His trip to the station had been reasonably uneventful, except for the seven undead he'd dispatched point-blank to avoid too much noise; they were embarrassingly easy to kill, as long as one paid attention to one's surroundings. He hadn't yet come across any of Umbrella's pets, the only real challenge he expected to face; there was one nicknamed "brain sucker" that he was very much looking forward to meeting, a multi-legged crawler with killing claws ...
One thing at a time; right now, you need information.
He'd already committed the names and faces of his
victims to memory and had a general idea of where each one was supposed to make contact, if not necessarily when; all of the Watchdogs were on different schedules, subject to change but mostly accurate. Martin, for instance, was due to report to Umbrella from a computer terminal at the RPD building's front desk at 1750 hours, about twenty minutes from now; his last report should have been just after noon.
"Let's see if you succeeded, Officer Martin,"
Nicholai said, quickly punching in the codes he'd acquired to access Umbrella's updated progress reports. "Martin, Martin ... ah, there you are!"
The policeman had missed his last two assigned windows, suggesting that he'd been dead or incapacitated for at least nine hours now. No information to collect there. Nicholai carefully read the numbers on the other Watchdogs, pleased with what he saw. Of the eight Watchdogs left after Martin, three others had failed to make their last assigned reports—one of the scientists, one Umbrella worker, and the woman who worked for the city's water department. Assuming they were dead—and Nicholai was willing to bet that they were— that left only five.
Two soldiers, two scientists, and the other Umbrella man...
Nicholai frowned, looking at the designated contact points for each of them. One scientist, Janice Thomlm-son, would be in the underground laboratory facility, the other at the hospital near the city park; the Umbrella worker was to report in from an allegedly abandoned water treatment facility on the outskirts of town, a cover for its use as an Umbrella chemical testing site. Nicholai didn't foresee any problems finding them ... but both of the soldier Watchdogs had been taken off the map.
"Where are you going to be, men ...," Nicholai said absently, tapping at the keys, his frustration growing.
At his last check only the night before, they had both been assigned to call in from the St. Michael Clock Tower...
Shit!
There they were, their names listed next to his; both
men had been moved to portable status, just like him. They'd report in from Umbrella laptops or wherever was most convenient, and were only required to file once a day—which meant that they could be anywhere in Raccoon City, anywhere at all.
A seething haze of red enveloped him, tearing at him. Without thinking, Nicholai charged across the office and kicked Martin's body as hard as he could, once, twice, venting his rage, feeling a deep satisfaction at the wet sounds his boot made, the jerking movement of the body and the crunch of ribs giving way—
—and then it was over, and he was himself once again, still frustrated but in control. He exhaled sharply and moved back to the desk, ready to revise his plans. It was simply going to take longer to find them, that was all; it wasn't the end of the world. And perhaps they would fail to report in, conveniently dying just like Martin and the other three.
He could hope but wouldn't count on it. What he could count on was his own perseverance and skill. Umbrella wouldn't send in their pickup for nearly a week—the longest, they believed, that they could keep the disaster quiet—unless the Watchdogs called in with complete results, unlikely at best. With six days to find only five people, Nicholai was certain that he would be the only one left to pick up.
"I won't even need all six," Nicholai said, nodding firmly at Martin's sprawled, lumpy corpse. "Three days, I'm sure I can do it in three."
With that, Nicholai leaned forward and started to call up the maps he would need, happy again.
Jill hadn't been able to find any shells for the 12-gauge, but she took it anyway, aware that her ammo wouldn't last forever; itwould make a good club, and she might find shells for it later. She'd just about decided to try climbing over one of the western blockades when she saw something that changed her mind, something she had fervently hoped never to see again.
A Hunter. Like the ones at the estate, in the tunnels.
She'd stood on the fire escape outside of an uptown boutique, seen it in the street just past one of the vans that blocked the fire escape's alley. It didn't see her; she watched it lope by and out of sight, a little different
than the ones from before, but close enough—the same strangely graceful, malignant carriage, the heavy, curved talons, the dark mud green color. She held her breath, her stomach in knots, remembering ...
...hunchedover so that its impossibly long arms almost touched the stone floor of the tunnel, both its hands and feet tipped with thick, brutal claws. Tiny, light-colored eyes peering out at her from aflat reptilian skull, its tremendous, high-pitched screech echoing through the dark underground just before it sprang...
She'd killed it, but it had taken her fifteen 9mm rounds to do it, an entire magazine. Later, Barry had told her that he'd heard them referred to as Hunters, one of Umbrella's bio-organic weapons. There had been other kinds on the estate—feral, skinned-looking dogs; a kind of giant, flesh-eating plant that Chris and Rebecca had destroyed; spiders the size of small cattle; and the dark, mutant things with bladed hooks for
hands, the ones that hung from the ceiling of the estate's boiler room, skittering overhead like spined monkeys.
And the Tyrant, somehow the worst because you could see that it had been human once; before the surgeries, before the genetic tampering and the T-virus.
So it wasn't just the T-virus loose in Raccoon. As awful as the realization was, it wasn't exactly shocking; Umbrella had been messing around with some very dangerous stuff, breeding slaughtering, nightmare children like some aberrant God without preparing for the inevitable consequences; sometimes, nightmares didn't just go away.
Unless—unless they did this on purpose.
No. If they'd meant to destroy Raccoon City, they would have evacuated their own people ... wouldn't they?
It was a question that haunted her on her journey to the police station. Seeing the Hunter had made up her mind for her about what to do next; she simply had to have more ammo, and she knew there'd be some in the S.T.A.R.S. office,in the gun safe—9mm, probably shotgun shells, maybe even one of Barry's old revolvers.
The station wasn't too far away, at least. She stuck to the growing shadows, easily dodging the few zombies she passed; many of them had decayed too much to move any faster than a slow walk. One of the gates she had to pass through to get to the station had been heavily roped and knotted, the knots soaked with oil. She gave herself a mental kick for forgetting to bring a knife; lucky for her she'd picked up a
lighter at the Bar Jack, although she worried some about the smoke drawing attention to her position— until she got through the gate and saw the heap of burning debris farther ahead, just in front of Umbrella's medical sales offices. Damage left over from the riots, she guessed. She thought about stopping to put out the flames, but there didn't seem to be any danger of their spreading in the cement and brick alleyway.
So, here she was, standing at the gates to the RPD courtyard. The rioting had been bad here. Trashed cars, broken barricades, and orange emergency cones littered the street, though there were no bodies amidst the rubble. To her right, a fire hydrant spewed a fountain of hissing water into the air. The gentle sound of splashing water might even have been pleasant in another circumstance—a hot summer day, children laughing and playing. Knowing that no fireman or city worker would be coming to fix the gushing hydrant made her ache inside, and the thought of children ... it was too much; she blocked it out, determined not to let herself start thinking about things she couldn't fix. She had enough to worry about.