Kaplan looked at her like she was nuts. “And you shot him?”
“She was crazed. She bit me.”
“She’s gone.”
Rain looked over at J.D. when he spoke. He had just walked over to where the crazy lady had fallen.
“She’s gone!” he said again.
“That’s bullshit!” You didn’t shoot someone three dozen times just to have them get up and walk off. That shit didn’t play.
“She fell right here and now she’s gone.”
“Look at this,” Alice said. “It’s blood—but not much.”
The cop squatted down to take a closer look. “Looks like it’s coagulated. But that’s not possible.”
J.D. sounded pissed off when he asked, “Why not?”
Rain already knew the answer, but let Matt the Wonder Detective take it.
“Because blood doesn’t do that till after you’re dead.”
Spence looked bored. “Can we go now?”
“We ain’t going anywhere till the rest of the team get here.” As Rain spoke, she loaded another clip into the MP5K. She was for damn sure not getting caught without a full load.
Then she saw the look on Kaplan’s face. He looked like someone strangled his favorite pet.
For that matter, Alice and Spence looked all uncomfortable now, too.
Finally, Kaplan said, “There’s no one else coming.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Wait.” J.D. grabbed her shoulder. “Quiet.”
Then Rain heard it, too. Metal scraping against metal.
Raising her rifle, she turned and saw it: a tall bald guy dragging a fire axe on the floor behind him. He was wearing a white lab coat and white outfit under it, too, though his was all wet and filthy. The guy’s shoulder was all fucked up, and his right foot was perpendicular to his leg—like he’d broken his ankle. But he didn’t seem to feel it.
Behind him, she saw more. Just like the crazy lady, they all kinda shuffled, they all had milky eyes, and they all had fucked-up teeth.
And some of them were injured.
Fatally injured.
This was in the next county after fucking nuts.
One guy had half his head carved out, another was missing his right eye and his entire nose.
Nobody was bleeding, though. Any blood she’d seen was coagulated.
“Fuck,” J.D. muttered.
“Don’t come any closer.” Kaplan sounded like a total moron.
“They’re behind us!” Spence pointed out.
“Jesus,” Kaplan muttered.
“They’re everywhere,” Alice added, stating the fucking obvious like it was some kind of revelation. “Guys, they’re everywhere, they’re all around us!”
Then the crazy lady, lab coat and white outfit full of bullet holes, jumped Rain.
This time Rain grabbed her by the head and twisted until she heard the snap of her neck bone.
Bitch didn’t get up this time.
Then she flipped the MP5K to semi-automatic—she was gonna need to conserve ammo with this many people—and fired on the big bald guy right in the chest.
He fell to the floor.
Then he got back up.
Fuckity fuck fuck fuck.
Kaplan, still in total moron mode, yelled, “I said stay back!” Then he took a few shots with his Beretta.
“Watch the tanks!” Alice cried.
Rain didn’t give a rat’s ass about the fucking tanks, she just wanted these whatever-the-fuck-they-were dead.
Or deader.
Damn, this was fucked up.
These things kept getting back up. She and J.D. exchanged a look. Without even having to speak, they knew what to do: can’t kill ’em, at least clear a path.
So they switched their rifles to automatic and concentrated their fire on one area, plowing down these shuffling bastards one by one.
“Let’s go!” J.D. yelled even as Rain cried, “Hurry up!”
Then one of the tanks exploded . . .
EIGHTEEN
MATT ADDISON HAD BEEN TRYING TO UNlock himself when the tank exploded.
At some point during her struggle with the woman who bit her, Rain’s keys had fallen off her person. Matt noticed the keys lying there on the floor as soon as he, Kaplan, Alice, and Spence joined J.D. and Rain.
His opportunity came when Alice pointed out the blood. On the pretense of squatting down to take a closer look at it—and to show off his knowledge as a “detective” by imparting his brilliant bit of wisdom about coagulated blood, even though that was something he remembered from high-school biology—he palmed the keys and had been working to free himself ever since.
