Genesis (11 page)

But there was no fire. And Lisa knew for a fact that the systems were working just fine.

Something was horribly wrong.

Several nightmare scenarios went through Lisa's head at once.

One was that they had traced her, and had sealed off this section, not because of a fire drill, but in order to make sure she herself didn't go anywhere.

Another was that the Red Queen was malfunctioning in some way, which would be even more of a problem,
since five hundred people's lives depended on the little brat being in perfect working order. That shouldn't have been the case, though, since Lisa herself was as familiar with the computer's workings as anyone in the Hive, and she'd found nothing wrong.

But then, she'd been so distracted the last few days . . .

A third possibility was that Alice herself had betrayed Lisa.

Before a fourth possibility could even occur to her, she heard a nasty hissing sound. Within seconds, the air around her seemed to shimmer.

“Halon!” she cried, even as the gas started to burn her throat.

With each passing second, it became more impossible to breathe. Her fellow workers banged at the PlastiGlas door in a futile effort to get out.

Lisa herself screamed, “Stop it!” at the Red Queen's security camera—the same one that Alice had shown her a recording from in the park days ago. The hypothesis that the brat had gone nuts was now foremost in what was left of her thoughts, and she wondered if indeed it had been her fault. Her mind hadn't really been on her job lately.

Right now, her mind was only on trying and failing to take another breath. “Stop it!” she cried again, more hoarsely, even as she collapsed to the floor, her legs suddenly unable to support her own weight.

The gas permeated the room, making it impossible to see.

All week, she'd been thinking about ways for the plan to go wrong, but this hadn't even made the list.

From the beginning, she knew that this endeavor might result in her death, but not this way. Not dying from a goddamn computer malfunction.

She tried to yell, “Stop it!” one last time, but she couldn't draw enough breath to formulate the scream. She did manage to say, “I'm sorry,” though. Whether it was to her coworkers, Matt, Alice, Fadwa, or Mahmoud, she couldn't say for certain. Maybe it was to all of them.

Unable to hold her eyes open, unable to stand, unable to breathe, she collapsed.

She thought about Fadwa.

After that, nothing.

MAJOR TIMOTHY CAIN DIDN'T TAKE ANY SHIT.

He was born with a different name in Berlin back when the city was separated by a large wall. The third of four children, and the youngest boy, he had the misfortune to be on the wrong side of it. Shortly after Mother died, when he was sixteen, Father managed to secure a way for them to emigrate to the United States. Upon arrival, Father declared their name to be Cain—an Anglicization of their name in German—and gave all his children new names. They were now Michael, Anthony, Timothy, and Mary, because those, Father said, sounded like American names. Any time they used their old German names, Father would hit them until they stopped. Not being fools, all the children learned quickly to think of themselves with their new identities.

In gratitude to his new home, Timothy enlisted in the Army on his eighteenth birthday. Shortly thereafter, he was sent overseas to fight in the Gulf War. Father was happy that his son did so. Michael, who was three years older than Timothy, had moved to Chicago and become a police officer, Anthony had moved to San Francisco and lost touch with the rest of the family. As for Mary, though women could serve, she had no interest in doing so, preferring a career in business.

Timothy Cain became alive for the first time in the desert. He had always succeeded academically, but mostly by rote. He was a fast learner, but he never had much enthusiasm for it. The two years of school he'd attended since immigrating were difficult, as Timothy spoke with a thick German accent, which made him the target of teasing by his peers, and made it difficult to derive any kind of enjoyment from the learning experience.

Combat, though, he took joy in that, especially when that combat was against the enemies of the United States of America. And in the desert, nobody cared about his accent, except for a few idiots, and they all shut up once they saw Timothy Cain in action.

