Resident Evil_ Extinction - Keith R. A. DeCandido [11]
A doctor came running in. “Are you all right?” she asked Isaacs rather stupidly.
Isaacs didn’t dignify that with a response but instead allowed her to help him to his feet and bring him to the infirmary. As she led him off, he said to Cole, “We’ll need to purge this base, relocate to the Detroit facility.” They had gone to San Francisco more because of its proximity to what was once Racooon City than anything, but the Detroit facility had better tracking equipment and was also the nerve center for directing Umbrella’s massive network of satellites.
He’d need them to keep track of Alice.
And eventually to bring her home.
FOUR
AFTER
In 1956, Congress passed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, a pet project of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The act was designed to create a national system of highways that would make road travel throughout the United States faster and more efficient.
Traditionalists, of course, decried the notion, as traditionalists always will do. Allowing travelers to stay on lengthy stretches of highway meant they could, as John Steinbeck put it, “drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.” Route 66, famed in song and story as the road across America, became, if not obsolete, at the very least reduced in significance in a world that valued speed. Why have a long, dragged-out trip through the small towns of Kansas when you could zip through it at eighty miles an hour (sure, the speed limit was reduced to fifty-five during the gas crisis of the 1970s, but the cops don’t even give you a second look until you approach triple digits) to get where you’re going faster? Besides, they had to compete with airplanes, which really could take you from New York to California without seeing a single thing save a few clouds.
The main parts of the interstates were highways numbered with two digits according to direction and location. Odd-numbered highways ran north-south; even-numbered were east-west. The numbers increased as you went either north or east. I-5 intersected with I-90 in the Pacific Northwest and with I-10 in San Diego. I-95 crossed I-10 in Florida and I-90 in Boston.
Arguably the best-traveled interstates were the two longest: I-80, which went from New York to San Francisco, and I-70, going from Baltimore to Cove Fort, Utah.
Because part of the 1956 act’s mandate was that the interstates go through all major U.S. cities, including through their downtown areas, there was an explosion in suburban populations. Suddenly, you didn’t have to live in the city to work in the city, and towns outside cities became cities in their own right.
Of course, not every city developed in that way.
Take Salt Lake City, Utah. The capital of the desert state, it stood virtually alone. If someone drove west on I-80 through Utah, there was nothing until you reached the interchange with I-215, and then, all of a sudden, you were in a city, just like that.
Which was why Alice Abernathy was surprised, as she rode her BMW K1200 west on 80, to see a sign reading SALT LAKE CITY—CITY LIMITS. She’d been riding on the highway for quite some time, with very little signs of life. She hadn’t realized she was so close to the city.
Then again, the whole world had very few signs of life these days.
The BMW was simply her latest ride. She’d had a chopper, but it washed out during a run-in with some undead back in Ohio. Alice had, of course, taken care of them, but it left her without a vehicle. She had had to walk from Youngstown to the Cleveland suburbs (she avoided going near Columbus; that was her hometown, and to see it now would be just too painful) before she found the BMW, left on the side of the road, its former owner decapitated and decomposing. Alice had seen no signs of the head, but the body was covered in bite marks, so it probably had been made undead and then