Chapter Three
The Hive
After finding a vehicle outside Washington D.C. I headed to Raccoon City where the rest of Umbrella was underground waiting at the Hive. The first thing done was to enter the Spencer mansion on the outskirts of Raccoon City away from the explosion and the rest of the infected city. We had already cleared the area and it wasn't hard to exterminate the rest of the undead along the way.
I sat before a bank of monitors showing live satellite feeds from around the world. Surrounded by high-tech equipment lit by fluorescent lights hanging overhead, but beyond the lights, the uneven stone features of a large natural cavern were hidden in shadowy gloom. The cavern's cool damp air suited me. The T-virus surging through my system often made me feel too warm, almost feverish, and I felt more comfortable here. I was pleased by what I saw on the monitors. Everything was going precisely according to—One of the satellite feeds was replaced by the image of an Asian man in his mid-thirties. I nodded. "Commander Lee." Lee nodded back, then called over his shoulder. "Si, I have Chairman Wesker for you." Lee stepped away from the screen, and Alexander Isaacs appeared. I, as always, kept my face impassive, but inside I was irritated by this interruption. "Dr. Isaacs," I said by way of greeting. Isaacs gave me a cat-that-ate-the-canary smile. "Look what I found on the roadside." A new image replaced Isaacs' face: Alice being pulled behind an Umbrella transport vehicle, an army of Undead following close behind her. I stared, unable to believe what I was seeing. "Impossible," I said. Isaacs reappeared on the monitor. "It would appear your mission to Washington was less successful than you made out. I hope you didn't leave any other loose ends." Despite the cavern's coolness, my temperature began to rise, and I felt a familiar itching all over my body which indicated my control over the T-virus was slipping. I'd never been able to fully master it, but recently it had begun to feel as if the virus was fighting me for control of my own body, as if it had a mind of its own. A ludicrous notion, I knew, but it was one I couldn't easily dismiss. I concentrated on maintaining my body's cellular stability as Isaacs continued speaking. And there's something else. I think she knows about the airborne antivirus."
"How could that be? Only the High Command has that information."
"I don't know. Yet. But we caught her on the road to Raccoon City. Why else would she be headed there?"
"If she knows about the antivirus, there may be others."
"Yes. Raise the security level at the Hive to maximum. No one in or out. I'll let you know when she talks." Isaacs ceased transmission and the monitor screen went blank. I caught a crimson flicker of light out of the corner of my eye, and I turned to see the Red Queen's holographic image floating in the air next to me. "You heard him. Security level to maximum."
"As you wish," the Red Queen said. I turned in my chair to face two cryostasis tanks occupying a commanding position in the center of the room. Inside each tank was the shadowy figure of an umbrella operative, and a single wheelchair sat in front.
"Should we wake them?" I asked the red bitch. "My instructions are to do so only in the greatest of emergencies." I considered the matter. Alice still lived, but she no longer had her powers, and she was Isaacs' captive. I had no illusions, though. I knew that as long as she was alive, she was still a threat. But it seemed that threat was contained—for the moment. "Very well. We'll wait."
Later that day, I watched Alice's progress on a monitor via satellite feed. Out of all the problems I'd been forced to deal with over the last decade—Dania Cardona being only the latest in a long line of them—Alice was the most persistent. I admired her, but in the way a hunter admires the capabilities of highly dangerous prey. She was coming for me, I knew that, but I wasn't afraid. I would bring her down, just as I had Dania and all the others. I was actually looking forward to a final reckoning with her. It was only a matter of time now. As if reading my mind, the Red Queen appeared. "Target is seventy-two miles and closing," she said. I thought I detected a subtle hint of excitement in the Red Queen's voice, but I knew that was impossible. She was an artificial intelligence, a staggeringly complex arrangement of hardware and software, one of the most advanced on the planet before the T-virus outbreak. But in the end, she was just a machine, and she possessed no true thoughts or feelings of her own. Although sometimes I wonder... "Lock down the Hive," I ordered. "Prepare for defensive measures. And alert our operative in Raccoon City."
I heard footsteps, someone walking toward me, moving silently on the vari-rubber soles of very special boots. Cardona. She'd helped develop the material in her early days working for Umbrella, and while it ranked as one of her lesser achievements during her time in the corporation—it was hideously expensive to produce, so it never caught on—she was still proud of it. It adjusted to virtually any surface or temperature, providing steady footing at all times, and it made no sound, even if you stomped your feet as loudly as you could. It was this latter quality that she relied on now as she moved across the floor of Central Control toward where I sat before a bank of monitor screens. A clone. Yet, the superhuman hearing the T-Virus granted me was more than enough to know where she was at every second.
