Calm Before The Storm

<--Previous Chapter|Next Chapter-->

Chapter Four

When Annette Birkin arrived at the lab that morning, she found people running around everywhere in a flurry of busy action. Low level researchers and lab assistants were organizing files, cataloging samples, filling out forms, doing just about everything you can do in a lab except perform actual science. The whole place was a mess of files and notes and records, with panicked assistants running around and harried researchers trying to get everything in order. Annette didn’t think she had ever seen the place so busy.

She managed to grab one of the lab assistants by the arm as they rushed down the hallway. “Just what in the hell is going on here?” she asked impatiently.

“Oh, Mrs. Birkin, didn’t you hear? They’re auditing us! We have to get everything organized before they get here! Oh God, we have so much to do!” And then the assistant ran off, carrying a cardboard box full of old sample results.

Puzzled, Annette walked down the hallway toward her husband’s office. In her more than ten years working with Umbrella, she had never heard of them performing an audit on an entire lab complex. But if they were actually doing one, then she could understand the assistants’ dismay; William Birkin was perhaps the laziest administrator in the entire Umbrella Corporation, and Annette knew for a fact that the lab had not done proper record-keeping in years. Getting this lab in condition for an audit would be like trying to alphabetize the entire Library of Congress in three hours.

She found Birkin in his private lab, as always, hunched over a microscope. But the place was even more disorganized than usual, with print-outs and papers scattered everywhere, even all over the floor around Birkin’s chair. There was a mountain of styrofoam cups on the desk, all stained brown from coffee.

“Will,” she said. “Can you explain what in the world is going on here?”

Birkin sat up very slowly and turned in the chair to face her. She almost gasped at his appearance. He looked terrible, his eyes half-open with dark bags underneath them, his face unshaven and his hair a greasy tangle on his head. There were several coffee stains on the front of his white lab coat. Birkin was never huge on personal hygiene and could care less about his appearance at the lab, but Annette had never seen him so disheveled. He looked like a homeless person had wandered into the lab.

“Jesus,” she whispered, still standing in the doorway. “When was the last time you slept?”

Birkin swallowed and looked down at his hands. He sighed and looked back up at Annette after a moment, shrugging weakly. “I don’t remember. A very long time.”

“What is going on out there? Someone told me that they’re going to audit the lab. Why wasn’t I told about this?”

Birkin glanced past Annette into the hallway, but no one was walking by to overhear them. “Because it’s not true,” he said. “I just told them that to keep them busy.”

“Keep them busy? What are you talking about?”

“I’m sorry I didn’t call you,”Birkin said, turning in the chair to face the microscope again. He rested his hands on the arms of the chair and took a deep breath. “But I’ve been so busy. God, there’s been so much to do.”

Annette finally stepped into the lab. She could smell Birkin from the doorway, a foul mix of body odor and stale coffee. She stepped on several sheets of paper as she approached, letting them crumple under her feet.

She touched the edge of the chair, almost hesitantly. “Will,” she said softly. “I think you need some sleep. A lot of sleep. Why would you tell all your people here that we were being audited?”

“They’re going to shut the lab down,” Birkin said, as if to himself. “They haven’t said so, but I know they’re going to. After they find out about the Arklay lab, they’ll shut us down in a heartbeat.”

“What about the Arklay lab?”

“Lock the door,” he said, looking up at her. “They can’t find out about this. You have to keep this a secret between us.”

“What?” Annette asked, feeling increasingly helpless. She was more than accustomed to Birkin’s habit of not sleeping enough, but this time he sounded disoriented and confused. It just wasn’t healthy to stay awake for days at a time, and maybe this time he had finally reached his personal threshold. She wondered if maybe his judgment was suffering, but she did as she was told and walked over to lock the lab room door.

“Okay,” she said. “Why are they going to shut us down?”

Birkin swallowed again and took another deep breath, as if he was having trouble even staying awake long enough to have this conversation. “Well, remember a few days ago when Wesker called the house asking for me?”

“Yes, of course.”

“He called to tell me that he had a contamination at his lab. The T-virus got out somehow.”

“Oh my God,” Annette said, lifting her hand to her face. “What happened? Do you mean … did anyone get infected?”

Birkin grinned for just a second and then nodded absently, looking away for a moment. “Yes, you could say that,” he said slowly. Then to her surprise, he rolled the chair forward a bit so he could reach out and take hold of her hands. He sighed again and looked up at her, and she almost choked up at the plaintive, pathetic look in his sad eyes.

“Annette,” he said softly. “It was a Level One. The virus got out of the lab. The virus is loose.”

For a long few seconds, Annette felt as if her heart had stopped beating. She felt Birkin’s hands on hers, but everything else seemed to fade away, and she could not hear anything but her own breath, which picked up speed until she was almost hyperventilating. Her legs felt weak underneath her, and she sat down on the edge of the desk to steady herself.

