by John Shirley
“Mommy!”
And in the background, ice floes crunched and squeaked against one another; the two men gasped and cursed; a gull squalled somewhere overhead. But that was all background noise. Jill was keenly focused on the business of killing. She reached through the broken glass, grabbed Alice’s legs, and pulled her back out into the icy wind
Leon and Luther were running out of steam, too.
Luther’s arms felt like sandbags as he raised them up to block their attacker. He was trying to see where they’d dropped their weapons… if he could grab one, shove it against her head, blow her brains out, she wouldn’t be able expel those bullets.
But she never gave him the moment he needed. And he only had one arm to work with.
Rain was laughing at them, slapping them around, and Leon, enraged, unleashed a punishing series of kicks, punches, and blocks, all with dizzying aggression. But the Las Plagas mutation hardly reacted to his onslaught. It laughed in his face, its swollen features swelling even more, its red eyes glowing a brighter crimson. She blocked him and drove him back with pile-driver fists, so that he staggered against Luther.
Got to find a weapon, Luther thought. He glanced desperately around. The snowfall had covered most everything—at least one weapon, too, had slipped through a crack in the ice, to be lost in the sea.
The Rain creature saw him fumbling in the snow, stepped in, and backhanded him hard, sending him flying back. He managed to keep his feet but his head was still spinning, he tasted blood in his mouth, and he choked as he tried to warn Leon, who was circling.
The creature was whipped around and slammed Leon hard in the chest with its right boot, sending him hurtling backwards through the air till he came to a stop on red and black metal: slammed hard into the conning tower of the submarine. Then the creature spun again and struck Luther—knocking him off his feet.
He lay there, trying to get the strength to stand…
The Rain mutant seemed to think he was done for. It turned away…
Alice got to her feet. She no longer had her ice axes, but she managed to use her fists to defend herself against some of the body blows that Jill was raining on her.
Seeing Alice react to strikes against the wound in her side, the trooper grinned sadistically and began to aim more and more blows there, making blood spurt freshly once more from the ruptured dressing. Alice blocked a blow of Jill’s fist—but couldn’t stop the metal rod from striking home.
The pain hit her like a stroke of lightning, making her arch her back, rising up through her to flood her brain with red glare… the color of a Las Plagas monster’s eyes. And then she fell to her knees, pitching forward, almost losing consciousness.
An instant later she aware that she was being lifted up by the throat. Jill turned her face toward the tracks that had driven the Spryte across snow and ice. The razor sharp steel blades, designed to penetrate hard packed snow and ice, were still spinning. They would slash her face into chopped blood-and-bone salad in seconds, if she allowed it.
Alice was jolted into consciousness at the sight. She grabbed Jill’s wrists, and struggled to pull the trooper’s hands off her neck. The pressure was making flickers appear before her eyes, cutting off her breath.
Then something occurred to her.
I’m fighting the wrong thing…
She let go of Jill’s wrists, resisting only with her lower body, reaching downward instead…
Jill Valentine chortled, certain she’d won now. She started to force Alice into the blades. They were less than an inch away…
And then she gasped—as Alice clamped her bloody hands onto the scarab fixed to Jill’s chest. She jerked it away, bringing with it tiny scraps of bloody flesh. Alice tore the scarab entirely free—and immediately Jill slumped to the ground, convulsing.
Alice straightened up and tossed the scarab away. It fell into the snow, and then flipped itself over. It started to scuttle about on tiny mechanical legs, seeking its host. Once it sensed Jill, it scurried back across the snow toward her.
Alice reached for Jill’s holster and pulled out her gun. She aimed it at the mind-control device just as the small bug-shaped robot leapt, eager to fix itself once more to the trooper’s nervous system. Several rapid-fire shots caused the scarab to explode in shiny, sparking fragments of titanium and glass.
The sound of a gunshot brought Luther partly to his senses.
His eyes fluttered, and his head hummed—but he didn’t want to move. He wanted to lie there and let the numbness that was gripping his limbs have its way, and take him into the warm dark escape of death. Every joint ached, and his damaged arm was screaming with pain.