Dania was middle-aged, short, and on the stout side. Her black hair was threaded with gray, but she didn't bother to color it. Umbrella didn't care about gender, race, sexuality, appearance, or age. They only cared about one thing: results. In that sense, the corporation was the fairest organization she'd ever worked for—even if it was responsible for the destruction of the planet. In the monitor covered by my figure I could see she carried a single weapon, a prototype sonic disruptor that had proven effective against the more powerful mutations created by the T-virus. And as I was among the strongest of T-virus mutants, she hoped the weapon—which resembled a silver handgun with a parabolic reflector attached to the muzzle—would prove equally effective against me. She'd contributed to the device's design, of course, just as she'd contributed one way or another to just about every advance Umbrella had made in the last twenty years, whether technological or biological.
But had she gotten recognition for her accomplishments? A promotion, or even a simple pat on the back, along with an appreciative 'You do good work, Dania'? No. Others got the credit and accolades. And more, they got the power, moving up in Umbrella's hierarchy, while Dania was left to toil anonymously in a lab. It was how the company worked. That part didn't bother me at all. It was always a means to an end. The T-virus outbreak had changed that, though. As civilization began to collapse, opportunities presented themselves. Factions emerged within the corporation and internal power struggles began. Umbrella spent as much time dealing with these insurrections as they did dealing with the outer world as everything turned to chaos. Dania, like others, decided to take advantage of that chaos to advance her position within the corporation.
Unlike those others, however, she was a scientific genius—if she did say so herself—and she was able to use her intelligence to modify existing Umbrella tech to develop new innovations in her campaign to seize as much power as she could. And in the process she'd discovered something about herself. She was as ruthless as any Umbrella employee, if not more so. She'd done well over the years, working quietly and behind the scenes at first, eventually becoming more confident until she fully emerged from the shadows to take her place as one of the major players in Umbrella's civil war. She'd done well, too, and with each rival she defeated, she gained new followers, until she'd reached the point where she could challenge my position. She'd had the resources to mount an attack on me in D.C., and despite appearances—and the unexpected interference from Project Alice—it had turned out exactly as she'd planned. And now here she was, only moments away from eliminating me and taking my place.
She'd be the one to bring Umbrella's ultimate plan to fruition, and she'd be the one to help usher in the new age that would follow. She grinned. Not bad for a one-time lab rat. Cardona had another reason for wanting to see me destroyed. Despite appearances, I was no longer human, and while I'd employed my mutant abilities in Umbrella's service, the future the corporation hoped to build had no place for such aberrations. I knew that. I had a back up plan for it too. Umbrella would have to destroy me sooner or later. She just intended to speed up the process a bit, that's all. As she drew closer to me, she found herself holding her breath. I see she'd taken precautions to prevent the all-seeing Red Queen from interfering and I could no longer hear it either. Around her right wrist she wore a masker, a device designed—by her, of course—to conceal the wearer from all electronic detection. The masker only jammed electronic signals; it didn't render the wearer literally invisible to anyone who might be present physically—and since it required a shitload of power to run, its battery charge lasted only a couple minutes at most. But that was okay.
She didn't need it to work longer than that. Her heart beat faster the closer she came to me, and it sounded so loud that I wouldn't be surprised if she was able to hear it, too. But I continued sitting before the bank of monitors, posture ramrod-straight as always, body so still he might have been a wax figure instead of a living being. It was that stillness of me which made her skin crawl whenever she was around me in the past. It was so inhuman, like a coiled snake that at first glance appeared to be sleeping but was instead watching your every move, waiting to see if you were foolish enough to come within striking distance. She was still holding her breath as she stepped up behind me. She raised the sonic disruptor, pointed the parabolic reflector at the back of my head, and fired. To her it had appeared she had won. My head being torn apart by sonic waves and reduced to globs of red jelly that splattered onto the computer monitors and control console. She deactivated the sonic disruptor and lowered the weapon to her side. Physically, Dania's stomach turned at the sight of the bloody gobbets smeared across the electronic equipment, but emotionally she was elated. She'd done it. She had killed me.
She'd defeated the vaunted Albert Wesker, Umbrella's best asset.
Or so she thought…
Now she would take my place and—Her instincts had screamed a warning then. Something was wrong, I knew she could feel it, even if she couldn't tell what... Dania Cardona was moving slowly looking back over her shoulders at the monitors.