It didn't take long for him to distinguish himself, work his way up the ranks. He was leading his fellow soldiers into combat after only a few weeks, and his men would follow him anywhere. He had a natural charisma, an aptitude for tactics, and an especially fine ability to kill Saddam's footsoldiers. Showing the usual armed forces proclivity for obvious nicknames, he
quickly became known as “Able” Cain, because no matter how bad the mission, no matter how ridiculous the plan, no matter what it was you needed to get done, if you put Sergeant Timothy Cain in charge, it was going to get done. Period.

Cain learned many things in the desert, but the most important thing was that, contrary to what Father had always taught him, life was neither precious nor sacred.

Life was, in fact, cheap.

If life was such a glorious, magnificent, wonderful thing, then it wouldn't be so easy to take it away.

If life was a great gift, then he wouldn't be able to kill a fellow human being with one hand, as he did often in the Persian Gulf.

When his tour ended, he went to OCS to get his commission.

After several more years as an officer, he realized another important truth: there was more to life than the military.

That truth didn't so much come from plowing through the desert and blowing up the enemy, something at which he had frankly excelled. No, this truth came from the gentlemen in suits who worked for the Umbrella Corporation and recruited him to run their Security Division. “Able” Cain had served his country. In a sense, he still would be, for Umbrella had many government contracts, and provided services for Americans everywhere.

The main difference was that now he'd be recompensed with an obscene amount of money.

Having achieved the rank of major, Cain said yes, though he insisted that he still be referred to by his rank. He was also able to buy Father a house in Florida. When Michael was shot in the line of duty, and was going slowly insane at a desk job, Timothy made him the head of security for Umbrella's Chicago office. He tracked Anthony down in a crackhouse in Berkeley and got him cleaned up, paying for his detox. (That he later jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge was hardly Cain's fault.)

When Mary learned her husband was cheating on her, Cain paid for her divorce lawyer. Then, after the divorce was finalized, and Mary had taken the bastard for all he was worth and then some, Cain tracked the ex-husband down—living in a shitty little studio apartment in South Bend, Indiana—and shot him in the head.

Life was, after all, easy to take. But it was so much more satisfying to destroy someone first.

Timothy “Able” Cain brought a military efficiency to Umbrella. When Edgardo Martinez retired as head of Umbrella's “sanitation” strike team, Cain recommended an old friend that he'd met during his days in Special Forces to take his place. The man had spent his career to that point in a variety of covert operations positions. His given name was lost to obscurity and dozens of clandestine missions. When he took the job, he went with the codename “One.” It simplifed things, he said.

One did his job superbly. He had a team of commandoes that he'd hand-picked and hand-trained. He had pulled them from a variety of sources—police
departments, the armed forces, jailhouses—and molded them into an enviable fighting force.

The yellow phone on Cain's desk was a direct line from One. It only rang when there was trouble.

It rang now.

Cain felt no trepidation as he picked it up, because Cain hadn't felt trepidation since he enlisted in the Army. As a teenager, sure, he felt trepidation all the time—he was in a new country, his skin was breaking out, he struggled with homework, he had difficulty with the language—but once he reached the desert, he never feared anything again.

Because he knew the secret.

Life was cheap.

“What's happening?” he asked as he picked up the phone.

One's deep, steady voice sounded on the other end. “The Hive's shut down.”

Cain leaned forward in his comfortable leather chair, leaning his elbows on his oak desk. “What do you mean it's shut down?”

“Just what I said. Security measures have taken effect. No heat signatures. We're cut off from the entire complex. It's been locked down, and we can't reach Abernathy or Parks at the mansion.”

That wasn't good. The only way the pair at the mansion would be incommunicado is if the security lockdown extended to the mansion. And that would only happen if things were totally disastrous.

No heat signatures meant probably nobody alive.

Five hundred dead employees definitely qualified as a disaster.

It was also possible that something had taken the ersatz married couple out. Cain had recruited Alice himself out of the Treasury Department, so he knew exactly what she was capable of. If someone or something had subdued her—well, that was disastrous, too.

“When did this happen?” he asked.

