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EIGHT

AFTER

Sam Isaacs mostly blamed Timothy Cain.

He was a handy scapegoat, the deceased major. For starters, he was deceased. It was always preferable to have someone to blame who was unable to defend himself.

Not that Cain would have been able to mount much of a defense. Cain had reopened the Hive, violating every protocol the company had—not to mention simple common sense—just to satisfy his own curiosity. Pretty much everything that had happened since could be traced to that event. If the Hive had remained sealed, Raccoon City wouldn’t have been infected, and it wouldn’t have had to be purified. The larger the infected area, the more difficult containment became—that was elementary mathematics, after all. Raccoon City proved too much, as the infection got out, presumably through Dr. Jim Knable.

And San Francisco—a major city located on a peninsula—was far more difficult to contain than a smaller city located on an island. In fact, it was impossible. The media had painted that California city as ground zero of the infection, but Isaacs knew better.

Not that it mattered now.

As he went up the hydraulic lift with two of the security people—DiGennaro and Humberg—he thought about how much better things would have been if Cain wasn’t such an idiot. He could have done the Nemesis tests on Addison and Abernathy in relative peace, instead of having them dropped into the infested Raccoon City to engage in some kind of boxing match—again, for no other reason than to satisfy Cain’s own curiosity. Not that he had any kind of scientific interest. Cain’s was the same morbid curiosity exhibited by a child who pulled the wings off flies.

Isaacs walked toward the mesh fence at the perimeter. He wasn’t entirely sure why the undead all congregated here, but there were certainly a lot of them—hundreds, it seemed. They carried the stench of rotting flesh, overripe fruit, and moldy dust. It was almost as if they saw that there was a fence here, and that meant that there was flesh they could feed on.

Certainly, this facility was the only place in the vicinity where there was human life.

Hundreds of undead shuffled forward, slamming into the fence, pushing harder and harder against it, trying and failing to get through. The ones closest to the fence had been slammed against it so many times they barely had faces left. One person’s head was little more than a cracked skull with two eye sockets dangling in front, thinly attached by fraying optic nerves. Their hands also were pounded to mulch, trying and failing to plow through to where the living were so they could feed on them.

How did they know, though? That was one of many mysteries, but it was one that pointed to a possible conclusion: there was more to these walking corpses than simple electrical impulses being fed to the brain in lieu of blood.

Plus, there were the dogs.

While humans were barely able to walk in this state, canines appeared to be fully functional. They could run and jump and do pretty much everything they could do when they were alive—yet they were not alive, given that they could neither respirate nor procreate. Still, they functioned far better than their human brethren, and among the many tasks Isaacs had set about to accomplish was to find out why.

And now there was some evidence to show that there was at least a rudimentary intelligence to go with the instincts. The undead had all congregated here, even though there was no evidence that there was life here except for the occasional person who came up the lift. The T-virus that the late Dr. Ashford had developed might have been able to cure far more than a degenerative nerve condition.

The bad news was that more tests needed to be run. The good news was that he had an infinite supply of test subjects right outside the fence.

To DiGennaro and Humberg, he said, “We need a fresh one. Prepare the tower.”

“Okee dokee,” DiGennaro said.

“Can you really call someone who’s dead fresh?” Humberg asked.

DiGennaro smirked. “Long as none of ’em grab my ass.”

Isaacs had long since lamented