Apocalypse - Keith R. A. DeCandido [74]
“No!”
Gathering every erg of strength in her dying body, Alice leapt across the cargo hold and—
—just as Matt had done for her—
—put herself between Angie and the threat.
For the second time in ten minutes, Alice was impaled by a sharp piece of metal.
Perfect ending to a perfect day.
Thirty-Two
There were days when Dr. Sam Isaacs hated his job.
Right now, Isaacs longed for a day that good.
As he stood in his Hazmat suit watching the various technicians, also in Hazmat suits, check over the wreckage of the Umbrella helicopter that had crashed in the Arklay Mountains shortly after Raccoon City was wiped out, he thought on the one piece of good news he’d gotten all day.
Timothy Cain was dead.
True, Isaacs didn’t actually rejoice in the fact that the man was deceased, but at the very least it meant he wouldn’t be Isaacs’s boss anymore. The man had been a complete imbecile with delusions of grandeur.
Worse, he’d had no concept of one of the most importants tenets of science, that of the controlled experiment.
Instead, he’d let the T-virus get out of the Hive—a nice controlled environment—and then he’d decided to use the killing fields of Raccoon City in the wake of this nightmare as the place to test the Nemesis Program.
It drove Isaacs crazy. Nemesis had been floundering for ages, and now they’d finally had a breakthrough. Abernathy and Addison were the perfect test subjects—Addison took to the mutations like a duck to water, and Abernathy had even taken it one step further.
Did Cain let Isaacs do his job and refine the process?
No, he’d let them loose in the city and set up some kind of idiotic death-cage match.
Now both subjects were as dead as Cain, and Isaacs would need to start over.
Not that that was the corporation’s highest priority at present. After all, they had a serious amount of spin control to deal with. Isaacs didn’t know how they were planning to manage that—blowing up a city wasn’t exactly something you could brush under the rug—but that was hardly Isaacs’s problem.
All he knew was that, based on the last report from Ian Montgomery before the pilot died in the crash, Cain was dead and Abernathy had been on this bird when it flew out of the city. If there was something—anything—to salvage, Isaacs needed it.
Then one of the techs moved a piece of wreckage to reveal Abernathy’s entire body.
Intact.
Well, mostly intact—a large piece of metal had cut right through her thoracic region, but that could be removed. And studying her corpse would be extremely beneficial.
“Fetch the medical team,” he said to one of the techs.
“Sir? She’s dead, sir.”
“Just do as I say.” Save him from idiot technicians! “Any sign of any of the others?”
Another tech shook her head. “No, sir. There are charred remains in the pilot’s seat—that was probably Montgomery. But there’s no sign of any other remains. My guess is that Olivera, the two civilians, and the Ashford girl all made it out alive.”
Isaacs shook his head.
“Unbelievable. The genetically engineered super-soldier doesn’t make it, but the regular people and the little girl do?”
The tech shrugged. “It’s a fucked-up world, sir.”
“Crudely put, but correct.” Isaacs sighed. “Keep checking. Just in case.”
“Yes, sir.”
Isaacs watched as the medical team approached and began pulling Abernathy’s body from the wreckage.
Jill Valentine looked down on the wreckage from her vantage point atop one of the mountains.
She, Carlos, Angie, and L.J. had spent hours climbing this mountain, getting as far from the wreckage—and Umbrella’s influence—as they could.
It was kind of ironic. For Jill, this whole thing had begun in the forests not far from here, when she saw zombies.
When she’d reported it, Umbrella had worked overtime to discredit her and force her suspension.
Now she was back in Arklay. The city where she’d grown up, that she’d spent her whole life in, that she had sworn an oath to protect and serve, was gone.
Carlos, who was carrying Angie Ashford on his shoulders, said, “They’ll be coming after us.”
Jill reached