Resident Evil. Retribution (21 page)

“I think I got it figured,” Luther said. He stepped up to the ladder, swung his good arm behind the ladder, and put his feet on the lowest rung, pushing himself upward. Each time took another step upward, the arm slid a bit higher, hugging the framework. It was awkward, but he could do it.

Alice led the way, Becky behind her. Excitement replaced fear on the girl’s features as she climbed. She was going to see the outside world in person, for the first time in her life. She was going to have real memories of the real world—not clone overlays, lies printed on her mind.

Alice hoped she wouldn’t find the outer world to be worse than Umbrella Prime…

A storm was blowing in. The cold had been steadily increasing, the last fifty rungs or so, and Alice was afraid her hands might freeze to the metal of the ladder. But she got to the top, climbed over the lip onto the snow in front of the bunkers, and turned to help Becky up.

“The… outside world…” She tried to say it aloud, but her teeth were chattering too hard. She signed the rest, “…so cold.”

“Not so cold,” Becky signed, “most places. We’ll go where it’s warm.”

Alice helped Luther up, and then Leon came over the edge, teeth chattering.

“Damn!” he said. “Let’s get in the Spryte! Come on!”

Alice glanced at the cratered area where the sea was still sucking into a powerful whirlpool around the wreckage of the vents. Then they hurried to the waiting vehicle. Becky had never seen anything like it, and looked around in fascination, though her teeth were chattering and her fingers were blue.

First Alice bundled her into the vehicle, then they all got in, Leon closing the door, settling in the driver’s seat and starting the engine. He immediately cranked up the heater. Both he and Luther were shivering almost uncontrollably, wet from the seawater in the elevator shaft, with ice on their noses and eyelashes.

They moved to a compartment in back, and when they returned they had changed into dry paramilitary togs. Luther’s injured arm was bound so that it wouldn’t move.

“That feels better,” he said, coming back to the front, the warm air from the heater soothingly rising around them. He was wearing a thick parka, and Leon brought two for Alice and Becky.

Luther looked sallow, sickly. He sagged into his seat with a soft groan, and Alice and Becky sat close by. Leon settled into the driver’s seat, looked at the instrument panel, then checked the fuel and the weather scanner.

“Storm is three miles out. Headed this way.”

Alice peered out the window. She could see it coming in, a billowing wall of snow approaching in the distance, down the beach, across the plateau up above, and whipping up the waves on the sea.

Leon put the vehicle in drive, and headed it down the beach, where the peninsula jutted out into the pack ice. Luther groaned every time they hit a bump— and Alice didn’t feel so good herself. Her adrenaline was wearing off and she was dizzy again.

Leon glanced at her in the mirror, guessed what was on her mind.

“There’s emergency supplies in that locker right in front of you.” She opened it and found a medical kit, as well as cans of quick-consume food. In the Arctic, where the body labored to survive in plunging temperatures, food
was
emergency supplies—consuming calories, carbs and glucose at the right moment could spell the difference between life and death.

Against his protestations, she removed Luther’s parka and shirt. As the steadily warming Spryte trundled along, Alice sprayed antiseptic on his bullet wound, confirmed that the bullet had gone all the way through, and dressed it. Becky watched the procedure with big eyed fascination.

“Looks like a cracked bone,” Alice observed. “Must hurt like a broken heart.”

He chuckled.

“Worse.”

She put a med patch on his shoulder, seeping painkiller in through his skin.

“There. That should help without putting you to sleep.”

“What about you?” he asked. “I saw you limping.”

She nodded. No use pretending anymore. She lifted her shirt and peeled away the cloth stuck to her side. Becky gasped with alarm. Alice sprayed it with cleanser and antiseptic, and a styptic blood clotter. Then she put surgical glue over it, and a dressing.

She gave herself a pain pad, too—not as strong as the one she’d given Luther. She liked to keep her head clear. Just in case.

Then it was time for the food.

“Instant heat cans in there,” Luther said. “Great invention.”

Alice looked at Becky, then pointed to the food and repeated his words to her in sign.

