Resident Evil_ Extinction - Keith R. A. DeCandido [103]
Now Alice understood. In order to synthesize the cure, Isaacs had to be taken care of, and the AI couldn’t do that as long as he was down there. The best she could do was contain him, which was fine if that was the only goal.
But a cure was down there.
So Alice nodded to the AI, grabbed a flashlight from a nearby rack, and slid the door open with a metallic grinding.
Just before she stepped over the threshold, the AI said, “Alice—good luck.”
Stepping in, she saw more smashed light fixtures, with only Alice’s own flashlight and dim blue emergency lights providing illumination. In the center of the space was a pile of human bodies. The pile was surprisingly neat. Most were wearing Umbrella security garb; some wore lab coats. If this was Isaacs, he seemed to have carved a swath through his own employees.
Well, as she herself knew quite well, employee loyalty wasn’t high on Umbrella’s list of important things to consider.
Muttering, “Someone’s been busy,” she moved on through the lab.
She kept getting a sense of movement in the room but nothing she could see. Either she was imagining things—unlikely—or there was something in here that was inhumanly fast—very likely.
Then she saw the tank.
Alice had woken up in one of Isaacs’s labs in a tank just like that one in San Francisco.
And like that tank, this one had Alice in it.
Another clone.
Moving the flashlight to the left, she saw that there were more of them—dozens of Alice clones in tanks.
“Well—this is different.”
Then the movement came closer.
Without warning, something struck Alice, knocking her to the floor and sending her flashlight flying.
In the remaining light, she could barely make out the form, but she caught a glimpse of a face.
For the most part, it looked like Isaacs. The blood staining his teeth was new, as was the maniacal gleam in his eyes. Not to mention the enhanced muscles in his torso and the arms that weren’t so much arms as tentacles. Dozens of them.
He struck again, but this time Alice was ready. She ducked under the strike and elbowed his shoulder, dislocating it.
It didn’t even slow Isaacs down. He grabbed her and—in a move quite similar to what she did to him back in San Francisco—threw her into one of the tanks.
Green fluid mixed with broken glass poured all over Alice, and she had to push the dead weight of her own cloned body off her. Managing to get to her knees, she reared back and threw one of her Kukris at Isaacs.
It sliced through Isaacs’s shoulder, a blow that would have killed a human.
Next to her, the clone coughed and stammered and shivered, looking befuddled and frightened. Alice couldn’t blame her.
Alice looked up, but Isaacs was gone. She’d only turned away for a second.
He was as fast as she. Faster, perhaps.
Her attention was grabbed again by the clone, who started to cough and convulse even harder, her blue eyes widening in obvious agony. Alice put her arms around her twin’s shoulder and whispered, “It’s okay. It’s gonna be okay.”
Then the clone put the lie to those words by dying in her arms.
Snarling with rage, Alice got up and ran out of the lab to the nearest corridor, the only way Isaacs could have gone. There was a door there, marked with the words TEST FACILITY. Throwing it open—
—Alice found her world turning upside down. She was back in the mansion.
Built by an eccentric old millionaire in the 1960s, the mansion had been taken over by Umbrella and used as the gateway to the Hive. Security Division always posted two people there, posing as a reclusive married couple, to serve as the gatekeepers.
The last two people to hold that position had been Spence Parks and Alice herself.
For reasons passing understanding, Isaacs had re-created at least the hallway here.
Walking over to the table, she saw the “wedding photo” of her and Spence.
Spence. The man who started all of this with his greed. If only he were alive, so Alice could kill him again.