Alice lifted her head from the floor when she heard the little girl's voice. "What was that?" she asked. "Did you hear that?"
"Yeah," Spence said. "It's probably that fucking computer."
"I'm… I'm going to go try to talk to her," Alice said, rising unsteadily to her feet.
"Hey." Spence grabbed Alice's hand, stopping her. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah," Alice said, quickly pulling her hand away, using it to wipe the last of the tears and snot off her face, then applying the mess to Spence's shirt without hesitation. "You?"
"I'll manage," Spence said, looking down at his shirt with a pained grimace.
Alice gingerly stepped over the blood and gore as best she could, finally making her way into the chamber. Kaplan was struggling with the EMP thingie, and she wasn't incline to help him. The Red Queen was projecting herself as a hologram, that of a little girl. It almost gave Alice the willies.
"Get out, you can't be in here," the Red Queen said, turning to Alice.
"She's repeating herself," Kaplan said. "Don't listen to anything she says. She's a holographic representation of the Red Queen."
"Gee, really? I never would have guessed." Alice rolled her eyes. "I thought she was a ghost."
Kaplan didn't pay attention to her response, struggling as he was with the physical and emotional weight of what he was dealing with. "She's modeled after the head programmer's daughter."
Alice knelt in front of the hologram. "Hi, I'm Alice," she said, giving her a warm smile. "You didn't really want to kill anyone, did you?"
"Don't listen to her!" Kaplan repeated. "She'll try to deceive us, to confuse us!" He grunted as the EMP thingie finally locked into place.
The Queen turned back to Kaplan. "I wouldn't advise this," she warned. "Disabling me will result in loss of primary power."
"She'll say anything to stop us from shutting her down," Kaplan dismissed, finishing up his preparations.
"Well yeah, if someone has a gun to your head you're not just gonna twiddle your fucking thumbs," Alice pointed out. "You're gonna fight to stay alive."
"I implore you," Red Queen said to Kaplan.
"Implore away," Kaplan said, getting the trigger ready.
"Implore? Oh my God, that's so fucking cute I'm gonna die!" Alice gushed. "Kaplan, seriously, let's talk to her before —"
"No!" Kaplan shouted, pressing the starter button on the trigger.
The Red Queen gave them one last parting thought. "You're all going to die down here."
"Kaplan, STOP!" Alice tried to wrest the controller from his hands, but he simply pivoted away and pushed the button to discharge the device.
The lights went out, and the Red Queen's hologram did her best Cheshire Cat speedrun, vanishing from sight.
After a few moments, the hum of electricity returned, along with the lights flickering back on.
"I totally said that, you know," Alice finally said, sullen. "Like, twice. Bet you wish you had a button to shut me off."
"Yeah, well, you weren't threatening anything," Kaplan pointed out. "The Red Queen did a hell of a lot more than just threaten."
"Was it a threat?" Alice mused. She saw him fiddling with the… computer-server-core-whatever the fuck it was that housed the Red Queen. "What's that you're up to?" she asked.
"The pulse forces the circuit breaker to shut down her mainframe for thirty seconds," Kaplan explained. "After that, if I don't have her board, she can reboot."
Alice suddenly felt a bout of volcanic fury erupting from within her. "…Wait, you fucking morons weren't actually killing her and didn't bother to correct my assumption? Just a quick little 'Hey Alice, I know EMP comes with a lot of Hollywood-associated imagery of turning everything electronic into charred bits of plastic and metal, but this is just a really fancy way of us turning her off because there's no convenient "Off" button' would have been really fucking reassuring!" She swatted him on the back of the head.
Kaplan looked up at her as he withdrew the circuit board thingie. Was it meant to look like that? It didn't look even remotely like something from the inside of an actual computer, but Alice figured maybe that was partly due to her total amnesia. "You realize that you can't actually kill something that's not alive, right?" he asked.
"Fuck that semantical bullshit," Alice said. "Red Queen presents as a adorable little girl, I'm gonna treat her like one. Granted, she wasn't emotional or anything so I'll allow that that makes her come across as a bit creepy, but there's no reason not to treat her as a person."
