Genesis - Keith R. A. DeCandido [58]
Alice.
"Come on."
Nodding, he let her lead the way away from the zombies. He couldn't see any of the rest of the Goon Squad.
"Where is everybody?"
"I lost track of Rain, J.D., Kaplan, and Spence."
Matt nodded. "What about the rest of them?" The team leader, the medic, and the other two goons were still unaccounted for.
"They're dead."
That got Matt's attention. All they were doing was shutting down the damn computer! Did the zombies get them, too?
No, that wasn't possible—the zombie attack was a surprise to everyone.
So how the fuck had those four gotten themselves killed?
Matt's urgency increased a hundredfold. Umbrella hadn't just built an underground headquarters in order to hide their research, they'd built a fucking deathtrap. Five hundred employees, and now four of their security people.
With six of them left and in serious danger of joining them.
He and Alice made their way out into a corridor. As soon as the opportunity presented itself, he slipped away. Alice didn't follow him, so he definitely gave her the slip.
Right now, his priority was Lisa's desk.
She had described her office space to him in her encrypted e-mail, including the route there from the elevator bay. Finding that was only the work of a few minutes—it came complete with another fake window and fake cityscape—then he traced the route she had provided.
He found himself in an area full of boring metal desks, with papers, file folders, staplers, phones, cords, inboxes, disks, and various other items strewn haphazardly about the floor. With no idea which one was Lisa's, he investigated the desks themselves. Most of them had some kind of personal object to indicate the personality of the user, and Matt knew that Lisa's own desk had a picture of her, Matt, Mom, and Dad from a cruise they'd taken when she and Matt were teenagers.
Matt tried not to think about what he was doing as he looked at pictures of a man with his dog, a woman with her children, Beanie Babies, a pennant from the minor-league baseball team that played in Raccoon City, and all the other personal items of people who were not only dead, but still up and walking around, biting people or getting shot at by the likes of Rain and J.D.
He got to one desk, which had a computer with a broken monitor on it. No sign of a picture, but he found the next best thing: Lisa's ID badge.
Squatting down at the file cabinet next to her desk, he started going through her files, hoping to be able to salvage something from this nightmare.
A thud scared him out of what few years of life he still had left. One of Lisa's "zuvembie" coworkers was banging on the window next to her desk.
However, the zombie was cut off from Matt by the window, and seemed content to simply bang on it rather than try to find an alternate route.
So Matt let him. He had more important things to deal with.
Or so he thought. Lisa's files were all meaningless to him. They probably related to her actual job. Nothing about a T-virus or anything like that.
Of course, she wouldn't keep anything like that at her desk. She wasn't that stupid.
Unfortunately, that meant he had nothing that he could take back to Aaron.
This was not shaping up to be a good day at all.
Hearing movement behind him, he whirled around, ready to face another zombie, hoping he could fend it off with a stapler or a keyboard or something, since J.D. had disarmed him back at the mansion.
Then he saw who it was.
"Lisa?"
She stood in the middle of the space amidst the office supplies festooned about the floor, looking completely normal. A little distressed, but that was to be expected.
Had she actually survived this? Had one fucking thing actually gone right today?
Matt got up.
Then Lisa jumped him and tried to bite him with decaying teeth…
Nineteen
BEFORE TODAY, BART KAPLAN'S WORLD made sense.
Before today, computers didn't go on homicidal rampages, killing five hundred people for no good reason. Before today, he and his team were top pros, always achieving their mission objectives. Before today, the team always came home