Genesis (19 page)

Matt got up.

Then Lisa jumped him and tried to bite him with decaying teeth . . .

BEFORE TODAY, BART KAPLAN'S WORLD made sense.

Before today, computers didn't go on homicidal rampages, killing five hundred people for no good reason. Before today, he and his team were top pros, always achieving their mission objectives. Before today, the team always came home alive.

Before today, dead people didn't get up and walk around.

He wasn't sure how it got so bad so fast. One second he was standing with J.D., Rain, Alice, Spence, and that Addison guy, the next they were surrounded. After the tank exploded, he was knocked to the floor, but he got up quickly and started unloading his Beretta into the
walking corpses that simply would not stop for anything. His ears were ringing.

Somehow he and J.D. wound up back to back. They were just around the corner from the door that would take them back to the hallway where the offices and labs were. “We lost the others.”

“Keep moving!” J.D. said as he fired his rifle into the crowd.

They inched closer, finally reaching the door. Kaplan thought his head was going to explode from the noise of the gunfire, the explosion, and the screaming.

Not to mention the image of his four comrades being killed while he was helpless to do anything about it.

Spence was standing there as Kaplan holstered his pistol and approached the keypad.

Surprised, Kaplan asked, “You waited?” Leaving aside the fact that he was unarmed, this particular iteration of Spence Parks didn't strike Kaplan as the gung-ho, take-one-for-the-team type. More like the run-away-and-save-his-own-ass type.

“Didn't know the code.”

Run-away-and-save-his-own-ass it was, then. Luckily, Kaplan did know the code. All he had to do was summon it from the recesses of his brain. The problem was doing it through the pounding headache.

He entered 0431961.

Nothing happened.

“Shit!”

“Come on,” Spence said.

He entered the code again.

Again, nothing.

“Shit!”

He didn't get it. That was the code, he was sure of it.

If only the noise would stop . . .

Spence, still being his usual useful self, said, “Hurry up.”

As if it would make a difference, he entered 0431961 more slowly.

Yet again, nothing.

“Shit!”

J.D. ran up to the door, grabbed Kaplan and shoved him out of the way. “Move! What's the code?”

Under other circumstances, Kaplan would have objected to this course of action. But maybe there was something wrong with the way he was entering it. Not that there was any trick to it, really, you just entered the eight numbers.

“Move!” J.D. said. “What's the code?”

“Hurry up!” Rain called from a few feet off. “I'm runnin' out of ammo!”

Pulling out his Beretta and shooting into the ever-nearer crowd, Kaplan yelled out, “Zero, four, three—”

Then it hit him.
Eight numbers.
He'd left out a digit. “No, fuck!”

Spence walked up to Kaplan and got right in his face. Kaplan was tempted to turn his pistol on the arrogant prick. “What is the code?”

Kaplan took a breath. “Zero, four, zero, three, one, nine, six, one.”

“Got it.” J.D. entered the code. Then he turned to look
at Kaplan as the door slid open. “See how easy that was?”

Behind the door was a sea of former Hive workers.

Kaplan didn't know what the look on his own face was, but he imagined it was very similar to the look of abject shock on J.D.'s as dozens of hands grabbed him and pulled him into the hallway. A second later, and Kaplan couldn't even see J.D. anymore.

“J.D.!”

Rain came out of nowhere and dove in after him. Was she out of her fucking mind?

Kaplan ran up to her and grabbed her arm. To his shock, Spence helped. No sense in losing both of them.

One of them bit Rain in the neck even as Kaplan and Spence yanked her out. Kaplan quickly slammed his hand on the switch that would shut the door after shooting one in the face.

Again, Rain screamed, “J.D.!”

“Forget it,” Spence said. “He's gone.”

Pounding her fist on the door, Rain screamed, “Goddammit!”

The sweat beaded on Kaplan's brow. This wasn't supposed to be happening.

