by S. D. Perry
Except they won't call it an accident, because that could mean negligence on their part; no doubt they've already got a scapegoat lined up and ready to hang, some unlucky yes-man they can frame for the murder of thousands…
Not if she could help it, not if her friends could; one way or another, the truth was going to come out. It had to. Jill noticed a few tools lying around – a set of socket wrenches, a couple of crowbars and it occurred to her that it might be handy to pack a few things for the trol-ley. It'd suck to get there and end up needing a screw-driver or the like, something they'd have to come back for. She was a mechanical illiterate herself, but maybe Carlos had some experience… Thump! Thump! Thump! Jill dropped into a crouch behind the counter as soon as she heard the slow, heavy knocks at the garage's side door, insistent and steady. Nemesis? No, the rappings were loud but not power-ful, it was either a human or… "Uuhh." The gently hungry cry filtered through the door, joined by another, then a third, then a chorus. Virus carriers, and it sounded like a large group of them. Any relief she felt upon realizing that it wasn't the Nemesis quickly faded; a dozen zombies hammer-ing on the door was the equivalent of a flashing neon sign that read GOOD EATS.
And how exactly am I going to sneak out of here now?
Her simple plan, to hide until the Nemesis went away, had pretty much crapped out. She needed a new plan, preferably one she had more than a few seconds to map out.
So come up with something already. Unless you mean to go charging out there and start kicking ass.
Jill sighed, the low gnaw of dread in her stomach so constant that she no longer noticed it. Outside, the de-caying carriers continued to shuffle and cry, beating helplessly against the door. Might as well run through her options; she had a few minutes to kill.
They made it to the trolley without any trouble. Carlos was feeling hopeful as they staggered into the station yard lit by an expanse of merrily burning debris to one side – no zombies, no monsters, and Mikhail didn't seem to be getting any worse. The City Hall gate had been open, a dozen jewels set into a kind of clock on a nearby pedestal, which meant Jill had already gone through. Carlos had expected her to make it, but it was still a relief. "There it is," Mikhail said, and Carlos nodded, squinting as a gust of foul-smelling smoke washed over them. To their right was a grand old building, either the trolley station or the alleged City Hall. In front of them, past a stack of crates that blocked their path, was an old-fashioned trolley car, its red paint slightly faded. As they got closer, Carlos could see that a second car was attached, most of it hidden in the shadow of a building overhang. Jill was probably waiting in one of them. Carlos shoved a few of the crates aside with one hip, Mikhail steadying himself against the station wall. "Almost there," Carlos said. Mikhail smiled weakly. "Bet you'll be glad to dump my ass into a seat." "Be gladder to sit my own ass down. One-way ticket outta here." Mikhail actually managed a laugh. "I heard that." They moved beneath the overhang, Carlos searching the windows of both cars for movement. He didn't see anything; worse, he didn't feel anything. The place seemed totally deserted, still and lifeless.
Hope you 're taking a nap in there, Jill Valentine.
The sliding side door of the first car they reached was locked; to their mutual relief, the second wasn't. After giving the car a once-over to be certain it was empty, Carlos helped Mikhail aboard, getting him set-tled into a window bench seat. As soon as the platoon leader was lying down, he seemed to fall into a half swoon.
"I'm going to check out the second car, then see what I can do to get a few lights on in here," Carlos said. Mikhail grunted in response. Not surprisingly, Jill wasn't in the other car, either, but Carlos did find the electrical controls next to the driver's seat. At the touch of a button, a row of over-head lights switched on, illuminating an aging wood floor and red vinyl padded seats lining both walls. "Where are you, Jill?" Carlos muttered, feeling real worry for her. If something had happened, he was going to feel at least partly responsible for not accom-panying her back to the restaurant. Mikhail was barely conscious when Carlos checked on him, but it was more like sleep than coma. Until a doctor looked at the wound, rest was probably the best thing for him. There was an open control panel at the back of the car, which Carlos knelt to examine. His heart dropped when he saw that it was part of the primary power setup and that a few parts had been removed. He didn't know anything about cable cars, but it didn't take a genius to understand that you couldn't run a machine when the wires had been pulled, particularly on such an ancient system. It looked like there was a missing fuse, too. "Hijo de la chingada," he whispered and heard a feeble laugh behind him.
