by John Shirley
She must be dreaming about the clones, she mused, the ones in the vats. That was a damned hard thing to process. Alice had seen the same thing herself, at another Umbrella facility. She’d liberated hundreds of copies of herself—hundreds of Alices—and later on she’d seen them die. She’d fought beside copies of herself and watched them get shot down. She hadn’t been able to help them, not really. And each dying clone looked exactly like her.
She still had nightmares about it, sometimes. And she was sure Becky was going to have nightmares about what she’d seen in the last couple of hours, maybe for years to come. If she lived that long.
Thinking about clones, and the Shibuya Scramble in Tokyo, remembering how she’d been sure she’d killed Wesker, Alice wondered.
What the hell is real, anyway?
She bent her head to look out the window, trying to see the sky. She could see the broken clouds flashing past, driven by the stormy wind, in a hurry to get somewhere. The dull sunlight came angling through from time to time, stabbing down, cutting off as the clouds raced over, then stabbing down again.
Sure looked real.
“Are you okay?” Luther asked her. He was staring at her, a worried look on his face.
Alice nodded.
“What are you looking at?” he asked.
“The sky.” She hesitated. “The real world.”
He smiled wanly.
“You had doubts?”
“Just checking.”
They churned out away from the peninsula—and further onto the ice as the weather congealed around them.
“We’re sure this ice is… is thick enough, here, Leon?” Luther asked.
Leon glanced back at him with that a look of irritation, then he seemed to reconsider—maybe thinking about all they’d been through together—and nodded.
“It’s thick enough, bro. Trust me.”
Alice thought she could hear the ice groaning under the weight of the Spryte. She thought about global warming, and she wondered if Leon wasn’t a little too confident.
The storm really hit them then, hundred-mile-an-hour winds buffeting the windows, making the metal frame of the vehicle creak, blowing snow around them, whining and sighing. outside, it was a total whiteout. The blizzard darkened the world as it at last completely swallowed the vehicle.
Alice expected Leon to slow the vehicle—but he kept right on at the same steady speed.
“Better hit the lights,” Luther said.
Leon nodded, and flipped a switch.
Alice glanced at Luther, and thought he was swaying a little in his seat. He’d lost more blood than she had, she guessed, and he might have the start of an infection. The treatment she’d given him would help—but he needed hospitalization.
Something which really didn’t exist anymore…
She was feeling better, but still wasn’t up to snuff herself. Her hands looked pale and they trembled when she lifted them off her knees. Alerted by the movement, Luther glanced at her.
“Are you okay?”
“Better than you.” She patted his good arm. He really did look sickly. Bullets will do that to you. Then she put her arms around Becky, and the child snuggled against her. She laid her head against the child’s hair, taking comfort in its simple homey smell of her.
Are you my Mama?
I am now.
She hoped she could live up to it.
Alice closed her eyes, and slipped into an uneasy sleep.
The dream started more or less benignly—it was based in genuine memories.
Alice was reliving a night at an award ceremony, where she was expected to accept one of the employee appreciation plaques the Umbrella Corporation had given out, back in the days when the company was still just another major multinational.
Back before the scarabs were invented.
Mind control was so much easier than old-school human resources. Mind-controlled employees never asked for raises, never started unions. The scarabs were the perfect tool for corporate human resources.
She had received two such plaques for her work in security. To get this latest honor, she’d protected the lab from something she’d been told was a “terrorist break-in.” Alerted by the security computers, she’d shot all three of the criminal commandos who’d broken into the lab. That was a year before the Hive was opened. The incident had led to her becoming Head of Security.
Right before things fell apart, she’d realized that the “terrorist commandos” she’d shot had been activists trying to confirm rumors that the company was secretly experimenting on human beings—homeless people taken by force, prisoners requisitioned from privatized prisons. The experiments often killed the subject… or did something to them that was worse than death.
