The tram’s light appeared after a few seconds, the tiny circle of brightness getting bigger as they watched. After the trials they’d been through, Claire decided to be as fantastically optimistic about this new development as she could—primarily to keep from worrying about what horrible thing would prob-ably happen next. The train would lead out of the city, of course, and it would be well-stocked with food and water; it’d have showers and fresh, warm clothes—
• nah, scratch that. A hot tub, and a couple of those thick terry robes, for after. And slippers. Nice, but she’d settle for anything that didn’t in-clude monsters or crazy people. She glanced at Sher-ry, and noticed that she was still rubbing her locket. “So what’s in there?” she asked, wanting to make Sherry smile again. “You got a picture of your boy-friend, or what?”
“Inside? Oh, it’s not a locket,” Sherry said, and Claire was pleased to see a faint blush rise in her cheeks. “My mom gave it to me, it’s a good-luck charm—and I don’t have a boyfriend. Boys my age are totally immature.”
Claire grinned. “Get used to it, sweetie. As far as I can tell, some of them never grow out of it.” The train was close enough now for them to see its shape, a single car about twenty or twenty-five feet long riding smoothly along its overhead track. “Where do you think it goes?” Sherry asked, and before Claire could answer, the door to the platform exploded.
The hatch blew inward, torn off its hinges in a squeal of metal and clanging to the floor—
• and Claire grabbed Sherry, pulling her close as the towering Mr. X stepped into the room, bending low and sideways to squeeze through the opening, his soulless gaze turning toward them at once. “Get behind me!” Claire shouted, pulling Irons’s handgun, risking a glance back at the approaching train. Ten seconds, they needed ten seconds—
• but X took a giant step toward them, and she knew they didn’t have them. His bland, terrible face, expressionless, his giant hands already rising, still twenty feet away but only four steps in his massive stride—
“Get on the train when it stops!” Claire screamed, and pulled the trigger.
Four, five, six shots, beating into his chest. The seventh hit one dead-white cheek, but Mr. X didn’t blink, didn’t bleed—and didn’t stop. Another mighty step, the black, smoking pit in his face a testament to his inhumanity. Claire lowered her aim, legs, knees—
Bam-bam-bam!
• and he paused as the rounds smashed into him, at least one a direct hit to his left knee, the black eyes fixed on her, marking her—
“—here, come on!”
Sherry was pulling at her vest, screaming, and Claire backed away, squeezing the trigger again. Two more rounds hit him in the gut—
• and then she was on the train, and Sherry had found the control for the door. It whooshed shut, Mr. X framed in the tiny window, not coming forward anymore but still not falling. Not dying. “Follow me!” Claire shouted, spotting the board of blinking lights to her right, knowing that the door wouldn’t hold for a second if the giant, terrible creature started walking again.
She ran for the control board with Sherry at her side, thanking God that the designer had been user-friendly as the red “go” button snapped down be-neath her shaking hand—
• and the train was moving, sliding away from the platform, away from the indestructible un-man and into the black.
Annette sat in the staff bunk room on level four, waiting for the mainframe to respond to the power-up and debating whether or not to initiate the P-Epsilon sequence. Once the fail-safe system was triggered, all of the connecting corridor doors would unlock, and those doors that were electronically powered would open. The creatures that had been trapped these last days would be free to roam, and most of them would be hungry ...
... hungry and hot, bleeding pure virus from their clotted flesh ...
She didn’t want to run into any—unpleasantness upon her departure, but as the first lines of code spilled across the screen, she decided against running the sequence. The P-Epsilon gas was an experiment anyway, something a couple of the microbiologist techs had worked up to appease the Umbrella damage-control staff. If it worked, it would knock out the Re3s and all of the human carriers that had been infected by the initial airborne—the first wave—en-suring her a safer trip to the escape transport tunnel; but the spies were coming, and Annette didn’t want to make things easy for them. She’d heard the lift being recalled as she’d stumbled her way to the synthesis lab—which was fine, great, they’d be just in time for the finale, and she wanted them fighting for their lives as she sped away from the facility, away from the brilliant explosion that would consume the multibillion-dollar facility...
... and it’ll burn, it’ll all burn and I’ll be free of this nightmare. Endgame and I win. Umbrella loses, once and for all, the sneaking, murdering animal bas-tards—
She felt good, awake and aware and in very little pain; she’d meant to go straight to the nearest com-puter outlet upon her return to activate the fail-safe even before collecting the sample, but she’d barely been able to see straight as she’d stumbled off the lift; she’d been afraid of forgetting something—or worse, of falling and being unable to get up again. A trip to the meds locker in the synthesis lab had fixed all that; already, the terrible pain was a distant memory, along with the bizarre, deluded thought processes that had made it so hard to concentrate. When her little cocktail shot wore off, she’d pay for the temporary reprieve, but for the next couple of hours, at least, she was as good—she was better—than new.
Epinephrine, endorphin, amphetamine, oh my! Annette knew she was high, that she shouldn’t overestimate her abilities, but why shouldn’t she feel happy? She grinned at the small computer in front of her and started to tap in the codes, her fingers flying over the keys, feeling like her teeth would crack as the synthetic adrenaline pounded through her dilated veins. She’d made it back to the lab, William had come back, and the sample, the very last viable G-Virus sample in the facility, was tucked into her pocket. She’d hidden it in one of the fuse cases before she’d gone looking for William, and picked it up on the way to the staff room—
• 76E, 43L, 17A, fail-safe time... 20, vocal warning/power cut, 10, personal authorization, OOOlBirkin—
• and that was it. Annette couldn’t stop grinning, didn’t want to stop as she lightly stroked the “entef’ key, the triumph a hot and liquid joy spinning through her numb and tattered flesh. One touch, and there was nothing on earth that could stop it. In ten minutes, the taped warnings would start to run, and the transport lift would shut down, cutting the facility off from the surface; in fifteen, the audio would begin the countdown—five minutes to reach the minimum safe distance by train, another five and—
Boom. Twenty minutes before the explosion. More than enough time to get to the tunnel and power up the train, no matter what is loosed; enough time to speed away from the ticking dock, beneath the city streets, through the isolated foothills at the outskirts of Rac-coon. Enough time to get to the end of the track, walk out into the private plot of land, turn around—and see Umbrella lose it all.
As the clock ticked to zero, the plastique fail-safe charges in the laboratory’s central power core would be activated. Even if all but one of the twelve explo-sive packets failed, that one blast would be enough to set off the secondary charges that were built into the walls themselves; Umbrella’s fail-safe system had been designed to take it all down. The lab would become an inferno, blasting up into the dead city, visible for miles—and she’d be there to see it, to know that she’d done what she could to make things right.