'Guess I'll go check that out – wanna come with?'Ha ha,' Mikhail whispered. 'Be careful.'Carlos nodded. 'Try to get some sleep. If anyoneshows up, tell them I'll be right back.'
Mikhail was already slipping back into a doze.'Sure,' he mumbled.Carlos checked Mikhail's rifle to make sure it wasloaded, and he placed it next to the padded bench,within easy reach. He hunted around for something elseto say, some words of reassurance, and finally justturned and walked to the exit. Mikhail wasn't stupid, heknew what the stakes were.
His life, among other things.
Carlos took a deep breath and opened the door, pray-ing that the gas station wasn't too far away.
Chan was gone, and not only was there no way to tell where he was headed but Nicholai had missed him by bare minutes. The computer he'd apparently made his report from was still warm, the glass of the monitor crackling with static electricity. Nicholai impulsively scooped up the monitor and threw it across the room, but wasn't satisfied with its mundane explosion of cheap plastic casing and glass. He wanted blood. If Chan came back to the office, Nicholai would beat him severely before ending his life. He paced the small, heavily littered office, fuming.
He teases me with his ignorance. He is so stupid, so oblivious, how can he be so inferior and still be alive?
Nicholai knew that the thought wasn't strictly rational, but he was furious with Chan. Davis Chan didn't de- serve to be a Watchdog, he didn't deserve to live. Gradually, Nicholai took hold of himself, breathing deeply, forcing himself to count to a hundred by twos. It was still early in the game. Besides, Nicholai's plan de-pended on having information that Umbrella wanted and if he meant to steal that information, he had to allow some time for the other Watchdogs to collect it. The daily field reports were a bare summary of condi-tions and body count, used as much as a check-in as anything else; the real stuff was being stored on disk, transcribed from found documents or picked out of someone else's files, only downloaded by cell if the Watchdog considered it of critical importance.
And… while I'm waiting, I can check in with my comrades at the trolley.
Nicholai stopped pacing, struck by the realization that he had truly enjoyed his deception of Carlos and Mikhail. Somehow, that there were two of them had turned it into a more exciting game. Would they suspect him? What were they saying about his sudden depar-ture? What did they think of him?
And what would it be like to witness Mikhail's slow, excruciating loss of life, watch him lose his capacity for reason as the young protagonist Carlos vainly strug-gles to beat the odds? Nicholai could disable the bell mechanism once they reached the clock tower… per-haps bravely volunteer to seek out the hospital, to bring back supplies… Nicholai laughed suddenly, a harsh barking sound in the stillness of the room. He had to kill Dr. Aquino the scientist who was supposed to report in from the hospital, the one working with the vaccine anyway, and he knew that Aquino had been ordered to see to the hospital's destruction before leaving Raccoon, to elimi-nate trace evidence from his research. And there was also a specific species of organic stored at the hospital that Umbrella had decided to abandon, the Hunter Gamma series, so blowing up the hospital meant two objectives met for the price of one. It seemed that the HGs weren't cost effective, al-though there had been serious disagreement within the administration about whether or not to destroy the pro-totypes. If Nicholai could lure Carlos into combat with one of them, he would have some valuable information of his own to sell… and he, too, would be meeting more than one objective with a single action. It all came together, there was a kind of symmetry to it all. He'd drop me entire scheme if anything went wrong, of course, or if he found it wouldn't mesh with his plans. He wasn't an idiot, but having a project to fill his downtime would keep him from becoming overly frustrated. Nicholai turned and started for the door, amused by his own indulgence. Raccoon City was like some haunted kingdom where he was ruler, able to do as he wished – anything he wished. Lie, murder, bathe in the glory of another man's defeat. It was all his for the tak-ing, and with a payoff at the end. He felt like himself again. It was time to play.
THIRTEEN
JILL HAD FINALLY DECIDED TO OPEN THE metal shutter and make a break for it when she heard shots outside, the high-pitched chatter of an assault rifle. To say she was relieved was an understatement; the relentless thumping of the mostly dead outside had been eating at her nerves, almost tempting her to shoot herself, just so she wouldn't have to hear it anymore
– and now, in a matter of seconds, it was quiet onceagain.She moved quickly to the side door in the garage,ducking beneath a disemboweled red compact on a liftand pressing her ear to the cold metal. All was silent,the virus carriers surely dead…Bam-bam-bam!Jill jerked back as someone hammered on the door,her heart keeping time.
