Genesis

by Keith R. A. DeCandido

“What the hell’s going on?” Mariano asked.

  Resisting an urge to ask her partner how she could possibly know what the hell was going on, she instead barked orders. “Get the computers covered! Move it!”

  “I’m trying!” Johnny-Wayne said even as he did as she said.

  “Get the experiments—move them!” Even as the panic left, replaced by anger and a desire to protect their work, Anna still found herself gripped in cold, and she wondered whose bright idea it was to use water that was apparently brought straight in from the Arctic for the sprinkler system.

  By the time she, Johnny-Wayne, and Mariano got the cages, computers, and slides covered in plastic, the water was up to her ankles, her long blond hair was now plastered to her forehead and back, and her white lab outfit would have made her a dandy entrant in a wet T-shirt contest.

  She prayed that Mariano wouldn’t notice and make a joke about it. As it was, she was suddenly very grateful that she had chosen to wear a nondescript white bra this morning, since her shirt was so wet, an observer would’ve been able to make out, say, a lace pattern. That, she didn’t need.

  Last night, as she sat in the train station, trying to come up with imaginative ways to fillet Mariano, she had thought she was at a low point in her life. Twenty-eight years old, living in a high-priced cave, with her only prospects for a relationship being a Britney Spears-loving twit with a cute smile who nonetheless couldn’t be relied upon to show up for a date.

  Which wouldn’t have been so bad if they weren’t in a mostly isolated community of five hundred people. If she couldn’t even do a relationship right under these circumstances . . .

  And now this.

  A totally fucked-up fire drill flooding her lab. If this kept up, they wouldn’t just be two days behind. The clean-up of the water-logged lab would set them back a week or more.

  Looking up, Anna saw the omnipresent security camera—the Red Queen’s eyes and ears. Wading over to stand in front of the thing she yelled over the sound of the water that was still rushing into the lab through several nozzles, “There’s no fire here! No fire!”

  “The code doesn’t work.”

  Ignoring Mariano, Anna instead repeated, “There’s no fire here! No fire! What’s wrong with you?”

  “The door won’t open.” Mariano came back down the stairs and walked over to Anna. “This water isn’t going anywhere.”

  Anna blinked. “What?”

  “It’s a sealed room.”

  “No shit, Sherlock. And here I thought the water was up to my knees because this room doubled as a fucking wading pool.” She walked away from Mariano before he could make some kind of cute reply. She turned to Johnny-Wayne. “Help me with the doors.”

  “Oh, fuck the doors!” Johnny-Wayne went over to the far wall, opened the emergency door, and pulled out the axe that was standard issue in every room in the building, thus acquiescing to the Raccoon City fire code. As if an axe would do any good in a room like this.

  Before Anna could stop him, Johnny-Wayne splashed across the room, building up as much speed as he could in knee-high water, and slammed the axe into the window. He used the back end of the axe, since it was more of a sharp point.

  Johnny-Wayne Carlson was a fairly big man, who worked out regularly, and could put a good amount of force behind an axe thrust. Based on how loudly he grunted, he used all his considerable strength when he hit the window with the axe.

  One small pebble-sized piece of PlastiGlas popped out the other side.

  “Great,” Anna said. “Keep that up for another three hours or so, and we’ll be home free.”

  “You got a better idea?”

  Anna said nothing in response to that. She had nothing to say.

  “Fine.” Johnny-Wayne turned and tried the axe again.

  Another pea-sized bit of PlastiGlas was dislodged by the action.

  She looked over to see that Mariano was continuing to enter the code into the door, in the futile hope that maybe this time it would release the door.

  The water crept up to her waist. She couldn’t even feel her feet anymore.

  Oddly enough, her primary thought was that she really regretted not getting another night in bed with Mariano.

  That, she thought as the water continued to creep up her chest, would make the shittiest possible epitaph . . .

  NINE

  LISA BROWARD WAS AS GIDDY AS SOMEONE about to go out on a first date with her dream boy, and as nervous as someone facing a firing squad.

