Apocalypse - Keith R. A. DeCandido [50]
Then the smile fell and Alice stopped walking.
“Wait.”
They were still in the alley, right next to an abandoned RCPD squad car. Alice looked down the alley at something at the mouth that emptied onto Swann.
“What is it?” Jill asked.
But Alice just kept staring down the alley.
Peyton started to walk past Alice, but she put a hand on his arm.
“No.”
Glowering down at the unwelcome hand, Peyton almost growled, “Sunrise isn’t going to wait.”
“There’s something out there.” Alice spoke with a surety and finality that worried Jill.
Jill didn’t see anything—no movement, nothing. Part of her wanted to believe Alice was telling the truth, but she didn’t really know a damn thing about this woman.
On the other hand, Alice had already demonstrated that she could’ve killed all three of them several times over, and hadn’t—a mercy she hadn’t extended to the monsters in the church or the zombies in the cemetery. That was at the very least a basis for some kind of trust.
But Jill still didn’t see a goddamn thing at the end of the alley except for the end of the alley.
“I don’t see anything,” Peyton said irritably.
“That doesn’t alter the fact that there’s something out there.” Again, the surety in Alice’s tone.
“We don’t have time for this bullshit.” Peyton pushed past Alice and proceeded down the alley.
“No—” Alice started, but Peyton ignored her.
Jill was about to join him when the report of dozens of rounds being fired at once slammed into her ears—
—just as the cause of those reports slammed into Peyton’s form. Blood splattered as the bullets tore through his body, and he went flying backward.
He was dead before he hit the ground, which he did about six feet behind where he was standing.
“Peyton! No!”
Jill looked up as a figure stepped out of the shadows.
“Figure” was truly an inadequate word. The person was eight feet tall at least, with huge muscles, and tubes running in and out of his flesh; he was carrying a big weapon that was roughly the size of Texas, and wearing a rocket launcher slung across his back in the exact same way Alice had her shotgun slung across her back.
How the hell this guy had managed to hide in the shadows was beyond Jill’s understanding.
Morales looked like she had shit in her socks. “What is that? Someone tell me, what the hell is that?”
“Nemesis.”
Jill whirled toward Alice, who had whispered that word.
Then she looked down at the corpse of Peyton Wells.
Unlike the higher-ups in the RCPD, Peyton had always believed Jill—more to the point, he’d believed in Jill. Not everyone was a hundred percent thrilled with a good-looking young woman in S.T.A.R.S. The facts that she was a crack shot and a brilliant officer, and had saved the mayor’s life, were secondary to the fact that she was a good-looking young woman, and therefore couldn’t possibly be good enough for S.T.A.R.S. unless she’d fucked her way to the top. Peyton had taken on anyone who’d tried to accuse her of that—not that she needed the help, she defended herself just fine against the sexist assholes, but she still appreciated the support.
Peyton had even chewed out Henderson when Jill was suspended, almost earning a suspension of his own.
Now he lay dead in an alley.
Jill Valentine had seen a lot of corpses today, more than she’d seen even in a lifetime of law enforcement.
But of all the bodies she’d seen today, this was the first one she cared about.
The next thing she knew, she was charging this Nemesis thing with both automatics blazing.
Every shot struck its target.
For all the good it did.
Nemesis didn’t even flinch at the shots she threw.
He did, however, raise the arm holding the big gun.
As Jill dived behind a garbage skip, automatics still blazing, she finally recognized Nemesis’s “handgun” as a rail gun. If even one bullet connected, it’d rip through her body like tissue paper.