Chapter 8: Reassigned
"He heard all that," Claire said, when Hollis had gone back to hiss. "Every word. Be loud."
"I know." Leon was staring at the radio. "So did Hollis. He said it anyway."
She turned to a clean page and wrote BE LOUD across the top, and then sat looking at it, because it was the first plan anyone had handed them since Tuesday the twenty-ninth of September, and it was two words long.
They filled in the rest over the next two days.
Loud meant the checkpoint channel, the one they'd first raised Hollis on, the one every car on the ridge kept on and the men in plain jackets listened to from their command post on the far side. Simplex was a whisper between cars; the checkpoint channel went to a repeater on the ridge and everywhere from there. Loud meant fifty watts out of the cruiser radio with nothing wasted. And loud meant height, because the wire tucked inside the bent mast barely reached State simplex any more.
So on the night of the twenty-eighth Claire went up the shaft for the third time, her legs still aching from the fever and Leon on the rope below her saying nothing at all, which was how she knew how scared he was. She untied the wire from inside the folded lattice and took it all the way up the top section of the mast, higher than before, and then ran the rest of the evidence-room copper out across the roof to the light pole on the old heliport, so the whole thing hung in a long slanting line against the sky. Anyone looking would see it now. It didn't matter. In two days it was going to be the most obvious thing in the valley.
At midnight Manners was cheerful.
"I understand Sergeant Hollis is back on the line. I'm so pleased for him." Not a ripple in it. "Noon on the thirtieth, Officer. I'm looking forward to it."
Leon put the pad on his knee and wrote something and turned it to her.
He's coming early.
"How do you know?"
"Because he knows Hollis is up to something, and he doesn't know what." Leon tapped the pen against the page. "If I were him I wouldn't wait for noon and a roof. I'd come in the dark the quiet way, while we're asleep. And the quiet way in is the way that thing used."
The sewer. The cistern. The service passage.
They spent the twenty-ninth getting ready for a fight they hoped wouldn't happen in the way they expected. Leon strung a second line of cans across the service passage, ten yards behind the first, and a third across the storage tunnel itself. Claire wrote the broadcast out on the pad in block capitals, from the notes Leon had given her, and crossed out every word that sounded like a police report.
"You can't say perpetrator," she told him. "You sound like a cop show."
"I am a cop."
"You're a cop who's been living in a basement for a month. Talk like it."
They ran the generator long enough to fill the car battery. They checked the bar on the vault door, the old steel bar in its brackets, and greased it with petroleum jelly from the 1962 medical kit so it wouldn't stick. Leon cleaned the pistol and counted his rounds out loud, twenty-two, fifteen in the magazine and seven loose in his pocket, and put the shotgun's last two shells in the gun. Claire loaded her last grenade round, the acid one, and set the launcher on the mattress where she could reach it lying down.
Then they lay down in the tent with their boots on, and the lantern out, and waited.
"If he doesn't come tonight," Claire said into the dark, "I'm going to feel really stupid."
"If he doesn't come tonight," Leon said, "I'm going to be really happy about you feeling stupid."
She found his hand. Neither of them slept.
At ten past two the cans rang.
Far off, muffled by two hundred yards of brick: a tinny clatter in the service passage, and then nothing. Leon was already sitting up. Beside him Claire was already reaching for the launcher.
Then nothing for a long time. Whoever had hit the first line had learned from it. The second line never rang. The third, across the storage tunnel twenty yards from the vault door, gave one faint tick, as if someone had found it with a fingertip and lifted it over.
Then a light under the door. A thin bar of white, moving.
Leon crossed the vault in the dark without a sound and put his ear to the steel. Voices, very low. Two of them, three. A soft metallic scrape at the hinge side of the door, and then another, and he knew what that was, because he'd watched a film about it at the academy. Somebody was packing the hinges.
He went back to the radio. Claire had already switched it on. The dial glowed amber, set to the checkpoint channel, the battery full, the antenna hanging out over the ruins in its long slanting line.
He picked up the mic.
"All units on the Arklay line, this is Officer Leon Kennedy, Raccoon City Police Department, badge number four-one-two-two. I'm inside the city. I'm at the RPD, in the basement, with one civilian, Claire Redfield." His voice came out level and quiet, the way it had on the first morning. "There are armed men outside my door right now, trying to get it open. They came in through the sewer. They were sent by the man who's been sitting in Sergeant Walt Hollis's patrol car at Checkpoint Four since the seventh of October, using Sergeant Hollis's radio and log. He's not State Patrol. He works for the company that owned the laboratory under this city."
He took a breath. Outside the door the scraping had stopped.
"On October ninth he sent a helicopter into your zone. It threw grenades into the pharmacy on Warren Street, where he'd been told we were, and then burned it. Every night since, at midnight, he's been offering to get us out. Some of you have that on tape."
He looked at Claire. She held out her hand, and he gave her the mic.
