Wesker's murder drew the ire of his zombie dogs, whom were easily dispatched by the assembled asskickers. Alice glanced over Wesker's wannabe throne and saw several cryotubes behind it, presumably where the mole zombies had been squirreled away at before he'd unleashed them onto the Citadel. Looking down at Wesker's body, it was still twitching about… and were his booboos starting to knit themselves together? Oh, that just wouldn't do. She stomped him in the face, breaking his stupid-ass sunglasses, administered a few stomps to the nut region, then proceeded to start dragging him to one of the cryo tubes.

"What are you doing?" Chris asked.

Alice spoke without turning around. "I'm putting this mofo on ice. I think he's trying to regenerate, and, well, we can't have that, can we? It's the best place for now until we can think of a more permanent solution for him." Alice wondered how far away the Marianas Trench was.

She shoved him into the tube, activated the controls to send the tube down into the floor, turned around… and stopped cold. There, huddled behind Wesker's little throne, sat Bennett, holding Kim in his lap. Kim was very, very dead — dessicated, like the corpses they'd passed walking into this room. Bennett was fixated on his one-time intern, tears streaking their way down his face.

"Hey, Bennett," Alice said, sitting down in front of him.

Bennett barely glanced up at her. "Should have listened to you," he muttered, looking back at Kim. "Kim wanted to go out east, but nooo, I had to go to the goddamned boat."

"It's okay," Alice assured him. "You couldn't have known. Tell me what happened."

"We came down here, looking for someone, anyone. We found that… that thing waiting for us," he said, gesturing to the area where Wesker's tube had descended into the floor. "He… clawed tentacles shot out of his mouth, like those fucking mole zombies, but bigger, you know? He would have gotten me, but Kim…" Fresh tears spilled down his face. "Kim pushed me out of the way. He saved my useless, worthless ass." He looked up at Alice, a haunted look on his face. "Why me?"

Alice gently placed a hand over Bennett's. "You're not worthless, Bennett. We all feel that way sometimes, when we lose someone we care about. Especially horrible situations like what you just described. The thing you have to realize is that you do matter, no matter what opinion you have about yourself. And if that doesn't work… try thinking of it like this. Kim thought that there was something in you that was worth saving. If you honestly don't feel like there is, instead of questioning it, why not build something inside of yourself that he would have been proud of?"

"I'm a movie producer," Bennett said. "That's all I really know what to do, but there'll never be another movie again. Even if every goddamn zombie falls over dead tomorrow and the human race starts to bounce back, I won't live to see the movie industry return."

"Hey, I'm sure there are plenty of cameras and microphones and stuff still laying around somewhere you could use," Alice pointed out. "I mean, it's not like the whole entire city burned down, you know? Just grab one and start making something that means something to you, even if that means making something that'd mean something to Kim. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised to discover, if you keep it up, that you'll find that you mean something to someone else too someday."

Bennett wiped his face on his sleeve and stared at Alice for a minute. "You know, you can forget my crack about you being a stuntwoman yesterday," he finally said. "I think you'd have been a big, big star. Because what you just told me? 100% bullshit, all of it." He shook his head, still in disbelief. "…But you've actually got me believing in it." A ghost of a smile crossed his face. "The hallmark of a great actress."

XXX

Alice made her way back to the bridge. Down below, Chris, Claire, and the others were working to start waking everyone back up, since they'd cleared the ship and found no other hostiles. Bennett had recovered enough to tell her about Wesker — after he'd killed Kim, he'd told Bennett that he needed to continually ingest fresh DNA, and hoped that Alice's DNA would be enough to sate him once and for all. He seemed a little less skeptical of Alice's tall tales, and Alice was immensely proud of herself for the fact that she didn't break out into an impromptu "Told ya so!" dance or something.

On the bridge, she grabbed the radio. "Citadel, this is Arcadia. Repeat, Citadel, this is Arcadia. Where's my favorite watchmaker?"

After a few moments, the radio crackled to life. "Arcadia, this is Citadel," Luther's voice said, exuberant. "It's damn good to hear your voice, Alice." He paused. "What's everyone else's status?"

"Chris and Claire are alright. Bennett survived. Kim… didn't." Alice sighed.

"Damn," Luther echoed. "Sorry to hear it. And the ship?"

"Two thousand plus survivors, being awoken from cryogenic storage as we speak," Alice said.

Luther whistled. "That's… that's incredible, Alice. Everyone here's gonna be glad to hear about it."

"About that…" Alice said. "The ship comes kitted out with a number of helicopters. I know you guys had your heart set on fixing up that old jalopy over the next week, but —"

"Are you kidding?" Luther interrupted. "Fuck the car, send us a helicopter!"

Alice laughed. "One helicopter, coming your way soon. I just want to make sure everything here's settled first before I —"

"Shit!" Luther swore. "Oh, Jesus, Alice, I just saw… oh hell, looked to be two dozen or so Umbrella gunships, all headed your way!"

Alice leapt to her feet. "Thanks for the warning, Citadel. Arcadia out, hopefully not forever." She broke into a dead run, down through the tower, into the cargo bay, past all the shipping containers, through the room — very crowded now — of defrosting prisoners, and into the helicopter bay.