"I know just enough Spanish to know you shouldn'tkiss your mother with that mouth," Mikhail said."What's wrong?"There's a fuse missing," Carlos said. "And these cir-cuits have got to be shorted out. We'll have to bypassthem if we want to get this thing moving."Just northeast of here…," Mikhail started, but hehad to pause for a few breaths before going on.
"There's a gas station. Repair shop. It was one of thelandmarks on the city map, it's suburbs past that.Probably have equipment there."
Carlos thought about it. He didn't want to leave Mikhail alone, and Jill or Nicholai could show up any minute…… but we ain 't going no place without a power cable and a high amp fuse, and Mikhail's on a downhill slide; what choice have I got? "Yeah, okay," Carlos said lightly, walking over to Mikhail. He gazed down at him, concerned about the high color of his cheeks, the waxy pallor of his brow.
"Guess I'll go check that out – wanna come with?"Ha ha," Mikhail whispered. "Be careful."Carlos nodded. "Try to get some sleep. If anyoneshows up, tell them I'll be right back."
Mikhail was already slipping back into a doze."Sure," he mumbled.Carlos checked Mikhail's rifle to make sure it wasloaded, and he placed it next to the padded bench,within easy reach. He hunted around for something elseto say, some words of reassurance, and finally justturned and walked to the exit. Mikhail wasn't stupid, heknew what the stakes were.
His life, among other things.
Carlos took a deep breath and opened the door, pray-ing that the gas station wasn't too far away.
Chan was gone, and not only was there no way to tell where he was headed but Nicholai had missed him by bare minutes. The computer he'd apparently made his report from was still warm, the glass of the monitor crackling with static electricity. Nicholai impulsively scooped up the monitor and threw it across the room, but wasn't satisfied with its mundane explosion of cheap plastic casing and glass. He wanted blood. If Chan came back to the office, Nicholai would beat him severely before ending his life. He paced the small, heavily littered office, fuming.
He teases me with his ignorance. He is so stupid, so oblivious, how can he be so inferior and still be alive?
Nicholai knew that the thought wasn't strictly rational, but he was furious with Chan. Davis Chan didn't de-serve to be a Watchdog, he didn't deserve to live. Gradually, Nicholai took hold of himself, breathing deeply, forcing himself to count to a hundred by twos. It was still early in the game. Besides, Nicholai's plan de-pended on having information that Umbrella wanted and if he meant to steal that information, he had to allow some time for the other Watchdogs to collect it. The daily field reports were a bare summary of condi-tions and body count, used as much as a check-in as anything else; the real stuff was being stored on disk, transcribed from found documents or picked out of someone else's files, only downloaded by cell if the Watchdog considered it of critical importance.
And… while I'm waiting, I can check in with my comrades at the trolley.
Nicholai stopped pacing, struck by the realization that he had truly enjoyed his deception of Carlos and Mikhail. Somehow, that there were two of them had turned it into a more exciting game. Would they suspect him? What were they saying about his sudden depar-ture? What did they think of him?
And what would it be like to witness Mikhail's slow, excruciating loss of life, watch him lose his capacity for reason as the young protagonist Carlos vainly
strug-gles to beat the odds? Nicholai could disable the bell mechanism once they reached the clock tower… per-haps bravely volunteer to seek out the hospital, to bring back supplies… Nicholai laughed suddenly, a harsh barking sound in the stillness of the room. He had to kill Dr. Aquino the scientist who was supposed to report in from the hospital, the one working with the vaccine anyway, and he knew that Aquino had been ordered to see to the hospital's destruction before leaving Raccoon, to elimi-nate trace evidence from his research. And there was also a specific species of organic stored at the hospital that Umbrella had decided to abandon, the Hunter Gamma series, so blowing up the hospital meant two objectives met for the price of one. It seemed that the HGs weren't cost effective, al-though there had been serious disagreement within the administration about whether or not to destroy the pro-totypes. If Nicholai could lure Carlos into combat with one of them, he would have some valuable information of his own to sell… and he, too, would be meeting more than one objective with a single action. It all came together, there was a kind of symmetry to it all. He'd drop me entire scheme if anything went wrong, of course, or if he found it wouldn't mesh with his plans. He wasn't an idiot, but having a project to fill his downtime would keep him from becoming overly frustrated. Nicholai turned and started for the door, amused by his own indulgence. Raccoon City was like some haunted kingdom where he was ruler, able to do as he wished – anything he wished. Lie, murder, bathe in the glory of another man's defeat. It was all his for the tak-ing, and with a payoff at the end. He felt like himself again. It was time to play.
