Ada started to shake all over. “G-Virus? Please, I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“You know,” Annette snarled. “Umbrella sent you to steal it, you can’t lie to me! William’s dead to me now, Umbrella took him from me, they forced him to use it! They forced him. ... ”
She trailed off, her gaze suddenly far away. Ada tensed—but then Annette was back, her eyes welling up with tears, the weapon pointed at Ada’s face. “A week ago, they came,” she whispered. “They came to take it, and they shot my William when he wouldn’t give them the samples. They took the case, they took all of the finals, both series—except for the one that he managed to keep, the G-Virus ...” Annette’s voice raised into a shout suddenly, a pathetic and somehow pleading shout. “He was dy-ing, don’t you see? He didn’t have any choice!” Ada understood. She understood all of it. “He injected himself, didn’t he?”
The scientist nodded, her limp blond hair falling across her eyes, her voice a whisper again. “It revi-talizes cellular function. It—it changed him. I didn’t see—what he did, but I saw the bodies of the men who tried to kill him, afterwards ... and I heard the screams.”
Ada took a step closer, reaching out as if to comfort her, her own features set into a mask of sympathy—but Annette thrust the gun at her again. Even in her sorrow, she wasn’t going to let Ada get any closer. But it’s almost close enough....
“I’m so sorry,” Ada said, lowering her arms. “So the G-Virus, it leaked, it changed all of Raccoon—“ Annette shook her head. “No. When the Umbrella assassins were—stopped, the case was broken. The T-Virus leaked—the lab workers hit by the airborne were contained, but there were rats, you see. Rats in the sewers....”
She paused, her lips trembling. “... unless Wil-liam, my sweet William has started to reproduce. Implanting embryos, replicating ... it shouldn’t be time for that yet, but I—“ She broke off, her eyes
narrowing, the madness sweeping over her again as visibly as a crashing wave. High color flared in her pale cheeks, her red-rimmed eyes glossy with paranoia.
Get ready—
“You can’t have it!” Annette screamed, spittle flying from her cracked lips. “He gave his life to keep it from you, you’re a spy and you can’t have it—“ Ada ducked and leapt, pistoning both of her arms beneath Annette’s, shoving the gun up and away from both of them. The Browning discharged, sending a round clanging off the ceiling as they fought for control of the weapon. Annette was physically weaker, but she was driven by demons of hatred and loss, the edge of insanity lending her strength—
• but no sense—
Ada let go of the gun suddenly and Annette stum-bled, not prepared for the unexpected move. She crashed against the railing of the bridge and Ada charged, driving her elbow into Annette’s lower belly, hitting her beneath her center of balance—
• and Annette half-turned, her mouth an open darkness of surprise, her arms pinwheeling for bal-ance—and she plummeted over the railing, silently, not a sound until the dull thump as her body hit the floor some twenty feet below.
“Shit, “Ada hissed, stepping to the rail and looking down. She lay there, facedown and motionless, the gun still clenched in one thin white hand. That’s just great. Walk into an ambush, not once but twice for hell’s sake, then kill the one crazy bitch who can tell you where the samples are—
A low moan floated up from Annette Birkin’s body—and she moved, hunching her back, trying to roll onto her side.
Shit shit shit!
Ada turned and ran across the bridge, scooping up the Beretta as she hurried for what looked like a control panel next to the fan shaft ladder. She’d have to lower the bridge, get to Annette before she could crawl away—
• except the panel was for the fan, and as another painful moan—a slightly louder moan—echoed up through the chamber, Ada knew she didn’t have much time.
The dump, I can go through the dump, circle back around through one of the tunnels—
Even as she thought it, she was jogging for the west ladder, hoping that the pitiful scientist was injured enough to stay down for a minute or two. There was a small balcony at the end of the bridge that looked over the dump, and the metal ladder hung down from an opening at the far right. Ada lowered herself down as quickly as she could, dropping the last several feet onto a cement landing.
The dumping area was a large boxy room, the walls heaped with industrial debris—smashed crates, rust-ing pipes, wire-encrusted panels, and rotting card-board. She stepped off the landing and into almost three feet of black sludge, the cold, gooey muck rising up to her thighs. She didn’t care, she only wanted to get to the lady Birkin, to bring an end to her time in Raccoon—
• except something moved. Beneath the opaque and stinking liquid, something big moved. Ada saw what might have been a reptilian spine slice through the murk in front of her, saw and heard a stack of
boards topple into the water some ten feet away in the same instant.
You gotta be kidding me. . . .
Whatever it was, it was big enough to change her mind about the hurry she was in to get to Annette.
Ada backed to the platform and boosted herself up, never taking her gaze from the indeterminate shape as it curled back through the lapping sludge—
• and rose up in a sudden, violent spray of dark-ness, coming straight at her. Ada raised the Beretta and started to fire.
There was a tiny elevator platform in one corner of the empty conference room, a square of metal that apparently went down. Claire hurried toward it, fetid water dripping from her clothes, feeling horribly lost and anxious to keep moving, to find Sherry. Please be alive, baby, please....
She’d found the drainage hole, but no Sherry—and after agonizingly long moments of screaming into the rushing water, of trying to squeeze into the tiny hole, she’d forced herself to abandon the effort. Sherry was gone, maybe drowned, maybe not—but unless the flow of water suddenly decided to reverse itself, she wasn’t coming back.
Claire found the controls for the one-man lift and punched a button. A hidden motor whirred and the lift descended, inching down through the floor, proba-bly taking her to some other empty hall, some other blank and unknown room—or worse, directly into the path of yet another unnatural creature. She clenched her damp hands in frustration as the lift slid slowly down, wishing that it was faster, that there was some way to speed up her search. She felt like she was running blind, taking whatever path was in front of her; from the tunnel where Sherry had been lost, she’d found a dimly lit corridor and then the unadorned and somehow sterile conference room. It was like an endless funhouse—sans fun—and she was feeling pretty shitty for bringing Sherry into it; if the girl was dead, it would be her fault—
She shut down the futile thinking before it got any farther, making herself focus. Self-recrimination was a killer, and she couldn’t afford it. The elevator was lowering into a hall, and she crouched down, pointing Irons’s heavy gun in front of her as her new surround-ings rose into view.
The concrete corridor had another lift at the other end, and was intersected by a second hall, maybe forty feet away—and next to the junction there was a body propped against one cement wall, what looked like a cop—
She felt a mix of shock and distress, her eyes widening as she took in the cop’s slack features, the hair color, the build . . .
. . . that’s—Leon?
Before the lift hit the floor, Claire jumped off and ran toward the crumpled figure. It was Leon, and he wasn’t moving, either unconscious or dead—but no, he was breathing, and as she crouched in front of him, his eyes flickered open. His hand was high on his left arm, his fingers wet with blood.