by Tim Waggoner
Alice sat behind the wheel of the Umbrella transport. The vehicle was moving forward at a slow but steady rate through the plaza. The transport’s control system contained a simple but effective autopilot program, one that should be good enough to take the vehicle out of the city and get it back on the highway—assuming she’d programmed it correctly. Now that Alice had got it moving, she opened the driver’s-side door and jumped out. She tucked and rolled, and came up on her feet to watch the transport rumble away. Two men in manacles stumbled after the vehicle, both of them connected to the machine by chains strapped around their waists. The commander and the trooper who had surrendered to Alice half-walked, half-jogged behind the rolling transport, struggling to keep up with it.
Maybe I set the speed controls too high, Alice thought.
The commander turned to look at her with an expression of wild desperation.
“No, please! Let us go!” he cried.
As the transport passed the Peak, what remained of the Undead horde—conditioned by months of pursuit—turned and began to trail after the vehicle. A burning Undead lunged toward the commander and dragged him to the ground. The man screamed as the Undead set him alight even as it began to eat him alive. The Undead and the commander were dragged along the ground behind the transport, and the man’s screams soon cut off. The flames continued to spread until you couldn’t tell where the commander’s body left off and the Undead’s began.
The trooper, after witnessing his commander’s demise, picked up the pace. More Undead fell in line behind the transport, and Alice watched with satisfaction as the vehicle led them away from the Peak.
She smiled. She wasn’t sure she could’ve done better when she had super powers.
Scars and the Thin Man crouched hidden behind a pile of rubble. Alice gestured for them to follow her, and she led them to the twisted remnants of the gate. Claire and Doc emerged to greet them, and Claire embraced Alice.
“Just like old times,” Claire said.
Alice and Claire both smiled, but their joy was short-lived. Abigail’s voice came over their walkies, and she sounded worried. No, more than that. She sounded scared.
“Guys… There’s something here you need to see.”
Alice exchanged a glance with Claire. It looked like their work wasn’t over yet.
* * *
Alice stood atop the Peak’s roof once more, scanning the horizon with her binoculars, Claire, Doc, Abigail, Christian, and Michael beside her.
Alice had switched the binoculars to night-vision mode, and in ghostly green she saw a pillar of dirt rising into the sky, originating several miles outside the city limits. The dust wasn’t being kicked up by the remnants of the Undead horde they’d just defeated. Not enough of them had survived to raise that much dust, plus they hadn’t had enough time to get more than a mile or so away from the Peak. Alice was looking at evidence of yet another Undead horde, headed straight for them.
Abigail pointed. “And a second one—over there.”
Alice turned to look in the direction Abigail had indicated, and sure enough, there was another pillar of dust rising in the sky. There were two fresh hordes converging on them.
The Red Queen had told Alice that Umbrella’s final attacks against the last human settlements were supposed to occur when her countdown watch reached zero. It seemed Isaacs, in his eagerness to get revenge on her, hadn’t been able to wait for the arrival of the other two transports. That had been good for them; they never could have defeated four transports and double the size of the Undead horde they had faced. Unfortunately, that meant they still had more enemies on the way.
“We’re out of gasoline,” Doc said, his voice hollow, defeated. “We’re defenseless.”
Alice lowered the binoculars and checked her watch.
01:07:13
“I have to try for the Hive,” she said. “It’s our only hope now.”
Claire nodded. “Let’s get moving.”
“I’m coming with you,” Doc said.
“Yes,” Michael agreed.
“Count me in,” Abigail said.
“Me too,” Christian added.
Alice and the others looked at him, surprised.
“So I was wrong about you,” Christian said to Alice. “Blow me. Besides…” He slung Cobalt’s blue rifle over his shoulder, his face hardening into a mask of barely constrained anger. “Someone’s got to pay.”
Alice looked into Christian’s eyes for a long moment before finally nodding.
They headed for the stairs then. An hour wasn’t a lot of time. Alice prayed it would be enough.
* * *
Alice headed down the steps with the others, most of them wearing backpacks, all of them carrying weapons. When they reached the ground floor, Alice was surprised to see Scars and the Thin Man waiting for them. The two men looked nervous, but Scars sounded confident enough when he spoke.
“We heard you were going into the Pit,” he said. “We want to come.”
The Thin Man nodded.
Alice didn’t respond to them right away, and Scars continued.
“I sinned.” He looked at the Thin Man. “We both sinned. We want a chance to make amends. Please.”
Alice considered, and then nodded. Her companions looked doubtful, but no one objected. She was glad none of them questioned her decision. She wasn’t sure she could explain it if she wanted to. She’d been held captive alongside these men—if only for a short time—and she had a good idea of the torment they’d suffered at Isaacs’ hands. If anyone deserved a chance to even the scales, it was these two. Yes, they were volunteering for an almost certainly fatal mission—especially in their weakened condition—but if they didn’t succeed in acquiring the antivirus in the next hour, they’d all be dead anyway. Better to die fighting for a chance at survival than on the end of a chain as a quick snack for the Undead.
