Resident Evil_ Extinction - Keith R. A. DeCandido [1]
Knable would stake his reputation on it. And his reputation was considerable.
An old man and a young woman came up next. Even as Knable was drawing blood from the woman, the old man suddenly collapsed.
Panic shot through Knable. He stood up straight for the first time in about four hours. If this old guy was infected…
“Oh, my God, Daddy!” The teenager fell to her knees and started unbuttoning the old man’s shirt. “He’s not breathing! It’s his heart—he has a weak heart!”
A heart attack wasn’t what Knable was worried about. People who were infected with this virus could easily just collapse out of nowhere. The old man didn’t have any visible bites, but Knable couldn’t see his entire body, either.
The girl started to give her father mouth-to-mouth, which wasn’t quite the stupidest thing she could’ve done but was right up there. “Get away from him!” Knable cried.
He was about to move to yank her off and found that he couldn’t. She was trying to save her father’s life, after all. Knable took his Hippocratic Oath very seriously—even if he couldn’t really remember all of it most of the time—and he couldn’t just stop someone from engaging in a lifesaving procedure.
But he could get someone else to do it. Looking up, he saw that Sergeant Wells of the RCPD was nearby, along with an armed woman wearing a tube top and a miniskirt. Knable presumed she was an off-duty cop pressed into service.
To Wells, Knable spoke in his best order-nurses-around voice. “Get her away from him.”
With a grunt, the sergeant did as he was told, though the girl didn’t make it easy on him. “No, let me go!” she cried.
“He’s saving your life,” Knable muttered as he removed the test tube from the needle. He had a very bad feeling about what the quick-test was going to show.
Before he even had a chance to add the solvent, the old man’s eyes opened.
They were a milky white.
Knable didn’t need to run the test to know that the blood he had in the test tube was going to turn up blue.
The old man was infected.
As if to prove it, he immediately bit Sergeant Wells’s leg, which meant the cop was going to turn into an animated corpse before too long as well.
Before anybody else could react, the woman in the tube top shot the old man right in the head.
While the girl was screaming that the woman had killed her daddy, Knable felt a hand grab his arm. It was Anderson, the head of the security detail down here. “We’re outta here, Doc,” he said, guiding Knable rather forcibly toward the gate.
“Wait a minute, you can’t—” Knable started, even as he was all but dragged toward the gate. He couldn’t just leave these people; he’d been there all day, and—
“Giddings,” Anderson said to the Bluetooth in his ear, “we’ve got an infected man here. I’m evac’ing the doc.” He then nodded in response to whatever Giddings might have said.
Anderson all but threw Knable through the gate, forcing the doctor to stumble to the ground.
Only then did he realize he was still holding the test tube with the old man’s blood, which he mostly noticed when it shattered on the pavement of the bridge.
Clambering to his feet, Knable looked down at the shards of test tube and infected blood, the latter spreading in rivulets through the asphalt. “Perfect ending to a perfect day,” he muttered.
Another security goon, a woman whose name patch read ZOLL, led him toward a helicopter that was waiting on the far side of the bridge. Halfway there, he heard a thunderous bang that made him almost jump out of his shoes. Whirling around, he saw that the gate had been closed. “They can’t just trap those people there.”
“Not my call, sir,” Zoll said. “We have to go.”
As they approached the helicopter, Knable heard Cain’s voice over a loudspeaker: “This is a biohazard quarantine area.”
Knable shuddered. He supposed