Genesis

by Keith R. A. DeCandido

  Spence pushed them both forward, one with each hand. “Can you two kill each other later?”

  Throwing his head back, he indicated the hordes of people shuffling toward them.

  Kaplan ran ahead. He opened the door to the Red Queen’s chamber, waited for Spence and Rain to come in, then shut the door behind them.

  It was his fault.

  All of it.

  He’d tried not to think about it, but Rain was right. It was his responsibility.

  Dead people all over the place. And the people best qualified to stop them were cut to ribbons before his eyes. Because he missed something, because he fucked up, over half the team was dead.

  “Whatever they are, there’s too many of them out there,” Rain said.

  “Whatever they are?” Kaplan repeated, trying and failing not to sound hysterical. “It’s pretty obvious what they are. Lab coats, badges—those people used to work here!”

  “All the people working here are dead.”

  “Well,” Spence said philosophically, “that isn’t stopping them from walking around.”

  “Where did they come from? Why didn’t we see them on the way in?” Kaplan couldn’t stop moving—if he stopped moving, he feared he’d die, and if he died, he’d become one of them.

  Rain spoke in a deliberate voice. “When you cut the power, you unlocked the doors. You let them out.”

  Something else that was on him. No, it wasn’t enough that he got One and the others killed, but he was responsible for letting all the dead people out to kill J.D.—and, for all he knew, Alice and Addison, too.

  The panic took over completely.

  “We’re never gonna make it to the surface.”

  Rain shook her head, then kicked the clip out of her rifle. “I’ve got one in the breech, and one spare mag.”

  Spence shook his head. “We are so fucked.”

  TWENTY

  THE ENCOURAGING THING FOR ALICE WAS that this was all starting to look familiar.

  Unfortunately, each memory that was triggered had an unpleasant connotation.

  She walked through the abandoned corridors of the Hive, dimly illuminated by the emergency lighting. Matt had wandered off, and Alice had lost track of Rain, J.D., Kaplan, and Spence.

  At the very least, the corridor through which she walked was empty, and so bereft of the undead horrors.

  Some areas she walked through meant nothing to her, but others triggered flashes. Here, the office belonging to the person in charge of Project: Open Book. There, the lab where they did some of the preliminary work on the Nemesis Program. Over that way were the cubicles where the support staff for Pharmaceuticals worked, answering phones, processing invoices, making photocopies . . .

  She turned another corner, and the name Clarence fell into her head as she spied a wall lined with eight animal cages: two horizontal rows of four. Each cage had wire mesh on the door—mesh that was currently covered in blood and ripped open from the inside.

  Was Clarence one of the animals? She couldn’t remember.

  With each memory that came back also came the mounting frustration of what she didn’t recall.

  She heard a noise and whirled around, but saw nothing.

  Typical.

  Again, she looked at the cages. She could not for the life of her recall what kind of animal was housed in those cages, but the evidence suggested that they had broken out on their own, and they were probably in the same condition as the Hive employees they’d been spending the last half-hour shooting, punching, and hitting.

  Then she heard the footsteps.

  No—not feet.

  The scratchy sound of clawed feet on metal floor.

  Tap tap tap tap tap . . .

  She turned to face the doorway through which she heard the noise just as a large doberman came into view.

  The doberman was covered in blood. Large chunks of flesh were missing, and Alice could see its rib cage, not to mention several internal organs, none of which seemed to be doing much of anything. The dog’s eyes were watery and white.

  Dead dog walking.

  Despite its deceased state, the dog was somewhat more agile than its human counterparts, and started running down the hall toward Alice.

  Somehow intuiting that offering to pet it and saying, “Good dog,” wouldn’t really cut it, Alice turned and ran to the door on the far end of the corridor. Miraculously, she remembered that it was one of the chemistry labs, and it had a door that latched shut.

  Running as fast as she could go in the maddeningly impractical boots she’d been stupid enough to put on back at the mansion, Alice barely made it into the lab ahead of the dog.

  Staring through the round window in the door, she watched in horror as the doberman leapt up and scratched at the door, trying to gain ingress, blood dripping from its teeth.

  Letting out a long breath, Alice turned around—

  —and found herself face to face with the blood-covered, very dead face of Clarence White.

  At once, Alice finally remembered that Clarence was the person assigned to care for the fleet of dobermans, though Alice still couldn’t for the life of her recall why they had a fleet of dobermans down here. Animal experimentation, maybe? Certainly not beyond the realm of possibility for Umbrella.

  That went through her head in one millisecond.

  In the next, she hit Clarence with a series of well-placed punches to the chest, then executed a perfect spin-kick that sent the guard flying into a glass shelf full of beakers and chemicals.

  Alice blinked.

  Holy shit.

  One’s words came back to her: “You and I have the same employer—we all work for the Umbrella Corporation. The mansion is an entrance to the Hive. You are security operatives placed there to protect that entrance.”

  Until now, she hadn’t given much thought to what that really meant. One had asked her for a report, as if she was his subordinate—and apparently she was more than that. She was, if not part of his actual team, part of the same division of the company.

  And that meant she knew how to kick some serious ass.