  The latter was the far more likely prospect.

  Her stomach felt like it had been tied into half a dozen slipknots. She hadn’t been able to hold down a single meal since her and Alice’s lunch at Che Buono.

  She and Alice had had several more illicit meetings, arranging to get her hands on the T-virus. Today was the day she would get it.

  After the last meeting, she had set things up with Matt. That was more of a challenge, since she couldn’t just call him on the phone—at least at first. She set up an e-mail account on a free service that was not likely to be traced to her. If somehow the e-mail was traced back to the Hive, the person Umbrella would assign to find it would be her, and even if someone else in the company realized it was specifically her, she could chalk it up to her account being hacked. It might cause her some embarrassment, but she could live with that.

  Once the account was set up, she sent out a mass e-mail to thousands of addresses with a text-only attachment that ninety percent of the e-mail programs in the country would interpret as spam and block. The remaining ten percent would get through and be deleted unread by the receiver. Anyone stupid enough to open an unsolicited attachment would find only a text file full of gibberish.

  However, one of the addresses that received the spam was one she set up for her brother. Matt checked that address once a day, and waited for an e-mail from this particular address. The gibberish was in a code that Matt had given her from his days as a Federal Marshal. Any halfway decent cryptographer could probably crack it in about five minutes, but the circumstances under which a cryptographer would even know of the file’s existence were extremely unlikely.

  Sure enough, two days after she sent the e-mail, Lisa got a phone call.

  “Hey Lisa, it’s Matt.”

  Putting on a surprised face for the benefit of any coworkers that might be looking on—not to mention the Red Queen’s surveillance—she said, “Matt? What’s the matter? Are Mom and Dad all right?”

  Matt laughed. “They’re fine, really. What, I’m only allowed to call my baby sister when there’s a family crisis?”

  “Allowed, no, but it’s usually the only time you do call me. Besides, ever since you quit the marshals you’ve been penny-pinching. You wouldn’t make a long-distance call unless it was an emergency.”

  “Well, it’s not a long-distance call, actually, I’m in Raccoon.”

  Lisa blinked in mock-surprise. “What brings you out here?”

  “Oh, just a visit. Got restless in San Francisco, so I thought I’d come up and visit my favorite sister.”

  “I’m your only sister, Matt.”

  “Okay, so it was easy to rank you first. Doesn’t change the fact that I came up to see you. Can you get away? I can be there in two hours.”

  That was the important part. She had arranged to meet with Alice this morning in the mansion. Matt just informed her that he, too, could be at the mansion this morning—specifically two hours from now. That was perfect.

  However, she still had a role to play. After all, she’d taken her leave for the month when she and Alice had lunch. “Damn, I can’t today. I’d have to run it by my boss. Maybe tomorrow?”

  “Maybe? Geez, Lisa, what’re you doing down there, the Manhattan Project Part 2?”

  Lisa swallowed. In a way, Matt’s joke hit closer to home than she was entirely comfortable with. The T-virus was as deadly as the atomic bomb. Maybe deadlier.

  Before she could reply to that, a high-pitched buzzing started.
/>   “What’s that noise?” Matt asked suddenly.

  Sighing, Lisa said, “It’s nothing. Fire drill.”

  “You’re in a hole in the ground; what do they need with fire drills?”

  “So we don’t die a horrible death when something catches fire here in our hole in the ground. Look, call me back tomorrow morning, okay? I’ve got to go do the drill.”

  “Yeah, fine. Bye, sis.”

  Hanging up, Lisa got up and grabbed her gray suit jacket off the back of her chair. In some ways, this worked in her favor. The mild chaos of a fire drill would make it that much easier for her to sneak off and meet with Alice.

  Along with everyone else, she headed toward the fire exit. The space that held her desk had two ways out, one toward the elevator bay, with fire stairs between the elevators and the fake windows; the other in the back leading to another set of stairs. The one by the elevator bay was wider and better lit, so everyone headed there.

  Before she got to the bay, however, she saw a crowd congregating in the hall. Why weren’t they moving forward?

