He waited two hours outside a fancy Washington restaurant while Alexia talked to her estranged cousin, some relative-through-marriage to the Simmons family, an American dynasty from the same primordial cash-pool as the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts. She was some kind of politician, but beyond that, Grayson didn't know anything about her, and didn't honestly care.
They flew back to the Arklays on a charter flight, on Umbrella's dime, out of Thurgood Marshall.
Cold rain gusted. Alexia told him they were going to an airport four hours away, so he drove, in silence, in a company car. On the interstate, green aluminum signs announced that they were twenty miles away from Raccoon City. And when they reached Raccoon City—Grayson drove past it—there wasn't anything left but a crater, and miles upon miles of barbed chain-link which said trespassers would be prosecuted, the land was government property.
Grayson got lost at some point, and pulled into the lot of a Stagla gas station near a town called Pinefield.
"All right," he said to Alexia, who was busy filing her nails in the passenger seat, "I'm gonna go inside and ask for directions to this airport." He paused. She didn't even look up. "You sure you don't know the goddamn way? You're the one who told me to drive."
"I don't know this bloody area," Alexia said, and looked at him with her pale, pale eyes. "You're the local, darling. You were living in Raccoon City, were you not?"
"Thanks, Lex," he said, and climbed out of the car. Before Grayson shut the door, he asked, "You want anything while I'm in there?"
"Coffee," she said, automatically.
"You don't wanna come in?"
"Not a chance, darling."
He went inside. The middle-aged woman behind the cash register looked bored, and she was busily organizing cigarettes behind the counter. A small box-set television sat in the corner of the store, behind the counter, and played a muted newscast. They were interviewing a Raccoon City survivor.
"Horrible what happened," the woman remarked, taking a couple packs of cigarettes from a cardboard box and shoving them into the display behind the register. "Can't even imagine what those poor folks went through. We were lucky. Whatever happened in Raccoon, it ain't affected us out here in Pinefield." She looked at him and smiled. "Anyway, what can I do for ya, hun?"
"I need directions," he told her. "Faraday Airfield?"
The woman raised her eyebrows. "Faraday? Tiny little place. Mostly charter flights, I think, and they gotta pilot school there." Then she described how to get there, in the way only someone who had lived their whole life in Pinefield, and who would probably die in Pinefield, could. When the woman noticed Grayson didn't follow, she smiled apologetically, said, "Lemme write that down for ya," and fed a blank slip of paper from the receipt printer, scribbling the directions with a disposable pen advertising Pinewood Bank. The woman folded the paper into four quarters, then passed it over the counter to him. "Here ya are, hun. If you need a map, you'll find those in the magazine display by the window."
He pocketed the directions. "Thanks. Hey, my girlfriend wants coffee. Where can I find that?"
The woman pointed to the little coffee area at the back of the store, near the drink coolers. "Over there, hun. If ya need anythin' else, you just holler," and she smiled and went back to sorting cigarettes.
He took the pot off the coffee-maker. It was surprisingly hot, which was good; Alexia wouldn't bitch about it. He fixed her coffee—Alexia liked hers with cream and sugar, to the point it could barely be considered coffee anymore—and one for himself—black, four teaspoons of sugar—then grabbed an atlas from the magazine display, and went to pay.
The woman had turned up the newscast. A reporter stood in front of a mob of angry protesters. The footage was live from downtown Arklay City, in front of Umbrella USA's new headquarters.
"Protesters have gathered in front of Umbrella's newly designated headquarters in Arklay City, three months after the tragedy of Raccoon City," the man began, in his clean newscaster voice. "Emotions are running high—" and the video cut to a woman shouting through a megaphone, panned across a crowd of sign-toting protesters—"among activists, and families still hurting from the loss of loved ones, with no answers in sight…."
The woman noticed him standing there, and looked deeply embarrassed. She turned the television down and turned to him. "Sorry, hun," she said, and rang up the coffees and the atlas.