“What’s that?” the girl asked in her uneven voice, unconsciously signing the words at the same time.

“You try it,” Alice signed. She handed her the can and signed, “Just open it the top, and that’ll start a chemical reaction in the sides. That’ll heat it up really fast. Then when it bulges up… right, just like that. Now pull off that cellophane stuff, and there it is, hot stew! That one’s yours. Here’s a spoon.”

“She cooking for me, too?” Leon asked. He turned around enough to point inquiringly at the food and then himself, to get his question across to the little girl.

“Yes!” Becky said, making an effort to speak out loud. It was a bit hard to understand her, but Alice made out, “You can have this first one!” She seemed to be enjoying it, like a little girl at a tea party.

She handed the heated can up to Leon, he shook his head at the spoon and drank it with one hand, like coffee from a cup.

Before she gave Luther his food, Alice added powder from a packet marked “blood loss,” then dropped the same mixture of vitamins and minerals into hers. She began to feel better within a couple of minutes. Sleepy, but better.

Becky and Luther dozed as the storm threatened to catch them, and the growing wind battered at the vehicle. The girl sometimes opened her eyes, stared out at the bleak landscape, and shook her head, as if vaguely disappointed.

Leon turned the snowcat to follow the peninsula out onto the frozen sea. On they trundled, in the shadow of the peninsula, and eventually he drove out away from the land entirely, keeping to the places where the pack ice seemed thickest. He caught her looking at him questioningly in the mirror.

“The choppers will meet us on the pack ice,” he explained. “We rendezvous in an hour. So just sit back and relax.”

Alice was feeling better, stronger, but a certain disorientation had set in, a flat feeling after the adrenaline rush of the last few hours. Becky was slumped against her shoulder, snoring softly. The kid was simply exhausted. She twitched in her sleep, and moaned. Her hands signed, unreadably, as she slept. Alice thought she saw the sign for
sisters.
And one for
glass.

She must be dreaming about the clones,
she mused,
the ones in the vats.
That was a damned hard thing to process. Alice had seen the same thing herself, at another Umbrella facility. She’d liberated hundreds of copies of herself—hundreds of Alices—and later on she’d seen them die. She’d fought beside copies of herself and watched them get shot down. She hadn’t been able to help them, not really. And each dying clone looked exactly like her.

She still had nightmares about it, sometimes. And she was sure Becky was going to have nightmares about what she’d seen in the last couple of hours, maybe for years to come. If she lived that long.

Thinking about clones, and the Shibuya Scramble in Tokyo, remembering how she’d been sure she’d killed Wesker, Alice wondered.

What the hell is real, anyway?

She bent her head to look out the window, trying to see the sky. She could see the broken clouds flashing past, driven by the stormy wind, in a hurry to get somewhere. The dull sunlight came angling through from time to time, stabbing down, cutting off as the clouds raced over, then stabbing down again.

Sure
looked
real.

“Are you okay?” Luther asked her. He was staring at her, a worried look on his face.

Alice nodded.

“What are you looking at?” he asked.

“The sky.” She hesitated. “The real world.”

He smiled wanly.

“You had doubts?”

“Just checking.”

They churned out away from the peninsula—and further onto the ice as the weather congealed around them.

“We’re sure this ice is… is thick enough, here, Leon?” Luther asked.

Leon glanced back at him with that a look of irritation, then he seemed to reconsider—maybe thinking about all they’d been through together—and nodded.

“It’s thick enough, bro. Trust me.”

Alice thought she could hear the ice groaning under the weight of the Spryte. She thought about global warming, and she wondered if Leon wasn’t a little too confident.

The storm really hit them then, hundred-mile-an-hour winds buffeting the windows, making the metal frame of the vehicle creak, blowing snow around them, whining and sighing. outside, it was a total whiteout. The blizzard darkened the world as it at last completely swallowed the vehicle.

Alice expected Leon to slow the vehicle—but he kept right on at the same steady speed.

“Better hit the lights,” Luther said.

Leon nodded, and flipped a switch.