But his friends needed him. Leon and Alice. The kid.
Had to get up…
Get your ass up, Luther.
Gritting his teeth he placed his feet under him and stood, looking blinkingly around. Saw the Rain mutant stalking over toward Leon.
Leon was slumped at the base of the submarine conning tower, half covered with falling snow, coughing blood.
Luther looked desperately around. There was only one thing handy—fallen from the overturned Spryte— that he could use as a weapon. He picked up the metal object and staggered, as quickly as he could, over to the mutant, coming up behind it, his feet slipping on ice.
At the same time Leon got shakily to his feet, seemed to gather his strength as the mutant loomed over him. He swung a haymaker at the creature’s face, but it caught his fist in a swollen, vein-covered hand, its eyes glowing brightly as it tightened its grip.
Luther, slipping up behind the creature, could hear the bones breaking. Leon gasped in pain and went to his knees. Rain towered over him, raising her fist to finish him off.
But Luther was within reach. He swung the fire extinguisher with all his strength, cracking the mutated trooper clone hard in the side of the head, breaking her skull, spattering blood.
She fell off balance, stunned…
“Not bad, huh?” Luther said, smiling weakly at Leon.
“For… an advisor,” Leon managed.
Luther looked at the mutant, and saw that the damage he’d done to Rain’s head was healing. The Las Plagas parasite was rebuilding her skull from within. Before he could react the creature stood up once more, glowering at him with burning red eyes.
Only one thing to do, he thought. Smash that skull to jelly. Crush it into something that can’t be repaired. So Luther brought the extinguisher up, readying himself to hit the creature again.
But the mutant moved lightning fast, knocking the extinguisher away with one hand. With the other it put all its mass into an open palm strike, directly to his chest. The impact was so powerful that he knew—instantly—that all the bones of his chest were collapsing. He could feel the shockwave moving through his chest, shattering ribs and pulverizing his lungs—and reaching his beating heart.
He could feel his heart’s last beats.
The very last beat.
And then—his heart stopped. That warm darkness he’d wanted just a few minutes ago was back, swirling around him, and this time he had no choice but to go with it.
The was only time for one last thought.
Alice…
22
Leaning on the Spryte, getting her strength back, Alice looked up just in time to see Luther’s body buckling under a devastating blow. She had seen many men die—and she knew just what this meant.
When she saw him collapse, utterly empty of life, she knew this time he was finally gone.
“Luther!” she shouted, knowing it would do no good.
Then Alice raised Jill’s gun and ran toward the monster that had once been a pretty clone named Rain. She fired as she came.
Jill Valentine, the former Commander of Security for Umbrella Prime, was trying to remember who she was.
She lay there, shivering in the cold, huddled against the wind, lying fetuslike in the snow. Her chest ached, throbbed, and bled where something had been removed. She felt drugged, but sh
e also felt the influence passing out of her.
With the scarab gone, her memories seemed both distant and tantalizingly near. She could almost touch them.
Who am I?
It began to seep back to her. Her childhood. Her interest in police work. Raccoon City. Her signing up with…
With what?
S.T.A.R.S. Special Tactics And Rescue Service. A branch of the Racoon City police.
Arklay Mountains. She’d been a rising star in S.T.A.R.S. until then. Then the Arklay Mountains incident—and Leon Kennedy. His death… was it real? They’d blamed her.
Umbrella—trying to control her—with money, at first. Using their influence to destroy her. Then taking her prisoner, and controlling her mind.
What had they made her do?
She had a nightmarish memory of trying to murder someone—to murder them horribly. Trying to force their face into the grinding blades of the Spryte’s tractor treads. And it was someone she respected— even liked.
It was Project Alice.
Just… Alice.
A voice—the uneven voice of a deaf child who’d learned to speak by feeling the vibration of her voice box. It was crying out, somewhere. She couldn’t understand the voice clearly, but she heard one word—
“Mama…!”