Alice had accepted the company’s plaque partly because of her “husband,” Spence Parks. Spence had been in charge of protecting the entrance to the Hive from snoopers and investigators… and they’d pretended to be the rich couple living in the mansion. And yes, there’d been some romantic connection between them, there—or maybe just a sexual one. He’s been an evil son of a bitch, but the guy had been good in bed.
She’d accepted the plaque, and up to that point the dream was fairly accurate. But then, as she turned, Alice glanced at the audience and saw a man in a tuxedo. He started convulsing, spitting up red foam, and falling… only to jump to his feet and sink his jaws into the face of a woman in an elegant dress, shaking his head like a pit bull with a grip, hard from side to side, to rip her face off her skull. The woman screamed and died, and then almost instantly jumped up and started chasing other members of the screaming audience.
A little girl who was clutching her mother screamed as a fat Undead tore the woman’s throat out. The little girl ran in abject terror toward the stage, but then she turned into Becky, and Alice was trying to help her climb onto the stage as an Undead clutched at the little girl’s ankles, chewed off one of her shoes.
Alice grabbed the screaming child and the two of them ran offstage, into the wings, past ropes that were supposed to control the curtains. They became hangman’s nooses that turned into living, predatory things, one tightening around Spence’s neck, lifting him off his feet, choking him. His kicking feet were out of reach.
I can’t help him, Alice thought.
Holding Becky’s hand, she ran under his twitching feet, toward an exit door. Then Alice heard evil laughter, very close by—she looked down at the plaque and saw a face on it, the brass relief image of Oswald Spencer.
The brass face tittered evilly and jeered.
“You made it all possible, Alice! People like you! All the people who did what we told them, who looked the other way when they knew that the sickness was taking hold! You protected the T-virus, Alice—and you protected Umbrella’s madness.
“Thank you! We honor you with this award!”
She threw the plaque away, and it spun in slow motion, laughing, to shatter on the exit door…
…which swung open, on its own, to reveal a burning world, a world of smoke and fire, a world of crashing planes, of exploding skyscrapers, of bloody-faced living dead men staggering about.
And Becky screamed.
“No, don’t take me out there,” she cried. “Don’t take me outside of Umbrella Prime!”
“…Going to be a shock for that little girl, being outside Umbrella Prime,” Luther said as Alice woke from the nightmare. He was talking to Leon as the Spryte drove out onto the creaking ice of the frozen sea.
“Nothing down in Umbrella Prime but seawater and frozen bodies now,” Leon answered. He was hunched over the steering wheel of the “snowcat,” watching the ice closely. He was driving more slowly now, Alice saw as she tried to shake the nightmare off.
“How’re they going to set down in this storm?” Luther asked, looking out the window at the whiteout of the blizzard.
“Weather report has it abating, out this way.”
“Doesn’t look like it to me.”
“I think we’
re almost through the worst of it.”
Alice looked down at Becky, the sleeping child twitching and squirming in her arms, still having nightmares. The child’s lips were quivering, her hands jerking, her eyelids jumping with R.E.M. movement. Alice considered waking her out of it.
But sometimes you need nightmares, to process the horror of life.
“One click from the RZ,” Leon said, glancing at an instruments on his dashboard. The blizzard did seem to be clearing away a bit.
Suddenly the Spryte lurched violently to the right, skidding on the slick surface. Leon braked and the vehicle slid to a halt.
“What is it?” Alice asked.
“I’m not sure,” Leon said.
Becky woke up, stretching, looking sleepily around.
“What’s going on?” she signed.
“We’re not sure yet,” Alice replied. But she could see giant cracks appearing in the ice outside the big vehicle. As she looked around, from one window to another, she could see that the cracks were spreading in all directions. And the Spryte lurched again…
If the vehicle fell through the ice, the chances of getting out of it—getting alive to shelter—were probably zero. They’d be killed by hypothermia, or simply drowned when the snowcat plunged through the ice and into the sea.
