Authors: Keith R. A. DeCandido

Genesis (26 page)

And instead of a running shower, she was being pelted with something else.

No, not pelted. Attached.

Wires. They'd put wires into her. They were in her legs and her torso and her arms and her head.

She sat up.

PAIN!

Awful horrible mind-numbing excruciating searing boiling
pain
that ravaged every fibre of her being.

She ripped one of the wires out of her left arm.

The process of ripping out the wire made the pain infinitely, impossibly worse.

But then it subsided.

That emboldened her to tear out the ones in her right arm.

Same thing: worse pain at first, then subsiding to something almost resembling tolerable.

She saved the two attached to the side of her head for last.

As horrendously wretchedly bad as the pain was when she first woke up, the pain she felt when she tore the wires out of her head was several thousand quantum leaps worse.

By the time the white-hot agony had dimmed to a throbbing deep pain, she tried to take stock of her surroundings.

When she had woken up, she had been on an examination bed. Half a dozen lights shone down on it. Now, though, she was on the floor in front of it.

She couldn't make her legs move.

Looking around, she saw that each of the wires she rended from her flesh led to the ceiling.

Aside from the lights, the one door, the wires, and the exam table, the room was white and empty, save also for a mirror.

Alice was pretty sure it was a one-way window.

Somehow, she managed to get to her feet. Her legs seemed not to remember how to function properly.

Stumbling over to the mirror/window, she slammed a fist into it. Calling for help.

If anyone heard her, they gave no indication of it.

She wondered how long she'd been unconscious on that bed.

She wondered where Matt was.

She wondered if she had heard Cain properly, and if he was truly insane enough to reopen the Hive after so many had died down there.

Alice Abernathy remembered everything now. She remembered reading about the T-virus. She remembered thinking something needed to be done about it. She remembered meeting with Lisa Broward. She remembered sex with Spence, then waking up to find him gone. She remembered getting into the shower, then being hit with the nerve gas.

Hell, she even remembered how baseball was played.

And she remembered something else, too. A memo she'd written to “Able” Cain pointing out a design flaw in the card-swipe mechanisms that unlocked the secure doors throughout Umbrella: a well-placed sharp point could disrupt the circuits and cause the doors to open.

Cain never acknowledged the memo. Alice was willing to bet that he hadn't bothered to fix the problem. Cain was an arrogant ass.

Alice grabbed one of the blood-soaked wires that had until recently been attached to her arm. She slid it into the card-swipe mechanism, and poked around until the door unlocked.

Nope, he never fixed the problem.

Asshole.

She walked the hallways of what she now recognized as the Raccoon City Hospital; the wing she was in had been donated by Umbrella, and they used it for their own purposes fairly regularly.

The hallway was utterly deserted.

No doctors, no nurses, no patients.

Nothing. And no one.

The quiet was deafening. Not only was there no sign of human activity, there was no sign of the possibility of human activity.

Passing a closet, she grabbed a doctor's lab coat and put it on over the flimsy gown.

Eventually she found the front door and walked out.

What she saw made the Hive look like a day at the park.

Abandoned, smashed vehicles: buses, cars, bicycles, motorcycles, news vans.

Broken pavement, overturned garbage cans, damaged buildings, broken glass, cracked faÃ§ades, garbage strewn about, streetlamps knocked over, smoke, bonfires.

Blood
everywhere.

But no bodies.

Slowly, walking gingerly on bare feet, trying to avoid the worst of the shattered pavement, rocks, and broken glass, she proceeded down the street.

A nearby newsstand displayed several copies of the
Raccoon City Times.
The front-page headline read,
THE DEAD WALK!

The fuckers had reopened the Hive and let the infected workers loose.

Assholes.

Still, Alice saw no peopleâliving or dead.

Or undead.

She knew, however, that that wouldn't last.

Two of the dozens of abandoned, shattered vehicles near her were RCPD patrol cars. She checked in one,
then the otherâthe second gave her what she wanted.

A shotgun.

She checked to see that it was fully loaded.

It was.

Alice pumped the shotgun.

And then she waited.

TO BE CONTINUEDÂ .Â .Â .

IN
RESIDENT EVIL: APOCALYPSE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in the Bronx to a pack of feral librarians, K
EITH
R. A. D
E
C
ANDIDO
is the best-selling author of dozens of novels, short stories, comic books, eBooks, and nonfiction books in a variety of media universes, ranging from
Star Trek
and
Doctor Who
to
Farscape
and
Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda
to Spider-Man and the X-Men to
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
and
Xena
. This is his first trip to the milieu of
Resident Evil,
though not his last, as he also wrote the novelization of
Resident Evil: Apocalypse.
His first original novel,
Dragon Precinct,
was published in 2004, and he has several
Star Trek
novels in the works as well. Find out various uninteresting things about Keith at his official website at DeCandido.net.

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

An
Original
Publication of POCKET BOOKS