The passageway dead-ended below a grating, which thankfully wasn't locked or bolted down or otherwise secured. Alice and Spence lifted it and took a peek: they were still somewhere in the labs, a dimly-lit corridor, but at least there weren't any zombies around. Spence moved forward a bit to look around, while Alice turned to aid Matt in hauling Rain out of the tunnel. "How are you feeling?" Alice asked her. "Can you see yet?"
"A little," Rain muttered. She lurched forward one step, Matt mostly holding her up, before she bent forward and hurled.
"Oh sexy," Alice said, grimacing. "And for once, I'm not being serious — I take the 'In sickness' part seriously, but not THAT seriously." She turned to Spence, who had returned to the others after seeing no zombies down the next bend. "Okay, soon-to-be-ex, help make our separation amicable and give Matt a hand with my Rain," she instructed. She would have just given Spence the gun, but he claimed to have not had any memories resurface, including any regarding weapons training or martial arts, so that left her as the only person in the group able to utilize it. Something about his story was starting to really bother her, but nothing she could verbalize yet. Most of it was just stewing away in her subconscious, so she let that be to do its thing.
She led them down the next few corridors, making sure they were clear before gesturing for Matt and Spence to follow. She slowed down upon realizing, in one of the corridors, that they were at one of the formerly flooded laboratories the team had passed by when they'd first breached the Hive. Rain began to speak unprompted: "When I get out of here, I think I'm gonna get laid."
"Why wait?" Alice responded with a seductive lilt. Matt chipped in with his own two cents, but Alice ignored him because she suddenly began to hear strange whispering at the edge of her consciousness. "Hold on," she murmured, too quiet for the others to hear her. She began turning this way and that, to see if the sound was coming from an external source or if she'd finally snapped and gone crazy, like, for real crazy.
"Hey, wait," Spence said, finally realizing Alice wasn't following.
"Are you okay?" Matt asked.
"Yeah, yeah, I'm fine," Alice said to reassure them. "Just hallucinating. Or maybe there are ghosts down here too." In her mind's eye, the former employees of the Hive began walking around again (alive for real, not the reanimated husks they'd become) — office workers, lab assistants, scientists in hazmat suits, etc. It didn't seem like a memory, not like the disjointed flashes she got of her and Matt's sister hanging out in the creepy graveyard in the woods.
"Alice, we're losing time," Matt reminded her.
"Yeah yeah," Alice said, waving dismissively. "I think this might be important." She walked up to the glass that separated them from one of the once-flooded labs, water still a few feet deep on the floor. She watched a scientist in a hazmat suit prepare a funny-looking needle gun — complete with double helix fluid reservoir — with some shit that looked like Windex before injecting it into a rabbit. "Oh fucking evil bastard," she murmured. The animal torturer proceeded to swap out the empty reservoir with one that looked like it contained Mountain Dew and injected that into the rabbit.
Was this the T-virus? Alice couldn't figure what else it might be, but what was up with the different colors? Was it a two-stage virus or something? Or was one maybe a vaccine? A distant, cool part of her told her that the blue was the virus, and the green was the anti-virus. Was that her pre-nerve gassed self? Could she even trust that part of her? "Fuck fuck fuck," she groaned, torn apart with doubt.
She turned around and Matt was standing right there. "Okay, so, there miiiight be a cure," she said. "If I can trust a weird memory-hallucination-thing I just had."
"What are you talking about?" Matt said.
"Well, it was ambiguous as fuck — I saw some sick bastard injecting a rabbit with Windex and Mountain Dew, but part of me — the old part of me? — is suggesting that the Mountain Dew-looking shit might actually work as a cure, so we may as well try it?" She turned to look at Rain, still draped over Spence like a flag from where they stood down the hall. "Hey love, do you wanna take the certainty of death, or try shooting up with Mountain Dew?" she called out.
"Gee, when you put it like that, it makes it really hard to choose," Rain deadpanned.
Alice darted into the laboratory, not seeing any scientists or rabbits, living, deceased, or otherwise. "Okay, they kept that shit here, but — eww — I'm gonna have to wade through corpsewater. Gonna have to take another shower."
"How do you know all this?" Matt asked, who had followed her.
"Oh, like I said, weird hallucination-memory thing," Alice said. "I think I was boning up on all this shit because I'm, well, 99% sure that I was working with your sister."
Matt gave her a hard look. "You betrayed her," he accused. "You caused all of this."
Alice held up her hands, conciliatory. "Okay, I acknowledge that that is a possibility," she said. "I have no memory of Past Alice's actions, but if she did do a whole hell of a lot of murder, then I take full responsibility for that, and I'm going to fight like hell to make it right. And part of that right now is dosing the woman I love with some shit that looks like neon vomit. After that, we can figure out the whistleblowing and the life in prison parts." She walked down into the water, grimacing. "Cold cold cold, ew ew ew," she began to murmur on repeat.
Spence brought Rain into the room and gently left her hanging on the railing of the short staircase that led down into the flooded lab floor. Rain immediately sank to the floor, unable to support herself. Both Spence and Matt watched as Alice struggled with the door that led to the sample storage room, entered, lingered for a moment, then walked back out, a frustrated look on her face. "Okay, funny story: Ever gone to the library and find out somebody else checked out the only copy of the book you wanted to read?"
It took the question a moment to sink in. "I can't," Rain uttered. "I just can't. It's over." She was quivering, but in her sickened state it presented as slowly rocking back and forth.
