Genesis

by Keith R. A. DeCandido

  “No. Spence and I had—other things to deal with yesterday.”

  “All day long?” Lisa grinned mischieviously. “I didn’t know he had that kind of stamina.”

  “Very funny.”

  Lisa noticed that Alice didn’t exactly deny her lascivious interpretation of what Alice and Spence had been doing all day. After all, they were both in that decadent mansion, most of their days were spent doing jackshit, and Spence was very easy on the eyes. Not her type, really, but she could see how someone in close proximity to him every day—especially one sharing the pretense of matrimonial bliss—might want to see if his body looked as good out of the tight jeans as it did in them.

  She shook off the thoughts quickly. Ever since she and Nick split, she’d had an unhealthy preoccupation with other people’s sex lives, which she mostly attributed to a lack of occupation with one of her own. Not that she’d had a shortage of offers, starting with Casey Acker shortly after her first day’s human-resources orientation session, and proceeding to potential dating partners who didn’t make her want to actually projectile-vomit, but she’d rebuffed all of them.

  After all, she had a job to do. Forming attachments would not be a good idea. That would make it harder to do what needed to be done.

  Whenever she felt herself weakening, she thought of Fadwa.

  After that, it was easy.

  Moving back to the left-hand window, she typed in another series of commands. The random character generator created a new password for the AABERNATHY account. Lisa Alt-Tabbed over, typed the username and then D84GTKVB8.

  Then she hesitated.

  Taking a deep breath and blinking twice, she hit ENTER.

  A wealth of information appeared on the right-hand side of her screen for about a second. Lisa had a phenomenal memory, and she tried to take in as much as possible.

  After that second, the screen went blank, replaced with two familiar words: ACCESS DENIED.

  As expected.

  But at last, after a month, her brilliant idea had paid off.

  Everything Lisa had told Alice was absolutely true. Forcing people to change their passwords on a weekly basis did wonders for keeping the Red Queen secure. The more one had to change one’s password, the more creative those passwords became, and creative passwords were much harder to hack into.

  However, that was not why she insisted on the policy.

  Because it wasn’t so much that people were stupid, as they were lazy. Too lazy to read memos, too lazy to follow the instructions in them—especially when most of them had other concerns relating to the high-intensity work they were doing here in the Hive. When you were trying to come up with the next great medical marvel or to fulfill a government contract while being harassed by your supervisor—herself being harassed by some four-star general in the Pentagon—remembering to change your password generally was pretty low on your to-do list.

  Which was exactly what Lisa was counting on.

  What she had just gone through with Alice, she had gone through with half the employees of the Hive. Each time, Lisa had to reset the password and test it.

  And each time, she’d been able to see the information that the person in question was trying to access.

  Most of the time, that information was harmless, personal, uninteresting, or all three. Occasionally, it would be something she wasn’t allowed to see, although still uninteresting and or harmless.

  On the latter occasions, she would still catch a glimpse of it before security kicked in. Even the Red Queen was only so fast, and it took her a second to recognize that there were two linked terminals, but only one was attached to a user authorized to view the information on the monitor. At that point, Lisa would get the ACCESS DENIED message.

  This time, though, she had something.

  “Thanks a lot, Lisa,” Alice said. “Hey, listen, you want to have lunch on Thursday? You’re up for your next city trip then, right?”

  Lisa frowned. Umbrella knew better than to think that they could keep people holed in the ground indefinitely. Even the false images in the windows could only go so far. Every employee was allowed to go topside once every two weeks, be outdoors, see the sun, breathe air that wasn’t recycled.

  Lisa had heard through the grapevine that there had been a fight over that interval among the powers-that-be of Umbrella. Some hardliners didn’t want to let anyone out at all, citing the delicate nature of the work they did as reason not to risk any kind of security breach. Others pointed out that the people they were doing that delicate work for would probably not be terrifically appreciative if the people doing that work went stark raving mad, which they would if they were forbidden from leaving the Hive for five years running—or even one month running.

