—and then it collapsed, dead before it hit the ground, before its outer layer of skin began to curl away, revealing the cooking meat of its innards.
Jill staggered to her feet, left hand pressed to her
throbbing shoulder as she backed away from the frying worm, the smell of it making her gag repeatedly. She'd actually done it, she'd killed the goddamn thing! A warm swell of triumphant victory surged through her as she breathed in another wave of roasting worm smell, 7 did it, and then she bent over and vomited her guts out.
When there was nothing left to purge, Jill shakily stood up and started walking east again, thinking about her confrontation with Nicholai. He wasn't as good a liar as he thought, and if she'd had only suspicions before, she was now certain that he was extremely bad news.
Her plans hadn't changed, but she was going to have to be very careful when she got to the water treatment plant. Nicholai was going to be there, she had no doubt... and if he saw her first, she'd be dead before she knew what hit her.
The roadblock was a massive pileup of cars that had actually been stacked three and four high, stretched between several buildings at the end of a block in a rough semicircle. Carlos could still see the crisscross of greasy treadmarks from whatever piece of heavy machinery had managed the feat, just as he'd spotted them on the last three streets he'd tried. Umbrella and the RPD hadn't
He stood in front of the stacked, partly crushed metal wall, experiencing an almost desperate indecision. Go back, try heading north first, then east—or try climbing over one of the precarious barricades, which seemed to have been specifically set up to deter him from finding Jill.
That's what it feels like, anyway.All that was north of the clock tower was a big park, but maybe thatwas the only way to get to the Umbrella facility; he couldn't imagine Jill scaling a wall of cars with a bad shoulder, and crawling through them was too dangerous ...
...but you're assuming she even made it this far, a nagging little voice whisperedMaybe she's already dead, maybe the Nemesis came for her, orNicholai, or —
Carlos cocked his head to one side, frowning, his thoughts disturbed by a distant sound. Shots? Possibly, but the light mist that was falling was having a dampening effect, distorting and muffling noises. He couldn't even be sure from which direction the sound had come ... but he was suddenly even more frantic to find Jill than before.
"After all I went through to get that vaccine, you better not get yourself killed," he murmured lightly, but it was too close to the truth to be funny. He had to do something, now.
Carlos stared at the wall of cars for another moment, picking what appeared to be the most stable route, over a minivan and two compact cars. He took as deep a breath as he was able to manage, mentally crossed his fingers, and started to climb.
TWENTY-FIVE
"NO, LISTEN, YOU GOTTA LISTEN—I DON'T know anything, you don't want to do this. They've had me doing reports on water and soil samples, that's it,
I'm no threat to you! I swear!"
Foster was working himself into a froth, and Nicholai decided that making a man wait for his death, particularly such a sad little man, was cruel. The researcher was already cowering in the corner, pressed against the door in the northeast comer of his office, his pinched, ratty features flushed and sweaty. It had taken Nicholai less than
five minutes to find him once he'd reached the facility.
"... and I'll just leave, okay?" Foster was still babbling. "I'll be gone and you'll never hear from me again, swear to God, why do you want to killme, I'm nobody. Tell me what you want and I'll do it, whatever it is, talk to me, man, okay? Let's just talk, okay?"
Nicholai suddenly realized that he was just staring at Foster, as if he'd been lulled into a trance by the rise and fall of the man's hysteria. It had been an endless day in a series of them... but as much as he wanted to get out, to be done with the entire operation, Nicholai felt oddly compelled to say something.
"There's nothing personal in this, I'm sure you understand," Nicholai said. "It's about money... or it was at the beginning, but things are different now."
Foster nodded quickly, eyes wide. "Yeah, sure they are, different."
Now that he'd started, Nicholai found he couldn't stop. It suddenly seemed important for someone else to understand what he'd gone through, what he was still up against—even if it was only someone like Foster.
"The money is still most of it, of course. But after I got here, after Wersbowski, I started to feel like I had come to a very special place. I felt... I felt that things were finally becoming the way they were supposed to be. The way my life should have been all along. Extreme circumstances, you see?"
Foster bobbed his head again but wisely said nothing.
"But then Carlos tricked me; he couldn't have died in the explosion, because Jill received the antidote. And I'm starting to think thatshe's the cause, that things changed because of her." As he spoke, he sensed the truth of it, as though a light was dawning in his mind's eye. It was true, talking helped.
"Even at the beginning, she ruined the setup I had with Carlos and Mikhail. Manipulative, controlling woman, there are a lot of them like that. She probably slept with both of them, too. Seduced them."
"Bitches, all of 'em," Foster sincerely agreed.
"Then she got sick and sent Carlos to steal the vac-
cine. I'm not excusing his part in all of this, not at all, but there's something about her... it's like her presence alters things, makes everything wrong somehow. I don't even think she's dead now. If a seeker can't kill her, a mutant certainly can't."
Nicholai stood silently, lost in thought for a moment.
He'd never been a superstitious man, but things really were different. Jill Valentine was—
—a woman, she's just a woman and you 're not thinking clearly, haven't been for days—
Nicholai blinked, and the thought was gone, and Foster was still in the corner, watching him with an expression of cautious terror. As though he thought Nicholai was crazy. Nicholai felt a rush of hatred for the little man, for trying to trick him, telling him to talk and then judging him for it. He deserved to die, as much as any of them.
"I'm not crazy," Nicholai shouted angrily, "and I'm done talking about this! You're the last one, after you it's over and that's just the way things are, sobe a man and accept it! "
Three rounds, a burst oftat tat tat through one of Terence Foster's pleading green eyes, and the researcher's head snapped back, blood splashing the door he leaned against, his body collapsing lifeless to the cold floor.
Nicholai felt nothing. The last Watchdog, dead, and there was no sense of accomplishment, no feeling of conquest. Just another corpse on the floor in front of him and a deeply felt desire to get out of Raccoon, where things had gone so sour.
Nicholai shook his head, his heart heavy, and started to search the office for Foster's data.
Jill stood in front of the narrow bridge that connected Memorial Park's back gate to the second floor of the Umbrella facility, suspended over what had to be a marsh or swamp, from the gassy-mud smell. It was too dark to tell by looking, but the odor was unmistakable—and so were the fresh bootprints that led from where she stood to the door on the opposite side. As she'd expected, Nicholai was here.