Resident Evil_ Extinction - Keith R. A. DeCandido [4]
The cameras followed her here, too, transmitting in infrared, the heat source being the woman in the red dress.
She crawled.
Time was lost in the imperative of moving forward. All that mattered was finding a way out that didn’t require staying in that glass corridor. She was moving in a direction that would put her back over the mansion. Perhaps she could get back in there.
The cameras found another heat source: a flicker of light that now came into her field of vision.
She crawled faster.
The light grew brighter, but it was also in the top of the air duct. Which meant it wouldn’t lead to the mansion. But any port in a storm—she crawled to it, found another air vent much like the one she’d kicked in to get here, and lifted it slowly—just enough for her to see where it led.
It was a dark corridor. One not made of glass, which put it one up on the corridor she’d just left.
Throwing the vent aside with a loud clank of metal on linoleum, she climbed up into the corridor. While not as sterile as the glass corridor, it wasn’t as homey as the mansion, either. Disinfectant tinged the air, which, along with the empty gurneys against one of the walls, identified this as a hospital—albeit an abandoned one. The only decorations were a few paintings that were probably meant to be soothing on the walls and the hexagonal red-and-white logo of the Umbrella Corporation on the floor.
Slowly, she walked forward, even more cautious after her last long corridor.
At the end of this corridor was not a forbidding hunk of metal but rather a set of glass doors. She could see the streets of Raccoon City beyond them.
Walking past the gurney, she suddenly stopped, looked around, as if sensing something wrong.
After looking up and down the corridor for several seconds, she grabbed the gurney and rolled it down the corridor.
Once the gurney made it to a fork in the corridor, a trip wire appeared and sliced the gurney clean in half. It would have done the same to her.
Shaking her head, she continued forward, carefully stepping around the spot that the gurney ran over to set off the trip wire.
And then she was thrown back several feet by a mine exploding.
She landed in a heap against one wall of the corridor, staring down in shock at the gaping, bleeding hole in her chest.
As the women breathed her last, Dr. Samuel Isaacs cursed.
Isaacs never used to curse. He had always prided himself on a fine vocabulary and a lack of need to resort to such crudity.
But the world had changed over the past few years, and Isaacs had been forced to change with it. Among other things, this meant that when things went wrong, he no longer shook his head, clucked softly, and said something bland like “What a pity” or “Back to the drawing board” or “Oh, dear.”
No, he pounded a gloved fist on the table in front of him and said, “Shit!”
Then he turned to his team—who all, like him, were wearing white Hazmat suits—and said, “Let’s move.”
Yet another clone of Alice Abernathy had failed to make her way through the Cretan Labyrinth.
The other technicians and scientists went ahead in. Isaacs paused to close and seal the faceplate of the suit. The “Cretan Labyrinth” nickname had come a few months back from Moody, one of the techs, and it had stuck. Timson had suggested that they try to re-create Nemesis and use him as the Minotaur, an offense for which Isaacs might have fired Timson under other circumstances.
The Nemesis Project had been Isaacs’s greatest success and greatest failure at the same time. He hated the very mention of it.
Once Isaacs’s suit was properly sealed, he went in after Moody, Timson, and the others. He hated wearing the damn suit, as it was impossible to breathe properly in the thing. In the old days, he’d have delegated. Sadly, the growing unpleasantness had reduced the staff to the point that Isaacs had to be much more hands-on than a supervisor of his experience usually was.