Resident Evil_ Extinction - Keith R. A. DeCandido [7]
Located in the heart of the Death Valley salt flats, the station was built around the same time that Andy’s mother had been hiding under her desk to stay safe from the bomb, and it hadn’t been upgraded in almost that long. A tube filled with mercury indicated the temperature, a method of determining heat that Andy thought had gone out with cassette tapes. The equipment on the walls and cheap Formica tables still had dials on them, for crying out loud.
But it wasn’t as if anybody needed to know the weather—especially here. It was the desert. It was dry, and it was hot.
Once the platform settled into place, Andy started backpedaling toward the open door. The Hazmat suit had its own temperature regulation, for which Andy was grateful, as the shift from the air-conditioned Umbrella complex to the great outdoors of the California desert was a transition Andy wouldn’t normally be eager to make.
Stepping outside, Andy deliberately looked down at the sandy ground outside the weather station. He didn’t want to see what lay beyond, he just wanted to dump the body and get back downstairs where it was safe.
“On three,” Paul said. Before Andy could say anything, he added, “And if you ask me if it’s one, two, three, and then go or go on three, I will punch you.”
Realizing he was getting predictable in his old age, Andy just muttered, “People have no respect for the classics.”
“I respect the classics. I don’t respect you beating them into the ground.”
Andy chuckled, grateful to the security guard for taking his mind off what they were doing and where they were doing it.
In unison, the pair of them started to swing the body. “And a one,” Paul said, “and a two, and a three!”
On three, they tossed the body to the left into the big trench.
Without even thinking about it, Andy looked up.
What he saw, as usual, made his most recent meal well up into the back of his throat, and he almost doubled over from the nausea.
His immediate field of vision was the big trench into which they’d thrown Alice-85. The trench was lined with lime and filled with the remains not only of Alice-85 but of the previous eighty-four Alices as well. Eighty-four identical, red-dress-wearing corpses. Well, eighty-two, really. The one that had been diced by the laser grid was just an undistinguished pile of meat chunks. And then there was Alice-9, who, for reasons no one had been able to figure out, just went crazy in the bathroom right after she woke up and dashed her brains out against the bathroom wall before she ever even got dressed, so her corpse had remained nude.
That wasn’t what made Andy want to lose his breakfast, however. He’d become inured to the multiple identical corpses. He suspected that if he ever met the real Alice Abernathy—“Ass-Kicking Alice,” as Paul referred to her—he’d expect her to wander around mutely until something killed her, too.
No, it was what lay beyond the trench.
The weather station was surrounded by a fifteen-foot-high perimeter fence that was topped with razor wire. Pushing against it were literally thousands of corpses that had been animated by the T-virus.
Andy preferred to think of them as animated corpses. Calling them zombies just brought to mind bad horror movies and also made it hard to take them seriously.
They all had learned the hard way to take these things seriously.
Once the fence had been electrified, but that proved to be more trouble than it was worth. The corpses were constantly shambling right into the fence, which meant that the current was nearly constant and not doing any good. Electrified fences generally were meant as a deterrent rather than a physical means of restraint. The subject would be shocked once and know better than to try again. But animated corpses didn’t even have as much reasoning ability as your average wild animal, and so no matter how much you shocked them, they didn’t die (being already dead), and didn’t learn any better. So Isaacs killed