said into his cell phone, sitting in the driver’s seat of his car as it idled softly. In front of his car was a large wrought-iron gate stretched across the dirt road leading to Spencer’s mansion. It was seven-thirty in the evening and the sky was dark and overcast, having rained on and off all day. His windshield wipers moved back and forth across the window, their steady rhythm a comforting distraction.
“I was wondering when you’d call,” came Wesker’s voice, and Birkin could detect the weariness and frustration in it. “Curiosity got the best of you?”
“Something like that,” Birkin said. “Why is the outer gate closed?”
“For security reasons,” Wesker hinted vaguely.
“Mine or yours?”
“Everyone’s.”
Birkin looked at the gate with a growing sense of alarm, taking a deep breath to calm himself. In all his years working for Umbrella, he never saw the gate closed. He thought the gate was purely ornamental, another of Spencer’s eccentric touches. But seeing it closed sent an involuntary shiver down his back. This road was the only entrance into the compound. The entire property fenced off to prevent accidental trespassers.
He tried to keep his voice neutral. “Is the gate closed to keep me out, or to keep something else in?”
“Boy, I can’t get anything past you, Will,” Wesker snickered sarcastically. “You were always too smart for me.”
“What happened?”
“It’s loose, that’s what happened.”
Birkin let his breath out slowly. “How?”
“I have no idea.”
“Let me talk to Spencer.”
“He’s gone.”
“What do you mean, gone?”
“I mean he ran off as soon as he found out the virus was in the open,” Wesker said matter-of-factly, as if merely stating the weather. “Left me a little note advising me to do the same.”
“You mean he just left?” Birkin asked incredulously.
“That’s exactly what I mean. I guess you could say he retired and left me in charge.”
“And the virus is in the open?”
“Yes.”
Birkin lowered the cell phone from his ear but did not turn it off. He let go of the steering wheel and let both hands rest in his lap, closing his eyes and resting his head against the headrest. The car idled softly as he sat there.
Ever since he first learned about the effects of the virus, more than fifteen years before, the one thing that nagged at the back of his mind, that kept him awake at night, that subtly haunted and terrified him, was the thought of the virus ever being escaping the lab and becoming exposed to the outside environment. If the Progenitor – or even worse, the T-virus – ever got loose and infected someone outside the lab, it would bring about an epidemic of catastrophic proportions. No one would be prepared for it, no one would be able to fight it, and no one would be immune to it. The virus, if allowed to spread uncontrolled, would infect everyone in Raccoon City in a matter of days, if it even took that long. The city would be completely infested with the walking dead, and the virus would not stop there. What if an infected individual made it out of the city and to the nearest town? What if the virus got loose of the city? What if they suddenly had to deal with a national epidemic instead of just a local one?
There would be no stopping it. The virus would spread like wildfire and consume the entire world. That was Birkin’s most dreadful thought and deepest fear. And now, it seemed, his deepest fear had come true.
So he was mildly surprised by how well he was handling it. His breathing was calm and relaxed, and his heart was not racing, as he would have otherwise expected it to. In general, he was absorbing the news rather well.
But he kept hearing a strange, mumbling noise, and vaguely wondered what it was until he realized that the cell phone was still on and Wesker was speaking to him.
He raised the phone to his ear. “I’m still here, Wesker. I was just thinking.”
“Good, I thought maybe you’d fainted on me.”
“So the virus is loose,” Birkin said, as if by repeating it one more time, Wesker might correct him and say that it was not loose at all and the whole thing was a big misunderstanding.
But Wesker said no such thing. “Will, the virus has been loose for more than forty-eight hours. As far as I can tell, I’m the only person on company property who’s still a susceptible first-stage host.”
Birkin winced at Wesker’s distorted use of the term. “How did you avoid getting infected?”
“By being careful, how else do you think? Me and Spencer were the first two people to discover what happened.”
“What about everyone else? They weren’t as careful as you?”
Birkin detected Wesker’s momentary hesitation. He knew what this meant, of course. He knew it the moment Wesker claimed to be the last one alive. “It’s hard to be careful against something when you don’t know it’s there,” he said evasively. “This wasn’t exactly the kind of news I was going to announce over the intercom.”
“You didn’t even warn them,” Birkin said flatly. It wasn’t an accusation, just a plain statement of fact. It would have surprised him if Wesker had warned them at all.
“At least I stayed to try to clean up,” Wesker said quickly, responding to the accusation that hadn’t come. “Spencer ran out of here without so much as a goodbye.”
“How exactly do you plan to clean something like this up?” Birkin asked.
“Perhaps ‘clean up’ is too optimistic a term,” Wesker admitted. “I’m trying to organize the chaos a bit.”
“Where are you?”
“Sigma lab. One of the new ones, I don’t think you’ve been here.”
Birkin sighed with resignation. “I think you and I need to have a face-to-face. Do you want to come out here and meet me, or is there a way inside that won’t get me killed?”
“Of course there’s a way in. How do you think I got here?”
“What do you mean?” Birkin asked. “You mean you haven’t been here the whole time?”
“I have a double-life to lead, remember? I can’t spend all my time here. I just got back from the police station a few hours ago.”
“Whatever, just tell me how to get in.”
“I’ll open the gate in a minute. Drive through and head toward the west wing entrance. There’s a maintenance shed on the other side of the fountain. I’ll unlock it from here. Take the elevator inside down to level three and I’ll meet you there.”
“Right, see you in a minute,” Birkin said, and clicked off the cell phone.
He wasn’t quite sure what possessed him to demand a personal meeting, especially under the dangerous circumstances. Maybe he just wanted to converse without a cell phone masking Wesker’s reactions; it was always easier to spot a lie when looking someone in the eye. Maybe he wanted to see some of the damage first-hand. Maybe he felt guilty about his involvement in the entire operation and wanted equal responsibility for trying to repair the damage.
But that wasn’t it, really. As the gate slowly opened in front of him, he knew why he wanted to go down there himself. It wasn’t that he thought he could somehow do a better job than Wesker could; if anything, Wesker was the most qualified person to deal with it. But deep down, Birkin just couldn’t live with the thought of someone like Wesker being responsible for the lives of so many people. Wesker had no loyalties, no ethics, no morals to guide him when it came to someone else’s welfare. Wesker cared only about Wesker.
If Birkin drove away and let Wesker deal with it, he was almost certainly dooming innocent people to their deaths, because Wesker wouldn’t think twice about sacrificing someone to achieve a greater goal. Birkin had that much compassion for humanity, at least. Wesker was simply too selfish and heartless to handle this alone.
At least that’s what Birkin told himself. The truth was probably much m
ore complicated than that, but he opted to put it out of his mind. He put his car into gear and slowly drove through the open gate. In his rear view mirror, he watched it close again after him, like a set of huge metal teeth swallowing him up.