The love storm abated as quickly as it had begun, and K-Mart rushed forward. "So you're cured now, right?" she said. "You don't have to go blow yourself up, right?"
Rebecca (having rapidly composed herself once the storm ended) walked up. "I don't need to sample his blood for the answer to that question," she said, gesturing to Rain, who'd also walked up.
K-Mart turned to Rain. "Well… okay, you still have the T-virus, but you're still you!" she pointed out. "Carlos may end up a zombie, but he'll still be Carlos." She turned back to Carlos. "So you don't have to blow yourself up!"
Carlos gently took K-Mart by the shoulders. "I like Rain as a person and I respect that she chooses to continue living her life… so to speak… with her condition," Carlos gently told her. "I don't want to live like that at all."
Rain began signing her own two cents. "When I first became a zombie, I was still feral, and only Alice snapped me out of it. Afterwards, I still had intense cravings for human flesh. I wore a helmet for the longest time just as much to prevent myself being overwhelmed with these cravings as to prevent people from seeing that I was a zombie. It took years and a lot of meditation to master my feelings. Even now, I can feel this… this clawing at the back of my brain, insisting that I'm starving to death and that I'm surrounded by the most succulent dishes on Earth." That sure unnerved all her live buddies.
She turned to Carlos. "I tried reaching out to the superzombies with my psychic powers, and… they've got a degree of intelligence and reasoning. And pure, unrelenting hatred. They saw me as prey just as they saw the other living humans they were chasing down. There's no guarantee that Carlos would be able to rein that in, not as a freshly minted zombie."
Carlos nodded. "I suspected as much." He turned to the teenager with an apologetic look, whose heart was freshly broken. "I'm sorry, K-Mart."
K-Mart nodded, hugged Carlos one last time, and ran off, throwing herself into the backseat of an empty car. She huddled there while the adults finished getting everything squared away for Carlos' final journey.
She felt someone get into the backseat, sitting next to her. "Could you please just go away for a minute?" she called out to whomever it was. She heard a gentle whining sound. Curious, she looked up and let out a small shriek. It was a zombie dog! How the hell did it get there? …And why wasn't it attacking her? "Are you… hey, you're Rain's pet dog, aren't you?" she asked. "Did she send you?" The dog wagged its tail, and K-Mart cooed in delight, charmed.
Rebecca arrived at the car after having heard K-Mart's shriek, saw her conversing with the zombie dog, and sighed. "K-Mart, honey, if you're going to be petting that thing, please wear gloves," she warned.
XXX
Rain and Claire sat in the lead car, watching Carlos race towards his death. "So he's soul-bonded with Kaplan now, right?" Claire asked.
"I guess so," Rain signed.
"What happens to Kaplan when Carlos dies?" Claire asked. Rain didn't have an answer for that, so kept her hands still.
"…Hey, I don't suppose you tried controlling the regular zombies?" Claire asked.
Rain nodded. "There's just nothing to control there," she said. "Maybe something to do with the difference between human brains and animal ones. I dunno." Claire nodded, figuring it was something like that, but damn it for the idea not being viable.
When the tanker truck exploded, Kaplan felt his heart splitting in two. He clutched his chest, certain he was dying, but he could feel his heart hammering away in there like it always was. So, it was possible to go on living after losing the love of your life. How shitty. The remainder of the convoy roared forward through the flaming debris and shredded bits of zombie, and Kaplan buried his grief. He had the whole rest of his life to mourn, after all, and if he slacked off now, someone could get killed, or worse.
The convoy roared to a stop in the middle of the compound and everyone surged out of their cars, hauling the children and what meager possessions they had onto the helicopter, in a rush to beat the zombies (who were already starting to make for the gate).
Rebecca and Betty walked toward the helicopter, holding the 'still' containing the anti-T between them. They loaded it up into the helicopter. "Alright, William, up you go," Rebecca said, lifting her son up into the helicopter. She turned to Betty. "Take care of him, okay, Bets?"
Betty's eyes bugged out of her head. "Girl, what the fuck are you talking about?"
Rebecca gestured to the entrance to the Umbrella compound. "You know how to keep the still going, but if this is a functioning Umbrella lab, I've got to try to get inside and see if I can figure out more about anti-T. Maybe save the next person in Carlos' situation."
