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Another change that had come in this new world they all lived in.

Not for the first time, Isaacs cursed the name of Timothy Cain. A German immigrant who served in the U.S. Army before joining the Umbrella Corporation, Cain was singlehandedly responsible for destroying the world.

Worse, he was already dead, so he couldn’t be punished. He died in Raccoon City shortly before it was vaporized by a tactical nuclear missile strike that Cain himself had ordered.

There was blame to spread elsewhere, of course. Based on the surveillance they’d been able to pull from the mansion attached to the Hive—the very same one that had been partially re-created in the Cretan Labyrinth—a former Umbrella security staffer, Percival Spencer Parks, had been the one to unleash the T-virus in the Hive, condemning five hundred people to death. After that, the Hive had been sealed, the only survivors being Alice Abernathy and Matthew Addison, who had been brought into the Nemesis Project.

Had the Hive remained sealed and been filled with concrete, it all would have been over. In fact, that had been Isaacs’s very recommendation to Cain. As with most recommendations from anyone other than himself, Cain ignored it. Which was a pity, as Isaacs then would have been able to develop Nemesis properly, and no one would have found out about what happened in the Hive. True, the families and friends of five hundred people would have to have been told something, but they all lived in an underground complex that was filled with attendant risks. Surely Umbrella could have found a cover story.

Instead, Cain reopened the Hive, supposedly because he wanted to know what had happened.

If the human race survived, Isaacs was quite sure that Cain’s decision would go down in history as humanity’s greatest blunder, surpassing such classics as Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and the introduction of the rabbit into the Australian ecosystem.

The infected corpses of the five hundred Hive employees—not to mention an entire Security Division team—had been animated by the T-virus, and Cain’s reopening of the Hive allowed them access to the world outside.

Within fourteen hours, Raccoon City was overrun. Each corpse was filled with an uncontrollable urge to feed on flesh, and when they did, their victims died and became hungry animated corpses themselves. Umbrella sealed off the city, just as it had sealed off the Hive, and then blew it up with a nuke.

That was only a temporary stopgap.

Isaacs looked down at the corpse. The dead blue eyes stared straight ahead. Blood pooled beneath the body from the gaping hole in its thoracic region.

He shook his head. “Take a sample of her blood. Then get rid of that.”

Turning around, he went back into the lab. He had to get out of the damn suit.

Andy Timson watched as Isaacs retreated to the safety of the observation room. “Wuss,” he muttered under his breath.

“Go ahead,” Brendan Moody said next to him, “say that louder. I double-dog dare you.”

“Aren’t you supposed to build up to that?” Andy asked Brendan as the latter reached into the sterilized pouch on his suit and took out a syringe attached to a test tube.

“Huh?” Brendan asked distractedly as he put the point of the syringe into the pool of blood under Alice-85’s body.

“You start with the dare,” Andy said. “Then it’s double dare. Then it’s double-dog dare.” He frowned. “I think. Been a while since I saw the movie.”

“Oh, that’s from a movie?”

“Christ, Brendan, did you have no childhood?”

Standing over them, the lone member of security assigned to the group, Paul DiGennaro, said, “Is there a chance that you two will ever shut the fuck up?”

“Not a big chance, no,” Andy said with a cheeky grin that Paul couldn’t actually see through the visor. Not that Paul needed to see it, since he knew it was there, and he probably shared it.

“Figured I’d ask. Maybe the nine-hundredth time’d be the fucking charm.”

Brendan stood up, removing the test tube from the syringe. “We’re all rooting for number nine-oh-one, Paul, trust me.”

In the old days, Andy and Brendan never would have dreamed