… and soon she'll come for me, maybe still playing dumb, still trying to seduce me with her helplessness. An Umbrella assassin, a spy and an exploiter, that's all she is, probably laughing at me behind that pretty face…

Maybe the spill had been an accident; the last time they'd met, William Birkin had seemed unsteady, paranoid, and exhausted, and accidents happened even under the best of circumstances. But the rest was fact, there was no other explanation for how com-pletely Irons had been ruined. That girl was coming to get him, she was from Umbrella and she'd been sent to murder him. And she wouldn't stop there, oh, no; she'd find Beverly and… and defile her somehow, just to make certain that nothing he cared about was left. Irons looked around the small, softly lit room that had once been his, gazing wistfully at the well-used tools and furniture, the sweet, familiar smells of disinfectant and formaldehyde emanating from the rugged stone walls.

My Sanctuary. Mine.

He picked up the handgun that lay on his special cutting table, the VP70 that was still his, and felt a bitter smile curl his lips. His life was over, he knew that now. This whole affair had started with Birkin, and would end here, by his own hand. But not yet. The girl would come for him, and he would kill her before he said his final good-byes to Beverly, before he admitted his defeat by taking a bullet. But he would see to it that she understood his suffering first. For every torture he'd endured, the girl would pay, the bill settled through flesh and bone and as much pain as he could inflict. He was going to die, but not alone. And not without hearing the girl scream in agony, creating a voice for the death of his dreams – a voice so clear and true that the echoes would reach even the black hearts of the company executives who had betrayed him.

The S.T.A.R.S. office was empty, cluttered and cold and layered with dust, but Claire was reluctant to leave. After her stumbling, frightened flight through the body-strewn halls of the second floor, finding the place where her brother had spent his working days had left her feeling weak with relief. Mr. X hadn't followed her, and although she was still anxious to help Sherry and find Leon, she found herself linger– ing, afraid to step back into the lifeless halls and hesitant to leave the one place that felt like Chris.

Where are you, big brother? And what am I going to do? Zombies, fire, death, your weird Chief Irons and that lost little girl – and just when I thought things couldn't get any more insane, I get to face off with The Thing That Would Not Die, the freak to end all freaks. How am I going to get through this?

She sat at Chris's desk, gazing at the small strip of black-and-white pictures that she'd found tucked in the bottom drawer; the four shots were of the two of them, grinning and making faces, a photo-booth memento of the week they'd spent in New York last Christmas. Finding the strip had made her want to cry at first, all of the fear and confusion she'd been holding back finally surging to the front at the sight of his well-loved smile – but the longer she'd looked at him, at the two of them laughing and having a good time, the better she'd started to feel. Not happy or even okay, and no less afraid of what was to come…… just better. Calmer. Stronger. She loved him, and knew that wherever he was he loved her back – and that if the two of them had been able to survive the loss of both of their parents, to build lives for them– selves and share a silly Christmas vacation in spite of having no real home to go to, then they could cope with anything. She could cope.

Can and will. I'm going to find Sherry and Leon and, God willing, my brother – and we're going to make it out of Raccoon.

The truth was, she didn't really have any choice, but she needed to go through the process of accepting her lack of options before she could act. She'd heard before that real bravery wasn't an absence of fear, it was accepting the fear and doing what was necessary anyway – and once she'd sat for a moment, thinking about Chris, she thought that she could do just that. Claire took a deep breath, slipped the photos into her vest, and pushed away from the desk. She didn't know where Mr. X had been headed, but he hadn't seemed like the waiting-around type; she would head back to Irons's office and see if Sherry had come back – or Irons, for that matter. If X was still there, she could always run.

Besides, I should have searched his office, tried to find something about the S.T.A.R.S. There's nothing here that can tell me anything…

Standing, she took a last look around, wishing that the S.T.A.R.S. office had offered a little more in the way of supplies or information. All she'd found of any use was a discarded fanny pack in the desk behind Chris's; according to the expired library card in one of the pouches, it had belonged to Jill Valentine. Claire had never met her, but Chris had mentioned her a couple of times, said she was good with a gun…

Too bad she didn't leave one behind.

The team had obviously cleared out all of the important stuff after their suspension, although there were still a surprising number of personal items left around, framed pictures and coffee mugs and the like; she'd spotted Barry's desk right away from the partly finished plastic gun model on top. Barry Burton was one of Chris's closest friends, a huge, friendly bear of a man and a serious gun nut. Claire hoped that wherever Chris was, Barry was with him, watching his back. With a rocket launcher.

And speaking of…

On top of everything else, she needed to find another weapon, or more ammo for the nine– millimeter; she had thirteen bullets left, one full clip, and when those were gone, she was SOL. Maybe she should stop and check some of the corpses on the way back to the east wing; even in her panicked run, she'd noticed that some of them were cops, and the hand– gun was an RPD issue. Claire didn't like the idea of touching any of the dead bodies, but running out of firepower was distinctly less desirable – particularly with Mr. X running around. Claire walked toward the door and pushed it open, trying to get her thoughts organized as she stepped back into the dim hall. Leaving the office put a damper on her resolve; she had to suppress a shudder at the still vivid image of Mr. X as she closed the door behind her, suddenly feeling vulnerable again. She turned right and started back toward the library, deciding that she wouldn't think about the giant unless she had to, wouldn't dwell on the memory of those blank, inhuman eyes or the way he'd raised his terrible fist, as if driven to destroy anything in his way…

… so knock it off already. Think about Sherry, think about getting some goddamn ammo or how to handle Irons, if you can find him. Think about trying to stay alive.

Just ahead, the dark wooden hall turned right again and Claire tried to steel herself against the task ahead; if memory served, there was a dead cop around the corner -

– like I can't tell by the smell -

– and she'd have to search him. He hadn't been too disgusting, at least, not that she'd noticed. Claire turned the corner and froze, staring. Her stomach knotted, telling her she was in danger before her senses could. The body that she'd jumped over on the way to the S.T.A.R.S. office was now only a bloody, tangled mass, flesh and broken limbs and shredded uniform. The head was gone, although there was no way to tell if it had been taken away or just smashed into an unrecognizable pulp. It looked like someone had taken a sledgehammer or an axe to the corpse in the few moments since she'd passed it, beating it into a clotted smear.

But when, how, I didn't hear anything…

Something moved. A shadow, soft and darting over the mashed remains some twenty feet in front of her, and at the same time, Claire heard a strange rasping sound, breathing… and she looked up, still not sure what she was seeing or hearing – that ragged breathing and the tick of talons on wood, the talons themselves, thick and curved, the claws of a creature that couldn't exist. Big, the size of a full-grown man, but the resemblance ended there – and it was so impossible that she could only see it in pieces, her mind struggling to put them together. The inflamed, purplish flesh of the naked, long-limbed creature that clung to the ceiling. The puffed gray-white tissue of the partially exposed brain. The scar-rimmed holes where the eyes should have been.