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Chris’s guys brought him five vials, and Leon gave two back. “Take ‘em to BSAA, or whoever the hell you work with these days. Highest priority. That is a very powerful antiviral that we need to get the lab geeks at work analyzing and replicating. My handler got into the system here before everything blew up, so you can put in a request to DSO for data sharing. It won’t have any details on the antiviral, though, or these guys wouldn’t have had to kidnap someone they thought could access it. I’ll keep these others.”
“Three, sir?” the grunt asked, not impolitely.
“My partner has the virus,” Leon said firmly.
“Understood. Give us another twenty and we’ll be able to task a chopper for your transport.”
“Thanks.” Leon started walking back to the ambulance across the clearing. His knees twinged a little, and he wasn't un-wounded, but the rest of him really did feel like a million bucks. “I’ll be damned,” he said softly, knowing Sherry was listening. “Can’t believe how well that antiviral actually worked. I feel better than I have in ages.”
“Thank God.” The words were carried through his earpiece on a sigh. “I’m glad you’re okay…despite your best efforts to give me a heart attack.”
“Well, your heart better hang on at least a day or two more. You heard me: I got a dose here with your name on it. You’ll be back in action in no time.”
“Thank you, Leon,” Sherry said with a smile in her voice.
“Could have gone a lot smoother if Chris weren't late to the party.” He snorted, looking around at the general destruction visible even here on the surface. “Typical.”
“Where is Chris, anyway?”
“No idea. Sure I’ll run into him at some point.” There was a low murmur of voices near the ambulance, and he saw one of the medics pass Grace a cup. There were fresh bandages wrapped around her middle, but they hadn’t bothered to change the old ones at her arm and shoulder: not much point until they were in an actually sterile environment. She’d probably gotten a ‘use this med injector and call me in the morning’. “I’ll call you back,” Leon told Sherry. In reply he got the beep of a closing channel, but even if he didn’t hail her she would tune back in if she felt the need. It was always way better working with Sherry than with one of the DSO agents that didn’t have a sense of initiative. He made an effort to walk more heavily than he was used to, scuffing gravel under his feet, and Grace looked up at him and smiled weakly.
“It’s really over, then.”
“Yeah,” Leon agreed. In his experience it was never really over, but this particular incident did seem to be pretty much on its last legs.
Grace’s eyes drifted away from his. “Elpis really was our last hope.”
“I’d call your plan a rousing success.” He shifted on his feet; compulsively adjusted the strap of his shotgun and resisted the urge to check his pistol as well. “Let’s just pray Umbrella hasn’t left us any more nasty surprises.”
Grace nodded, and bit her lip. She blinked hard, and her dirty nails tore at the paper rim of her cup. “I wish we could have saved Emily.”
God, the kid: Leon had forgotten. He took a step forward, the painlessness of the movement making it easier to say: “Grace, I didn’t hit any of her vitals. As best as I could, at least. These mutants are tough. She could still be alive.”
Grace’s pale eyes looked up at him hesitantly, like she thought he was fucking with her. “What are you saying?” she whispered.
“Elpis. Maybe we can save her.”
Grace started to smile, and Leon felt the corner of his own mouth lift in reply. “You think?” She said. The paper cup crumpled and spilled coffee on her leg as she gripped it unthinkingly tight: if it was hot she didn’t flinch. “No, you’re right…the other one, the shackled one…Marie…you blew its head half off and it still healed and came back. Maybe Emily really can be saved!”
“Stranger things have happened,” he said, and sat beside her on the back of the ambulance. She scooted a little to give him room, and he tapped his earpiece again. “Sherry, need some info. Has any agency been digging into Rhodes Hill yet? Physically in the building, I mean.”
“No, not yet.” He heard typing. Beside him, Grace subtly leaned a little closer to try and hear. “No, it’s cordoned off by local authorities but feds are waiting on your say-so. It’s your case, after all.”
“Good.” Leon scraped his hair behind his ear and tilted his head to where it almost touched Grace’s: a wordless offer of shared information. She flinched away at first, but then her curiosity evidently won out over her discomfort and she all but pressed her ear against his. (Her red-brown hair was stiff and scratchy against his cheek and he suddenly remembered that she had been blonde when he first saw her. This poor girl….) “Keep your eye on it. Be extra sure no one gets near the helipad. I’m gonna have Chris’ guys make a detour.”
“Got it. Anything else?”
“Grace is listening,” he said. Grace squeaked but didn’t retreat. “Say hi.”
“Hi, Grace!” Sherry said, all warmth and kindness. “I’m so glad you made it out okay. I hope this guy didn’t give you too hard a time.”
“Leon s-saved my life, like, f-five times,” Grace stammered, face reddening under the dirt and blood. “I’m really, really glad he was here. He’s super good at his job.”
“This is huge for me: she still thinks I’m cool, Sherry,” Leon said. Grace shied away, looking embarrassed, and he gave her an exaggerated wink. “Maybe I shouldn’t let you guys talk. I need this win.”
“She thinks you’re cool?” Sherry laughed, Grace pressing back in to hear. “Aw, man. Have you not heard the dad jokes, Grace?”
“Like I said: saved my life.” Grace’s voice was still shaking but she was smiling a little too. “I, ah, I think that’s probably, um, etiquette. Somewhere. If you save someone’s life you get, like, a bunch of free bad jokes.”
“I love this theory,” Leon said firmly. “Sherry, let’s put that in the policy manual. We can litigate the exact exchange rate later.”
