Resident Evil. Retribution (26 page)

“It’s a mutant,” Judy said hoarsely. “Oh, God. A Las Plagas mutant, judging from the eyes. Looks like it might’ve once been a ‘Rain’ designated clone.”

“That’s a clone, like me?” Dori asked, wide eyed.

“Not like you, kid,” Tom said. “That thing’s mean. They get like that, only one person can control them. Chances are that person’s dead. The thing’ll kill till it can’t kill anymore. But I don’t think it can get in here, to us. It looks like it’s about twenty yards ahead—it’s got ice on its arms there, see it? We’ll go back up, to right under the ice, and head out—and we’ll leave that thing behind.”

“It must’ve been one of those who were fighting, out on the ice,” Judy suggested. “Any way we can put it out of its misery?”

“Nah. Not while it’s down there. This vessel was used as a transport, for Umbrella’s top secret stuff, see. It wasn’t armed, though. They didn’t want to mess with any nuclear missiles, torpedos—too unstable after all these years. They took ’em out. There’s a machine-gun emplacement up top, though, on the turret. It’s all closed off but there’s ammo for it. No way we could hit that thing with it. You can only operate the gun from outside.”

“It looks like it’s trying to get close to us!” Dori said, and she pointed.

Indeed, the ice-laden creature was trying to lumber toward them, walking along the ocean floor, its booted feet raising the sand like slow motion dust clouds.

“Dammit!” Tom muttered, sitting in front of the control screen. He tapped the control for the ballast tanks, ordering them to blow half their weight. The submarine huffed, bubbles surged up, rumbling past—and the vessel groaned, as if complaining. They hung on again as it stabilized, rising—and in a few moments the mutant was gone from the screen.

Tom blew out a long stream of air in relief.

“Whew. Now…” He checked their depth on the bathymetry gauge. “Twenty-seven fathoms,” he said.

“What’s that?” Dori asked.

“It’s how deep we are. Judy teach you math? A fathom is six feet.”

“Of course!” she sniffed. “One hundred sixty-two!”

“That’s how many feet down we are. I’m going to keep us right about here, because I don’t want to run into the bottom of any icebergs. And I’m going to head southeast, if I can get the engine to cooperate with me.”

“Sure you know what you’re doing?” Judy asked again. “That’s a nuclear engine…”

“It’s a steam engine powered up by nuclear generators. Anyway—you want to live here, forever?”

“We could fish, when we ran out of food.”

“Umbrella will be back here, salvaging. Investigating.”

Judy winced at that.

“You’re right. Let’s go. But… let’s go slowly, till we get out away from the ice and the land.”

“Now you’re talking sense. We want to get to deep water, and away from all this ice…”

“Can you get the engine going?” Dori asked.

“Come over here,” Tom told her. She walked over and looked over his shoulder, hunching a little, her hands on her knees.

“Now—see that green tab there on the screen? Touch that with your thumb.”

She licked her lips—and touched the green tab. At first nothing seemed to happen. Then the submarine responded, grumbling deep within itself, whining, and then a vibration ran through it, from the back to the front. They could feel it passing through the attack center.

“Oh, look!” Judy said, pointing at the prow video.

They could see ice floes, up above, illuminated by light from the surface, passing by as they tooled along under them.

They were moving, and the compass indicated that they were heading south-by-southeast.

When Alice woke, she heard someone walking back to the rear of the big chopper. They remarked that they had just flown east over the coast of California.

Or what once was California,
Alice thought. Now it was just another wasteland, haunted by the Undead. There would be some tough survivors down there, fighting tooth and nail, struggling every day for life. And she hoped the sight of the choppers flying over would give them hope.

But she wasn’t sure they gave
her
any hope. It was Wesker’s outfit, after all. Who knew what he planned? He was one of the men who’d destroyed civilization in the first place.

She was on her way to be delivered to her greatest enemy.

She lay there a moment, listening to the percussive roll of the rotors, aware of crosswinds buffeting the aircraft, making it jolt from time to time. She could hear voices up forward, but no one seemed to be keeping an eye on her.

They’d have to stop for fuel at some point, and that might give her and Becky a chance to escape. Maybe Jill would help her—even go with her. Maybe not. Could be Jill would think of Wesker as her new employer.

