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

She had awakened on an examination bed with half a dozen lights shining 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’d rent 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 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’d 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 and arranging to give her the information about the T-virus so she could get it to people who would expose Umbrella’s involvement with this despicable activity. 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. She remembered waking up to find herself amnesiac, and accompanying One and his team of commandos, along with an equally amnesiac Spence and an RCPD cop named Matt Addison into the Hive.

She remembered the revelation that Spence was the one who’d unleashed the T-virus and that Matt wasn’t a cop, but Lisa’s outside contact, part of an organization dedicated to bringing Umbrella down.

She remembered watching as One and his entire team were killed: One himself, Danilova, Warner, and Vance by the security system; Kaplan and Spence by the licker; J.D. and Rain by the undead creatures that were all that remained of the Hive’s employees. She remembered making her escape with Matt after killing the licker, only to be captured by Cain.

And she remembered something else, too. A memo she’d written to 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 had 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 recently been attached to her arm. She slid it into the card-swipe mechanism, and poked around until the door unlocked.

Nope, he’d 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 coverall.

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 façades, 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 late-afternoon edition of the Raccoon City Times. The front-page headline read THE DEAD