quickly stepped on it again, and the hatch reopened. It
was good to know he wouldn't suffocate, at least.
The interior of the submarine was very plain, maybe
as big as a large bathroom, bisected by the narrow lad-
der. There was a small padded bench on one side, the
rear of the sub, and a simple control console in front.
"Let's see what we got here," Steve muttered, step- ping up to the controls. They were ridiculously simple, a
single lever with two settings - the handle was currently
next to the upper setting, marked "main." The lower set-
ting was marked "transport," and Steve grinned, amazed
that it could be this easy. Talk about user-friendly.
He tapped the pressure plate again, sealing the hatch,
wondering if Claire would be impressed by his discov-
ery as he pulled the lever down. He heard a soft metallic
fhunk and then the submarine was moving, descending.
There was a single porthole, but it was too dark to see
anything besides a few rising bubbles.
The anticlimactic ride was over in about ten seconds.
The sub seemed to stop moving, and he heard a sharper
metallic sound coming from the hatch, like it was brush-
ing against something - definitely not an underwater
sound.
Onward and upward. The hatch opened as he started to climb the ladder, gun firmly in hand ... and he
stepped out onto a metal platform walled in glass or
plexi, surrounded by black water on either side. There
were a few steps leading down to a well-lit hallway,
where only the left-hand wall was made out of water.
Yees. It was like the displays at some aquariums, where you could go through an underwater tunnel, look
at the fish. He'd never liked those things, finding it way
too easy to imagine the glass breaking just as a shark de-
cided to cruise by ... or something worse.
Enough of that. Steve stepped down into the hall and
followed it around two bends, deliberately staring
straight ahead. It was the first time since the attack on
the island that he'd felt really nervous - not so much
claustrophobia as a kind of primal fear, that something
would come flashing out of the dark water toward the
glass, an animal or something else - a pale hand, per-
haps, or maybe a dead, white face pressing against the
window, smiling at him...
He couldn't help it. He broke into a run, and when the
corridor met a door that apparently led away from the
water room, he called himself pussy but was vastly re-
lieved, anyway.
He pushed the door open - and saw two, three...
... four zombies in all, and all of them suddenly quite eager
for his company. Each of them turned and began to limp
or stagger toward him, the rags of their clothing - Um-
brella uniforms, no question - hanging from their out-
stretched arms. There was a smell like dead fish.
"Unnnh," one of them moaned, and the others chimed in, the wails strangely gentle in a way, kind of sad and
lost-sounding. Considering what Umbrella had put him
through, he didn't feel a whole lot of sympathy. None,
in fact.
The room was half-split by a wall, the three zombies
on the left unable to see the lone ranger on the
right ... though maybe they could, he thought, peering
closer. Each of the trio had eyes that seemed to glow, a
strange dark red. They reminded him of a movie he'd seen once, about a man with super X-ray vision, who
saw all kinds of shit.
Guess we'll never know what they see. Steve took aim at the nearest, closed one eye, and bam, right through
the ol' frontal lobe, a clean hole appearing in its gray-
green forehead like magic. The creature's red eyes
seemed to fade and go out as it dropped, first to its
knees, then flat down on its face, sploosh. Gross.
The zombie's comrades took no notice, kept coming.
The lone ranger's progress had been stopped by a desk;
he continued to walk anyway, apparently not noticing
that he wasn't going anywhere.
Steve took out the next in line same as the first, a one
shot kill, but for some reason, he didn't feel all that great
about it. Shooting them down like that. It hadn't both-
ered him before, back at the prison - then it had felt
good, powerful even; he'd been stuck in that hellhole for
long enough to be pretty righteously pissed, and having
some control again had been like Christmas, like a great,
big, Christmas present that some little kid had been
waiting for all year, like he used to wait...
Shut up. Steve didn't want to think about it, it was bullshit. So he didn't feel like clapping every time he
wasted another one of them, so what? All it meant was
that he was getting bored.
He hurriedly shot the last two, the shots seeming
louder than before, practically deafening. A quick look
around for anything useful - if paper clips and dirty old
coffee mugs were useful, he was sitting pretty - and he
was ready to move on. There were two doors on the
back wall, one on either side of the room; he picked left
on general principles. He'd read somewhere that when
given a choice, most people picked right.
After checking his ammo, he walked past a big,
empty fish tank that dominated the left side of the room
and cautiously pushed the door open, taking in as much
as he could in a single glance. Dark, cavernous, smells
of salt water and oil, nothing moving. He stepped inside,
sweeping with the Luger...
... and laughed out loud, a rash of pure joy washing
through his system as his laugh echoed back at him. It
was a seaplane hangar, and there was one big-ass sea-
plane sitting right in front of him. Big to him, anyway,
he'd mostly flown in a little twin-engine private plane.
Thoroughly pleased, Steve walked toward the plane,
which sat just below the mesh platform under his feet.
