Genesis - Keith R. A. DeCandido [77]
He managed a smile. "Bitch wouldn't open the door. Had to fry her."
That was when something smashed against the PlastiGlas window. Alice raised her axe instinctively, just as the thing smashed through the window.
They all ran past Kaplan into the hallway. Just as Kaplan shut and bolted the door, the whatever-the-hell-it-was crashed into the door, denting it.
That should not have been possible.
"What the fuck was that?"
"It's a long story," Alice said as she ran off.
Matt, who was now carrying Rain, filled Kaplan in on what had happened, telling him about the T-virus, the anti-virus, the strange monster that killed Spence—and the fact that all of this was Spence's doing.
Grateful to have someone to fob his guilt off on, Kaplan hobbled behind Alice and the Rain-carrying Matt to the train station. Alice was armed only with the fire axe. Kaplan was out of ammo for his Beretta and his revolver, and he'd thrown the latter away in any case. Matt and Rain were unarmed—hell, Rain was three-quarters dead.
Kaplan tried not to think about how pathetic they were. If that thing caught up to them, they were the deadest of dead meat.
Then again, they made it this far. Over five hundred people had died, but not them.
Alice pointed at the train. "Start it up—I'll get the virus."
Kaplan nodded and limped into the train. The pain at this point had gone down to just a dull throb—or maybe he just had gotten used to it.
Whatever. Right now, he was just grateful to be one of the living and not one of the dead.
Or undead.
Or whatever the hell they were.
While he started the train up, he looked out the window to see Alice going for the metal case. She closed it—
—just as Spence lunged at her.
Alice dodged out of the way with little difficulty. The damage to Spence's corpse was such that his legs were completely shot to shit, so he was reduced to pulling himself along the floor with his arms. He made Kaplan's own struggles through the vent shaft look positively elegant
Alice gave her "husband" a look. Kaplan swore that, if looks could kill, Spence would be a pile of ashes.
Ass-Kicking Alice, it seemed, was really and truly back.
"I'm missing you already," she said as she hefted the axe.
Then she cut his head off.
Kaplan tried not to think about the fact that that was the second decapitation he'd witnessed today. Instead, he focused on starting up the train.
"Okay," he said when the telltales all indicated that the train was ready to head back up to the mansion, "we're in business. Full power." He turned to the cab. "We're leaving!"
Alice, he noticed, paused only long enough to remove her wedding ring and drop it next to Spence's blood-soaked body, then retrieve both the case and Rain's Colt before boarding.
Matt came into the engineer's cubbyhole a minute later with a hypo-gun and some improvised bandages. He was also only wearing a white T-shirt. After staring at the blue bandages for a second, Kaplan figured it out—he'd cannibalized his shirt for the bandages.
Silently, the cop—or whoever the hell he was—injected Kaplan with the anti-virus, then started binding his wounds.
Kaplan tried not to think about the blood that felt like it covered as much of his body as Spence had on his. Instead, he focused on the report he planned to write when this was all over.
And was it going to be quite a report. Knowing that Spence was responsible for all of this emboldened him. It had freed him of the guilt in many ways. Kaplan knew that Umbrella did things their own way, but Jesus Christ. A computer that slices people who try to get at it to ribbons? A big scaly thing with no eyes and teeth the size of Rhode Island running around loose? One of your top security guys turning your supposedly secure underground facility into a horror movie? And then the kicker, a virus that kills you and animates your corpse?
In the past, Bart Kaplan had been willing to turn a blind eye to the less ethical areas of Umbrella, mostly because that eye was focused instead on the high number of zeros on his paycheck stub.
But this—this was too much.
He