• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Whoever he was, he had good taste in bikes. The K1200 was the biggest, most powerful road bike in production.

Until they stopped producing road bikes.

Or much of anything else.

Alice had made it all the way across the country on the BMW, scavenging supplies where she could. She had half a dozen saddlebags and gas cans—though the latter were mostly empty now—along with a radio receiver, all of which rattled about on the side of the bike as she weaved around abandoned, rusted cars and trucks.

As she approached the exit for Foothill Drive, she found what she was looking for: the KLKB building.

Alice could see, as she got off the highway and headed toward the local independent TV station’s parking lot, that the patch of overgrown grass and flowers in front of the building once was a well-mowed lawn, with the flowers arranged to spell out the station’s call letters. Desert sand choked the flowers and the sprinkler system, making the entire patch look like something a kid had started on the beach and then abandoned by halfheartedly kicking sand over onto it.

Alice drove around three cars that were in various states of disrepair—and at different angles to the pavement—and parked the BMW near the station’s front door.

Reaching up, she pulled the bandana down from her face. She didn’t bother with a helmet. Ever since that bastard Isaacs had experimented on her after the Hive disaster, every wound, every injury, healed almost instantly. There was nothing a helmet could protect her from. She only wore the bandana because getting dirt, sand, and bugs in her mouth was irritating.

Reaching into the pocket of the duster that she’d taken off an undead she’d killed in Joliet (she’d gotten a pair of sunglasses from him, too, but they’d been broken in Cheyenne), she pulled out the digital memory stick she’d liberated from Umbrella’s Detroit facility and put its earpiece in her left ear.

It played the file she’d downloaded from the radio receiver—another “gift” from her brief time in Detroit—yesterday when she’d left Cheyenne.

The voice she heard was that of a woman, one who sounded desperate. Alice recognized the tone fairly easily. Most people had it these days.

“This is KLKB, transmitting on the emergency frequency. Can anyone hear us? We have seven people here in need of urgent medical attention. We’ve taken refuge in the TV station at the edge of town. We’re surrounded, and we need help . Can anyone hear us? Can anyone help us? Please!”

Alice switched it off.

Then she looked around.

The woman had said they were surrounded, but Alice saw no evidence of the undead in the vicinity. Thanks to Isaacs—whom she intended to flense if she ever saw him again—she had a sensitivity to the T-virus, and she had only a faint whiff of it here. That could mean that the undead had come and gone or that they’d been killed.

Or that they were hiding.

Of course, it was possible that in the twenty or so hours since Alice first picked up this transmission, the undead who’d surrounded them had stopped surrounding and started feeding and then moved on to greener pastures.

She inspected the station visually. All of the windows and doors were boarded up, those boards riddled with bullet holes. Whoever was in there, if anyone was in there, probably felt they were under siege.

But then, a siege mentality was one of the few tenable strategies these days. And even a tenable strategy had only a fifty-fifty chance of succeeding.

Alice headed to the front door, knocking both door and nailed-on boards down with one well-placed kick to the door’s center. With a loud crack, the wood splintered at the impact of her boots, backed up by her T-virus-enhanced strength.

Inside was an empty reception area. Her noisy entrance drew nobody out. The desk was still intact, although it was covered in blood—some of which had been used to clumsily draw various religious symbols. Looking around, she saw that those same symbols—only a few of which Alice recognized—covered the walls as well, obscuring the posters advertising the station’s programming.