Genesis (10 page)

The elevator stopped at their floor, and she went out ahead of him.

“Look,” he said, “I'll make it up to you.”

“Really?” she asked dubiously.

“Yeah, really. Why don't we meet in the cafeteria tonight for dinner?”

She sighed, brushing one of her long locks of blond hair behind her ear. “I suppose it's a possibility.”

“Good. Ten o'clock?”

She opened the door to their lab. The late hour was necessary, given the amount of overtime they were going to need to put in. “All right, ten. But maybe
I
won't show this time.”

“Why not?” Mariano asked petulantly.

“Because I'm busy.”

At that, Mariano hit her with that mischievious
smile. Anna sighed, realizing that he was not going to take this seriously in the least.

But then, was there any reason to? As colleagues, they had a great deal in common. They were both bright young biologists leapfrogging their way toward the top of the field of viral research. Thanks to Umbrella's resources, they were doing work light-years ahead of anyone else's. In particular, they'd been taking Dr. Ashford's work, and bringing it to a whole new level.

Unfortunately, while they were more than able to work together, and had made some fantastic breakthroughs, once you got past the shop talk, they had nothing in common. She loved chamber music; he thought Britney Spears was deep. She loved to read American Civil War histories, Toni Morrison novels, and Agatha Christie mysteries; he found the sports pages of the
Raccoon City Times
to be taxing. Her definition of art was Monet; his was a Velvet Elvis.

But damn, was he good in bed.

Maybe she should just leave it at that.

Johnny-Wayne closed and sealed the door behind him, then went to feed Daffy, one of the rabbits. (Johnny-Wayne had suggested the name, saying it'd be after the cartoon character. When reminded that Daffy was the duck, and Bugs the rabbit, Johnny-Wayne shook his shaved head and said, “Damn—always get them two mixed up.” However, they stuck with the appellation.) He knelt down by Daffy's cage—one of several along one wall—put the dish down into the slot, and watched as the white rabbit happily chowed down.

Anna and Mariano moved down the three stairs to the table in the middle of the room to get started on the day's work.

Before she could even set her coffee down, the fire alarm went off.

“Oh, Christ,” Johnny-Wayne said, getting up from watching Daffy eat. “Not another fucking drill.”

“Great,” Anna muttered. “We're already two days behind, now they pull this shit.”

Mariano grinned. “Hey, at least now we have an excuse. Our work's being disrupted.”

“I'd rather just get the work done.”

She gazed almost wistfully at the slides sitting on the desk in the middle of the lab, waiting to be put under the microscope for study. After the frustrations of the previous night—waiting around for Mariano to never show up, then a restless night of very little sleep—she wanted nothing more than to throw herself into her work.

Instead, she trudged back up the three stairs that led to the door.

With a sudden clunk, the sprinkler system activated. Water—ice-cold water—burst forth from the nozzles in the ceiling.

Cold, fear-filled panic gripped Anna, as she thought there was actually a fire in the lab.

However, a quick glance around the room revealed that thought to be absurd. Hell, most of the room and the equipment in the room was made of not-remotely-flammable plastic or metal or both. Obviously that stupid little-kid computer had a glitch.

“Shit!” she exclaimed.

“What the hell's going on?” Mariano asked.

Resisting an urge to ask her partner how she could possibly know what the hell was going on, she instead barked orders. “Get the computers covered! Move it!”

“I'm trying!” Johnny-Wayne said even as he did as she said.

“Get the experiments—move them!” Even as the panic left, replaced by anger and a desire to protect their work, Anna still found herself gripped in cold, and she wondered whose bright idea it was to use water that was apparently brought straight in from the Arctic for the sprinkler system.

By the time she, Johnny-Wayne, and Mariano got the cages, computers, and slides covered in plastic, the water was up to her ankles, her long blond hair was now plastered to her forehead and back, and her white lab outfit would have made her a dandy entrant in a wet T-shirt contest.

