Chapter 44
Exactly seven hours and fifty-four minutes after fell asleep, Wesker awoke. He blinked twice and reached for his sunglasses. Sitting up, he put them on and immediately fumbled in his pants pocket for his cigarettes. He lit one and inhaled deeply, the sudden rush of pleasant nicotine helping him to wake up.
He wanted a hot shower and a big healthy breakfast, but he knew he would get neither. For breakfast, he might be able to gag down a stale breakfast bar and a cup of lousy coffee. As for the shower, he didn’t have time for luxuries like personal hygiene and cleanliness. That would have to wait until the work here was done. Hopefully, it would only be one more day at the most.
After a quick stop in the bathroom, went out into the hallway and took out another cigarette, lighting it with the previous one. Birkin must have heard him coming, because he poked his head out of the security office, a surprised look on his face.
“You’re awake already?”
Wesker shrugged and tossed the used cigarette away, popping the new on in its place. “I said eight hours,” he said. “I usually don’t even sleep that long.”
Birkin returned to his seat at the desk as Wesker entered the room, leaning against one of the side tables. He took a long drag and blew smoke from his nostrils like an angry dragon. “I take it nothing important happened.”
“Nothing I thought I needed to wake you up for.”
“That doesn’t tell me anything,” Wesker grunted. “I doubt you would have woken me up for anything.”
Birkin snickered. He didn’t laugh often when working with his own men, but given the surreality of the situation and the presence of his old partner Wesker, Birkin felt free to find something funny enough to chuckle at. “Well, you might find this surprising. It turns out that two of your officers made their way into Marcus’s old lab.”
Wesker flinched as if Birkin had thrown a bucket of cold water on him. He coughed and cleared his throat, then asked, “Did they get all the way to the maintenance entrance?”
Birkin shook his head. “No, they somehow figured out the code to the elevator under the astronomy tower.”
“How in the world did they do that?”
“Don’t ask me. There’s no camera inside the tower, so I couldn’t see. In fact, I probably wouldn’t have even known they made it down there if you-know-who hadn't followed them down.” Birkin typed in code for the security camera showing the back of the training facility mansion. The video was a saved copy from earlier. It showed two figures, one male and one female, leaving the mansion through the back doors to the conference room. They headed right for the tower and went inside. “Now, let me fast forward a bit,” Birkin said, and the video skipped forward rapidly for a few moments. When he returned it to normal speed, it showed someone in a white lab coat running across the rear lawn faster an any human could move.
“That’s him?” Wesker said quietly.
“Unless we have another mutant undead scientist you failed to tell me about.”
“No,” Wesker muttered. “Just the one.”
“He’s changing, though,” Birkin said, his tone more serious. “I won’t even hazard a guess what the virus has done to him after all these years, but look at this.” He switched to the saved video of the attack in the mansion hallway.
Wesker puffed silently on his cigarette as he watched the video. When he had it down to the filter, he tossed it on the floor and exhaled smoke. “How much do you know about T-virus mutation?” he asked suddenly.
Birkin weighed the question. “Not as much as I should, I guess,” he said finally. “I know your work about as well as you know mine.”
“I know more about it than anyone else alive,” Wesker said, and then he pointed at the screen. “And I’ve never seen anything like that in my life.”
“He looked pretty human in the other video you showed me.”
“Something is altering the rate of mutation. It could be anything, a change of environment, a change in metabolism. He must have been in some kind of biological stasis before.”
“We still haven’t explained how he’s here at all,” Birkin said. “If he was dead, the T-virus shouldn’t have affected him in the first place. You’re sure he was dead, right? I mean, I’m not missing something, am I?”
“Getting shot a dozen times is usually fatal. He was dead when they took him out of the lab, that much I’m sure of. But when those idiots opened fire, they shattered the terrariums and some of his leeches got loose.”
“Do you think they infected him before died?”
“I suppose it’s possible, but if that was so, he would have come back long before now. Something kept him from coming back all this time. And besides, if this was a regular infection, he would just be a zombie like the others. At most, he would be a Tyrant, but this is something totally different.”
Birkin did not say anything right away. “I never wanted to know before, but now I think it’s important. What did you do with the body?”
“Dumped it at the plant,” Wesker said straightforwardly. He pulled out another cigarette. “We should have burned it like the others, but I just ... I don’t know. I guess I felt the old man deserved better than the incinerator. I told them to put the body in one of the disposal pits.”
“He probably deserved a decent burial and a funeral service,” Birkin said.
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Wesker said, lighting the cigarette. “His hands were dirtier than mine back then.”
Birkin started to say something, and then shook his head, as if unwilling to take that topic any farther. In all the time they had discussed it, neither of them had gone far enough to even say his name, as if naming him would make his existence more complete. As long as he remained nameless, maybe they could deal with him easier.
“I wasn’t done talking about those two cops,” Birkin said, changing the subject. “Like I said, I wouldn’t have known they made it into the lab if our old friend hadn’t followed them. But what really got my attention was when the electrical grid lit up. I had to check the power mainframe maps, but it looks like they activated the old rail car.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope, they got it running, and I think we can assume they drove it to the treatment plant.”
“They’re getting farther than I thought.”
“They aren’t the only ones,” Birkin said. “One of the others made it through the guardhouse all the way to Delta lab. Last I checked, he passed through the aquatic lab, but that was a few hours ago.”
“What about the others?”
