task - in this case, killing me."
Carlos gazed at her skeptically. "Why you?"
"Long story. The short answer is, I know too much.
Anyway, I was hiding here, but..."
Carlos finished for her. "But a gang of zombies showed up, making it hard for you to leave. Gotcha."
Jill nodded. "What about you? You said you made it to the trolley, what you doing here?"
"I ran into two other U.B.C.S. guys. One of mem got
shot, he's still alive but not doing so great Mikhail.
Nicholai - that's the other one - thought he knew
where to get some explosives, so Mikhail and I went to
the trolley to wait for him. It turns out that there's an
evac on standby, if we can get to the clock tower and
ring the bells. We ring, helicopters come."
He noticed Jill's expression and shrugged, grinning.
"Yeah, I know. It's some kind of computer signal, I
don't know how it works. Great news, except to get the
trolley running we're going to need a couple of
things - a power cable and one of those old-fashioned
electrical fuses, to start with. Mikhail told me there
was a repair shop over here; he's one of the platoon
leaders, he got a good look at a map before we
landed..."
Carlos frowned, then nodded to himself as if he'd
solved some puzzle. "Nicholai must have seen a map, too, that would explain why he didn't need directions."
"Carlos, Mikhail, Nicholai - Umbrella doesn't dis-
criminate based on nationality, does it?" Jill made the joke offhandedly, mostly to cover a deepening sense of
unease. She thought Carlos was decent at heart, but two
more Umbrella soldiers, one of them a platoon
leader - what were the odds that all three were stand-up guys who had been misled by their employer? Um-
brella was the enemy, she couldn't lose focus of that.
Carlos was already walking away, his attention fixed
on the raised red car. "If they were doing any electrical checks, there should be ... there, that's what I'm look-
ing for!"
It seemed that Carlos had seen the cable he wanted
in the tangle of cords and wires spilling out from
under the hood, some of them hooked to machines Jill
didn't recognize, some just trailing on the oily ce-
ment.
"Careful," Jill said, moving to join him as he reached up and grabbed one of the cables, dark green. She had
an instinctive mistrust of electrical equipment and
vaguely believed that people who messed around with
wires were just asking to be electrocuted.
"No problem," Carlos said easily. "Only a real ba-boso would leave any of these hooked up to the..."
Crack!
An orange-white spark spat out from one of the trail-
ing wires, loud and bright and as explosive as a gun-
shot. Before Jill could draw breath, the cement floor
was on fire - no gradual build, no sense of expansion, it
was just suddenly and completely ablaze, the flames
two, three feet high and rising.
"This way!" Jill shouted, running toward the open door that led into the office, the oil-fed fire blasting
heat against her bare skin, when it hits the car's gas tank it's going to blow, we gotta get out of here...
Carlos was right behind her, and as they ran into the
office, Jill felt her blood run cold. Screw the car, the car
was nothing compared to what was going to happen
when the fire got to the underground tanks in front of
the station.
A chain pulley hung next to the steel shutter that
blocked the front door. Jill ran for it, but Carlos was
one step ahead. He snatched the chain and pulled, hand
over hand, the shutter inching slowly upward in spite of
the frantic rattle of metal links.
"Drop and crawl," Carlos said, raising his voice to be heard over the clanking, over the oceanlike rumble of
spreading fire in the shop.
"Carlos, the tanks outside..."
"I know, now move!"
The bottom of the shutter was a foot and a half from
the ground. Jill dropped, flattening herself against the
cold floor, shouting up to Carlos before she belly-
crawled outside.
"Leave it, it's good enough!"
Then she was through, stumbling to her feet,
reaching around to grab Carlos's hand and pulling him up after her. Inside the shop, something ex-
ploded, a dull whoomp of sound, maybe a gas can or that cabinet full of machine oil, Jesus I must be
cursed doomed something things keep blowing up
around me...
Carlos grabbed her arm, snapping her out of her
wild-eyed freeze. "Come on!"
She didn't need to be told twice. With the rising light
pouring from the machine shop's windows, illuminat-
ing in manic orange the heaped corpses of at least eight
virus carriers, she ran, Carlos beside her.
The gridlock was bad, the street jammed, no clear
path for them to make time. Jill could feel the seconds
fly as they struggled through the maze of dead metal
and blank, staring glass. The first real explosion and the
sound of shattering windows behind them was too
close, we're not far enough yet, but all they could do was what they were doing - that and pray that the fire
would somehow miss the main tanks.
Maybe we should take cover, maybe we're out of the
blast radius and...
Somehow, she didn't hear it - or rather, she heard a
sudden, total absence of sound. Too focused on wend-
ing through the silent traffic in the dark, the rush of
blood in her ears, the passing time, perhaps. All she
knew was that she was running, and then there was a
mammoth wave of pressure that boosted her from be-
hind, lifting her up and forward at once, the side of a
beaten panel truck rushing at her and Carlos screaming
something - and then there was nothing but blackness,
nothing but a distant sun that lapped at the edges of her
dark, sending her dreams of angry light.
