Resident Evil. Retribution (22 page)

“Nothing down in Umbrella Prime but seawater and frozen bodies now,” Leon answered. He was hunched over the steering wheel of the “snowcat,” watching the ice closely. He was driving more slowly now, Alice saw as she tried to shake the nightmare off.

“How’re they going to set down in this storm?” Luther asked, looking out the window at the whiteout of the blizzard.

“Weather report has it abating, out this way.”

“Doesn’t look like it to me.”

“I think we’re almost through the worst of it.”

Alice looked down at Becky, the sleeping child twitching and squirming in her arms, still having nightmares. The child’s lips were quivering, her hands jerking, her eyelids jumping with R.E.M. movement. Alice considered waking her out of it.

But sometimes you need nightmares, to process the horror of life.

“One click from the RZ,” Leon said, glancing at an instruments on his dashboard. The blizzard did seem to be clearing away a bit.

Suddenly the Spryte lurched violently to the right, skidding on the slick surface. Leon braked and the vehicle slid to a halt.

“What is it?” Alice asked.

“I’m not sure,” Leon said.

Becky woke up, stretching, looking sleepily around.

“What’s going on?” she signed.

“We’re not sure yet,” Alice replied. But she could see giant cracks appearing in the ice outside the big vehicle. As she looked around, from one window to another, she could see that the cracks were spreading in all directions. And the Spryte lurched again…

If the vehicle fell through the ice, the chances of getting out of it—getting alive to shelter—were probably zero. They’d be killed by hypothermia, or simply drowned when the snowcat plunged through the ice and into the sea.

The cracks continued to spread, in lightninglike forks…

But there was something strange. It didn’t look as if it was the Spryte breaking the ice. It looked like something was cracking it from beneath, off to the right. There was something dark out there, pushing upward, shouldering great floes out of the way. And suddenly rearing into view, a monolith of metal came squealing up through the ice, shedding chunks of frozen sea as it came.

“What the hell is that?” Luther burst out.

Then the shockwave reached the Spryte—and the world turned topsy-turvy. Alice and Becky and Leon and Luther were tossed around inside the vehicle like rag dolls as the vehicle was flipped over.

Becky made a shrill sound of terror as the world seemed to spin. Luther cursed and even Leon wordlessly yelled as he clutched at the steering wheel. The Spryte turned completely upside down. Its roof struck the ice with an ear-splitting clang.

Leon ended upside down on the ceiling of the Spryte’s cab, alongside Luther and Alice and Becky, all of them twisting about to get their feet back underneath them.

“Becky!” Alice shouted, signing as well. “Are you hurt?”

“No, I’m okay,” the girl replied.

“You’re sure?” she signed, insistently, while her other hand checked Becky for broken bones.

“I’m okay… really,” she said out loud in her uneven voice.

“Stay here,” Alice signed.

Luther was the first to drag himself out of the vehicle, and Alice followed close behind. Carrying a machine pistol, she crawled to a window, its glass shattered now, where she wormed through and stood up on the slightly rocking surface. She scooped up two sharp ice axes she found lying in the debris, for use as backup weapons. Shoving them into her back straps, Alice looked around.

There was a grinding sound, and she turned to see that the blades of the Spryte’s tracks were still going around, whirring away at the sky.

It was cold as death out here. Her teeth started to chatter; the gun felt icy in her fingers. The blizzard was waning, but there were still sheets of snow slanting down. She stared at the monolithic shape looming a dozen paces away—great streams of seawater poured off the steel monolith as it stabilized.

The monolith was the conning tower of a Typhoon Class submarine—it was one of the submarines from the Umbrella base.

Leon joined her, watching as a hatch opened at the bottom of the conning tower, and several figures emerged. One was the “Rain” clone trooper; another was Jill Valentine. Both held guns in hand.

The third was Ada Wong. She was still handcuffed, badly bruised and battered, but staring defiantly, spirit unbroken.

Leon turned to Alice.

“I told you she’d have a plan…”

This is her plan?
She glanced at him. Was he serious?

Then Alice looked at the three figures by the submarine, and called out to Jill Valentine.