"This is Claire Redfield." Her voice shook at the start and then didn't. "You've got a twelve-year-old girl named Sherry Birkin. She walked out of the Arklay rail tunnel on October first carrying a steel case, and she told everybody that Claire was right behind her. I'm Claire. I got off the train because Leon was down on the platform and I wasn't leaving him, and the doors closed on a timer, and she went on without me." She swallowed. "Nobody out there ever heard my last name on a radio. The man on Four knew it on his first night. So somebody in the room where you've been talking to Sherry has been talking to him. I'd find out who, if I were you."
She let go of the key. Her hand was shaking. Leon took it.
For three seconds there was nothing but hiss.
Then: "Checkpoint Nine. I copy, Kennedy." Hollis, loud and clear, not bothering to whisper. "All units, that's the same transmission I took from inside the city on October third. That's them. They're alive."
And after him, a voice neither of them had heard before. Flat, unhurried, official, the voice of a man used to having the last word in a room. "Raccoon RPD, this is Ridge Control. Stay on this frequency."
Outside the vault door, a radio squawked.
Leon heard it through the steel, faint and tinny, a voice he knew. Mild. Courteous. Unhurried, even now. He couldn't make out the words. He didn't need to.
"Claire," he said. "Get behind the drums."
The hinges blew.
The noise was so big Claire felt it more than heard it, a slam that came up through the floor and into her knees. Brick dust filled the air. When she could see again, the vault door hung crooked, its top hinge torn out of the wall, its bottom one bent, the whole heavy slab leaning inward on the old steel bar that still held it in its brackets.
There was a gap now along the hinge side, eight inches wide, top to bottom. White light poured through it.
A rifle muzzle came through after the light, and Leon shot the hand behind it.
Then it was all noise. Suppressed fire through the gap, a flat ugly coughing, rounds sparking off the brick over the drums and smacking into the cracker tins. Leon was down on one knee behind the shelving at the side of the door, firing back through the gap whenever the light moved, counting under his breath the way she'd heard him count on the shaft. Claire lay flat behind the drums with the launcher and the last round and waited for a shot that was worth it.
Then the cans rang again.
All of them. The first line, far down the service passage, then the second, a crashing clatter that went on and on as something tore straight through them without slowing. And under it, coming up through the floor, through her elbows on the brick, the slow heavy thump of something walking.
Outside the door the firing stopped. Someone shouted. The white light swung away from the gap, down the tunnel, toward the service passage door.
It came up out of the dark.
She couldn't see it, only the lights jerking and the shadows on the far wall of the storage tunnel, huge, and she heard the bellow, the one she'd felt in her teeth in the back lot, and the suppressed fire going wild, and then a man screaming, and then not. Something big hit the tunnel wall so hard grit sifted down onto the drums. Another man fired a full magazine in one long burst and then fired nothing.
Then quiet, except for breathing. Huge, slow, wet breathing, just outside the door.
The gap went dark. Something was standing in front of it.
A hand came through. It was the split one, the long jointed fingers like a bundle of blades, and it closed on the edge of the door and pulled, and the steel bar in its brackets groaned and bent.
Leon fired the shotgun through the gap, both shells, as fast as he could rack it. The thing bellowed and the hand jerked back and came again.
Claire stood up from behind the drums.
She had perhaps four seconds. It was enough. Through the gap, three feet away, she could see the burned black ruin of its chest, and the scar across it where her flame round had burst eleven days ago, and she put the acid round straight into the scar.
It screamed. It reeled back from the door, clawing at itself, smoking.
"Leon—"
He was already moving. One of the men lay just outside the gap, half in the light of his own dropped flashlight, and Leon reached through the gap up to the shoulder, tore something off the dead man's vest, pulled the pin, and threw it underhand into the dark after the thing.
The tunnel went white.
It was the same fierce glare that had eaten the pharmacy. The creature was in the middle of it. It bellowed, and turned, burning, and went away down the storage tunnel toward the sewer shaft with fire pouring off it, hitting the walls, and she heard it reach the shaft, and heard the rungs of the iron ladder tearing away from the brick one after another, and then, a long time after, a great heavy splash in the black water at the bottom.
Then nothing at all.
At dawn Leon went out through the gap with the pistol and a flashlight and Claire right behind him, because nobody was deciding anything alone any more, least of all who went first into that tunnel.
There had been four of them. Three were in the storage tunnel. The fourth was halfway down the service passage, past the scattered cans, as if he'd tried to run back the way he'd come. Leon didn't look at their faces longer than he had to. He did what he'd been trained to do at a scene. He kept his voice flat and his hands steady and he wrote it down for Claire to put on the pad, and somewhere in the middle of it he realized he hadn't counted any of them as his.
The sewer shaft was a ragged hole where the ladder had been. Claire shone the light down it. Far below, the water was black and still and something large lay half under it, not moving, a few last threads of smoke coming off it in the cold.
