Wesker, having remotely controlled Alice to evil ends, wrapped up his time with her by triggering her T-virus-enabled superpowers to once again go dormant. "Thank you for your help, Mrs. Ocampo," he said aloud, chuckling. "The human race, consisting of Umbrella High Command and its eventual offspring, is forever indebted to you."

He left the Oval Office for the last time and made his way to the roof. Ada had been making herself useful the past few weeks by procuring a high-powered sniper rifle from somewhere and plunking away at any of the monsters that poked their heads above the wall, or else flew too close to the building's perimeter. "Sir," she acknowledged, keeping track of her latest quarry.

"We're leaving, Ada," he told her. "I'd suggest you grab anything of yours that you don't want to be gone forever, although that offer doesn't extend to that boytoy of yours."

Ada looked away from the scope. "Sir, what do you mean?"

Wesker grinned. "Umbrella's final victory is at hand," he informed her. "It's probably for the best if we're well away from here, oh, by the time twenty-eight minutes have passed."

"What are you talking about?" Ada asked, her face becoming contorted with shock. "…my God, you never did change sides, did you?"

Wesker shook his head. "A convenient ruse, to get close to the President. But… I was never able to get close enough. The old bastard never left his bunker, you see. Enter Project Alice, and the unique manifestation of her psychic powers."

Ada felt like she was going to be sick. "…Why didn't you just let her go free from Umbrella Prime, then?"

Wesker shook his head. "That would have been a bit too obvious, don't you think? No, I had to make it look real. And even then I had a hell of a time convincing Alice to take the shot to restore her abilities."

"Why even convince her?" Ada asked, thoroughly disgusted. "Why not just forcibly inject her with the T-virus?"

Wesker's grin grew wider. "I just thought it would be utterly, deliciously ironic. And hilarious. Turns out I was right." He turned around. "Come along, Ms. Wong. I've arranged for transportation for us in the old subway tunnels that they sealed up at the start of the pandemic. From there, we go on to…" He realized she wasn't following and turned to see what she was up to.

She stood her ground, sniper rifle in hand, aimed right at him. "I'm not going with you, Albert."

He cocked his head to the side. He'd foreseen that this was a possibility, and he had to admit he was a little disappointed to lose such a valuable asset. So, he gave her one chance. "…Are you sure? Need I remind you, Ms. Wong, that certain death awaits you if you don't accompany me out of Washington now."

Ada pulled the trigger. The bullet zinged through the space Wesker stood in less than a heartbeat before. He tore the rifle from her hands, snapped it in two, and tossed the pieces off of the roof. "What, are you going to kill me now?" she asked.

"Why bother?" Wesker said, shrugging. "I'll let you have the next twenty-odd minutes. Maybe you can reflect on what a tremendous mistake you've just made. Maybe you can find Mr. Kennedy in that timeframe, drag him into a closet somewhere, and finally have some extremely unfulfilling sex with him before the end." He shook his head. "At any rate, thank you for your years of service, Ms. Wong. Farewell." And moving faster than the human eye could follow, he disappeared.

"The bunker…" she said aloud. She dashed for the rooftop access and made her way through and down the building, until she reached the bunker. There were several bodies along the way that had been hastily covered up, but nobody was in a hurry to move them anywhere; many people just stood around, crying. She began to get a tremendous sinking feeling in her stomach.

Nobody bothered stopping her, another seriously bad sign. She made it to the central command room, where Leon was comforting Ashley Graham as a nurse gave her a large amount of painkiller. Alice was handcuffed and sitting up, fixated on the strategic map of the world. Ada looked at it for several seconds and her stomach flapped and flopped about inside her abdomen as she saw the lines emanating out from the western half of the country, reaching out to touch the submarine fleet worldwide. As each line touched a sub, both the line and the sub would flicker out of existence.

"Can't we do something?" she asked, helpless. "Issue a recall code or something?"

"No such thing," Alice murmured. Her voice, normally so bright and cheerful, was flat, dull, dead. "A fiction whipped up by Hollywood. Can you imagine going up to Curtis 'War Crimes' LeMay and telling him, 'Hey general, let's put a radio beacon on all our nukes so we can deactivate them mid-flight, in case there's an oopsie-doodle and we launch them by accident!'. He would laugh at you, tell you that the Reds would certainly exploit it to sweep all American warheads from the sky, then have you reassigned to latrine duty in Alaska for the rest of your career."

"That can't…" Ada trailed off, realizing that it made a chilling amount of sense.

"Oh, look," Alice said. One of the tracking lines intersected with a sub off the west coast, and both lights flickered out. "Bye, Becky. Bye, Rain and Rain. Bye, Luther. See you soon. Tell Jill I said sorry I exploded her brain."

"Jill Valentine?" Ada asked.

Alice nodded. "We were together in a gift shop when the announcement from Graham came. After that… I wasn't myself anymore. I tried to fight it, I really did. I'm sorry."

"Surely there are anti-missile defenses in the city…" Ada muttered.

Leon shook his head. "The military's been primarily concerned with pacification of the undead and various BOWs. There were a few missile defense sites in the city, but I think they've fallen or were decommissioned over the past decade."

