Barry jogged toward it, revolver in hand, feeling
tense and worried. Christ, what a balls-up this opera- tion was! S.T.A.R.S. teams were often sent into risky situations where the circumstances were unusual, but
this was the first time since he'd been a rookie that
Barry felt like things had gone totally out of control.
Joseph was dead, Chickenheart Vickers had left them
to be eaten by dogs from hell, and now Chris was in
trouble. Wesker shouldn't have sent him in alone.
Jill reached the door first, touching the handle with
slim fingers and looking to him. Barry nodded and
she pushed it open, going in low and left.
Barry took the other side, both of them sweeping an
empty corridor.
"Chris?" Jill called out quietly, but there was no answer. Barry scowled, sniffing the air; something
smelled like rotting fruit.
"I'll check the doors," Barry said. Jill nodded and edged to the left, alert and focused.
Barry moved toward the first door, feeling good
that Jill was at his back. He'd thought she was kind of
bitchy when she'd first transferred, but she was prov-
ing to be a bright and capable soldier, a welcome
addition to the Alphas.
Jill let out a high-pitched gasp of surprise and Barry
spun, the scent of decay suddenly thick in the narrow
hall.
Jill was backing away from an opening at the end of
the corridor, her weapon trained on something Barry
couldn't see.
"Stop!" Her voice was high and shaky, her expres- sion horrified and she fired, once, twice, still backing toward Barry, her breathing fast and shallow.
"Get clear, left!" He raised the Colt as she moved out of the way, as a tall man stepped into view. The
figure's arms were stretched out like a sleepwalker's,
the hands frail and grasping.
Barry saw the creature's face then and didn't hesi-
tate. He fired, a .357 round peeling the top of its ashen
skull away in an explosive burst, blood coursing down
its strange, terrible features and staining the cataracts
of its pale, rolling eyes.
It pitched back, sprawling face-up at Jill's feet.
Barry hurried to her side, stunned.
"What..." he started, then saw what was on the
carpet in front of them, laying in the small sitting area
that marked the end of the corridor.
For a moment, Barry thought it was Chris, until
he saw the S.T.A.R.S. Bravo insignia on the vest, and
felt a different kind of horror set in as he struggled to
recognize the features. The Bravo had been decapi-
tated, the head laying a foot away from the corpse, the
face completely covered in gore.
Oh jeez, it's Ken.
Kenneth Sullivan, one of the best field scouts Barry
had ever known and a hell of a nice guy. There was a
gaping, ragged wound in his chest, chunks of partly
eaten tissue and gut strewn around the bloody hole.
His left hand was missing, and there was no weapon
nearby; it must have been his gun that Joseph had
found out in the woods.
Barry looked away, sickened. Ken had been a quiet,
decent sort, did a lot of work in chemistry. He'd had a
teen-aged son who lived with his ex in California.
Barry thought of his own girls at home, Moira and
Poly, and felt a surge of helpless fear for them. He
wasn't afraid of death, but the thought of them
growing up without a father.
Jill dropped into a crouch next to his ravaged body
and rifled quickly through the belt pack. She shot an
apologetic look at Barry, but he gave her a slight nod.
They needed the ammo; Ken certainly didn't.
She came up with two clips for a nine-millimeter
and tucked them into her hip pocket. Barry turned
and stared down at Ken's murderer in disgust and
wonder.
He had no doubt that he was looking at one of the
cannibal killers that had been preying upon Raccoon
City. It had a crusty scum of red around its mouth
and gore-encrusted nails, as well as a ragged shirt that
was stiff with dried blood. What was weird was how
dead it looked.
Barry had once done a covert hostage rescue in Ecuador, where a group of farmers had been held for
weeks by a band of insane guerrilla rebels. Several of
the hostages had been killed early in the siege, and
after the S.T.A.R.S. managed to capture the rebels,
Barry had gone with one of the survivors to record the
deaths. The four victims had been shot, their bodies
dumped behind the small wooden shack that the
rebels had taken over. After three weeks in the South
American sun, the skin on their faces had shriveled,
the cracking, lined flesh pulling away from sinew and
bone. He still remembered those faces clearly, and
saw them again now as he looked down at the fallen
creature. It wore the face of death.
Besides which, it smells like a slaughterhouse on a
hot day. Somebody forgot to tell this guy that dead
people don't walk around.
He could see the same sickened confusion on Jill's
face, the same questions in her eyes, but for now,
there weren't any answers; they had to find Chris and
regroup.
Together, they moved back down the corridor and
checked all three doors, rattling handles and pushing
at the heavy wood frames. All were securely locked.
But Chris had to have gone through one of them,
there's nowhere else he could have gone.
It didn't make sense, and short of breaking the
doors down, there was nothing they could do about it.
"We should report this to Wesker," Jill said, and
Barry nodded agreement. If they'd stumbled into the
hiding place of the killers, they were going to need a
plan of attack.
They ran back through the dining room, the stale
air a relief after the corridor's reek of blood and
decay. They reached the door back to the main hall
and hurried through, Barry wondering what the cap-
tain would make of all this. It was downright.
Barry stopped short, searching the elegant, empty
hall and feeling like the butt of some practical joke
that simply wasn't funny.
Wesker was gone.
SIX
"WESKER!" BARRY SHOUTED, HIS DEEP VOICE
echoing through the chilly room. "Captain Wesker!"
He jogged toward a row of arches at the back of the
hall, calling to Jill over his shoulder as he ran. "Don't
leave the room!"
Jill walked to the stairs, feeling almost dizzy. First
Chris, now the captain. They hadn't been gone five
minutes and he'd said he was going to stay put. Why would he have left? She looked around for signs of a
struggle, a spent cartridge, a spot of blood - there was
nothing to indicate what might have happened.
Barry appeared on the other side of the giant
staircase, shaking his head and walking slowly to join
her. Jill bit her lower lip, frowning.
"You think Wesker ran into one of those-things?"
she asked.
Barry sighed. "I don't think the RPD showed and snuck him out. Though if he did run into trouble, we
would have heard the shots."
"Not necessarily. He could have been ambushed,
dragged away ..."
They stood silently for a moment, thinking. Jill was
still a bit shaken from the face-to-face with the
walking corpse, but thought she'd accepted the facts
pretty well; the woods bordering Raccoon City had
become infested with zombies.
After a lifetime of reading trashy novels about serial
killers, is a cannibal zombie so hard to swallow?
Somehow it wasn't, and neither were the murderous
dogs or the secretly kept estate. There was no question
that it all existed. The question was, why? Did the
mansion have anything to do with the murders, or
had the zombies simply overrun it like they'd overrun
Raccoon Forest?
And was that creature the last thing Becky and Pris
saw?
She rejected that thought almost violently; thinking
about the girls now would be a mistake.
"So do we go looking or do we wait?" Jill said finally.
"Go looking. Ken made it here. The rest of the
Bravos could be somewhere in this house. It'd be easy
enough to get lost. Chris . . ."
He half-smiled, though Jill could see the worry in
his eyes. "Chris and Wesker got-side-tracked, but we'll find them. It'd take more than a couple of
walking stiffs to cause either of them any grief."
He reached into a pocket in his vest and pulled out