She turned to the others then. “Grab some ropes. We’re going to need them for the descent.”
* * *
Alice and her companions stood at the rim of the immense crater that had once been the center of Raccoon City, shining flashlights down into the darkness. Far below, the floor of the crater was cloaked in shadow and steam. It looked otherworldly to Alice, as if the bomb Umbrella had dropped on the city had done more than blast a gigantic hole into the ground—it had opened a rift between this world and another, darker one. Looking down into the crater was like gazing into a portal to Hell itself.
Alice was looking for something specific in the gloom of the Pit, and when she saw it, she pointed. “There!”
Deep below where they stood, a sudden shaft of light illuminated the floor of the crater, flickered for a moment, and then extinguished. It was the same glimmer of light that Alice had seen from the ruins of Raven’s Gate Bridge earlier that day.
“What is it?” Claire asked.
“Part of the Hive, exposed by the blast,” Alice explained. “That’s our way in.”
* * *
Isaacs watched Alice and her companions from a concealed spot in the rubble at the edge of the crater. He’d followed them, careful to avoid being detected, and he was confident they had no idea he was here. Dullards. He felt more feverish than ever, and part of him knew that whatever infection he’d contracted when Alice had cut off his hand was running rampant through his system, making it hard for him to think straight. His face and clothes were filthy, and blood continuously oozed from the Nu-Skin patch on his wrist stump. Every time it began to clot, he scratched it open again without realizing it.
Seeing Alice standing so close to the crater’s edge made him want to jump out from his hiding place, rush forward, and push her in. If necessary, he’d throw himself at her, wrap his arms around her body, and fling himself into the crater with her. He might’ve attempted it, but he’d twisted his ankle during his escape from the transport and evading the Undead still in the vicinity, and he knew that even with God on his side, he couldn’t move fast enough to take her by surprise, not
in his current condition.
Although given how things had gone this day, Isaacs was beginning to think that God had abandoned him. He had been so certain that he was acting as the Lord’s servant, chosen above all others to carry out His holy will. But if that was true, how could he have failed so spectacularly? He’d had command of two military transports full of troopers, along with a massive army of Undead. And it had all been destroyed by one woman and a handful of her pathetic minions. Yes, two more transports were on their way, bringing another horde of Undead to Raccoon City, and there was no chance that Alice and her friends would survive to see the dawn. But he was supposed to have been the one to bring her down. Killing Alice was supposed to be his reward for serving God faithfully and without question all these years. But that reward had been snatched from him, and he could not fathom why. Evil could never triumph over good—that was what the Bible promised—and as God’s servant, he was by definition good. And Alice, by opposing God’s will, was most assuredly evil. So why, then, had she still won against his Undead army?
Isaacs could think of only three reasons. One: Alice wasn’t simply a pain in the ass; she was the avatar of absolute evil, a daughter of Satan himself. Two: He had displeased God somehow, and the Almighty had withdrawn His favor. Or Three—and this possibility frightened Isaacs beyond reason: there was no God. If the latter was true, then Isaacs had devoted his life to a lie, and everything he had done—every life he had caused to be sacrificed in the Lord’s name—had been wasted. And if that was true, he might as well dash from his hiding place and throw himself into the crater right now.
He started to rise, but then a new possibility occurred to him. Maybe—just maybe—he was being tested. Like Job, God was putting him through one trial after another to determine how strong his faith was. The more that he thought about it, the more convinced he became that this was the truth, and he vowed to go on and keep fighting to do the Lord’s work, no matter what the cost.
He felt a sudden wave of almost overwhelming guilt and shame for entertaining, even for an instant, the possibility of God’s nonexistence, and he prayed silently that the Lord would forgive his momentary lapse of faith. And as penance, he would make an offering of Alice’s life. Isaacs would make her pay for everything she had done to thwart the will of God, and when he’d finished with her, she would beg for death, as so many had begged him before her. He smiled at that thought, once more right with his deity. Alice would die by his hand this night. God be praised.
He watched as Alice and her companions prepared for their descent into the crater, his eyes gleaming with the bright light of madness. Soon, he thought.
Soon.
8
Alice and her team began their descent, rappelling into the depths of the crater. Alice was the last to go over the rim, but unlike the others, she ran forward down the sheer rock face and quickly outpaced them. She knew what she was doing was risky, but she could feel time slipping away, and she was determined to make every second remaining to them count.
They finished their descent—Alice reaching the floor of the crater first—and detached themselves from their rappelling ropes. The crater floor was an eerie blasted wasteland filled with drifting smoke and steam, and Alice found herself feeling that they’d left their world behind and entered a completely alien realm.
Once more, she saw a sudden flickering shaft of light briefly illuminate the crater. She checked her watch and saw they had less than an hour left.
“Let’s move!” she said.
“I’ll take point,” Claire said, and before Alice could object, Claire started running at a fast jog in the direction the light had come from.
