by John Shirley
A huge vaulted stone chamber carved out of the living rock was one of the facility’s few reminders of its Soviet origins. The drafty chamber was dominated by Cyrillic lettering painted high on the walls—which no member of Umbrella Squad Seventeen could read, though they all stared up at it as they entered.
The squad entered rapidly, double-timing into the room, kicking up small clouds of dust, guns at the ready. Their captain followed them in.
“Orders from Commander Valentine,” he said. “The facility is to be placed under complete lock down!”
A communications specialist stepped up.
“Sir! We have unauthorized movement of Elevator 2!”
“Contact topside,” the captain snapped back. “Find out who it is.”
“I’ve already tried, sir,” came the reply. “There’s no reply from the surface.”
The captain frowned. Someone had sabotaged the transmitters. He gestured toward key spots around the chamber.
“Defensive formation!”
The Umbrella troops responded instantly, and several of them knelt in a ring around the narrow tube that came from the elevator shaft, pointing their weapons. Their fingers tightened on the triggers, a hair’s breadth from firing.
“Mark your targets,” the captain advised. “Fire at will.”
The giant elevator platform neared the bottom, hardly visible in the murk, and the space was pierced by the red rapiers of targeting lasers. But there appeared to be no one on the elevator.
“It’s empty, sir…”
Suddenly there was a series of explosions as a group of Jumping Jack mines detonated from the bottom of the platform, spraying deadly fragments in every direction, ripping through the troops. Each detonation was accompanied by a deafening burst of sound.
Then, as the platform reached the bottom of the shaft, the intruders appeared. They’d been lying flat, hiding on the floor at the back of the platform, visible only at the last second when they jumped up, weapons in hand. The captain thought he could see them grinning in the gloom.
One of the intruders flung something at the troopers. It detonated a second later, just as the captain realized it was a Jumping Jack mine. The storm of spiked ball bearings tore through him and his men…
He was knocked onto his back, and when he tried to move—it was no good. One of the spiked balls had pierced his gut and smashed into his spine.
There was a firefight with the few survivors of his squad, but it was brief. As silence descended, he heard two of the intruders talking. But the words seemed to make no sense to him, in the sucking vacuum of pain and chaos and darkness.
“Submarine pens are up ahead,” one of the men said.
“Barry, you and I take point…”
“We’re down to an hour and forty-five seconds!” another man said.
“I can read my counter, Luther, no need for you to…”
The Umbrella captain didn’t hear any more, except the rising wave of white noise in his ears, which must be, he supposed, the sound made by Death as it arrived.
10
The narrow utility shaft, bathed in soft, red emergency lighting, descended about fifty feet to a room containing bulky aluminum heating and air conditioning units.
Ada and Alice dropped from the ladder to the concrete floor, and looked around. Ducts rose to the ceiling like the arms of giant robotic octopi; hulking silver machines flickered with indicator lights.
“I hope you’re not lost,” Alice said.
Ada shook her head. She glanced at her countdown watch.
“Not lost—just… behind schedule. We need to get to the secondary meet-up—fast.” She led the way across the warm chamber, through a smell of industrial cleansers and the faint tang of leaking natural gas, to a stairway that wound up the farther wall. “Up this, and past a utility room, along a corridor, and then out into Times Square.”
Five minutes later they were there.
Anyway, it used to be Times Square, Alice thought. No… it used to look like Times Square.
“New York,” she murmured. Now it looked like a forgotten war zone. Bodies were scattered about the streets and sidewalks. Some of them were trying to crawl. The cars were burning, many overturned; one was rammed through a store window. Refuse from overturned trash cans blew past Alice and Ada on artificial winds.
Overhead was the darkness of the “night sky”—a distant black ceiling without a star to be seen. Some of the Times Square neon signs still burned and blinked; pretty dancers did choreographed kicks on a huge screen; streams of lights chased around the frames of billboards. Stock market quotes—from a stock market that no longer existed in the real world— flowed past along an electronic sign.
“This way,” Ada said. “We need to cross two more test environments to get out.”
Alice followed her, still looking around.
“Why would Umbrella still be running these tests?”
“To start with, all they wanted to do was to sell the biohazard. But now they want to study it—learn how to contain it. Control it.”
Control it. Alice shook her head. She’d seen them try that, in Las Vegas. Clumsily conditioned Undead had been let loose, supposed to operate as soldiers. The difference between them and the other Undead had been negligible.
What was Umbrella up to, now? It had destroyed civilization. Perhaps now it wanted to create a warped caricature of civilization. Maybe it wanted to use the T-virus to create an alternate humanity. New levels of class distinction, perhaps. At the bottom rung would be the controlled Undead. At the top, mutated, virus-warped superhumans.
And in between, everyone else.
That was Alice’s guess, although it really didn’t make sense to her. But then again, who said Umbrella’s plans had to make any sense? Maybe whoever was in charge of it now was as psychotic as the world they had created.
Suddenly she saw light, flashing from directly overhead. She craned her neck and watched as giant banks of lights, mounted in the distant ceiling, began to switch on. Night was turning quickly into day.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“It’s the end of the scenario,” Ada explained, as she stepped over a moaning woman. “They rarely last more than an hour.”
