Apocalypse - Keith R. A. DeCandido [61]
Jill cocked her head. “The T-virus.”
Angela nodded. “But they took his invention away from him. The men at Umbrella. I’ve heard him crying, too, at night, when he thinks no one is listening. But I’ve heard him. He’s not a bad man, you see. He didn’t mean for any of this to happen. Honest.”
Tears started to well up in Angela’s eyes. She’d thought she was out of tears, but knowing she was finally going to see her daddy…
“Honest.”
She collapsed into Alice’s arms.
“I believe you,” Alice said. “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”
Then Angela heard the sound of a door slamming open. Alice was suddenly holding a shotgun and pointing it at the door.
But there was also a red light shining on Alice’s chest.
Angela looked at the front of the room to see a man holding a big gun with a red light on it.
The man with the gun was wearing the same all-black uniform as Mr. Sokolov. “Don’t point that at me unless you intend to use it.”
He spoke, so he wasn’t a monster.
“He’s cool!” said another voice. The man who dressed funny and who’d come in with Jill and the other woman who was dead now walked up behind the man with the gun. “He be cool. He made a deal with Dr. Doom, same as you.”
Jill looked at the man in black. Angela could now see a name tag on his chest that said OLIVERA. “How many of you guys are there?”
“What do you mean?” Mr. Olivera asked.
Then Mr. Olivera saw the body of Mr. Sokolov and his head sank.
“Nicholai…” he whispered.
Angela was tired of looking at dead bodies.
She wanted her daddy.
“When were you bitten?” Alice asked.
Now Angela looked at Mr. Olivera more closely. He looked all pale and sick.
“Two hours ago.”
Angela held up the Spider-Man lunchbox.
Alice smiled. “It’s your lucky day.”
“Nobody’s having a lucky day in this town today, Alice,” Mr. Olivera said. “Don’t know if you remember me—Carlos Olivera.” He looked down at Angela. “I’m guessing this is the package we were both sent to pick up?”
“Looks like. Dr. Ashford obviously likes to hedge his bets.”
“He works for Umbrella, of course he’s hedging his bets.”
Jill said, “Don’t you two work for Umbrella?”
Both Alice and Mr. Olivera said, “Used to,” at the same time. Angela felt a funny urge to giggle.
“Whatever. Let’s get the hell out of here. I’ve got a truck parked outside, we can give him his shot there.”
“I heard that,” the funny-dressed man said. “We just gots to find the pretty TV lady.”
“The ‘pretty TV lady’ is dead,” Jill said.
“What? Bull shit! She can’t be dead, she’s a celebrity!”
“Afraid so.” Jill pulled the video camera out of her pocket. “All we’ve got is her legacy.”
“Damn. There goes my chance at stardom.”
Twenty-Seven
Charles Ashford wondered when it was, exactly, that he’d lost his soul.
Was it a gradual process, he wondered, or had the Umbrella Corporation just eaten away at it like vultures picking over a corpse until there was nothing left but dry bones?
He had had the noblest of intentions, of course. There were so many things to learn, so many breakthroughs to accomplish—but in order to do that, one needed resources.
Umbrella had deeper pockets than anyone else in the world. Only they could fund his research; only they could take that research to the next level; only they could apply it to real-world solutions beyond the theoretical gosh-wow-wouldn’t-it-be-great-if-we-could-do-
this stage of lab work that had been Ashford’s frustrating status quo until he was hired by Umbrella.
Umbrella also didn’t care about his degenerative nerve condition. Ashford had never understood why, in a world where Stephen Hawking was the world’s most famous living scientist, a man in a wheelchair would have so much trouble getting funding for his scientific work. Yet on dozens of occasions he’d had sure-thing grants and projects kicked out from under him right