Apocalypse - Keith R. A. DeCandido [1]
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.
Now Cain stood outside the mansion. Located in the neighborhood of Foxwood Heights, two miles outside the Raccoon City limits, the mansion looked like something out of one of those snooty British movies that Cain hated rather than an actual structure outside a small American city.
It was also owned by the Umbrella Corporation, used as the primary entry point to the Hive.
Five hundred men and women employed by Umbrella lived and worked in the Hive, a massive underground complex where the corporation’s most sensitive work was done.
The existence of the Hive was not kept a secret—it was impossible to sequester five hundred employees, many of whom were in the upper echelons of their respective fields, without someone noticing they were missing—though it was not widely advertised either. Umbrella kept its public headquarters in downtown Raccoon where everyone could see it: the public face of the company that provided the best computer technology and health-care products and services in the country.
Unfortunately, something had gone horribly wrong in the Hive. The facility’s sophisticated artificial intelligence—named the Red Queen—had gone quiet, security measures were activated, and the Hive was now sealed. Cain had sent a team led by his best security operative, a Special Forces veteran who went solely by the code name One, to find out what the hell had happened.
In that, they seemed to have failed, since their contingency plan—sealing the Hive—had been enacted. That only would have been the case if the team was incapacitated or killed.
Cain had assembled a team of doctors and security personnel outside the mansion as backup for One. Based on the protocol that the Red Queen appeared to have used, the crisis was medical in nature and the AI had felt the need to activate a quarantine. So the entire team was dressed in Hazmat suits, with several gurneys and diagnostic equipment on standby, and a sterile umbilical linking the entrance of the mansion with the helicopter that would take them back to Umbrella’s Raccoon City corporate headquarters.
Observing the feed from the security cameras located throughout the mansion on his PDA, Cain and his team waited to see if anyone would emerge from the Hive.
Only two people did. The first was the head of the Hive’s security, Alice Abernathy, one of Cain’s top people. The other was a man Cain didn’t recognize. Of One and his six-person team, there was no sign.
That was bad news. Not only was One Cain’s best operative, but the team he’d brought were Umbrella’s elite. Bart Kaplan, Rain Melendez, J.D. Hawkins, Vance Drew, and Alfonso Warner were the best of the best, and Olga Danilova was a talented field medic. If they were dead…
Still, Cain felt no trepidation, because Cain hadn’t felt trepidation since he enlisted in the army. As a teenager, sure, he’d felt trepidation all the time—his skin was breaking out, he’d struggled with the language, he had difficulty with girls—but once he reached the desert, he never feared anything again.
Because he knew the secret.
Life was cheap.
As Cain watched on his PDA’s screen, Abernathy and the man made it to the vestibule just inside the mansion’s front door.
The man had three wounds in his shoulder that looked like they were made by large claws.
Cain instantly knew what had happened. Someone—probably the fucking computer—had let the damn licker out.
This was turning into a clusterfuck of epic proportions.
Abernathy stumbled to the floor. She was carrying