They took what the men had brought, because the men weren't going to need it and the two of them were.
FROM THE TEAM: SMG (suppressed, 9mm), 1 full mag + 1 half. 2 pistol mags, fit L's gun. 1 incendiary. 8 MREs. Med kit (morphine x4, dressings, suture kit). 2 gas masks + filters. 1 field radio. 1 map.
Ammo: L 9mm 44 rds. Shotgun 0. C launcher 0.
The map was a survey sheet of the valley in a plastic sleeve, the quarantine line drawn on it in grease pencil with every checkpoint numbered. And along the old rail cut that ran from the edge of the city up to the Arklay junction, the one Sherry's train had taken, someone had drawn a dashed line and written beside it, very neatly, CONTRACTOR ACCESS.
In the team leader's breast pocket, folded in four, was a typed sheet with two photographs stapled to it. Leon's was his academy ID, a kid with a fresh haircut squinting at a flash. Claire's was from a driver's license. Under each was a paragraph. Claire read hers twice, and then sat down on an upturned cracker tin, and handed it to him without a word.
REDFIELD, Claire. 19. Sibling: REDFIELD, Christopher, formerly S.T.A.R.S. Alpha. Departed Raccoon City August 1998. Current location: Europe (unconfirmed). Possible leverage.
"He's alive," she said. "He's in Europe. They don't know where." She laughed, and pressed her hands over her face, and laughed again. "Card for C. He was going to send me a card."
Leon sat down on the floor beside her tin and leaned his head against her knee, and she put her hand in his hair and left it there.
At nine Ridge Control came back on the checkpoint channel.
"Raccoon RPD, Ridge Control. Be advised: an aircraft departed Checkpoint Four at zero-one-forty without authorization. It has been grounded. The individual occupying Checkpoint Four has been detained." A pause. "Remain at your location. You'll be contacted regarding your statements."
Not rescue. Not extraction. Statements.
Hollis came on right after, and he sounded like a man trying not to laugh in church. "Kennedy. They walked him out of my car in cuffs about an hour ago. He was wearing my jacket. Had my name tag on it." He paused. "Fella looked real surprised."
Claire took the mic. "Sounds like he's been reassigned."
There was a silence on the channel, and then somebody somewhere on the ridge laughed out loud with his thumb still on the key.
On the last day of October, a month since the city went, Claire climbed to the roof one more time, and Leon came behind her on the rope, and neither of them needed it.
She read the meter. "Point oh two." She clicked it off. "Seven-ten. A month. Every time I check, it's a little less true that it can hurt us."
They sat on the parapet in the cold with the pad between them. Below them the city lay gray and quiet under a sky that had begun, sometime in the last week, to look like an ordinary sky again.
Hollis had come on at six with the rest of it. Ridge Control wanted them for hearings; Ridge Control wanted them its own way, in its own time, in a room with no windows. The contractors had been pulled off the line overnight, all of them, and the gate at the end of the rail cut was nobody's now. And Hollis had a truck, and a day off on the eighth, and said nobody had ever told him he couldn't park at the Arklay junction.
Claire had done the rest that morning. It was on the page between them in her neat capitals.
FOOD. Crackers 4 tins + end of 5th. Candy 4. Bars 7. MREs 8. = to about NOV 24.
Dog food: +6 wks. Mid-January.
DIESEL ~240 gal. WATER: cistern. RADS: falling.
SNOW in the passes: mid-Nov (Walt).
OPTION 1. Winter here. Wait for Ridge Control. Eat the dog food.
OPTION 2. Rail cut to the junction, 11 miles. Walt, Nov 8. Then our statements, our way. Find Sherry. Find Chris.
"We could stay," Leon said. "We're good at this now. We've got heat. Water. A door." He considered. "Most of a door."
"We could."
"But you want to go."
"I want to know what you want." She held out the pen. "That's the rule."
He looked at the page for a long time. Then he took the pen and drew a box round OPTION 2, and gave the pen back to her, and she drew a second box round his, slightly crooked.
From her jacket pocket she took the last can of peaches. She'd carried it up the shaft in secret, and he looked at it and then at her and started to grin. She opened it with the knife and speared a slice and held it out.
"You first," she said.
"You'll stab me."
"I absolutely will."
He ate it. She ate the next. They passed the knife back and forth on the parapet in the cold, one slice each, while the city lay quiet below them. When the slices were gone she drank half the syrup and handed him the can, and he finished it and set it on the parapet very carefully, and kissed her, and tasted of peaches, the way he had the first time.
Something landed on the back of her hand.
She looked down at it. It was small and cold and white, and it didn't smear when she touched it. Another came down on the pad. Another on his sleeve.
"Leon," she said. "Is that snow?"
He tipped his head back and looked up into the sky, where it was coming down out of the gray in slow, clean flakes, the first of the year, settling on the ash and turning it white.
"That's snow," he said.
Eight days. She wrote it at the bottom of the page, and underlined it twice.