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Still, Carlos stared at her.

Molina said, “Fuck it, Olivera, she wants us gone; let’s be gone! We already lost Burton and King, we can’t—”

“We can’t lose her, too. If we do—”

Alice interrupted, “You’ve already lost me, Carlos. Just go!”

Four security guards came running around the corner, and Alice proceeded to shoot them down in succession, blowing the head off the fourth one before the first one even hit the ground.

“Go!”

Molina was already headed out.

But Carlos kept staring at her with those intense brown eyes of his.

The two of them had been through hell together, saved each other’s life a dozen times over. Alice hadn’t had many friends in her life, and the few she’d had, she’d lost.

Most recently, she’d killed one with her own hand. Never mind that it was at Isaacs’s direction, it was still her finger that pulled the trigger that ended Angela Ashford’s life. Poor little Angie, who had, in essence, saved all of them, since they only knew about the helicopter that took them out of Raccoon before the bomb dropped because Angie’s father had told them about it in exchange for rescuing his daughter.

She couldn’t let that happen again. Like it or not, the strike team would have to do without her. As it was, she was directly responsible for the deaths of Jisun, Angie, and King. Who knew how many more innocents would die because of Isaacs and his ridiculous obsession with her?

No, it had to end.

Carlos must have seen something in Alice’s blue eyes, because he finally looked away. “Fine. Let’s move!” He joined Molina in heading toward the exit.

Alice ran in the other direction, refusing to let herself look back.

She just needed to make it to a room with a computer terminal and stay away from Isaacs. Without his direct instruction, she could fight this, but she had to fix things so he could never give her direct instruction again.

Which meant not finding her again. Another reason to stay away from other people.

Years ago, Alice had been recruited by Umbrella to join Security Division. She had been promised more money and more chances for advancement than she’d get in the U.S. Treasury Department. Given her inability to be assigned to the Secret Service—the whole reason she’d joined Treasury in the first place—she jumped at the opportunity.

It may well have been the stupidest decision she’d ever made. She soon learned that her new employers were a nest of vipers. And since her attempt to bring them down, with Lisa Broward’s help, had failed, the human race had been hit with an extinction-level event thanks to the very deadly sins of Umbrella employees: Spence’s greed, causing him to steal the T-virus and set it loose in the Hive to cover his tracks; Cain’s stupidity, reopening the Hive, thus causing Raccoon City to be infected; and Isaacs’s scientific curiosity, which obviously came at the expense of his humanity, experimenting on her and Matt, turning them into freaks.

And now Isaacs had taken from her the only method she had for helping people by forcing her to go off the grid and away from the only people in the world she could allow herself to trust.

Fucker.

She found a computer terminal in an empty room and started working…

PART TWO

FIGHT FOR SURVIVAL

EIGHTEEN

Alice had intended to go to sleep as soon as she made camp somewhere in Nevada, but while she ate her can of Spam, she started reading the journal she’d found next to the hanged body in the Enco station.

The last few pages of the journal were all about a place called Arcadia, Alaska. “Heard the transmission again,” the journal’s author had written. “They’re broadcasting from a town in Alaska. No infection, no undead. They’re isolated up there…safe.”

Intermixed with the increasingly sloppy handwriting were clips from magazines about Arcadia. One was a feature about polar bears, but it had photos of Arcadia in it. The entire journal was a monument to Arcadia.

Intellectually, Alice knew there had to be places like that. True, the infection had spread all the way across the globe, but nothing gained one-hundred-percent penetration.