Apocalypse - Keith R. A. DeCandido [37]
Moving faster than Alice would have believed possible from someone who wasn’t Alice herself, Valentine drew one of her own weapons and pointed it right at Alice’s head. “Hold it!”
Wells pulled out his own weapon and pointed it at Alice.
Alice drew one of her Uzis and pointed it at Valentine.
Morales, naturally, raised her camera to make sure she got all of this on tape. Not that Alice could entirely blame her. What reporter could resist a front-row seat for a good old-fashioned Mexican standoff?
“What do you think you’re doing?” Valentine asked.
It was probably the stupidest thing she could have said. “He’s wounded,” Alice said slowly. “The infection’s spreading.”
“I’m fine,” Wells said.
He sounded as awful as Rain had when she insisted she was still okay. She’d died on the train, when they were only minutes from making it out. Matt had had to shoot her in the head.
Alice looked at Valentine. “You should take care of him now.”
She almost added: Like I didn’t take care of Rain when I had the chance.
“He’s my friend.” Valentine had yet to lower her pistol.
“I understand,” Alice said, meaning it wholeheartedly, “but it’ll be more difficult later. You know that.” Then she cocked her Colt.
“No!” Valentine cried, doing the same with her weapon. “If it comes to that—I’ll take care of it myself.”
Unbidden, Alice thought back to the train, just before the licker had attacked, when she, Matt, Kaplan, and Rain thought they were home free.
“I don’t want to be one of those things,” Rain had said, “walking around without a soul. When the time comes, you’ll take care of it.”
Valentine and Wells had that bond law-enforcement officers had. Alice had seen it during her abortive time in the Treasury Department, before the government agency’s sexism drove her to Umbrella’s waiting, and high-paying, arms.
She lowered her weapons.
“As you wish.”
Only then did Valentine lower hers.
Alice turned to Wells.
“It’s nothing personal. But in an hour, maybe two, you’ll be dead. Then, minutes later, you’ll be one of them. You’ll endanger your friends, try to kill them—maybe succeed. Sorry, but that’s just the way it is.”
Before the shocked-looking Wells could form a reply, they were all startled by the sound of wrenching metal.
The undead were breaking through the fence.
Morales, of course, was filming with that camera of hers. Alice noted with some sliver of amusement that the camera had been manufactured by one of Umbrella’s subsidiaries.
Luckily, the undead hadn’t really focused on the four of them yet, and they still moved ridiculously slowly. It was the living’s best advantage: speed.
Then Morales screamed.
Alice looked over to see that the reporter was being pulled down into the mud by the occupant of one of the graves.
The T-virus had gotten into the ground.
Valentine pulled Morales free even as Wells drew his weapon.
Alice put a hand on his arm. “Save your ammo.”
Then she dispatched the undead with a swift kick to its head, breaking its neck.
“These things react to sound. Use your guns and we’ll just attract more of them.”
“You really think that matters?” Valentine asked, looking past Alice.
Dozens of undead were coming in from Lyons Street. Dozens more were rising from their graves.
Then Alice moved.
Valentine took a couple down, and Wells might have gotten one. Morales just stood filming everything.
Alice took out the rest of them.
It was an odd feeling—kind of like Zen and the Art of Killing Zombies. She didn’t really need to think about what she was doing, she simply let her instincts take hold. Whatever Cain’s science goons had done to her had taken her natural athleticism and her years of training and raised them both several orders of magnitude.
Even as she snapped one undead’s neck with her arms, her legs were planting her feet for a spin-kick that would shatter the spine of another, then her hand slammed into the throat of a third, then she broke the leg of a fourth with a kick that set it up to have its neck broken—all in the time it took Valentine to throw one punch.
When there was only one left,