Chapter 2: The Seven-Ten Rule
On the third day Claire climbed the elevator shaft with sixty feet of stolen copper wire looped over her shoulder and Leon's voice in her ear, telling her to be careful in six different ways.
The wire came from the evidence room: six spools a burglary crew had stripped out of construction sites over the summer, tagged for a trial that would never happen now. Leon's handheld could hear the checkpoint traffic when the air was right, but five watts from the bottom of a basement went nowhere. The patrol cars in the garage had fifty-watt radios under their dashes. What they didn't have was an antenna higher than a fender.
"So we give it one," Leon had said, drawing on the back of the legal pad: a car, a line running up the shaft, a stick figure on the roof tying it to the mast.
"You drew yourself on the roof."
"That's you."
"It's got your haircut."
They'd argued for twenty minutes. She'd won the way she usually won, by being right. She was lighter, she had two working shoulders, and he couldn't lift his right arm above his head without going white around the mouth. He'd given in, and then spent the morning acting as if she were about to walk into traffic.
Now she was forty feet up a steel ladder in the dark, the penlight in her teeth and the survey meter bumping her hip, and his voice crackled out of the handheld on her collar.
"How's it looking?"
"Like the inside of an elevator shaft. Stop asking."
"Copy." A pause. "You're doing great."
"Leon."
"Copying."
In the machine room the roof door had been blown off its hinges. Claire stepped over it, out into the light, and stopped.
She'd first seen Raccoon City four days ago, riding in at dusk, the city strung out under the mountains in lines of streetlights. She'd thought it looked like a nice place to live. Chris had always said it was.
Now, to the northeast, where downtown had been, there was nothing. A flat brown plain under a column of smoke that leaned with the wind, the stumps of things, no clock tower. Closer in, buildings stood up out of the ash like the shells of crabs, roofless, windows black. Fires burned in a dozen places, low and orange and patient. The sky was the color of weak tea, and the sun hung in it small and white, a coin you could look straight at.
Ash lay on the roof as thick as beach sand. The heat had burned off sometime in the last two days and left still, cold air that smelled of wet char, and a quiet so complete she could hear the wire whisper against her jacket.
She thumbed the meter on. Point four. More than she liked; on the first morning, up here, it would have read a hundred times that. "Ten minutes, right?"
"Ten minutes. I'm counting."
The mast had been bent over at the base like a stalk of grass, but its top section still pointed at the sky. She climbed the twisted lattice as far as she dared, wrapped the wire three times round a crossbar and tied it off with the knot Chris had taught her for strapping a bike onto a trailer, then let the coil drop down the side of the building toward the shaft vent.
From up there she could see five blocks east, past a church with half a steeple, to a green cross on a pharmacy sign hanging crooked from a building that still had four walls.
And something walking down the middle of the street.
It moved the way they all moved, that loose-jointed drag, but it was black from head to foot, burned to the texture of a log left in a fireplace, and it left a trail through the ash like a sled. It stopped below her and lifted its head. Turned it slowly, left, right. Listening. She held still on the mast until it lowered its face and dragged itself on east, toward nothing.
"There's one still walking out there," she told Leon. "Burned. It's gone. I'm coming down."
"Six minutes. You've got time."
She had time. At the second floor, where the elevator doors had been blown half open, she swung off the ladder onto the sill and went along the east corridor, past an office with no outside wall, to the door with S.T.A.R.S. stenciled on its frosted glass.
Chris's desk was by the window. She knew it was his because of the mess. Under a drift of plaster, a list was stuck to the monitor in his blocky handwriting: eggs. 9mm. oil change. card for C.
She stood looking at that for longer than she'd meant to.
In the bottom drawer was a box of protein bars, twelve of them, chocolate peanut butter, the kind he'd eaten since high school because he thought they tasted like candy and was wrong. In the locker by the door hung an enormous gray Air Force sweatshirt. She took both.
"Claire. Two minutes."
"Coming," she said, and put the list in her pocket too.
The car was a Ford cruiser, nose-in at the south end of the garage where the roof had held. Leon had charged its battery off the generator the day before and timed what the generator drank: forty minutes for just under a gallon off the sight glass. Call it a gallon and a half an hour. Twenty gallons made thirteen hours of power, total, unless they found more diesel, and he'd written that on the pad in a box with a line under it.
They sat in the front seats with the doors open, the antenna wire snaking in through the passenger window to the jack under the dash, and Leon turned the dial slowly through the channels.
Static. A man reading numbers in a monotone. Static.
"—Four, nothing on the line here, it's quiet—"
Claire's hand found his sleeve. He keyed the mic. "Checkpoint Four, this is Raccoon City Police, inside the city. Do you copy?"
