big park, but maybe that was the only way to get to the Umbrella facility; he couldn't imagine Jill scaling a wall of cars with a bad shoulder, and crawling through them was too dangerous…… but you're assuming she even made it this far, a nagging little voice whispered. Maybe she's already dead, maybe the Nemesis came for her, orNicholai, or…
Carlos cocked his head to one side, frowning, his thoughts disturbed by a distant sound. Shots? Possibly, but the light mist that was falling was having a dampen-ing effect, distorting and muffling noises. He couldn't even be sure from which direction the sound had come… but he was suddenly even more frantic to find Jill than before.
'After all I went through to get that vaccine, you bet-ter not get yourself killed,' he murmured lightly, but it was too close to the truth to be funny. He had to do something, now.
Carlos stared at the wall of cars for another moment, picking what appeared to be the most stable route, over a minivan and two compact cars. He took as deep a breath as he was able to manage, mentally crossed his fingers, and started to climb.
TWENTY-FIVE
'NO, LISTEN, YOU GOTTA LISTEN -I DON'T know anything, you don't want to do this. They've had me doing reports on water and soil samples, that's it, I'm no threat to you! I swear!'
Foster was working himself into a froth, and Nicholai decided that making a man wait for his death, particularly such a sad little man, was cruel. The researcher was al-ready cowering in the corner, pressed against the door in the northeast corner of his office, his pinched, ratty fea-tures flushed and sweaty. It had taken Nicholai less than five minutes to find him once he'd reached the facility. '… and I'll just leave, okay?' Foster was still bab-bling. 'I'll be gone and you'll never hear from me again, swear to God, why do you want to kill me, I'm nobody. Tell me what you want and I'll do it, whatever it is, talk to me, man, okay? Let's just talk, okay?'
Nicholai suddenly realized that he was just staring at Foster, as if he'd been lulled into a trance by the rise and fall of the man's hysteria. It had been an endless day in a series of them… but as much as he wanted to get out, to be done with the entire operation, Nicholai felt oddly compelled to say something.
'There's nothing personal in this, I'm sure you un-derstand,' Nicholai said. 'It's about money… or it was at the beginning, but things are different now.' Foster nodded quickly, eyes wide. 'Yeah, sure they are, different.'
Now that he'd started, Nicholai found he couldn't stop. It suddenly seemed important for someone else to understand what he'd gone through, what he was still up against – even if it was only someone like Foster.
'The money is still most of it, of course. But after I got here, after Wersbowski, I started to feel like I had come to a very special place. I felt… I felt that things were finally becoming the way they were supposed to be. The way my life should have been all along. Ex-treme circumstances, you see?'
Foster bobbed his head again but wisely said nothing.
'But then Carlos tricked me; he couldn't have died in the explosion, because Jill received the antidote. And I'm starting to think that she's the cause, that things changed because of her.' As he spoke, he sensed the truth of it, as though a light was dawning in his mind's
eye. It was true, talking helped.
'Even at the beginning, she ruined the setup I had with Carlos and Mikhail. Manipulative, controlling woman, there are a lot of them like that. She probably slept with both of them, too. Seduced them.' 'Bitches, all of 'em,' Foster sincerely agreed. 'Then she got sick and sent Carlos to steal the vac-cine. I'm not excusing his part in all of this, not at all, but there's something about her… it's like her pres-ence alters things, makes everything wrong somehow. I don't even think she's dead now. If a seeker can't kill her, a mutant certainly can't.'
Nicholai stood silently, lost in thought for a moment. He'd never been a superstitious man, but things really were different. Jill Valentine was…
… a woman, she's just a woman and you 're not think-ing clearly, haven't been for days.
