Genesis (17 page)

Alice yelling at him from her vantage point at the door was
not
helping. Neither was Spence hovering over him.

And neither was watching the laser cut through the room. Drew's gun hand was sliced off at the fingers.

Then Olga . . .

Christ.

The laser just went right through her neck like it was nothing. It seemed as if the beam just passed harmlessly through the medic. At first, Kaplan allowed himself to believe that the security measure died down before it reached Olga.

That belief lasted right up until Olga's head fell off.

“My God, Kaplan, there's something
killing
them in there!”

“Open the door!”

Jesus Christ, couldn't these two shut the fuck
up?
“Yeah, I am
trying!”

“Kaplan!”

“I'm almost there,” he said, as much to convince himself. Just a few more protocols to go through.

“Kaplan, open the door!”

“I am
trying,”
he said for the third time.

“Well try
harder,”
Spence said, as if that would help.

The laser came through a second time, finishing off Warner and Drew, and almost taking out One.

“Oh God.”

“Do it!”

He almost had it shut down. “I'm almost there!”

“Come on!”

“Got it!” Kaplan cried—

—just as the laser grid had finished slicing and dicing One.

The laser winked out.

The door opened.

Somehow, Kaplan made himself stand up.

Jesus.

One head. One decapitated body. One body sliced in twain. One pair of legs. One torso with head and arms attached. A bag containing an EMP delivery system.

And a pile of human meat that used to be One.

Kaplan was probably the only person in the team who knew One's real name. He'd managed to pull it from an NSA database he wasn't supposed to have access to. He never revealed it because One had been the guy that came to him at the Bureau, made him the offer the Bureau refused to provide.

Gave him his life.

And this was how Kaplan repaid that favor.

If he had just been one second faster, One would still be alive.

Instead, his boss was in dozens of cleanly sliced cubic pieces on the floor of a metal corridor a thousand feet underground.

Jesus Christ.

“All right.” Kaplan's voice sounded weak and hoarse, even to himself. He didn't care. He needed to focus. “Let's do it.”

“Do
what?”
Spence looked at him like he was crazy. Kaplan wasn't sure he'd be wrong in that assessment.

“We have to complete the mission.”

“There's no way I'm going down there.”

Kaplan wanted very much to agree with Spence. He didn't want to go in there, either. That room had already killed four of his comrades, including One.
One,
for God's sake. Kaplan didn't think anything could kill him this side of a thermonuclear detonation, and even then, Kaplan would've laid even money on him making it through that.

Weakly, he said, “Her defenses are down.”

“
Déjà vu,
anyone?” Spence said snidely.

Kaplan ignored him.

This was what field agents did. This was what he wanted.

Well, not what he
wanted.
In fact, this was exactly what he hated: sitting uselessly typing code into a keyboard while everyone else risked their lives. It was precisely to avoid this sort of thing that he had left the Bureau.

Gingerly, he entered the corridor.

Trying very hard not to look at the remains—trying even harder not to pay attention to the smell of burning meat that permeated the corridor—he bent down and picked up the duffel bag with the EMP.

A hand on his shoulder scared the shit out of him. For one brief, insane moment, he thought it was One, telling him the exercise was over.

But it wasn't. It was Alice. Good old Ass-Kicking Alice, though she herself probably didn't remember that yet.

One was still just as dead.

She gave him a look of understanding.

Maybe she wasn't all back yet, but at least some of the instincts were there.

They entered the Red Queen's chamber. A dark room with a circular trapdoor in the floor, the rest of the room was decorated in the same boring metallic decor as the rest of the Hive. Kaplan couldn't imagine how people lived and worked down there all the time without going nuts.

Of course, maybe they did. Maybe that was what happened.

The door shut behind them, but Kaplan didn't panic. It was
supposed
to happen this time.

Opening the zipper, he hauled the device out of the duffel bag, placed it on the floor, then flipped open his wrist-top and tapped some commands in.

