Apocalypse - Keith R. A. DeCandido [53]
The very thin chute. No way that Nemesis could fit down here, nor did the structure allow the possibility of his opening the space up further. The only way he could follow her would be to go outside and around to the back of the building.
She landed on the floor of the basement in a heap. Ten feet to her right was the oversize mail bin that normally sat under the chute—and which she had been hoping would break her fall—tipped over and ripped to pieces.
As she clambered to her feet, several white-hot lances of pain sliced through her left arm. She had dislocated her shoulder coming through the chute door, been shot in the biceps, and broken two of her fingers when she landed. Not to mention all the cuts from the glass.
After running across the room, she slumped against a wall, on the far end from the room’s only entrance, and behind several more mail bins. With any luck, Nemesis wouldn’t see her when he came in the door.
One-handed, she fashioned a tourniquet from a strip of canvas torn from one of the damaged mail bins and used it to stop the bleeding of her gunshot wound.
Years ago, when she was still with the Treasury Department, Alice had been involved in a fight with a mugger who mistook her for a helpless young woman walking down a dark Washington, D.C., street. She’d disabused him of that notion in fairly short order, but not before the punk sliced open her left shoulder with his switchblade.
Alice still carried the scar from that encounter, but more important, she remembered the searing agony of that knife wound when it was first inflicted, and the continuing pain as it slowly healed. It was weeks before she had full use of her left arm again—maddening, since Alice was, in fact, left-handed.
What struck her now was that the trauma she’d suffered today was several orders of magnitude worse than that knife wound—yet the pain was nowhere near as debilitating.
Intellectually, she knew she should have fainted from the shock, or from the blood loss.
She did neither.
Instead, she shoved her shoulder and her broken finger bones back into their sockets.
The pain was beyond tremendous, yet Alice felt it only on an intellectual level. It wasn’t debilitating.
She added this to the ledger of Things Umbrella Had Done to Her.
Looking down at her arm, she saw that the cuts from the broken glass had already healed.
Satisfied that she’d be able to keep going, she got to her feet. Her right leg, which was feeling wonky after her landing in the basement, now felt fine.
Still no sign of Nemesis.
So she risked heading toward the only door. They still had a little girl to rescue.
Twenty-Three
All Jill Valentine wanted to do was get out of Raccoon City.
If she was brutally honest with herself—and what better time than now as she drove a hot-wired truck through the dead streets of the city alongside a frightened weathergirl shortly after having shot one of her best friends in the head after he was turned into a zombie?—that had been her goal since they first suspended her.
All she had ever cared about was becoming an RCPD cop. The biggest thrill of her life had been when she graduated the academy, matched only by the tremendous honor of being tapped for S.T.A.R.S.
But now the city had gone crazy and was dying. No, scratch that, it was dead. It had died the moment Umbrella started doing zombie experiments. That had led both to Jill’s suspension—irreparably damaging her career as a cop in this town—and to today’s disaster.
Her entire life had been reduced to one imperative: get out of Raccoon.
Right now, that meant finding Angela Ashford so her father would clear their way out. And if the father tried to renege on the deal, Jill had no problem with using Angela as a hostage to get what she wanted.
That might not quite be by the good-guy playbook, but Jill was beyond caring at this point.
She looked down briefly at her hands. They were still covered in blood.
Peyton’s blood.
When she looked up, she saw a man jumping up and down in front of her in the middle of the road.
Instinctively,