Resident Evil_ Extinction - Keith R. A. DeCandido [67]
Then the bullet tore into her flesh, rending her adorable face into mulch, drilling through her skull, splattering cranial matter, flesh, and bone all across the back window of the SUV.
Angie’s body fell to the side, dead.
“Noooooooo!”
Alice sprang upward, her nine-millimeter out and ready.
All around her, fires burned. The campfire was going full bore, and several cacti were ablaze as well. Rocks and boulders and litter floated in the air—as did the BMW.
A second after she awakened, it all fell to the ground. The fires all went out.
“Shit.”
She walked over to the bike, which was mangled from the impact—or maybe from Alice’s burst of telekinesis. The power had scared her, and she hadn’t used it much, even when it might have been useful.
But this dream, this was the worst. She wasn’t sure what had triggered it—the journal, probably, and its dream of a better life—but the upshot was a nightmare as bad as she’d ever experienced.
And the sad thing was, that nightmare was simple memory.
She walked over to her radio and tuned it to a particular frequency that she’d heard many times before but never acted on.
“This is Claire Redfield’s convoy, present location the Desert Trail Motel. Latitude 35, longitude 115. Calling any survivors.”
Hoisting the saddlebags over her shoulders, Alice started walking toward latitude 35, longitude 115.
If nothing else, she was looking forward to seeing Carlos again.
Sam Isaacs cursed as the computer displayed the words GENETIC MATCH WITH ORIGINAL PROJECT ALICE INCOMPLETE—75% CHANCE OF SERUM FAILURE.
Which meant that Alice-86 was only twenty-five percent successful. Hardly the results that would make him—or Wesker and his merry band of lunatics—happy.
He pounded a fist on the keyboard and cursed again.
“Dr. Isaacs.”
“Yes,” he said testily to the White Queen, “what is it?”
“My sensors have detected a peak in psionic activity, both alpha and beta wave.”
That got Isaacs to sit up in his chair. None of the clones had shown the same proclivity for psionics that the original Project Alice did. “From number eighty-seven?”
“No. The activity is not from one of the clones. It occurred outside the complex.”
Instinctively, Isaacs said, “That’s not possible,” then realized that the words were idiotic in a world that had been overrun by animated corpses and where he spent all his time working with fully grown clones of a super-powered woman. Old habits, however, died hard.
In her usual snotty tone, the White Queen said, “My sensors were quite clear. Massive psionic activity was detected fifteen minutes ago, centered on a desert location.”
“Triangulate immediately. I want latitude and longitude.”
“Of course.”
Ever since the Detroit debacle, Isaacs had been trying to track down Project Alice. She’d done something to the computers and to her implant. Isaacs was sure that if he could just get her in the same room with him, he could control her again, as he had when he had her shoot Ashford’s tiresome child, but accomplishing that was proving problematic.
She had been clever, too—not using her psionic abilities overtly and staying out of satellite range.
But now, perhaps, there was a chance. And once he had Project Alice back in hand, everything else would flow far more smoothly…
NINETEEN
L.J. checked on his wound while he sat in the ambulance waiting for Betty.
As soon as he saw the festering, bleeding mess that the zombie-ass motherfucker had made of his arm, he wished he hadn’t fucking bothered.
He supposed he should’ve been grateful. After all, he wasn’t no special shit, he was just a hustler who got lucky.
Now his luck had run right the fuck out.
All them motherfuckers disappearing and dying and shit, and L.J. kept going. First it was their whole secret society bullshit with Alice and Carlos and Angie and Jill. Then Jill got took by the feds, and they started picking people up, finally forming that strike team shit.