Resident Evil. Retribution (13 page)

And then, as Luther was trying to get a bead on the creature’s glowing red eyes, it shoved its chainsaw past Tony’s gun muzzle, slashing downward, cutting him from the left shoulder down, sawing through him stem to stern, ripping down through his flesh and bones, through his collarbone and ribcage and sternum, grinding his heart to paste, shredding his entrails—

Luther’s gut twisted at the sight and he nearly threw up, but he squeezed the trigger.

Too late, dammit, you’re too late!
he told himself.

He fired… and missed. Leon was shooting at the chainsaw wielder, too, and hitting him, and so was Barry, but none of them were kill shots.

The thing turned to ram the chainsaw down Leon’s throat—

And then Luther squeezed off three quick shots, precisely aimed. One each for the creature’s eyes, puncturing right through, the third striking
between
the eyes.

The chainsaw soldier swayed, blood gushing where its eyes had been—then fell back, dead.

Leon looked at Luther with a new respect.

“Not bad.”

Luther shrugged.

“For an advisor,” he replied. He could still feel his gorge rising, but managed to hold it together.

Barry was firing through the smoking gap, taking out a biker who tried to ride in over the rubble. The riderless bike skidded out and lay, spinning its wheels and spewing exhaust by the creature’s shattered body.

Then the smoke cleared, and the charge had stopped—the plague soldiers had eased off to regroup.

He looked at what was left of Tony—took in the horrified expression forever frozen on the man’s snow-pale face. A nauseating smell rose from the ripped-apart corpse, fecal matter and blood and guts and a smell that might be bone marrow… all mixed with the heavy throat-scratching pall of gun smoke.

Luther sighed. Too bad about Tony… but he probably wouldn’t be the last one of them to die.

He turned to Sergei—saw him in the midst of all the smoking chaos and rubble, poring over his laptop. The little computer was dusted with shattered plaster, its screen blurred, but he worked at it by sheer desperate instinct, fingers flying over the keyboard.

Leon stepped over bodies to look over Sergei’s shoulder.

“We should be at the rendezvous already,” he said grimly. “Find us a way out of here!”

“Downloading schematics now.”

“Downloading?” Leon said. “You’re still
downloading
?”

Sergei just shrugged in that way only an I.T. engineer would understand.

Dori found a tire iron lying beside a car that was up on a jack, one wheel off. She picked it up, hefted it, experienced a kind of inner click as her overlays and training merged.
Using narrow metal bars for weapons, parts one and two.

She was most of the way across Times Square— making her way to the open door of a souvenir store that she suspected would offer a way out of the simulation—when the Undead came at her from behind a still-smoking, half-burned minivan.

The thing had been a woman. And for a moment Dori thought it was… her.

It was Alice. Only it wasn’t Alice. It was
an
Alice. And it was extending its bloodstained fingers like claws to slash at her eyes, its mouth stretching wide for the rustling, bristling mandibles forcing their way out.

Dori let her reflexes guide her—she spun on her heel to work up the momentum she’d need, coming all the way around, driving the sharp end of the tire iron straight at the creature’s face, hard as she could. The tire iron crunched into Alice’s nose, sliding up a nostril, through her sinuses, and into the brain.

The creature hesitated, but didn’t fall—the damage wasn’t enough.

Gagging at what she was having to do, Dori twisted the tire iron around the way people scrape the innards from a pumpkin to make a jack-o-lantern. The Undead shuddered and fell back. As it did, she held tightly onto the tire iron so the corpse’s fall would pull it free.

She turned away, and shook the rotting black glop from her weapon, gagging once more, then forced herself to go on, to run toward the storefront. She went through the open door, glanced at the souvenir props arranged on shelves inside. There were miniature Statues of Liberty, Empire State Buildings. Dori knew what they were—the real ones—because JudyTech had shown them to her on a computer screen. But the Empire State Building was mostly burned down, now, and overrun with Undead…

She’d never get to see them in their glory. The people who had come before had wrecked the world, had trampled all that they had built. And they thought they were better than clones? Dori laughed bitterly at that, and made her way to the store through the door.

