Stupid grownup lies—
Claire leaned back, smoothing Sherry’s hair away from her face. “I don’t blame you for being scared. I’m scared, too. This is a bad situation—and hon-estly, I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I want to do the right thing by you, and that means that I’m not going to take you into a situation where you could get hurt, not if I can help it.”
Sherry swallowed back tears, trying again. “But I want to come with you . . . what if you don’t come back?”
“I’m going to come back,” Claire said firmly, “I promise. And if—if I don’t, I want you to hide again, like before. Somebody will come, help is going to come soon, and they’ll find you.”
At least she was being honest; Sherry didn’t like it, not at all, but at least there was that—and from the look on her face, Sherry could see that there was nothing she could say to change her mind. She could be a baby about it, or she could accept it. “Be careful,” she whispered, and Claire hugged her again before standing and moving toward the eleva-tor. She pushed a button next to the gate and there was a low, soft hum; after a few seconds an elevator car rose into view, coming to a gentle stop. Claire pulled
the gate open and stepped inside, turning for a last look at Sherry.
“Stay here, sweetie,” she said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Sherry forced herself to nod—and Claire let the gate close. She touched something inside the elevator and the car went down, her smiling, strong face descending out of sight, leaving Sherry by herself in the cold, dark passage.
Sherry sat down on the dusty floor and hugged her knees close to her body, rocking herself slowly. Claire was brave and smart, she’d be back soon, she had to come back soon. . . .
“I want my mommy,” Sherry whispered, but there was nobody to hear. She was alone again, the thing she wanted least of all.
But I’m strong. I’m strong, and I can wait. She rested her chin on one knee, touching the necklace her mother had given her for good luck, and started to wait for Claire to come back.
SixfEEn
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 3 s 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.