The cracks continued to spread, in lightninglike forks…
But there was something strange. It didn’t look as if it was the Spryte breaking the ice. It looked like something was cracking it from beneath, off to the right. There was something dark out there, pushing upward, shouldering great floes out of the way. And suddenly rearing into view, a monolith of metal came squealing up through the ice, shedding chunks of frozen sea as it came.
“What the hell is that?” Luther burst out.
Then the shockwave reached the Spryte—and the world turned topsy-turvy. Alice and Becky and Leon and Luther were tossed around inside the vehicle like rag dolls as the vehicle was flipped over.
Becky made a shrill sound of terror as the world seemed to spin. Luther cursed and even Leon wordlessly yelled as he clutched at the steering wheel. The Spryte turned completely upside down. Its roof struck the ice with an ear-splitting clang.
Leon ended upside down on the ceiling of the Spryte’s cab, alongside Luther and Alice and Becky, all of them twisting about to get their feet back underneath them.
“Becky!” Alice shouted, signing as well. “Are you hurt?”
“No, I’m okay,” the girl replied.
“You’re sure?” she signed, insistently, while her other hand checked Becky for broken bones.
“I’m okay… really,” she said out loud in her uneven voice.
“Stay here,” Alice signed.
Luther was the first to drag himself out of the vehicle, and Alice followed close behind. Carrying a machine pistol, she crawled to a window, its glass shattered now, where she wormed through and stood up on the slightly rocking surface. She scooped up two sharp ice axes she found lying in the debris, for use as backup weapons. Shoving them into her back straps, Alice looked around.
There was a grinding sound, and she turned to see that the blades of the Spryte’s tracks were still going around, whirring away at the sky.
It was cold as death out here. Her teeth started to chatter; the gun felt icy in her fingers. The blizzard was waning, but there were still sheets of snow slanting down. She stared at the monolithic shape looming a dozen paces away—great streams of seawater poured off the steel monolith as it stabilized.
The monolith was the conning tower of a Typhoon Class submarine—it was one of the submarines from the Umbrella base.
Leon joined her, watching as a hatch opened at the bottom of the conning tower, and several figures emerged. One was the “Rain” clone trooper; another was Jill Valentine. Both held guns in hand.
The third was Ada Wong. She was still handcuffed, badly bruised and battered, but staring defiantly, spirit unbroken.
Leon turned to Alice.
“I told you she’d have a plan…”
This is her plan? She glanced at him. Was he serious?
Then Alice looked at the three figures by the submarine, and called out to Jill Valentine.
“Only the two of you?” She nodded toward the Rain trooper.
“It’ll be enough!” Jill responded. She and “Rain” both had the scarabs on their chests.
There was a moment when the weather forced hesitation on them—another burst of snowfall, carried on the howling wind. Alice had the machine pistol ready—and she was weighing how she might shoot Jill and the Rain clone without hitting Ada.
Rain reached into a pocket, and produced a cylindrical device—some kind of high-tech syringe. Alice could see a red fluid in the formula chamber. And then Rain stabbed the business end of the syringe into her own neck… and injected herself. Was there something writhing within that red fluid?
“The Las Plagas parasite,” Leon muttered.
And then “Rain” began to transform.
21
Rain’s whole body contorted. She seemed to swell up, her clothing splitting at the seams, and her eyes began to glow with an unearthly red light. Jill’s attention focused on her, and Ada Wong took the opportunity to run.
Before she had gone more than a step, Jill spun and viciously backhanded her, knocking her back. Ada fell heavily to the ice, stunned.
Alice’s weapon was up, aiming at Jill—but the security chief was already in motion, charging across the rocking ice at Alice, Leon, and Luther. The transfigured Rain sprinted alongside her.
Jill leapt into the air, flipping to make a difficult target, and Alice missed her shot—missed her by microns.
Luther raised his weapon, aiming at the Rain creature. Leon followed suit.