One. Warner. Drew. Olga. And now J.D.

They weren't supposed to die. Shit, J.D. and Rain were the toughest badasses on two legs—all you had to do to know that was to watch them for five minutes.

And One, well, One was just
the
best.

If even
J.D.
couldn't survive this, if even
One
couldn't survive this, what the fuck chance did some computer geek like Kaplan have?

“Come on,” Spence said, pointing across the hall. “There's a clear path back to that computer room.”

Kaplan nodded. He turned to Rain. “C'mon, Rain.”

“They fuckin' killed J.D., man. That's
bull
shit!”

Spence grabbed her arm. “They're gonna fuckin' kill
us
if we don't move our asses!”

Shrugging off Spence's hand without looking at him, Rain turned and moved for the door. Kaplan followed, as did Spence.

As they ran, Rain asked, “So what the fuck
did
happen to the rest of the team? They zombie food, too?”

“No, the Red Queen's defenses got them.”

Rain stopped and grabbed Kaplan by the shoulder. “Say the fuck
what?
I thought
you
were supposed to bring down—”

Spence pushed them both forward, one with each hand. “Can you two kill each other later?”

Throwing his head back, he indicated the hordes of people shuffling toward them.

Kaplan ran ahead. He opened the door to the Red Queen's chamber, waited for Spence and Rain to come in, then shut the door behind them.

It was his fault.

All of it.

He'd tried not to think about it, but Rain was right. It was his responsibility.

Dead people all over the place. And the people best qualified to stop them were cut to ribbons before his eyes. Because he missed something, because he fucked up, over half the team was dead.

“Whatever they are, there's too many of them out there,” Rain said.

“Whatever they are?” Kaplan repeated, trying and failing not to sound hysterical. “It's pretty obvious what they are. Lab coats, badges—those people used to
work
here!”

“All the people working here are dead.”

“Well,” Spence said philosophically, “that isn't stopping them from walking around.”

“Where did they come from? Why didn't we see them on the way in?” Kaplan couldn't stop moving—if he stopped moving, he feared he'd die, and if he died, he'd become one of them.

Rain spoke in a deliberate voice. “When you cut the power, you unlocked the doors.
You
let them out.”

Something else that was on him. No, it wasn't enough that he got One and the others killed, but he was responsible for letting all the dead people out to kill J.D.—and, for all he knew, Alice and Addison, too.

The panic took over completely.

“We're never gonna make it to the surface.”

Rain shook her head, then kicked the clip out of her rifle. “I've got one in the breech, and one spare mag.”

Spence shook his head. “We are so fucked.”

THE ENCOURAGING THING FOR ALICE WAS that this was all starting to look familiar.

Unfortunately, each memory that was triggered had an unpleasant connotation.

She walked through the abandoned corridors of the Hive, dimly illuminated by the emergency lighting. Matt had wandered off, and Alice had lost track of Rain, J.D., Kaplan, and Spence.

At the very least, the corridor through which she walked was empty, and so bereft of the undead horrors.

Some areas she walked through meant nothing to her, but others triggered flashes. Here, the office belonging to the person in charge of Project: Open Book. There, the lab where they did some of the preliminary work on the Nemesis Program. Over that way were the
cubicles where the support staff for Pharmaceuticals worked, answering phones, processing invoices, making photocopies . . .

She turned another corner, and the name Clarence fell into her head as she spied a wall lined with eight animal cages: two horizontal rows of four. Each cage had wire mesh on the door—mesh that was currently covered in blood and ripped open from the
inside.

Was Clarence one of the animals? She couldn't remember.

With each memory that came back also came the mounting frustration of what she
didn't
recall.

She heard a noise and whirled around, but saw nothing.

Typical.

Again, she looked at the cages. She could not for the life of her recall what kind of animal was housed in those cages, but the evidence suggested that they had broken out on their own, and they were probably in the same condition as the Hive employees they'd been spending the last half-hour shooting, punching, and hitting.