“Kaplan picked it up about fifteen minutes ago.”

Knowing it was a stupid question—if One wasn't capable of thinking of this for himself, Cain wouldn't have hired him—he had to ask anyhow: “Can we get into the Red Queen to shut her down?”

“Kaplan's been trying, but she's also cut off from all externals. We can't get at her systems, processors—not even the surveillance cameras. Nothing. Only way to find out what's happening is to go in.”

“The mansion's still open?”

“Yes.”

“Not for much longer.” Cain leaned back in his chair. This wasn't good. There was a lot of very important research going on in the Hive, but if any of it got out, there'd be hell to pay. The licker, the T-virus, the Nemesis Program, Project: Open Book—any one of them getting loose would be very bad for the corporation.

He immediately tapped some keys on the Umbrella laptop that sat to the right of the yellow phone on his desk, calling up the dossiers of who from One's staff was on duty today.

It was his primary team: the aforementioned Bart
Kaplan, a former FBI agent, One's second, and the resident computer expert; Olga Danilova, their field medic, formerly with the Russian Army; and four soldiers, Vance Drew, J.D. Hawkins, Rain Melendez, and Alfonso Warner, recruited out of, respectively, the NYPD, the CIA by way of the Navy SEALs, the LAPD, and the federal penitentiary located just outside Raccoon City.

If anyone could find out what happened down there, it was them.

“You have a go,” Cain said. “Procedure Three. You know the drill.”

“Understood,” One said without even a moment's hesitation. “We'll be airborne in ten.”

That was one of the reasons why Cain liked One. He understood chain of command.

“Godspeed, One.”

Cain hung up the yellow phone.

HIS HANDS RAN GENTLY UP AND DOWN HER naked flesh, his callused fingers playing over her skin, feeling both rough and smooth at the same time.

His lips hungrily attacked hers, as if they were trying to consume each other. Their tongues explored—teasing, tasting, dancing.

He pulled her slim athletic form tight against his muscular body.

Nothing mattered right now but him as they rolled around the oh-so-comfortable mattress. Their bodies were intertwined, his arms wrapped around her torso, her legs wrapped around his waist.

She moaned in utmost ecstasy, as for the first time in years, she
felt
something. That's what had been missing for so long.

She never wanted it to end.

Eventually it did . . .

When she woke up, it was raining and her jaw hurt.

The images from her dream—was it a dream?—faded slowly. Something about a man and a bed, but she couldn't bring it into focus.

Or much of anything else.

The ground was cold against her sore jaw. She tried to prop herself up, only to feel a stabbing pain in her right shoulder.

She forced herself to focus, to take in her surroundings.

The first thing she realized was that the ground was cold because it wasn't ground. It was marble.

The rain was only coming down on her feet. It was the steady rhythm of a shower.

Gently rubbing her right shoulder with her left hand, she looked down. Aside from a crumpled shower curtain—which, based on the bent metal hooks along one end of it, had been ripped off the rod—she was naked.

Obviously something had happened in the shower.

But what?

Her need to figure out what was going on led her to another stunning revelation.

She had no idea who she was.

Taking a deep breath, she tried to recall—anything. She knew that she was a woman lying naked in a marble shower. It was more like a big shower stall—the size of a bathtub, but with only a small lip all around, and just the one faucet.

That didn't make sense—she could identify marble, a faucet, a shower, tell the difference between a tub and a stall, yet she hadn't the first clue who or where she was.

Gingerly, she got up. Her right shoulder and the right side of her face both still ached, but the ache was already receding. Just residual pain from falling down.

Assuming she had fallen down.

The evidence, at least, supported that. The way she was sprawled on the shower floor, the way the curtain had been ripped down with her—all of that pointed to her falling down, probably grabbing the curtain for support as she fell.

This only served to confuse her more. For whatever reason, she was having no trouble analyzing her situation, even drawing conclusions.