Resident Evil. Retribution

by John Shirley

  “Ferguson!” she shouted. “Don’t!”

  He glanced back at her.

  “Lady, get back to the chopper! This is security business!” He turned to the Undead, who were pushing over the outer fence. They were starting to climb over it, as now that it was crimped down at a forty-five degree angle. Ferguson raised his M60. “I warned you, buzzard biscuits!”

  He pushed the muzzle of the gun through a gap in the chain-link fence and opened fire, strafing at about head height. A half-dozen Undead fell back, their heads shot open.

  “Wee-hoo!” Ferguson hooted.

  Suddenly forty more piled over the dead ones and rushed at the inner fence. They were in tattered military uniforms, their faces bloodied, many without lips, some with mandibles that extruded to yank at the fence’s links with unnatural strength. Ferguson had maddened them with his proximity and now they were working like a swarming carpet of army ants, seeking to break through.

  “Ferguson!” Alice shouted. “Get back to the chopper!”

  He turned her a furious scowl.

  “Lady, I thought I told you—”

  That’s when the inner fence collapsed, clamping down over Ferguson like the jaws of a steel spring-trap. He staggered back as it fell on him, trapping him from the waist down. His gun was trapped too, the muzzle lying next to him, pointing back toward Alice.

  He screamed, long and loud and shrilly, as the zombie—who’d once been a fat old two-star general— leapt on him, snarling, its mandibles ripping at his throat. Alice kicked hard at the general, breaking its neck. The walking corpse sagged on Ferguson, but the others were pressing through. She had just time to grab the muzzle of the gun and Ferguson’s belt of ready ammo magazines, and pull them free of the fence.

  But there was no time to get the gun into position. Two zombies who’d once been women, still partially in uniform, came side by side, looking almost like twins. Both caught bullets in the head, their skulls exploding under the impact.

  Alice leapt back to avoid the splashing gore.

  Then Jill, an assault rifle smoking in her hand, stepped up beside her.

  “Thanks,” Alice said as she brought the M60 up to face the charging Undead. “Nice shooting.”

  Jill didn’t answer, she was busy firing at the onrushing horde, skillfully strafing a line of zombie heads. The front line, pressing through the gap in the damaged fence, went down like harvested crops under a scythe—but more clambered over them.

  Alice propped the M60 on her hip, firing at the onrushing horde almost point blank, blasting rotting blood and yellow bone into the air, sending snarling creatures spinning into the sweet release of final death. But there were just too many of them, and she and Jill were going to run out of ammo pretty soon.

  They kept backing up toward the chopper.

  Alice felt something tug at her foot, looked down to see Ferguson, who’d gone Undead. Somehow he had squirmed out from under the fence and the bodies, half tearing his face off, and now he was clutching at her ankle, snapping at her toes.

  “Oh, Ferguson,” Alice said, shooting him in the head. “You moron—you just don’t listen.”

  Gunfire came from behind them, zipping past to take out a line of stumbling zombies. Alice worried about “friendly fire”—some of those rounds were going past pretty close. She turned, emptied her clip into the Undead, then shouted at the soldiers who were firing from the chopper.

  “Hold your fire till we get back there!”

  The gunfire slackened as she and Jill turned and sprinted. She hardly felt the pain from her cracked ribs—half-healed wounds, now—and the adrenaline rush pushed away the remaining pain.

  “You seem to be feeling better,” Jill commented.

  “Still feel like crap,” she replied. “But that’s kind of the high end of what I usually feel.”

  They got behind the three soldiers lined up in front of the chopper. Alice could see Becky peering out the hatch behind them, her expression a mix of relief and terror.

  One of the Undead was dragging a dead, half-eaten deer behind it. Some of them had extruded mandibles that waved in the air in front of their faces, others were stalking along with single-minded determination, trying to get to the bloody objects of their desire.

  Alice ran up the ramp, gently pressed Becky back inside, then slapped another magazine into her weapon. She fired—the high angle enabling her to avoid the soldiers below her—and nailed a couple of Undead halfway across the tarmac. One of them, though, kept coming. She’d shot it through its neck, and its head sagged to one side—hanging, it seemed, by an artery.