She found a door marked “Emergency Exit Only,” and when she went through it she discovered that she was in a kind of alley. There was no one there and, still carrying her bloody tire iron, she went through another door, emerging into a broad staging area, under a series of catwalks and an intricate mesh of utility wires.

It was shadowy here, dusty, and her footsteps echoed…

She thought she knew which way the clone creche was, but she wasn’t sure she’d be able to get into it. By now, JudyTech would be looking for her.

What would they do to her mother—to JudyTech— if they caught her searching for Dori… if the whole story came out? They’d either kill her, or implant her with a scarab. And the scarab might be worse. She’d see Dori, and simply turn her over for the recycling vat.

Her own mother would turn into one of those robotic, empty-eyed people. She wouldn’t know her; she would feel nothing for her.

It would be better if they killed her.

Alice, Ada, and the little girl traversed the iconic suburban neighborhood that had been the killing floor for so many. Alice held the girl’s hand with one of her own; with her other hand she carried her auto pistol, with the safety off.

Ada was frowning, looking from side to side for her strike team.

There were no Undead to be seen—Umbrella must have disposed of the ones they didn’t want kept alive for tests. They’d put the facility at risk if allowed to wander randomly about. Did the corporation send in troopers to kill them? Did they use nerve gas?

The girl tugged to get her attention.

“Mom, who are we looking for?”

“Ada’s friends,” Alice signed back. “Who’ll help us get safely out of here.”

“You know sign,” Ada remarked, glancing at them.

“Of course,” Alice said. “Basic training, just like you. You forget, we worked for the same people.”

Ada glanced at her countdown watch and shook her head.

“We should have waited at the rendezvous point.”

“And what if they never came?”

The woman in red made a sound of exasperation, deep in her throat.

“What the hell is taking them so long?”

“You know it’s strange,” Alice said, “when I woke up in the interrogation cell, I had this… dream, I guess, fading from my mind. About this street, these houses. I had a husband, and we had a house we lived in. With a daughter.”

It occurred to Alice that the technicians working for Umbrella must have decided to
make
the girl deaf, to make it all seem more real, another fanatically crafted detail in the background of a family. A pointless detail, really. It was almost as if some of them enjoyed creating the maximum believability—just so they could enjoy the suffering of people as their “lives” were taken away from them…

Sick bastards.

“But how could I know?” Alice muttered, mostly to herself.

”How could you have had a dream about it?” Ada said, still looking around. “When it happened to a clone—and not you?”

“Yeah,” Alice admitted. “Somehow… it was like I was experiencing it myself.”

“After you… left the company, they found out that the people who were cloned often retained a kind of telepathic connection—especially if the experience was emotionally powerful enough. It’s not unlike the experiences encountered by identical twins.”

It was just an echo from someone else’s mind.
Alice looked at the girl.

And yet the connection between them was more than an echo. She knew, now, that she would defend this child with her life.

Luther picked up Tony’s rifle and dropped down on one knee, firing through the still-smoking gap in the wall, nailing two plague soldiers that were rushing at them. Eventually these guys were going to figure out flanking. And then, Luther figured, he and his companions were screwed.

As if the creatures had heard him thinking, a group of them came from his left flank—three of them, one firing a shotgun that took the head off the last standing mannequin.

As one, Luther, Leon, and Barry all swung left, firing as they did, the three of them ripping into the oncoming plague soldiers, making them dance with the impacts of the bullets, splashing the walls and ceiling with blood and brains. But there were always more where those came from. They were going to run out of ammo—and then what? Maybe scrounge weapons from the Undead.

If they had a chance before they were overrun…

Two more soldiers went down. Pretty soon they’d be able to stack them up to use them as cover, a bunker of human flesh.

Spent cartridges from Luther’s gun rained down on Sergei’s laptop. He glanced up at Luther.