“That’s why you haven’t seen me for a few days,” Birkin said, although she barely heard him. “I was at the Arklay lab with Wesker, trying to figure out what happened. We tried our best to contain it, but ... I mean there was nothing we could really do.”

“A Level One breach?” she whispered, terrified. “How could that have happened?”

Birkin had no answer for that, so he just shook his head and continued. “That’s why I said they’re going to shut this lab down. That’s why I told everyone to start organizing our files. I’m sorry, but I didn’t want to tell you this over the phone.”

“My God ...”

“Yeah,” Birkin agreed. “Praying might be a good idea right about now.”

Annette shook her head to clear it. There were still a million questions she wanted to ask, but she had to focus on the problem at hand. “Okay, but why are you still here working?” she asked. “I mean, shouldn’t you be helping them get the lab in order? What’s so important that you have to stay up for days to work on it?”

At that, Birkin finally did smile, and it was an honest, open smile. The kind that Annette so rarely saw on her husband’s face. “Take a look at the microscope. Go ahead, take a look and you’ll see.”

He slid his chair away so Annette could stand in front of the microscope. She looked through the eyepiece at the magnified blood under the lens for a few moments, trying to get an idea of what she was looking at. It was a slide like a thousand others she had seen, but there was something different about this one, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

“What am I looking at?” she asked finally.

“That sample has been given the G-virus,” Birkin prodded.

Annette furrowed her brow and looked at the sample again. She upped the magnification a little bit and stared at the tiny cells. “It doesn’t look like it,” she said. “I don’t see any of the ...” She paused momentarily.

When she said nothing for almost a full minute, Birkin pushed himself up out of the chair and put his hand on her shoulder. He leaned close enough to feel her breath and said softly, “I did it, honey. The G-virus in that sample has bonded with the DNA in the cells. It was just a routine experiment with one of our enzyme cocktails. But it worked.”

Annette backed away from the microscope, a curious, wide-eyed smile on her face. “It bonded with the DNA? You mean it ...”

“It’s what I’ve been trying to do for years. And I finally did it.”

“Oh my God!” Annette blurted out, and then she laughed suddenly and wrapped her arms around Birkin. “You did it! I don’t believe it!”

Birkin smiled but did not laugh; he was too tired to laugh. But he embraced Annette tightly and breathed a long sigh of relief. It made him feel good that Annette was happy for his discovery, because sometimes he wondered if she even cared about the work anymore. She was at the lab so rarely, busy with the business of raising their daughter and taking care of their house that Birkin so rarely visited himself. The fact that she seemed so thrilled at his success was a very pleasant surprise.

He held her close until her initial joy wore off, and she let him go, still looking just stunned at the extent of his discovery. She ran a hand through her hair and laughed shortly. “God, of all the times to find something like this.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “I finally succeeded right at the exact same time that Wesker completely failed. A bit of cosmic irony, don’t you think?”

“So what are you going to do? If the T-virus is out in the open ...”

She didn’t even have to finish the sentence. Birkin sat back down with a grunt and rubbed his eyes. “We don’t have much time. But I need to know as much about this new strain of the G-virus as I possibly can.”

“Why? I mean, I know how you are about this kind of thing, but Umbrella’s going to shut the lab down, right? So we’ll just get transferred somewhere else, and you can work on it there. Why spend so much time working on it here when they’re shutting us down anyway?”

Birkin tried to find a way to explain. It would be awfully hard to make Annette understand when she had no idea about what had happened at Arklay. Birkin could not give her many details without revealing his involvement in the entire disgusting business. It was easy for him to blame Wesker for the whole disaster, but he had certainly done nothing to help. He was basically an accomplice at this point. Annette could not know that, she could never find out about his guilt in the matter.

“I’ve told you about Spencer,” he said. “About how he kind of tutored Wesker and I when we were first promoted. Well, with the Arklay lab completely infected, let’s just say that Spencer is no longer in a position of authority.”

“Okay,” Annette said, crossing her arms. “So what?”

“Spencer protected us,” Birkin said, and he wondered if it was even a lie. “I’ve told you how ambitious and greedy Wesker is, and you know how ... how obsessed I am. Spencer promoted us because we were geniuses, not because we were good employees. He let us do whatever we wanted as long as we got results, and he didn’t look too closely to see if we were doing it all by the book.”

Annette gave him a disapproving look, but said nothing, so he continued. “When Umbrella comes down here and sees what happened at the Arklay lab, they are going to start looking for someone to blame. They’ll go through everyone’s employee records with a fine-toothed comb to look for discrepancies or possible connections to Wesker and the work he did. They’ll be on a witch hunt. And I will be the first person they point the finger at.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Annette said, but Birkin could sense the nervousness in her voice, the hint that maybe she didn’t believe what she was saying. “You haven’t worked with Wesker in more than ten years. Our work is totally separate from what Wesker does. They can’t possibly fire you just because of your connection to him.”

