Apocalypse - Keith R. A. DeCandido [44]
Nemesis continued firing the rail gun with one hand.
With his other, and without a single hesitation in the discharge of the other weapon, he raised the rocket launcher onto his shoulder and fired a missile at the roof of Grady’s Inn.
A moment later, the entire inn was one massive heat signature as it exploded from the missile’s impact.
Nemesis lowered his weapons, having accomplished his most recent directive.
Oh, God…
Then Nemesis turned toward Mostly Colt.
Nineteen
“What do we have?” Cain asked Johanssen.
The young tech looked up at the major as he approached. Karl Johanssen was one of the primary tech-heads assigned to the Nemesis Program, and the only one Cain could stand to talk to. Johanssen had served for two tours in the U.S. Marine Corps before taking the job with Umbrella. True, he was a jarhead asswipe, but that still made him easier to talk to than the other, much bigger asswipes in the Nemesis Program. None of them was quite at the same level of irritation as Ashford. However, while Cain had to be nice to Ashford, he was under no obligation to be the same for the scientists, technicians, and other head-in-the-clouds jackasses.
Johanssen, though, understood things like chain of command and how to follow an order. So he was the liaison between the program and Cain himself. With Nemesis now up and running, Cain had ordered Johanssen to be the one handling the board while he was active.
The head of the Nemesis Program, an irritating little twerp named Sam Isaacs, objected to this, saying that he should be the one to run it, since he knew the program better than anyone, and, while he had nothing but the utmost respect for Mr. Johanssen, it would really make a great deal more sense for Isaacs to be running the board.
Cain told Isaacs to go fuck himself, and instructed Johanssen to run the board.
This meant that Johanssen had access to Nemesis’s sight, shown on a plasma-screen monitor; his hearing, piped through top-of-the-line speakers from PerryMyk (a subsidiary of Umbrella); his vital signs, displayed on another plasma screen; and his brain, via a computer terminal with an ergonomic keyboard that fed directly into his cerebral cortex.
Right now, the sight monitor was showing a gun shop and several heat signatures. Since the undead didn’t show up on infrared, that meant living beings.
In response to Cain’s question, Johanssen said, “A dozen armed men, well organized.”
Cain shook his head. “I’m surprised there’s anyone left alive.”
“They’re S.T.A.R.S.,” Johanssen said. “Raccoon City’s S.W.A.T. team, basically. They’re the best.”
“The best.” Cain snorted. One and his team were the best. These guys were just glorified beat cops who got to play with nicer toys. “Let’s see how good they really are.”
Johanssen nodded in understanding. That was another reason why Cain liked Johanssen—he understood what Cain told him without having to have it explained several dozen times. And it wasn’t as if there were any moral issues. Anyone still in Raccoon City was as good as dead—if the T-virus didn’t get them, tomorrow morning’s cleansing would—so what difference did it make how they died?
Life was, after all, cheap.
“Altering protocols.” With those words, Johanssen wheeled his chair over to the ergonomic keyboard and started typing in commands.
The directive prompt came up on the monitor, and Johanssen typed in: SEEK AND DESTROY MEMBERS OF S.T.A.R.S.
While he did so, Cain watched the monitor. The computer had identified most of the people in the gun shop from their RCPD uniforms. One in civilian clothes was Ryan Henderson, the captain in charge of S.T.A.R.S. Operations. The remaining two were probably officers who were off duty when all hell broke loose, or maybe civilians the others were protecting.
Nemesis then found a S.T.A.R.S. sniper on the roof of a nearby building.
Cain looked over to see that Johanssen was calling up face ID on the sniper. He was