A second later, the trapdoor opened, and the Red Queen's massive CPU rose up into the room.

“Give me a hand with this,” he said to Alice.

The pair of them picked up the EMP device from the floor and screwed it into the top of the CPU.

As they worked, Kaplan heard the whirring of the projectors that he knew were hidden throughout the
chamber. Seconds later, a red-tinged hologram appeared in the middle of the room.

“Get out! Get out, you can't be in here!”

“Don't listen to anything she says,” he said quickly to Alice. Normally he wouldn't need to bother, but in her current state, Alice wouldn't be expecting this. “She's a holographic representation of the Red Queen.”

“You have to get out!”

“The head programmer modeled her after the daughter of some bigwig in the corporation. She'll try and deceive us, confuse us—”

“I wouldn't advise this. Disabling me will result in loss of primary power.”

“—she'll say anything to stop us from shutting her down.”

They finished setting up the EMP. Kaplan pulled out the transmitter that would activate the surge.

“I implore you.”

Kaplan had never liked the idea of artificial intelligence. Computers were inherently stupid, only doing what they were told. The idea of AI was one he found contradictory, and potentially quite dangerous. It was like handing an atomic bomb to an autistic child. “Implore away.”

“Please—please!”

At Kaplan's urging, he and Alice both moved to the far reaches of the room. His thumb hovered over the button on the remote that would shut the Queen down.

“You're all going to die down here.”

Kaplan pushed the button.

The lights all went out, plunging the room into total darkness.

A second later, the emergency lights came on.

Squatting down, Kaplan started opening up the CPU access to the motherboard.

Sounding confused, Alice said, “I thought you were here to shut her down.”

“So I can retrieve her operating systems. The corporation has to find out what went on down here. They wouldn't want her destroyed.”

“I'm sure. Must be quite an investment.”

Kaplan said nothing. Right now he'd be the first to pull the plug—or take a really big hammer—to the computer that killed not only the five hundred people down here, but his entire team. On the other hand, they
did
need to know what happened.

So, rather than answer the question directly, he took his usual tack of plunging into technobabble. “That pulse forces the circuit breaker to shut down her mainframe for thirty seconds. After that, if I don't have her motherboard, she can reboot.”

He eased the motherboard out.

“But since I have the board, this won't be a problem.”

Forcing a smile, he stood up, dropping the motherboard into the duffel.

“Come on, let's get back.”

RAIN WAS BORED.

When One told her and J.D. to keep an eye on the dumb cop while they went to shut down the little-kid computer, she didn't say anything, 'cause she didn't do that. One was the boss. Shit, One was the guy who got her the job. She'd take point heading into the gates of hell if that was the order he gave.

But that didn't make this babysitting shit any less boring.

“So what the fuck you doing here?” she asked Addison, who was sitting on one of the crates.

The asshole tried to shrug while wearing cuffs, then winced in pain. J.D. grinned when he did that.

“We got a call—some kind of disturbance at the big
mansion in Foxwood Heights. My sergeant told me that I had to check it out.”

Rain laughed.

“What's so funny?” Addison sounded all defensive.

“Fuckin' rookie.” Rain shook her head. “You believe this? RCPD pulls this shit all the time.”

“What do you mean, ‘fuckin' rookie'?”

J.D. pulled out his Smith & Wesson and checked the clip. “You said you just transferred, right?”

“Yeah, so? I've been a cop for ten years.”

“I was a cop, too, asswipe,” Rain said, “and I know that new in town means rookie. Don't matter how far into your pension you are from some other burg.”

Putting the clip back into his pistol, J.D. said, “You, my friend, got hazed. Nobody's supposed to go to the mansion. They don't get calls. All the locals know that.”

Rain grinned. “ 'Cept you.”

Then the lights went out. The only thing Rain could see were the display lights on the crates.

J.D.'s voice sounded in the darkness. “Guess Kaplan found the off button.”