Something piquant in the voice made her open her eyes—and she saw someone she knew. Was that her? Wasn’t that… Alice?
Jill sat up, shaking with cold, and brushed ice crystals from her eyelashes, watching as Alice ran, firing the auto pistol at the monstrous creature that had once been designated “Rain.” Formerly one of her troopers—ordered to taint herself with the Las Plagas parasite. The creature was swollen, vein-marbled, losing some blood but seeming to absorb the bullets that struck her. And then spitting them out, some of them issuing from its mouth, some from its fingers.
The creature had its right hand raised, with an open palm—and Jill knew what that meant. The death strike. Alice was shooting, trying to destroy the creature’s brain—but not hitting it straight on enough.
And then… Alice was within reach. She tried to block the blow, but failed, and it slammed her in the chest, open handed with precision and power.
Alice gasped—and fell to her knees, choking. Blood seeped from between her lips.
Jill got to her feet. Her legs were like jelly under her. She found her back-up pistol in a holster. Held it in her shaky hand—and didn’t think she could fire it accurately. Not yet. Anyway, it seemed to be too late. Alice’s eyes were glazing… she seemed to be dying, or perhaps already dead.
The creature was turning away from her.
Jill looked around. She saw nothing but cold emptiness… the inevitability of death. She saw ice, and the flying clouds, and snaking spits of snow coming down, and the deathly cold dark sea. The man called Leon, dying, and Luther’s corpse. Ada Wong, trying feebly to get up, but she probably wouldn’t make it. She would likely die here, and so would they all.
She could feel it creeping into her flesh, her bones. She could see it like a stark message written on the barren face of the world.
And then—Alice raised her head. And she struggled to her feet. She raised her fists, to defy the creature who’d been Rain. Seeing that, Jill felt a sudden surge of hope. If Alice could live through that, if life could stand up to death even now…
The Las Plagas horror turned back, its eyes glowing, the veins throbbing on his swollen head and neck, and it struck. It hammered Alice with a flurry of blows, ending with a spinning kick that sent her flying.
As she was flung through the air, Jill saw the weapon she had tried to use, slipping from her hand, whirling away, to be lost in a crack in the ice.
And then Alice fell heavily on an ice floe, groaning…
But still she tried to get up, tried to fight, as the creature came stalking over her. The ice creaked under its feet, but held.
Jill knew, then, what had to be done.
“Alice!” she shouted, her voice ringing out over the frozen sea.
The woman looked blearily in her direction. Jill marshaled her strength, and threw the gun. It hit the ice, skidded, and slid over—just as Rain was about to strike.
She snatched it up.
Eyes shining with a fierce red glow, the monster sneered gratingly.
“You can’t kill me!”
“I don’t need to,” Alice said, hoarsely. Then she fired, using most of the clip—but not at the creature. She fired at the ice under its feet, blasting a line of holes in the frozen surface.
Already weakened by the submarine, the pack ice cracked—and broke apart. The mutant roared in fury, but its roar became a gurgle as it suddenly slipped into the water, as quickly as dropping through a trap door. “Rain” was gone from sight—then rose up again thrashing, grabbing at floating pieces of ice, trying to claw its way back onto the pack.
But the creature wasn’t alone.
A pair of zombies, pale grey and wearing Russian military uniforms, appeared in the water. Then they were clinging to her, biting her, dragging her down. The Rain thing tried again to drag itself out of the icy death trap, but two more of the Undead appeared, grasping her limbs and pulling her back.
“I’m coming back for you!” the mutant howled, locking eyes with her intended prey. “You wait! I’m coming back!”
“Good luck with that,” Alice replied. The creature clawed futilely for purchase, and then was dragged underneath once more.
Bubbles seethed where it had been, and then even those were gone.
Alice knelt by the edge of the ice, shivering, and looking down.
“Mom!”
Jill and Alice both turned to see the little girl, picking her way across the ice toward her mother, signing frantically.
“I’m okay,” Alice signed. “Don’t… worry.”