  Two weeks had apparently been a compromise. Lisa’s two weeks were indeed coming up on Thursday, but she was surprised to hear that Alice knew that.

  Then again, Alice was the head of security for the Hive, and one of the top brass in Security Division generally.

  “Sure,” Lisa said. Maybe then she could get the truth about her and Spence’s “day-long project” out of her.

  “Great. We’ll meet at the train station at eleven on Thursday.”

  “Okay,” Lisa said.

  The “train station” was the terminus of the train that went from the secret entrance under the mansion to the Hive’s topmost floor. That was the access point to the Hive for most people, as well as the tube that went straight up to the basement of Umbrella’s corporate headquarters in Raccoon City. The latter, however, was only for emergencies and for the higher-ups in the company. Lesser mortals like Lisa had to take the train to the mansion, get cleared by the “happy couple” in the mansion—at present, Alice and Spence—and then depart. On the off-chance that they were seen, they would simply be friends visiting the reclusive couple in the mansion, but that rarely happened. The mansion’s reputation—and very real threat of the law being called on trespassers—generally kept prying eyes away.

  Sometimes reputation was the best security.

  Lisa removed the headset and hit the END button on her phone. Then she stared at the monitor for several seconds.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “No,” Lisa lied to the AI. “I think we’ve nailed this down.”

  “Agreed. Let’s hope it doesn’t happen again.”

  With that, the face of a ten-year-old-child-cum-Frankenstein-monster winked out from the upper-left-hand corner of Lisa’s flatscreen.

  Lisa had to resist the urge to stick out her tongue at the faded image.

  Instead, she sat back in her vinyl chair—a product of PosturePerfect, a subsidiary of the Umbrella Corporation, designed to be ergonomically correct and damned comfortable—and thought about what she had seen on Alice’s monitor.

  It had contained two graphics and a huge block of text. She hadn’t caught all the text, but several words jumped out at her: “T-virus,” “anti-virus,” and “fatalities.” All three words showed up several times, in fact.

  The graphics, however, were of more immediate concern. One showed a white rabbit being injected with some kind of blue substance.

  As for the other one . . .

  The more Lisa thought about it, the more ridiculous it seemed, and the more she thought that perhaps she had been imagining things.

  But that, she feared, was wishful thinking. The graphic had taken up about a third of the available space in the window.

  It was like something out of a nightmare. Or one of those old monster comic books Matt had collected when they were kids.

  Nominally, it had a human shape: two arms, two legs, though its spine was bent in such a way that it could move on all fours—which it appeared to be doing in the graphic. It had skin like a rhinoceros’s, plated and faceted, only it was more brown and red than the gray of a rhino. Lisa wasn’t sure, but it looked like there were bones sticking out amidst the corded skin. The thing’s fingers and toes ended in huge claws that looked like they could rend st
eel.

  What Lisa remembered most clearly from her brief glimpse, however, was the head.

  It had a huge, squared-off mouth, filled with jagged teeth and a tongue that looked like a snake had taken up residence in the thing’s mouth.

  Scariest of all were the creature’s eyes.

  It didn’t have any.

  At once, Lisa Broward was thrilled and scared.

  Thrilled because she had finally stumbled onto something big, something that Matt and his friends could use to expose Umbrella for the scum-sucking weasels they were. Creating fatal viruses was not part of Umbrella’s corporate mission statement as far as she knew, and she was pretty sure it wasn’t particularly legal either. Not to mention whatever that—that thing was.

  Scared because anything that could create a fatal virus and a monster out of every child’s nightmare may not have been someone she wanted to go up against.

  Then she thought of Fadwa.

  After that, everything was easy.

  FIVE

  LISA BROWARD HAD KNOWN SHE WAS GOING to have to make sacrifices when she moved from New York to Raccoon City, but the one she had least expected to have an impact was the one that wound up hitting her the hardest: the lack of decent restaurants.