“Only the two of you?” She nodded toward the Rain trooper.

“It’ll be enough!” Jill responded. She and “Rain” both had the scarabs on their chests.

There was a moment when the weather forced hesitation on them—another burst of snowfall, carried on the howling wind. Alice had the machine pistol ready—and she was weighing how she might shoot Jill and the Rain clone without hitting Ada.

Rain reached into a pocket, and produced a cylindrical device—some kind of high-tech syringe. Alice could see a red fluid in the formula chamber. And then Rain stabbed the business end of the syringe into her own neck… and injected herself. Was there something writhing within that red fluid?

“The Las Plagas parasite,” Leon muttered.

And then “Rain” began to transform.

Rain’s whole body contorted. She seemed to swell up, her clothing splitting at the seams, and her eyes began to glow with an unearthly red light. Jill’s attention focused on her, and Ada Wong took the opportunity to run.

Before she had gone more than a step, Jill spun and viciously backhanded her, knocking her back. Ada fell heavily to the ice, stunned.

Alice’s weapon was up, aiming at Jill—but the security chief was already in motion, charging across the rocking ice at Alice, Leon, and Luther. The transfigured Rain sprinted alongside her.

Jill leapt into the air, flipping to make a difficult target, and Alice missed her shot—missed her by microns.

Luther raised his weapon, aiming at the Rain creature. Leon followed suit.

Still in mid-mutation, she was charging toward them. They fired, their rounds tearing into her, and she halted as they ran through their clips. She seemed to sway, and blood ran from her nose…

But she didn’t fall. Luther could see something moving under her skin—like dozens of small, sluglike creatures making their way from the center of her body to her extremities. Then they reached her fingers—and burst from her fingertips.

The things dropping from her fingertips… were bullets. The very slugs they had shot into her—she’d used her Las Plagas mutation to expel them from her body. They rattled on the ice, and Rain raised her head. She howled in triumph.

Leon recovered first, raising his gun to fire, trying to get a headshot—but the mutated Rain—eyes glowing, limbs swollen—was rushing them again. She was just too fast, and her spinning kick sent him flying back against the side of the overturned Spryte, making it resound with a hollow thump.

Jill Valentine closed on Alice, and with stunning speed knocked her weapons aside. Alice had the ice axes, which she plucked from her back straps. Jill had a telescoping metal attack rod in her hand, which she used to counter the flashing axes.

The wind blasted around them; snow swirled into their eyes, the ice was slippery and both of them struggled for good footing, but still they fought—even as Rain and Leon and Luther fought nearby.

Alice was slowed a bit by her injury and the medication she’d taken—and Jill seemed to anticipate every move she made. No matter what Alice did—and she used every trick she knew—Jill seemed to predict it, block her, or avoid the cut completely. It flashed through Alice’s mind that Jill’s scarab might be helping her, using its expert systems to anticipate Alice’s moves, prescribing defenses and counter attacks.

Back and forth they ranged, arms flashing, weapons making only minor strikes—but with the attack rod, even a glancing blow to the shoulder was excruciatingly painful. One struck just above the wound in her side, so that she gritted her teeth with agony, forcing herself to counter attack. Her axes slashed, cutting Jill’s left arm, but only slightly, but enough that the blood was flecking the snowy ice at their feet crimson.

She was being driven back by Jill’s attack, pushed toward the Spryte. In her peripheral vision she saw Leon and Luther’s fight with the Rain clone—the creature laughed nastily, and Alice suspected it was only toying with the two men. She felt the icy air stabbing her lungs as she labored to block Jill’s attacks, and it was getting harder by the second.

Alice’s arms were beginning to feel heavy as she tried to slash past Jill’s blur-fast defenses. She managed to nick Jill’s right ear—but that gave Jill an opening and she cracked Alice glancingly across her right cheekbone, laying open her skin and sending a thrill of pain that reverberated to the core of her being.

Normally Alice could detach herself from the pain, but that one was hard to ignore. She groaned and slipped to one side, almost losing her footing. Blood was slicking her neck, running onto her fingers. It was becoming difficult to hold onto the axes. They seemed to double in weight every few seconds, as Alice’s arms trembled with fatigue. Sweat trickled, mixing with blood, then freezing in the shrieking wind.

