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3…2…1.

Then she waited.

She hated this part. Time slowed to a crawl, and she was afraid to move. True, she’d been trained to stay absolutely still if need be—training that went back to when she started taking karate as a teenager in Columbus and which the T-virus enabled her to do with ridiculous ease—but her ability to rid her mind of all thought the way Sensei had taught her had lessened of late.

There was simply too much in her mind to clear it all out.

And most of it was death.

After several dozen eternities, the watch beeped again. That meant that Umbrella’s satellite was no longer overhead. She could come out.

Within minutes, she was back on her BMW, the tarp having been folded back into its carrier and the Kukris now alongside her other weaponry.

Firing the bike up, she got back onto 80 and headed into Salt Lake City. Big cities were dangerous—they had many enclaves of undead hidden in buildings and other odd places—but they also had lots of supplies that might still have gone unlooted. It was certainly worth a look, since she was already in town.

FIVE

BEFORE

They told Jill Valentine she was insane.

They told her she was rumormongering. That what she was telling everyone was truth was, in fact, the realm of video games and action movies, not real life. That she was seeing things, that she was mistaken, that she was overreacting.

Then, when the truth came out, when the same undead creatures she’d fought off in the forests of the Arklay Mountains invaded Raccoon City proper, to the point where the Umbrella Corporation had had to seal the city, Jill had made damn sure she got out. Alongside two former members of Umbrella Security—Carlos Olivera and Alice Abernathy—as well as Angie Ashford, the child of another Umbrella bigwig, and a street thug named L.J. Wayne, Jill had gotten out. She even had video footage, taken by the late Terri Morales, the Raccoon 7 weather reporter.

She had thought that having video proof—not to mention a nuked city—would be enough to bring those Umbrella fuckers down.

Carlos and Alice both had warned her that Umbrella’s reach was long, that it was more powerful than any world government, that it could even make the nuking of a city go away.

And they were right.

Worse, Jill and Carlos had been named as fugitives. Umbrella used her suspension after reporting the zombies in Arklay against her, not to mention Morales’s own history of faking footage to get a story. Morales had been a news reporter until she showed footage of a councilman taking a bribe that turned out to be fake, thus relegating her to the weather. Like all the best liars, Umbrella used a grain of truth to make its falsehood more convincing.

Carlos had managed to forge papers that would allow them to get Alice out of the San Francisco facility—something Angie had insisted they do—but they had to get out of California as fast as possible after that, as there was no way Carlos’s forgery would hold up for more than five minutes.

So they wound up in the middle of nowhere in Idaho. Jill knew it was the middle of nowhere because they’d gone through a considerable patch of nowhere before finally arriving at the middle of it.

They’d checked into some dump—L.J. had jokingly called it the “It’ll Do Motel”—and plotted out their next move while sitting in one of the rooms. It was barely big enough to fit the two double beds and a bureau with a battered television on top of it. The end table between the beds had a lamp with a flickering bulb, a remote for the TV, and a Gideon Bible next to the phone book in the drawer—both books had many pages ripped out. Besides the door leading outside, there were two other doors—one to the adjacent room, which Carlos and L.J. were sleeping in, and one to the tiny bathroom. The toilet made strange gurgling noises every few minutes, which Jill just knew was gonna keep her up all night. The walls were covered either in stained puce wallpaper or large, awful abstract paintings. It was even money