Great. They drink blood. That just fucking figured.
“Rain?”
Their motor functions weren’t juiced up enough by the stupid virus to let them climb—shit, they could barely walk—so they were safe for now.
“Rain!”
She finally turned to acknowledge Alice.
“We have to do something about your wounds.”
“I’m fine.”
Alice tried to grab her collar to expose her neck wound. Rain smacked the pushy bitch’s hand aside.
“I said I’m fine!” She held her hand out, watching more blood drip. “You like that, don’t you? Huh? Huh? You like the way it tastes, don’t you? You like the taste of that?”
“She was right.”
Rain looked over at Kaplan. He was holding his own wound. He also looked about as lifeless as those mindless motherfuckers below them.
“We’re all gonna die down here.”
“No,” Alice said. “We’re getting out. All of us.”
Rain shook her head. This was Ass-Kicking Alice, back in fucking business.
Not that it mattered.
J.D. was dead.
She watched him die.
Twice.
Shit.
“There’s a vent over this way.” Rain looked up to see that it was Addison talking. Looked like he was scoping out the pipes to find a way out. Bully for him.
Maybe he really was a cop.
Maybe someday she’d give a shit.
Addison led the way across the pipes. They had to crawl, since the space to the ceiling was only a few feet.
The smell got worse. And was there something in the air? Everything was getting all blurry and shit.
Maybe it was tears. Rain wasn’t a cryer, but dammit, J.D. was dead. So was One and Warner and Drew and Olga. The whole fucking team.
Well, except for Kaplan, but that weenie boy barely counted.
Addison came to another one of those wire-mesh things and kicked it in. He crawled in, then Spence, then Rain. Alice and Kaplan were right behind her.
“Kaplan, you okay?” Alice asked
Kaplan didn’t say shit, the fucking little wimp.
WHAM!
Rain turned around. Everything was all blurry, still, but she saw that the pipe finally collapsed. Not really a big shock, since the thing wasn’t designed to have five people crawling all over it.
Kaplan fell into the sea of hungry dead.
Shit.
Alice almost fell in, but Addison and Spence managed to catch her and pull her in.
Rain thought she’d be glad to see Kaplan go. His fuck-up got One and the others killed, and if he’d remembered the fucking code, then he’d have been the one taken at the door instead of J.D. He deserved what was coming to him.
But seeing him mobbed by the zombie hordes of fucking hell, watching him kick and scream and struggle to stay alive, she realized that, goddammit, Kaplan was part of the team, too, and she was not going to let these freakazoids take anyone else.
Not even Kaplan.
So she took aim.
And couldn’t make a fucking thing out.
It wasn’t tears, it was the fucking virus. She had it.
She couldn’t see.
“Help him!” Alice yelled.
The words were painful to say: “I can’t.”
“What’re you waiting for?”
“I can’t focus! I can’t see!”
She couldn’t believe it. Six between-the-eyes shots in a target fifty feet away, but now, less than half that distance away, she couldn’t tell where Kaplan ended and the zombies began.
If she missed, she’d hit Kaplan.
If she missed.
Words she’d never had to think before.
Suddenly, the Colt was ripped from her hands. What the fuck?
It was Alice. She shot two of the zombies in the head, which gave Kaplan the freedom to run up the fallen pipe.
Unfortunately, it put him about ten feet away, with no direct access to the vent.
“Kaplan—hold on!” Alice urged. “We’re gonna come get you. We need to cut this wire, then we can throw it to him. Then we can go get him. Hold on!”
Rain thought Alice was out of her fucking mind.
Kaplan emptied that stupid revolver he carried as a backup. She missed the part where he emptied the Beretta. Or maybe he lost it in the crowd down there.
He had one bullet left.
“That’s lucky,” he muttered. Then he looked at the rest of them. “I want you to go.”
“No,” Alice said. “We’re not leaving you, Kaplan.”
“Yes, you are.”
“No!”
“You can’t kill all of them! I’m not goin’ anywhere. I want you to go, now! Please, just do it! Just do it now! Please—go!”
For the first time since she joined One’s team, Rain respected Kaplan.
She never would’ve given him the credit to take one for the team. Shit, she doubted any of them would.
Then again, they’d never come across anything like this. Nobody had.
Either Addison or Spence started guiding her down the vent. Normally she’d have told him to go fuck himself, but her vision was getting worse. She didn’t trust that she wouldn’t bump into a wall or some shit like that.
She heard a single gunshot.
Braver sonofabitch than she thought.
Now she was the only one left.
TWENTY-THREE
ALICE FORCED HERSELF NOT TO THINK ABOUT the gunshot she’d just heard.
As she crawled along the vent shaft, she tried desperately to banish the last image of Bart Kaplan she had: him putting the barrel of the gun in his mouth.
Part of her was angry at him for taking such a coward’s way out. On the other hand, he had been bitten by those things, and they were coming after him.
At least by shooting himself in the head, he guaranteed he wouldn’t be resurrected by the virus.
But she forced herself not to think about it.