And then it came to her. My headless body still sat in the chair, my hands resting on the console. My body should've gone limp, slumped forward, or perhaps slid sideways out of the chair and fallen to the floor. And the neck should be a ragged stump that gushed blood, but flesh had sealed over the wound, leaving it smooth and undamaged.
"Oh no," Dania whispered.
My headless body then stood and turned toward her. In a blur, my right hand snatched the sonic disruptor from her with blinding speed, and crushed it as easily as if it had been made of balsa wood. My hand opened, allowing the pieces of the shattered weapon to fall to the floor. And then, impossibly, I began to speak. "I have complete control over my body, Dania. Did you really think I'd be foolish enough to keep my brain somewhere it was so easy to get at? It is spread throughout my entire body, and I've created multiple chemical backups of my memory that are stored in different organs. I am almost impossible to kill." My voice was muffled somewhat, and it seemed to be coming from the center of my body. A second later, Dania learned why when my hand unzipped the front of his black uniform to reveal a vertical seam running from my throat to my navel. It was, Dania realized with sick horror, a large mouth, and it was lined with sharp white teeth. "I have to hand it to you, Dania. Your plan was quite devious. The attack on me in D.C. was led by a clone, wasn't it? The entire purpose of the attack was to lull me into thinking you were dead so you could assassinate me here in the Hive. It might've worked, too—if I were human. But since I'm not..." Before Dania could so much as take a step backward, I lunged toward her and grabbed her by the shoulders. My grip was like iron to a mere human, and she couldn't pull free. And then I slowly began to pull her toward the nightmarish obscenity of a mouth that gaped wide in my chest. "You took my head," I said. "I think it is only fitting that I take yours in return." Dania started to scream, but then I yanked her forward and shoved her head into his chest-mouth. The teeth sliced into her neck with all the sharpness and efficiency of a guillotine blade, and the last thought she had before she died was, I hope I give you indigestion, you bastard. And then she was gone. Once I assimilated my prey their memories were mine.
Sometime later, I checked on the survivors' preparations atop the Peak city they had made over the buildings in Raccoon City way above the ground via a live satellite feed. They didn't stand a chance in hell of winning, of course, but I found their determination to defend their pathetic excuse for a home amusing. I was even more amused to see that Alice had gotten drawn into helping them. Whether enhanced by the T-virus or not, she was a magnificent warrior. Too bad she allowed sentiment to get in the way of doing what needed to be done. Empathy was a weakness, and I was glad I possessed none. Even if I had slept with women in the past for pleasure. Not only did it make me more efficient at my job, it made life so much simpler.
After ingesting Dania's head, I had devoured the rest of her body. Waste not, want not. Her genetic material had allowed me to regrow a new head of my own, and more, it had helped stabilize my cellular structure... for the time being. I had lied to Dania when I'd said I was in complete control of my body. In truth, I was at constant war with it, the T-virus that gave me this enhanced abilities always threatening to take control. I had to be very careful about using my metamorphic capabilities, which had grown considerably over the years, or else I might lose molecular cohesion entirely. I supposed I could use the same antidote I'd given Alice if I wished to return my body to its human state—assuming that was possible by this point—but I had no desire to do so. I liked the power the T-virus had granted me, and besides, what was life without a little risk? I thought I'd reabsorbed all the bits and pieces of my own head that Dania had splattered onto the control console, but looking at it now, I saw a tiny glob of brain matter. I scooped it up on my index finger, licked it off with a long, slender tongue that looked like a serpent's, and then returned my attention to my work. I flipped a switch on the panel to open a comm channel to Isaacs' transport. Time for a chat with the good doctor. A second later, the image of the Peak buildings vanished from the monitor, and I found myself looking at Isaacs. The man was pale and sweaty, as if he were sick, or perhaps fighting off some End of infection. "So... how is the interrogation going?" I asked. Isaacs glared at me, and I smiled slightly before going on. "It seems you let her slip through your fingers." I noticed the patch of Nu-Skin on the stump where Isaacs' hand had been. "What remains of them," I added. Isaacs' face turned bright red with fury. "Don't forget who you're talking to!" he snapped. "Where is she?"
"The settlement in Raccoon City. It seems she's preparing for a fight."
"Good. I'll be there in an hour." Isaacs broke the connection, and the monitor screen went black for a second before resuming the satellite feed of the Peak. So Alice and her friends had more time to prepare, and Isaacs was hardly in top condition. The situation had suddenly become very interesting. I leaned back on the chair, focused my gaze on the monitor, and waited for the show to begin.