Resident Evil. Retribution

by John Shirley

  As she recovered from the shock, Alice realized that the child who hugged her was deaf, and spoke to her in hand signs. Thanks to her training, Alice understood.

  “You came back!” There were tears of joy in the little girl’s eyes. “I hid—just like you told me to! I love you, Mom, I love you so much!”

  Mom? What… Alice sank to the ground in shock, still holding the child in her arms.

  The girl began to calm down. She looked up and signed again.

  “What happened to your clothes? And your hair?”

  12

  Times Square was lit by strong ceiling lights. Jill Valentine and her squad halted in the midst of a forgotten traffic jam. The cars were there but the drivers had gone, as if they’d just gotten out and walked away.

  Strange thoughts came to Jill, sometimes…

  She led her squad onward, toward the enemy.

  Why were they the enemy? Because the scarab said so. Umbrella said so. Reason enough, wasn’t it?

  An electric shock punished her, like a bee sting to the skull—a shot of electricity, warning her that she was having unauthorized thoughts.

  Just keep going, the scarab said. Do your job.

  The traffic lights hung like dead things; the cars showed no headlights, the signs were dead.

  “How are our guests?” Jill asked. The African-American clone trooper put on a set of tactical glasses, checked the surveillance feed.

  “Still alive.”

  “Let’s change that,” Jill said firmly.

  “Yes ma’am,” the trooper replied. He tapped the tactical glasses, peered at the heads-up display, and issued a few commands.

  Luther and the others had taken shelter in the GUM department store—where they were trying to repel an army of Las Plagas Undead.

  The strike team was crouched behind the display case podiums for the department store’s front windows—the window glass was gone, shot away, and the mannequins were blown to pieces. Heads and limbs littered the floor around them.

  The surreal nature of their situation struck him as he blasted at a motorcyclist plague soldier riding by. It hadn’t felt so strange to be firing from the old prison they’d taken over, back in Los Angeles. But this place—with its ornate, neoclassical architecture commissioned by Catherine the Second—was a strange bunker in which to be hunkered down.

  Luther popped shots from his auto pistol, out the store windows past remnants of mannequins wearing the hot new fashions of a few years back. He had the pistol set on single-shot to conserve ammo. The Undead hadn’t organized into a charge, yet. They roared back and forth in front of the store, firing their weapons and presenting surprisingly inviting targets.

  Windows shattered under the impacts of bullets, rocket launchers blew up pieces of the store’s ornate façade—but so far no one on the team had been hit. It had been a close thing, running in here with bullets from that machine gun strafing up right behind them. But they’d made it to good cover.

  Only, it wasn’t going to last.

  The plague soldiers, dim-witted though they were, would inevitably charge into the store. The strike team was heavily outnumbered.

  What’s gonna happen if we don’t get out of here, Luther wondered, before those explosives go off?

  Suddenly the fighting dropped off for a moment. The plague soldiers seemed to be regrouping.

  And then they began to advance, moving forward like a wall of rotting flesh, eyes ablaze, firing as they came.

  “They can’t shoot for shit!” Barry said as the bullets cut the air overhead.

  “Yeah, but there’s plenty of them!” Leon said, firing a burst from his machine rifle. He hit a motorcycle’s gas tank, and it exploded in an orange ball of flame, the Undead driver continuing to drive it, the ball of flame rocketing along on two wheels until it crashed through a false wall.

  A rippling line of Las Plagas plague soldiers came at them, firing, creating a storm of bullets overhead. If Luther had stood up, he’d have been perforated— turned into raw hamburger. The noise of it racketed and echoed in the GUM store spaces; like someone was pounding directly on Luther’s eardrums.

  The enemy fire slackened for a moment. Leon jumped up and unleashed a long stream of machine rifle fire. The strafe cut a swath through the onrushing soldiers, many of them falling—but others came after them, stepping on the bodies of the fallen without even glancing down. Others, ripped across the middle by bullets, kept staggering onward.

  “And they don’t go down easy,” Leon growled, as he ducked down again.

  Luther fired several more single shots, bringing down a couple of their attackers, And then, all at once, the enemy gunfire stopped.

  Silence—except for the ringing in his ears.

  “Now what?” Leon asked.

  “Maybe they’re giving up?” Barry suggested. Luther had to look to see if he was serious.

  Leon gave Barry a look of mild disgust.

  Luther looked back through the ruined window, wondered how the plague soldiers were communicating. He hadn’t seen any of them giving orders, but somehow they’d all decided to hold off for a moment… and they’d decided it all at once.

  Some kind of telepathic connection, maybe?

  And what were they up to?

  Then he saw it. On the back of a flatbed truck, a plague soldier was leveling a rocket launcher—aiming it right at the department store. And the deep cough of the rocket launcher sounded as he fired.

  Oh, crap!

  It was headed straight for Leon.

  “RPG!” Luther shouted. “Down!”

  They flattened, and the RPG round exploded, blowing out a nearby chunk of the GUM façade. Debris rained down on them. His ears ringing more than ever, Luther saw Leon lifting up to look accusingly at Barry.

  Barry just shrugged, causing bits of debris to fall from his shoulders.

  “Can’t be right all the time.”

  A new sound caused Luther to turn. The plague soldiers had used the rocket attack as their moment, their opportunity. While the smoke was still clearing, they charged, pouring in through the ruined gap made by the RPG shell.

  Luther and Leon jumped up, fighting side by side as the plague soldiers rushed them. Bullets whipped past—then a soldier was leaping at Leon, swinging its weapon like a club. Leon ducked under the swing and pivoted into a kick, slamming the Undead in the jaw with his boot, drilling shards of broken bone into its brain.

  Luther kicked another in the balls, was surprised at how much effect it had—the Undead buckled up, and Luther stuck the barrel of his auto pistol in its mouth, firing—splashing the thing’s brains into the glowing red eyes of the soldier coming after it, temporarily blinding the creature so that he was able to yank his pistol free and mix the first one’s brains with the shattered gray matter of the second.

  Leon shot two other charging plague soldiers, delivering quick, effective headshots, and then another came in—and Luther saw with a chill it was the one with the chainsaw. The big machine, held in both its hands, was grinding away, roaring, the chain whirring. Tony shot at the Undead but it blocked with the saw, the rounds ricocheting from the blade’s metal.

  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, puncturi
ng 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.

  13

  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 d
ance 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.

  BIO-DEVELOPMENT PERSONNEL ONLY UNAUTHORIZED PERSONS SUBJECT TO RECYCLING

  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.