“I should have been in communication with him on a regular basis, I should have been reading his status reports, I should have been coordinating the work done between my lab and his, I should have known how dangerous he was.”

“Will ...”

“I’m just predicting what they’re going to say,” Birkin said. “They’ll take one look at Wesker’s file and know right away that he should never have been in charge at the Arklay lab. And they’ll look at Spencer’s records and see that the old man treated the entire lab like his own personal kingdom. They’ll second-guess every single decision he ever made, including my promotion here. The fact that Spencer let Wesker run that lab proves that his judgment was clouded. The old man was probably going senile.”

Birkin spread his hands to indicate the entire lab. “And when they come here and see what a total disaster it is? You know that we never kept proper records. And when everyone who works here tells them what kind of manager I am? I’m hardly a popular guy around here, and you know that as well. Umbrella will take one look at me and kick me right out the door. They’ll get rid of me as fast as you can blink.”

“I just ... I just don’t believe they would do that,” Annette said weakly, shaking her head. “They can’t just fire you.”

“They’ll accuse me of negligence, of incompetence, of insubordination. Whatever they can think of to discredit me. And I’ll have no allies to back me up, not with both Spencer and Wesker out of the picture. Spencer had enough clout to protect me if he had to, but I’m on my own this time.”

Annette continued to shake her head, and once more had to lean against the desk for support. This time, Birkin did not reach out to touch her. She had to deal with this on her own, without Birkin trying to pressure her. Despite their arguments and their strained marriage over the years, and Annette’s waning interest in working at the lab, Birkin knew her enough to know that she was thinking along the exact same lines that he had a few days ago. Her mind worked in tune with his, which was one of the reasons he had fallen in love with her in the first place.

This entire lab, all the work done there over the years, was accomplished solely because of Birkin’s obsessive work ethic. He pushed his assistants to the absolute maximum and did not tolerate laziness or failure. He performed more experiments and did more tests than any three similar labs combined, because he never stopped working. He was a fanatical workaholic and had developed that same mindset in the group of scientists and assistants who managed to put up with his gruff demeanor, until they worked almost as hard as he did. Everyone at that lab had proved their worth, because Birkin did not suffer fools and got rid of anyone he didn’t feel was perfectly qualified to be there.

Every discovery and every success at that lab could be directly traced back to Birkin. At many labs, the Project Manager was just an administrator who let his underlings do the actual scientific work. But not at the Raccoon City lab. At this lab, Birkin did just as much grunt science work as the newest trainee, if not more. He performed experiments on his own, he scheduled tests and read every single result. He left nothing to chance and rarely let someone else do a job that he had time to do himself.

Birkin made this lab a success, and he deserved all the credit for this new discovery with the G-virus. And yet, despite all this, Umbrella could come to this lab and fire him at the drop of a hat, for nothing but his past relationship with people like Spencer and Wesker. He’d be guilty by association, and everything that he did at the lab would be taken away and scattered to a dozen different labs. He’d never receive an ounce of credit or appreciation for the work he did. Umbrella would throw him to the wolves and steal his life’s work without so much as an apology.

“What are you going to do?” Annette said softly, and Birkin could not help but smile to himself. No one knew him like Annette did, and he loved her for it.

“The first thing I have to do is sleep,” Birkin said. “Give me an hour here to close up my office and I’ll go home with you and go to bed. While I’m sleeping, you and Sherry have to start packing. Everything you want to save, everything that you want to take with us when we go. I already have some things ready here at the lab. I haven’t spent the past two days just working with this new strain, I’ve been backing up files on my computer. Give me two days here at the lab to finish. I think I can get everything I need.”

“It won’t work. They’ll track you down.”

“Let me worry about that. I have a plan and I think we can get away clean. Umbrella will have its hands full dealing with the outbreak, so that will give us some time. Just pack up whatever you need from the house. I’ll handle the lab. But I don’t want to wait longer than two days. I want to be out of Raccoon City in two days or less.”

“Okay,” Annette said, pushing away from the desk. Birkin stood up once more and they embraced again, this time more deeply. Birkin knew that Annette was holding back tears, but exactly what the tears were for, he didn’t know.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered into her hair. “I didn’t want this to happen.”

“It’s not your fault,” Annette whispered back. “We’re just doing what we have to do. You don’t owe them anything, Will. You’ve given them so much, maybe it’s time you can take something for yourself.”

She pulled away, but not before kissing his cheek tenderly. Her eyes glistened with tears, and now Birkin had a good idea that the tears really were for him.

“What are we going to tell Sherry?” she asked.

“Let’s tell her the truth,” Birkin said. “We have to move away because something very bad is going to happen here.”

<--Previous Chapter|Next Chapter-->