  “What’s the problem?” she asked as she put on her jacket, flipping her dirty-blond hair out from under the jacket’s collar.

  “The doors won’t open.”

  Lisa blinked. She peered through the crowd to see that the PlastiGlas doors had shut, blocking access to the elevator bay. That wasn’t supposed to happen until after the room was evacuated, unless there was an actual fire that necessitated sealing the room to prevent a spread.

  “What about the ones at the back?” Lisa asked.

  One of the new Technical Support guys said, “Locked as well.”

  This was going in a direction Lisa didn’t like in the least. She was as familiar with the fire-suppression systems as anyone, and she ran through it in her head: the room was evacuated, sealed, and then flooded with halon gas until the fire went out. The halon would suck the oxygen out of the room, thus starving the fire.

  The problem, of course, was that the gas would also starve any animal life of oxygen, which was why the system was designed not to seal the room until after the evacuation was complete. The sole exception to this was if the fire was so out of control that the lives of anyone inside would be just as forfeit if they weren’t sealed in the room.

  But there was no fire. And Lisa knew for a fact that the systems were working just fine.

  Something was horribly wrong.

  Several nightmare scenarios went through Lisa’s head at once.

  One was that they had traced her, and had sealed off this section, not because of a fire drill, but in order to make sure she herself didn’t go anywhere.

  Another was that the Red Queen was malfunctioning in some way, which would be even more of a problem, since five hundred people’s lives depended on the little brat being in perfect working order. That shouldn’t have been the case, though, since Lisa herself was as familiar with the computer’s workings as anyone in the Hive, and she’d found nothing wrong.

  But then, she’d been so distracted the last few days . . .

  A third possibility was that Alice herself had betrayed Lisa.

  Before a fourth possibility could even occur to her, she heard a nasty hissing sound. Within seconds, the air around her seemed to shimmer.

  “Halon!” she cried, even as the gas started to burn her throat.

  With each passing second, it became more impossible to breathe. Her fellow workers banged at the PlastiGlas door in a futile effort to get out.

  Lisa herself screamed, “Stop it!” at the Red Queen’s security camera—the same one that Alice had shown her a recording from in the park days ago. The hypothesis that the brat had gone nuts was now foremost in what was left of her thoughts, and she wondered if indeed it had been her fault. Her mind hadn’t really been on her job lately.

  Right now, her mind was only on trying and failing to take another breath. “Stop it!” she cried again, more hoarsely, even as she collapsed to the floor, her legs suddenly unable to support her own weight.

  The gas permeated the room, making it impossible to see.

  All week, she’d been thinking about ways for the plan to go wrong, but this hadn’t even made the list.

  From the beginning, she knew that this endeavor might result in her death, but not this way. Not dying from a goddamn computer malfunction.

  She tried to yell, “Stop it!” one last time, but she couldn’t draw enough breath to formulate the scream. She did manage to say, “I’m sorry,” though. Whether it was to her coworkers, Matt, Alice, Fadwa, or Mahmoud, she couldn’t say for certain. Maybe it was to all of them.

  Unable to hold her eyes open, unable to stand, unable to breathe, she collapsed.

  She thought about Fadwa.

  After that, nothing.

  TEN

  MAJOR TIMOTHY CAIN DIDN’T TAKE ANY SHIT.

  He was born with a different name in Berlin back when the city was separated by a large wall. The third of four children, and the youngest boy, he had the misfortune to be on the wrong side of it. Shortly after Mother died, when he was sixteen, Father managed to secure a way for them to emigrate to the United States. Upon arrival, Father declared their name to be Cain—an Anglicization of their name in German—and gave all his children new names. They were now Michael, Anthony, Timothy, and Mary, because those, Father said, sounded like American names. Any time they used their old German names, Father would hit them until they stopped. Not being fools, all the children learned quickly to think of themselves with their new identities.

