RE: Apocalypse Novel
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There were days when Dr. Sam Isaacs hated his job.
Right now, Isaacs longed for a day that good.
As he stood in his Hazmat suit watching the various technicians, also in Hazmat suits, check over the wreckage of the Umbrella helicopter that had
crashed in the Arklay Mountains shortly after Raccoon City was wiped out, he thought on the one piece of good news he'd gotten all day.
Timothy Cain was dead.
True, Isaacs didn't actually rejoice in the fact that the man was deceased, but at the very least it meant that he wouldn't be Isaacs's boss anymore. The
man had been a complete imbecile with delusions of grandeur.
Worse, he'd had no concept of one of the most important tenets of science, that of the controlled experiment.
Instead, he'd let the T-virus get out of the Hive - a nice controlled environment - and then he'd decided to use the killing fields of Raccoon City
in the wake of this nightmare as the place to test the Nemesis Program.
It drove Isaacs crazy. Nemesis had been floundering for ages, and now they'd finally had a breakthrough. Abernathy and Addison were the perfect
test subjects - Addison took to the mutations like a duck to water, and Abernathy had even taken it one step further.
Did Cain let Isaacs do his job and refine the process?
No, he'd let them loose in the city and set up some kind of idiotic death-cage match.
Now both subjects were as dead as Cain, and Isaacs would need to start over.
Not that that was the corporation's highest priority at present. After all, they had a serious amount of spin control to deal with. Isaacs didn't know
how they were planning to manage that - blowing up a city wasn't exactly something you could brush under the rug - but that was hardly Isaacs's problem.
All he knew was that, based on the last report from Ian Montgomery before the pilot died in the crash, Cain was dead and Abernathy had been on this bird
when it flew out of the city. If there was something - anything - to salvage, Isaacs needed it.
Then one of the techs moved a piece of wreckage to reveal Abernathy's entire body.
Intact.
Well, mostly intact - a large piece of metal had cut right through her thoracic region, but that could be removed. And studying her corpse would be
extremely beneficial.
"Fetch the medical team," he said to one of the techs.
"Sir? She's dead, sir."
"Just do as I say." Save him from idiot technicians!
"Any sign of any of the others?"
Another tech shook her head. "No, sir. There are charred remains in the pilot's seat - that was probably Montgomery. But there's no sign of any
other remains. My guess is that Olivera, the two civilians, and the Ashford girl all made it out alive."
Isaacs shook his head.
"Unbelievable. The genetically engineered super-soldier doesn't make it, but the regular people and the little girl do?"
The tech shrugged. "It's a fucked-up world, sir."
"Crudely put, but correct." Isaacs sighed. "Keep checking. Just in case."
"Yes, sir."
Isaacs watched as the medical team approached and began pulling Abernathy's body from the wreckage.
The man looked at her. "Can you hear me? Do you understand what I'm saying?"
The thing on her mouth let her breathe, but kept her from talking. She remembered that nodding would work in this case, so she did.
"Good." The man turned to one of the other people in the laboratory. "Begin the purging process."
She heard a strange noise. Moments later, the water was down to her head - then her neck, her chest, and so on, until the tube was empty. Hot air
blasted her for a few seconds, drying her off. Then the tube opened, and one of the people in the laboratory removed the tubes and the thing around her
mouth.
Now she could walk around freely. She started exploring the room, taking in the sights, sounds, textures - the different colours of all the pieces of
furniture and clothes, the humming of the various pieces of equipment, the coldness of the floor against her bare feet.
"Her recovery is remarkable." One of the people in white was talking about something - probably about her. "The regeneration of both organs and tissue
is simply off the scale. And her powers, both physical and mental, seem to be developing at a geometric rate. Better than we ever could have hoped
for."
One of the people in white - not the one who was talking - was sitting and using a stick of some kind on a piece of paper.
Another of the people in white, the one who seemed to be in charge of everything, asked, "You know what that is?"
She just stared at it - she had no idea.
The man in charge took it from the other man and started mimicking his motions. "Pen. See?"
He took her hand, put the stick - the pen, rather - into it and guided it onto the piece of paper.
"A pen," he repeated.
The man in charge let go, and she started using it on her own. She couldn't do much with it - even though she'd only just figured out what it was, she
recognized that what she was doing with it was silly looking.
So silly, in fact, that she smiled.
"That's right," the man in charge said, "pen."
For the first time since they'd let her out of the tube, she tried to talk. "W-"
The sound came out scratchy. She tried again.
"Where-"
The man in charge prompted her. "Where are you?"
She nodded.
"You're safe. Do you remember anything? Do you remember your name?
What was that?
"Your name?" the man in charge said again.
"Name?" she asked.
"That's right."
"My-name-is..."
The concept was tickling at the back of her mind. She knew what a name was, she was pretty sure, but it wouldn't come to her.
She sighed.
The man in charge turned to the other people. "I want her under twenty-four hour observation. I want a complete set of blood work and chemical and
electrolyte analysis by the end of the day."
Then, suddenly, it hit her.
"Sir!"
That was one of the lab techs - whose name, Alice now remembered, was Cole. He'd noticed something on the brain-wave pattern indicator and was
trying to get the attention of the man in charge.
Dr. Samuel Issacs.
The man who'd experimented on her and Matt Addison, at the direction of Major Timothy Cain, all for the benefit of the Umbrella Corporation.
Isaacs, though, wasn't paying any attention to Cole, or to Alice herself.
"Advanced reflex testing is also a priority. I want electrical impulses monitored and her-"
"Sir!" That was Cole again.
Sounding annoyed, Isaacs asked, "What is it?"
She didn't give him a chance to answer.
"My name is Alice. And I remember everything."
Isaacs went pale. He signaled one of the guards standing by the door, a young man named Doyle.
Before he could even draw his sidearm, Alice lunged at Doyle with the pen she still held, going for his eye.
Frozen in shock, Doyle didn't move, even though Alice stopped just a millimeter short of his cornea. The blow would kill him, after all, and Alice had
no interest in killing a young man who was just doing his job. Besides, his wife was expecting a baby, and it wasn't fair to her.
Instead, she coldcocked him.
Two orderlies came out of nowhere to subdue her.
She subdued them in about two and a half seconds.
Then she grabbed Isaacs's arm.
Him, she wanted to kill. But, no, that wasn't fair - if he died, he couldn't begin to pay for what he'd done to her.
So she broke his arm. Let him feel pain for a while. It would start to compensate for the pain she'd suffered at his and Cain's hands.
Then she threw him headfirst into the tank she's been held in.