Genesis - Keith R. A. DeCandido [31]
Anna blinked. "What?"
"It's a sealed room."
"No shit, Sherlock. And here I thought the water was up to my knees because this room doubled as a fucking wading pool." She walked away from Mariano before he could make some kind of cute reply. She turned to Johnny-Wayne. "Help me with the doors."
"Oh, fuck the doors!" Johnny-Wayne went over to the far wall, opened the emergency door, and pulled out the axe that was standard issue in every room in the building, thus acquiescing to the Raccoon City fire code. As if an axe would do any good in a room like this.
Before Anna could stop him, Johnny-Wayne splashed across the room, building up as much speed as he could in knee-high water, and slammed the axe into the window. He used the back end of the axe, since it was more of a sharp point.
Johnny-Wayne Carlson was a fairly big man, who worked out regularly, and could put a good amount of force behind an axe thrust. Based on how loudly he grunted, he used all his considerable strength when he hit the window with the axe.
One small pebble-sized piece of PlastiGlas popped out the other side.
"Great," Anna said. "Keep that up for another three hours or so, and we'll be home free."
"You got a better idea?"
Anna said nothing in response to that. She had nothing to say.
"Fine." Johnny-Wayne turned and tried the axe again.
Another pea-sized bit of PlastiGlas was dislodged by the action.
She looked over to see that Mariano was continuing to enter the code into the door, in the futile hope that maybe this time it would release the door.
The water crept up to her waist. She couldn't even feel her feet anymore.
Oddly enough, her primary thought was that she really regretted not getting another night in bed with Mariano.
That, she thought as the water continued to creep up her chest, would make the shittiest possible epitaph…
Nine
LISA BROWARD WAS AS GIDDY AS SOMEONE about to go out on a first date with her dream boy, and as nervous as someone facing a firing squad.
The latter was the far more likely prospect.
Her stomach felt like it had been tied into half a dozen slipknots. She hadn't been able to hold down a single meal since her and Alice's lunch at Che Buono.
She and Alice had had several more illicit meetings, arranging to get her hands on the T-virus. Today was the day she would get it.
After the last meeting, she had set things up with Matt. That was more of a challenge, since she couldn't just call him on the phone—at least at first. She set up an e-mail account on a free service that was not likely to be traced to her. If somehow the e-mail was traced back to the Hive, the person Umbrella would assign to find it would be her, and even if someone else in the company realized it was specifically her, she could chalk it up to her account being hacked. It might cause her some embarrassment, but she could live with that.
Once the account was set up, she sent out a mass e-mail to thousands of addresses with a text-only attachment that ninety percent of the e-mail programs in the country would interpret as spam and block. The remaining ten percent would get through and be deleted unread by the receiver. Anyone stupid enough to open an unsolicited attachment would find only a text file full of gibberish.
However, one of the addresses that received the spam was one she set up for her brother. Matt checked that address once a day, and waited for an e-mail from this particular address. The gibberish was in a code that Matt had given her from his days as a Federal Marshal. Any halfway decent cryptographer could probably crack it in about five minutes, but the circumstances under which a cryptographer would even know of the file's existence were extremely unlikely.
Sure enough, two days after she sent the e-mail, Lisa got a phone call.
"Hey Lisa, it's Matt."
Putting on a surprised face for the benefit of any coworkers that might be looking on—not to mention the Red Queen's surveillance—she said, "Matt? What's the matter? Are Mom and Dad all right?"
Matt laughed. "They're