"Maybe if we close the bunker —" Ada began.

Again Leon shook his head. "This place was designed and built in the 50s, before the Soviets got the hydrogen bomb. A Minuteman going off anywhere within a mile of this place will be powerful enough to bury us, and it's not going to miss."

"That would be funny," Alice remarked. "A missile missing."

Nobody laughed.

Ada felt her legs go weak as she collapsed into a nearby chair. For the first time in her life, she truly didn't have an escape plan. Yet she felt zero regret for turning down Wesker's offer. She looked to Alice, who somehow still had a look of innocence about her even though she'd taken a blow to her soul that could very well be lethal, and she looked to Leon, who once more reminded her of that lost little puppy he'd been wandering the sewers beneath Raccoon City. But really, it hadn't been for them… it had been for herself, after all. She stroked the beautiful pattern of her dress for reassurance.

Leon walked up to her and put a comforting hand on her shoulder, and this time she allowed it to stay. They all watched the line grow closer and closer to the last, best hope the human race had.

The line reached Washington, and the room was abruptly plunged into darkness as the room trembled like God himself had picked it up and drop-kicked it.

XXX

The Minuteman missile exploded high above the White House, an airburst strike. Wesker could have easily programmed the missile to detonate on the surface, killing everyone instantaneously, but as one last spiteful parting gift to those who would oppose Umbrella, he wanted them to die screaming.

The initial effect of the blast was to send out an electromagnetic pulse that fried every last electronic device in the area. All the tanks, helicopters, automatic turrets, radios, night vision goggles, AA guns… every last one of them died instantaneously. Any airborne helicopters began to fall from the sky, and the pilots struggled to control their craft, or at least give it a survivable crash landing. (The stupid ones did, at least. The smart ones aimed to crash to take as many monsters out as possible).

The next effect of the blast was the wave of thermal radiation, setting hundreds of fresh fires all over the city. The White House, being white, was mostly resistant to this. Anyone caught out in the open was immediately subject to horrific third-degree burns, though. The massive army of undead surrounding the White House also sustained massive burns, but they didn't care, as the T-virus made them just psychic enough that they didn't need eyes to hunt.

Finally, the blast wave arrived and brutally pummeled the entire compound. Many who had just sustained horrific burn injuries were further punished with broken bones. The White House itself remained more or less intact, but every window in the building was shattered. The great wall encircling the White House crumbled.

Inside the bunker, emergency lights flared on. The distant sound of shooting and screaming could be heard. Someone ran into the bunker and shouted "The wall is down! The goddamn wall is down! We need everyone who can hold a gun upstairs, now!"

Alice felt hands roughly pull her to her feet, before the same hands grabbed her by her wrists and unlocked her handcuffs. "Come on, Alice, we need you!" She thought it was Leon. She ran upstairs in a frantic rush with everyone else, grabbing one of the guns from one of the men she had killed.

The first zombie she ran into, she thought she would just lower the gun and let it kill her. Mechanically, her body acted of its own volition, raising the gun and firing. "Okay," Alice said to herself. "The next one then." She shot zombie after zombie, thinking that surely this time she would let events play out the way they ought to. And each time her body moved of its own volition — not being puppeted, no, this was just Alice having a mental break and her body was kicking ass on autopilot — and shot its enemies. And when the bullets ran out, she resorted to good ol' hand to hand, and (of course) the classic mid-air kick.

Gradually, the sounds of combat died out, as the humans ran out of ammunition. The screams grew farther and farther apart, as the monsters ran out of victims. She found herself in a tunnel somewhere; a fire had started and smoke was filling the space up. She was blindly feeling along, again on autopilot; her mind wanted to just sit down and start taking in big lungfuls of smoke (Jill would have been proud, she thought), but her body stubbornly kept refusing.

She found a ladder through sheer luck and pulled herself up. It led to the outside surface. The sun had risen at some point and as Alice pulled herself up she thought, This is it. The zombie hordes will rush in and overwhelm me now.

She looked around and saw that the area was utterly bereft of anything moving, living or dead. "Hey, this is just like Antz," Alice murmured. "We win, 1-0." Too bad nobody was around to hear her funny jokes.

She let her feet take her where they would, and she soon found herself at the reflecting pool before the Washington Monument, which still stood in the distance, battered-looking but phallic as ever. She knelt down and took several gulps of the water in the pool, worries about dirt low in her thirsty mind.

A great big bloated zombie lurched out of the water and she managed to wriggle out of its grasp, a length of barbed wire wrapped around its foot preventing it from pursing her. "Sorry, didn't realize this pool was occupied," Alice said to the snarling creature. She picked up a nearby rock and caved its head in, then went back for a few more slurps. "You know," she said, feeling philosophical. "Corpsewater isn't all that bad, actually."

XXXXXXXXXX

Separate Ways is the name of Ada's side story from the RE4 game, showing what all she was up to while Leon was saving Ashley. Of course, here she chose NOT to go a separate way, for good or ill.

You know Alice is in dire straits when she drinks corpsewater without hesitation.