She prayed that Mariano wouldn't notice and make a joke about it. As it was, she was suddenly very grateful that she had chosen to wear a nondescript white bra this morning, since her shirt was so wet, an observer would've been able to make out, say, a lace pattern. That, she didn't need.

Last night, as she sat in the train station, trying to come up with imaginative ways to fillet Mariano, she had thought she was at a low point in her life. Twenty-eight years old, living in a high-priced cave, with her only prospects for a relationship being a Britney Spears-loving
twit with a cute smile who nonetheless couldn't be relied upon to show up for a date.

Which wouldn't have been so bad if they weren't in a mostly isolated community of five hundred people. If she couldn't even do a relationship right under these circumstances . . .

And now this.

A totally fucked-up fire drill flooding her lab. If this kept up, they wouldn't just be two days behind. The clean-up of the water-logged lab would set them back a week or more.

Looking up, Anna saw the omnipresent security camera—the Red Queen's eyes and ears. Wading over to stand in front of the thing she yelled over the sound of the water that was still rushing into the lab through several nozzles, “There's no fire here! No fire!”

“The code doesn't work.”

Ignoring Mariano, Anna instead repeated, “There's no fire here! No fire! What's wrong with you?”

“The door won't open.” Mariano came back down the stairs and walked over to Anna. “This water isn't going anywhere.”

Anna blinked. “What?”

“It's a sealed room.”

“No shit, Sherlock. And here I thought the water was up to my knees because this room doubled as a fucking wading pool.” She walked away from Mariano before he could make some kind of cute reply. She turned to Johnny-Wayne. “Help me with the doors.”

“Oh, fuck the doors!” Johnny-Wayne went over to the far wall, opened the emergency door, and pulled out the axe that was standard issue in every room in the building, thus acquiescing to the Raccoon City fire code. As if an axe would do any good in a room like this.

Before Anna could stop him, Johnny-Wayne splashed across the room, building up as much speed as he could in knee-high water, and slammed the axe into the window. He used the back end of the axe, since it was more of a sharp point.

Johnny-Wayne Carlson was a fairly big man, who worked out regularly, and could put a good amount of force behind an axe thrust. Based on how loudly he grunted, he used all his considerable strength when he hit the window with the axe.

One small pebble-sized piece of PlastiGlas popped out the other side.

“Great,” Anna said. “Keep that up for another three hours or so, and we'll be home free.”

“You got a better idea?”

Anna said nothing in response to that. She had nothing to say.

“Fine.” Johnny-Wayne turned and tried the axe again.

Another pea-sized bit of PlastiGlas was dislodged by the action.

She looked over to see that Mariano was continuing to enter the code into the door, in the futile hope that maybe
this
time it would release the door.

The water crept up to her waist. She couldn't even feel her feet anymore.

Oddly enough, her primary thought was that she really regretted not getting another night in bed with Mariano.

That, she thought as the water continued to creep up her chest, would make the shittiest possible epitaph . . .

LISA BROWARD WAS AS GIDDY AS SOMEONE about to go out on a first date with her dream boy, and as nervous as someone facing a firing squad.

The latter was the far more likely prospect.

Her stomach felt like it had been tied into half a dozen slipknots. She hadn't been able to hold down a single meal since her and Alice's lunch at Che Buono.

She and Alice had had several more illicit meetings, arranging to get her hands on the T-virus. Today was the day she would get it.

After the last meeting, she had set things up with Matt. That was more of a challenge, since she couldn't just call him on the phone—at least at first. She set up an e-mail account on a free service that was not likely to be traced to her. If somehow the e-mail was traced back
to the Hive, the person Umbrella would assign to find it would be her, and even if someone else in the company realized it was specifically her, she could chalk it up to her account being hacked. It might cause her some embarrassment, but she could live with that.

Once the account was set up, she sent out a mass e-mail to thousands of addresses with a text-only attachment that ninety percent of the e-mail programs in the country would interpret as spam and block. The remaining ten percent would get through and be deleted unread by the receiver. Anyone stupid enough to open an unsolicited attachment would find only a text file full of gibberish.