'Hey, is somebody in there? The zombies are dead, you can open up now!'
No mistaking the accent; it was Carlos Oliveira. Re-lieved, Jill turned the lock, announcing herself as she threw the door open.
'Carlos, it's Jill Valentine.'
She was happy to see him, but the look on his face was so sincerely elated that she felt almost shy sud-denly. She moved back from the door so he could step inside.
'I'm so glad you're okay, when you weren't at the trolley, I thought…' Carlos trailed off, his 'thought' obvious enough. 'Anyway, it's really good to see you again.'
His apparently serious concern for her was a sur-prise, and she was uncertain how to respond – irrita-tion, that she was being patronized? She didn't feel irritated. Having someone interested in her well-being, particularly considering the kind of chaos they were in, was – well, kind of nice.
The fact that that someone is tall, dark, and hand-some isn't such a terrible thing, either, hmm? Jill in-stantly clamped down on the thought, cutting it short. True or not, they were in a survival situation; they could make eyes at each other later, if they made it out alive. Carlos didn't seem to notice her slight discomfort.
'So, what are you doing here?' Jill gave him a half smile. 'I got sidetracked. Don't suppose you saw Frankenstein's monster wandering around out there?' Carlos frowned. 'You saw him again?' 'Not him, it. It's called a Tyrant, if it's what I think it is – or some variation, anyway. Bio-synthetic, ex-tremely strong, and very hard to kill. And it appears Umbrella figured out how to program it for a specific task – in this case, killing me.' Carlos gazed at her skeptically. 'Why you?' 'Long story. The short answer is, I know too much. Anyway, I was hiding here, but…' Carlos finished for her. 'But a gang of zombies showed up, making it hard for you to leave. Gotcha.' Jill nodded. 'What about you? You said you made it to the trolley, what you doing here?' 'I ran into two other U.B.C.S. guys. One of mem got shot, he's still alive but not doing so great Mikhail. Nicholai – that's the other one – thought he knew where to get some explosives, so Mikhail and I went to the trolley to wait for him. It turns out that there's an evac on standby, if we can get to the clock tower and ring the bells. We ring, helicopters come.'
He noticed Jill's expression and shrugged, grinning.
'Yeah, I know. It's some kind of computer signal, I don't know how it works. Great news, except to get the trolley running we're going to need a couple of things – a power cable and one of those old-fashioned electrical fuses, to start with. Mikhail told me there was a repair shop over here; he's one of the platoon leaders, he got a good look at a map before we landed…'
Carlos frowned, then nodded to himself as if he'd solved some puzzle. 'Nicholai must have seen a map, too, that would explain why he didn't need directions.' 'Carlos, Mikhail, Nicholai – Umbrella doesn't dis-criminate based on nationality, does it?' Jill made the joke offhandedly, mostly to cover a deepening sense of unease. She thought Carlos was decent at heart, but two more Umbrella soldiers, one of them a platoon leader – what were the odds that all three were stand-up guys who had been misled by their employer? Um-brella was the enemy, she couldn't lose focus of that. Carlos was already walking away, his attention fixed on the raised red car. 'If they were doing any electrical checks, there should be… there, that's what I'm look-ing for!'
It seemed that Carlos had seen the cable he wanted in the tangle of cords and wires spilling out from under the hood, some of them hooked to machines Jill didn't recognize, some just trailing on the oily ce-ment. 'Careful,' Jill said, moving to join him as he reached up and grabbed one of the cables, dark green. She had an instinctive mistrust of electrical equipment and vaguely believed that people who messed around with wires were just asking to be electrocuted. 'No problem,' Carlos said easily. 'Only a real ba-boso would leave any of these hooked up to the…'
Crack! An orange-white spark spat out from one of the trail-ing wires, loud and bright and as explosive as a gun-shot. Before Jill could draw breath, the cement floor was on fire – no gradual build, no sense of expansion, it was just suddenly and completely ablaze, the flames two, three feet high and rising. 'This way!' Jill shouted, running toward the open door that led into the office, the oil-fed fire blasting heat against her bare skin, when it hits the car's gas tank it's going to blow, we gotta get out of here…