  She noticed Becky signing from the corner of her eye,

  “What?” she said, slapping in another magazine. Becky read her lips.

  “I want to learn how to do that!” She pointed at the gun.

  Alice nodded at her.

  “Some day soon,” she signed.

  No innocence left…

  It was a killing field, a charnel slaughterhouse floor, out on the tarmac, covered with bodies—some of them squirming, most of them unmoving—but still the Undead came. That was how they overwhelmed defenders. Sheer numbers. You could only pull the trigger so many times. And the Undead had no fear of bullets. Either they sought true death, or they were too blind with bloodlust to consider it.

  One of the soldiers ran out of ammo, and panicked, and turned to run up the ramp.

  “They’re coming! Get us out of here!” he shouted, his voice high-pitched.

  “The fuel line’s still hooked up!” Jill shouted. They didn’t dare take off. It could cause them to crash—or to explode into flame.

  Alice swore and jumped down off the ramp, ran to the back of the chopper, then fumbled at the interface where the fuel hose was plugged into the fuselage. It took her a moment to figure out how to release it— and then the Undead were upon her. Three of them, all burly soldiers once, now looking like drunks who’d taken terrible beatings, one boot off and one on, clothes in disarray, faces masked in blood. The one in the middle was extruding mandibles.

  Suddenly the fuel line came free, and gas was still gushing out the big plastic and fiberglass tube, pouring out on the ground. If she fired her gun now, it might turn the chopper into a fireball.

  One of the Undead grabbed her arm. Then Jill was running toward her, and she put a round into the side of the Undead’s head, putting him down.

  “Hold your fire, the fuel’s still flowing!” Alice shouted. She grabbed the hose and turned it toward the two closest Undead, who were snapping at her face. They snarled and clawed at their eyes. Then she tossed the end of the hose—heavier than it looked—at the wave of Undead running toward her so that it gushed under their feet. They splashed through the gasoline as she turned, shut the fuel gasket on the chopper, and ran.

  She felt and smelled hot rotten breath on the back of her neck.

  Alice reached the ramp, and jumped up beside Jill. The sergeant was shouting at the soldiers to get into the chopper. One of them made it, running up the ramp, but the other—a heavyset man who was covered with sweat—tripped and fell on his face. He was instantly swarmed by Undead, four of them biting into his legs, a fifth into the back of his neck, another crunching through his skull with its mandibles, ripping out his spine with its bare hands.

  His screams echoed across the mountainside.

  Alice shot him in the head to put him out of his misery and save him from turning into a zombie, then emptied her clip into the nearest group. She turned and jumped through the hatch as the ramp began to pull itself up.

  As the chopper began lifting into the air, a Filipino woman in a military nurse’s uniform leapt onto the ramp as it closed. The creature’s head was caught in the doorway between the ramp and the frame, growling, mandibles extruding and waving about. The helicopter angled upward, turning so that a gunner could fire at the Undead swarming the tarmac.

  The bullets struck the still spreading pool of fuel and it burst into flame, taking the refueling tank w
ith it. A lake of flame consumed the crowd of roaring Undead.

  Jill slammed at the head of the creature stuck in the frame of the door, crunched it to jelly, then knocked it free so it could fall into the lake of fire… and the hatch finally shut completely.

  Becky was crying. Alice took her in her arms and looked out the port at the fiery hillside receding below.

  She was going to Washington, D.C. after all.

  26

  Tom was looking through the periscope at the sea up above—they were just below the surface, rumbling along south-by-southeast. It was early morning out there. He could see seaweed, gulls, and a floating wreck of a ship—fortunately the ship was a mile to port, so it shouldn’t be a problem. He hadn’t figured out how to use the sonar yet, and was worried about running into debris…

  He heard Dori’s unmistakable footsteps, light and quick, on the deck.

  “Tom? There’s a trap door in the floor of food storage three,” she said. “I was looking for some food for dinner and I noticed it. I didn’t try to open it. But… what’s under there?”