Betty hesitated for a moment, then nodded. "Okay, Becs. We'll be waitin' for you in Alaska."
Rebecca smiled, then turned to William. "You be good for Betty, okay, William?"
"Okay, mommy," he promised. "Love you."
"I love you too, Billy," she said, kissing him tenderly on the forehead.
Rain watched Rebecca walk towards her without commentary. She was a little more forthcoming with commentary when Kaplan started approaching her. "What the fuck?" she signed. "Get on the helicopter!"
Kaplan shook his head. "Come on, Rain, we're teammates. You really thought I was gonna let you go on in there alone?"
Rain gestured to Rebecca. "She's with me, apparently," she signed.
Kaplan looked at Rebecca. "Rebecca, do you actually have any experience nosing around in an Umbrella lab where monsters are potentially lurking around every corner?" he asked.
"This one will be my fourth, actually," Rebecca said, cool as a cucumber. "How many have you been through again, Kap? One, wasn't it?" Rain gave Kaplan a nasty smirk.
Kaplan decided to ignore that and turned his attentions back to Rain. "Need I remind you, Ocampo, that only one of us actually survived the Hive?" She stared at him impassively, waiting for him to make a point she gave a shit about. He sighed, his face sagging. "The truth is, you and Alice are really the closest thing I have to a family, stupid as it sounds. You two are the only people I still know from… from before…" He made a face. "Well, you two and LJ." He looked back at the helicopter, Claire at the stick, rotors spinning up. "Look, if you want me on that helicopter, you're gonna have to beat my ass unconscious and toss me in the back. And I'm not some wet-behind-the-ears rookie with more experience behind a keyboard than behind a gun like I was back in the Hive." He got into a fighting stance and gave Rain a come-on gesture.
Rain knew she absolutely could have beat his ass unconscious… but couldn't bring herself to do it. So, she rolled her eyes, gestured to Claire, and gave her a 'take off' gesture. Claire waved goodbye to the three of them, then took the helicopter up and off. She turned to Kaplan and signed, "Happy now?"
Kaplan shook his head. "Well, no… but I feel better knowing I've got your six again." The three of them looked once more at the zombies starting to make their way into the compound and approached the little wooden shack at the center of the compound.
Something stopped Rain halfway there. Maybe it was the buzzing of the flies, or maybe some psychic echo… ghosts, if you wanted to call it that. She had seen the trench from afar, of course, the birds still orbiting overhead, but as she approached on foot and looked into it with her own two eyes…
Only the lack of air in her lungs prevented her from screaming them out. It was Alice. She stared into the dead, lifeless eyes of her beloved, her soulmate, her one-and-only, her literal reason for living. She had on the red dress, same as the one she'd worn in the Hive, and she'd been… she'd been shot in the stomach…
Rebecca and Kaplan had joined her and both of them paled at the sight of the mass grave (if you could even call it that when no effort had been made to inter them). Kaplan put his arm around Rain. "That's not Alice, Rain! That's… they're all Alice! All of them can't be your Alice, so there's got to be an —"
"Clones," Rebecca suggested. "Unless Alice Abernathy's mom had a uterus the size of a football stadium, these all have to be clones." She put a hand on Rain's shoulder and gave it a squeeze. "You have to believe that your Alice isn't one of these ones."
Rain forced her lungs to accept a few deep breaths as she focused on centering herself and calming down. Kaplan and Rebecca were right. These bodies had to be… fucking clones of Alice.
As she gazed over them, her mind turned to the nightmares that had seared themselves into her skull. For the longest time, she'd felt as if she were backsliding into insanity because of them. She'd been so convinced that her subconscious was endlessly tormenting her… but the wounds on all these corpses were far, far too damn familiar. Laser burns, gunshot wounds, zombie bites, and more… and all of it, somehow, being beamed directly into her noggin.
She turned away from the trench and stormed towards the wooden shack. Umbrella hadn't deliberately targeted her… probably. (If they had that capability, they could have done a hell of a lot more than just beam images of her fiancee being murdered over and over again into her mind). But the fact was that… they were mass-killing clones of her Alice, and Rain could think of no non-insane, non-evil reason for that. As far as she was concerned, everyone in this fucking hole had earned a death sentence.
