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Armed with MP5Ks and all looking alike in their white Hazmat suits, the seven-person team moved through the high-ceilinged rooms of the mansion in a moderately tight formation. One of them—probably Schlesinger; that little punk was always slow—kept lagging half a step behind the other six. Cain brought up the rear.

Ward signaled another of his people—Osborne, the tech-head in Ward’s team, recognizable by the sterile bag of tricks tethered to the belt of her Hazmat suit—once they reached the giant floor-to-ceiling mirror in the sitting room. She opened a panel with two knob switches, revealing a socket. Reaching into her pouch, she pulled out a plug and inserted it.

The mirror slid open to reveal a concrete staircase. Osborne then pulled out a minicomputer and started tapping its keyboard with gloved hands. “Sir, I still can’t access the Red Queen. I should be hardwired into it now.”

“Try again.”

Osborne tapped more keys. “Nothing, sir.” She looked up, her mirrored visor staring at Ward’s equally blank visage. “The only way this could be happening is if the computer was totally fried.”

“One’s team was supposed to shut down the computer and remove the memory.”

“They did more than that—if it was just that, I’d be able to restart her in at least a limited mode. But there’s nothing there to fire up. The Red Queen’s dead.”

Cain ground his teeth. Definitely an epic clusterfuck.

He gave Ward a nod, and Ward then signaled his team to move down the stairs to the bottom, where the way was blocked by a giant blast door.

This, Cain knew, was the contingency plan in action.

It was about to be put into inaction.

“Open it.”

Ward nodded, then gave another nod to Osborne, who entered more commands into her minicomputer.

A second later, the blast door opened.

Ward and Schlesinger took point and moved in, MP5Ks at the ready. The rest of the team followed, with Osborne and Cain himself bringing up the rear.

Two seconds later, Cain heard the scream.

Only after the scream did he hear the footsteps.

He hadn’t realized they were footsteps at first; they were so rhythmic that he assumed them to be the background noise of the Hive’s operations. But no, these were feet moving slowly and meticulously.

Osborne pulled a flashlight out of her pouch and shined it ahead just as the sounds of gunfire erupted ahead of Cain.

Ward was shooting into a crowd of people. Next to him, Schlesinger lay on the floor, his Hazmat hood removed, a huge hunk of flesh ripped out of his throat.

As usual, Schlesinger was too fucking slow.

Ward kept firing, but even as the bodies fell, more kept coming. There seemed to be an endless supply of them.

“What the fuck are those things?” Osborne asked.

Cain said nothing, but simply looked at them. All of them were wearing either dark suits or lab coats over all-white outfits. Said clothes were filthy and muck-encrusted, but still recognizable as clothes conforming to Umbrella’s strict employee dress code.

That wasn’t why Osborne had asked her question, though. No, it was the faces.

At best, they were blank and expressionless.

At worst, they were missing parts.

One person’s neck was at an impossible angle.

Another’s throat was almost completely missing, only an exposed spinal column keeping head attached to body.

Another was missing both eyes.

Another, its cheek.

Many had wounds on their bodies—teeth marks on some, bullet holes on others.

The four hundred ninety-two employees who lived and worked in the Hive were all dead.

And, based on the fact that this was not stopping them from wandering around the Hive, they had been killed by the T-virus.

Which was doing exactly what several of Umbrella’s top scientists had predicted it might do if it went airborne. Especially after those experiments in the forests by the Arklay Mountains. Umbrella had managed to hush up that particular nightmare, and then moved the project down to the Hive, which could be contained in case of a disaster.

At least