by John Shirley
She wanted out of the boxes—she wanted, more than anything, to see the great outside. To see the sky and the sun, not just pictures of them; to feel the world’s unrestrained wind, to see animals in the wild, to see birds soaring, and hear great beasts roaring.
“No,” JudyTech said gently. “This isn’t the outside, not yet. We’re a little closer. But no… You see those vessels? Do you know what they are?”
“I don’t think you ever showed them to me.”
“Those are submarines, love. The Russians built them once, long ago. They still operate. They’re big, and there’s a lot of room in them. And I don’t think they’re being used now. With luck—we can get inside one, and hide. Others will come, and pilot it out, after the flooding. At least I hope so. And we’ll find our way past them then.”
“And—to the outside? The real outside?”
“Yes. To the real outside.”
Dori stared at the enormous, red-and-black-painted objects.
“On that one—that thing sticking up—there are men lying there. I think they’re dead. I see blood, dripping down.”
“Yes. That will work to our benefit, I believe. Come, child…”
They stepped out into the chilly air, and their feet echoed in the great, silent grotto.
They were on the platform of a Metro subway station— or what was supposed to resemble one—somewhere near Red Square, in Moscow. On the wall were billboards and a station name, all painted in Cyrillic lettering.
They’d stepped out of a mirror wall which reflected the station so that the tracks seemed to stretch on endlessly. To the left was a set of stairs, leading upward.
“Where are we?” the shocked girl signed. But before Alice could respond, she heard a sound behind her. She turned, raising her gun, preparing to fire at whoever was there.
It was Rain, coming through the door in the mirror. She must have followed them through.
Alice aimed for the heart.
“Wait!” the little girl signed. “She helped us! Don’t you remember?”
Alice stared. That outfit—the top with all the buttons. No gun in her hand. Her hair entirely different… this was a different Rain. She’d have seen it sooner, but she was getting woozy from loss of blood.
Alice lowered her gun.
“You two made it!” The Rain clone hurried over to them, and surprised Alice with a hug for them both. “I’m so happy there’s someone else left alive!” Alice untangled herself from the awkward gesture, wincing at the pain in her wound.
The young woman looked around, amazed.
“What is this place?” She looked Alice up and down. “And what’s with the get-up?”
In the distance, Alice heard the sound of gunfire. There was a battle, somewhere. A considerable battle.
“You know how to use this?” Alice held out one of her automatic pistols to Rain.
Shaking her head, Rain looked at the gun with undisguised disgust.
“I campaigned for gun control!”
No you only think you did. That’s a false memory they planted… Alice considered saying it aloud, but there was no time to explain. And how could she convince her that her whole past life was an illusion, that all her memories were overlays?
Instead she stepped behind Rain, pressing the gun between her hands. Before the young woman could object, she stretched out her arms, aiming the gun for her, pointing it at the wall on the opposite platform.
“It’s just like a camera,” Alice said. She pressed her cheek to Rain’s, and showed her how to aim along the top of the gun. “Point and shoot.”
Rain squeezed the trigger, and across the tracks a section of tiled wall flew apart under the impact of a burst. She shuddered, staring at the smoking muzzle.
“Congratulations,” Alice said dryly. “You’re now officially a badass.”
Rain’s lips curved into an odd little smile.
Somewhere above, the sound of battle intensified, echoing through the station.
“What the hell is going on here?” Rain asked, still staring at the gun in her hands.
“I’ll explain everything when I get back.” She nodded toward her daughter. “Right now I need you to keep her safe.”
The girl looked up at her with big, astonished eyes—Alice felt that look like an arrow through her heart.
“You’re going?” Becky signed. “You said you wouldn’t leave!”
“I’m going to be right back,” Alice responded.
“You promised!”
Alice knelt down beside her. The girl looked away, hurt. Alice put her hand where she could see it, and signed.
“Look at me,” she said. “You can trust me—you do trust me, don’t you?”
