Resident Evil. Retribution (16 page)

“Umbrella must’ve had it developed in a lab,” Barry said, slapping a clip in his rifle. “Released it here to stop us.”

Luther could see the monster more clearly now. It looked as if the outer layer of skin had been scraped off, down almost to the muscle. The top half of its skull—including its eyes—was entirely missing. Where they should have been there was a big, leathery, overgrown brain, looking like some hideous fungus. Though apparently blind, the thing somehow sensed them. It stalked toward them on dragonlike legs—four of them, its front limbs almost as much like legs as the rear. Scything claws scratched the street with each step, its dripping serrated tongue whipping out, feeling its way along.

Luther backed off—then a bullet cut the air just over his head, coming from behind. He turned and saw plague soldiers running up toward them, firing sporadically.

They were boxed in.

He fired at the Licker but it stalked implacably toward them, squealing and snarling, apparently unhurt. It was so big their bullets were just irritants.

Then Luther heard something that had no place here—a roaring car engine. He saw the double pools of headlights illuminate the creature, making it turn. A Rolls-Royce Silver Phantom, gleaming and thoroughly pimped out, was doing eighty miles an hour as it rocketed toward the Licker.

The giant creature roared in fury, then the driver engaged the brakes and the tires squealed as the car skidded, deliberately power-sliding, striking the hulking flesh-colored monster side-on. The impact knocked the Licker sideways, and then over onto its back so that it tumbled through the plate-glass window of another fake store.

Stunned, the monster thrashed about in the window display, crushing mannequins underfoot, confusedly lashing at them with its tongue, trying to right itself.

Leon and Barry began firing at the plague soldiers, forcing them to take cover behind cars parked on the street. The Rolls-Royce Silver Phantom jolted to a stop, and a door opened, revealing the driver.

Alice.

“Hi,” she said, casually.

Luther was dizzy with emotion, just looking at her. Too much had happened in the last few minutes.

But he swallowed hard, and smiled.

“Nice ride,” he said.

“Well, this
is
Moscow,” she countered. She gestured and the three men ran to the sedan. They climbed in, Luther up front beside her.

“Let’s get outta here before that thing figures out that dummies don’t make a good dinner,” he said. She nodded. The wheels spun, and the Rolls-Royce peeled out. Bullets from the plague soldiers smacked into the side. She ran over what was left of Sergei’s body as she went, but Luther didn’t criticize her for it. They were in a hurry.

Barry looked over his shoulder, up at the ceiling.

“Those people—were still alive!”

“The creature was cocooning them,” Alice said. “Saving them for food.”

She barreled down the street, and Luther introduced the other two men.

“Barry, Leon… Alice.”

“Pleased to meet you,” she said.

Luther looked behind them, saw that the Licker had freed itself. It was racing after them—and it was pissed off. It killed a couple of plague soldiers on the way, for good measure, with casual snaps of its jaws.

Still, the Rolls was outdistancing it.

“You might want to buckle up,” Alice said. They were coming to a blocked cross street. It was stop, crash into the blockade, or turn.

She’d better decide,
Luther thought, looking at the speedometer.
We’re going seventy miles an hour.

Without slowing, she pulled a hand-break turn, the G-force making the men strain to keep their places in the car.

“Nice driving,” Barry said.

Luther smiled. Aware of the absurdity of the situation, and yet somehow not caring. Here, anyway, was Alice.

“Nice to see you again,” he said.

Alice returned his smile.

“Nice to be seen.”

Leon glanced back.

“It’s gaining.” Luther looked back and saw that the Licker was running like a rabid racehorse, coming on strong, moving closer to them.

“Not a problem,” Alice said. She turned to Luther. “So… did you miss me?”

“Really?” He looked at the Licker. “We’re going to do this right now?”

Alice shrugged, then smiled. She looked pale, at least to Luther.

“No time like the present,” she said.

Luther considered asking her how she’d found them—but probably she’d lucked onto “Moscow,” and then followed the sound of gunfire.

Up ahead the street was clogged by abandoned and burned-out vehicles, many of them overturned. Alice slowed just enough to weave skillfully between them, like a stunt driver on an obstacle course. The giant Licker didn’t bother weaving. It charged straight through the vehicles, bounding up, and crushing them as it came down, or shouldering them aside like a rhino tossing bales of hay.

