Resident Evil_ Extinction - Keith R. A. DeCandido [79]
Reaching into his lab coat, Isaacs pulled out the digital recorder. The red light was on, indicating that it was still recording. He touched a button, and the red light went off.
Returning to his lab, Isaacs once again docked the recorder, adding this conversation to the sound files he already had in a secure, password-protected folder on his hard drive that he simply called 15627, a series of numbers picked randomly. He ran a program that would carve out Wesker’s voice, then isolate the individual words. The program created new files for each word, and the directory for 15627 saw several sound file icons being added, each with a file name corresponding to the word in question.
When the computer flashed the words CAPTURE COMPLETE, Isaacs sat down and called up another program, one that would compose a sound file from the individual files he created. The work was tedious and slow, but after about twenty minutes, he had a complete sound file. He played it to be sure.
Wesker’s disjointed voice played over the speakers, the words sounding uneven and with odd pauses: “The, Committee, authorize, immediate, action, release, of, vehicles, and, personnel, under, command, of, Doctor, Isaacs.”
Isaacs smiled.
Soon.
Very soon.
TWENTY-THREE
Jill Valentine had spent most of the last few days gathering up every citizen of the city of Baltimore who wasn’t in the convention center.
That proved to be depressing in many ways. For one thing, the number of people she’d been able to find was only a hundred. And those she found were barely able to stand upright. They were malnourished, dehydrated, and many were on the brink of death. Worse, these people were also unarmed, unless you counted two-by-fours that were lying around abandoned row houses, which meant that when people did die—and according to Andre, they did pretty regularly—they became “zees.”
Safety in numbers was a concept that they had abandoned. Many had gone to the convention center, hearing of food and shelter, but the few who made it back alive said that they shot anyone who came close—a tactic Jill had experienced firsthand. The convention center was just for “them boys.”
It was hard enough for people to survive in this world, but to have them denied at least a chance by their fellow living humans?
Jill wasn’t about to stand for that.
First, she needed to organize everyone, bring them all together. That proved challenging. Some were willing to be convinced. Some were too weak to argue and just went along for lack of ability to reject the notion. One person, a woman named Maureen, refused to exit her building, saying, “Last time I talked to somebody, she died and tried to eat my ass. Git!”
Jill finally persuaded Maureen to come out in exchange for food. Besides her own stores, Andre had shown her a deli that was bolted shut that nobody had been able to get into. Jill broke into the place with very little effort. While the perishables had rotted to the point where you could hardly breathe, they managed to liberate a mess of canned food and bottled water.
She had made her pitch to each person, gathering them all up in an abandoned building on Fayette Street. Most everyone said yes. The ones who didn’t were so far gone that there was no helping them. They’d be dead and zombified soon.
Jill had been half tempted to shoot them in the head and have done with it.
When she asked if there was anyone left, Andre hesitated. “There’s one guy, but you don’t wanna be talkin’ to him.”
“Why not?”
“He fuckin’ crazy.”
Someone else—a boy named Marlo—said, “You talkin’ about Jasper? Shit.” That last word’s vowel went on for several seconds. “He one crazy nigger. Back in the day, he used to be po-po, and when the shit went down, he took all the dope an’ all the guns.”
“He was a cop?” Jill asked.
“What’d I just tell you?” Marlo said. “Yeah, he a cop—back when they was cops, an’ shit. Used to trade drugs for food, but he don’t be doin’ that no more on account’a ain’t no one gettin’ high no mo’.”
That surprised Jill. “Nobody gets high?”
Andre