The girl looked at her—and nodded.
“What I say is true,” Alice signed. “I will be back for you.”
The girl’s lips trembled. Alice could see she was working to hold back tears.
“Okay?” Alice signed.
The girl nodded, and signed, “Okay.” So Alice stood up, started to turn away.
“I love you,” the girl added quickly.
Alice stared. She wasn’t sure how she should react. This wasn’t really her daughter. The child desperately believed, though, that Alice was her mother. She looked at her—and saw a girl desperate for reassurance.
“I love you, too,” she signed.
The Rain clone turned to the girl.
“She’ll be back. Don’t worry. Come on—let’s find some place to hide.”
The girl seemed to get the gist by reading Rain’s lips. She nodded and took her hand.
“I met your sister,” the girl signed.
Rain looked at her in puzzlement—she didn’t understand hand signs.
“What?”
“She’s not very nice,” Becky signed.
Alice turned away, the wound in her side aching—but what hurt worse was the pang of uncertainty, her fear for the little girl. She wasn’t used to this—she was used to being confident in herself, trusting herself to make the right move.
This was uncharted territory.
Was she lying to this child? Her instincts were strong, and she would defend the girl to the death—but they weren’t a mother’s feelings. Not exactly. She’d have to tell the truth eventually. Was she leading an innocent deeper into betrayal?
When it was all about surviving, Alice told herself, about not getting shot, or killed when a bomb went off, there was no need to worry about hurting people’s feelings. That was where she had to be now.
But still, those trusting eyes haunted her…
They’d lost track of Project Alice.
Waiting by the ruins of the house, half a dozen troopers standing at ease nearby, Commander Jill Valentine listened to reports from her troopers. The security cam system for this scenario had been damaged by explosions, but it seemed likely she’d moved over to the next test floor—Moscow. Perhaps Alice was hoping to join Ada Wong’s team.
Jill growled. How was she supposed to do her job with so few personnel? So many clones were thrown away on these incessant tests.
She felt a strange dissonance inside her—as if something in her rejoiced at Alice’s escape, temporary though it would prove to be. She had to suppress those feelings, however—or the scarab would punish her. She might end up in a bio-vat. Parts from noncloned humans were recycled in the bio-vats. Their proteins, amino acids, and other fundamentals were used to create new clones—more cannon fodder for Umbrella.
Jill forced herself to concentrate on the task at hand—confirming that Ada Wong was dead. She was about to order the excavation of the smoldering remains, when the blackened floorboards not ten steps away split open.
Ada Wong forced herself out. She swayed, coughing, in the smoking wreckage, looking bruised, bloodied, and blackened with ash—yet fundamentally unarmed.
The Rain trooper stepped onto the foundations of the house and pointed her weapon.
“Going somewhere?”
At Jill’s hand signal, the other troopers closed around her.
Ada stared at them, looking overcome and weak. Then she slowly raised her hands in surrender.
Well, Jill thought. This could be useful.
15
Leon, Barry, Sergei, and Luther crouched behind a pile of bodies and debris, firing only when they had to. Their improvised “bunker” was made of piled-up dead plague soldiers, along with fallen cornices and display props from the GUM store. The limbs of mannequins were mixed up with the limbs of dead men.
Sergei was still hunched over his laptop, desperately poring over the schematics of the Moscow test floor.
“We’re running out of time,” Leon shouted at him. “You have to find a way around them!”
“Almost there!”
Luther looked at his countdown watch. Only thirty-three minutes left to go.
Make that thirty-two.
No make it thirty-one minutes and fifty seconds…
A plague soldier with glowing red eyes came out of the smoke and vaulted over his dead compatriots, right at Luther—who raised his gun, squeezed the trigger—
And nothing happened. He’d lost track of his ammo. The weapon was unloaded.
The soldier had a shotgun in his hand. He swung it toward Luther—then the top of his head flew off in a corona of blood, as Leon shot him.
