Apocalypse - Keith R. A. DeCandido [71]
So was the woman in the blue tube top. Both she and the Umbrella guy grabbed fallen weapons and joined Matt in firing on Cain’s thugs.
“This is Cain, priority overload—initiate launch proceedings, effective immediately!”
He still couldn’t see him, but Matt heard that bastard’s voice all too clearly. He had ordered the missile strike. Raccoon City would be one big firestorm soon enough.
Then the stealth copter took off and started to chase Alice down.
She was staying one step ahead of them, but that couldn’t last. Even Alice had her limits. So Matt ran over and grabbed the rocket launcher.
Then he turned and ran toward the building across from City Hall where the copter was chasing Alice.
By the time he caught up, Matt saw that Alice was defiantly facing off against the copter’s bulletproof windows and 50 mm cannons with a Colt .45. Matt had to admire her tenacity, but even she couldn’t beat those odds.
At least, not with that weapon.
With one mighty leap, Matt interpolated himself between the muzzles of the copter’s cannons and Alice.
Then he raised the rocket launcher and fired it.
When Nemesis had blown up the inn on which the S.T.A.R.S. sniper was positioned, Matt had wailed in agony as he was forced to watch himself kill a cop who had done nothing wrong but be stuck in a nightmarish situation.
Now, though, he took nothing but satisfaction from the task.
The copter exploded in a fiery conflagration.
He watched with peace of mind as the tail rotor broke away from the rest of the fusillage and plummeted down—
—right toward them.
Oh, shit.
As fast as he and Alice were, even they couldn’t dodge the rotor—or the rest of the wreckage—in time.
Maybe it’s better this way.
A fireball came crashing to earth, burying Matt in debris, burning metal, exploding fuel, and shattering pavement.
Now, at least, it’s over.
Thirty
Timothy Cain knew when it was time to retreat.
It seemed they would have to go back to the drawing board with the Nemesis Program as well. And he’d have to explain to his superiors why Charles Ashford hadn’t made it out of Raccoon City alive. He would, of course, blame the good doctor himself, say that he’d managed to get back into the city somehow in a misguided attempt to rescue his little girl.
They’d believe that. Ashford was obscenely dedicated to that idiot child. The board of directors had even approved allowing the girl to serve as the template for the Hive’s artificial intelligence avatar, a move that bewildered Cain no end.
Still, they had learned a great deal, and next time they wouldn’t make the same mistakes.
Probably the most important thing was to find some way to totally eradicate the personality of the host body for Nemesis. That had been the downfall of both parts of the experiment. Abernathy’s individuality had proven too problematic, and even Addison had managed to overcome the programming.
It would also take a while to replace the troop leaders they’d lost. The soldiers themselves weren’t an issue—such hired guns were a dime a dozen, easily found by combing armed forces, police departments, and jailhouses all across the world. They were near-infinite resources.
No, it was the men like Olivera, Ward, and One who would be difficult to replace. Along with Ashford, they were the only ones that Cain had anything resembling a regret about losing.
And even they could be replaced eventually.
Life, after all, was cheap.
He scrambled into the C89. Montgomery, the pilot, had already started up the copter.
Shouting over the sound of the rotor turning and the engine running, Cain cried, “Get us airborne!”
Behind him he could hear the exchange of gunfire between his own people and Olivera and that woman in the tube top, whoever she was. Based on what little he’d seen, she was a crack shot, as she and Olivera—whose skill Cain was already familiar with—were more than holding their own against almost a dozen of Cain’s handpicked troops.
He also heard the woman yell, “He’s getting away!”
No, he thought, he had already gotten away.