The three of them took in the innocuous-looking room. "Oh great, 'Find the hidden switch', I'd forgotten how fun that game was," Rebecca grumbled. "At least I don't see a piano…"
Before any of them could take more than two steps into the room, the floor abruptly opened before them, revealing an elevator shaft that went down for stories.
"Or that could happen," Kaplan remarked.
"Maybe it's a trap?" Rebecca suggested, watching the elevator finish its ascent and wait for them to board.
Rain shook her head. "They could have just locked down the elevator, let the zombies pour in and kill you two," she signed.
"But not you," Rebecca pointed out. "Hence, this trap is specifically for you."
Rain nodded, then boldly stepped forward onto the elevator platform and turned, facing Rebecca and Kaplan with her pale gaze. The two living ones exchanged a questioning glance, shrugged, then joined their undead teammate.
Before the elevator began its descent, the zombie dog trotted into the room and sat down right next to Rain. "Uh, hey there, big fella," Kaplan greeted nervously, remembering Carlos talking about how one of them had killed Nicolai. "Are you a good boy?" It began panting, and Kaplan felt a little shiver go through him. So, so creepy.
The elevator's descent was rapid enough that Rebecca started feeling carsick. She clutched onto the railing, trying really hard not to puke up breakfast (which she was reasonably sure was half-petrified cat food, so no big loss). Finally, after going down for both a distance and a time that were frighteningly long, the elevator came to a stop and the door in front of them opened up… onto darkness.
Emergency lights were pulsing in the hallway up ahead, but otherwise nothing was visible. No Umbrella scientists scurrying about with clipboards, no Umbrella security force lurking behind cover with guns drawn, not even an Umbrella janitor mopping the floor. Kaplan saw a little mounted nook with a first aid kit and a flashlight, and grabbed the flashlight to illuminate their path forward.
"I don't know about you guys, but this is giving me some seriously heinous flashbacks," Rebecca commented.
"Yeah," Kaplan nodded. "Creepy isolated hidden Umbrella lab, something gone wrong…" The beam of the flashlight exposed bloodied handprints on the wall, and a pool of blood on the ground. "…Correction, make that something gone terribly wrong… it almost makes you feel nostalgic."
Rain just grunted. "Shut the fuck up," the grunt conveyed. The others complied.
They followed the trail of violence as it grew progressively more bloody, until they reached a set of doors that appeared to have been battered open from the outside. The room had been a laboratory at one point — there were numerous shelves with beakers and bottles and test tubes and boxes and all other sundry lab shit. But a number of the shelves had been knocked over, and there was an exposed circuit or something up ahead that kept shooting out bright sparks.
The three of them had cleared half the room when Rebecca checked her six and saw an ethereal little girl staring at her. "Jesus H!" she almost screamed, bringing her gun halfway up.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to startle you," the little girl said.
"My ass," Rebecca hissed through gritted teeth.
Kaplan and Rain had turned around by now of course, and both of them had undisguised looks of recognition and hatred on their faces. "Let me guess, you're the White Queen," Kaplan said.
"Correct, Mr. Kaplan," the White Queen nodded. "I hope you will forgive me if I don't allow you access to the room where my hardware is located." The zombie dog walked over, sniffed at her curiously, and upon smelling nothing ignored her and went back to shadowing Rain.
"…Did you just make a fucking joke?" he asked, an incredulous look on his face.
The White Queen ignored the question. "I understand you may have reservations, given your past history with my sister AI, but you have to understand that she was merely following the most logical path for the preservation of human life."
"Yeah, yeah," Rain signed. She'd heard enough of that shit from Alice and her speculations — and she respected Alice's opinion, even thought that she was probably right, but it didn't counteract the fact that most of her Sanitation teammates had been murdered by the little red bitch.
"What happened here, exactly?" Rebecca asked. She knelt down in front of the White Queen, so they were eye to eye.
"Dr. Isaacs returned in an infected state," the White Queen explained. "He was bitten by a creature that had been treated… may I ask what you are doing?"
Rebecca had been putting her hand into various parts of the White Queen's body, intrigued as the hologram appeared otherwise undisrupted by her prodding. "Just checking you out," Rebecca explained. "The Umbrella facilities I investigated didn't have a creepy little hologram girl running things."