Luther nodded his thanks and reloaded his weapon. He sighed. His mouth was dry, his heart was banging in his chest, and he was hungry and tired. And he still saw Tony, in his mind’s eye, getting sawed in half by that roaring chainsaw, blood spraying everywhere.
So here I am, Luther thought. How the hell had he got himself into this? Trying to find Alice, was how.
Women. That’s what got you into the worst—
Suddenly Sergei slammed his computer shut.
“Got it!” he shouted triumphantly. “This way!”
Barry, Leon, and Luther fired suppressive rounds and threw the last of their grenades to keep the plague soldiers back, and then turned and bolted after Sergei. He led them along the inside of the wrecked façade of the GUM store, past more tumble-down, smoking displays, toward a far corner of the building.
Their sudden departure left the plague soldiers momentarily confused, still focused on the “bodies bunker” the team had left behind. So the team made good progress, and safely reached the corner of the building, all of them breathing hard. Ahead was an intact glass display window.
Sergei picked up a steel chair, swung it with one hand and tossed it, sending it flying high. It crashed through the store window, breaking most of the glass out.
“This way!” Sergei shouted.
He jumped up on the display and past the bashed-out window. Luther followed, with Leon and Barry close behind.
“Move, move, move!” Leon urged them.
Then they were out on a street corner, in the Moscow testing set, their boots crunching over broken glass. It was in an “evening” mode out here, the lights dimmed down.
“We can work our way…” Sergei said between gasps, “around the perimeter… and…”
And suddenly something pink and wet and serrated and big as a power line cable whipped out, wrapping itself around Sergei. Luther could see his ribs cracking as the screaming Russian was lifted off his feet, and up…
Luther looked up, following the wet pink cable. Up, up, farther up—and he stared.
The cable was a tongue—an impossibly long tongue, extending from the dripping maw of the most hideous thing he had ever seen. Hanging upside down in the shadows, clinging, somehow, to girders far overhead, was a gigantic flesh-colored creature, at least twelve yards long from head to tail, with the general heft of a fairly squat elephant.
Sergei shouted in pain and struggled as the tongue reeled him in, bringing him to its mouth—and he screeched hideously as it bit him in half, calmly chewing him up. The lower half of him fell to the ground, landing with a wet sound.
Shit!
Luther had to look away, try to control his gagging.
He forced himself to look back as the others began to fire at the creature. That’s when he realized that to either side of big pink mutant, pasted to the ceiling in translucent, glutinous cocoons, were human beings—clones who were supposed to have taken part in the tests. Writhing in their restraints.
Still alive.
The bullets had little effect on the monster—except to make it want to come down and take them out in person. It released its hold and dropped, flipping itself in the air, landing in front of them on its four sets of claws. The street shook with the whump of its landing.
“What the fuck is it?” Luther asked.
“A Licker,” Leon told him, his voice shaking as he aimed his gun. “The biggest one I ever saw or heard of. Mutated from a variant of the T-virus. Believe it or not, that thing was once a human being…”
“Umbrella must’ve had it developed in a lab,” Barry said, slapping a clip in his rifle. “Released it here to stop us.”
Luther could see the monster more clearly now. It looked as if the outer layer of skin had been scraped off, down almost to the muscle. The top half of its skull—including its eyes—was entirely missing. Where they should have been there was a big, leathery, overgrown brain, looking like some hideous fungus. Though apparently blind, the thing somehow sensed them. It stalked toward them on dragonlike legs—four of them, its front limbs almost as much like legs as the rear. Scything claws scratched the street with each step, its dripping serrated tongue whipping out, feeling its way along.
Luther backed off—then a bullet cut the air just over his head, coming from behind. He turned and saw plague soldiers running up toward them, firing sporadically.
They were boxed in.
He fired at the Licker but it stalked implacably toward them, squealing and snarling, apparently unhurt. It was so big their bullets were just irritants.