  Amid the sound of shattering glass, Alice heard the sound of bone snapping. She hoped that meant that Clarence would stay dead.

  She looked down at the corpse. It didn’t move, which made it unusual for corpses around here.

  It also had a nine-millimeter pistol sitting in a holster.

  If she knew how to spin-kick, maybe she knew how to shoot a gun, too. After all, she wouldn’t have had a full armory in her dresser drawer if she didn’t know how to use its contents, right? She certainly had nothing to lose by taking the pistol—Clarence sure as hell didn’t need it anymore.

  Gingerly, she undid the buckle on the holster, slowly pulling the pistol out, hoping Clarence wouldn’t choose this moment to come back to unlife.

  Then the dog crashed through a window Alice hadn’t even realized was there and came at her.

  Fingers tightening around the grip of the nine-millimeter, she ran for the door, and again ran through it and closed it on the dog in the nick of time.

  This was getting tiresome.

  She clicked off the safety of the nine-millimeter. It was only a matter of time before the pooch from hell jumped back out through the same window.

  Turning around, she found herself confronted by seven more dobermans.

  One was missing an ear.

  Another was missing its throat.

  Two had broken limbs.

  One had a massive gash in its side.

  All seven of them leapt for her at once.

  Gripping the nine-millimeter with both hands, she aimed straight for the lead doberman’s head and fired.

  Seconds later, she’d emptied all sixteen rounds in the clip. Seven of the sixteen were perfect head shots that took the dogs down.

  That took her out of immediate danger, but the only potential source of fresh ammo was Clarence’s body in the lab, and Alice was not going back in as long as the other dog was the
re.

  Then she heard growling.

  Suddenly, the other dog being in the lab was less of an issue.

  The doberman leapt out at her, and it was between her and the lab door, so that trick was not going to work a third time. And the nine-millimeter was now a useless piece of metal.

  Alice saw some crates piled against a wall, and then her legs moved almost of their own volition. She ran to the crates, stepped up onto one, then up to another more highly piled one, then along the wall, building up momentum.

  Pushing herself off the wall, she delivered a powerful kick to the doberman’s head, breaking the neckbone with a resounding snap.

  She landed elegantly on her feet, wishing she’d remembered she could do stuff like that earlier.

  There had been eight cages, so she felt confident that the danger from undead pooches had passed.

  However, she was still unarmed.

  Sort of. Turned out her body was a lethal weapon.

  She needed to find the others. The only chance they stood was together.

  If they stood any kind of chance at all. Who knew what else was lurking down here. Killer bunnies? Monster cockroaches? Zombie rats?

  Something worse?

  Continuing through the corridors, she found a huge room full of cubicles—and movement!

  Dashing into the room, she saw Matt being attacked by one of the undead. Looking around, she spied a paperweight that had a picture of a white rabbit, a girl in a blue dress, and a man with a big head wearing a large hat, as well as the inscription ALICE IN WONDERLAND.

  Alice thought that was more irony than she really needed as she grabbed the paperweight and slammed it into the undead woman’s head.

  She fell to the floor, unmoving, allowing Matt to get up.

  However, Alice didn’t spare Matt a second glance, because Alice realized that she knew who this woman was.

  Lisa Broward.

  They were standing in a park. There was a statue—the same one that was wrapped in plastic in the hallway right before One and his team came in. Alice and Lisa were talking amidst the fallen leaves of autumn.

  “I can help you get the virus. I have access to security plans, surveillance codes, the works.”

  Alice hesitated.

  “But—?” Lisa prompted.

  “But there’s going to be a price.”

  “Name it.”

  Matt knelt down beside Lisa, breaking the spell. Alice blinked, unable to remember the rest of the conversation.

  What did it mean, “get the virus”?

  And why was Matt now cradling Lisa’s head?

  “Who is she?” Alice asked.

  “My sister.”

  Alice’s response died on her lips. She hadn’t been expecting that. After a second, she said, “I’m sorry.”

  Something wasn’t right here. Correction, something else wasn’t right here.

  “You’re not a cop, are you?”

  His silence spoke volumes.

  “If there’s something you’re not telling me, something she was involved with . . .” She trailed off. She really wasn’t in a position to be making threats, given how little of her own memory she retained.

  Still, though this entire situation down here was utterly insane, most of it made a certain amount of sense. Her and Spence, the Red Queen going mad, One’s team, even the undead employees, given what little she could remember of the types of experiments that went on down here.

  But then there was Matt Addison. He’d been an x-factor all along, and it was about time he came clean.

  Apparently, Matt himself felt the same way. He set his sister’s head down and sat up straight.

  “Corporations like Umbrella think they’re above the law. They’re not. I’m part of an alliance of people who think the same. There are hundreds of us all over the world. Most of us will never meet, but we all share the same goals. Some of us give information, some give support, some take more direct action.”

  “Like you,” she prompted after Matt paused.

  He nodded. “If your friends had been a little more thorough, they would have seen straight through that false ID. Then all the red flags would’ve gone off: Quantico, VICAP, NSA, all the rest. I could never have infiltrated the Hive.”

  Alice understood the logic—up to a point. “So you sent your sister?”