Alice looked up again, her sense of reality stressed to the breaking point. “Times Square” gained a giant, floodlit roof over it, as if it had been a construct in some existential theater.
She chuckled, and shook her head.
“Come on,” Ada said.
“They can’t be far behind,” Alice responded. “They must’ve seen us come out into the square on surveillance cameras…” She hefted the combat rifle, adding, “Maybe we should set up an ambush.”
“No time for that.”
“But what if we—”
Then something grabbed Alice’s right ankle. Instinctively, she jerked her leg free—just in time to avoid a bite from the snapping jaws of an Undead. It was a bulbous man in a street cleaner’s coveralls, with a bruise-colored round face and blood-caked beard. He got to his hands and knees, and in that position— growling and making other doglike noises—he looked like some demented amalgam of man and canine.
He came towards Alice on his hands and knees surprisingly fast, growling, licking his lips, his milky eyes staring unblinkingly up at her. She shot him through those staring eyes, careful to aim so the bullets continued directly into the brain.
The Undead street cleaner fell flat with a final whining cry, twitching for a moment, then going still.
Circling around him, Alice followed her companion. Ada, striding along up ahead, hadn’t even glanced back.
Alice hoped she didn’t have to kill Ada, before this was over. She sort of liked the woman, somehow. She respected someone with the kind of capability and tough determination that Ada had. But she wondered at her choice of allies.
Albert Wesker…
Am I allied with Wesker, now, too?
Her jaw set tightly at the thought.
> No. But let him think so… for the moment.
Lying flat under a car, Dori watched Alice stride by.
Is that really her, or just one of the Alice clones?
Somehow, Dori knew. Maybe it was the confidence, the style that seemed to speak of long experience. The trained intelligence that glimmered in her eyes. It was her. The legendary Alice Abernathy.
Dori was tempted to crawl out into view and talk to her, right then and there. But Alice might shoot her, thinking her an Undead, before she could utter a sound. Dori looked like a healthy fifteen-year-old girl, but she was pretty dirty and had blood on her face. She’d been standing too near an Undead that was hit by an out of control car.
And besides—JudyTech had told her not to.
“Speak to no one but me unless asked a question. Then only answer the way I’ve taught you.” Dori remembered when JudyTech first told her about Alice. It was the fourth overlay session in the clone creche. JudyTech always waited till the other biotechs and the monitor bots were off in another part of the facility, before waking Dori for the overlay.
The normal procedure for an overlay was different—usually the techs approached the clone tank without waking the clone who was floating inside. They’d activate the program for planting artificial memories and basic skills—such as walking—into the clone. The bio-interface transmitted the overlay to the electrodes, which translated it into neuronal encoding. In turn, that was printed into the brain via specially engineered proteins.
Dori knew all that—it was something none of the other clones knew—but she only knew it because JudyTech had told her. Judy had used an old voice-conditioning system long considered obsolete. Dori’s language overlays had allowed her to understand what JudyTech said.
She hadn’t understood everything, though, until JudyTech had released her from the tank as part of the prep for the testing floors. JudyTech had waited for her chance, then secretly separated Dori from the other clones, taking her to a room that wasn’t used by the facility anymore. It was in a sub-basement where there had been Undead contamination, but the contamination was long gone, and JudyTech had fixed up the room to look like a girl’s bedroom.
She’d provided simple computer games for Dori to play, and pictures of the world, and a full education. JudyTech had explained that she was one of the few non-clone humans left on the staff, and she’d always wanted a child, and she hadn’t had one—and she’d decided that Dori would be her daughter. She was bothered by the way Umbrella used clones, too, and felt they should be given a chance for better lives, especially now with the world so underpopulated. She and Dori would escape, she explained, to get away from Umbrella, to some place that was safe from the Undead.
She’d told Dori about Alice Abernathy, who was a legend. JudyTech had hacked into Umbrella’s files to find out all about Alice. And JudyTech told Dori about the Undead, about the testing floors. She’d showed her films of what happened there. She’d told her about the scarabs, too.
Bio-techs and other top scientific personnel didn’t have scarabs. They were the ones who designed scarabs and put them on other people. But even people like JudyTech could be fitted with mind-control devices, so JudyTech was very careful to cover her tracks.
All of that scared Dori. She hadn’t had any real feelings, floating in the tank—she was too sedated in there. But here, away from her sedation, she felt fear, and anger, and worry… and she felt love. She and JudyTech were bonded—that’s what JudyTech called it.
“The way the world is now,” JudyTech told her, “is so lonely. All the survivors are suspicious of one another. No one really trusts anyone else. Most families have been destroyed. So what we have, you and I, is precious and rare…”
Every day, after her twelve-hour shift, JudyTech would come to the hidden bedroom, and she’d train Dori physically and mentally. Dori had athletic skill overlays, copied from Alice, but the overlays had to be activated by training. Because of the overlays, an hour’s training gave Dori as much as an ordinary person would get in a month.