Seeing Alice panting for breath, increasingly on the defensive, Jill grinned in murderous glee and moved in for the kill, her scarab glowing as she attacked with resurgent fury.

The fight had been carried out almost as much by the scarab as by her own brain and body. She was in hyper-sync with the object, its impulses and flow of data making her like a ballet dancer in sync with music, and the scrolling computer text projected onto her eyes gave her data on her own condition.

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Behind her opponent, the upturned tractor-tracks of the snowcat continued buzzing along, their blades still slashing at the sky. They, too, could be used as a weapon, if the occasion arose.

And Jill saw her opportunity. As Alice crossed her axes to block a particularly vicious down-slash, it left her middle unguarded. Jill threw her weight onto her right foot, cocked her left, and slammed it with all her strength into Alice’s chest.

She was sent crashing back through the windshield of the Spryte. Stunned, she lay inside in the broken glass. Jill heard the girl—the odd little clone with which Project Alice had saddled herself—shrieking from somewhere inside the big snowcat.

“Mommy!”

And in the background, ice floes crunched and squeaked against one another; the two men gasped and cursed; a gull squalled somewhere overhead. But that was all background noise. Jill was keenly focused on the business of killing. She reached through the broken glass, grabbed Alice’s legs, and pulled her back out into the icy wind

Leon and Luther were running out of steam, too.

Luther’s arms felt like sandbags as he raised them up to block their attacker. He was trying to see where they’d dropped their weapons… if he could grab one, shove it against her head, blow her brains out, she wouldn’t be able expel
those
bullets.

But she never gave him the moment he needed. And he only had one arm to work with.

Rain was laughing at them, slapping them around, and Leon, enraged, unleashed a punishing series of kicks, punches, and blocks, all with dizzying aggression. But the Las Plagas mutation hardly reacted to his onslaught. It laughed in his face, its swollen features swelling even more, its red eyes glowing a brighter crimson. She blocked him and drove him back with pile-driver fists, so that he staggered against Luther.

Got to find a weapon,
Luther thought. He glanced desperately around. The snowfall had covered most everything—at least one weapon, too, had slipped through a crack in the ice, to be lost in the sea.

The Rain creature saw him fumbling in the snow, stepped in, and backhanded him hard, sending him flying back. He managed to keep his feet but his head was still spinning, he tasted blood in his mouth, and he choked as he tried to warn Leon, who was circling.

The creature was whipped around and slammed Leon hard in the chest with its right boot, sending him hurtling backwards through the air till he came to a stop on red and black metal: slammed hard into the conning tower of the submarine. Then the creature spun again and struck Luther—knocking him off his feet.

He lay there, trying to get the strength to stand…

The Rain mutant seemed to think he was done for. It turned away…

Alice got to her feet. She no longer had her ice axes, but she managed to use her fists to defend herself against some of the body blows that Jill was raining on her.

Seeing Alice react to strikes against the wound in her side, the trooper grinned sadistically and began to aim more and more blows there, making blood spurt freshly once more from the ruptured dressing. Alice blocked a blow of Jill’s fist—but couldn’t stop the metal rod from striking home.

The pain hit her like a stroke of lightning, making her arch her back, rising up through her to flood her brain with red glare… the color of a Las Plagas monster’s eyes. And then she fell to her knees, pitching forward, almost losing consciousness.

An instant later she aware that she was being lifted up by the throat. Jill turned her face toward the tracks that had driven the Spryte across snow and ice. The razor sharp steel blades, designed to penetrate hard packed snow and ice, were still spinning. They would slash her face into chopped blood-and-bone salad in seconds, if she allowed it.

Alice was jolted into consciousness at the sight. She grabbed Jill’s wrists, and struggled to pull the trooper’s hands off her neck. The pressure was making flickers appear before her eyes, cutting off her breath.

Then something occurred to her.

I’m fighting the wrong thing…

She let go of Jill’s wrists, resisting only with her lower body, reaching downward instead…

Jill Valentine chortled, certain she’d won now. She started to force Alice into the blades. They were less than an inch away…