Resident Evil_ Extinction - Keith R. A. DeCandido [76]
Alice wanted to say something, but she didn’t know any of these people. L.J. and Carlos were the only ones she did know; the rest had all joined up long after Detroit. Alice assumed that Molina and Briscoe had fallen somewhere along the way.
The survivors, who’d lived with those ten people in this convoy, couldn’t bring themselves to eulogize them. Likely, there’d been so many dead that they’d run out of words.
L.J. walked over to the one labelled ELIZABETH “BETTY” GRIER and hung something that Alice couldn’t make out on top of it. Tears were streaking his cheeks. L.J. had never struck Alice as the sentimental type—she recalled him saying that he once got his own mother involved in a pyramid scheme—but there he was grieving as hard as a person could grieve.
Carlos brought the leader over to Alice. “This is Claire Redfield,” Carlos said, confirming what Alice had assumed. “She put together this convoy.”
Alice shot Carlos a look. She had assumed Carlos to have done it. Maybe after Detroit, he lost interest in leading people in much the same way Jill had lost interest in following.
“Thank you for your help,” Claire said.
“Wish I could have got here sooner.”
Claire nodded. “Excuse me, I have things to attend to.”
Alice watched the woman walk away. She hid it better than the rest of them, but her spirit was just as broken.
Idly, Alice wondered whether they had the sense to snap the necks of the ten corpses. Otherwise, they’d all be climbing out of their graves to wreak havoc. But Alice wasn’t sure how to broach the subject, and besides, she knew for a fact that Carlos knew to do that. Mentioning it would just pour salt on the giant wound that the convoy had become.
“Don’t take it personal,” Carlos said, indicating Claire’s retreating form with his head. “In the last six months, she’s lost half the convoy.”
Alice raised her eyebrow at Carlos’s phrasing. He definitely had had his fill of leadership if he was talking about Claire losing people, rather than the convoy or Carlos himself being the ones doing the losing.
Carlos continued: “Pretty soon, there’ll be more of us dead than alive.”
Then Alice looked up at the sky. Something was bothering her.
“What is it?”
She checked her watch—there was still another hour before the satellite would be overhead. Letting out a breath, she said to Carlos, “Nothing.”
“Alice, what happened to you?”
Overwhelmed by the sheer tonnage of the weight of the answer to that question, Alice said nothing.
“Why did you leave?” Carlos asked. “After Detroit?”
That was one she could answer. “I didn’t have a choice. They were using me. I was endangering all of you.”
“What do you mean?”
She thought about Jisun and Angie and King and wondered how Carlos could ask that, but he probably didn’t realize just how much responsibility Alice carried for that. After all, technically, Jisun was overwhelmed by the undead, King was killed alongside Carlos trying to rescue her, and she never told him the truth about Angie.
“They were tracking me,” she said after a moment. “I couldn’t be around you—any of you. I’d have gotten you all killed.”
“That’s why you disappeared.”
Alice realized that meant that Carlos had been actively looking for her after Detroit, and she wondered if his failure to find her contributed to his inability to continue leading.
“I hacked into their computers and downloaded the satellite trajectories. I stayed off the grid—ceased to exist.”
“And after the world ended, why stay out there alone?”
In her mind’s eye, she saw the bullet fly out of the muzzle in a puff of smoke and smash into Angie’s skull.
She looked at Carlos, who had experienced so much death and destruction and was now partly responsible for more than a dozen children, and found she couldn’t tell him the truth.
So she just shrugged and said, “Habit.”
It was a weak answer, and he knew it.
“Could you be more evasive?” Carlos asked.
Now Alice smiled. “Oh, yes.”
Carlos, however, refused to take the bait. Instead, he just stared at her. He knew there was more to it than she