Thanks for the kind reviews, everyone! And as to Xmaster's question...you'll have to read on and find out...

I sat up again when the lights blinked off. A moment later the backup power came on, lighting the hall in a cold blue glow. Reflexively I flicked back to Red Queen, searching her for the cause of the power loss. That's odd, I thought. I was sure that was the only inhibitor. But I could only find complete blackness. It was as if Red wasn't even…
Oh my god.
They had shut down Red Queen? All the pieces clicked together. Why they were going to her Chamber, why she killed the four she trapped in the hallway. But that meant...that meant...
Kchink...kchink...
"I'm on it," the woman said, sheathing the knife she had taken back from me. She turned a corner as I watched, frozenin disbelief. It was too fast! They wouldn't have...
"Hey JD, we got a survivor!" the woman's voice called from nearby. Then softer, "It's okay, we're here to help...you seem to be in some serious"
"Rain, no!" I screamed, lurching forward to my hands and knees. I was too late.A snarl, and Rain yelled in surprise and pain.
"Get offa me...get offa me! Get 'er off me, JD, before I stab her ass!" I hauled myself to my feet by the edge of a box, no easy task with the white wrap holding my ankles together. "Rain, JD, you have to kill her!" I yelled to them. "Shoot her!" I picked up a piece of glass and slashed off the stupid wrap at the knees and dashed a few holes around the new bottom so it would stretch. Then I straightened, tightening my fingers around the shard that poked painfully at my soft palms. I wanted a weapon, no matter how meager.
I staggered into the cleared area where Rain and JD were standing, leaning on boxes along the way and trying to start walking on my own. Rain had her machine gun braced against her shoulder. In front of her, stooped and snarling, stood a female scientist with blood staining her bared teeth. I recognized her. Dr. Amy Diltoven, a bio-technician who had been working on a variation of a drug that would have cured Alzheimer's.
They weren't all bad, I thought sadly as Rain's machine gun thundered and Amy was knocked across the floor into a heap of plastic piping. Then again, they all knew the things the company did. They all knew about the human testing, and they did nothing!
"I told you to shoot her," I said angrily. "Yeah," she said, eyeing me suspiciously. "How'd you know my name?" I opened my mouth to answer, but then paused. There wasn't time for a real explanation. "Some things, you just know," I told her instead. Rain looked at me hard, studying me, then opened her mouth as if to speak.
She was interrupted when three people appeared, a red-haired woman with a leather jacket over some kind of filmy red dress, and two men, one dressed like JD was and one in a grey-blue shirt and a pair of jeans. The man in uniform had a jacket like the one JD had loaned me, with white lettering that read, "Kaplan." Just underneath it was a familiar, red-and-white sigil, like an open umbrella.
I looked down in horror at the jacket I wore, which bore the same sigil, and frantically shrugged it off my shoulders unto the floor. I took a step back in disgust. JD saw, but didn't ask why. He was intelligent, I thought. He understood that I would rather freeze.
"Kaplan" spoke up, saying, "What was all the shooting?" "We found a survivor," Rain answered.
"And you shot him?"
"She was crazed," Rain said coldly, unrolling a bandage. "She bit me."
"She bit you?" I cried, seizing her wrist. A drop of blood from her wound touched my finger, and I had the sudden urge to shriek and shake it off. Tainted blood.
No...a voice in my mind mourned. I didn't want her to die.
The thought should have seemed strange. After all, she had plenty of chance to survive. But it seemed strangely natural, and that frightened me. The only time things like that seemed so natural was when they were going to happen.
"She's gone...she's gone!" JD breathed, kicking aside a piece of plastic piping.
"That's bullshit." Rain finished wrapping her hand as she went to stand by JD's side. "She fell right here," he insisted, "But she's gone!"
The red-curls woman spoke up next, and as her words filled my ears I found her name. Alice. She said, "Look at this. There's blood, but it's not much."
The handcuffed man crouched to look at it. "Looks like it's coagulated," he said.
