• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

There was a fight here. A vicious one. Quite possibly some of the undead who’d been set loose on Vegas had gotten free and killed everyone. That was Alice’s ideal scenario, and she found herself entertained by the notion of Isaacs being torn to tiny pieces by his own monsters. If anyone deserved the Frankenstein ending of being destroyed by his own creation, it was Sam Isaacs.

Following the bloody corridor, she found the door to a storage room opened. Peering inside, she saw that the light fixtures had been smashed, bullet holes riddled the walls, and blood was everywhere.

But no bodies.

She looked up and saw that a ventilation duct had been smashed open. There was blood all over the hole, and Alice wondered if bodies had been carried up there.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sensed movement, and she whirled around with her sawed-off and shot.

The shot went straight through the hologram of a little girl, one that looked eerily similar to Angela Ashford.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. I am the artificial intelligence which—”

“I know what you are,” Alice said with disgust. She’d lived with the Red Queen every day of her life as head of security for the Hive and had been sentenced to death by that same computer. She’d had her fill of Umbrella’s little-kid answer to Hal-2000. “I knew your sister. She was a homicidal bitch.”

Using the same prissy tone that the Red Queen had used—but which Alice had never heard from Angie—the computer said, “My sister computer was merely following the most logical path for the preservation of human life.”

“Kill a few, save a lot?”

“Put simply, that was her goal.”

Unable to resist the shot, Alice said, “Didn’t quite work out, did it?”

“We cannot control the vagaries of human behavior.”

That was a particularly euphemistic way to refer to Timothy Cain’s psychosis. Rather than get into a protracted discussion on the subject—which wasn’t something Alice was all too eager to dwell on in any case—she went on a different tack. “What happened down here?”

“Dr. Isaacs returned in an infected state. He was bitten by a creature that had been treated with a newly developed serum—a serum derived from your blood. The resulting infection has caused massive mutation.”

“My blood?” Suddenly, the ditch full of Alice clones made a sick sort of sense.

“Your blood has bonded with the T-virus. Dr. Isaacs correctly deduced that it could be used to reverse the process of infection. To cure or destroy the biohazard for good.”

Alice blinked. “My blood is the cure for all this?”

“Correct.”

Had this facility belonged to any other company, she would have asked why this cure hadn’t been mass-distributed. But that wasn’t Umbrella’s style.

Remembering the devil’s bargain she’d been forced to make with the Red Queen in the Hive, Alice asked, “And why are you helping me?”

“Like my sister, I was programmed to preserve human life. My satellites show that there are one million, seven hundred thirty-three thousand, five hundred forty-eight human survivors still alive on the surface of the Earth.”

Alice found that that news made her almost giddy. She had honestly been convinced that there weren’t even a thousand people still alive, much less a million. And it also gave her hope that Claire and her group would find fellow survivors in Arcadia.

The computer went on: “Your blood is pure, and this facility contains all the laboratory equipment you will require to synthesize a cure.”

“This could all end?” Alice asked cautiously.

“Correct. There is, however, a small problem.”

Now Alice smiled. “Let me guess—Isaacs?”

“Yes. Continue down this corridor, and take the emergency stairs to level seven. That is as far as my program is able to control.”

Not liking the sound of that, Alice did as the AI instructed, eventually finding herself at a giant steel door labelled LEVEL 7. The AI’s face appeared on a flat-screen near the door, which Alice found only marginally less annoying than the hologram.

“I have him contained on the lower levels,