  Tom frowned. He didn’t remember seeing a trap door in the deck there—but then he hadn’t been looking for one. There was a lot about this submarine he didn’t know yet.

  “Show me,” he said.

  He followed her down the ladder. She was getting to be a real sailor, and she slid down the metal banisters like a seasoned pro. He followed the slow way, trying not to bang his head on the sides of the hatch.

  Two more ladders and then they were on the level where the galleys and storage were found. She led the way along a narrow corridor and into storage three. At the back, on the deck between high metal shelves crowded with canned goods and boxes of freeze-dried food, was the trap door. It was closed, flush with the deck, and looked to be some kind of maintenance hatch, maybe for electrical connections.

  “Doubt there’s much under there but wires.”

  “Can we look?”

  “If I can get it open…”

  He knelt down, flipped up the latch. There was a little keyboard there, for punching in an access code. According to Umbrella’s manual, that was 758666. He typed it in, a green light flicked on, and a click sounded inside the trap door.

  Tom lifted the latch and the door swung back, lifted on its own servos. Below were a ladder and a narrow shaft, dropping just about seven feet down to what looked like a glass floor which emanated a mild light.

  “Ooh, look Tom!” Dori said.

  “Yeah. I didn’t see this mentioned in the manual. There was something about a sub-storage unit, but it was marked “No Entry.” I assumed it was nuclear fuel or something…”

  Suddenly a chill went through him. Could this be, in fact, some kind of plutonium storage hold? He looked around, saw none of the usual radiation warning signs he’d expect to see if there was radioactive material down there.

  “Well, this is a risk,” he said, “but we need to know as much as we can about this damned Rusky tub. I’m going down!”

  “What about me?”

  “You want your JudyTech to kick my ass five ways from Sunday? No way you’re going down there, not till I find out it’s safe, and maybe not even then. Don’t you move from that spot.”

  Grunting as he maneuvered his large, aging frame down the shaft, he descended, working his way down the ladder, barely fitting in the passage. As he did, he felt a deep, icy cold reaching up from below. When he reached the bottom he turned, looked at the glass floor under his feet—and swore blackly to himself.

  Under the glass he could see several heads, and the upper bodies of six figures. What had been men, but were Las Plagas Undead. Not the powerful kind like that one he’d seen on the sea floor—these were the regular soldier types that Umbrella had been experimenting with.

  They looked inert. Their eyes were cracked open and a sullen red glow seeped out from between the eyelids. He could see frost on the inside of the glass, around the edges, and on the eyelashes of the Undead. Could be they were in some kind of suspended animation—as neatly laid out as frozen chicken legs in a supermarket package.

  Zombies under glass, he thought.

  They looked for all the world like they’d been stored, like you’d store meat in a freezer. If Umbrella had put them there, then they were being kept to be weapons. Maybe part of a plan to bio-infect rival corporations… sneaking them into a rival base via submarine.

  He had to be sure he didn’t let them loose. Suppose he hit the controls on the computer, somewhere, and accidentally released them? Tom shook his head, baffled about what to do.

  “What is it?” Dori called down impatiently. He almost told her that it was nothing she need concern herself with. But he didn’t want to lie to her. She did need to be concerned about it. If anything happened, she should know what was going on.

  “Come on down and see,” he said. “But don’t touch anything.”

  She climbed down the ladder, and looked at the faces under glass.

  “Oh!”

  “Yeah, oh! Las Plagas zombies, that’s what they are. I’m thinking of sealing this up so they can’t get out… I mean, if anything wakes them up.”

  “They’re asleep?”

  “The cold seems to keep them in some kind of what-you-call-it, suspended animation. Come on, that’s enough. Let’s get out of here.”

  Tom watched her climb up the ladder, then climbed up after her, closed and locked the trap door. But he had a strong feeling that wasn’t the end of it. Once you opened Pandora’s box…

  Jack and Uncle Chung were standing on the pier of Avalon’s marina, shivering a little in the early morning chill as they gazed out over the channel between the island of Catalina and Los Angeles. There was a boat coming and the sight of it—the possibilities—made his heart thump with excitement.