"We'll figure something out, sweetie," Alice assured her. She turned to Spence, who had walked down into the water and was staring at the sample room. Alice wondered if he was having a flashback. Alice wondered where all the samples had gone.
Something clicked. "Hey dummy, fucking put two and two together," she whispered to herself. Going back to normal speaking volume, she asked him, "Hey Spence, got a question about the physics of gaseous particle dispersion."
His eyes widened at the non sequitur. "I don't know how well I know the science stuff, but shoot," he said.
"The nerve gas that our employer hosed us down with is pretty specialized stuff, right? I mean, any ol' chemical agent could just kill us stone dead, but to just knock us out even when the room is saturated means that it'd have to be a fairly complex concoction to synthesize and store long-term. Right?" Spence nodded. "Fairly easy to set up in our house, of course, but man, they must have been fucking geniuses beyond compare if they were able to set up a similar system in that fucking huge-ass subway tunnel, right? I mean, they'd have to have set up a pressurized tank the size of an actual damned lake in order to saturate that entire area, you know?"
Spence could have agreed with her, tried arguing that Umbrella probably had done exactly that just to try to keep stringing her along a little longer, but fuck it. He grabbed the gun that Alice had absentmindedly set down on a nearby table when she was struggling with the door, just as Alice attempted to dive for it and splashed down into the water for her effort.
"FUCKING SICK! CORPSE WATER! EWWWW!" Alice stood up, dripping wet, and began spitting like crazy. She walked over to Matt and wiped her face and the inside of her mouth off on his shirttail, giving not even a glance at Spence holding the gun on her. Matt, for his part, was now giving that intense look to Spence, and was barely even aware of what Alice was doing.
Spence lowered the gun, pointing it at the water between him and Alice. "We can still make it out of here," he appealed. "Come with me." Alice finally shot him a look, one conveying boredom more than anything else. "We can have everything we've ever wanted. Money's out there, waiting. You wouldn't believe how much."
"Cool," Alice said, giving the fakest smile ever. "What I want is for Matt and Rain to come with us, and also that gun." She held out her hand. "Anytime, hubs!"
Matt vaulted the railing straight into the water, only for Spence to swivel the gun around and point it in his face. "Please," Spence said. "I wouldn't want to shoot you."
"Aw, why not?" Alice asked, genuinely curious. "Is murder only fun for you when you don't have to stare the person in the face?"
"Might need the bullets," Spence explained. "Back off!" he snarled, prompting Matt to step backwards.
"Ah, so you never learned how to pull off cool-ass martial arts stunts, got it," Alice said. "Fucking weenie."
"You know, you can't just wash your hands of this," Spence said, turning back to her.
"I know, I'm gonna need another shower," Alice said. "Fucking corpsewater."
"That's not — look, we work for the same company. You knew what they did. Do you really believe that people like him —" He gave Matt another glance. " — will ever change anything?" He shook his head. "No. Nothing ever changes."
"Where… where is…" Rain began.
"Oh, he left the Mountain Dew on the choo-choo," Alice said. "It's the only place it could possibly be, really, in that same little compartment he was hiding, cowering in terror at the idea that someone, somewhere, was making the moral choice of doing the right thing against impossible odds." Behind Spence, a zombie rose out of the water. "For example, even now I don't want to kill you. And if I saw a zombie coming out of the water behind you — as is actually happening now, Spence, this is not a hypothetical scenario — I would tell you, because you don't deserve to have your throat torn out like some asshole on When Animals Attack." Spence didn't turn around, thinking it was a trick. "No, you deserve a neat and tidy jail cell for the rest of your natural life — so turn around and shoot that zombie, or it'll never happen."
"In or out?" Spence simply asked. "In… or out?"
"The funniest shit ever is gonna happen in, like, three seconds," Alice warned him. "Three… two… one… fuck you."
The zombie sank its teeth into Spence's neck, drawing a scream out of him. He fired the gun into its stomach, turned, and emptied two more rounds into its face. Matt tried tackling him and Alice tried to surge through the water to join in on the attack, but Spence quickly regrouped, elbowed Matt, and trained the gun back on Alice. "Back the fuck off!" he said, indignant.
"Hey, buddy, I warned you," Alice pointed out. "BOOGA BOOGA I MADE A MORALLY SUPERIOR CHOICE!" She followed him as he backed away towards the door.
"I'm missing you already," he sneered as a parting shot, before closing the door and shooting the locking mechanism, sealing it tight.
"No!" Matt ran for the door and futilely tried opening it.
Rain, expending a lot of strength, lifted her head. "Your boyfriend's a real asshole."
"No shit," Alice said, shucking off his jacket and draping it over the deceased zombie's face. "That's why I've been trying to upgrade." She grabbed Rain's hands and gave them a gentle squeeze and smiled at her, and Rain was so out of it she actually smiled back.
XXXXXXXXXX
Yeah, what's up with Alice's weird memory/hallucination thing? Why did it manifest as ghosties, instead of like her flashbacks with Lisa Addison?
I did consider having Alice realize there's no way Spence could have been nerve gassed sometime sooner, but decided to just squeeze it in right when Spence fucks them over anyway. (The movie doesn't really say, but I think Spence really was faking the entire time, haha).
Heads up, folks: Next chapter, some wild shit goes down. Like, nobody on Earth is going to anticipate what's about to befall our heroes. It's not going to derail the plot or anything, the next five movies will still more or less happen, but if you read the wild shit and decide it's not for you, I'll understand. I honestly can't wait to post it and see what everyone thinks!