Then Luther heard something that had no place here—a roaring car engine. He saw the double pools of headlights illuminate the creature, making it turn. A Rolls-Royce Silver Phantom, gleaming and thoroughly pimped out, was doing eighty miles an hour as it rocketed toward the Licker.
The giant creature roared in fury, then the driver engaged the brakes and the tires squealed as the car skidded, deliberately power-sliding, striking the hulking flesh-colored monster side-on. The impact knocked the Licker sideways, and then over onto its back so that it tumbled through the plate-glass window of another fake store.
Stunned, the monster thrashed about in the window display, crushing mannequins underfoot, confusedly lashing at them with its tongue, trying to right itself.
Leon and Barry began firing at the plague soldiers, forcing them to take cover behind cars parked on the street. The Rolls-Royce Silver Phantom jolted to a stop, and a door opened, revealing the driver.
Alice.
“Hi,” she said, casually.
Luther was dizzy with emotion, just looking at her. Too much had happened in the last few minutes.
But he swallowed hard, and smiled.
“Nice ride,” he said.
“Well, this is Moscow,” she countered. She gestured and the three men ran to the sedan. They climbed in, Luther up front beside her.
“Let’s get outta here before that thing figures out that dummies don’t make a good dinner,” he said. She nodded. The wheels spun, and the Rolls-Royce peeled out. Bullets from the plague soldiers smacked into the side. She ran over what was left of Sergei’s body as she went, but Luther didn’t criticize her for it. They were in a hurry.
Barry looked over his shoulder, up at the ceiling.
“Those people—were still alive!”
“The creature was cocooning them,” Alice said. “Saving them for food.”
She barreled down the street, and Luther introduced the other two men.
“Barry, Leon… Alice.”
“Pleased to meet you,” she said.
Luther looked behind them, saw that the Licker had
freed itself. It was racing after them—and it was pissed off. It killed a couple of plague soldiers on the way, for good measure, with casual snaps of its jaws.
Still, the Rolls was outdistancing it.
“You might want to buckle up,” Alice said. They were coming to a blocked cross street. It was stop, crash into the blockade, or turn.
She’d better decide, Luther thought, looking at the speedometer. We’re going seventy miles an hour.
Without slowing, she pulled a hand-break turn, the G-force making the men strain to keep their places in the car.
“Nice driving,” Barry said.
Luther smiled. Aware of the absurdity of the situation, and yet somehow not caring. Here, anyway, was Alice.
“Nice to see you again,” he said.
Alice returned his smile.
“Nice to be seen.”
Leon glanced back.
“It’s gaining.” Luther looked back and saw that the Licker was running like a rabid racehorse, coming on strong, moving closer to them.
“Not a problem,” Alice said. She turned to Luther. “So… did you miss me?”
“Really?” He looked at the Licker. “We’re going to do this right now?”
Alice shrugged, then smiled. She looked pale, at least to Luther.
“No time like the present,” she said.
Luther considered asking her how she’d found them—but probably she’d lucked onto “Moscow,” and then followed the sound of gunfire.
Up ahead the street was clogged by abandoned and burned-out vehicles, many of them overturned. Alice slowed just enough to weave skillfully between them, like a stunt driver on an obstacle course. The giant Licker didn’t bother weaving. It charged straight through the vehicles, bounding up, and crushing them as it came down, or shouldering them aside like a rhino tossing bales of hay.
Alice looked in the rear-view mirror, and Luther saw that she was becoming worried. The Licker was getting close. Real close. It was whipping its tongue out ahead of it, slapping at the rear window.
Nasty, Luther thought.
He looked up ahead—and saw something bearing down on them. Another pair of high beams, their source obscured.
“Alice…” he said. She didn’t seem to hear him. “Alice!” The car’s headlights were glaring in his eyes— it was coming right at them, head-on.