  To their right rocked eight abandoned boats of varying sizes, tied up to the marina’s floating slips. To their left was the harbor. Sea gulls gave their eerie cries, flying under the hazy, lowering clouds, and a pelican swam lazily by. Both Jack and Chung had their M1s on straps, over their shoulders.

  “Maybe that’s what you saw in your dream,” Jack said. “Maybe it wasn’t a submarine at all.”

  “Perhaps,” Chung said. “These things are not always literal. It could be a symbol… but…” He shook his head. “It was a submarine. When I woke I had the taste for truth in my mouth.”

  “What’s the taste for truth?”

  “Something you have to learn, over time. So anyway, it looks like someone is driving that boat. The Undead can drive nothing. Except—on one of the radio transmissions I heard rumors of something, another kind. But I’ve never seen one capable of driving anything. Or doing anything but clawing and biting.”

  “So they’re not Undead—then we should welcome them!”

  “We shall see how happy we are to see them… when we meet them. There are many kinds of men, many kinds of women.”

  It was a cabin cruiser, throwing a white, bifurcated wake that was a novelty these days. There were so few boats being piloted on the seas anymore, and Jack could just make out a tall gangly man, with a small automatic weapon in hand, at the prow of the boat. Next to him was a woman with wide hips and shoulders, wearing skintight leopard-print pants and a jean-jacket top, a pump shotgun in her hands. Her hair was a blousy bleached corona waving in the wind of their approach.

  “Rough customers?” Bim asked, walking up the pier behind them.

  “Can’t tell,” Jack said. “I’m just glad to see anybody.”

  “Let’s move onto the boat, over here,” Uncle Chung said, nodding toward the sailboat to their right. It had a superstructure that would offer some cover if they needed it, but Jack didn’t see why they should. Why would anyone, really, want to attack you, except for the Undead? That was one thing he’d always figured must be true—survivors must be united in having to fight the Undead. Everybody alive was on the same side now, he figured.

  But he didn’t know for sure.
These were the first new people he’d seen since the last boats had left the island. So he followed Bim and Uncle Chung onto the boat.

  “Doesn’t it look kind of, I don’t know, hostile or something,” he said, “if we take up a firing position over here?”

  “All in how it’s done,” Uncle Chung said calmly. He was always calm, no matter what happened. Though he’d wept when he had to shoot the walking corpse of his sister, he had done the shooting calmly.

  They stood side by side on the slightly rocking deck of the sailboat, the cabin’s superstructure poking up enough to give them cover from the neck down. Silently, fascinated, they watched the battered white and red cabin cruiser chug up to the pier. The lanky guy climbed out and tied up loosely. He was a grimy man, with a bunch of tattoos, in a grimy T-shirt and military trousers tucked into his boots. His gray-brown hair fell greasily to his shoulders. Over one shoulder was a submachine gun on a leather strap.

  The woman grinned at them. She had sunken eyes and looked to be missing most of her teeth. Only a couple showed up in that grin. She had tattoos on her neck that seem to have been crossed out. A big man stepped out of the pilot house of the cabin cruiser. He looked Hispanic, was heavyset, almost obese.

  How does anyone find enough fattening food to get obese anymore? Jack wondered. They must’ve found an old junk-food warehouse.

  The Hispanic man had the number 3 tattooed on his cheek. He had big jug ears, and dangling earrings made of bullet cartridges. He wore a grimy silver-colored track suit and only when he stepped onto the pier did Jack see his weapon—the biggest pistol Jack had ever seen.

  “That pistol’s a Desert Eagle,” Bim muttered. “Where’s he get ammo for that thing?”

  The three strangers were about thirty feet away, on the other side of the pier, staring. Finally the woman spoke.

  “They got a young adult teeny boy, there.” She chortled, at that.

  “Hey there!” the Hispanic guy said, stepping forward, waving, smiling big. He had gold coating all his teeth, and it glinted in the morning light. “Good to see some real people around! Don’t see many!” He had a slight Mexican accent.