Alice didn’t look okay. She looked as if she was on death’s door. Becky stared at the freshly bleeding wound on Alice’s side.
“You’re hurt!” she said, repeating it with hand signs.
“I’m just fine. I’ll be okay…”
The storm, which had seemed to slacken away, now appeared to intensify with a booming sound and the whipping up of snow in a new surge of wind. A drumming sound made them look at the sky—where floating lights illuminated the storm, like a vision of a U.F.O., a giant spaceship descending from the clouds.
Jill made herself stagger over to Leon, to see if he was still alive. He was. She reached down, helped him to his feet.
“So you’re free again,” he said into her ear, as she helped him stand. “Don’t leave Ada behind…”
“I won’t,” she responded. They moved painfully, like two injured people in a three-legged race, picking their way over the cracks toward Alice and Becky. They stopped to help Ada to her feet. and the three of them continued on.
“What is it?” Becky said, signing the words and saying them as best she could. She pointed upward.
“It’s help,” Leon told her, as he and Jill staggered up, dragging Ada between them. “You’re going to be okay.” Alice smiled weakly and tried to stand—but then her eyelids fluttered… and she fell. Becky knelt to try to help her.
Jill could see clearly now: helicopters. Several of them. Their rotors were sending flurries of snow across the ice, a miniature mechanical storm in themselves. As they moved in, Jill prayed that they were friends.
“The question is,” JudyTech insisted, “do you know how to pilot this thing? They’ve abandoned it, it’s all ours, but we can’t survive in here indefinitely.”
She and Tom stood in the submarine’s “attack center,” the equivalent of a ship’s bridge. It lay under the conning tower, at the bottom of the craft. Tom had just explained that it was the nerve center of the vessel.
They didn’t understand much of what they saw, looking around the intricately outfitted room, but she had some scientific training, And Tom had some engineering training. So maybe…
“Well, Tom?” she persiste
d. “Can we drive this thing?” She was wearing an old Russian sailor suit, and was staring at him expectantly.
“Ah, well,” Tom said, “I think I can get it under the water a way. It’s just a matter of the right filling of the ballast tanks. And I think I can point it pretty good, too.” He cleared his throat, noticing she still had the gun with her, tucked in the waistband. Tom still wore his coveralls, though he’d made a point of washing them. “Where’s the girl at, by the by?”
“She’s taking a nap in the crew quarters.” Judy said. “Tom—if this thing is nuclear… I mean, what if we make a mistake? Run it too hot or something?”
“You know, the nuclear power’s not as complicated as it sounds,” he replied. “Really it’s just a complicated steam engine. The nuclear reactors heat up water, that turns the turbines. It’s just that they don’t need diesel, and it provides a lotta power. I’ve watched them start ’er up more than once, and Umbrella put a manual on the computer. Now, some of it’s Greek to me, but I’m pretty sure I can use it to get the thing down forty feet, maybe fifty, get us under the ice. We’re out on the northern edge of the Pacific Ocean, here, and if we head south, why, we can maybe find somewhere safe… someplace we can fetch up, as my old dad would say.”
Now she was giving him that fish-eye again, that funny look she gave him sometimes. Kind of amused, kind of suspicious.
“You talk a lot of ‘we,’” Judy said slowly. “I’d like to think we can trust you. It helped that you gave me the gun back. But… we’re two females, and we’re alone in the world.”
“I know,” he said. “Seems like there’s nothing in the world but things to be afraid of. But there’s a chance for something more, seems to me. Look here, Judy, we should stick together. There ain’t very many real, human people left… people without those damned scarabs on ’em, folks who aren’t trying to bite your face off.
“We got to stick together, or no one gets past this thing. And the whole… the whole history, the whole…” He struggled to find a way to say it. “The whole history of the human race—it’ll mean nothing but a big bad joke. If we’re all afraid of each other all the time—life’s got no meaning! Because what gives it meaning is…” He cleared his throat again and looked away from her. “…is other people.”