A gap. Then: "Who the hell is this?"
"Officer Leon Kennedy, RPD. I've got one civilian with me. We're at the police station. We're alive."
When the voice came back it had gone careful, the way a man talks when he's walked somewhere nobody can hear him. "This is Sergeant Walt Hollis, State Patrol, up on the ridge on Arklay Road. Son, there's nobody alive in there."
"There's two," Claire said, leaning across to the mic. "Sergeant, the girl who came out of the rail tunnel. Twelve, blonde. Is her name Sherry?"
"That's her. Sherry." Hollis made a sound that might have been a laugh. "Ma'am, she's fine. She walked out of that tunnel carrying a steel case like a lunchbox and wouldn't let anybody take it off her. The medics checked her over, she ate an entire pound cake out of an MRE, and she kept telling everybody Claire was right behind her. Kept watching the tunnel."
Claire put her hand over her mouth.
"That's you," Hollis said. "Isn't it."
She couldn't answer. Leon took the mic gently out of her fingers. "That's her. Where's Sherry now?"
"Helicopter, yesterday morning." Something went flat in Hollis's voice. "Some men came up from the command post in plain jackets, no insignia. Took the case, took the girl. Said she was being taken care of. I believe them on the first part."
"When are they coming in for us?"
The silence went on so long that Claire thought they'd lost him.
"They're not," Hollis said. "I'm sorry. There's a line around that whole valley, and nobody crosses it, in or out, and the order doesn't come from anybody I can call. And those same jackets have been going car to car up here asking whether anybody's picked up a transmission from inside." He paused. "I told them no."
"Why?" Claire said.
"I've got a girl about Sherry's age at home. And I didn't like the way they asked." His voice dropped. "Get off this channel. Go to State car-to-car, the simplex one, your guy'll know it. I'll listen there at oh-six-hundred every other day. If I hear you, I'll key twice. Don't call me unless you have to."
"Sergeant—"
"Stay alive in there," Hollis said, and the channel went to hiss.
Claire sat in a dead patrol car under a collapsed roof and laughed, and then she was crying, and then both, with her forehead against the dashboard. Sherry was fine. Sherry had eaten a pound cake. She'd meant to ask about Chris. She'd had the words ready, Have you heard of a Chris Redfield, S.T.A.R.S., he left in August, and they'd gone by in the rush.
Leon didn't say anything. After a while she felt his sleeve against her hand, the gray cotton of the sweatshirt she'd shoved at him an hour ago because he'd been shivering and pretending not to, and she wiped her face on it.
"That's my brother's," she said. "Don't get it dirty."
"Too late," he said, and stayed where he was.
By evening he had the radio out of the dash and set up in the vault on an upturned cracker tin, the battery beside it and the wire run down the tunnel and under the door. On the morning of the fifth day, at six exactly, it clicked twice. They both breathed out at the same time and pretended they hadn't.
It rained on the fourth day, and the Geiger counter didn't like it.
The counter had been in the bottom of the yellow box: a smaller instrument than the survey meter, with a probe on a cord and headphones like something off a telephone switchboard. On the drums it gave slow, lazy clicks, a few a second. Background, the card called it. The world's ordinary noise.
The rain came down through the seam in the garage roof in a gray curtain, and where it ran off the slabs it ran black. They'd set out everything that would hold water: the empty drum, two cracker tins, a mop bucket, the dome off Tom's retirement cake. Claire knelt with the headphones on and held the probe over the bucket, and the clicks ran together into a dry chatter like hail on a tin roof.
She held one earcup out to Leon.
He listened. "That's bad."
"That's four days of sky washing out in one go." She clicked it off. "It's dust. Dust settles. We let it stand a day, pour off the top, filter it, check it, boil it."
"Or we drink the drums, like we've been doing, and leave the glowing rain alone."
She showed him the pad. One of the three sealed drums had turned out to be a liar, its water the color of strong tea under the bung and smelling like a radiator. That left two good drums, thirty-five gallons, plus the split ones that tasted of pennies. And water didn't only go in your mouth. It went into the gauze on his shoulder twice a day, into the cut on her palm, into the crackers when they mashed them into paste.
35 gal good. ~2 gal/day. = 17 days.
"Seventeen days," she said. "And you smell like the sewer. So do I. Your shoulder isn't going to stay clean on a damp rag. I want to wash."
He looked at the number. Then he fetched a five-gallon bucket from the janitor's closet and a hammer and a nail, and started punching holes in the bottom without being asked.
