Resident Evil. Retribution (20 page)

He kept his hand poised over the button as they rushed upward, shivering, cold air blasting past them.

New York City. Times Square.

Undead wandered through the streets—those the maintenance bots hadn’t got hold of yet. They staggered about, mouths open, endlessly hungry,
maddeningly
hungry, no relief to be found. Something deep down inside each one of them, a little spark of humanity, yearned for an end to it. For an end to the wandering. For an end to the mindless searching, the perpetual pain, the feverish hunting that never ended… as hours became days without sleep, without rest, without end.

And then, the ice-cold hand of the world blessed them, at last. It offered relief. It offered surcease from their unliving hell.

Because that’s when the tidal wave, the internal tsunami, swept through the testing floor, smashing buildings, flattening false fronts, picking up cars and flipping them around as unruly children played with toys. Sparkling billboards crackled and short circuited, spitting sparks; windows shattered and blasted broken glass through the air, speckling the rising waves, mixing with the ice; debris churned like the blades of a garbage disposal, cutting up anything and anyone in it.

Charged wires spat and leapt over the water, then the lights went off across “Times Square,” as if the seawater was throwing switches methodically as it went.

The Undead were caught in the wave, and made instinctive efforts to thrash out of it, to escape. But at heart—deep inside—something at the cellular level whimpered in release as the cold of cosmic entropy crushed them to itself, smothered them, and ended their suffering at last, at long last…

If you can drown joyfully, that’s what they did.

Shibuya Scramble, Tokyo.

The JumboTron screens were shivering, shaking, their looping images flickering, the giant faces of pretty people—models who had died in the great rising of the Undead—were electronically corroding, warping, pitting, as if they were becoming digital zombies. The distant false ceiling was dropping bits of paint chips and dust; a piece of a cornice fell down with a crash.

Puzzled troopers on clean-up duty looked around. Some of them seemed to take little dance steps backwards, as the ground shook…

And then the wall of seawater rushed in upon them. They felt a wave of cold air first, and then turned to find the great white curtain of foam sweeping down on them, tumbling cars and vans and the bodies of tester clones and prop furniture from storefronts along ahead of it. Mannequins swept from window displays seemed to thrash about as if trying to swim.

A thousand-pound dead walrus, sucked in along with the seawater, struck one of the troopers as the water rushed over him, crushing him.

Another trooper found herself lifted up by a rising surge of water, tossed this way and that until a gigantic face filled her vision—a giant, two-dimensional, lovely Japanese model, her mouth open as if to swallow the trooper. It was a digital face, fizzing out and re-forming itself on the gigantic screen. And it did swallow her, in a way, as she was thrown headfirst into the digital mouth, smashing through the JumboTron, her neck broken.

A moment later a minivan was heaved through the same screen, the electronic sign exploding in sparks. Within moments the Shibuya Scramble was drowned, the reproduction of Tokyo’s commercial heart sunken under seawater, like some Nipponese Atlantis, where the bodies of troopers spun and tangled with the bodies of the Undead.

Moscow, Russia. Red Square.

The tsunami came inexorably rampaging through, hurling cars to the right and left, ripping buildings from foundations and turning them end over end, ripping up power cables and spitting the sparks, blue and yellow, into the air…

The Las Plagas Undead—the plague soldiers—tried to outrun the massive wave, the great wrecking ball of ice and frigid seawater, but they were swept away as the mountain of water swept through the Moscow streets, crashing against the turrets and twisted minarets of the Kremlin. The wave picked up the Undead and smacked them hard against the walls of the faux Kremlin, smashing them to jelly, so that blood and innards colored the sea.

A pilot whale had been sucked down, alive, with the seawater and found its way here—it ripped into the thrashing Undead, tearing them apart with its great white teeth. As it surfaced, an errant Licker swam up, like some primeval behemoth in a prehistoric sea, and swarmed onto the mammal, biting into it, its tongue winding around the pilot whale’s jaw. The two predators fought, rolling over and over in foamy rage, dying the sea crimson and black.

