Alice found herself wandering around some kind of kennel. Why did they have a kennel underground? Was it for people who lived here that wanted to adopt puppies? Were they rent-a-dogs? Guard dogs? Let's-conduct-horrific-experiments-on-these-innocent-babies dogs? She wanted to stop and rummage around, maybe figure it out, but more pressing was the need to find Rain. And the others, of course, but mainly Rain.
And Matt. The idiot had mumbled something about splitting up to cover more ground before separating away from Alice. If he'd stuck around for longer than two seconds she would have pointed out the fact that they appeared to be inside of an actual factual horror movie and splitting up usually ended very terribly in those, but he was almost frantic in his haste to get away from her. She briefly wondered if she had some B.O. going on before remembering she'd started this whole mess in the shower.
The kennel doors were all in varying stages of broken. Some were hanging loose on their hinges; others had had the wire mesh in the center simply torn open from the inside (with blood staining the wires). It was very alarming, making Alice wonder if a poor little puppy or two was limping around hurt. She forced the mental images out of her head, afraid that Sarah McLachlan would begin playing directly inside of her skull, and then it'd be impossible to turn off the waterworks.
She made it to the end of a long corridor filled with damaged kennels and was about to look through the window of some kind of observation room when an incredibly creepy door creaking sound almost made her leap right out of her skin. She turned around, back to where she had come from, and after a moment heard the clicking of animal nails on metal. "Doggy?" she quietly called out.
The doggy appeared in the doorway. "Doggy!" Alice said happily, waving at it. It stopped and looked at her, and its coat appeared slick and wet… and red. "Doggy hurt?" she asked it. "Are you okay, doggy?" The dog approached, and she realized it was emitting a low growl from deep in its throat. "Are you a good boy, or a bad boy?" she asked, feeling her mouth go dry, suspecting she already knew the answer. Its coat wasn't wet: its coat was missing. The word 'degloving' flashed through her head and she had to repress the urge to vomit and scream and cry at the same time. "Oh, you poor baby," she cooed pitifully.
The doggy snapped its jaws, and WERE THOSE TEETH FUCKING RAZOR SHARP?
"Bad boy!" Alice cried out, spinning and running as she heard it begin to run after her. "Very bad! No Scooby Snacks for you!" She saw the door to the observation room was open, and quickly darted it in and pulled the door closed. "Haha, doggy can't open doors," she taunted. The doggy got up and repeatedly attempted to reach Alice through the small glass circle set at her face level in the door.
She turned around and a man with a bloodied face came at her, growling. "Oh FUCK THIS!" she screamed, pelting him in the chest half a dozen times with rapid blows from her fists, before abruptly channeling her inner Trinity and leaping straight up into the air to deliver a mighty kick to his face. He flew backward and into a glass shelving unit that had dozens of jars and vials and beakers and sundry other lab shit equipment. She looked at her hands in wonder and recalled One telling her that her and Spence were glorified doormen to this hellhole. "Fucking BADASS!" she screamed, jumping in the air and doing the kick again against an imaginary attacker. "I know kung fu!"
She looked down at the dead dude — and it was really starting to sink in that these people were capital-D Dead, what with the punishment they could take and Matt's observation about the congealed blood. The name "George Romero" kept running through Alice's mind, and part of her wished her memory would hurry up with the flooding back so she could understand why that name seemed so important.
She reached down and yanked the gun protruding from the man's belt. Security guard, she guessed. Janitors probably didn't go around packing heat. Unless they had to deal with giant rats crawling out of toilets? Ew. She wrinkled her nose at the acrid odor filling the room and realized that a lot of the samples that had broken open must have been dog urine. Sick.
As she stood up, the glass observation window she'd been on the verge of looking through burst inward, the doggy leaping in to attack Alice. She quickly opened the door, slipped through it, and closed it again. "Ha ha, I'm smarter than you!" she again taunted it. "Bad dog!" She turned around and saw his seven identical doggy brothers. "Ha ha, I'm a fucking moron!" she declared in a strained voice, even as the gun in her hand seemed to raise up of its own volition. Part of her didn't want to pull the trigger, wanted to rage and fight and let the doggies do as they would, they were just innocent creatures at heart and didn't ask for this.
The mental image of one of these creatures descending on Rain cut those thoughts off cold, and her gun found their targets almost too easily.
"I'm sorry," she said in a quiet voice, biting her lip hard, the pain keeping the tears from forming. One had expressly left her in charge, and it was her job to get everyone out alive. (Okay, he 100% had not done that, but she now knew that she knew badass combat skills, so it wouldn't be hard to prove to the remaining mercs that she should be put in charge of this epic clusterfuck).
