Apocalypse - Keith R. A. DeCandido [17]
All they’d told him was that he needed to scramble his team.
“I’m on vacation,” he had said. “Let One’s team handle it.”
“One’s team is out of play,” the suit had said.
“What about Ward?” he had asked, referring to the other of the three team leaders.
“Out of play also.”
Carlos’s eyes had widened in shock at the euphemism. Of all the commando teams employed by Security Division, One had the best of the best—it was the main reason he was able to get away with calling himself by some dopey code name—and Ward was an ex-Marine who could handle pretty much anything. If whatever they were dealing with could take out One and Ward—not to mention the likes of Melendez, Hawkins, Schlesinger, Osborne, and the other members of their respective teams—it wasn’t something Carlos was overeager to face.
Not that he had a choice.
Now he sat in one of several Darkwing helicopters flying over a Raccoon City that had gone to hell in several dozen handbaskets. Apparently, something that had escaped in the Hive was now loose in the city: a virus that was the central component of Umbrella’s new miracle wrinkle cream was killing people, but keeping their corpses animated and mindlessly searching for food.
When Carlos was a kid, his family had moved around a lot as papí tried to get work. For a while, they lived in Lubbock, and there was this beaten-down old movie house that only showed monster movies. Carlos and Jorge, his current best friend—each new home brought a new best friend, since the old ones had fathers who were actually capable of keeping jobs and generally staying on the right side of the law—spent many a night watching Frankenstein’s monster, werewolves, mummies, mutated insects, space aliens, vampires, and every other creature that wanted to destroy humanity.
Including zombies.
The last night he was in Lubbock, before Carlos, mamí, papí, and his older sister, Consuela, packed up and headed for San Antonio, Carlos and Jorge saw a double feature: Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy and Dawn of the Dead. He still remembered that night with perfect clarity, especially the argument afterward, since it was the last time Carlos and Jorge would ever speak to each other.
Carlos had always been partial to mummies—still was, in fact; he loved the two recent mummy pictures, especially the cool guy with the long hair and the beard—but Jorge thought the zombies were scarier.
Looking down from his vantage point in the Darkwing at the shambling things trudging through the Raccoon City streets that looked completely human and yet didn’t look human in the least, Carlos decided that Jorge was right.
He turned his gaze back to his team. Nicholai Sokolov, his second-in-command, sat across from him, a grim look on his face.
The rest of the team sat on the facing benches of the Darkwing, all wearing ear- and mouthpieces that allowed them to talk to each other over the noise of the rotors. J.P. Askegren, the ex-cop from Virginia who always had a toothpick in the side of his mouth. Jack Carter and Sam O’Neill, who were, like Carlos, recruited out of the USAF, but had quit to join Umbrella so they could start dating each other. Yuri Loginov, Nicholai’s fellow Russian, a former KGB operative in the days before the Soviet Union’s fall. And their medic, Jessica Halprin, who’d retired from the Navy Medical Corps and joined Umbrella.
They looked ready for anything.
Carlos wondered how they could truly be ready for this, though.
Their jackass of a supervisor, Major Able Cain, had briefed them before sending them out. The upshot was that they needed to contain the damage. If anyone showed the signs of infection, they were to be contained. If they showed that they had succumbed, the only way to stop them was cranial or spinal trauma.
If Cain had any concern about the sheer volume of human lives being sacrificed to Umbrella’s incompetence—because nothing short of total incompetence could explain a disaster like this—he didn’t show it, the heartless SOB.
Then again, if it had been Cain who