The waves sawed at foundations until the model of the Kremlin collapsed, and another tsunami surge crashed through the enormous proving ground, turning the minaret towers into giant spears that were flung about. The shattered walls and windows were turned into disposal blades, whirling around broken ends of concrete and sheets of metal and glass in a spinning whirlpool, an aquatic meat grinder, slashing whale and Licker to shreds. Decapitating some of the zombies, and drowning the rest.

Leaving Red Square’s Undead quite dead at last.

The internal tsunami roared over the quiet, tree-lined streets of suburbia, picking up houses and making temporary vessels of them, crashing them against one another till they splintered and sank.

The gigantic wave of seawater tore up telephone poles and sent sparking electrical wires whipping through the air, cutting through the foliage of the silk-leafed fake trees. It flooded the streets and cleansed them of the vile bodies that decayed in their intersections.

And the wave crashed into a large house where the clone of Alice had been killed trying to save her daughter. Here the clone designated “Todd” was still creeping about, having been missed by the clean-up teams. He was caught in a basement room, busily chewing at the leg of one of the troopers that Alice had killed, gnawing on the leg like a senile lunatic chewing on a raw chicken drumstick.

Suddenly the water swirled and rose round, and with the detached, ragged leg clamped in its mouth, the zombie tried to grab the rising water, to choke it, to drive it away.

But the Todd Undead was swept off its feet, sucked up the stairs by a powerful current, then out through a broken window. Still clamping the half-eaten human leg in its mouth, it made vaguely remembered attempts at dog paddling, till it was drawn into a whirlpool where broken window frames, edged with fangs of glass, sawed through its spine and belly, cutting it in half, and sent its halves waltzing together, dancing in rotting black blood, down into the cold depths.

In the submarine, Dori, JudyTech, and Tom were sharing a quite remarkably large can of pork and beans, when they heard a distant booming, followed by a strange vibration that grew by the moment.

“What the hell,” Tom grumbled.

Within a minute the submarine itself was shuddering, the deck seesawing under them, and Dori was thrown against the bulkhead. She sucked air through her teeth, at the pain in her bruised shoulder.

“You okay, kid?” Tom said, grabbing her arm. The sub lurched once more, and he held her so she wouldn’t fall again.

JudyTech, who had the gun now, looked at Tom closely.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said, waving the gun toward the door, “back to our hiding place.”

Tom nodded. He already had a rucksack filled with canned goods, and he grabbed it, then they headed down the narrow passageway—Tom leading the way, JudyTech keeping him covered with the pistol, Dori coming behind—past the Cyrillic signs and wheel-opened doors, till they got to the door marked with a crude sign: F
IRE
A
BATEMENT
S
TOWAGE
.

“In there!” JudyTech instructed him. “Go!”

Tom went in without a murmur, and they followed, Dori hesitating in the door, listening as she was about to close it.

She’d heard something…

“There’s someone up there—voices!” she said. She could hear footsteps, too, and people shouting commands.

“Come in and close the door,” JudyTech ordered. As she said this, she turned to Dori, and half turned from Tom—who instantly snatched the pistol from her hand.

“Ha! That’s
mine,
thank you!” He pointed the gun at JudyTech and told Dori, “Now both of you get inside here and girly, you close that hatch!”

Dori didn’t know what else to do. She couldn’t abandon JudyTech, and it sounded like there were troopers in the other parts of the submarine. So she and Judy stepped through; Dori closed the door, and locked it.

Inside, the light was yellow and the long hold— sixty feet long—was mostly filled with old fire hoses stretched out on aluminum racks, many of the hoses were mildewy and pitted, probably useless in a fire. Soviet-era workmanship.

Tom put the rucksack down.

“This where you picked to hide?” He looked around approvingly. “Smart! Real smart! They probably wouldn’t be coming in here, less’n they really got to, and those hoses are okay to lay down on, get your forty winks—maybe even to hide under. Good thinking.” He nodded to himself. Then he looked at the gun in his hand. “I’m a mechanic, not a soldier. I don’t like guns much. I’m getting too old for all the stress of not being able to trust nobody at all. Can’t take it.