At least he’d convinced the security goons that he was a legit cop. The hazing story worked like a charm, and he hadn’t even had to supply the details. Rain and J.D. knew the RCPD well enough to fill in the blanks. Sending a neophyte detective on a fake call to the infamous Mansion You Stayed Away From was a run-of-the-mill prank, and Matt knew there were enough ex-cops in Security Division’s employ for that to be common knowledge.
Now, though, things were just getting too weird. He knew that Umbrella was into some hardcore shit, but this . . .
As the numbers of people stumbling toward them grew, Matt came to several realizations. The first was that these people were all wearing suits or lab coats over all-white jumpsuits. He knew from Lisa that Umbrella had a dress code—unusual in the post-dot-com world of Business Casual, but not unheard of—matching that of these people’s clothing.
The other was that they were already dead.
When he was a kid, one of Matt Addison’s favorite words was “zuvembie.” He came across it in a lot of the comic books he read when he was a child, and it referred to reanimated dead bodies. In later years, he would learn of the word “zombie”—mostly from horror movies—and later still discovered that the comics called them “zuvembies” only because they weren’t allowed to use the word “zombie.” The Comics Code Authority established in the 1950s that kept comics G-rated forbade that word, and some bright mind at one of the comics companies made up a synonym that was similar enough to convey the meaning without actually violating the code.
Twelve-year-old Matt, picking up some monster comic or other, just thought it was a really, really cool word.
Now, decades later, he found himself confronted with real-life zuvembies.
More than ever, he needed to get out of these damn cuffs and ditch these gonzos so he could find Lisa’s desk and get to the bottom of this. Umbrella’s fingers were in shit much worse than anything he, Aaron, and the rest of them could possibly have dreamed of if this was the kind of thing coming out of the Hive.
He was pretty close to finally getting the cuffs off—no mean feat when you have basically no leverage whatsoever—when one of the tanks blew up. Alice—who seemed to be the only person in the group with anything like a brain, even with the drag effect of her amnesia—warned them to beware of the tanks, but nobody listened, and one of them exploded, sending Matt onto his back.
Glancing around quickly, he caught sight of the keys and crabwalked his way back to where they were: under a table.
A zombie followed him, and tried to reach in under the table and pull him out. Said zombie was wholly undeterred by the fact that he was on fire.
Matt kicked at the zombie and tried to grab the keys, but succeeded only in knocking the latter into a vent.
Splitting his focus, he reached into the vent for the keys while continuing to kick the zombie.
Eventually he succeeded in both endeavors. The zombie’s neck broke from one of the kicks, which stopped it coming after him, and he managed to grab the keys.
The bad news was, now his leg was on fire.
He couldn’t do a damn thing about it while bound, so he fumbled agitatedly with the keys, hoping the fire didn’t spread past his right shin, knowing that it was a pretty slim hope.
But he for damn sure wasn’t dying down here. Not un
til he found out what happened to Lisa.
It was one thing to be prepared for something to go wrong—that was almost a given. His boss at the Federal Marshal’s office always used to say, “Plan A never works.” This, however, was several orders of magnitude beyond something going wrong. Arriving at the mansion to find some woman dressed like she was going to a cocktail party or something, then being attacked by the Security Goons from Hell, and finally reliving Day of the Dead wasn’t even on the contingency plan list.
He got the cuffs unlocked.
Then he tamped down the fire on the leg of his pants before it could spread to even less comfortable regions of his body.
Pausing to take a breath, he saw that three more zombies had decided to take a shot at him.
Then another arm grabbed his shoulder and pulled him out.
Alice.
“Come on.”
Nodding, he let her lead the way away from the zombies. He couldn’t see any of the rest of the Goon Squad.
“Where is everybody?”
“I lost track of Rain, J.D., Kaplan, and Spence.”
