Resident Evil_ Extinction - Keith R. A. DeCandido [10]
The tone of the head of security for the Hive.
“—is Alice.” She flashed a smirk at Isaacs. “And I remember everything.”
Isaacs quickly realized that Plan A wasn’t an option.
Moving faster than any human should have been able to move, Alice grabbed Doyle’s pen and stabbed him in the eye with it.
No! Though her arm’s momentum had to be incredible, given the speed alone with which she moved it, she was able to stop the pen before it struck Doyle’s eye.
Isaacs found he was almost giddy over the prospect of what he could do with her. His disappointment at her memory returning was ameliorated by his own foresight.
Alice then elbowed Doyle, knocking him to the floor.
After that, Isaacs could barely follow what happened. She took out one, maybe two more people, and then, before he could react, she grabbed Isaacs by the arm.
Then she flexed her wrist.
Isaacs had always thought stars forming in one’s eyes from incredible pain was a fanciful creation of cartoon animators. Having his arm broken with but a flick of the wrist cured him of this misapprehension in short order. Glass cut into his hands and face as the tank shattered, and he fell to the floor covered in blood and glass.
With knives of pain slicing through his shoulder and arm, Isaacs blinked back tears and tried to focus on what was going on.
Cole and Kayanan had left. Doyle was still on the floor, as were Stolovitzky and Bruner. Lang had whipped out his taser and fired it at Alice. It struck her right in the shoulder.
The taser glowed with an electrical charge that would have sent a normal person to the floor, twitching. Alice didn’t move—or even blink—as hundreds of amps shot through her body. She just looked at the sharp end of the taser, ripped it out of her shoulder, rending flesh but with no more effort than she would swat a fly, and then reared and threw the taser right back at Lang.
It had somewhat more of an effect on the security guard, who screamed as he fell to the floor.
And then she walked out.
Isaacs tried to focus past the pain. It wasn’t easy, but he had a very important task to perform. He knew he wouldn’t be able to hold Alice if she remembered who she was, so he had to do the next best thing: Let her think she was free.
It was the same principle that applied to animals. Why try to keep them trapped in enclosures when you could let them run free and keep track of them in the wild?
The advantage of working for the Umbrella Corporation was that one didn’t have to rely on something so crude as a tag in the ear.
Looking up at the security monitors, Isaacs saw that Alice had not only made it outside but was now in an SUV, alongside several other people dressed as personnel from Umbrella’s Security Division. Isaacs recognized three of them instantly. One was Angie Ashford, the daughter of Dr. Charles Ashford, one of Umbrella’s top scientists and another casualty of Raccoon City. The other two were probably recognizable the world over as the fugitives who were allegedly responsible for the “false video” of strange, diseased people shambling through the streets of Raccoon City infecting the populace: Carlos Olivera, a former member of Security Division, and Jill Valentine, a former RCPD cop in their elite S.T.A.R.S. section.
With his good arm, he reached into his lab-coat pocket, took out his phone, and signaled the front gate.
Under other circumstances, Isaacs would have ordered security to stop them.
Instead, he said only three words: “Let them go.”
After the guard disconnected, Isaacs switched his phone over to interface with the mainframe and said three more words: “Program Alice activated.”
It would have been better if she had remained amnesiac, but Isaacs had known from the beginning that there was a better than even chance that she’d remember it all. After all, her mind worked better, faster than any human’s. Unlike the other success the Nemesis Project had—Matthew Addison, who’d been mutated by the T-virus into a killing machine—Alice hadn’t been changed by the T-virus. She’d changed it.
But he’d never