She saw movement out of the corner of her eye — it was that dog again, the one she'd been playing Door Tag with. She knew that there were no more bullets left in the gun without having to bother checking — probably another side effect of her badass combat training. She let it drop to the floor, did some wicked-ass parkour shit off the wall, and caught the bad doggy right in the head, the same as the dead guard.
Alice made her way back out of the kennels, went down the way Matt had gone, and found him struggling with a dead blonde gal. A very familiar-looking gal, at that. (Living dead, not dead dead. Not a necrophilia situation). She picked up a big heavy glass cube, some poor asshole's paperweight or something, and brained her, killing her for the second and final time.
Staring at the poor girl's face, the memory again began playing in her head: the two of them, the creepy graveyard out in the woods, the promise of a virus. "But there's gonna be a price," Memory Alice had warned her.
"Name it," the dead woman said.
Alice was shaken from the memory by the realization that Matt was now cuddling, for lack of a better word, the zombie, the corpse wrapped in his arms. "Uh, what's going on with this?" she asked.
Matt looked up, a bleak look on his face. "This was my sister," he explained. He hesitated for a moment. "Corporations like Umbrella think they're above the law… but they're not." He looked up at Alice, now defiant. "There are hundreds of thousands of us who think the same, all over the world. Some of us provide information, others give their support." He was now staring intently at his dead sister. "Some take more direct action."
"Like you and her," Alice said. Relief silently filled her; she'd like her brain to finish playing back that memory, but she could probably guess how it was gonna play out.
"If your friends had been a little more thorough, they would have seen right through my false ID," he said. "Then all the red flags would have gone off. Quantico, NSA, VICAP, all the rest. There's no way I could have infiltrated the Hive."
"So your sister volunteered," Alice concluded.
There was a subtle shake of his head. "I asked her to go," he said, the guilt palpable. "We needed something concrete. Anything to expose Umbrella to the press. Proof of the research that was going on down here."
"The monsters in that quote-unquote cafeteria, right? And… a virus," Alice said, unsure.
"Yeah, both genetic and viral. Very illegal. My sister was going to smuggle out a sample of the virus they were developing." He wiped his nose, snotting up a little out of sadness.
"How was she going to do that? The security here is fucking insane," Alice pointed out. "Did I mention that One and the others were sliced and diced by fucking lasers?"
Matt shuddered at the mental image, but continued with his story. "She had a contact within the Hive, someone I never met. They had access to security codes, surveillance, everything she needed." They were silent for a moment. "I don't know, maybe she trusted the wrong person. Maybe they set her up, kept the virus for themselves." Alice grimaced. Maybe she wasn't so sure how that memory would play out after all.
"Well… wouldn't she have just been taken into custody then?" she ventured. "Seems like a piss-poor way to handle a leak, to murder the entire facility."
"Do you have any idea how much the T-virus would be worth on the open market?" he countered.
Alice looked back down at the deceased Lisa. "I'm guessing enough money to drown out all the screaming of your victims as you slept at night," she supposed. She looked back at Matt. "I guess you weren't really looking for the other mercs, huh?" He shook his head, and she gave his hand a gentle squeeze. "Hey, it's okay. You wanted closure, I can respect that. I'm sincerely sorry this happened to you, and to her."
"Thanks," Matt said. He took off Lisa's suit-jacket-thing and draped it over her face. "Where to now?"
Alice rubbed her chin in thought. "The whole Hive is probably crawling with zombies," she concluded. "I'm willing to bet they fell back to the Red Queen's chambers. Very few corpses there, and they were all rendered immobile by their deaths."
It was Matt's turn to grimace. "Lasers, you said? Jesus." He shook his head. "I guess we don't have much of a choice, huh?"
"Relax, Matt, I found out I'm a secret badass," Alice said, giving him a cocky grin. "Check THIS shit out." She did the cool air kick thing again, making sure Matt was well out of range. "Pretty cool, right?"
"I, uh, saw your underwear," he said, blushing a little, unable to meet her eyes.
"Grow up, Matty," Alice said, rolling her eyes. "I'm sure they sell women's undergarments at the store right next to the men's ones, and you didn't die of shock then." She hiked her skirt briefly. "BOOGA BOOGA BOOGA!"
"Are you done?" Matt asked.
Alice waited a heartbeat or two, then flashed him one more time. "BOOGA BOOGA BOOGA! …Okay, yeah, I'm done."
XXXXXXXXXX
They don't really explain Alice and Matt splitting up in the movie, nor how they know where to reunite with the other survivors, so this is me 'filling in the blanks', haha.