Resident Evil_ Extinction - Keith R. A. DeCandido [13]
And damn, but the people had fucked things up.
A whimpering sound caught her ear, and she moved slowly into the next room, pulling out her sawed-off twelve-gauge.
That next room was a studio, the set decorations scattered and shattered, with traces of dried blood everywhere, as well as more of the quasi-religious symbols sloppily drawn in blood on the walls and the equipment. Alice stepped over a battered, tipped-over camera as she moved to the corner of the studio where the whimpering noise was coming from.
“My baby—my poor baby.”
Alice recognized the voice as the same one she’d picked up over the radio in Cheyenne.
“Please.”
The woman was curled up in the corner of the studio, cradling a dirty blanket in her arms. Presumably, the baby she was muttering about was swaddled in that rather sad bundle. She looked up at Alice, tears streaming down a dirty face, and held out the bundle.
“Please help my baby.”
Her shotgun still in one hand, Alice reached out with the other to take the bundle. It felt like a dead weight, and Alice feared that the baby was a corpse.
With a shudder, she wondered what would happen if the baby was infected. She’d seen plenty of small children who became undead, starting with the kids at Angie’s school back in Raccoon, but never an infant, at least not yet.
Angie…
Shaking off those unpleasant thoughts, Alice pulled back the blanket to reveal a dead face.
Mostly because it was made of plastic. She’d been handed a doll.
Before she could start to formulate a response to this crazy woman, she looked up to see that the woman had a shotgun.
Alice dropped the doll to the floor and started to raise her own shotgun before she realized that they weren’t alone.
Without even looking, she knew that there were five other people surrounding her, all armed, all with their assorted weaponry pointed right at Alice. Based on the clicks, they were all cocked and ready to shoot.
“You bitch,” the woman said with a nasty smile. “You dropped my baby.”
“Yet now you stop crying.” Alice shook her head. “Must be getting old—should’ve seen this coming.”
“Yeah, you really should’ve. Murph?”
One of the men, whose face was pockmarked, lowered his pistol and walked over, holding a half-rusted pair of handcuffs. “My pleasure.”
He grabbed Alice and whipped her arms around. “You’ve done this before,” Alice said calmly.
“Used t’be a state trooper. Till they fired me, anyhow. Said I was poorly socialized. Least, I think that’s what they said—don’t remember much, on account of I wasn’t listenin’. That was my other problem—I don’t listen too good.” Once he slipped the cuffs on, he slammed her over what Alice figured was a news desk. “You’re the prettiest fish we caught in a while.”
That confirmed what Alice suspected as soon as the trap was sprung. This was standard operating procedure for these people. She wondered what they did with their “fish.” She also figured she’d get the answer in fairly short order.
As if to confirm, the woman put on the same tone she’d used over the radio. “We’re surrounded. We need help. Can anyone hear us? Can anyone help us? Please!”
They all got a good laugh at that. All except for another of the men, a short one who also looked to be the youngest of the bunch. He was checking out Alice’s twelve-gauge, as well as her other weapons.
“Look at these,” the kid was saying.
Murph walked over to take a closer look at the twelve-gauge. “This fish is packing.”
A big man came over. Alice’s eyes widened as she saw the two Kukri blades in the large man’s hands. She’d seen the Nepalese knives only once before, as part of the collection belonging to one of Umbrella’s security higher-ups, who went by the code name of One. One had been killed during the Hive mess, diced by the laser grid protecting the Red Queen computer, and his collection presumably was destroyed