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If she had done it even a day sooner, none of this would have happened.

She continued to stare at Nemesis.

Something seemed familiar about his eyes.

No, it was more than that—there was something familiar about Nemesis. Not just the body, but the very concept, as bizarre as that seemed.

Her heart beat loudly in her chest. Since she’d awakened in the Raccoon City Hospital, her heightened senses had made her aware of her heartbeat, but this was even more intense than before.

After a moment, she realized why.

She wasn’t hearing just her own heart—she also heard Nemesis’s.

And it was in perfect time with her own.

Then Nemesis took a step forward.

So did Alice.

She drew both her Uzis.

Nemesis lifted the rail gun.

Alice fired both Uzis into Nemesis.

The creature didn’t even slow down as the bullets slammed into his chest.

They charged each other like two bulls going at it, right up until they were three steps from colliding.

Then Alice leapt into the air, flipping up and over Nemesis’s eight-foot-tall frame and landing solidly behind him.

Before Nemesis could turn to face her, she ran toward the basketball court that was behind the alley.

She slammed the gate behind her as she ran into the court, but that, predictably, didn’t slow Nemesis down. However, to Alice’s surprise, Nemesis didn’t just tear through the chain-link fence.

He stepped on the RCPD squad car and then jumped over the fence.

When Nemesis landed on the court, he cracked the pavement beneath his massive feet. Then he raised one huge fist, and brought it down.

Had Alice not rolled and tumbled out of the way, that fist would have pulped her entire body.

She kept moving, never giving Nemesis a chance to get a bead on her, dashing about the basketball court. Unfortunately, being in an enclosed area didn’t help matters. Her biggest advantage was speed and agility, and she needed space for that.

Within moments, he had her trapped in a corner.

So she ran up the fence and dived over the top, landing gracefully on her feet on the other side.

That would, she knew, give her only a few seconds’ head start.

If she was lucky, it would be enough.

She ran out onto Swann Road, crossing the street to an office building at the corner of Cleveland Street. The door was actually around the corner on Cleveland, but there was a perfectly good window right in front of her.

Alice ran, leapt, and dived through the window, covering her face with her arms.

Just as she did, she heard the report of the rail gun.

Fuck.

Cold pain sliced through her arms and shoulders as shards of glass cut into her skin, followed immediately by a single hot pain in her left arm.

One of the rail gun’s bullets had hit her.

The amazing thing was that only one shot had connected.

Rolling across the floor, now littered with broken glass, Alice tumbled into an upright position and started running away, ignoring the blood and the pain.

Behind her came the booming sound of eight feet of genetically engineered monstrosity walking through a wall and shattering the plaster and brick.

Alice hoped like hell he didn’t come through a support beam.

The one way in which Alice’s speed didn’t help her was in a chase, by virtue of Nemesis having considerably longer strides. The monster was already closing the distance, so Alice just ran ahead without thought to where she was going.

This turned out to be a mistake. Within seconds, she found herself facing a dead end, with only a wall containing a mail chute covered by a metal door in front of her, and no other way out except backward.

But backward was Nemesis with his two oversize weapons.

Without breaking stride, she raised her Uzis and started firing on the mail chute door, then dived for it headfirst as she’d done through the window moments earlier, gambling that her enhanced strength and the bullet power would weaken the chute door enough for her to penetrate it.

Luckily, the gamble paid off. She smashed through the door, pain ripping into her bones from the impact,