Apocalypse - Keith R. A. DeCandido [68]
Throughout, Nemesis had stood unmoving, an eight-foot-tall statue. The only movement came from the occasional blinking of his blue eyes.
Blue eyes.
That seemed wrong somehow.
And yet very familiar.
Alice looked away, toward Valentine and the others.
She and Carlos locked eyes for a moment.
Almost imperceptibly, Carlos nodded.
Good. While the Umbrella troops had taken the handguns, they hadn’t done a thorough search. He still literally had something up his sleeve: the knife, retrieved from the guard he’d killed earlier.
Cain, meanwhile, turned toward Nemesis. “Discard primary weaponry.”
The sound of Nemesis dropping the rocket launcher and rail gun to the pavement echoed off the PlastiGlas.
“Now kill her.”
It took less than a second. One moment, Nemesis was doing his statue impersonation.
The next, he was charging her.
But, as fast as he was, Alice was faster. She dodged the frontal assault with little difficulty.
He attacked again. She dodged again, but did not attack.
This kept up for several minutes. Alice just needed to stall until Carlos could free his knife and himself.
Cain, however, was starting to look pissed.
“Fight him!”
“No.” Alice had no intention of hurting Nemesis if she didn’t have to. Whoever he was, he was as much a victim as she was.
Unholstering his Glock, Cain said, “Fight him, or they die.”
Shit.
Alice should have expected Cain to pull that tactic.
But then, he didn’t know how much she cared one way or the other. So she tried a bluff.
“What makes you think I care?”
Without any hesitation, Cain pulled the trigger.
Ashford fell to the ground, blood pooling around his head.
Angie screamed, “Daddy!”
Cain pointed the Glock at Valentine.
“He was a valuable asset to the corporation. I don’t even care about these people.”
Grinding her teeth, Alice nodded and moved to face Nemesis.
Lowering his weapon, Cain said, “Begin.”
When Alice had first started taking martial arts courses as a teenager in Columbus, Ohio, her sensei had told her that the truly great fighters enter into a trance where they shut out everything but their own movements. “One does not think. One simply does.” Such great fighters, however, were rare. Perhaps one in a million.
He’d told her this, he said, because he saw a greatness in her that might someday allow her to be one of those one-in-a-million fighters.
With the aid of Umbrella’s tampering, Alice had become more than that.
Once before on this night she had come close to entering this trance: in the graveyard behind the church on Dilmore Place, when the undead came rising from their graves.
Now it happened again.
She moved.
Of the collateral damage to the square, she was wholly unaware, though she vaguely knew it had to be tremendous. Nemesis’s strength was monumental, and every blow that missed her struck a statue or a car or pavement or a kiosk.
Of the onlookers, she was equally unaware, though they probably suspected that she was losing, as her moves had become more and more defensive.
Nemesis backed her up against a wall.
Cornered.
A massive fist went straight for her head.
At the last second, she ducked it, then ran up Nemesis’s chest and delivered a spinning heel-kick to his face, sending him crashing backward to the ground.
Anyone else’s neck would have snapped.
Nemesis, however, was not anyone else.
Dazed, he grabbed a ten-foot piece of metal. Focused as she was, Alice had no idea where the metal came from—support beam, statue, vehicle debris, whatever.
What mattered was that Nemesis wielded it now like a sword.
She backflipped over his first thrust, which missed her by inches.
The second thrust came straight for her head just as she landed on her feet.
Flinging up her hands, she brought them together over the flat of the blade, stopping it just short of her head.
Her