Nicholai blinked, and the thought was gone, and Foster was still in the corner, watching him with an ex- pression of cautious terror. As though he thought Nicholai was crazy. Nicholai felt a rush of hatred for the little man, for trying to trick him, telling him to talk and then judging him for it. He deserved to die, as much as any of them. 'I'm not crazy,' Nicholai shouted angrily, 'and I'm done talking about this! You're the last one, after you it's over and that's just the way things are, so be a man and accept it! '
Three rounds, a burst of tat tat tat through one of Ter-ence Foster's pleading green eyes, and the researcher's head snapped back, blood splashing the door he leaned against, his body collapsing lifeless to the cold floor. Nicholai felt nothing. The last Watchdog, dead, and there was no sense of accomplishment, no feeling of conquest. Just another corpse on the floor in front of him and a deeply felt desire to get out of Raccoon, where things had gone so sour. Nicholai shook his head, his heart heavy, and started to search the office for Foster's data.
Jill stood in front of the narrow bridge that con-nected Memorial Park's back gate to the second floor of the Umbrella facility, suspended over what had to be a marsh or swamp, from the gassy-mud smell. It was too dark to tell by looking, but the odor was unmistak-able – and so were the fresh bootprints that led from where she stood to the door on the opposite side. As she'd expected, Nicholai was here.
Wonderful. What a treat.
Nicholai aside, she was glad to have found the bridge; she'd been concerned that the park would turn out to be a dead end and that she'd have to backtrack. The bridge also conveniently led to the second floor; it made sense that the offices and control rooms – hope-fully at least one of them would have a transmitter sys-tem – would be on the second floor of the two-story building, the first floor being where the water treatment took place. Assuming Umbrella had bothered with a sensible layout, she should be able to get in and out easily enough. If there was no radio, she'd circle around to the front of the building's first floor and see about the roads. She carefully edged out onto the wood-and-metal span, breathing deeply, focusing herself as she reached for the low wood railing to steady herself. Dealing with Umbrella's creatures, bred or created, took skill and concentration, but facing a human adversary took more than that; people were much less predictable than ani-mals, and if she meant to keep away from Nicholai, she had to be as fully alert as possible, her intuition and awareness jacked up to feel an oncoming attack -
– like now.
Jill froze halfway across the bridge, feeling for the Beretta's safety with her thumb, something was very wrong but she couldn't tell… Ka thud! Behind her. Jill spun, heart racing, and saw the Nemesis stand-ing twenty feet away, its freakish body hideously transformed by fire and buckshot. Its chest and arms were bare, giving her a clear look at how the waving tentacles were attached, sprouting from its upper back and shoulders. Much of its skin had burned off, re-vealing fibrous red muscle tissue in patches of ashy black. 'Starsss,' it rumbled, limping forward a step, and she saw that much of its lower right side was mangled from where she'd hit it with the grenade gun. The flesh from the bottom of its rib cage to about midthigh looked like burned spaghetti, smashed and shredded, but she doubted very much that it felt pain, and she had few illusions about its strength being overly affected. In an instant, her adrenaline-pumped mind flashed through a hundred options and latched on to her best bet. The ledge at the clock tower. Carlos had pushed it right off, but it had been blinded, distracted…
… distract this, freak!
She opened fire, aiming at the most obvious part of its deformed face, its improbably white teeth – and saw at least two shots shatter through the eerie grin, pale splinters exploding out in a spray.
The S.T.A.R.S. killer howled, its flesh tentacles spreading like a cape behind it, framing the beast in a coiling, quivering sunburst.
– not in pain, maybe, but it feels something
– GO NOW!
Jill continued to fire as she ran for it, her instincts screaming at her to run the other way, her logic remind-ing her that she couldn't possibly run fast enough. The Nemesis was still howling when Jill smashed into it, pushing up and out to smack into its chest the way Carlos had, inwardly cringing at the feel of its skin against her palms, wet, gritty, cold -
– and it staggered backwards, landing heavily at the very edge of the bridge, inches from empty space. Its weight and mass worked for Jill as she'd prayed it would, she could hear the explosive crack of the weath-ered board beneath its heels, the side rail crunching as the giant fell against the slats…… but two, three of the twisting tentacles were grab-bing at the undamaged railing on the other side, the reeling Nemesis putting its hands out, struggling to re-gain its balance. Jill jumped, twisting, knowing that she couldn't let it stand up again, and landed both feet against its ravaged abdomen, kicking off from the monster's body with all of her strength. She fell solidly to the wood planking, involuntarily crying out in pain as her wounded shoulder absorbed much of the impact, but the
