Resident Evil Legends Part One - Welcome to the Umbrella Corporation
Page 16
Chapter 15
Birkin said nothing to his research team the following morning about the bruise on his cheek or the cut on his lip. They went to work like normal, combining their efforts toward isolating the regenerative qualities of the Progenitor virus. It was slow, deliberate, exceedingly frustrating work, and the longer it went on, the more frustrating it got. After six months of endless tests and experiments and hard work, they still had nothing concrete to expand their work on. Taking the negative qualities of the Progenitor away while leaving the helpful regenerative qualities was like trying to remove the taste of food without changing any of the ingredients. The two could not be separated.
At noon, Birkin took a short break. He went to the break room, poured his fifth cup of coffee of the day, and bought a prepackaged apple pie from the vending machine. He fell into a chair and lowered his head into his hands.
“Have you heard about Dr. Marcus?”
Birkin lifted his head. One of the other resident scientists, whose name Birkin didn’t even know, poked his head into the break room. “Did you hear what happened?”
“Yes,” Birkin grunted. “I heard it the moment it happened.”
“What?”
Birkin waited outside the astronomy tower that morning for Wesker to re-emerge, even though he still hadn’t. Not long after Wesker and the soldiers entered, Birkin heard muffled noises that could only have been gunshots coming from underground.
He did not say this, however. Instead he just set his head back on the table. “No, what happened?”
“He had a heart attack this morning. Security found him and drove him to the hospital.”
A heart attack. That was original. “Is he alright?” Birkin asked blandly.
“Nobody knows. We can’t seem to contact him. He wasn’t at the Raccoon City Hospital, and security won’t tell us his location.”
“He must be at a private hospital,” Birkin said, feeling sick.
“Probably. Somebody said his family is keeping it quiet for now.”
Birkin was pretty sure that Marcus had no family, but he didn’t say that either. He hated himself for participating in this gruesome masquerade. He wanted to tell his clueless coworker that Marcus had not suffered a heart attack, but had been shot to death by commandos in the early morning, murdered for reasons unknown. But instead, he only said, “It must be pretty serious if they haven’t told us what his condition is.”
“Yeah,” the scientist said somberly. “I’m sure they’ll let us know sometime today. Let me know if you hear anything, okay? I’ve got to get going,” he said, heading back down the hallway. Birkin could only nod as the man walked away.
Just two weeks ago, Birkin’s parents called on the phone to talk to him and ask how everything was going. In the roughly two years since he had been hired by Umbrella, he had talked to his parents exactly three times. They called on Christmas, on his birthday, and two weeks ago. There was a note of finality in his mother’s voice as she spoke to him, as if admitting to herself that her son was perfectly happy living on his own and had no need of his parents anymore, since in his entire time there, he had never once called them. He had cut the umbilical cord, so to speak, and much earlier than she would have preferred. It was the kind of hesitant conversation that made him doubt they would even bother to call next Christmas. When they asked him how things were going, he told them that everything was fine. Everything was great.
It was a lie, of course. A terrible, incredible lie. Birkin still had trouble coping with the horrific side effects of the Progenitor virus, and working so hard to solve the problem without coming up with an answer sapped his enthusiasm on a daily basis. But even with all the difficulties, Birkin was capable of dealing with it. This is the life he had worked for since childhood, and even with all the challenges, he wouldn’t have changed it for anything.
Now, he wasn’t so sure. He could deal with hideous diseases and long days of hard work, but he didn’t know if he could deal with murder. Especially a murder that was the focus of a hasty cover up. A murder he wasn’t even supposed to know about.
He ate his apple pie without tasting it and downed the cup of coffee. He returned to his lab and went back to work, barely acknowledging his fellow scientists. He felt numb. When the lab phone rang, one of his assistants answered it.
“Dr. Birkin,” he said, holding the phone out. “It’s for you.”
“I’m busy,” Birkin grunted. “Is it important?”
The assistant seemed nervous. “Yes, sir. It’s Dr. Spencer. He wants to talk to you.”