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TWENTY-ONE

Alice woke up in a motel bed and wondered if she was still dreaming.

But no, she couldn’t have been still dreaming, because she didn’t dream in the first place. For the first time in a long time, she slept like the proverbial rock.

For once, she had something to thank Sam Isaacs for: her first good night’s sleep in years came because she used the abilities he gave her.

She tried to avoid them where possible. The passive powers—the strength and fast healing, for example—she couldn’t do much about; the active ones, she tried not to use. But when she arrived at the convoy to see an arc of fire about to fry Carlos Olivera, she acted on instinct.

Too many good people were dead. Alice couldn’t bear to see another worthy soul lost.

She felt something on her arm and saw that someone had put a bracelet made of electrical wire on her wrist. Looking around, she found herself in the dilapidated remains of what used to be a lousy motel room. A young girl sat on one of the guest chairs, reading a battered, torn magazine. She had dozens of similar bracelets on her own arms.

“This belong to you?” Alice asked, kicking the blanket off.

The kid dropped the magazine onto the floor and nodded. “Gave it to you last night—for luck. Looked like you needed it.”

Trying and failing to recall the last time she slept in a real bed, Alice smiled and said, “Looks like it worked. What’s your name?”

“Kmart. It’s where they found me—Claire and the others.”

“You have a name before that?”

Shrugging, Kmart said, “Never liked it. And everyone I knew was dead. Seemed the time for a change.”

Kmart couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old, but she sounded like someone three times her age. Alice shuddered. This was what being a kid was now.

She heard a sound like a leaky pipe and turned to see several small children staring at her through the window. The noise had been one of them shushing the others. As soon as they realized that Alice was looking at them, they ran off.

Chuckling, Alice shook her head. “What’s up with them?”

“They didn’t think you were real,” Kmart said with a shrug. “They tell stories about you at night, like you’re Dracula, the bogeyman, something like that.”

“Really?”

Kmart nodded. “Carlos used to talk about you a lot. So did Jill.”

“Jill’s here?” Alice blinked. She’d heard rumors about Jill but nothing solid.

Shaking her head, Kmart said, “Nah, we hooked up with her back in Atlanta, and she’d brought some folks for the convoy—Mikey was with her, and so were Dillon and Blair, two of the guys who died this morning—but she didn’t stick around. Said she didn’t join groups anymore.”

“Sounds familiar,” Alice muttered. Somehow it didn’t surprise her that Jill had followed the same path as Alice. She’d been betrayed by her own back in Raccoon when her fellow cops wouldn’t stand up for her after she encountered Umbrella’s undead experiments in the Arklay Mountains, and that sense of betrayal by her comrades never really left. When she’d been on the run with Alice, Carlos, L.J., and Angie, Jill had always been the least trustful, and when the opportunity to leave the group came—never mind that she had little choice—she jumped at it eagerly.

Getting up from the chair, Kmart said, “Listen, we’re doing a kind of memorial thing for Otto and the rest of the people who—who died. So I’m gonna go do that, okay?”

“Mind if I join you?”

Kmart just shrugged, the classic gesture of the teenager. Some things, it appeared, didn’t change.

Alice followed Kmart through the halls of the Desert Trail Motel and found a gathering of about twenty people. They stood in a circle, surrounding ten wooden markers, each with a name scratched sloppily into it: FRED AN-DREASSI, ELIZABETH “BETTY” GRIER, MONIQUE LANG, BLAIR MANFREDI, DILLON MATHEWS, KENNETH MI-NAYA, JARED PETERS, E. RICHARD PRICE, OTTO WALENSKI, and JASON WILLIAMS.

A blond-haired woman stood at the center of the circle and looked around at the survivors. “Anyone want to say something?” This, Alice assumed, was Claire Redfield.

Nobody spoke.

Ten people Alice hadn