And why not? Wesker had access to resources. He might have partnered with one of the other surviving multinationals. Umbrella couldn’t be the only one. And if they had medical resources, fuel, helicopters, they’d provide some kind of shelter in a world still overrun by horrors.

Were they as ruthless as Umbrella? Then again, in the world as it was now, maybe that’s how you had to be.

No,
Alice decided.
There’s no world that could justify what Umbrella has done.

Yet if Alice hoped to escape—she’d have to be ambulatory to do it. She stretched, testing her limbs, then grimaced—the “Rain mutant” had damaged her pretty severely. But rest and pain meds had helped. And she seemed to have some of her old healing ability, though to a lesser degree than when she’d had all her powers.

She carefully unfastened the restraints that held her in place and, grimacing with little stabs of pain, sat up. The I.V. was still in her arm—she pulled off the tape and jerked the needle out of the vein. There was a roll of surgical tape on the table, and some clean gauze. She made a bandage to stop the bleeding, and then plucked off the monitor wires. The monitor chirped repeatedly, emitting a prissy-sounding alarm.

And the medic came in. He was a tall, skinny black man with an afro, probably from not having access to a barber, and a fuzz of beard. He wore cammie-style paramilitary togs.

“Hey, you lay back down now!” he told Alice. “What are you doing, taking your I.V. out?”

“Am I a prisoner?”

“Not that I heard. Your friend Jill is walking around as she pleases. Your little girl is watching the pilots. Only reason you’re strapped down is because you were injured, and we’re going to land for a refuel in Nevada pretty soon. You’ve got to be strapped down when we land.”

He seemed genuinely concerned for her, and Alice didn’t feel like fighting him.

“I’ll lay down, but no I.V., I already need a bedpan.”

“I’ll get you one of those,” he promised. “Just lay down. How’s your pain?”

“Not bad. When I move around, though…”

He shook his head, and looked at her as if he thought she was insane.

“You got cracked bones in there, lady. Just take it easy.”

Alice was feeling dizzy anyway. She shrugged and lay back down. It wasn’t the right moment. There was Becky to consider.

The medic brought her the bedpan, waited, looking out a port, then took it away to empty. Very professional. That touch of civilized care was comforting, after so long in a world under siege.

A few minutes later Becky came in, looking giddy, and sat on the edge of her cot, smiling and signing.

“Mama, I was watching the pilots!” she said. “I want to be a helicopter pilot!”

“Some day!” Alice signed, and she smiled. They continued to sign back and forth, Becky sometimes talking aloud in her squeaky way. Alice spoke aloud as she signed, to encourage Becky to learn to read lips.

“Jill can sign too,” Becky revealed.

“I know she can. So can Ada.”

“And she told me we’re going to Washington, D.C.! The real one!”

“Right, not one of those pretend towns that Umbrella made. The real one.”

“I sometimes think I can remember being outside— but Jill says I wasn’t even alive before a few days ago.”

“You were alive, but you were sleeping in a lab. Like those others we saw. They put some memories in your mind, so you wouldn’t be confused when you woke up. But they aren’t real memories. You’re making real ones now.”

Becky nodded gravely.

“I’ll never forget any of this,” she signed. “Never. I want to see Washington, D.C. Our nation’s capital.”

“It’s not like it used to be,” Alice warned. “The Undead have overrun a lot of it, for now. But someday we’ll get rid of them, take it all back, and build it up again. A lot of it was burned down, you know, by the British, in the War of 1812. Centuries ago. They rebuilt it. It can be our nation’s capital again.”

“It’s not now?”

“Maybe in some ways. But the nation’s lost a lot of… organization.” She hoped she’d signed ‘organization’ right. “We’ll fix it. But it’ll involve having to fight a lot, I think. I don’t want to go there now unless I have to… but someday people like us will rebuild it.”

Alice hoped she wasn’t leading Becky into false hope. It occurred to her that before the second Fall of Man—before the rise of the Undead—there’d been new prototypes of artificial hearing devices, implants, transplants, various devices that were purported to treat deafness. Becky might’ve had her deafness effectively cured. And she could have become “a helicopter pilot” someday, in that world.

