City Of The Dead Read online

Chapter Sixteen

 

  Annette birkin sat in the laboratory monitor room, exhausted, staring up at the wall of video screens centered over the surveillance console. She'd been there for what felt like years, waiting for William to appear, and was starting to think that he never would. She'd give it a little longer, but if she didn't see him soon, she'd have to do another search.

  Goddamn technology. . .

  It was a brand-new system, less than a month old -

  - twenty-five screens with a channel control that should have allowed her to see any and every part of the facility. A brilliant security advance - except only eleven of the screens still worked at all, and over half of those would only show static, an endless dance of electric snow. Of the five she could still get a clear picture from, all she could see - all there was to see -

  -were dead, rotting bodies and the occasional Re3, either feasting or sleeping. . .

  "Lickers. You called them lickers, because of their tongues. . . "

  She thought she'd been past the worst of the pain, but the lonely sound of her own voice in the cold, cavernous chamber and the realization that there would be no answer - that there would never be an answer again - brought on a fresh, knifing wave of grief. William was gone, he was gone and she was talking to no one at all. Annette lowered her head to the console, closing her weary eyes. At least there were no more tears; she'd wept an ocean of them in the days since Um- brella had come for the G-Virus, but was simply too spent to cry anymore. Now there was only pain, interspersed with fits of violent, helpless fury over what Umbrella had done.

  Another month, maybe two, and we would have given it to them. We would have turned it over without a fight, and William would have made the executive board and we would have been happy. Everyone would have been happy. . .

  There was a faint squealing from one of the muted security screens. Annette looked up, hoping and dreading at once, but it was just a licker, one floor up in the surgical bay. It had dropped from its ceiling roost to snack on one of the techs, howling stupidly to itself as it ripped into the corpse's guts. The dead man looked like Don Weller, one of the chemical plant go- betweens, but she couldn't tell for certain; he was almost as mutilated and inhuman looking as the Re3 that was eating him. She watched the licker feed, watched the small screen but didn't really see; her mind wandered, running over what was left for her to do. She'd already wiped all of the computers and locked in the countdown codes; the lab was ready, and her escape route was secured. But she couldn't finish things until she saw him again, saw that he was back in the Umbrella facility. Destroying the lab wouldn't solve anything if he wasn't in the blast zone; they would find him, and extract the virus from his blood. . .

  . . . and Umbrella won't have it. I'll die before I let them have it, so help me God.

  Her only consolation in all of this mad, horrible affair was that Umbrella hadn't managed to get their greedy hands on William's synthesis. They hadn't and they never would. Everything that had gone into the creation of the G-Virus would be buried under a thousand burning tons of stone and wood, along with William and all of the monsters they had created for the company. She would go into hiding for a while, take some time to heal, to consider her options and then she would sell the G-Virus to the competition. Umbrella was the biggest, but they weren't the only conglomerate working on bioweapons research and when she was through with them, they wouldn't be the biggest anymore. It wasn't much of a revenge, but it was all she had left. "Except for Sherry," Annette whispered, and the thought of their young daughter made her heart ache, a different pain but pain nonetheless. Since the day Sherry had been born, Annette had meant to spend more time with her, to focus on the child instead of on her part in William's brilliant work. And yet some- how the years had slipped by, William's promotions had kept coming up, the work had grown ever more interesting and valuable and although both she and William had made promises to themselves and each other that they would make more of an effort to develop their family life, they had continued to put it off.

  And now it's too late. We'll never be a family, we'll never be parents together. All that time wasted, slaving for a company that sold us out in the end. . .

  It was too late; there was no point in mourning what could have been. All she could do now was make sure that Umbrella wouldn't get anything else from the Birkin family. William was gone, but there was still Sherry; that part of him would go on, and Annette meant to finally become the mother she should have been all along. Of course she'd have to wait until things cooled down before she could collect Sherry, at least a few months, but the girl would be safe; the cops would send her to live with William's sister, it was in both of their wills. . .

  . . . unless Irons is still alive. That fat, greedy bas-tard could find a way to screw even that up if given half a chance.

  She hoped he was dead; even if he wasn't directly responsible for Umbrella's awareness of the G-Virus, Brian Irons was a disgusting, arrogant man with the morals of a sea slug. After years of loyalty to the company, he'd been bought out for a measly hundred thousand dollars. Even William had been surprised, and he'd had an even lower opinion of the police chief than she had. . . On the screen, the Re3 had finished its meal. All that was left of the dead man was an empty shell, arched, bloody ribs, and a faceless cup of skull, the surely vibrant colors lost to the video's flat shades of gray. The licker scrabbled out of view, trailing sticky fluids in its wake. Thanks to the T-Virus, all of the reptile series were efficient killers, although the 3s had design flaws - the protruding cerebrum was the most obvious, but they also had a ridiculously high meta- bolic rate; keeping them fed had been a constant hassle.

  Not a problem anymore. Plenty of canton to go around - and lucky them, they'II get a chance for a hot dinner soon enough. . .

  Annette felt drained of energy, and didn't want to go back out into the facility - but she couldn't just keep hoping that William would happen by one of the working cameras. She'd heard him up on level three, perhaps two days before, but hadn't seen him in almost twice as long; she couldn't keep waiting. Umbrella's people were probably already working on a way in - even with the mainframe wiped, there were other ways to get past the doors. . .

  . . . and William may have found a way out. I can't keep denying it, no matter how much I want to. There was an abandoned factory west of the lab, a shipping company that had been bought up by Um-brella to ensure that the underground levels would stay secret; it was how Umbrella had managed to build the complex in the first place without arousing suspicion, hiding equipment and materials in the factory's warehouses and using the heavy machinery lift to transport them. Although the entrances from the factory had still been sealed off the last time she'd checked, there was a slim chance that William had gotten through - and if he could get to the factory, he could get into the sewers.

  Annette forced herself to stand up, ignoring the cramps in her legs and back as she picked up the handgun on the console. She didn't know much about guns, although she'd figured out how to use one quickly enough, after. . .

  . . . after they came for the G-Virus, the men in the gas masks, shooting and running and William, poor William dying in a puddle of blood and I didn 't see the syringe until it was too late. . .

  She took a deep, shuddering breath, trying to push that terrible memory aside, trying to forget about the incident that had taken William from her and turned Raccoon into a city of the dead. It didn't matter anymore. The journey ahead wouldn't be a pleasant one, and she had to concentrate. Escaped Re3s, first-and second-stage infected humans, the botany experi- ments, the arachnid series - she could run into any of the T-Virus carriers, not to mention whomever Um- brella had managed to send.

  And William. My husband, my beloved - the first human G-Virus carrier, who isn't really human any-more.

  She'd been wrong to think that she had no more tears inside. Annette stood in the middle of the vast, sterile room five floors beneath t
he surface of Rac- coon and wept lost, racking sobs that didn't even begin to touch the pain of her loneliness. Umbrella would be sorry. Once she could be sure that William was beyond their reach, she was going to destroy their precious facility, she was going to take the G-Virus and run, she was going to make sure that they understood how badly they'd screwed up - and God help anyone who tried to stop her.