Matt. His nameis Matt.
Alice agreed, and Matt said disbelievingly, "It's not possible."
"Why not?" JD demanded. Matt straightened and looked him square in the eye, a challenge. "Because blood doesn't do that 'til after you're dead."
"Can we go now?"
Spencer was the speaker, the blue-shirted man I had noticed before.
"We're not going anywhere until the rest of the team get here," said Rain authoritatively. A long pause followed. Alice looked at Kaplan, Kaplan looked at Alice, Spence looked at both of them, and I looked at the floor.
"There's no one else coming," Kaplan said softly. Rain's gaze snapped up and she said, "What the fuck are you talking about?"
JD hushed her. "Wait. Quiet." The sullen rasp of steel on concrete rang behind me. I turned slowly, full of dread, even knowing already exactly what I would see. The man's face was half gone and oozing globs of congealed blood, a soaked lab coat clung to his peeling shoulders, and under his corneas were festering pockets of pus. Dead eyes.
Murmurs of horror and disbelief sounded behind me, and a chorus of words arose that said nothing but steadied the mind in the saying. Stay back...I said stay back...they're behind us...they're everywhere...why aren't they dying? I heard them without hearing. One of the creatures stumbled toward me. I dropped my pathetic piece of glass and finally stood on my own feet, grabbing a metal pipe that rested on the ground. Reflexively I brought up the pipe as it lunged, and the thing's jaws closed around it, wide and drooling. It was a man, in a janitor's uniform.
My stomach lurched. I wrenched the pipe a full 180 degrees around, snapping his neck in a rattle of cracks and pops.The man'sbody went limp and he slumped to the floor.
I had wasted to much time on weakness.The only way out of the Hive, as far as I knew, was now blocked by a horde of human viruses. It sunk in as I swung the pipe like a bat at another creature's skull. I had thought all this...Red Queen going psycho, the T-virus getting out...was an opportunity. Now I realized it wasn't. It was a nightmare, and I was going to have to fight my way out, tooth and nail. The pipe connected and the woman-virus staggered backward. I wound up for another swing. I refuse to give up without a fight.
Behind me I heard something. Kaplan's voice. Numbers.
"Zero four, zero three one, nine six five!" Kaplan finished, turning again to fire on the oncoming dead. For a fraction of a second an image shot across my mind, across my vision. JD's face, hands, neck, torn and bloody, his eyes marred by the white sores of a T-virus victim.
"No! Don't open it!" I screamed, hurling myself toward him. My body crashed into his and he stumbled, but too late. The elevator door swung open, and what seemed a hundred hands wrapped around him, insisting, unshakably pulling him into the writhing mass of bodies. Bodies with teeth, and nails, and insatiable, inhuman hunger.
Rain yelled desperately to JD, "Grab my hand, man! Come on!" "Don't let go!" JD begged. "Don't let go!" Rain didn't let go. She was bitten, and her fingers released of their own accord. "JD!" she yelled, desperately reaching for him. Heart wrenchingly, he called back to her. "Rain!" he begged. And once more, desperate. "RAIN!" he howled, before he disappeared foreverinto the mass of arms like vicious vines.
Wordless screams of pain rang in my ears, but I blocked them out, and I wrapped an arm around Rain to pull her away. I was glad her clothes stood between my skin and hers. Already the searing grief and horror that I felt from her choked me. A phrase came, unbidden, and echoed and re-echoed in my mind. The first of our number to die. True, One, the Medic and the two young ones who I knew nothing of had fallen to Red's lasers, but I had never seen them, never seen their faces. JD had helped me. He gave me his jacket.
The first of our number to die. But not the last.
Sometimes those revelations would shock me or startle me. Sometimes I had to get it two or three times before I could believe it. This one did not startle me. I knew the first time that it was true. And in that, my heart was crushed.
I staggered after the "Us" I had found myself bound to, in mourning in my own way.For Amy, as well as JD.