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That didn’t make any sense.

Oh, yeah, the bastards had done something to her.

The question was, what?

Then she heard another noise—the revving engine of a motorcycle.

She turned and looked out the front. A Harley was headed straight for the store window.

And was not slowing down.

Even as she dived for cover behind the cashier’s desk, the motorcycle smashed through the window with a crash that Alice found unusually loud—in part because it had been so quiet, but also, she now realized, because her hearing was, like everything else, much more acute now.

She stood up to see that the bike had come to a halt by crashing into a clothes rack full of fatigues. A large man in a leather jacket was slumped over the handle-bars, head obscured by a pile of green camos.

As soon as she got close, the biker shot upright. She couldn’t see his eyes behind the mirrored shades, but the way his mouth almost fell open was unmistakable.

Alice calmly grabbed his head, one hand on either side, and twisted.

Then she threw the biker to the ground headfirst, causing him to tumble off the bike. She located the ignition, turned it off, then wheeled the bike out of the clothes rack, standing it up against the cashier’s desk.

Now she had a more efficient way of getting around town.

Even as the zombie brigade shuffled around her, ignoring her completely, Alice continued her shopping expedition, the list of what she could carry having just increased slightly.

Thirteen

If you’d asked Jill Valentine how she managed to escape the chaos of Ravens’ Gate Bridge, she couldn’t have told you.

One minute, she was screaming at everyone to get back. The next moment, gunfire. The moment after that, a sea of humanity running every which way.

Next thing she knew, she was running down the streets of Raccoon City, supporting the wounded Peyton Wells and accompanied by, of all people, Terri Morales.

Had the situation been slightly different—say, Morales wounded and Peyton in good shape—Jill would not have allowed herself to be slowed down by a wounded person. But she wasn’t about to abandon Peyton.

Once those who’d survived Umbrella’s skeet shoot at Ravens’ Gate managed to get to the Raccoon side of the bridge, they scattered to the four winds. Jill chose the direction the three of them went as much for its comparative emptiness as anything else. She figured the zombies would tend toward greater concentrations of people, so while most headed down Route 22 or Western Boulevard, Jill and Peyton—and Morales, who was now clinging to them like a leech—went down the less-traveled Dilmore Place, which led to a run-down residential area.

As they moved farther down Dilmore, Jill glanced over at Peyton, hobbling along with his left arm wrapped around her neck. He was getting pale and sweaty, though the latter could have been due to the heat, which hadn’t abated with the sun going down.

Most of the streetlights weren’t working, but plenty of bonfires and burning cars lit their way. Jill caught sight of a large church at the end of the road where Dilmore met Lyons Street.

What better place to seek sanctuary?

She tried to reassure Peyton. “We’ll rest up soon.”

“Don’t worry about me,” he said, trying desperately to sound tough and failing miserably.

That more than anything showed how sick Peyton was. He usually had no trouble sounding tough.

Morales, who had been mercifully quiet up until then, suddenly burst into a torrent of words.

“What the fuck is going on!? They were shooting at people! Innocent people! Why didn’t you do something, you’re the police!”

The ex-reporter did have a point. After all, it wasn’t like Umbrella had any standing as a law-enforcement or military agency. The words of that guy on the wall notwithstanding, they couldn’t “authorize” use of live ammunition anywhere outside a firing range.

But ultimately, the only person with true authority was the one holding the biggest gun. Right now, that was Umbrella.

However, Jill had neither the interest nor the patience to explain it to Raccoon