"Hey, don't worry about it," he said, and paid with a five. "It's a shit-show."
"A heckuva circus," the woman agreed, smiling. "You have a good day now, hun."
Alexia was fiddling with the radio, and seemed incapable of deciding between shitty 80s pop, which she only wanted to listen to because she found the familiarity comforting in this strange fifteen-years-later world, and the latest hit from Marilyn Manson, which Grayson recognized as The Dope Show. "What's bloody happened to music in the last fifteen years?" she asked.
Grayson climbed into the car and passed her the coffee. "It's all terrible now." He turned the keys in the ignition, then tossed the atlas into her lap. "Here. I need you to make sure we're going the right way."
Alexia sipped her coffee, made a face, and put it in the cup-holder. Then leafed through the atlas, which was titled VACATIONER'S GUIDE TO THE ARKLAYS. "Who holidays here?" she asked. "I can think of a dozen better places to spend one's time."
"Hikers. Campers. Outdoorsy people," Grayson offered, and drove with one hand, sipping his coffee with the other. "Everything you're not."
"Look at me, Grayson," she said, flashing a pale wrist that was almost transparent. "I'm clearly an indoors person."
Rain splattered on his windshield. It was the middle of the day, but the conditions made it feel like nighttime. Cars randomly braked in front of him, went slow, or switched lanes without warning. He cursed. He had this theory that intelligence correlated with the amount of rainfall—the more it rained, the dumber people got.
A guy in a red pickup suddenly cut him off, and Grayson punched his horn. "Fucking asshole!" he shouted. Then, calmer, "I hate this fucking highway."
Faraday Airfield was one of those tiny, middle-of-nowhere airports where the local farmers could earn a pilot's license in the slower seasons, and where people who wanted helicopter tours of the Arklays could go to experience the joys of the mountains from a bird's-eye view, flown by their own farmer-turned-pilot.
A single air-strip cut a neat, surgical line across the December-dead grass, and a small concrete building served as the airport's terminal, the equally small hangar beside it. Light planes were housed inside the hangar. It didn't look like Faraday was doing much in the way of business today, probably because of the shitty weather.
"Not exactly the kinda place I envisioned," Grayson said to Alexia, walking alongside her across the slick parking lot, and the crunchy winter-dead grass. It was still raining, and the wind hit his cheeks like cold, wet needles. He shivered, involuntarily, within the folds of his black Burberry coat. Rain pattered rhythmically on his umbrella, and this close to Alexia, huddled underneath it, he could smell her perfume. "I thought it'd be bigger."
"My cousin had to pull some strings," Alexia explained. Like him, she was huddled in her coat, and looked like she wanted to be anywhere but here, someplace warm. "Due to very specific and complicated circumstances, it was best to greet our guest quietly—off the grid, so to speak." They stopped at the edge of the runway, and Alexia checked her watch, a vintage Rolex on a pale leather strap. "They should be here any minute now."
Within twenty minutes, a plane was cleared to land. Unlike the planes here, it was a small bizjet, the kind used by business men or government officials to move clandestinely from point to point. When it landed, a young girl was escorted off the aircraft by two spooks in suits and earpieces.
Sherry beamed when she saw him, and ran across the tarmac, hugging him around the middle. She wore a winter jacket and jeans, and a backpack. "Grayson," she said, and squeezed him tight, "you're alive."
Grayson looked at Alexia, whose face, predictably, remained unreadable. "Yeah," he said to Sherry, and kissed the top of the girl's head, hugging her tight. "I'm alive. I'm sorry about your mom, Sherry." He felt as if he'd just realized he was inside a lucid dream, that none of this was real, and it would all go away very soon. But it was real. Sherry didn't vanish; he didn't wake up somewhere else, alone, still wondering what had happened to her.
"This is all very touching, really," Alexia said, her voice cutting into the moment like a knife, "but let's not dally. I've got things to do."
"You're Alexia," Sherry said, looking at her. "Alexia Ashford."
Alexia smiled. "I see William has told you all about me."