"Ada, wake up! Ada!"
Nothing. He lowered her gently to the floor, then pulled at the bloody hole in her dress, just above her hip. Blood was welling up from two deep punctures; there was no way to tell how bad, and he ripped at the fabric, tearing off" the bottom few inches of her short dress and pressing the wadded material against the wound…… and again the monster screamed, and the rage in its throaty howl was nothing to what Leon was feeling, staring down at Ada's still and closed face. He stretched her tight dress over the makeshift bandage, fixing it in place as best he could, then stood up and unstrapped the Remington.
Ada had taken care of him, had protected him when he couldn't protect himself. Leon loaded the shotgun grimly, feeling no pain at all as he prepared to return the favor.
When they reached what looked like the end of the line, it was Sherry who figured out where her mother must have gone. They'd walked into yet another open, shadowy room, but it only had the one door; there seemed to be no other way out of the cavernous chamber, unless Annette had jumped off the raised floor and trekked off through the unlit emptiness that surrounded them. They stood at the edge of the darkness, trying to see down into the shadows and having no luck. The room was set up almost like a loading dock: a railed platform ran from the door along the back wall, then ended abruptly, giving way to a seemingly endless void. Either Annette had climbed down and navi– gated some secret path through the dark, or Claire had been mistaken about which way she'd gone.
So what now? Go back, or try to follow?
She didn't want to do either one – although going back pretty much beat the crap out of the idea of walking into a pitch-black abyss. And Leon was probably still back there somewhere…
"Could it be a train? Is this like a train station?"
Sherry asked, and as soon as she said "train," Claire gave herself a solid mental kick in the ass. Platform, railings, about a thousand overhead "pipes."… Claire grinned at Sherry, shaking her head at her own stupidity; she was getting flaky, no doubt about it. "Yeah, I think it is," she said, "though you guessed it, not me. My brain must be on strike…"
The small computer console on one side of the platform, the one she'd dismissed as unimportant, was probably the control board. Claire headed for it, Sherry following along and clutching absently at her gold locket as she described the noises she'd heard, down in the drainage well.
"… and it was moving away, like a train would. It scared me pretty bad, too. It was loud."
Sure enough, just beneath the small monitor screen on the standing console was a recall command code and a ten-key. Claire tapped in the code and hit "enter" – and the chamber was filled with the smooth hum of working machinery: the sound of a train. "You're one smart cookie, you know that?" Claire said, and Sherry practically beamed, her entire face crinkling with her sweet smile. Claire wrapped an arm around her shoulders and they walked back to the edge of the platform to wait. 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…