"Yes there is: she's NOT a person," Kaplan reiterated. "Not to mention all the deaths she's responsible for! It is extremely easy for me to not see her — it — as a person!"
Alice huffed in frustration. There was a time and a place to have this argument, but she reckoned that hundreds of feet below the surface of the Earth, nestled in a large techno-tomb, was probably not the best place for it. Taking deep breaths, she stared intently at his face, and then something clicked. "Did anyone ever tell you you've got kind of a David Boreanaz thing going on?" she asked.
Kaplan let out a bark of laughter. "JD and… and Warner wanted to nickname me Angel, but One… he put a stop to it." He bowed his head in a poor effort to hide his tears. "Stupid assholes," he muttered.
"I'll miss them too," Alice said, giving him a hug. "One especially. I only knew him for a little while, but he definitely gave off Cooler Older Brother vibes." She patted the circuit board thingy. "Come on, let's get the hell out of here."
Their trek back to the Room of Ominous Machinery was hastened by the sound of gunfire, both the pap-pap-pap of a pistol and the braaaaaaaaap of a submachine gun. Kaplan found Rain, JD, and Matt first, leading with "What was all the shooting?"
"We found a survivor," Rain said, wrapping her bloody hand in gauze.
"And you shot him?" Kaplan asked, incredulous.
"He probably deserved it," Alice suggested. "Aw, babe, what happened to your hand?"
"She was crazed," Rain said, testy. "She bit me."
"Oh, filthy! We gotta get some, like, alcohol or whatever to flush your wound!" Alice said. "The human mouth has, like, more germs than a public toilet seat." She gave Rain another flirtatious look. "Not that I wouldn't mind a few more germs in my mouth, if you know what I mean." Rain just rolled her eyes, growing more and more inured to the incessant flirting.
"She's gone," JD said from the far side of the room. "She's gone!" he repeated louder.
"Well yeah, you shot her a thousand times," Alice pointed out. "Pretty sure anyone would be gone after that."
"Bullshit," Rain snarled, marching over to him.
"No, really, if you shoot someone enough times, they'll die," Alice countered. "You think you'd be made aware of this during gun safety classes."
"She fell right here, but she's gone!" JD snapped, gesturing to the ground. "And I mean 'missing', Abernathy, not 'deceased'." He gave Alice a pointed look.
Alice shrugged. "Maybe you missed?" She pointed to the ground. "I see a little bit of blood, so maybe you just winged her?"
"She was a dozen feet away, we didn't miss!" JD insisted.
Matt squatted down to look at the blood. "Looks like it's coagulated," he remarked. He shook his head. "It's not possible."
"Why not?" JD asked.
Matt stood back up and faced JD. "Because blood doesn't do that until after you're dead."
"Ooooor maybe it coagulated after it got shot out of her body?" Alice suggested.
"After just a few seconds?" Matt shook his head, highly skeptical.
"Can we go now?" Spence asked.
"We're not going anywhere 'til the rest of the team get here," Rain said, exchanging the clip in her SMG for a fresh one.
Alice, Spence, and Kaplan exchanged a tense look. "There's no-one else coming," Kaplan finally volunteered.
"What the fuck are you talking about?" Rain said, taking a few angry steps towards Kaplan.
Alice was going to voice her apologies to Rain for the loss of her friends when JD gestured. "Wait! Quiet!" Alice realized a sound was echoing through the room — sounded like some kind of metal being dragged on concrete.
A man was walking towards them from the rows of mad science machines. It looked like he was wearing a lab worker outfit, except it was discolored, yellowing. Some indistinct stains were on his shirt, exposed by the open lab coat hanging loosely on him. The metallic sound was the fire axe he was dragging behind him. Oh, and his right foot was bent at a horrible-looking angle. Others came into sight from other corners of the room, and the stunned silence of Alice and the mercs was quickly replaced by animalistic growls. One of the newcomers, a man in some kind of red and black outfit — janitorial? Maintenance? — turned to Alice and snarled, exposing a mouth of blackened, rotting teeth — and the fact that half his face was just gone, left eye sagging with the absence of any muscle tissue to support it.