  For all that non–New Yorkers complained about the price of a dinner at the average Big Apple eatery, the fact of the matter was, at least as far as Lisa was concerned, you got what you paid for. In terms of sheer variety and quality, nothing beat New York City restaurants for high-caliber cuisine. The only exceptions she had ever been willing to make were for Mexican food—that was better in Southern California and Texas—and barbecue—superior in the midwest, especially Kansas—but that was it.

  So she knew that transplanting to Raccoon City would mean a serious downturn in the quality of food, even more so given that she’d be spending most of her time in the Hive. True, its dining facilities were infinitely superior to those of other office cafeterias where she’d choked down fare during her career, but those offices were all in midtown Manhattan. All it took was a phone call, and the nearest gourmet eatery would deliver victuals of almost any kind right to the front desk of the building. Or, time permitting, she could go out for a sit-down meal at a superior Greek, Italian, French, Indian, or Japanese restaurant. For a time, she worked close to a magnificent Sri Lankan place. Sometimes, in her dreams, she could still smell the spices . . .

  Even on those occasions when she was able to go out for food, however, Raccoon City proved to be a wasteland. The “fine Italian dining” served a tomato sauce that would be deemed unacceptable at a neighborhood pizza joint in New York, the one and only time she ventured into a sushi place she left with an upset stomach gained after eating the most doleful looking fish she’d ever seen, and the grape-leaf salad she’d had at an “authentic” Greek eatery wasn’t fit for Umbrella’s guard Dobermans. It had gotten to the point where she would gravitate toward fast food and family restaurants, if for no other reason than her expectations were considerably lower and therefore she wouldn’t be disappointed. And those places, at least, didn’t charge exorbitant amounts for their relentlessly average foodstuffs.

  It was, therefore, with a due sense of ennui that she approached her Thursday meal with Alice Abernathy. Her main reason for wanting to go along was the company, not the food. Plus a desire to get out of the hole for a day.

  Since employees who worked in the Hive had no particular reason to follow the traditions of the Monday-through-Friday workweek, they worked in staggered and rotating schedules. Everyone was scheduled for only five eight-hour workdays per week, though overtime was a near-universal constant, especially when project deadlines and the end of the fiscal year loomed.

  But which two days a week one got off varied, thus allowing there to be work going on within the Hive seven days a week. At present, Lisa’s schedule called for her to work Saturdays through Wednesdays, with Thursday and Friday constituting her weekend. On some of those weekends, she had to work, of course, but for some, she was permitted to go topside and actually see the sun. This was one of those weekends, and she was grateful to Alice for giving her a reason to get out into the world for a little bit.

  Especially after seeing that—that creature.

  She’d thought of little else since seeing it, and was no closer to figuring out what it was, nor what it had to do with a T-virus or an anti-virus. Linking the image to that of “fatalities” was less of a stretch, though—she couldn’t imagine that thing leaving anything in its wake but fatalities.

  The question foremost in her mind was: what was it? Genetically engineered monster? Mutated animal? Mutated human? Alien borrowed from Roswell? What?

  She shoved those thoughts—and thoughts of Fadwa, which never stayed shoved for long—to the back of her mind as she disembarked from the train that ferried her from the Hive to the mansion. The train was a one-car affair, mostly one big cargo space that could ferry equipment in bulk as well as up to a hundred people—if they crammed rush-hour close to each other—back and forth from the mansion to the Hive. The train didn’t come equipped with seats, but given the short duration of the trip, that wasn’t much of a hardship.

  Alice was waiting, a smile on her face. She wore an elegant light-brown, ankle-length leather coat with a high collar made of some kind of fleece. Late fall in Raccoon City meant temperatures in the forties. Lisa herself was wearing her battered old winter coat over a turtleneck sweater. She had gotten it at a street fair for only twenty bucks the weekend after she left Nick. With her salary she could have easily afforded a coat as nice as Alice’s, if not more so. But the coat gave her comfort in more ways than just the physical.