Still in mid-mutation, she was charging toward them. They fired, their rounds tearing into her, and she halted as they ran through their clips. She seemed to sway, and blood ran from her nose…
But she didn’t fall. Luther could see something moving under her skin—like dozens of small, sluglike creatures making their way from the center of her body to her extremities. Then they reached her fingers—and burst from her fingertips.
The things dropping from her fingertips… were bullets. The very slugs they had shot into her—she’d used her Las Plagas mutation to expel them from her body. They rattled on the ice, and Rain raised her head. She howled in triumph.
Leon recovered first, raising his gun to fire, trying to get a headshot—but the mutated Rain—eyes glowing, limbs swollen—was rushing them again. She was just too fast, and her spinning kick sent him flying back against the side of the overturned Spryte, making it resound with a hollow thump.
Jill Valentine closed on Alice, and with stunning speed knocked her weapons aside. Alice had the ice axes, which she plucked from her back straps. Jill had a telescoping metal attack rod in her hand, which she used to counter the flashing axes.
The wind blasted around them; snow swirled into their eyes, the ice was slippery and both of them struggled for good footing, but still they fought—even as Rain and Leon and Luther fought nearby.
Alice was slowed a bit by her injury and the medication she’d taken—and Jill seemed to anticipate every move she made. No matter what Alice did—and she used every trick she knew—Jill seemed to predict it, block her, or avoid the cut completely. It flashed through Alice’s mind that Jill’s scarab might be helping her, using its expert systems to anticipate Alice’s moves, prescribing defenses and counter attacks.
Back and forth they ranged, arms flashing, weapons making only minor strikes—but with the attack rod, even a glancing blow to the shoulder was excruciatingly painful. One struck just above the wound in her side, so that she gritted her teeth with agony, forcing herself to counter attack. Her axes slashed, cutting Jill’s left arm, but only slightly, but enough that the blood was flecking the snowy ice at their feet crimson.
She was being driven back by Jill’s attack, pushed toward the Spr
yte. In her peripheral vision she saw Leon and Luther’s fight with the Rain clone—the creature laughed nastily, and Alice suspected it was only toying with the two men. She felt the icy air stabbing her lungs as she labored to block Jill’s attacks, and it was getting harder by the second.
Alice’s arms were beginning to feel heavy as she tried to slash past Jill’s blur-fast defenses. She managed to nick Jill’s right ear—but that gave Jill an opening and she cracked Alice glancingly across her right cheekbone, laying open her skin and sending a thrill of pain that reverberated to the core of her being.
Normally Alice could detach herself from the pain, but that one was hard to ignore. She groaned and slipped to one side, almost losing her footing. Blood was slicking her neck, running onto her fingers. It was becoming difficult to hold onto the axes. They seemed to double in weight every few seconds, as Alice’s arms trembled with fatigue. Sweat trickled, mixing with blood, then freezing in the shrieking wind.
Seeing Alice panting for breath, increasingly on the defensive, Jill grinned in murderous glee and moved in for the kill, her scarab glowing as she attacked with resurgent fury.
The fight had been carried out almost as much by the scarab as by her own brain and body. She was in hyper-sync with the object, its impulses and flow of data making her like a ballet dancer in sync with music, and the scrolling computer text projected onto her eyes gave her data on her own condition.
ADRENALINE SURGE - 150%
Behind her opponent, the upturned tractor-tracks of the snowcat continued buzzing along, their blades still slashing at the sky. They, too, could be used as a weapon, if the occasion arose.
And Jill saw her opportunity. As Alice crossed her axes to block a particularly vicious down-slash, it left her middle unguarded. Jill threw her weight onto her right foot, cocked her left, and slammed it with all her strength into Alice’s chest.
She was sent crashing back through the windshield of the Spryte. Stunned, she lay inside in the broken glass. Jill heard the girl—the odd little clone with which Project Alice had saddled herself—shrieking from somewhere inside the big snowcat.