However, one of the addresses that received the spam was one she set up for her brother. Matt checked that address once a day, and waited for an e-mail from this particular address. The gibberish was in a code that Matt had given her from his days as a Federal Marshal. Any halfway decent cryptographer could probably crack it in about five minutes, but the circumstances under which a cryptographer would even know of the file's existence were extremely unlikely.

Sure enough, two days after she sent the e-mail, Lisa got a phone call.

“Hey Lisa, it's Matt.”

Putting on a surprised face for the benefit of any coworkers that might be looking on—not to mention the Red Queen's surveillance—she said, “Matt? What's the matter? Are Mom and Dad all right?”

Matt laughed. “They're fine, really. What, I'm only
allowed to call my baby sister when there's a family crisis?”

“Allowed, no, but it's usually the only time you do call me. Besides, ever since you quit the marshals you've been penny-pinching. You wouldn't make a long-distance call unless it was an emergency.”

“Well, it's not a long-distance call, actually, I'm in Raccoon.”

Lisa blinked in mock-surprise. “What brings you out here?”

“Oh, just a visit. Got restless in San Francisco, so I thought I'd come up and visit my favorite sister.”

“I'm your only sister, Matt.”

“Okay, so it was easy to rank you first. Doesn't change the fact that I came up to see you. Can you get away? I can be there in two hours.”

That was the important part. She had arranged to meet with Alice this morning in the mansion. Matt just informed her that he, too, could be at the mansion this morning—specifically two hours from now. That was perfect.

However, she still had a role to play. After all, she'd taken her leave for the month when she and Alice had lunch. “Damn, I can't today. I'd have to run it by my boss. Maybe tomorrow?”

“Maybe? Geez, Lisa, what're you doing down there, the Manhattan Project Part 2?”

Lisa swallowed. In a way, Matt's joke hit closer to home than she was entirely comfortable with. The T-virus was as deadly as the atomic bomb. Maybe deadlier.

Before she could reply to that, a high-pitched buzzing started.

“What's that noise?” Matt asked suddenly.

Sighing, Lisa said, “It's nothing. Fire drill.”

“You're in a hole in the ground; what do they need with fire drills?”

“So we don't die a horrible death when something catches fire here in our hole in the ground. Look, call me back tomorrow morning, okay? I've got to go do the drill.”

“Yeah, fine. Bye, sis.”

Hanging up, Lisa got up and grabbed her gray suit jacket off the back of her chair. In some ways, this worked in her favor. The mild chaos of a fire drill would make it that much easier for her to sneak off and meet with Alice.

Along with everyone else, she headed toward the fire exit. The space that held her desk had two ways out, one toward the elevator bay, with fire stairs between the elevators and the fake windows; the other in the back leading to another set of stairs. The one by the elevator bay was wider and better lit, so everyone headed there.

Before she got to the bay, however, she saw a crowd congregating in the hall. Why weren't they moving forward?

“What's the problem?” she asked as she put on her jacket, flipping her dirty-blond hair out from under the jacket's collar.

“The doors won't open.”

Lisa blinked. She peered through the crowd to see
that the PlastiGlas doors had shut, blocking access to the elevator bay. That wasn't supposed to happen until after the room was evacuated, unless there was an actual fire that necessitated sealing the room to prevent a spread.

“What about the ones at the back?” Lisa asked.

One of the new Technical Support guys said, “Locked as well.”

This was going in a direction Lisa didn't like in the least. She was as familiar with the fire-suppression systems as anyone, and she ran through it in her head: the room was evacuated, sealed, and then flooded with halon gas until the fire went out. The halon would suck the oxygen out of the room, thus starving the fire.

The problem, of course, was that the gas would also starve any animal life of oxygen, which was why the system was designed not to seal the room until
after
the evacuation was complete. The sole exception to this was if the fire was so out of control that the lives of anyone inside would be just as forfeit if they weren't sealed in the room.