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After three or four rings, they all stopped—

—except for the one next to a burned-out diner.

It wouldn’t stop ringing.

“Call it a hunch,” Valentine said, “but I think someone wants to talk to us.”

Alice agreed. She went over and gingerly picked up the phone. Next to her, Valentine unholstered her pistol.

“Hello?”

“I thought you were never going to answer,” said a male voice on the other end.

“Who is this?”

“I can get you out of the city. All four of you.”

Alice put her hand over the mouthpiece and said to Valentine, “He can see us.”

The man on the other end continued. “But first, we have to come to an arrangement. Are you ready to make a deal?”

Valentine immediately started a systematic check of the area to see where this guy was hiding. Alice admired the efficiency, but it was a waste. A glance across the street revealed how this man could see them.

“Are you ready to make a deal?” the man repeated.

“Do we have a choice?”

A bitter chuckle sounded through the earpiece. “Not if you want to live beyond tonight.”

Valentine finished her search. She mouthed the words, “There’s no one there.”

Pointing across the street, Alice indicated the surveillance camera over the intersection. Used primarily to monitor traffic infractions, the network of cameras had been installed by Umbrella three years earlier under contract to the RCPD.

“What is your answer?” the man asked.

From what Valentine had told her, getting out of the city was damn near impossible. Umbrella would have every outgoing artery sealed off, and it was just like Cain to tell his people to use deadly force on innocent people.

Asshole.

Like she’d indicated in her question to their caller, they didn’t have a choice.

“Tell me more.”

Seventeen

Never in his life had Carlos Olivera seen anything like this. If he lived to be a hundred, he doubted he’d ever see anything like this again.

Then again, his living to see even tomorrow morning was looking doubtful in the extreme.

Jorge was definitely right: zombies were scarier. Especially when hundreds of them were shuffling toward him and his team in almost perfectly choreographed unison, dozens of pale, sickly, watery-eyed, black-toothed animated corpses with but a single thought.

Chow down on Carlos and his people.

Askegren had been killed when they first made it onto the street from the roof where Carlos had failed to rescue the blond woman.

Carter had been wounded when one of the zombies bit his arm, and he could barely hold up his MP5K.

Carlos, Loginov, O’Neill, and Nicholai were trying to shoot the things in the head, but there were so many of them….

Laying down suppressing fire, Carlos cried, “Fall back! I said, fall back!”

Even as they moved back toward Main Street, another surge of zombies came out from an alley, cutting Loginov off from the rest of them.

“Dammit! Yuri!” Carlos raced into the mass of zombies. He’d already lost one man; he wasn’t losing anyone else.

Just as he had on the roof, Carlos unloaded both his Colts into the mass of zombies trying to eat Loginov alive.

That wiped out enough of them that Carlos was able to get the now-wounded Loginov out of the crowd and help him toward the remainder of the team.

Standing in his way was Askegren. Blood covered his face from the massive head wound that had killed him, but apparently whatever part of his brain the T-virus had activated was still intact.

J.P. Askegren had been an officer with the Prince Georges County Sheriff’s Department, but, as he often joked, he’d left “because I passed the IQ test.” There was, Askegren felt, too much of the southern redneck in that particular border state, or at least in the sheriff’s office, and he got tired of dealing with people whose loftiest goal was “to see how many niggers they could bust before lunchtime.”

Six months after he’d quit in disgust, his wife got a job offer from a company in Raccoon City, and they’d moved. Cain had hired him and assigned him to Carlos’s unit. He was a good