  “Ready for the meal of a lifetime?” Alice asked as Lisa stepped off the train along with a few other employees looking forward to a day breathing air that hadn’t gone through the Hive’s filtration system.

  “In this town?” Lisa couldn’t help but laugh. “The only thing that qualifies as the meal of a lifetime around here is the last meal they give to people on death row.”

  Alice smiled. “That’s what you think.” Then she led Lisa through the lavishly appointed halls of the mansion to the front door.

  Not for the first time, Lisa marveled at the beauty of the place, particularly after being stuck in the sterile confines of the Hive for so long. Umbrella didn’t encourage personalization of the workplace, nor did Lisa’s own tiny working environment provide much opportunity for it in any event. As for her apartment, she worked enough overtime that she spent most of her time in it either decompressing from work, worrying over what she was truly doing there, or sleeping.

  The latter, the last few days, had not been much fun. Nightmares full of images of that creature mixed in with Fadwa crying . . .

  Waiting for them at the front door was a Lincoln Town Car owned by the car service Umbrella used. The driver, an old man with pronounced jowls and bright blue eyes, held the door open for them both.

  Once the driver got into his own seat, he asked, “Where to, ladies?”

  “Che Buono.”

  The old man grinned.

  Lisa frowned. “I’ve never heard of that place.”

  “Good. If too many people hear about it, it might become famous, and then we’d never get a seat at lunch hour.”

  As expected, the drive to Raccoon from the remote mansion took an hour, even though the distance as the crow flew was the same as that of the twenty-minute train ride Lisa had just taken. However, the train didn’t have to deal with red lights, winding roads, and, once they reached the city limits, traffic. Not to mention a driver who actually came to a full stop at stop signs. To Lisa, weaned on New York cab drivers, the latter was especially befuddling.

  Still and all, they finally arrived at an out-of-the-way street not too far from the middle of downtown Raccoon. The building they pulled in front of had a ten-step stoop that led to a single entryway with three doors. Two led to storefronts that took up the ground floor—a newsstand and a flo
oring place. The third led to an apartment-building lobby.

  It took Lisa a moment to realize that their destination was in the basement. Another staircase lay adjacent to the stoop, leading down to a door with a modest sign: CHE BUONO.

  “That’s it?” Lisa asked.

  “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” Alice’s smile had turned mischievous. “First rule of Security Division.”

  The first thing she noticed when Alice opened the door was the smell: olive oil, garlic, tomato sauce, fish. It reminded her of Da Vittorio’s or Carmine’s in New York. Then she realized it was better than that: it reminded her of the trip to Venice she and Nick had taken—the last vacation they’d take together before his mother got sick.

  The last vacation they’d take together, period.

  “Alice! So good to see you!”

  Lisa had to look down to see the round face on the tiny body that had greeted them. The woman stood at only five feet tall—if that—and her face was covered in wrinkles, none more pronounced than the smile lines around her mouth. She looked up at them with the happiest brown eyes Lisa had ever seen.

  “And who is this?”

  “This is my coworker Lisa,” Alice said. “She’s from New York.”

  “Bene, bene. Welcome to Che Buono, Lisa. Come, come, sit, sit,” the old woman said, waving her hand as she led the way into the small restaurant.

  There were only about half a dozen tables, covered in red-and-white checked tablecloths straight out of every pizza joint in the world.

  The little old lady seated them at one of the tables, Lisa taking the side with her back to the wall, Alice facing her. Lisa noticed pictures of Italy all around the place—Milan, Venice, Rome, all looking fairly recent—as well as one large painting over the door to the kitchen of the Ponte Vecchio in Florence.

  “This is lovely,” Lisa said, a broad grin on her face. “Where’d you find this place?”

  “By accident, honestly. I was walking around downtown one Valentine’s Day feeling sorry for myself because I was alone. I got hungry, but there wasn’t room anywhere—if you didn’t have a reservation, you were out of luck.”