Alice glanced at Luther, and thought he was swaying a little in his seat. He’d lost more blood than she had, she guessed, and he might have the start of an infection. The treatment she’d given him would help—but he needed hospitalization.

Something which really didn’t exist anymore…

She was feeling better, but still wasn’t up to snuff herself. Her hands looked pale and they trembled when she lifted them off her knees. Alerted by the movement, Luther glanced at her.

“Are you okay?”

“Better than you.” She patted his good arm. He really did look sickly.
Bullets will do that to you.
Then she put her arms around Becky, and the child snuggled against her. She laid her head against the child’s hair, taking comfort in its simple homey smell of her.

Are you my Mama?

I am now.

She hoped she could live up to it.

Alice closed her eyes, and slipped into an uneasy sleep.

The dream started more or less benignly—it was based in genuine memories.

Alice was reliving a night at an award ceremony, where she was expected to accept one of the employee appreciation plaques the Umbrella Corporation had given out, back in the days when the company was still just another major multinational.

Back before the scarabs were invented.

Mind control was so much easier than old-school human resources. Mind-controlled employees never asked for raises, never started unions. The scarabs were the perfect tool for corporate human resources.

She had received two such plaques for her work in security. To get this latest honor, she’d protected the lab from something she’d been told was a “terrorist break-in.” Alerted by the security computers, she’d shot all three of the criminal commandos who’d broken into the lab. That was a year before the Hive was opened. The incident had led to her becoming Head of Security.

Right before things fell apart, she’d realized that the “terrorist commandos” she’d shot had been activists trying to confirm rumors that the company was secretly experimenting on human beings—homeless people taken by force, prisoners requisitioned from privatized prisons. The experiments often killed the subject… or did something to them that was worse than death.

Alice had accepted the company’s plaque partly because of her “husband,” Spence Parks. Spence had been in charge of protecting the entrance to the Hive from snoopers and investigators… and they’d pretended to be the rich couple living in the mansion. And yes, there’d been some romantic connection between them, there—or maybe just a sexual one. He’s been an evil son of a bitch, but the guy had been good in bed.

She’d accepted the plaque, and up to that point the dream was fairly accurate. But then, as she turned, Alice glanced at the audience and saw a man in a tuxedo. He started convulsing, spitting up red foam, and falling… only to jump to his feet and sink his jaws into the face of a woman in an elegant dress, shaking his head like a pit bull with a grip, hard from side to side, to rip her face off her skull. The woman screamed and died, and then almost instantly jumped up and started chasing other members of the screaming audience.

A little girl who was clutching her mother screamed as a fat Undead tore the woman’s throat out. The little girl ran in abject terror toward the stage, but then she turned into Becky, and Alice was trying to help her climb onto the stage as an Undead clutched at the little girl’s ankles, chewed off one of her shoes.

Alice grabbed the screaming child and the two of them ran offstage, into the wings, past ropes that were supposed to control the curtains. They became hangman’s nooses that turned into living, predatory things, one tightening around Spence’s neck, lifting him off his feet, choking him. His kicking feet were out of reach.

I can’t help him,
Alice thought.

Holding Becky’s hand, she ran under his twitching feet, toward an exit door. Then Alice heard evil laughter, very close by—she looked down at the plaque and saw a face on it, the brass relief image of Oswald Spencer.

The brass face tittered evilly and jeered.

“You made it all possible, Alice! People like you! All the people who did what we told them, who looked the other way when they knew that the sickness was taking hold! You protected the T-virus, Alice—and you protected Umbrella’s madness.

“Thank you! We honor you with this award!”

She threw the plaque away, and it spun in slow motion, laughing, to shatter on the exit door…

…which swung open, on its own, to reveal a burning world, a world of smoke and fire, a world of crashing planes, of exploding skyscrapers, of bloody-faced living dead men staggering about.

And Becky screamed.

“No, don’t take me out there,” she cried. “Don’t take me outside of Umbrella Prime!”

“…Going to be a shock for that little girl, being outside Umbrella Prime,” Luther said as Alice woke from the nightmare. He was talking to Leon as the Spryte drove out onto the creaking ice of the frozen sea.