  In gratitude to his new home, Timothy enlisted in the Army on his eighteenth birthday. Shortly thereafter, he was sent overseas to fight in the Gulf War. Father was happy that his son did so. Michael, who was three years older than Timothy, had moved to Chicago and become a police officer, Anthony had moved to San Francisco and lost touch with the rest of the family. As for Mary, though women could serve, she had no interest in doing so, preferring a career in business.

  Timothy Cain became alive for the first time in the desert. He had always succeeded academically, but mostly by rote. He was a fast learner, but he never had much enthusiasm for it. The two years of school he’d attended since immigrating were difficult, as Timothy spoke with a thick German accent, which made him the target of teasing by his peers, and made it difficult to derive any kind of enjoyment from the learning experience.

  Combat, though, he took joy in that, especially when that combat was against the enemies of the United States of America. And in the desert, nobody cared about his accent, except for a few idiots, and they all shut up once they saw Timothy Cain in action.

  It didn’t take long for him to distinguish himself, work his way up the ranks. He was leading his fellow soldiers into combat after only a few weeks, and his men would follow him anywhere. He had a natural charisma, an aptitude for tactics, and an especially fine ability to kill Saddam’s footsoldiers. Showing the usual armed forces proclivity for obvious nicknames, he quickly became known as “Able” Cain, because no matter how bad the mission, no matter how ridiculous the plan, no matter what it was you needed to get done, if you put Sergeant Timothy Cain in charge, it was going to get done. Period.

  Cain learned many things in the desert, but the most important thing was that, contrary to what Father had always taught him, life was neither precious nor sacred.

  Life was, in fact, cheap.

  If life was such a glorious, magnificent, wonderful thing, then it wouldn’t be so easy to take it away.

  If life was a great gift, then he wouldn’t be able to kill a fellow human being with one hand, as he did often in the Persian Gulf.

  When his tour ended, he went to OCS to get his commission.

  After several more years as an officer, he realized another important truth: there was more to life than the military.

  That truth didn’t so much come from plowing through the desert and blowing up the enemy, something at which he had frankly excelled. No, this truth came from the gentlemen
in suits who worked for the Umbrella Corporation and recruited him to run their Security Division. “Able” Cain had served his country. In a sense, he still would be, for Umbrella had many government contracts, and provided services for Americans everywhere.

  The main difference was that now he’d be recompensed with an obscene amount of money.

  Having achieved the rank of major, Cain said yes, though he insisted that he still be referred to by his rank. He was also able to buy Father a house in Florida. When Michael was shot in the line of duty, and was going slowly insane at a desk job, Timothy made him the head of security for Umbrella’s Chicago office. He tracked Anthony down in a crackhouse in Berkeley and got him cleaned up, paying for his detox. (That he later jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge was hardly Cain’s fault.)

  When Mary learned her husband was cheating on her, Cain paid for her divorce lawyer. Then, after the divorce was finalized, and Mary had taken the bastard for all he was worth and then some, Cain tracked the ex-husband down—living in a shitty little studio apartment in South Bend, Indiana—and shot him in the head.

  Life was, after all, easy to take. But it was so much more satisfying to destroy someone first.

  Timothy “Able” Cain brought a military efficiency to Umbrella. When Edgardo Martinez retired as head of Umbrella’s “sanitation” strike team, Cain recommended an old friend that he’d met during his days in Special Forces to take his place. The man had spent his career to that point in a variety of covert operations positions. His given name was lost to obscurity and dozens of clandestine missions. When he took the job, he went with the codename “One.” It simplifed things, he said.

  One did his job superbly. He had a team of commandoes that he’d hand-picked and hand-trained. He had pulled them from a variety of sources—police departments, the armed forces, jailhouses—and molded them into an enviable fighting force.

  The yellow phone on Cain’s desk was a direct line from One. It only rang when there was trouble.

  It rang now.

  Cain felt no trepidation as he picked it up, because Cain hadn’t felt trepidation since he enlisted in the Army. As a teenager, sure, he felt trepidation all the time—he was in a new country, his skin was breaking out, he struggled with homework, he had difficulty with the language—but once he reached the desert, he never feared anything again.