JD raised his rifle but hesitated to fire. "Fuck," Spence uttered, seeing another mutilated person, a man in a suit with one eye gone, approach.
"Don't come any closer!" Kaplan warned.
"They're behind us!" Matt shouted.
"Jesus!" Kaplan called out.
Another one in a stained lab outfit fell onto Rain, struggling to sink her teeth into the merc. Alice stepped forward to help, but Rain positioned her hand on the woman's chin and, in a motion almost too fast to follow, snapped the woman's neck, dropping her like a sack of potatoes. "Unf," Alice said, amazed that Rain kept getting sexier by the minute.
The spell was broken, and the mercs began to open fire, Rain and JD shooting in controlled bursts, and Kaplan joining in with a dinky-ass revolver, of all things. As the gunfire caused those shot to barely stagger, it was becoming more and more clear that something worse than your everyday garden-variety computer-perpetrated mass murder was happening.
"Hey, let's not waste the ammo!" Alice threw out, ignored. "It's clearly not having an effect on these guys!" Then she saw bullets collide with one of the fucked up tanks. "Also, try not to shoot the mysterious devices in the sinister fucked-up laboratory, thanks!"
"Let's go!" JD called out, lowering his gun and rushing forward.
"Hurry up!" Rain added, following.
Alice wasn't sure if they'd managed to clear a path or were just retreating blindly from the thing they'd shot (which was venting a lot of steam through its bullet holes), but didn't want to be separated from them, so she grabbed Matt by his arm and urged him forward. (For a second, it was almost like he didn't want to move — what was up with that?) But he finally budged, and they made it barely a few yards before the evil science thingy just straight-up exploded, sending them both flying.
As the debris settled, Alice heard a voice rattling around inside her head. "I can help you get the virus," it said. It was her own voice. Images filled her mind's eye of some creepy place out in the woods, with an angel statue and other monuments. Some kind of graveyard? "I have access to security codes, surveillance plans, the works." There was a brief flicker of some woman, an attractive blonde… was this a memory? Was Alice cheating on her fake husband with a woman even before her little trip to Nerve Gas Neighborhood? Oh, and the bit where she may have been complicit in bioterrorism wasn't great.
Alice didn't have time to probe her mind for more memories. She pulled herself to her feet, Matt (and the others) nowhere in sight. Had she been knocked out for a minute? She heard the jingle of Matt's handcuffs and found him under some machinery, where some of the attackers were trying to crawl under to reach him. Right before she pulled him out, there was a great tearing sound and a big hole opened up in the tank close to Matt's head. She pulled him up and they both stared at it for a moment — had they really seen a big fucking claw sticking out of it for a second? — and fled the room, hoping they would find Rain and the others soon.
"Oh hey, your handcuffs are gone!" Alice realized. "Way to go, Penn and Teller!"
"You do realize those are two separate people, right?" Matt asked.
XXXXXXXXXX
The Red Queen's innards look funny, nothing like how real computer innards look. That's Hollywood for you, I guess!
Seriously, Kaplan, what's up with that little toy gun you carry around? When the other mercs aren't around, do you twirl it around on your finger like Revolver Ocelot? Like to imagine that you're the rootinest, tootinest cowboy north, south, east, and west of the Pecos? Is it a prop for your moonlighting as a male stripper and part of your routine involves you lip-synching to the Will Smith hit Wild Wild West as you shuck off your cowboy outfit?
(Since RE1 came out in 2002, I've been trying to limit myself to non-anachronistic pop culture references, where appropriate. Alice was going to refer to Rain as 'bae' but that didn't come about until after the Oughts, and I had to Google to make sure WWW came out before RE, hahaha. Also, did you know there's a Carfax billboard in the New York section of RE5, featuring their mascot the Car Fox? Did you know the Car Fox was only introduced in, like, 2010? This is just like the time Game of Thrones had a Starbucks cup appear onscreen, hahaha.)