“That’s why I deserted from Umbrella, and hid down here. They were gonna put me on one of those damn scarabs soon, like they done my brother. Not me, no ma’am. Anyway…”

He flipped the gun around in his hand and offered it to JudyTech, butt first.

“You hold onto this. If I’m gonna trust you—well, you’ll have to know you can trust me.”

Alice and Becky entered a ceiling vent above the clone room, clambered from there into a maintenance crawl space, and moved hurriedly along a catwalk used by engineers who worked on the facility’s intricate electronic, hydraulic, and aeration systems.

The walls shivered and groaned; the sound of rushing water roared louder and louder. They’d felt the reverberation from the explosions overhead— Alice had heard the internal tsunami thundering through Umbrella Prime, and she’d guessed what had happened. The countdown had reached its completion.

As much as she could, Alice answered Becky’s questions, sketching in a little about the facility and the clones. How the real world was outside. How everything she’d experienced was artificial, used to give her a sense of a past.

“All a test,” Becky signed, shaking her head with sad wonder. “Just a test. That’s…” She hesitated, unsure how to put it.

“It’s
cruel
,” Alice signed. “They’re cruel people. But not everyone is.”
But most of the good people have died,
she mused. She’d explained a little about the Undead, and the Lickers. But it was all too much—too shocking for the girl to take in.

All a test…

Sometimes Alice thought all of existence was a test. Just another proving ground, set up by some unknown entity. Because she constantly felt tested. So far, she’d passed the tests that determined survival. But there were others she felt she’d failed.

And someday she’d fail the survival test. Still— everyone failed it someday, whether they died in a bed… or were shot by a trooper clone.

Alice tried to angle toward the elevator shaft, using the blueprints she’d memorized, and then a girder suddenly rammed right through the wall, spewing chunks of concrete, squealing as it came. Partly blocking the catwalk, it was a heavy steel strut pressed out of place as the imploding facility shrugged and shifted about. It seemed as if the entire structure was buckling inward.

Becky began crying to herself, and Alice put her arm around her.

“We’ve gotten this far,” she signed. “We’ll make it! Come on…” She kissed the top of the girl’s head, took her hand, and helped her climb over the girder, wishing she felt as confident as she sounded. They hurried onward, with the building making grinding sounds all around them, sounding as if it were about to collapse completely.

They came to a service elevator. Alice pried the doors open and looked down the shaft—it was filling up with rising seawater, churning with broken ice.

“Not that way…” she said. “Come on, I think it’s more this way…” She remembered the girl couldn’t hear her, and repeated herself with signing.

Then they forged onward.

The freight elevator carrying Luther and Leon had been rammed up by the geyser of seawater, propelled into the broader silo, rocketing them upward toward the cold outer world. It seemed for a while as if they’d never slow down.

But at last the pressure was equalizing, the force of propulsion was spent, and the elevator began slowing. As it did so, the only thing keeping it suspended in the shaft was water pressure, which was sure to drop.

Luther knew that when the water pressure under the platform subsided, they’d be dropped down into the water… icy water, in which a man couldn’t survive—not for long. It was just a matter of time.

And then it happened—the platform began to drop. And drop faster…

Leon punched for the emergency brakes. And the platform slowed, gratingly coming to a shuddering stop, locked in place with water swirling around their ankles. Unlatching his belt from the railing, and shivering uncontrollably, Luther glanced up. They were still a hundred feet from the surface.

Not going to be easy to negotiate that with one hand—if he could do it at all.

“Now we climb,” Leon said.

Luther had his doubts—but he started toward the ladder.

And then there was a banging noise above them. It was a metal utility grate that was moving, creaking— then swinging down out of the silo wall. Leon and Luther sighted in on it—ready for troopers or Lickers.

That’s when Alice and Becky stepped out on the grating, together.

Well I’ll be damned…
Luther smiled.

Alice looked down at them with mock reproach. She put her hands on her hips.

“I thought I said not to leave without me!”

Leon grinned.

“Well, maybe this mission isn’t a complete bust after all,” he said. “Okay, Alice. Lead the way. Up the ladder!”

Alice looked at Luther.

“How’s he going to…?”