THIRTEEN
JILL HAD FINALLY DECIDED TO OPEN THE metal shutter and make a break for it when she heard shots outside, the high-pitched chatter of an assault rifle. To say she was relieved was an understatement; the relentless thumping of the mostly dead outside had been eating at her nerves, almost tempting her to shoot herself, just so she wouldn't have to hear it anymore
– and now, in a matter of seconds, it was quiet onceagain.She moved quickly to the side door in the garage,ducking beneath a disemboweled red compact on a liftand pressing her ear to the cold metal. All was silent,the virus carriers surely dead…Bam-bam-bam!Jill jerked back as someone hammered on the door,her heart keeping time.
"Hey, is somebody in there? The zombies are dead, you can open up now!"
No mistaking the accent; it was Carlos Oliveira. Re-lieved, Jill turned the lock, announcing herself as she threw the door open.
"Carlos, it's Jill Valentine."
She was happy to see him, but the look on his face was so sincerely elated that she felt almost shy sud-denly. She moved back from the door so he could step inside.
"I'm so glad you're okay, when you weren't at the trolley, I thought…" Carlos trailed off, his "thought" obvious enough. "Anyway, it's really good to see you again."
His apparently serious concern for her was a sur-prise, and she was uncertain how to respond – irrita-tion, that she was being patronized? She didn't feel irritated. Having someone interested in her well-being, particularly considering the kind of chaos they were in, was – well, kind of nice.
The fact that that someone is tall, dark, and hand-some isn't such a terrible thing, either, hmm? Jill in-stantly clamped down on the thought, cutting it short. True or not, they were in a survival situation; they could make eyes at each other later, if they made it out alive. Carlos didn't seem to notice her slight discomfort.
"So, what are you doing here?" Jill gave him a half smile. "I got sidetracked. Don't suppose you saw Frankenstein's monster wandering around out there?" Carlos frowned. "You saw him again?" "Not him, it. It's called a Tyrant, if it's what I think it is – or some variation, anyway. Bio-synthetic, ex-tremely strong, and very hard to kill. And it appears Umbrella figured out how to program it for a specific task – in this case, killing me." Carlos gazed at her skeptically. "Why you?" "Long story. The short answer is, I know too much. Anyway, I was hiding here, but…" Carlos finished for her. "But a gang of zombies showed up, making it hard for you to leave. Gotcha." Jill nodded. "What about you? You said you made it to the trolley, what you doing here?" "I ran into two other U.B.C.S. guys. One of mem got shot, he's still alive but not doing so great Mikhail. Nicholai – that's the other one – thought he knew where to get some explosives, so Mikhail and I went to the trolley to wait for him. It turns out that there's an evac on standby, if we can get to the clock tower and ring the bells. We ring, helicopters come."
He noticed Jill's expression and shrugged, grinning.
"Yeah, I know. It's some kind of computer signal, I don't know how it works. Great news, except to get the trolley running we're going to need a couple of things – a power cable and one of those old-fashioned electrical fuses, to start with. Mikhail told me there was a repair shop over here; he's one of the platoon leaders, he got a good look at a map before we landed…"
Carlos frowned, then nodded to himself as if he'd solved some puzzle. "Nicholai must have seen a map, too, that would explain why he didn't need directions." "Carlos, Mikhail, Nicholai – Umbrella doesn't dis-criminate based on nationality, does it?" Jill made the joke offhandedly, mostly to cover a deepening sense of unease. She thought Carlos was decent at heart, but two more Umbrella soldiers, one of them a platoon leader – what were the odds that all three were stand-up guys who had been misled by their employer? Um-brella was the enemy, she couldn't lose focus of that. Carlos was already walking away, his attention fixed on the raised red car. "If they were doing any electrical checks, there should be… there, that's what I'm look-ing for!"
