Resident Evil. Retribution (32 page)

“Wesker,” Alice said, nodding once. “Making yourself at home?”

Wesker rose from behind the presidential desk and came casually around toward her.

“I must say, it does have a certain ease to it…”

Then he struck.

Lightning-fast, he stabbed Alice in the neck with a syringe. The high-tech device instantly injected her with a red fluid. Alice screamed in fury and frustration—she knocked his hand away, but it was too late. The infected fluid was traveling like a blinding flash of electricity through her nervous system, making her arch her back with agony.

She trembled, and as the trembling became shaking, she fell to her knees, rocking back and forth as waves of pain and heat alternated when they swept through her.

“What… was in there?” she demanded through gritted teeth.

Wesker smiled down at her.

“You were the only one to successfully bond with the T-virus. To fully realize your powers.” He gestured with a magisterial flourish. “Well, now I have need of you. The
old
you. You are the weapon…

“Come with me,” he continued.

He led the way to a stairs, and up. They climbed, floor after floor—Wesker, Alice, Becky, Ada, Leon, and Jill—until they reached a hallway just under the roof. They followed the hall to a door at the end, where they saw a sign.

SECURITY/OBSERVATION

Wesker nodded to the guard there, and they all went through, then up another set of steps, through a small structure on the roof of the building. Finally they were standing atop the White House roof, behind the barricades and razor wire, near gun emplacements and watchful guards.

He led the way to the edge of the roof, where they commanded a good view of what had been the front lawn, and Pennsylvania Avenue.

“A lot has changed in the past weeks,” Wesker said. “This is the last that remains of us… of the human race itself.”

Alice could have argued with that. The world was a big place. There would be other survivors. But still— he wasn’t far wrong.

“It seems we are bonded against a common foe,” Wesker continued. “This is why we needed you back. The ultimate weapon…”

Alice stared at him.

I’m the ultimate weapon?
It was an impossible concept to grasp.
He’s insane.
But still she said nothing.

At Wesker’s signal, the spotlights swung down to illuminate the streets. He gestured out toward the Avenue, and as Alice looked that way, her eyes adjusted. She felt a sick shock ripple through her…

“This,” Wesker said, “is humanity’s last stand.”

Thousands of them out there. No… there were
hundreds
of thousands of them.

The Undead. Surging against the walls of the makeshift fortress around the White House. Troops on the barriers by the Avenue were using flamethrowers to try to keep them back. The creatures fell, burning and thrashing—but others clambered over their charred bodies and charged at the walls.

Rocket launchers coughed, and shells exploded amongst the Undead. Their bodies flew to pieces, and yet more came to replace them, surging from the inky darkness that lay out past the lights. As if the darkness itself were spawning the endless horde.

“…the final conflict…” Wesker said.

A burst of lights came stabbing down from the circling choppers, and in it Alice saw that she’d been wrong in thinking that there were hundreds of thousands of Undead out there.

There were
millions
of them.

And there was every kind of Undead in the horde; every perversely transfigured mutation. There were Lickers, mutated dogs, Executioners, Giant Spiders, all the creatures of the apocalypse, joined together in a vast mindless army. It was an army without a commander—unless its commander was hunger itself, the mad rapacious furious unstoppable hunger to kill and consume that burned within each of the monsters.

The millions of Undead surrounded the White House. The last bastion of civilization, under siege…

“…the beginning of the end…” Wesker continued softly.

And then, as a helicopter flew overhead, using a prow-mounted turret gun to strafe the mobs, to keep them back from the barricades, things Alice had never seen before began to rise up, flapping on leather wings from the shadowy corners of the restless crowd of zombies…

Dark, winged creatures, they were, a cloud of them, rising up from the horde. A storm of fangs and claws, they swarmed over the helicopter, clustering on it, screeching in fury, tearing at its mechanisms… and the helicopter came tumbling down to crash in a ball of fire.

Alice shuddered. But she also felt the new strength in her. She felt the promise of that strength, and the promise of battle. An epic battle to end this dark journey at last.

It was coming, and she would be its spear point.

It was all down to her…

Alice.

With thanks to Steve Saffel, Cath Trechman, Nick Landau, Vivian Cheung, Tim Whale, Natalie Laverick and Elizabeth Bennett at Titan Books, and Johannes Schlichting, Franz Trosthammer and Kat Kleiner at Constantin Film Development.

John Shirley’s novels include
Everything is Broken,
the
A Song Called Youth
cyberpunk trilogy (omnibus released in 2012),
Bleak History, Demons, City Come A-Walkin’
and
The Other End.
His short story collection
Black Butterflies
won the Bram Stoker Award, and was chosen by
Publishers Weekly
as one of the best books of the year. His new story collection is
In Extremis: The Most Extreme Short Stories of John Shirley
. His stories have been included in three
Year’s Best
anthologies.

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