If she could get her hearing back, now, somehow, it would increase her chances of survival. If you can hear an Undead coming up from behind, you have a better chance of escaping.

But that world was gone now. People who weren’t killed by the Undead often died anyway, for lack of medical attention when they got an infected cut. Hearing implants? Not likely.

Still—what about Wesker, and whoever he was working with? They might have a cure for Becky, somewhere in their labs. But then, their “cure” might be a horror, too.

The black medic came in, then.

“We’re going down for refueling.”

“Where?” Alice asked.

“There’s an old Air Force fuel dump we’ve taken over, in the Sierras. Razor wire all around it—should be fairly safe.”

Who are you talking about when you say “we,”
Alice wondered. But before she could ask, the medic busied himself hustling Becky to the opposite bulkhead, where he buckled her into a fold-down seat.

“You just take it easy right there, little lady,” he said. She didn’t understand his words but she smiled at him. He tousled her hair and took his own fold-down seat as the helicopter began to angle downward, coming in for a landing.

Becky looked happily around, and Alice swore to herself she’d see that the girl was taken care of. In time she’d have to teach her certain things—like how to use weapons, martial arts techniques. Probably start with judo. Work her way up, teaching her how to kill with her hands alone.

There was room for hope in the world, sure. But innocence? There was no room for innocence. As far as Alice could tell, innocence was dead. Umbrella had killed it.

The chopper’s engine changed its tune, whining, and then, after the slight jarring of setting down, the rotors slowed, their song getting lower in pitch.

Now was her chance…

Alice had made up her mind that she didn’t want to go to Washington. That would take them to Wesker—and that, alone, was enough reason to get away from the helicopter.

Albert Wesker, after all, had once tried to eat her alive. To literally
eat her.
He had transformed himself with the empowering variant of the T-virus, becoming a transfigurable superhuman. Sometimes he was just a pale man with slicked-back brown hair, shades, a long, black-leather coat, and black gloves. But when he chose, he could transform—his enormous mandibles extruding from between elastic jaws, his body swelling, muscles bulging.

Wesker didn’t have complete control over his transformations, so he’d decided that consuming “Project Alice,” as he called her, would allow him to absorb some key part of her DNA. Alice had told him that she wasn’t “on the menu”—and she’d escaped.

Just barely.

His mind was the most monstrous thing about him—his intricate rationalization for wanting absolute power. But it came down to something simple: The only thing that controls power, he said, is more power.

Wesker had been chairman of Umbrella when the T-virus project had been approved. Alice couldn’t prove it, but she suspected that Wesker might have manipulated Spence into releasing the virus. And now they were taking her to that monster.

Her and Becky?

No.

The medic got up, checked on her, patted her shoulder, and asked her if she needed anything.

“Maybe something nutritious to drink?” she replied. “Have anything like that? One of those canned smoothies or something?”

“We do. It’s about a year past its ‘use-by’ date but so is everything we got. I’ll get it for you.”

He went forward, and Alice unstrapped herself, ignoring the pain as she sat up. Becky unstrapped herself and came over.

“Listen,” Alice signed, “maybe we should go our own way—just you and me, from here. I don’t know much about these people. Would you trust me, to just go with me? You don’t have to.”

Fear flickered in Becky’s eyes. Her mouth trembled.

“Don’t leave me,” she signed.

“I won’t—I’m saying that you can go with me.”

“Will they let us go?” Becky asked.

An astute question…

Watching a tern fly away, past the circling cloud of gulls and out to sea, Jack Tannager ached to leave the island.

But he wasn’t sure he ever would. Uncle Chung claimed that wherever you were, it was enough. The world, he said, is small in the cosmos. Everything is a speck, ultimately, so why not live on a small island? The whole Earth was a small island in the infinite reaches of space, after all.

Yet here he was, standing on the stony beach at sunset, on the west side of Catalina Island, gazing out to sea, and every fiber of his being ached for exploration. There were, at least, other islands that might be clear of the Undead. At least
they
could be explored.

Uncle Chung wouldn’t hear of it.

“The sickness that killed your mother and father— it will not have you, too. I loved my sister very much. When it took her, changed the vessel that had held her soul, dishonored her memory, I swore I would give it no chance to harm you, Jack. We have been safe here for a long time. We will not take the chance…”