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The next, she was walking—not even running but almost sauntering—back toward the SUV.

“Alice, what the fuck?” Carlos cried out, even as he used his titanium knife to stab someone wearing a maintenance worker’s uniform in the eye. “Where you going?”

She tried to answer Carlos, but she couldn’t make her mouth work. Or stop her legs from moving.

An undead with most of the left side of his head missing and an eye socket dangling down over where his left cheek should’ve been crossed her path as she walked up Russell Street. Typically of the undead, he ignored her—her blood was swimming with the T-virus, and for whatever reason, that meant the undead didn’t view her as a food source the way they did other living humans—but just by being in her way, he caused something to kick in. Alice grabbed the undead, gripping the back of his head with one hand and the sticky gunk of what was left of the side of his head with the other, and broke his neck.

Once the immediate perceived threat passed, Alice went back to walking toward the parking garage on Third Street where they’d put the SUV, along with King’s pickup truck and Molina’s minivan.

Alice focused all her concentration on trying to make herself stop walking, but nothing worked. It was as if she’d been programmed. Probably by that fucker Isaacs. He was the one who’d performed all the modifications to Alice to turn her into a freak, and he had done the same to poor Matt Addison, transforming him into some kind of monster-movie creature.

But in the end, Matt had been able to plow through the Nemesis Project programming and reassert control, sacrificing himself to save Alice and the others.

Now Alice failed to do likewise.

She kept trying, though. Matt probably had been trying to fight the programming the entire time Nemesis stomped through Raccoon City, massacring cops and people and trying to do the same to Alice. His persistence eventually paid off, and Alice’s would do likewise.

At least, that was what she hoped. So she kept fighting.

Jisun was standing outside the SUV, Angie inside doing something on her laptop. “What’s happening?” Jisun asked as Alice approached.

Alice desperately wanted to answer her, but her mouth refused to form the words. Worse, Jisun was standing directly between Alice and the driver’s-side door to the SUV, which—based on her reaction to the undead with half a face—meant that Isaacs’s programming probably would cause her to remove Jisun with extreme prejudice.

Sure enough, Alice turned her body and then leapt into a jumping side kick, aimed straight at Jisun’s head.

Never was Alice more grateful for the fact that Jisun’s martial arts training was as good as Alice’s own. A third-degree black belt in Kenshikai karate, Jisun easily dodged the side kick by ducking and rolling on the parking-lot pavement. For her part, Alice instead kicked the window of the driver’s-side door, shattering it. She fell to the ground, then quickly clambered to her feet. There was no pain, but there almost never was anymore. Between the T-virus and Isaacs’s tampering, Alice was beyond such irrelevancies as pain now.

Physical pain, at least. Mental anguish, however, was in full bore as she and Jisun started sparring. Jisun kept trying to ask Alice what was going on between kicks and punches, but Alice said nothing, no matter how hard she tried to speak.

At one point, Jisun let loose with an axe kick; her heel slammed down onto Alice’s head with a bone-jarring impact, and Alice fell to the pavement.

Only then did Jisun take out her weapon, a Glock that King had given her. “What the hell is going on?” she asked, her breath ragged.

Moving far faster than even Jisun could react, Alice slammed her palm heel into Jisun’s nose.

No!

Alice used every erg of willpower she could gather up to try to stop herself, but nothing worked. She was convinced that she’d just killed a friend.

But then Jisun got up, blood pouring from her nose. Miraculously, Alice hadn’t hit her hard enough for the skull to crack and send bone shards into the brain. Or perhaps