Chris was walking in her direction, saw her running, saw the look of alarm on her face, and jogged up to her, turning to keep apace with her. "What's the situation?" he asked.

"Hostiles incoming. Multiple choppers. Two dozen or so, unsure exact count," Alice rattled off, too shaken to even try to be silly.

"Fuck," Chris grunted. "I'll let Claire know, we can each pilot one of these gunships. Three against two dozen…" His face was grim, it was very poor odds.

"For the last time, you need to learn to count, Chris," Alice countered. "It's gonna be just one against two dozen." Chris realized Alice hadn't made a beeline for the nearest gunship… rather, she was sprinting for the farthest one. He immediately grasped what her intention was, and wanted to tell her how impressed he was, she was all guts, he would never forget her, etc. etc. Instead, he just gave her a quick salute and said, "Good luck, Ocampo, you fucking asshole."

"You know it." Alice gave him a terse smile and a quick nod before climbing into the gunship, opening the launch doors, and grimacing as the craft was slingshotted out of the Arcadia and into the sky. She swung the craft around, aimed eastwards, and the radar screen on the instrument panel lit up with a buttload of hostile pings.

She figured there was an ever-so-slight chance she could actually pull this off successfully and not die in the process. She quickly figured out how to access the gunship's autopilot and plotted a course that would take her right through the center of the cluster of enemy gunships. Then she did the mental calculus of whether she should set the black hole bomb to explode after just a few seconds and risk being caught in its radius, or set it to explode after, like, half a minute, giving her plenty of breathing space, but with the risk that one of the enemy gunships would shoot her craft down without her onboard to engage in evasive maneuvers.

She finally decided to go for the longer time. At this range, they wouldn't see her parachute, and they would assume there was a pilot still in the craft. They would hopefully be too arrogant to shoot down a solitary craft that wasn't actively attacking them, and they would never dream, thinking it was still manned, that there was a black hole bomb ready to compact them all into a microscopic singularity. She quickly figured how long it would take for her craft to meet the enemy swarm, then punched that number into the timer, slid on the parachute, and bailed out.

She stayed in free-fall for as long as she dared before pulling the parachute's ripcord. Her body jerked with the parachute's deployment, and she kept her eyes fixated eastward even as she splashed down into the ocean and began to tread water.

"Come on, come on, come on," she chanted.

An immensely bright light blossomed in the distance, accompanied several moments later by hurricane-force winds as the atmosphere was gobbled up by the incredible gravitational forces being exerted by the blast.

And then, a moment later, the light subsided, the winds died down, and Alice felt relief at having (hopefully) wiped out all the incoming craft.

Within moments, the sound of a motor caught her ears and she whipped her head around, only to see Claire at the controls of the craft they had arrived at the Arcadia with. "Chris told me what happened," Claire said. "I figured you'd live through it." She pulled Alice from the water and piloted them back to the Arcadia, where Chris awaited them at the top of the stairs.

"Did you get them all?" Chris asked.

Alice looked at the eastward sky. "I think they would have shown up by now," she finally concluded… jinxing it. The three of them began to walk back sternside, until the sound of gunship rotors once more filled their ears, and the three of them turned their heads to see a single, solitary craft approach, black and menacing, coming in lower and slower than the others but in first place nonetheless. Slow and steady, as always, wins the race.

The three of them dove for cover behind the one place they could: the wreckage of Alice's airplane. They watched as the gunship hovered over the space on the deck between them and the bridge. Chris and Claire checked their guns; Alice had left hers on the bridge, like a dumbass. Not that she'd necessarily need them, one rinky-dink squad of Umbrella mercs were nothing compared to —

The back hatch of the gunship opened up, and a large figure in black leapt from it, no rappel line attached. Alice watched as it impacted with the ship's deck, sending vibrations that the three of them could feel. She suddenly felt a surge of happiness within her as the figure stood up, up to its full height of seven feet and some odd inches. The sun shone brightly on the metallic fasteners of his familiar black trenchcoat (not to mention the ones on his face), and the one remaining eye over his lipless, distorted mouth searched about for anyone… and it finally landed on her.

And that's when the hope inside Alice died, as Nemesis, upon seeing her, opened its mouth and bellowed out a furious "SSSTTTTAAAAARRRRSSSSSS!", the barrel of its minigun spinning up and ejecting a torrent of lead in their direction.

XXXXXXXXXX

RIP Kim. :'(

Bet none of you had a "Bennett Sinclair redemption arc" spot on your bingo card, huh?

One downside of just icing Wesker before he has a chance to monologue is that we miss out on a lot of fun exposition, which Bennett can fortunately relay some of.

SURPRISE, MOTHERFUCKERS! Did you think our dear friend Matt Addison was quietly executed offscreen or something? NOOOOOPE! He's back, with murder on his mind! What ever could have happened? Guess we'll have to find out in the next story, titled It's Aliceing Rains!

…And hey, you know how I always post the first chapter of a new story on the same day I post the last chapter of the old one? What if… what if I didn't do that? What if I let this cliffhanger just… hang around for the next three days? And by 'what if' I mean 'I am 100% doing it', hahahahahahahahahahahaha. See y'all around then!

Yours truly, Satan.