SIXTEEN
ANNETTE BIRKIN SAT IN THE LABORATORY
monitor room, exhausted, staring up at the wall of
video screens centered over the surveillance console.
She'd been there for what felt like years, waiting for
William to appear, and was starting to think that he
never would. She'd give it a little longer, but if she
didn't see him soon, she'd have to do another search.
Goddamn technology . . .
It was a brand-new system, less than a month old -
- twenty-five screens with a channel control that should
have allowed her to see any and every part of the
facility. A brilliant security advance - except only
eleven of the screens still worked at all, and over half
of those would only show static, an endless dance of
electric snow. Of the five she could still get a clear
picture from, all she could see - all there was to see -
- were dead, rotting bodies and the occasional Re3,
either feasting or sleeping. . .
"Lickers. You called them lickers, because of their
tongues..."
She thought she'd been past the worst of the pain,
but the lonely sound of her own voice in the cold,
cavernous chamber and the realization that there
would be no answer - that there would never be an
answer again - brought on a fresh, knifing wave of
grief. William was gone, he was gone and she was
talking to no one at all.
Annette lowered her head to the console, closing
her weary eyes. At least there were no more tears;
she'd wept an ocean of them in the days since Umbrella
had come for the G-Virus, but was simply too
spent to cry anymore. Now there was only pain,
interspersed with fits of violent, helpless fury over
what Umbrella had done.
Another month, maybe two, and we would have
given it to them. We would have turned it over without
a fight, and William would have made the executive
board and we would have been happy. Everyone would
have been happy. . .
There was a faint squealing from one of the muted
security screens. Annette looked up, hoping and
dreading at once, but it was just a licker, one floor
up in the surgical bay. It had dropped from its ceiling
roost to snack on one of the techs, howling stupidly to
itself as it ripped into the corpse's guts. The dead man
looked like Don Weller, one of the chemical plant gobetweens,
but she couldn't tell for certain; he was
almost as mutilated and inhuman looking as the Re3
that was eating him.
She watched the licker feed, watched the small
screen but didn't really see; her mind wandered,
running over what was left for her to do. She'd
already wiped all of the computers and locked in the
countdown codes; the lab was ready, and her escape
route was secured. But she couldn't finish things until
she saw him again, saw that he was back in the
Umbrella facility. Destroying the lab wouldn't solve
anything if he wasn't in the blast zone; they would
find him, and extract the virus from his blood . . .
. . . and Umbrella won't have it. I'll die before I let
them have it, so help me God.
Her only consolation in all of this mad, horrible
affair was that Umbrella hadn't managed to get their
greedy hands on William's synthesis. They hadn't and
they never would. Everything that had gone into the
creation of the G-Virus would be buried under a
thousand burning tons of stone and wood, along with
William and all of the monsters they had created for
the company. She would go into hiding for a while,
take some time to heal, to consider her options and
then she would sell the G-Virus to the competition.
Umbrella was the biggest, but they weren't the only
conglomerate working on bioweapons research and
when she was through with them, they wouldn't be
the biggest anymore. It wasn't much of a revenge, but
it was all she had left.
"Except for Sherry," Annette whispered, and the
thought of their young daughter made her heart ache,
a different pain but pain nonetheless. Since the day
Sherry had been born, Annette had meant to spend
more time with her, to focus on the child instead of on
her part in William's brilliant work. And yet somehow
the years had slipped by, William's promotions
had kept coming up, the work had grown ever more
interesting and valuable and although both she and
William had made promises to themselves and each
other that they would make more of an effort to
develop their family life, they had continued to put it
off.
And now it's too late. We'll never be a family, we'll
never be parents together. All that time wasted, slaving
for a company that sold us out in the end. . .
It was too late; there was no point in mourning
what could have been. All she could do now was make
sure that Umbrella wouldn't get anything else from
the Birkin family. William was gone, but there was
still Sherry; that part of him would go on, and
Annette meant to finally become the mother she
should have been all along. Of course she'd have to
wait until things cooled down before she could collect
Sherry, at least a few months, but the girl would be
safe; the cops would send her to live with William's
sister, it was in both of their wills . . .
. . . unless Irons is still alive. That fat, greedy bastard
could find a way to screw even that up if given half
a chance.
She hoped he was dead; even if he wasn't directly
responsible for Umbrella's awareness of the G-Virus,
Brian Irons was a disgusting, arrogant man with the
morals of a sea slug. After years of loyalty to the
company, he'd been bought out for a measly hundred
thousand dollars. Even William had been surprised,
and he'd had an even lower opinion of the police chief
than she had...
On the screen, the Re3 had finished its meal. All
that was left of the dead man was an empty shell,
arched, bloody ribs, and a faceless cup of skull, the
surely vibrant colors lost to the video's flat shades of
gray. The licker scrabbled out of view, trailing sticky
fluids in its wake. Thanks to the T-Virus, all of the
reptile series were efficient killers, although the 3s had
design flaws - the protruding cerebrum was the most
obvious, but they also had a ridiculously high metabolic
rate; keeping them fed had been a constant
hassle.
Not a problem anymore. Plenty of canton to go
around - and lucky them, they'II get a chance for a hot
dinner soon enough ...
Annette felt drained of energy, and didn't want to
go back out into the facility - but she couldn't just
keep hoping that William would happen by one of the
working cameras. She'd heard him up on level three,
perhaps two days before, but hadn't seen him in
almost twice as long; she couldn't keep waiting.
Umbrella's people were probably already working on
a way in - even with the mainframe wiped, there were
other ways to get past the doors...
... and William may have found a way out. I can't
keep denying it, no matter how much I want to.
There was an abandoned factory west of the lab, a
shipping company that had been bought up by Umbrella
to ensure that the underground levels would
stay secret; it was how Umbrella had managed to
build the complex in the first place without arousing
suspicion, hiding equipment and materials in the
factory's warehouses and using the heavy machinery
lift to transport them. Although the entrances from
the factory had still been sealed off the last time she'd
checked, there was a slim chance that William had
gotten through - and if he could get to the factory, he
could get into the sewers.
Annette forced herself to stand up, ignoring the
cramps in her legs and back as she picked up the
handgun on the console. She didn't know much about
guns, although she'd figured out how to use one
quickly enough, after...
... after they came for the G-Virus, the men in the
gas masks, shooting and running and William, poor
William dying in a puddle of blood and I didn 't see the
syringe until it was too late...
She took a deep, shuddering breath, trying to push
that terrible memory aside, trying to forget about the
incident that had taken William from her and turned
Raccoon into a city of the dead. It didn't matter
anymore. The journey ahead wouldn't be a pleasant
one, and she had to concentrate. Escaped Re3s, firstand
second-stage infected humans, the botany experiments,
the arachnid series - she could run into any of
the T-Virus carriers, not to mention whomever Umbrella
had managed to send.
And William. My husband, my beloved - the first
human G-Virus carrier, who isn't really human anymore.
She'd been wrong to think that she had no more
tears inside. Annette stood in the middle of the vast,
sterile room five floors beneath the surface of Raccoon
and wept lost, racking sobs that didn't even
begin to touch the pain of her loneliness.
Umbrella would be sorry. Once she could be sure
that William was beyond their reach, she was going to
destroy their precious facility, she was going to take
the G-Virus and run, she was going to make sure that
they understood how badly they'd screwed up - and
God help anyone who tried to stop her.
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