Alice looked in the rear-view mirror, and Luther saw that she was becoming worried. The Licker was getting close. Real close. It was whipping its tongue out ahead of it, slapping at the rear window.

Nasty
, Luther thought.

He looked up ahead—and saw something bearing down on them. Another pair of high beams, their source obscured.

“Alice…” he said. She didn’t seem to hear him. “
Alice!”
The car’s headlights were glaring in his eyes— it was coming right at them, head-on.

“Carl”
Luther shouted.

Instead of slowing, Alice accelerated—drove straight on instead of turning, apparently intent on hitting the other vehicle.

Too late to do anything but brace for impact.

Then Alice jogged the wheel and hit the brakes, doing a “bootlegger reverse.” The car spun around through a sickening 180 degrees, but avoiding the pursuing Licker—which
couldn’t
stop. It did so suddenly as it hit something with a sickening crunch.

It wasn’t another car that had been coming at them—it was the Rolls, reflected in the mirror. The creature smashed through the glass, and was flailing wildly. Luther hoped it was cut to pieces.

He held on as Alice squealed the car around, sent it burning down a side street. Then he turned to Barry with a “did you see that?” look—and was surprised when Barry high-fived him.

“I can see why we came for her,” Barry said.

But Leon was scowling.

“Where’s Ada?” he demanded, leaning toward Alice.

She shook her head sadly.

“I don’t think she made it,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

Leon took a long ragged breath.

“You saw her die?” he asked.

“No,” Alice admitted.

Leon nodded to himself, and he actually seemed to relax.

“She always has a plan.”

At that moment the rear window shattered in a sudden fusillade of bullets. There were two flatbed trucks pursuing them, one mounted with a rocket launcher, the other with a machine-gun turret—the vehicles they’d seen at the Red Square, driven by plague soldiers.

Persistent bastards,
Luther thought.
But what else are they going to do? Go bowling?

The machine gunner opened up again, and bullets hammered the back of the Rolls. It wouldn’t take much more of this kind of bullet storm, Luther mused.

“Boys,” Alice said coolly, “would you mind?” There was an odd strain to her voice, though—as if she was in pain.

“Shall we?” Leon said to Barry, like a gentleman asking another if he’d like to go duck hunting.

“My pleasure,” Barry responded, clamping his perpetually unlit cigar in a corner of his mouth. He leaned out the back of the shattered back window and fired his machine rifle, Leon followed suit.

“This is for Sergei, you pricks,” he muttered.

The machine gunner lost the top of his head in one of Barry’s bursts—but he was quickly replaced by another. Leon aimed very carefully at the muzzle of the RPG launcher—and fired when he saw the flash of its ignition. His rounds impacted neatly with the rocket-propelled grenade, before it had quite exited the barrel. The whole assembly exploded, tearing the Undead gunman apart.

Luther didn’t have much ammo—he looked for a shot but he was afraid he might hit Leon or Luther. So he leaned out of his shattered side window, and fired at the pursuing trucks, trying to hit the drivers.

Driving furiously, screaming through turns, trying to evade her pursuers, Alice noticed a Las Plagas Undead riding a motorcycle, pulling up close to her, a machine pistol in his right hand. She ducked as he fired and a spray of bullets knocked out her side window.

She lifted up enough to see, and jerked the wheel in order to sideswipe the motorcycle. That sent it crashing into a newsstand, where the bike flipped over and slammed down on the Undead like a hammer.

Then she veered around a burning wreck in the street, looked in the mirror, and saw another RPG launcher pop up from the back of the flatbed that held the machine gun. There was a flash, a puff of smoke, and she saw the rocket streaking toward the rear of the Rolls.

Timing it carefully, she jogged the steering wheel so the Rolls swerved and the rocket whipped on by, passing the car and exploding in the street up ahead. There was no choice but to drive right through the ensuing fireball and Luther—leaning out a window to fire at their pursuers—shouted a curse as the flames licked around the sedan.