The shaft dead-ended under a grate. She looked at Matt and Spence, who were right behind her.
No words were exchanged, nor had they been since they left Kaplan behind.
Getting into a squatting position, Alice slowly stood upright, pushing the grate slowly upward.
It opened into one of the corridors.
One thankfully short on undead employees of the Umbrella Corporation.
She came out first, holding Rain’s gun at the ready. Spence was right behind her.
“Come on,” Spence called down to Matt and Rain.
Matt climbed out first, then reached down to Rain.
“Give me your arm.”
A limp, sweat-and-blood-covered arm reached up. He grabbed it and pulled. Rain managed to stumble out.
“Now up over my shoulder.”
Even as she did what he said, she fell forward and threw up.
To his credit, Matt didn’t bat an eyelash. He just waited for her to stop.
“Thanks.” Rain’s voice was even more ragged. It was amazing that she was still holding on. “Sorry I slapped you around back at the mansion.”
Matt smiled. “It’s all right. I probably had it coming. Just hold on.”
Alice shivered. She wondered if Rain would be so accommodating if she knew the truth about Matt.
Right now, though, none of that mattered. All that was relevant right now was that no one else was going to die. Not if she had anything to say about it.
There was something.
Something she was starting to remember.
It was about the colors blue and green, of all things. It had been niggling her in the back of the head, but she’d dismissed it as another bit of trivial information that wouldn’t come to her, like what a bathrobe was called.
Now, though, she was sure that those two colors were critically important.
Spence, meanwhile, went over to help Matt with Rain, even as Alice continued to scout ahead.
So fa
r, the corridor was clear.
She wondered how long that would last.
From behind her, she heard Rain’s voice.
“When I get outta here—I think I’m gonna get laid.”
Spence chuckled.
“Yeah,” Matt said dryly. “You might want to clean up a bit first.”
Alice was about to laugh, too, but then it caught in her throat.
She knew this corridor.
And she knew the lab she was standing next to, looking into the window of.
“You okay?” Matt asked. She turned to see that Matt had left Rain with Spence to check up on her. She must have gone vacant for a second.
Blue. Green. Blue and green.
And rabbits.
Then it all came back. In her mind’s eye she could clearly see Mariano Rodriguez and Anna Bolt injecting a white rabbit with a hypo-gun. The rabbit was named Daffy for some reason Alice couldn’t remember. The hypo was loaded with a corkscrew-shaped tube containing two different color liquids.
One blue. One green.
“Blue for virus, green for the anti-virus.”
Matt gave her a funny look.
“There’s a cure,” she said.
“What’re you talking about?” Matt asked, sounding confused.
“There’s a cure. The process can be reversed.” She turned and looked at Rain, still held up by Spence down the corridor. “There’s a cure! You’re going to be okay.”
Rain actually smiled. “I was beginning to worry.”
Alice ran into the lab. The entrance was at the top of a raised entryway, with a short staircase leading down to the main part of the lab. The unsealing of the doors when Kaplan powered the Red Queen down had reduced the flooding down to the level of the raised entryway, so the room was still knee-deep in water.
This was where Mariano and Anna had worked, along with their lab assistant, a big bald guy whose name Alice couldn’t remember.
They were the ones working on the T-virus.
With a start, Alice realized that she’d seen all of them. Anna was the corpse whose presence floating in this very lab had scared Matt when they first arrived. The bald lab assistant had been one of the ones who first attacked them in the so-called dining hall. And Mariano had been one of the ones trying to kill Kaplan in the tunnel.
Jesus.
“This is where they kept the T-virus.”
“How do you know all this?” Matt asked.
She decided to go for broke. Besides, Matt deserved to know.
“Because I was going to steal it.” She turned to look at him. “I was your sister’s contact.”
Matt’s eyes went wide. “You betrayed her.”
“I don’t know.”
“You caused all this.”
“I can’t remember.”
She started to move down the staircase, but Matt grabbed her arm.
“The truth.”
“I don’t remember the truth,” she said honestly.
But she found she couldn’t look Matt in the eyes, either.
Instead, she turned and proceeded down the stairs.
She remembered it now. The door on the far end of the room had the vault that held the T-virus.
Wading through the sprinkler-system water, she was, for the first time since the mansion, eternally grateful for the thigh-high boots, as they kept her mostly protected from the frigidly cold knee-high water.
The door leading to the vault required both hands to get open, so—since the dress had no pockets, nor did she have a holster—she set Rain’s gun down on a table that was above the water line.
Behind her, Matt guided Rain down to sit down on the dry entryway, legs hanging over into the main lab.
Spence, meanwhile, waded down the stairs.
Alice yanked the door open.
She saw the far wall, and the PlastiGlas window that gave a view into the containment unit. Over it were the levers to manipulate the waldoes that manipulated the vials inside. Underneath the window was the slot that allowed one access to the contents.
The slot was open.
Inside, the container for the T-virus was empty.
All fourteen slots were empty.
Slamming her hands on the open containment unit, Alice cried, “I don’t understand.”