  “We needed something concrete. Anything to expose Umbrella to the press. Proof of the research they were doing down here.”

  “What kind of research?” There were bits and pieces in her head of what went on down here, but none of it would come into focus.

  “The illegal kind. Genetic—viral. My sister was going to smuggle out a sample of the virus they were developing. I was meeting her today.”

  “I can help you get the virus.”

  Suddenly things got much much more complicated.

  Swallowing, Alice asked, “How was she going to get out of here?”

  “She had a contact within the Hive, someone I never met. They had access to security codes, surveillance, everything she’d need.”

  “I have access to security plans, surveillance codes, the works.”

  Thinking she needed to be very careful, she slowly asked, “So then why didn’t she make it?”

  Matt shrugged. “Maybe it was bad luck. Maybe she trusted the wrong person. Maybe they set her up, kept the virus for themselves.” He seemed to visibly shudder. “Do you have any idea what something like this T-virus would be worth on the open market?”

  Alice was stunned. She looked around at the devastation, thought about the creatures, both human and canine, that were stumbling around down here.

  “Worth all this?”

  “To someone.”

  Alice wasn’t sure what scared her more: that there was someone out there who believed there was someone like that out there—

  —or that she herself might be that person.

  TWENTY-ONE

  KAPLAN THOUGHT HIS HEART WAS GOING TO stop when the door opened. How the hell had the beneath-the-earth road show of Night of the Living Dead managed to enter the right codes?

  Rain whipped out her Colt, but then Kaplan saw that it was Alice and Matt. Kaplan guessed that Alice finally remembered the security code for the door.

  “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!” she cried as she and Matt entered.

  “Close that door!” Spence yelled, running for the door to force it shut again.

  “They’re right behind us!” Alice added, as if that was some kind of surprise.

  No, to Kaplan the surprise was that they made it here alive.

  One of the zombies grabbed Spence’s arms even as he tried to shut the door. Matt and Alice managed to pry the thing’s death-grip off him.

  Spence backed off quickly, rubbing the spot the zombie had snagged. “Son of a bitch!”

  “You okay?” Rain asked Alice.

  “They’re right behind us,” Alice muttered. Then she moved toward the other door. “What about that one?”

  Kaplan ran after her. “They’re waiting out there, too.”

  She stopped, turned, and moved toward the glass-walled corridor where four people had met their grisly deaths thanks to Kaplan’s own incompetence.

  “That way?”

  “It’s a dead end.” Kaplan winced at his choice of phrasing. “There’s no way out of the Queen’s chamber.”

  “So we wait,” Spence said. “Someone doesn’t hear from you, they’ll send backup or something. Right?”

  Kaplan and Rain exchanged glances. It looked like they didn’t remember Procedure Three.

  “What?” Spence asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “We don’t have much time,” Kaplan said evasively.

  Rain was more direct. “You know those blast doors we passed on the way in from the mansion? They seal shut in just under an hour. If we’re not out of here by then, we’re not getting out.”

  “What are you talking about?” Spence, who had been Mr. Unflappable up until now, sudd
enly started sounding as panicky as Kaplan felt. “They can’t just bury us alive down here.”

  Sitting down on the desk, Rain started to massage her bandaged hand. “Containing the incident is the only fail-safe plan they had against possible contamination.”

  Spence looked at her incredulously. “You’re only telling us this now? When we’re trapped half a fucking mile underground?”

  “We have to find a way out of this room.” Alice spoke with finality. Then she grabbed Kaplan’s duffel from the desk.

  “What’re you doing?” Rain asked as she shouldered the bag and went into the corridor to the Queen’s chamber.

  “Where are you taking those?” Kaplan asked, though the answer was obvious.

  “I’m turning her back on.”

  Following her down the corridor, Kaplan said, “That’s not a good idea.”

  “She’ll know a way out of here.”

  Alice set down the duffel and pulled out the motherboard.

  Rain and Spence had also followed her and Kaplan in. “That homicidal bitch killed my team,” Rain said angrily.

  As calm as Rain was furious, Alice said, “That homicidal bitch may be our only way out of here.”

  Spence’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “Considering the way she’s been treated, I’m sure she’s gonna be real happy to help us out.”

  Alice ignored him and slid the motherboard into its slot. Without looking at him, she asked Kaplan, “That circuit breaker you were talking about—can you bypass it?”

  “Yeah,” Kaplan said, sounding confused.

  “So do it.”

  As Alice finished off her work, Kaplan went over to one of the other parts of the CPU and entered some codes, then pulled out a remote control.

  “All right, circuit breaker’s disabled. This time, if I hit the switch, she won’t be able to shut down.” He looked around at everyone. “She’s gonna fry.”

  Rain actually gave him something resembling a comradely nod at that. Considering Kaplan was half expecting her to put a bullet into his brain for getting One and the rest of them killed, he considered this a good sign.

  Maybe she, like Kaplan, was realizing that this whole fucking situation was way beyond the pale.

  As soon as Alice slid the motherboard into place, the computer rebooted, the lights came on, and the red-tinged hologram of a ten-year-old girl appeared.