Apocalypse - Keith R. A. DeCandido [26]
The living ones rarely were grateful. They usually just ran like hell.
Alice couldn’t blame them. A woman in a hospital gown carrying a shotgun wasn’t exactly someone you wanted to hang around and have a chat with.
Walking the broken streets of Raccoon City, she found herself disgusted with the very concept of greed.
Greed had created this nightmare:
Umbrella’s greed in creating the T-virus in the first place, as the basis for a wrinkle cream used to feed the egos of vain fools, and perhaps also as something to sell to the highest bidder as a bioterror weapon.
And Spence Parks’s greed leading him to steal the virus and its antigen so he could sell it to his own highest bidder, and to infect the entire Hive and condemn five hundred people to death in order to cover his tracks.
Looking back, Alice should have seen it coming. Spence had made no bones about his greed from the moment they met, and were partnered as the faux married couple assigned to guard the mansion. He said he had abandoned his job at the Chicago Police Department without a moment’s thought because of the paycheck that came with working for Umbrella’s Security Division.
But Alice had never paid close attention to him beyond how good he was in the bed they shared and how well he did his job as her partner. Even though her training, her instincts, her job description all required her to look beneath the surface.
What was it she’d said not long ago? “Don’t judge a book by its cover. First rule of Security Division.”
Alice’s instincts had served her well in so many other ways, but they’d failed her with Spence.
Now Spence was dead, the Hive employees were all dead, Rain and the rest of One’s team were dead, half of Raccoon City was dead with the other half likely to follow suit, she had no idea what had happened to Matt—and it was all because of greed.
That, and stupidity. She knew Cain, and this had his fingerprints all over it. For all that asshole talked about efficiency, his operations were always sloppy and reckless. He never took collateral damage into account, and all too often wound up living out the worst-case scenario of his contingencies.
That was certainly the case here.
The last thing Alice had heard Cain say in the mansion was that he was reopening the Hive, which was quite possibly the stupidest thing anyone could have done under those circumstances.
Alice had thought herself to be wandering aimlessly through downtown Raccoon, but as soon as she turned the corner onto an out-of-the-way street, she knew she had a particular destination in mind, if only subconsciously.
She walked up to a building with a ten-step stoop that led to a single entryway with three doors. Two led to storefronts that took up the ground floor—a newsstand and a flooring place. The third led to an apartment-building lobby. Adjacent to the stoop was another staircase, which led down to a door with a modest sign emblazoned with the words CHE BUONO.
The last time Alice had been in Raccoon proper was when she had taken Lisa Broward to lunch. Alice had discovered that Lisa, the person in charge of maintaining security on the massive Red Queen computer network, had a personal vendetta against Umbrella relating to the death of a former coworker of hers. So Alice had recruited her to help expose Umbrella’s development of the T-virus, which was in violation of national law, international law, and any number of treaties the United States had signed over the years.
Unbeknownst to Alice at the time, Lisa had been planted in Umbrella by her brother, Matt Addison, who was part of a secret group dedicated to exposing Umbrella for the shits they were.
Spence’s greed had managed to muck that up, too. Lisa had been all set to deliver the T-virus to Matt, who was meeting her at the mansion. Instead, Matt found himself caught up in the nightmare Spence had caused.
Alice had first found Che Buono one Valentine’s Day. She was wandering around downtown