He was an inexperienced pilot, but figured he probably
knew enough not to crash the thing.
First things first, board her and check fuel, general
condition, learn the controls...
He stopped at the edge of the platform and looked down, frowning. He was at least ten feet above the front
hatch, which looked to be locked down tight.
There was a bank of machinery to his left, a few pan-
els lit up. Steve walked over and looked at them, smiling
when he saw a control to power up the boarding lift. The
system should also open the plane door, according to the
tiny diagram.
"Presto," he said, flipping the switch. A loud and grat- ing mechanical noise bellowed through the giant hangar,
making him wince, but it stopped after a few seconds, as
a two-man lift slid to a halt at the platform's edge.
He stepped onto the lift, studied the standing control
panel - and started to curse, every bad word he could
think of, twice. Next to a trio of hexagonally shaped
spaces were the words, "insert proof keys here." No
keys, no power.
They could be anywhere on the whole goddamn is-
land! And what are the chances that all goddamn three
of them will be goddamn together?
He took a deep breath, made himself calm down a lit-
tle, and spent the next few minutes figuring out how the
plane's controls were hooked up to the rest of the sys-
tem, looking for a way to bypass the keys. And after a
careful, thoughtful deliberation, he started cursing
again. When he finally got tired of that, he resigned
himself to the inevitable.
Steve turned around and started to search the area,
peering into every dark crevice, formulating theories
about where the proof keys might be as he ran his hands
over the greasy, dust-slimed machinery cabinets - and
he decided that he was definitely going to dance all over
the bones of the next Umbrella employee he gunned
down, just for working at such an unnecessarily compli-
cated place. Keys and emblems and proofs and sub-
marines; it was a wonder they ever got shit done.
The virus carrier was wearing a lab coat and its lower
jaw had fallen off somewhere, or been broken off; it gur-
gled and spluttered horribly, its wormy tongue flopping
limply across its neck. Claire couldn't tell if it had been
a man or woman, although she supposed it didn't really
matter. As pitiful as it was revolting, she put it out of its
misery with a single shot to the temple and then
searched the area - working laboratory office, small in-
ventory room - before stepping back into the hall, dis-
couraged at her overwhelming lack of success.
The entrance she'd walked back to from the mansion
had opened up into a reasonably big courtyard, hard
packed dirt and totally utilitarian - more like the prison
than the palace, although even after searching a few
rooms, she still couldn't figure out where she was, ex- actly; some kind of testing facility, maybe, or a training
ground for guards or soldiers.
Maybe just a building designed to destroy hope, she thought blackly, looking toward the front door. She'd
walked in maybe ten minutes ago, hoping that Rodrigo
wasn't already dead, that Steve had found a boat, that
Mr. Psycho Ashford and his sister weren't planning to
blow up the island - and in just ten minutes, those hopes
had been thoroughly stomped on. All she really wanted
now was a goddamn bottle of medicine, because then
she'd be one step closer to leaving.
She'd tried the upstairs first, undergoing an exciting lit-
tle adventure that had shaved a few years off her age. All
she'd found up there was a small, locked lab with a lot of
broken glass on the floor, from what appeared to be rup-
tured holding tanks. She'd seen the damage through an
observation window, and had been about to leave when
some poor, bloody guy in an environmental suit threw
himself at the glass. It had been his dying act; the suit ob-
viously hadn't done him much good, his head had practi-
cally exploded, coating the inside of his helmet with gore.
It hadn't done her heart much good, either, scaring her
half to death, and the whole upstairs experience had been
topped off by an emergency shutter lockdown, apparently
triggered by the suit guy. She'd practically had to hurl
herself down the stairs to avoid being trapped.
Whee.
Nine zombies she'd had to put down so far, three of
them in lab coats or scrubs, and not even a cotton swab
to show for it. Nothing in the locker room - and she'd
looked through practically every damned one of the
lockers, turning up jockstraps and porn, but little else,
nothing in the odd little shower room, zip and zilch.
She'd have thought that a pharmaceutical company
might actually have a few Pharmaceuticals lying
around, but it was looking more doubtful by the mo-
ment.
Claire walked back to the long hall that branched off
from the building's first floor, that opened into an out-
door courtyard. She'd hoped to find something for Rod-
rigo without having to leave the building proper, but
there was no help for it.
If I get lost, I can just follow the trail of corpses back,
she thought, walking quickly down the nondescript cor-
ridor. Not funny, but she wasn't feeling all that politi-
cally correct at the moment. She was starting to run low
on ammo, too, which made her even less inclined to a
positive frame of mind.
She stepped from the relative warmth of the hall into
the mist-cloaked courtyard, smells of the ocean perme-
ating the cold gray night. A small fire burned against one wall. The whole Rockfort facility was strangely laid
out, she thought, an unlike mix of new and old. Ineffi-
cient, but interesting; the little courtyard was actually
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