Matt nodded. “What about the rest of them?” The team leader, the medic, and the other two goons were still unaccounted for.
“They’re dead.”
That got Matt’s attention. All they were doing was shutting down the damn computer! Did the zombies get them, too?
No, that wasn’t possible—the zombie attack was a surprise to everyone.
So how the fuck had those four gotten themselves killed?
Matt’s urgency increased a hundredfold. Umbrella hadn’t just built an underground headquarters in order to hide their research, they’d built a fucking deathtrap. Five hundred employees, and now four of their security people.
With six of them left and in serious danger of joining them.
He and Alice made their way out into a corridor. As soon as the opportunity presented itself, he slipped away. Alice didn’t follow him, so he definitely gave her the slip.
Right now, his priority was Lisa’s desk.
She had described her office space to him in her encrypted e-mail, including the route there from the elevator bay. Finding that was only the work of a few minutes—it came complete with another fake window and fake cityscape—then he traced the route she had provided.
He found himself in an area full of boring metal desks, with papers, file folders, staplers, phones, cords, inboxes, disks, and various other items strewn haphazardly about the floor. With no idea which one was Lisa’s, he investigated the desks themselves. Most of them had some kind of personal object to indicate the personality of the user, and Matt knew that Lisa’s own desk had a picture of her, Matt, Mom, and Dad from a cruise they’d taken when she and Matt were teenagers.
Matt tried not to think about what he was doing as he looked at pictures of a man with his dog, a woman with her children, Beanie Babies, a pennant from the minor-league baseball team that played in Raccoon City, and all the other personal items of people who were not only dead, but still up and walking around, biting people or getting shot at by the likes of Rain and J.D.
He got to one desk, which had a computer with a broken monitor on it. No sign of a picture, but he found the next best thing: Lisa’s ID badge.
Squatting down at the file cabinet next to her desk, he started going through her files, hoping to be able to salvage something from this nightmare.
A thud scared him out of what few years of life he still had left. One of Lisa’s “zuvembie” coworkers was banging on the window next to her desk.
However, the zombie was cut off from Matt by the window, and seemed content to simply bang on it rather than try to find an alternate route.
So Matt let him. He had more important things to deal with.
Or so he thought. Lisa’s files were all meaningless to him. They probably related to her actual job. Nothing about a T-virus or anything like that.
Of course, she wouldn’t keep anything like that at her desk. She wasn’t that stupid.
Unfortunately, that meant he had nothing that he could take back to Aaron.
This was not shaping up to be a good day at all.
Hearing movement behind him, he whirled around, ready to face another zombie, hoping he could fend it off with a stapler or a keyboard or something, since J.D. had disarmed him back at the mansion.
Then he saw who it was.
“Lisa?”
She stood in the middle of the space amidst the office supplies festooned about the floor, looking completely normal. A little distressed, but that was to be expected.
Had she actually survived this? Had one fucking thing actually gone right today?
Matt got up.
Then Lisa jumped him and tried to bite him with decaying teeth . . .
NINETEEN
BEFORE TODAY, BART KAPLAN’S WORLD made sense.
Before today, computers didn’t go on homicidal rampages, killing five hundred people for no good reason. Before today, he and his team were top pros, always achieving their mission objectives. Before today, the team always came home alive.
Before today, dead people didn’t get up and walk around.
He wasn’t sure how it got so bad so fast. One second he was standing with J.D., Rain, Alice, Spence, and that Addison guy, the next they were surrounded. After the tank exploded, he was knocked to the floor, but he got up quickly and started unloading his Beretta into the walking corpses that simply would not stop for anything. His ears were ringing.
Somehow he and J.D. wound up back to back. They were just around the corner from the door that would take them back to the hallway where the offices and labs were. “We lost the others.”
“Keep moving!” J.D. said as he fired his rifle into the crowd.
They inched closer, finally reaching the door. Kaplan thought his head was going to explode from the noise of the gunfire, the explosion, and the screaming.