She waded back outside and looked at Rain. “It’s gone. It’s gone, it’s not there.”
Rain seemed to deflate before Alice’s very eyes. “I can’t. I just can’t.”
Alice had been so sure, dammit.
Was it somewhere else? In the mansion somewhere, maybe? Could they get back there in time?
As she walked over to comfort Rain, she wondered what they would do next.
TWENTY-FOUR
SPENCE PARKS LOOKED AT THE OPEN DOOR, saw the empty vault—
—and remembered.
He’d been biding his time for weeks, getting the plan together. From the minute he heard about the T-virus from one of the other guys in Security, he started his inquiries. Naturally, he kept it all subtle. It didn’t do to arouse suspicions, and the people at Umbrella were damned suspicious.
So he took his time. First he got the security codes. Then he got a buyer lined up.
The question was whether or not to involve Alice.
There was a lot to like about Alice. She was tough, strong, single-minded, brilliant—and the best lay he’d ever had. God, she was like an acrobat in combat, and she was like an acrobat in bed.
Spence had had many women in his life—it was why he became a cop, initially. His uncle was a cop, and he always said, “Spence, it’s the best fuckin’ job in the world. You get to sit in a car all day and you get all the pussy you could ever want.” In that, he was prophetic, but his dear old uncle neglected to mention that the sexual perks only partly made up for the severe lack of monetary ones.
But greed begat greed, and even the huge sums Umbrella paid him didn’t satisfy him.
The quality of the pussy increased tremendously, though. Hell, living in a big mansion for free, getting to have sex with Alice pretty much any time he wanted—this was the life.
It wasn’t enough, though. Not when he knew what he could get for the T-virus.
He thought dozens of times about letting Alice in on his little plan. They could split the money, run off to some tropical island without an extradition treaty, and have sex under the sun for the rest of their lives.
Or, more realistically, until they got tired of each other and moved on. But whatever—the plan was sound.
However, she was also good enough that he had to be careful.
So he kept an eye on her.
Out of the blue, Alice asked some woman from the Hive out to lunch, which aroused Spence’s suspicions. Those suspicions had orgasms when Spence learned that the woman was Lisa Broward, the person who handled the security for the Red Queen.
By the time the lunch rolled around and Alice had the Town Car drop them off a fair distance from the mansion, the suspicions were already smoking their post-coital cigarettes.
Luckily, the mansion was well appointed with top surveillance equipment. Spence pointed a distance microphone at the area where Alice and the Broward woman were talking, put on the headset, and started recording.
It took a while before they were in range of the microphone. He caught bits and pieces here and there.
Alice: “It took a while, but it wasn’t too hard to figure out once I knew what I was looking for.”
Broward: “What’s going on, Alice?”
Alice: “It’s a T-virus, and you’re right, it’s not at all natural.”
Broward: “So they’ve created a killer that turns you into a zombie?”
Then nothing for a bit. Spence listened to static until he heard Alice’s voice again.
“I may look like a Bond girl, Lisa, but I’m not a Bond villain. I didn’t bring you here to kill you. I brought you here to talk to you.”
“About what?”
“I thought that was obvi
ous. After all, Mahmoud al-Rashan was your friend—and I can’t imagine that the settlement Umbrella gave his wife did much to alleviate her grief. It took a lot of guts to do what you did. You want the virus?”
“I might.”
“I can help you get the virus. I have access to security plans, surveillance codes, the works.”
“But—?”
“But there’s going to be a price.”
“Name it.”
“You have to guarantee me that you’ll bring this corporation down.”
“What makes you think I want to bring anyone down? Maybe I just want to use the virus to kill the people who killed Mahmoud.”
“You’re not that type, Lisa. Trust me, I know killers. I’ve spent all my adult life surrounded by them, on both sides of the law. You don’t have it in you. What you do have is outrage, and that’s what I need.”
“Why can’t you do this yourself?”
“I’m too far inside. There are ways they can shut me down. You’re still pretty clean, though. You’ve only been here a couple of months, they haven’t been able to sink their claws all the way into you yet. If I try it won’t work. To be honest, it may not work for you, either. These people are good.”
“And if I screw it up, you’re still clear.”
“You’re not nearly as stupid as Spence looks. This is a dangerous game, Lisa. You sure you want to play it?”
“Completely sure.”
Spence heard enough.
He turned off the recorder.
So much for the tropical island.
Spence kept a low profile for the next few days. Eventually, his buyer alerted him that he was ready.
He and Alice had particularly good sex that morning. Maybe the best ever.
Ironic, really.
She slept while he got dressed, her glorious naked body sprawled out on the incredibly comfortable mattress.
He was definitely going to miss the sex.
On a whim, he wrote TODAY ALL YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE on the pad of paper on the desk in the bedroom.
Then he proceeded into the Hive.
He entered the proper security codes to get in, he put on the Hazmat suit, then went through the titanium-reinforced door to the temperature-regulated room that housed the T-virus, again entering the proper security code. The little-kid computer was none the wiser.
Genesis Page 17