The emergency lights came on. “Yeah, well, sun shines on a dog's ass every once in a while.” Kaplan wasn't that bad a guy, really, but he was a geek who didn't really belong in the field. Sure, he could hold his own in a firefight, but he was about the last person Rain wanted covering her ass. She trained a kid just like Kaplan when she was a cop, all eager-fucking-beaver with lots of brains but no sense.

For this kind of work, you needed
cojones
of steel. Kaplan's were made of tin.

Rain noticed that the indicators on the crates went from
ENVIRONMENT STABLE
in green to
ENVIRONMENT UNSTABLE
in red.

Pulling out her knife, she started to scrape dirt out from her thumbnail. She was bored again.

“They're late,” J.D. said.

Rain checked her watch—they had one hour, twenty-seven minutes left before the Hive'd be sealed off.

Then she heard a noise, like metal clanging on the floor.

She put away the knife and pulled out her MP5K.

“I'm on it.”

Of all the weapons she'd wielded both as a cop and as Umbrella security, nothing felt more comfortable in Rain's hands than the MP5K.

Stepping over the thick tubes that went from the crates into the floor or to other crates, Rain moved around, trying to find out where the noise came from.

She heard it again, and turned right, moving toward it.

The third time she heard the noise, she saw the metal cylinder rolling on the floor. Holding the rifle up, ready to blow holes into whatever got in her way, she walked forward.

Turning around one of the crates, she saw a woman leaning against one of the smaller crates, head down. She wore a lab coat and an all-white outfit, just like the
corpse in the flooded lab. This one was brunette, though—and she was alive!

Lowering the rifle, Rain called back, “J.D., we got a survivor!” Then she turned back to the woman and began to slowly approach her. “It's okay, we're here to help.”

The woman almost fell into Rain's arms. She caught the woman, guided her up by gripping her on either side of the head. Damn, but her skin was cold and clammy, and she was paler than Warner, and white folks didn't get any paler than Warner.

Keeping her best you'll-be-okay voice on, honed from years dealing with the public for LAPD, she said, “Don't worry, you seem to be in some sort of—aaaaaahhhh!”

She screamed when the bitch bit her on the right hand, smack between her thumb and index finger.

Bit
her! Rain couldn't fucking believe it!

Rain tried to knock her down, but the crazy lady had some kind of iron grip on her, and they both fell to the floor, rolling around like some kind of mud-wrestling match.

“Get off!”

As they struggled, Rain noticed that the crazy lady's eyes were all watery and fucked up, her teeth looked like something had died in her mouth, and she wasn't just pale, she was fucking ghostlike.

“Get off of me!”

She heard someone running up to them. Taking a quick glance up, she saw that it was J.D.

“J.D., get her offa me before I stab her ass!”

Grabbing her by the lab coat, J.D. tossed the crazy lady off to the side.

Then he looked down at Rain. “You okay?”

Rain quickly got to her feet. “She bit me, man! She took a chunk clean right outta me!”

The crazy lady rolled over. J.D. took out his S&W, pointing it right at her.

“Stay down.”

The bitch didn't listen, but started to get to her feet.

“I'm warning you,” J.D. said, “stay
down!”

Rain shook her head. “She's crazy.”

“Come any closer and I'll fire,” J.D. said as she started walking toward him.

No, she wasn't walking. Nobody walked like that. She was—she was
shuffling,
like some kind of late-night-movie zombie monster shit.

This was getting too fucking weird for Rain.

“I mean it!”

J.D. spoke those words as if it mattered, but Rain knew he shouldn't have bothered. This woman was fucking nuts.

She moved closer and closer. J.D. shook his head, aimed his pistol downward, and fired.

The shot went clean through her knee.

Normal people would react to a .357 Magnum bullet tearing through their knee by stumbling, falling to the floor, and screaming in deep pain. It was a cripple shot, and it usually meant the victim would never walk again.