they needed to know who and why.
“Rebecca,” he said again, and this time she turned, unashamed of the tears she wiped away. She blinked up at him.
“Did I hear you firing a few minutes ago?” she asked.
Billy nodded, tried a smile but it didn't come off. “Monster bug. You?”
“Dog,” she said, and wiped away a last tear. “And ... and someone I used to know.”
He shifted uncomfortably, both of them silent for a beat. Then she sighed, pushed her bangs off her forehead. “Tell me you found the keys,” she said.
“Something like that,” he said, hefting the shotgun.
“Won't work,” she said, and sighed again. “It has magnetic bolts, like a bank vault or something.”
“On a passenger train?” Billy asked.
Rebecca shrugged. “It's privately owned. Umbrella.”
The pharmaceutical company. Between the court-martial and sentencing, Billy hadn't given much thought to where he was headed for execution, but now he remembered—Raccoon City, the closest thing this area had to a metropolis, was where the megacorporation had originally set up shop.
“They have their own train?”
She nodded. “Umbrella's all over around here. Offices, medical research, laboratories ...“
“We heard today about the Arklay lab . . . and we 're being sent in to check it out next week.' Raccoon forest, Raccoon City itself, was nestled in the Arklay mountains.
Rebecca's thoughts seemed to be turning in the same direction. “You don't think—“
“I don't know,” Billy said. “And right now, it doesn't matter, anyway. We still have to get through that door.”
She started to turn back toward the front of the train, then seemed to think better of it, perhaps not wanting to see her friend. She looked at the floor, spoke in a low voice.
“There's a body up by the door, a man holding a key,” she said. “Maybe it opens something useful”
“Wait here a sec,” Billy said. He stepped past her and moved forward, stopping at the corridor's end. The decrepit corpse of a train worker was huddled by the locked door, the body she'd been bent over at their first meeting. Sure enough, he had a metal key in one stiff hand. Billy pried it free, held it up in the low light. The small tag attached to it read, dining car.
That's wonderfully helpful, thank you so much. He set it aside, then spent a minute going through the man's coat, coining up with a pack of cards and a handful of lint-covered breath mints in one front pocket . . . And in the other, a few more keys on a small ring. Two were unlabeled, but a third had conductor's etched into the metal. Billy pocketed them, and after a moment's thought, he knelt and carefully removed the man's coat, grimacing at the cold, spongy feel of his flesh. The poor guy didn't appear to have caught the virus, but person or persons unknown had worked him over with their teeth; he was a mess, his face and hands missing large, ragged chunks of skin and muscle.
Billy walked back to where Rebecca stood, pausing to cover the dead S.T.A.R.S. team member with the coat. It only concealed his face and upper body, but he figured anything was an improvement, for the girl's sake. She nodded gratefully at him as he approached, but said nothing.
“The key you saw was for the dining car, which we've already sampled,” he said. He pulled the ringed set out of his pocket. “But these might open something.”
They were standing near the door labeled as the conductor's office. Billy held up the marked key. With a nod from Rebecca, he slid the key into the lock; it turned easily. He readied his weapon and pushed the door open, ready to fire at anything that didn't identify itself in their first second of contact.
There was no one. Billy relaxed slightly, stepping into the office. Rebecca waited in the doorway, her weapon also drawn, looking down at a small desk littered with papers. She rustled through them as Billy threw the rest of the tiny cabin.
“Schedules, letters . .. Here's something called a 'Hookshot Operator Manual,' ” Rebecca said. “Memos from maintenance, a note about a ring lock, whatever that is, kitchen order forms ...“”
Billy opened the closet while she continued to rattle off the desk's clutter. A couple of signs, postcards and notes tacked to the inside of the door, ledgers, a locked briefcase. Billy picked up the briefcase, shook it. Something inside rattled, but it was very light; something like a keycard, perhaps?
Not likely, but he could always hope.
He examined the lock, frowning. There was no keyhole, though there was an indentation on the front, in the shape of a circle. He jiggled the handle. It was solidly locked. He could probably take the thing apart, but it was well made, it would take time they couldn't spare ...
“A minute ago, you said something about a ring lock?” He asked.
Rebecca pushed a few papers aside. “Ah . . . Here. It's just a handwritten note, says, 'Means of access in case, scattered ring lock, two parts.' ”
In case of what? He started to shrug, then felt a flush of excitement. In case. The card was in the case, he could feel it. He looked closer at the lock, suddenly remembering the unusual silver ring he'd
found upstairs, before his run-in with the scorpion-thing. The indentation on the lock was notched like the ring had been.
But the note says two parts, and—
“Hey, I found a ring, at the back of the train,” Rebecca said. Billy looked up as Rebecca pulled a gold ring from her index finger, knowing even before she handed it over that it was the second part.
“I think we have a winner,” Billy said, actually smiling, a real smile for the first time since . .. since he didn't know when. There would be a radio in the engineer's compartment, and controls, and maybe a map for how the hell to get out of the woods.
They were almost out of this, he was sure of it.
He had no idea.
Someone had actually started the goddamn train. There was a chance that one of the workers was still alive, but Wesker figured it more likely that one of the mush-brain carriers had fallen into the controls. In any event, the 'copters's pilot hadn't even hesitated, had only changed the ETA by a few moments.
The timing was lucky; unstopped, the train would head straight for the training facility, would crash if it was unmanned, and the last thing they needed was to draw attention to any of the infected lockdown areas.
“We're deploying now, over.”
Wesker waited. He could hear the sound of the helicopter in the background, could even hear the men's drop lines whipping in the wind. He half wished he was there, about to step onto the doomed train as it sped through the storming night, his weapon drawn, the walking diseased waiting to be laid to rest in a blast of blood and bone ...
Birkin interrupted the pleasant fantasy, his voice and manner anxious as he reached out to cover the microphone with one pale hand. “We're sure this is the virus, right? I mean, we're not dealing with a hijacking, or ... or a mechanical error, perhaps? I mean, do we know for certain that this team is here to handle the train?”
Wesker sighed internally. William Birkin was an intelligent man, but also obsessively paranoid. His conviction that Umbrella wanted to steal his work was almost childlike in its intensity.
“We're sure,” he answered. “What else could it be, if not the virus?”
Birkin nodded toward the monitor where they'd seen the soldier with the rubbery arm. “Maybe something to do with that.”
Wesker shrugged. It was a mutation, it had to be. Unusual, but hardly impossible. “I doubt it. Don't worry, William. No one at the top knows about your precious G virus.” Not exactly true, but Wesker wasn't in a hand- holding mood. “As for the train ... perhaps the T is simply better at adapting than we thought.”
Birkin wasn't buying, which wasn't a surprise; Wesker didn't, either. If the infection of the train was an accident, he was his Aunt Maddie's teapot, as it were.
“The mansion, the labs, the train ... Who did it?” Birkin asked softly. “And why?”
One of the cleanup pair broke in. “We're down, over.” The background whup-whup sound of the helicopter's blades had been replaced by the rhythmic rumble of a moving train. About goddamn time. “Excellent,” Wesker said, again covering the microphone so that he could answer Birkin.
“That's irrelevant. What matters now is that this doesn't get out, that it doesn't go any further. The train has
