Genesis - Keith R. A. DeCandido [81]
She sat up.
PAIN!
Awful horrible mind-numbing excruciating searing boiling pain that ravaged every fibre of her being.
She ripped one of the wires out of her left arm.
The process of ripping out the wire made the pain infinitely, impossibly worse.
But then it subsided.
That emboldened her to tear out the ones in her right arm.
Same thing: worse pain at first, then subsiding to something almost resembling tolerable.
She saved the two attached to the side of her head for last.
As horrendously wretchedly bad as the pain was when she first woke up, the pain she felt when she tore the wires out of her head was several thousand quantum leaps worse.
By the time the white-hot agony had dimmed to a throbbing deep pain, she tried to take stock of her surroundings.
When she had woken up, she had been on an examination bed. Half a dozen lights shone down on it. Now, though, she was on the floor in front of it.
She couldn't make her legs move.
Looking around, she saw that each of the wires she rended from her flesh led to the ceiling.
Aside from the lights, the one door, the wires, and the exam table, the room was white and empty, save also for a mirror.
Alice was pretty sure it was a one-way window.
Somehow, she managed to get to her feet. Her legs seemed not to remember how to function properly.
Stumbling over to the mirror/window, she slammed a fist into it. Calling for help.
If anyone heard her, they gave no indication of it.
She wondered how long she'd been unconscious on that bed.
She wondered where Matt was.
She wondered if she had heard Cain properly, and if he was truly insane enough to reopen the Hive after so many had died down there.
Alice Abernathy remembered everything now. She remembered reading about the T-virus. She remembered thinking something needed to be done about it. She remembered meeting with Lisa Broward. She remembered sex with Spence, then waking up to find him gone. She remembered getting into the shower, then being hit with the nerve gas.
Hell, she even remembered how baseball was played.
And she remembered something else, too. A memo she'd written to "Able" Cain pointing out a design flaw in the card-swipe mechanisms that unlocked the secure doors throughout Umbrella: a well-placed sharp point could disrupt the circuits and cause the doors to open.
Cain never acknowledged the memo. Alice was willing to bet that he hadn't bothered to fix the problem. Cain was an arrogant ass.
Alice grabbed one of the blood-soaked wires that had until recently been attached to her arm. She slid it into the card-swipe mechanism, and poked around until the door unlocked.
Nope, he never fixed the problem.
Asshole.
She walked the hallways of what she now recognized as the Raccoon City Hospital; the wing she was in had been donated by Umbrella, and they used it for their own purposes fairly regularly.
The hallway was utterly deserted.
No doctors, no nurses, no patients.
Nothing. And no one.
The quiet was deafening. Not only was there no sign of human activity, there was no sign of the possibility of human activity.
Passing a closet, she grabbed a doctor's lab coat and put it on over the flimsy gown.
Eventually she found the front door and walked out.
What she saw made the Hive look like a day at the park.
Abandoned, smashed vehicles: buses, cars, bicycles, motorcycles, news vans.
Broken pavement, overturned garbage cans, damaged buildings, broken glass, cracked facades, garbage strewn about, streetlamps knocked over, smoke, bonfires.
Blood everywhere.
But no bodies.
Slowly, walking gingerly on bare feet, trying to avoid the worst of the shattered pavement, rocks, and broken glass, she proceeded down the street.
A nearby newsstand displayed several copies of the Raccoon City Times. The front-page headline read, the DEAD WALK!
The fuckers had reopened the Hive and let the infected workers loose.
Assholes.
Still, Alice saw no people—living or dead.
Or undead.
She knew, however, that that wouldn't last.
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