Then she heard the footsteps.

No—not feet.

The scratchy sound of clawed feet on metal floor.

Tap tap tap tap tap . . .

She turned to face the doorway through which she heard the noise just as a large doberman came into view.

The doberman was covered in blood. Large chunks of flesh were missing, and Alice could see its rib cage,
not to mention several internal organs, none of which seemed to be doing much of anything. The dog's eyes were watery and white.

Dead dog walking.

Despite its deceased state, the dog was somewhat more agile than its human counterparts, and started running down the hall toward Alice.

Somehow intuiting that offering to pet it and saying, “Good dog,” wouldn't really cut it, Alice turned and ran to the door on the far end of the corridor. Miraculously, she remembered that it was one of the chemistry labs, and it had a door that latched shut.

Running as fast as she could go in the maddeningly impractical boots she'd been stupid enough to put on back at the mansion, Alice barely made it into the lab ahead of the dog.

Staring through the round window in the door, she watched in horror as the doberman leapt up and scratched at the door, trying to gain ingress, blood dripping from its teeth.

Letting out a long breath, Alice turned around—

—and found herself face to face with the blood-covered, very dead face of Clarence White.

At once, Alice finally remembered that Clarence was the person assigned to care for the fleet of dobermans, though Alice still couldn't for the life of her recall
why
they had a fleet of dobermans down here. Animal experimentation, maybe? Certainly not beyond the realm of possibility for Umbrella.

That went through her head in one millisecond.

In the next, she hit Clarence with a series of well-placed punches to the chest, then executed a perfect spin-kick that sent the guard flying into a glass shelf full of beakers and chemicals.

Alice blinked.

Holy shit.

One's words came back to her:
“You and I have the same employer—we all work for the Umbrella Corporation. The mansion is an entrance to the Hive. You are security operatives placed there to protect that entrance.”

Until now, she hadn't given much thought to what that really
meant.
One had asked her for a report, as if she was his subordinate—and apparently she was more than that. She was, if not part of his actual team, part of the same division of the company.

And that meant she knew how to kick some serious ass.

Amid the sound of shattering glass, Alice heard the sound of bone snapping. She hoped that meant that Clarence would stay dead.

She looked down at the corpse. It didn't move, which made it unusual for corpses around here.

It also had a nine-millimeter pistol sitting in a holster.

If she knew how to spin-kick, maybe she knew how to shoot a gun, too. After all, she wouldn't have had a full armory in her dresser drawer if she didn't know how to use its contents, right? She certainly had nothing to lose by taking the pistol—Clarence sure as hell didn't need it anymore.

Gingerly, she undid the buckle on the holster, slowly
pulling the pistol out, hoping Clarence wouldn't choose this moment to come back to unlife.

Then the dog crashed through a window Alice hadn't even realized was there and came at her.

Fingers tightening around the grip of the nine-millimeter, she ran for the door, and again ran through it and closed it on the dog in the nick of time.

This was getting tiresome.

She clicked off the safety of the nine-millimeter. It was only a matter of time before the pooch from hell jumped back out through the same window.

Turning around, she found herself confronted by seven more dobermans.

One was missing an ear.

Another was missing its throat.

Two had broken limbs.

One had a massive gash in its side.

All seven of them leapt for her at once.

Gripping the nine-millimeter with both hands, she aimed straight for the lead doberman's head and fired.

Seconds later, she'd emptied all sixteen rounds in the clip. Seven of the sixteen were perfect head shots that took the dogs down.

That took her out of immediate danger, but the only potential source of fresh ammo was Clarence's body in the lab, and Alice was
not
going back in as long as the other dog was there.

Then she heard growling.

Suddenly, the other dog being in the lab was less of an issue.

The doberman leapt out at her, and it was between her and the lab door, so that trick was not going to work a third time. And the nine-millimeter was now a useless piece of metal.