But yesterday Dori had gotten restless. And she’d slipped out of the hidden bedroom to explore… She hadn’t yet been issued “street clothes,” so she’d put on her clone-prep jumpsuit, and she’d gone up some ladders to the lab floors. She’d had an urge to try to talk to other clones, and when she was noticed by bio-techs, she pretended to be sedated like the other clones. She got in the line with them, and the techs issued her clothes, which she had to put on.
Before she knew it, she was herded with the others into an access corridor and out to Times Square. Nearby a woman had turned, then a young boy, and the Undead virus started spreading. But Dori had been ready for that. She’d taken cover—just gotten a little bloody when she’d looked out from under the car, just as an Undead got squished by a taxi.
She considered going after Alice, and that other woman, but… no. If they took her with them, that would be deserting JudyTech. She could never do that. JudyTech was the only reason she had any kind of hope at all.
I’m not just a clone, she thought fiercely. And I’m going to prove it to the world…
So Dori stayed where she was for another twenty minutes or so, then she crawled out, looked around, and set out to find her mother.
Luther and the other four men followed a long concrete corridor that led from the bottom of the elevator shaft to the submarine pens. As they approached their destination Leon gestured for them to hang back, and they found cover, peering into the gigantic, dimly lit chamber from the doorway as he slipped out and ran from cover to cover
Leon’s breath was steaming in the cold room; sometimes that was all Luther could see of him.
There were six docking bays, and two of them were occupied by large Soviet vessels. A couple of masked Umbrella troopers were setting up a machine gun post atop one of the submarine conning towers. Leon appeared behind the troopers, moving with a stealth that didn’t seem humanly possible. Using a silenced pistol, he shot them both in the back of the head— the two shots so rapid they almost blended into one— dispatching them silently.
He looked around, then signaled for the team to emerge. When they came out into the colossal room that contained the submarines, Luther paused, and whistled in awe.
The chamber was dull, dusty—overhead lights illuminated the soaring reinforced-concrete walls— the cement surfaces were stained with rust that bled from iron studs. The two huge submarines were rebuilt Soviet vessels now painted with the red and black colors of the Umbrella Corporation. They were as big as high-rises lying on their sides, and they seemed motionless. But they were floating, he knew; countless tons of steel and glass, fluids and weaponry, suspended in seawater.
Did they have nuclear weapons on them, he wondered? It seemed unlikely, at this point. But who knew what else they might contain. Might be a real handy thing to have, a sub like that. Just let the Undead try to get at you in there.
Then Luther shook his head sadly. That was the first thought that came to a man, now, when he walked into a new place. If I can’t eat it or have sex with it… then how does it help me survive? How does it protect me from the Undead?
The others were double-timing across the pens to catch up with Leon. Luther easily kept pace—running was something he was good at. He spoke up as they reached the shadow of the first big submarine.
“That’s some hardware…” he began.
“Typhoon class,” Sergei said blandly. “Biggest nuclear subs the Soviets ever built. Umbrella used them to transport bio-weapons all over the globe. Secretly of course.”
“How come you know so much about Umbrella?”
“I used to work for them,” Sergei replied. “For a boy from Murmansk, it was a good job.” He added thoughtfully, “Now I like to consider it a youthful indiscretion.”
Luther snorted.
“You used to work for the bad guys—but I’m the one nobody trusts?” He shook his head, but let it drop.
Sergei shrugged as Leon rejoined th
em, looking at his countdown watch.
“Let’s pick up the pace!” Leon said. “We have less than ninety minutes!”
An empty street in New York City…
Except it wasn’t. Alice and Ada walked down the middle of the empty avenue, making their way around a series of abandoned vehicles.
“When do I see Luther?” Alice asked, trying to sound as if she were only mildly interested in the answer.
“The strike team will rendezvous with us in the next environment,” Ada said. “But until then, we’re on our own.”
“Of course,” Alice murmured. She’d been mostly on her own since the day she’d awakened in the mansion, out in the country, near Raccoon City.
She wondered if there were anyone left alive there— really alive.
Don’t think about it, she told herself. It just led her to agonize about her part in the spread of the T-virus. She’d protected Umbrella, as their head of security, while they were developing the biowarfare pathogen in the Hive. She hadn’t known what they’d been up to, at least for much of the time—but still, was her ignorance just an excuse?
She’d failed to stop Spence from releasing the T-virus in the Hive; she’d failed to keep it from getting out of the Hive into Raccoon City. And she’d failed to stop it spreading through the world.
Stupid to blame yourself. But she couldn’t help it. She never spoke about her feelings. Rationally, she knew it wasn’t really her fault. But still—she felt the weight of it all.
There weren’t that many people left alive who were capable of doing anything about it. Those few who remained had the fate of the human race in their hands. They had to take responsibility. There was no one else to do it. No excuse for standing on the sidelines…
There was a cure for the T-virus. It worked if it was injected into people early enough in the viral incubation process. But Alice had none of the formula—not at the moment. But if she could get that formula, could get it out to protect people from the T-virus, then it might make up for her past sins—for serving Umbrella.