“Har, har. I’ll get to monitoring the care center now.”
“Thanks.” The channel beeped and he shrugged. “Sounds like we have a plan.”
Grace nodded. She took a sip from the cup and almost gagged like someone who was used to coffee that tasted more like candy and less like the tarry shit spec ops guys preferred. She set the cup aside. (Not without looking around first; checking to see if the medic would see her reject what they’d given her? Cute.) “You won’t, um, get in trouble…will you?” She shifted and pulled the shock blanket tighter. A little bubble of fresh blood trickled across her fingers as she moved. “That is, if we w—if we use one of the vials of Elpis on Emily.”
“Maybe a little. Nothing that’s gonna ruin my day.” He slid back to his feet and absent-mindedly pulled out Requiem to check the ammo and then spin the barrel a few restless times. “DSO lab geeks are good at what they do. One vial should be more than enough…not to mention the pound of flesh they’re likely to take from me to analyze, since I am a handy example of what the cure looks like in action.” He smiled at her. “Thanks, by the way. You saved my life a couple times as well. Maybe we should subtract that from my credit.”
“Your–? Oh! The, um, bad joke thing. We can, ah…let Sherry decide?”
“I can get behind that,” he said, holstering Requiem and flicking through the pockets on his vest as he tallied how many clips he still had for the Snapper. “I do prefer the term ‘dad jokes’ though. Makes it sound more like a genre than a judgement.”
Grace laughed faintly, then looked startled like she hadn’t realized she could still do that. Leon knew the feeling. “Sure, that’s fair.” She looked at the droplet of fresh blood on her hand, and started to raise it to her mouth before grimacing and rubbing it against the blanket instead. “Do you, um, have kids?”
“Nah,” Leon said easily. “When I was young I always kind of thought it would happen eventually, but….” He looked at his arm, no longer veined in black but still thick with a webbed tracery of scars. “Never seemed like a good time. And I’ve been exposed to some weird shit over the years, so. Better safe than sorry, honestly.”
It was a thought that didn't even upset Leon these days: he hadn’t been lying about the bullshit no doubt in his bloodstream and DNA. Grace looked stricken, though, like someone who had clumsily stepped on a stranger’s toes. “I, um, that is….” Her hands squeezed at the fabric around her shoulders, then she dropped them and started fumbling at the latch of one of the pouches she was wearing at her belt. “Oh! I have…m-maybe your agency will be l-less likely…I’m sure they could use—ah, here.” She held out a device about the size of an old Walkman, the kind that played cassettes. Leon accepted it and turned it over curiously.
“What’s it do? Some kind of analysis device?” There were several knobs with very fine detailed symbols around the periphery, and what looked like a glass vial streaked with blood.
She nodded, trying to smile, and slid down off the vehicle to stand beside him. She groaned and faltered as her weight landed on her feet, and Leon’s free hand hovered in case she was going to drop. Grace waved him off. “I’m j-just sore,” she said bravely, and leaned over the device in his hand to point out different parts of it to him. “It’s a, ah, a blood analyzer, and it does some kind of w-wild molecular reconfiguring. Completely insane. The part here siphons up the samples, and you can see the reservoir—I found a manual and was able to kind of kitbash together a solution to hold more in there at once. Found a lot of info on what it can convert the samples to, also. I mostly used it for this hemolytic compound it can make: it completely destroys infected cells, so it worked great against the zombies in the care center and the ARK.” She pulled something else out of her pocket, holding up what looked like an expended med injector. “I can reuse one of these about five times before the hemolytic compound degrades it too much, let me show you how it works. There should be enough blood in the reservoir.” She wrenched one end off the injector with her teeth, and fit the main body of it against part of the device. Turning the dials to specific settings that she seemed to know by feel, she triggered a mechanism and the reservoir drained as a paler and more purplish fluid filled the injector. When it was full she replaced the part she’d taken off with her teeth and held up the recycled injector. Leon took it.
“That is incredibly useful. And also explains a lot of things.” He had wondered at the explosive gore patterns in the care facility, which had suggested nothing more than a carefully calibrated explosive round but without the more intact body parts a thing like that usually left. No wonder the poor woman looked like she’d swam in a pool of blood. “It makes other things too?”
Grace nodded. “Some meds—I was too nervous to try most of them. A corrosive that works really well against those skinless monsters in ARK.”
Leon tucked the injector in a pocket and stared at her. “You could get close enough to a Licker to inject them with something? I knew you were light on your feet, but hot damn.”
“Oh, no, no no.” She winced, shaking her hands out like she was imagining what that would feel like. “I worked out how to, um—” she took out a small glass bottle this time, and what looked like a tempered glass stirring rod: she put the bottle’s mouth at the base of the device, and slid the rod across to fold back whatever triggers were designed to fit the injector. A little spurt of leftover liquid trickled into the bottle. She corked it up and presented it on her palms. “Then I can just throw it.”
Leon nodded, poking at the mechanism. “Like milking a snake,” he murmured, and Grace stared at him. She seemed to be trying to decide if it was a serious comparison. (It was.) “Good work, Grace. Our people will definitely be glad to study this. Don’t suppose you kept the manual, did you?”
“No,” she sighed. “My stupid pants have girl pockets, and I also had to carry around ammo and shit. I just m-memorized what I needed and left it.”
“It will be good enrichment for the lab geeks, figuring it out themselves,” he said drily. “Come on, looks like the grunts are ready. Let’s go get your girl.”
***