“Still in the mansion. One of them is dead, and another might be.”
“Which ones?” Wesker asked.
Birkin felt a tingle down his spine, a slight nauseous twinge. Wesker talked about the brutal deaths of people he had worked with as casually as someone else might discuss a baseball game. Birkin let it pass. He was in no position to judge Wesker at this point.
“I don’t know their names,” he said. “And I’d rather not.”
“Just show me on the cameras.”
It took a few minutes for Birkin to track down all of the members of Bravo team. Wesker took Birkin’s notes and scribbled names down where Birkin had numbered them. He watched some more snippets of video that Birkin had saved for him.
Enrico made it all the way through Delta lab, but that wasn’t much of a surprise. By far, he was the best officer in Bravo team, and Wesker fully expected him to outlast all the others. The man was stubborn as a bull and utterly fearless. He never functioned better than when he was placed in a volatile situation like this.
Kenneth was asleep in a corner, having cowered there all night by Birkin’s account. If anyone was the opposite of Enrico in a combat situation, it was Kenneth. Wesker was stunned that he was still alive, although the only way he had stayed that way was by staying put, too scared to go anywhere.
Forest was dead, or at least he l
ooked that way from the video. Wesker guessed he had been bitten by a zombie and succumbed to the virus sometime during the night. He was slumped in a chair out on the rear second floor balcony, most of his face missing. Crows flapped around his body, pecking at the exposed flesh.
Edward was not visible on any screen, but the last time Birkin had seen him, he was outside one of the gallery rooms on the second floor. A giant snake was around there somewhere according to Birkin, so Wesker guessed that he was dead as well.
Richard was listed nowhere in Birkin’s notes and had left no sign on any security camera, so Wesker had to guess he had been killed before he got to the mansion. Either he was killed by one of the infected dogs running loose, or he found the train and was killed there.
That left Rebecca, the newest member of the team. Wesker wasn’t exactly sure what happened on the train, but it was obvious that the mystery man had attacked it and killed everyone on board. He must have started it back up and driven it toward the training facility, although for what reason, Wesker had no idea. Rebecca must have been on the train, but how she wound up in the basement was unknown as well. And then there was her companion, whoever he was.
Wesker decided not to worry about it. He must have been a passenger on the train, but how he survived the attack was a mystery as well.
“So what’s the plan for today?” Birkin asked.
“I have to go talk to Irons and set up the Alpha team. We’ll be going in this evening.”
“We?”
Wesker shrugged. “I have to go in with them to make it authentic.”
“That’s taking a pretty big risk.”
“Unavoidable,” Wesker said. “If I didn’t go in with them, they’d know something was wrong. We’re bound to get separated as soon as we land, and I’ll take the opportunity to slip away and make my way here. I know the grounds like the back of my hand. It won’t be too hard.”
“Will you need my help?”
“Probably not. You can leave here any time you want. If I were you, I’d hurry up about it, because you’re going to need all the time you can.”
“Time for what?” Birkin asked, feigning innocence. “I’m not the one running from a biological time bomb. I’m not responsible for this.”
“Have you listened to anything I’ve said? The virus is loose, and there is a one hundred percent chance that it’s going to spread to Raccoon City. Do you really want to be there when it happens? You’re going to have to do exactly what I’m doing now. Get all your work together and get out of town before the virus breaks out completely.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way. What if your cop friends manage to kill every zombie in the whole compound? If you destroy the sources, it won’t spread.”
Wesker laughed, a short harsh sound. “You’re a scientist, Will. You know it isn’t that easy. You’d have to kill every single zombie and animal that’s been infected. Right now there’s a bunch of crows feasting on Forest Speyer’s body. Could you kill each crow before it passed the virus on to something else? We are way beyond containment here.”
“Maybe if you’d reacted quicker,” Birkin shot back, suddenly angry. “Instead of worrying about your career, you should have shut down the plant before any of the zombies got loose.”
“Shutting down that entire plant would be impossible and you know it. We might be able to keep the zombies from getting out, but the cause of all this would still have escaped and spread the virus everywhere he went. You know that, so stop acting like all this is my fault.”
Birkin shook his head. “I can’t believe we’re just going to sit back and let the virus spread like this, and not even try to stop it.”
“You can’t stop it. Every single rat and bird and insect that touches a zombie could carry it miles from here. Could you really keep a lid on something like that? Even burning down the whole forest might not stop it from spreading. The virus is exposed, and that’s all she wrote.”
Birkin sat at the desk for a few moments and pushed the chair back to stand up. He had known all of that already, of course, or else he would not have phoned his lab and told them to start organizing everything. But he had to preserve his moral superiority, as shallow as it was.
“I guess I might as well get going then,” he said, looking at Wesker. “I have a lot of work to do.”
“I bet you do,” Wesker said. “And if you manage to get out of this mess with your life, look me up sometime. If we combine our research, we could probably make some real discoveries.”
Birkin just laughed sourly and brushed past him. He went out into the hallway and Wesker listened to his footsteps as head headed down to the elevators to take him to the surface. At least he was out of Wesker’s hair. He did what Wesker needed him to do, and now he was out of the way and Wesker could get on to the final parts of his plan.
He needed to make some last minute trips to the lab to finalize his departure, and then he had to pay Chief Irons a visit to thank him for his help over the years. And then he could arrange Alpha team’s trip to the mountains. And then maybe he could finally finish what he had started.