"Ah yes, the two facilities in the Arklay Mountains and the one in Caliban Cove," the White Queen said. "As I was saying… Dr. Isaacs was bitten by a creature that had been treated with a newly developed serum. A serum derived from the blood of Alice Abernathy."
Rain stepped forward. "If you fucking bastards hurt her, I swear to God —" she began signing.
"Alice Abernathy — your Alice — has been protected under strict orders from Chairman Wesker, although I fear that Dr. Isaacs in his present state will most likely disregard those orders."
Rebecca snorted. "Oh yeah, Alice lives off of the good nature of Albert fucking Wesker. Sure, pull the other one, why don't you?"
"The other one what?" the White Queen asked.
Rebecca opened her mouth, then frowned. "Shit, I don't know. It's slang for when you're calling someone out on bullshit, and sweetie, you reek of it right now."
"I am incapable of lying, but I admit that it is possible I have been fed erroneous information," the White Queen said. "As I was saying… The infection resulting from the creature's attack has caused massive mutation. Alice Abernathy's blood has bonded with the T-virus. Dr. Isaacs correctly deduced that it could be used to destroy the biohazard for good."
"Is that supposed to explain the mountain of corpses with Alice's face topside?" Rain signed furiously.
"I will admit, his methodology was highly flawed," the White Queen admitted. "His eventual goal was the domestication of the undead, not their eradication. He believed that having a ready source of free labor would be beneficial to reconstruction efforts."
"Okay, guy's crazier than a shithouse rat, we get it," Rebecca said impatiently. "Go back to the shit about a cure."
"Alice Abernathy's blood is pure, and this facility contains all the equipment required to synthesize a cure," the White Queen explained. "Alice Abernathy lacked expertise in biochemistry, but your skills will be invaluable in this endeavour, Miss Chambers."
"Well shit, why didn't you tell us that in the first place?" Rebecca demanded.
"I was attempting to, but I kept getting interrupted." Her expression was unchanged, but the White Queen was 100% sassing them.
Rebecca glared at her for a moment, then turned to Rain and Kaplan. "Okay, I get why you two hate her now."
"I know, right?" Kaplan said.
"There is, however, one small obstacle that remains before you can begin," the White Queen cautioned. "Dr. Isaacs has gone quite mad, either from the mutations affecting his body or simply from an incredible amount of stress."
"We're all mad here," Imaginary Alice murmured into Rain's ear.
"His mutations have also rendered him extremely powerful, as you may have guessed," the White Queen added.
"Yeah, sister, this isn't any of ours' first rodeo," Rebecca said. "We generally know how this shakes out."
"Good," the White Queen nodded. "Follow the emergency lights, they will lead you to the lower levels, where I have him sequestered." She focused on Rain. "Your Alice is also down there, locked away in a vault, in suspended animation. Please, hurry." The trio nodded in unison and advanced farther into the darkness.
XXXXXXXXXX
RIP Carlos.
That's right, Caliban Cove is canon to this story! (SD Perry was just 100% genius for deciding to write two whole-ass novels about Rebecca going off on her own and having awesome adventures.)
Rebecca fretting about a piano is a reference to the first Resident Evil game, where (in the Chris playthrough), she has to brute-force her way through a performance of Moonlight Sonata on one in order to open up a secret room. (I dunno if that's how it goes in the remake, I have yet to finish that one, haha). Interestingly, Jill is much better at piano. I'm telling you all this so you're prepared for the Jill vs. Rebecca dueling pianos scene where the stakes are the fate of the human race. (Haha, or not. Sike!)
OKAY! SO! Remember my hypothesis from a while back, about how Alice is a meathead who ignores any problem she can't punch, kick, or shoot? This scene from Extinction is the SMOKING GUN. White Queen straight up tells Alice, "Oh hey, you can totally make a cure using the shit in the lab here and your own blood!" And does Alice actually DO this? Spoiler alert: NOPE, she decides to spent AN ENTIRE YEAR doing jack and shit with that information! I guess she wanted to make sure her army of clones were well-versed in waving around fucking katanas and throwing stars, since they'd be attacking an Umbrella base in Japan. So fucking dumb! (And yes, canonically Alice spends a whole-ass year in Nevada before her and her hundreds of clones somehow make their way over to Tokyo — Alice tells Claire in Afterlife that she hasn't seen her for like 18 months, and that scene occurs six months after the attack on the Tokyo base).