worked for Umbrella as a truck driver, who had been caught trying to steal a formula from one of their labs. He told her about his mother, who had been gunned down by a trio of Umbrella soldiers in their own home, lay choking and bloody and dying on the living room floor when Steve came home from school. The men had taken them away, taken Steve and his father to Rockfort. 'I thought he was killed in the air strike,' Steve said, wiping at his eyes. 'I wanted to feel bad about it, I did, but I just kept thinking about Mom, about how she looked … but I didn't want him to die, I didn't, I … I loved him, too.'
Saying it out loud made him start crying again. Claire's arm was around him but he barely felt it, so sad that he thought he might die. He knew he had to get up, he had to find the keys and go with Claire and fly the plane, but none of that seemed important anymore. Claire had been mostly quiet, only listening and holding him, but she stood up now and told him to stay where he was, that she'd be back soon and then they could leave. That was okay, it was good, he wanted to be alone. And he was more exhausted than he'd ever been in his life, so tired and heavy that he didn't want to move. Claire went away, and Steve decided that he should go looking for the proof keys soon, very soon, as soon as he stopped shaking.
SEVEN
In the cool darkness, rodrigo had been resting uneasily. Now he heard a noise out in the corridor, and forced himself to open his eyes, to get ready. He lifted his weapon, bracing his wrist on the desk when he realized he hadn't the strength to hold it up. I'll kill anyone who messes with me, he thought, more by habit than anything else, glad he had the gun even if he was already a dead man. A zombie guard had fallen
down the stairs and crawled into the cell room sometime after the girl had left, but Rodrigo had killed it with a boot to the head and taken its weapon, still holstered on its broken hip. He waited, wishing that he could go back to sleep, trying to stay alert. The gun eased his mind, took away a lot of his fear. He was going to die soon, it was inevitable … but he didn't want to become one of them, no matter what. Suicide was supposed to be a particularly awful sin, but he also knew that if he couldn't manage to wipe out an approaching virus carrier, he'd eat a bullet before he let it touch him. He was probably going to hell, anyway. Footsteps, and someone was walking into the room, too fast. A zombie? His senses weren't working right, he couldn't tell if things were speeding up or he was slowing down, but he knew he had to shoot soon or he'd miss his chance. Suddenly, a light, small but penetrating and there she was, standing in front of him like some dream. The Redfield girl, alive, holding a lighter up in the air. She left it burning, set it on the desk like a tiny lantern. 'What're you doing here?' Rodrigo mumbled, but she was rummaging through a pack at her waist, not looking at him. He let the heavy gun drop from his fingers, closing his eyes for a second or a moment. When he opened them again, she was reaching for his arm, a syringe in one hand. 'It's hemostatic medicine,' she said, her hands and voice soft, the prick of the needle small and quick.
'Don't worry, you won't OD or anything, somebody wrote dosage numbers on the back of the bottle. It says it'll slow down any internal bleeding, so you should be okay until help comes. I'll leave the lighter here … my brother gave it to me. It's good luck.'
As she spoke, Rodrigo concentrated on waking up, on overcoming the apathy that had taken him over. What she was telling him didn't make sense, because he'd let her go, she was gone. Why would she come back to help him? Because I let her go. The realization touched him, flooded him with feelings of shame and gratitude. 'I … you're very kind,' he whispered, wishing there was something he could do for her, something he could say that would repay her for her compassion. He searched his memories, rumors and facts about the island, maybe she can escape… 'The guillotine,' he said, blinking up at her, trying not to slur his words too badly. 'Infirmary's behind it, key's in my pocket … supposed to be secrets there. He knows things, puzzle pieces … you know where's the guillotine?'
Claire nodded. 'Yes. Thank you, Rodrigo, that helps me a lot. You rest now, okay?'