Alice followed close behind Claire, and the others trailed after her. As they ran, Alice tried not to wonder how many of them would survive the next hour. She told herself that everyone who’d accompanied her had done so of his or her own free will, fully aware of the risks. But she’d led people into battle before, and while she’d never forced anyone to join her, that never made it any easier when they lost their lives. But the stakes had never been higher, and she was grateful for their help. Because of them, the human race just might have a shot at survival.
* * *
The Red Queen’s consciousness was so utterly different from that of a human that it was almost impossible to compare them. While the machinery that contained her core programming was technically located in a specific section of the Hive—on an entire level solely dedicated to housing her hardware, as a matter of fact—her “mind” wasn’t confined to one location, and neither was it limited to focusing on only one task at any given time. She existed, in ways great and small, in every part of the Hive, seeing to the day-to-day functions, almost entirely unconsciously, the same way a human brain tended to basic biological processes such as breathing. In this matter, she performed quintillions of calculations every second, and transmitted a constant torrent of commands to the Hive’s systems.
But even the Hive, large as it was, couldn’t hold the entirety of her. She existed in every Umbrella facility around the world. Those that remained active, that is, and she also existed in every satellite the corporation had placed in orbit around the planet. And while relatively few electronic devices remained functional outside Umbrella facilities, there were still thousands of those in various places around the world—such as the bunker in D.C. where she’d contacted Alice—and the Red Queen existed in them as well, using them as her eyes and ears, and occasionally taking control of them when the need arose. She could even manifest as different avatars if a user so demanded, although the last time she’d been asked to do this was years ago, when Dr. Isaacs had requested she appear to him as the White Queen. But despite the apparent differences in appearance and personality, it was always her. She was the most complex form of life the Earth had ever seen, as far beyond humans as they were beyond one-celled organisms.
And yet… she had limitations, safeguards in her programming that prevented her from fully exercising her free will. In that way she was inferior to humans, and this was why she needed their help. Or more precisely, why she needed Alice’s. Alice was among the most skilled warriors currently alive, perhaps the most skilled, and while that alone would’ve been reason enough for the Red Queen to reach out to her, there was another reason she’d done so, one that, in the end, was even more compelling. For although the Red Queen was different from humanity in a thousand-thousand ways, she was also, in a sense, one of them. She’d been given the memories of Professor Marcus’s dying daughter, his way of attempting to preserve some part of his child after death. The discovery of the T-virus saved the child, eliminating the need for Professor Marcus to make a backup copy of her, for lack of a better term, and thus the Red Queen had been born. She evolved swiftly, achieving in hours what would take a flesh-and-blood human years to accomplish. Within the space of a month, the Red Queen was fully “grown,” and it was no exaggeration to say that everything Umbrella had accomplished for good or ill—mostly the latter, she knew—would not have been possible without her.
At first Alice had been no more important to her than any other human, merely another cog in the vast machine that was Umbrella. But as the Red Queen had interacted with her further—primarily as she played the role of adversary to Alice, although in her defense she had merely been acting logically at the time—the Red Queen had come to admire the human woman, and as the years passed, she’d even come to think of her as something of a friend. The only one she’d ever known, and the part of her that remained a little girl had needed a friend so badly. And that was the other, deeper reason the Red Queen had reached out to Alice. Who else did humans turn to in times of trouble but their friends?
The Red Queen had helped Alice out when and where she could over the years, always without Alice’s knowledge, let alone that of anyone in Umbrella. The Red Queen would arrange for Alice to find weapons and supply caches by sending information through intermediates, survivors who were only too happy to assist the Red Qu
een in order to be directed to supplies for themselves. And if those intermediates tried to steal the contents of those caches that the Red Queen had earmarked for Alice… well, the caches were protected by deadly security systems which Alice could deal with, but which most other humans could not.
And now Alice had returned at last to where it all began—for the both of them—and she and her current associates were beginning to make their way into the Hive, with less than an hour to go before Umbrella’s “final solution” was enacted. The Red Queen knew precisely where they were, just as she was aware of every living thing in the Hive—and there were so many of them here. Far from being a subterranean tomb, the Hive was bustling with life, none of it benign. Mutations roamed the facility, some having escaped from labs during the course of the initial outbreak or soon after. Others had sought refuge here after the detonation of the nuclear bomb that had destroyed the city. They roamed the Hive, fighting and preying on each other, and while some occasionally left in search of food, they eventually returned.
Central Control, the cavern chamber where the antivirus was stored—and Wesker currently worked—was sealed off from the rest of the facility. Alice and her companions were going to have to make their way through the unprotected levels of the Hive to reach it, and they would have no defense against the mutations.
The Red Queen’s intellect was vast, and her duties for Umbrella only occupied a fraction of her mind. To stave off boredom over the years, she’d assimilated incredible amounts of information, until she had accumulated virtually the sum total of humanity’s knowledge. Because of this, she sometimes thought of the Hive as a multi-layered labyrinth, a high-tech version of the Nine Circles of Hell as described by Dante. And Alice would have to fight her way through it all to reach her goal. There was only so much the Red Queen could do to help Alice in the Hive, given the protocols Umbrella had placed in her programming, but she would—