“Son of a bitch!
”

He pulled back into the vehicle, driven in by the blast. He slapped some small flames out on his coat, and turned to Alice.

“Let me know when you plan on doing that again,” he growled.

Alice glanced in the rear-view mirror—and saw another RPG round rocketing toward them on a tail of fire.

“Heads up!” she called out, and she jogged the wheel again so the projectile exploded beside the Rolls, making the car rock.

She jerked the wheel into a sharp turn, taking them into the midst of Red Square—and saw a motorcycle coming straight at her on a collision course. The Undead rider was firing a machine gun over the handlebars as it came. Bullets sparked off the hood.

“Down!” Alice shouted, ducking. Luther and the other men ducked down just as the front windshield imploded, and bullets flashed over their heads.

She peered over the top of the steering wheel, saw the motorcycle about to impact with the Silver Phantom. She spun the Rolls into a 180-degree slide, opened her heavily built side door—and smashed it into the motorcycle. Acting like a fly swatter, it flattened the Undead, knocking him and his bike into a twisted, spinning heap of bloody, burning slag.

Alice spun the car again, back on course… and Barry spoke up.

“Guess who’s back.”

In her rear-view mirror, she could see that the giant Licker had found its way back to her. It was in hot pursuit.

The gigantic Licker was gaining. It was mangled, badly cut up from crashing into the mirror wall. And it looked seriously pissed off. She wasn’t going to be able to shake it—not the way she’d been doing it. And if they happened upon the Las Plagas soldiers again, chances are their luck would run out.

They couldn’t survive another hailstorm of bullets.

She was going to have to do something extreme— for a change. And she saw exactly what she needed, up ahead.

The Red Square Metro station.

“Almost there!” Alice shouted.

“Where?” Luther asked.

She looked in the mirror again. The Licker was closer yet—shoving the pursuing Undead out of the way, crashing their vehicles into the ornate walls of the Resurrection Gate. The gigantic pink mutant was one good bound away from leaping on the Rolls, big enough to smash what was left of the Silver Phantom.

No time to do this delicately.

“Hold on—this is going to get bad!”

“It’s going to
‘get’
bad?” Luther laughed bitterly. But she didn’t bother to respond.

Alice slammed on the gas, crashed through a construction site at the edge of the square, and jumped off a ramp of piled chunks of asphalt. The Rolls soared twenty feet off the ground, arcing through the air, coming down with a squealing, bone-rattling crash at seventy miles per hour.

And then it plunged down the steps that led to the Metro.

Luther, Barry, and Leon yelled as the car bounced and clattered down the steps, their shouts wavering like yodels with the impacts on the stairs. They all held onto whatever was handy, their heads whipping around with every impact. Alice gripped the steering wheel, got a jerky glimpse in the rear-view mirror of the mangled Licker, still following her down into the underground station.

If it caught up, it would leap onto the Rolls, rip it open like a sardine tin, and begin feasting.

At the bottom of the stairs was an archway that appeared to be under repair—heavy stones curved along the arch. Scaffolding held up part of the ceiling. The car reached the bottom, and ignoring the shooting pain in her side, she deliberately slammed it into the scaffolding—just as the Licker leapt.

Alice slammed her foot down on the accelerator and crashed through the scaffolding, knocking it down behind the Rolls. The stone arch it had held up was knocked down with it. Tons of stone and girders dropped onto the Licker, burying it and plugging up the tunnel behind her. A cloud of dust rose up around the falling debris.

She ground the car to a halt and looked back. The Licker was at least half buried.

That should slow it down.

“Everyone okay?” she asked, looking at Luther. He looked as if he might be sick to his stomach.

“We’ll live,” Leon said.

“Time to get out and walk,” Luther said.

Alice led the way, carrying the hook gun that Ada had given her, as well as the machine pistol. Not far down the tunnel they came to an abandoned station

“Hello!” Alice called. “You can come out now!”

The Rain clone and a little girl emerged from the darkness at the other end of the tunnel, where they’d been hiding. The girl ran straight to Alice and threw her arms around her waist. Alice hugged her.

“She was very brave,” Rain said.

Luther looked with undisguised surprise at the little girl holding onto Alice.

“Who’s this?” he asked.