Страница 36 из 54
A
Play it dumb, and don't give her a reason to doubt it. "T-Virus? What's…" Ada blinked, then widened her eyes. "Doctor Birkin? Wait, the Doctor Birkin, the biochemist?"
She saw a flash of pleasure cross A
She trailed off, her gaze suddenly far away. Ada Tensed, but then A
A
The scientist nodded, her limp blond hair falling across her eyes, her voice a whisper again. "It revi-talizes cellular function. It… it changed him. I didn't see – what he did, but I saw the bodies of the men who tried to kill him, afterwards… and I heard the screams."
Ada took a step closer, reaching out as if to comfort her, her own features set into a mask of sympathy, but A
But it's almost close enough… "I'm so sorry," Ada said, lowering her arms. "So the G-Virus, it leaked, it changed all of Raccoon…" A
She broke off, her eyes narrowing, the madness sweeping over her again as visibly as a crashing wave. High color flared in her pale cheeks, her red-rimmed eyes glossy with paranoia.
Get ready… "You can't have it!" A
Ada ducked and leapt, pistoning both of her arms beneath A
– but no sense -
Ada let go of the gun suddenly and A
That's just great. Walk into an ambush, not once but twice for hell's sake, then kill the one crazy bitch who can tell you where the samples are…
A low moan floated up from A
Shit shit shit!
Ada turned and ran across the bridge, scooping up the Beretta as she hurried for what looked like a control panel next to the fan shaft ladder. She'd have to lower the bridge, get to A
The dump, I can go through the dump, circle back around through one of the tu
Even as she thought it, she was jogging for the west ladder, hoping that the pitiful scientist was injured enough to stay down for a minute or two. There was a small balcony at the end of the bridge that looked over the dump, and the metal ladder hung down from an opening at the far right. Ada lowered herself down as quickly as she could, dropping the last several feet onto a cement landing. The dumping area was a large boxy room, the walls heaped with industrial debris – smashed crates, rust– ing pipes, wire-encrusted panels, and rotting card-board. She stepped off the landing and into almost three feet of black sludge, the cold, gooey muck rising up to her thighs. She didn't care, she only wanted to get to the lady Birkin, to bring an end to her time in Raccoon -
– except something moved. Beneath the opaque and stinking liquid, something big moved. Ada saw what might have been a reptilian spine slice through the murk in front of her, saw and heard a stack of boards topple into the water some ten feet away in the same instant.
You gotta be kidding me…
Whatever it was, it was big enough to change her mind about the hurry she was in to get to A
There was a tiny elevator platform in one corner of the empty conference room, a square of metal that apparently went down. Claire hurried toward it, fetid water dripping from her clothes, feeling horribly lost and anxious to keep moving, to find Sherry.
Please be alive, baby, please…
She'd found the drainage hole, but no Sherry and after agonizingly long moments of screaming into the rushing water, of trying to squeeze into the tiny hole, she'd forced herself to abandon the effort. Sherry was gone, maybe drowned, maybe not, but unless the flow of water suddenly decided to reverse itself, she wasn't coming back. Claire found the controls for the one-man lift and punched a button. A hidden motor whirred and the lift descended, inching down through the floor, proba-bly taking her to some other empty hall, some other blank and unknown room – or worse, directly into the path of yet another u