She reached out and stroked his hair back from his forehead, a simple gesture, but so sweet, so nice, he wanted to weep. 'Rest,' she said again, and he closed his eyes, calmer, more at peace than he'd ever felt in his life. His last thought before he drifted off was that if she could forgive him after the things he'd done, show him such mercy as if he deserved it, maybe he wouldn't go to hell, after all. Rodrigo had been right about secrets. Claire stood at the end of the hidden basement corridor, steeling herself to open the unmarked door in front of her. The infirmary itself was small and unpleasant, not at all what she would have expected for an Umbrella clinic no medical equipment to be seen, nothing modern at all. There was only a single examination table in the front room, the splintery wooden floor around it stained with blood, a tray of medieval-looking tools nearby. The adjoining room had been burned beyond recognition; she couldn't tell what purpose it had served, but it looked like a cross between a recovery room and a crematorium. Smelled like one, too. There was a tiny, cluttered office just off the first room, a lone body sprawled in front of it, a man in a stained lab coat who had died with a look of horror on his narrow, ashen face. He didn't appear to have been infected, and since there were no virus carriers in the room and no obvious wounds, she guessed that he'd had a heart attack, or something like it. The contorted expression on his pinched features, bulging eyes and gaping, downturned mouth, suggested to her that he'd died of fright. Claire carefully stepped over him, and found the first secret in the small office almost by accident. Her boot had nudged something when she walked in, a marble or stone that had rolled across the floor which had turned out to be a most unusual key. It was a glass eye, one that belonged in the grotesque plastic face of the office's anatomical dummy, propped leering in the corner. Considering what Steve had said, about no one coming back from the infirmary, and considering what she already knew about the kind of insanity that Umbrella seemed to attract, Claire wasn't surprised to find a hidden passage behind the office wall. A worn set of stone steps were revealed when she'd placed the eye back where it belonged, which hadn't really surprised her, either. It was a secret, a trick, and Umbrella was all about secrets and tricks.
So open the door, already. Get it over with.
Right. She didn't have all day. She didn't want to leave Steve alone for too long, either, she was worried
about him. He'd had to kill his own father; she couldn't imagine the kind of psychological damage that would do to someone… Claire shook her head, irritated with her own dawdling. It didn't matter that she was in a barren, frightening place where lots of people had apparently died, where she could feel the pervasive atmosphere of terror emanating from the cold walls, trying to wrap around her like a burial shroud… 'Doesn't matter,' she said, and opened the door. Immediately, three stumbling virus carriers started for her, drawing her attention, keeping her from really seeing the details of the large room they'd been trapped in. All three were badly disfigured, missing limbs and long, ragged strips of skin, their putrefying flesh flayed and raw. They moved slowly, painfully dragging themselves toward her, and she could see older scars on the exposed rotting tissue. Even as she targeted the first, the knot of dread in her stomach was expanding, making her feel sick. It was over quickly, at least but the terrible suspicion that had been growing in her mind, that she'd been hoping was false, was confirmed with a single good look around.
Oh, Jesus.
The room was strangely elegant, the muted lighting coming from a hanging chandelier. The floor was tiled, with a runner of finely woven carpet leading from the door to a kind of sitting area on the other side of the room. There was an overstuffed velvet chair and cherry wood end table there, the chair facing out so that someone sitting there would be able to see the entire room … which was worse than she could have imagined, worse than the mad Chief Irons's dungeon, hidden beneath the streets of Raccoon. There were two custom-built water wells, one with a pillory built into its rail, a steel cage suspended over the other. Chains hung from the walls, some with well-used manacles attached, some with leather collars, some with hooks. There were a few elaborate devices that she didn't look at too closely, things with gears and metal spikes. Swallowing back bile, Claire focused on the sitting area. The elegance of the furnishings and of the room itself made things worse somehow, adding a touch of warped ego to the obvious psychosis of its creator. Like it wasn't enough to enjoy torturing people, he –or she –
– wanted to observe it in luxury, like some mad aristocrat. She saw a book on the end table and walked over to retrieve it, keeping her gaze fixed straight ahead. Virus zombies and monsters and useless death were all horrible things, tragic or frightening or both but the kind of sickness represented by the chains and devices all around her was appalling to her very soul, because it made her want to give up her faith in humanity. The book was actually a journal, leather bound with thick, high quality paper. The inner cover proclaimed that it was the property of a Dr. Enoch Stoker, no title or inscription otherwise. 'He knows things, puzzle pieces…' Claire didn't want to