It seemed that Carlos had seen the cable he wanted in the tangle of cords and wires spilling out from under the hood, some of them hooked to machines Jill didn't recognize, some just trailing on the oily ce-ment. "Careful," Jill said, moving to join him as he reached up and grabbed one of the cables, dark green. She had an instinctive mistrust of electrical equipment and vaguely believed that people who messed around with wires were just asking to be electrocuted. "No problem," Carlos said easily. "Only a real ba-boso would leave any of these hooked up to the…"
Crack! An orange-white spark spat out from one of the trail-ing wires, loud and bright and as explosive as a gun-shot. Before Jill could draw breath, the cement floor was on fire – no gradual build, no sense of expansion, it was just suddenly and completely ablaze, the flames two, three feet high and rising. "This way!" Jill shouted, running toward the open door that led into the office, the oil-fed fire blasting heat against her bare skin, when it hits the car's gas tank it's going to blow, we gotta get out of here…
Carlos was right behind her, and as they ran into the office, Jill felt her blood run cold. Screw the car, the car was nothing compared to what was going to happen when the fire got to the underground tanks in front of the station. A chain pulley hung next to the steel shutter that blocked the front door. Jill ran for it, but Carlos was one step ahead. He snatched the chain and pulled, hand over hand, the shutter inching slowly upward in spite of the frantic rattle of metal links. "Drop and crawl," Carlos said, raising his voice to be heard over the clanking, over the oceanlike rumble of spreading fire in the shop.
"Carlos, the tanks outside…" "I know, now move!"
The bottom of the shutter was a foot and a half from the ground. Jill dropped, flattening herself against the cold floor, shouting up to Carlos before she belly-crawled outside.
"Leave it, it's good enough!"
Then she was through, stumbling to her feet, reaching around to grab Carlos's hand and pulling him up after her. Inside the shop, something ex-ploded, a dull whoomp of sound, maybe a gas can or that cabinet full of machine oil, Jesus I must be cursed doomed something things keep blowing up around me… Carlos grabbed her arm, snapping her out of her wild-eyed freeze. "Come on!" She didn't need to be told twice. With the rising light pouring from the machine shop's windows, illuminat-ing in manic orange the heaped corpses of at least eight virus carriers, she ran, Carlos beside her. The gridlock was bad, the street jammed, no clear pa
th for them to make time. Jill could feel the seconds fly as they struggled through the maze of dead metal and blank, staring glass. The first real explosion and the sound of shattering windows behind them was too close, we're not far enough yet, but all they could do was what they were doing – that and pray that the fire would somehow miss the main tanks.
Maybe we should take cover, maybe we're out of the blast radius and…
Somehow, she didn't hear it – or rather, she heard a sudden, total absence of sound. Too focused on wend-ing through the silent traffic in the dark, the rush of blood in her ears, the passing time, perhaps. All she knew was that she was running, and then there was a mammoth wave of pressure that boosted her from be-hind, lifting her up and forward at once, the side of a beaten panel truck rushing at her and Carlos screaming something – and then there was nothing but blackness, nothing but a distant sun that lapped at the edges of her dark, sending her dreams of angry light.
Mikhail was sinking, descending into the fevered delirium that would undoubtedly kill him. All Nicholai had been able to get out of the dying man was that Car-los had gone to get equipment to repair the trolley, and that he would be back soon. If there was any more, Nicholai would have to wait until Mikhail's fever broke or Carlos returned, neither of which seemed likely. Mikhail was only going to get worse, and the deep, rumbling explosion that had quaked the ground beneath the trolley, that had preceded a lightening of the night sky to the north, suggested that there had been a fire at the gas station – not necessarily Carlos's fault, but Nicholai suspected that it probably was, and that Carlos Oliveira had burned to a crisp.
Which means I'll have to find a power cable myself if I want a ride to the hospital.