Mikhail was sinking, descending into the fevered delirium that would undoubtedly kill him. All Nicholai
had been able to get out of the dying man was that Car-
los had gone to get equipment to repair the trolley, and
that he would be back soon. If there was any more,
Nicholai would have to wait until Mikhail's fever
broke or Carlos returned, neither of which seemed
likely. Mikhail was only going to get worse, and the
deep, rumbling explosion that had quaked the ground
beneath the trolley, that had preceded a lightening of
the night sky to the north, suggested that there had been
a fire at the gas station - not necessarily Carlos's fault,
but Nicholai suspected that it probably was, and that
Carlos Oliveira had burned to a crisp.
Which means I'll have to find a power cable myself if
I want a ride to the hospital.
Irritating, but it couldn't be helped. Nicholai had
found a box of spare fuses inside the station, as well as a five-gallon container of properly mixed machine oil,
more than enough to get the cable car to the hospital -
- but no power cable, no wiring at all with which to by-
pass the shorted circuits. Nicholai wondered why
Carlos hadn't thought to break into the station's main-
tenance room, and decided it was probably due to an
absence of imagination.
"No ... no, it can't ... fire! Fire at will, I think ... I
think..."
Nicholai looked up from his inspection of the trolley's
control panel, curious, but whatever Mikhail thought was
lost as he dropped back into a troubled slumber, the an-
cient bench creaking beneath his restless movements. Pa-
thetic. He could at least babble out something interesting.
Nicholai stood and stretched, turning toward the
door. He'd already added the oil to the engine's rudi-
mentary tank system, but he'd taken the wrong land of
fuse. He'd get another one on his way back into town,
probably all the way back to that same damned parking
garage where he'd tracked Mikhail; he'd noticed some
shelves of equipment there. All of the running back and
forth was becoming tiresome, but at least most of the
cannibals in the area had already been killed, so it
wouldn't take too long - and when he returned, he
could reward himself for his efforts by telling Mikhail
who was responsible for his impending death.
He stepped out into the train's yard, thinking
vaguely about where he might sleep for the night,
when he saw two figures stumbling toward the trolley,
their forms half hidden in the sparse light from a
dying fire in the northwest corner of the yard. They
drew closer, and he saw that Carlos had managed to
escape death after all and had brought a woman with
him, undoubtedly the same woman who'd told him
about the trolley. Both were singed, their exposed skin
reddened and grimy with ash; perhaps he hadn't been
that far off the mark about who had started that
fire...
... and once again, let the games begin!
"Carlos! Are you injured? Either of you?" He stepped forward so they could see him clearly, could
see the deep concern on his face.
Carlos was obviously glad to see him. "No, I'm... ... we're both fine, just a little banged up. The gas station
caught fire and blew. Jill blacked out for a minute or
two, but she's..."
Carlos abruptly cleared his throat, nodding toward
the woman. "Uh, Jill Valentine, this is Sergeant Nicholai Ginovaef, U.B.C.S."
"Nicholai, please," he offered, and she stared at him, her expression unreadable. It seemed that Ms. Valentine
wasn't interested in making friends. That pleased him,
though he wasn't sure why. She carried a .357 revolver
and had what looked like a 9mm tucked into the waist-
band of an extremely snug skirt.
"We are indebted to you for telling Carlos about the
trolley. You're with the police?" Nicholai asked. Jill's gaze was fixed on his, and there was no mistak-
ing the tone of challenge in her response. "The police are dead. I'm with the S.T.A.R.S., Special Tactics and
Rescue Squad."
Well, well, how ironic. I wonder if she's encoun-
tered Umbrella's little surprise yet... If she had, she probably wouldn't be standing in front of him; unless
it was malfunctioning, a Tyrant could break a full-
grown man in half without exerting even a quarter of
its strength. Someone like Jill Valentine didn't stand
a chance against something even more advanced,
Umbrella's new toy that had been scheduled to ap-
pear.
Nicholai was pleased with the strange coincidence of
meeting a S.T.A.R.S. member; it made him feel like
everything was in order, that connections in his mind
were reflected in the world around him...
"How's Mikhail?"
Nicholai looked away from Jill's unwavering stare to
answer Carlos, not wanting to seem combative. "Not very well, I'm afraid. We should leave as soon as possi-
ble. Did you find anything useful? Mikhail said you
were going to get repair equipment."
"It's all gone, burned up," Carlos said. "I guess we'll have to keep..."
"Did you get your explosives?" Jill interrupted, still watching him carefully. "Where were they?"
Not openly hostile, but very close; not surprising,
considering. The inside line on the S.T.A.R.S. was that
they had uncovered information about Umbrella's real
research at the Spencer estate lab. They'd been discred-
ited later, of course, but Umbrella had been trying to
get rid of them ever since.
If they're all as suspicious as this one, it's no wonder
Umbrella hasn 't succeeded.
"There weren't any explosives," he said slowly, abruptly deciding to push her a little, see how forth-
right she was. "All I found were empty boxes. Ms. Valentine, is something bothering you? You seem ... tense."
He deliberately shot a sharp glance at Carlos, as if
angry that he'd brought the mistrustful woman along.
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