• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Only one match left, too.

She folded the matchbook shut for a second and stared at it.

The stylized logo of McSorley’s Bar and Grill stared back at her.

For a second, she was scared to strike the match, as if the act of doing it would cut off her last connection to Raccoon City.

Jill had been born and raised in Raccoon. A lot of her youth was misspent at McSorley’s, hustling pool. While her friends were waitressing or working at fast-food joints for their pocket money, Jill was in McSorley’s, drinking Diet Cokes so old Eamonn McSorley wouldn’t lose his liquor license, and fooling guys into thinking that the cute teenage brunette didn’t know an eight-ball from a tennis ball right before she took them for all they were worth.

Once she got into the Police Academy, she had to stop hustling, of course—or, as she preferred to call it, “educating.” Eamonn had given her a neon Budweiser sign as a going-away present in gratitude for all the business she’d brought to the bar (once she got a rep, everyone wanted to take down the “pool girl”).

The bar was gone now. So was McSorley’s. So, presumably, was Eamonn himself—if the T-virus didn’t get the cantankerous old bastard, the nuke did—and so was her Budweiser sign.

The matchbook was all she had left.

It was funny—Jill had been set to leave Raccoon altogether. If Umbrella hadn’t put up a wall on Ravens’ Gate, she would’ve driven right out and not looked back—not at her brownstone, not at her job, not at anything. Not that she was all that hot to return to the job in any case; they had told her to fuck off and die. And she had no family anymore anyhow, so the only things she left behind in Raccoon were things that, she had told herself, could easily be replaced.

And yet, where would she find another McSorley’s matchbook?

Suddenly, she burst out laughing. The matchbook was, after all, the absolute least of her problems. The U.S. government wanted her for questioning in the perpetration of a fraud on the American public and slander against a fine American corporation. The same fine American corporation whose orders forced the RCPD to fuck her up the ass and suspend her when she had the temerity to tell the truth about thost things in the Arklay Mountains.

Shaking her head, Jill lit the last match and took a long, wonderful drag on the last cigarette.

The really funny part was that right before she was suspended, she was considering trying to quit smoking. So much for that crazy idea…

She walked down to the first fast-food place that presented itself and went in once she was done with her cigarette. As she waited in line, she decided to buy enough burgers, fries, and chicken for ten people. Sure, there were only five of them, but Angie was a growing girl, God knew what Alice’s metabolism was like now, and L.J. struck her as the type who could eat for four.

During the whole time she had walked in and stood in line, something had been nagging at the back of her brain. But she couldn’t figure out what.

Then, finally, just as she got to the front of the line, she caught it.

There was somebody in the fast-food place, a short guy in a big coat that was too warm for the weather but just the right size to conceal a shoulder holster, as well as a ball cap and sunglasses. He looked outside right when a car drove by that slowed down as it passed the fast-food place. Right when he did that, the car headed off in the same direction as the hotel.

Jill had been made.

She cursed herself up, down, backward, and sideways. If they’d traced the SUV to this podunk town, the first thing they’d do is check fast-food places, since it was the ideal location for people on the run, seeing as how you could get quick food for cash. Jill remembered a lecture given to the Academy while she was there by a member of the Fugitive Squad from an East Coast PD—she could no longer remember which one—who said that the best way to find someone who’s hiding is to track the pizza joints, fast-food places, and Chinese restaurants.

There were at least three of them—one here and two more in the car. Probably a