They built the filter in layers: gravel from the rubble, sand from the old red fire buckets in the boiler room, charcoal from a burned-out office upstairs broken up under Claire's boot, more sand, a clean undershirt tied over the top. They let the rain stand a day, and a gray silt settled in each tin like flour. Leon ladled off the top with a coffee mug, slow as a man defusing something, and poured it through, and it came out of the holes in thin clear threads.
Claire put the headphones on and held the probe over the tin.
Click. Click. Click-click. Click.
"Background," she said, and grinned at him, and he grinned back, and for a second they were just two people who had made something work.
They boiled it on the camp stove from evidence, a two-burner thing seized from a meth cook along with four propane canisters. One canister was already gone on his dressings, and each boiled about six gallons before it sputtered out. Three left: eighteen gallons, give or take, and after that they'd be burning furniture.
That night she washed her hair for the first time since Raccoon City started eating people, kneeling over the mop bucket while Leon poured warm water over her head from the coffee mug. She kept her eyes shut. She could hear him being careful. The soap from the locker room smelled like a hospital, and it was the best thing that had happened to her in a week.
"Your turn," she said, wringing out her hair.
"In a minute." He was looking at the cracker tin by the stove. Her tin. She'd stopped counting the crackers in it two days ago, because there always seemed to be enough.
She looked at it, and then at him.
"You've been putting yours in mine."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Leon. I wrote the list. You think I can't count crackers?" She was angry, suddenly and completely. "You don't get to do that. You've got a hole in you. I'm not some kid you have to feed."
"I know you're not. I'm not hungry. Honestly." He held up his hands. "I've got a backup plan."
"What backup plan?"
He went out the vault door and came back five minutes later with something in his fist. He sat down in front of her and opened his hand: a small brown pellet shaped like a fish.
"No," Claire said.
He ate it.
He chewed slowly, with enormous dignity, while his face went through a series of expressions she was going to keep forever, and then he swallowed and said, in the voice of a man reviewing a restaurant, "Chicken. In theory."
She laughed so hard she had to put her forehead on the floor. She laughed until her stomach hurt and her eyes ran, and every time she started to recover he said "Notes of cardboard," or "Very crunchy," and she was gone again. She hadn't known she still had it in her.
When she finally sat up, wiping her eyes, he was smiling at her. Not the dry sideways smile he used for jokes; a slower one, as if he'd been waiting to find out whether she still could.
"You eat your own crackers," she said. "Fourteen hundred. Every day."
"Yes, ma'am."
The sixth night was the coldest yet.
The thermometer Leon had hung by the door read forty-four degrees at midnight. Claire lay under two wool blankets from the holding cells and her own jacket, in the gray sweatshirt he'd given back, and couldn't stop shaking, teeth to feet, in long waves. Fourteen hundred calories didn't make much heat.
Across the six feet of floor she could hear Leon not sleeping either.
"There's a space heater in the security office," she said into the dark.
"Fifteen hundred watts." His voice was rough. "We'd have to run the generator the whole time. Two hours a night is three gallons, and we've got eighteen. Six nights of being warm, and then no radio, ever."
"I know. I did the math too."
She lay there and shook.
"Okay," Claire said, and got up and dragged her mattress across the floor on its pallet until it bumped against his.
He came up on one elbow, hair sticking up on one side. "Claire."
"This is thermodynamics. Two bodies, one heat. Don't make it weird."
"I wasn't going to make it weird."
"You're making it weird by saying you weren't going to."
"I'm going to stop talking."
"Good."
She lay down with her back to him and pulled her blankets over both of them, and his on top of that, and after a hesitation she could feel through the mattress, he moved in behind her. Careful, not quite touching. Then touching: his chest against her shoulder blades, his knees behind hers. His arm came over her as if it might not be allowed, and settled across her waist.
The shaking slowed. It went out of her in stages; she felt her jaw unclench, felt his breathing against the back of her neck go from careful to slow. He was the warmest thing she'd touched since the engine of her bike, and she thought about telling him so and didn't.
She found she was holding his wrist. She didn't remember deciding to.
It was a while before she understood that he was too warm.
Heat came off him in a way it shouldn't have, in a vault at forty-four degrees. His breath on her neck was quick and dry. When she turned over and put her palm flat on his forehead, his skin burned under it.
"Leon."
"Mm."
"You're burning up."
"It's fine." His eyes were half open, glassy. "You're cold, I'm hot. Thermodynamics."
She turned the lantern up and pulled the neck of his shirt aside. The tape had come loose at one corner. Around the dressing his skin was red and shiny and tight, and when she pressed beside it, gently, he hissed through his teeth, and the redness didn't fade under her finger.
Thin red lines ran out from under the tape toward his collarbone.