Genesis - Keith R. A. DeCandido [57]
Now, though, things were just getting too weird. He knew that Umbrella was into some hardcore shit, but this…
As the numbers of people stumbling toward them grew, Matt came to several realizations. The first was that these people were all wearing suits or lab coats over all-white jumpsuits. He knew from Lisa that Umbrella had a dress code—unusual in the post-dot-com world of Business Casual, but not unheard of—matching that of these people's clothing.
The other was that they were already dead.
When he was a kid, one of Matt Addison's favorite words was "zuvembie." He came across it in a lot of the comic books he read when he was a child, and it referred to reanimated dead bodies. In later years, he would learn of the word "zombie"—mostly from horror movies—and later still discovered that the comics called them "zuvembies" only because they weren't allowed to use the word "zombie." The Comics Code Authority established in the 1950s that kept comics G-rated forbade that word, and some bright mind at one of the comics companies made up a synonym that was similar enough to convey the meaning without actually violating the code.
Twelve-year-old Matt, picking up some monster comic or other, just thought it was a really, really cool word.
Now, decades later, he found himself confronted with real-life zuvembies.
More than ever, he needed to get out of these damn cuffs and ditch these gonzos so he could find Lisa's desk and get to the bottom of this. Umbrella's fingers were in shit much worse than anything he, Aaron, and the rest of them could possibly have dreamed of if this was the kind of thing coming out of the Hive.
He was pretty close to finally getting the cuffs off—no mean feat when you have basically no leverage whatsoever—when one of the tanks blew up. Alice—who seemed to be the only person in the group with anything like a brain, even with the drag effect of her amnesia—warned them to beware of the tanks, but nobody listened, and one of them exploded, sending Matt onto his back.
Glancing around quickly, he caught sight of the keys and crabwalked his way back to where they were: under a table.
A zombie followed him, and tried to reach in under the table and pull him out. Said zombie was wholly undeterred by the fact that he was on fire.
Matt kicked at the zombie and tried to grab the keys, but succeeded only in knocking the latter into a vent.
Splitting his focus, he reached into the vent for the keys while continuing to kick the zombie.
Eventually he succeeded in both endeavors. The zombie's neck broke from one of the kicks, which stopped it coming after him, and he managed to grab the keys.
The bad news was, now his leg was on fire.
He couldn't do a damn thing about it while bound, so he fumbled agitatedly with the keys, hoping the fire didn't spread past his right shin, knowing that it was a pretty slim hope.
But he for damn sure wasn't dying down here. Not until he found out what happened to Lisa.
It was one thing to be prepared for something to go wrong—that was almost a given. His boss at the Federal Marshal's office always used to say, "Plan A never works." This, however, was several orders of magnitude beyond something going wrong. Arriving at the mansion to find some woman dressed like she was going to a cocktail party or something, then being attacked by the Security Goons from Hell, and finally reliving Day of the Dead wasn't even on the contingency plan list.
He got the cuffs unlocked.
Then he tamped down the fire on the leg of his pants before it could spread to even less comfortable regions of his body.
Pausing to take a breath, he saw that three more zombies had decided to take a shot at him.
Then another arm grabbed his shoulder and