“Do you mind?” He sniffed, then went back to trying to find an escape route. “Trying to work here…”

A readout indicated that the door was malfunctioning.

Thank goodness,
Dori thought. At least she would be able to go through. Before she did, she tossed the tire iron away. Peering down the corridor, she looked both ways, saw no one. So she turned and jogged along in a direction she hoped would take her to the creche, the place she might find JudyTech.

If she could find her before being caught.

Corridor after corridor, corner after corner, stairway after stairway. What limited staff there were must have been confined in the lockdown. According to JudyTech, they’d lost a great many personnel to Undead outbreaks—there weren’t many people in the world left to recruit. And clones required both time and expense.

Tired and footsore, unused to so much activity, Dori was close to tears—sure she would never find her way back—when she recognized the warning sign over a door, at the other end of the latest stretch of hallway.

B
IO
-D
EVELOPMENT
P
ERSONNEL
O
NLY
U
NAUTHORIZED
P
ERSONS
S
UBJECT TO
R
ECYCLING

There was a security camera over the door. If she got much closer, the camera would pick her up.

She heard the troopers coming before they spotted her. Their boots, moving in lockstep, sounded to her left, where the hall vibrated. They’d reach her in a matter of moments.

Frantically Dori moved down the hallway, trying doors. Locked. Next one—locked. Another one—locked.

She had to find someplace to hide… She was already within the security camera’s range, and the sound of boots was getting louder.

Then a knob turned, a door opened, and she slipped quickly through—found herself in a lavatory. There were no booths, just toilets and sinks. No place to conceal herself, but perhaps none of the troopers would need to stop. Pressing her ear to the door, she heard them go tramping by.

She slumped, and suddenly realized that she had been holding her breath.

What should she do next? Where could she go? From experience, she now knew that the door to the creche was locked, but she needed to get past it.

And there was the security camera. She’d been close enough for it to see her. She wasn’t dressed properly—these jeans and this sweatshirt—for a worker in the facility. Her look would scream, “AWOL.” If anyone was monitoring that camera, they’d be here in just a minute, or two.

Dori went to a sink, and drank some water, splashed some on her face. She had to make up her mind.

She had to
think
…

Then the door opened.

Without daring to look at the newcomer, she walked toward the entrance, trying to act as if she’d just finished using the bathroom. Trying to look calm. But a hand restrained her, and she tensed. She turned and saw—

“JudyTech!”

The woman just grinned at her. She had buck teeth and showed a lot of gum when she smiled. She had lines at the corners of her small green eyes, a snub nose, and graying brown hair braided close to her head. There was something deeply kind about her face. She wore a green lab smock and dull-green lab pants, and she carried a blue satchel.

“I saw you on the security camera, Dori,” she explained. “I took over a shift so I could watch for you.”

Dori threw herself into JudyTech’s arms.

“I’m so sorry I wandered off,” she said, tears welling up in her eyes. “I just wanted to… I don’t know… I was…”

“It doesn’t matter,” JudyTech said. “Listen—we’re going to get out of here now. Right now. I monitored a conversation on the security system—I think there are bombs set to go off. This place is going to drown in seawater. We’ve got to escape!”

“But how?”

“Look…” JudyTech opened the satchel. Inside it were folded clothes for Dori—and on top of the clothes were two of the metal scarabs Umbrella used for mind control.

At the sight of them, Dori felt her heart sink to her knees.

“No…
no
!”

“Take it easy, hon,” Dori told her. “They aren’t real. The electronic guts, the drug infuser, all that has been taken out of them. There’s just the shell and the lights. They’re our tickets out of here.”

They arrived at Alice’s house—the house she had shared with Todd, and their daughter.

The clone Alice.

The clone Todd.

And the clone daughter…

Alice walked through the open front door, gun at ready, not sure if the place had been cleared. The girl and Ada came in behind her. A quick look around told her there were no creatures.

“We have to find Daddy!” the girl signed. She ran off down the hall before Alice could stop her.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” Ada demanded.