Not to mention the image of his four comrades being killed while he was helpless to do anything about it.
Spence was standing there as Kaplan holstered his pistol and approached the keypad.
Surprised, Kaplan asked, “You waited?” Leaving aside the fact that he was unarmed, this particular iteration of Spence Parks didn’t strike Kaplan as the gung-ho, take-one-for-the-team type. More like the run-away-and-save-his-own-ass type.
“Didn’t know the code.”
Run-away-and-save-his-own-ass it was, then. Luckily, Kaplan did know the code. All he had to do was summon it from the recesses of his brain. The problem was doing it through the pounding headache.
He entered 0431961.
Nothing happened.
“Shit!”
“Come on,” Spence said.
He entered the code again.
Again, nothing.
“Shit!”
He didn’t get it. That was the code, he was sure of it.
If only the noise would stop . . .
Spence, still being his usual useful self, said, “Hurry up.”
As if it would make a difference, he entered 0431961 more slowly.
Yet again, nothing.
“Shit!”
J.D. ran up to the door, grabbed Kaplan and shoved him out of the way. “Move! What’s the code?”
Under other circumstances, Kaplan would have objected to this course of action. But maybe there was something wrong with the way he was entering it. Not that there was any trick to it, really, you just entered the eight numbers.
“Move!” J.D. said. “What’s the code?”
“Hurry up!” Rain called from a few feet off. “I’m runnin’ out of ammo!”
Pulling out his Beretta and shooting into the ever-nearer crowd, Kaplan yelled out, “Zero, four, three—”
Then it hit him. Eight numbers. He’d left out a digit. “No, fuck!”
Spence walked up to Kaplan and got right in his face. Kaplan was tempted to turn his pistol on the arrogant prick. “What is the code?”
Kaplan to
ok a breath. “Zero, four, zero, three, one, nine, six, one.”
“Got it.” J.D. entered the code. Then he turned to look at Kaplan as the door slid open. “See how easy that was?”
Behind the door was a sea of former Hive workers.
Kaplan didn’t know what the look on his own face was, but he imagined it was very similar to the look of abject shock on J.D.’s as dozens of hands grabbed him and pulled him into the hallway. A second later, and Kaplan couldn’t even see J.D. anymore.
“J.D.!”
Rain came out of nowhere and dove in after him. Was she out of her fucking mind?
Kaplan ran up to her and grabbed her arm. To his shock, Spence helped. No sense in losing both of them.
One of them bit Rain in the neck even as Kaplan and Spence yanked her out. Kaplan quickly slammed his hand on the switch that would shut the door after shooting one in the face.
Again, Rain screamed, “J.D.!”
“Forget it,” Spence said. “He’s gone.”
Pounding her fist on the door, Rain screamed, “Goddammit!”
The sweat beaded on Kaplan’s brow. This wasn’t supposed to be happening.
One. Warner. Drew. Olga. And now J.D.
They weren’t supposed to die. Shit, J.D. and Rain were the toughest badasses on two legs—all you had to do to know that was to watch them for five minutes.
And One, well, One was just the best.
If even J.D. couldn’t survive this, if even One couldn’t survive this, what the fuck chance did some computer geek like Kaplan have?
“Come on,” Spence said, pointing across the hall. “There’s a clear path back to that computer room.”
Kaplan nodded. He turned to Rain. “C’mon, Rain.”
“They fuckin’ killed J.D., man. That’s bullshit!”
Spence grabbed her arm. “They’re gonna fuckin’ kill us if we don’t move our asses!”
Shrugging off Spence’s hand without looking at him, Rain turned and moved for the door. Kaplan followed, as did Spence.
As they ran, Rain asked, “So what the fuck did happen to the rest of the team? They zombie food, too?”
“No, the Red Queen’s defenses got them.”
Rain stopped and grabbed Kaplan by the shoulder. “Say the fuck what? I thought you were supposed to bring down—”
Genesis Page 14
