RE: Extinction Novel
 |
|
As the woman breathed her last, Dr. Samuel Isaacs cursed.
Isaacs never used to curse. He had always prided himself on a fine vocabulary and a lack of need to resort to such crudity.
But the world had changed over the past years, and Isaacs had been forced to change with it. Among other things, this meant that when things went
wrong, he no longer shook his head, clucked softly, and said something bland like "What a pity" or "Back to the drawing board" or "Oh, dear."
No, he pounded a gloved fist on the table in front of him and said, "Shit!"
Then he turned to his team - who all, like him, were wearing white Hazmat suits - and said, "Let's move."
Yet another clone of Alice Abernathy had failed to make her way through the Cretan Labyrinth.
The other technicians and scientists went ahead in. Isaacs paused to close and seal the faceplate of the suit. The "Cretan Labyrinth" nickname
had come a few months back from Moody, one of the techs and it had stuck. Timson had suggested that they try to re-create Nemesis and use him as
the Minotaur, an offense for which Isaacs might have fired Timson under other circumstances.
The Nemesis Project had been Isaacs's greatest success and greatest failure at the same time. He hated the very mention of it.
Once Isaac's suit was properly sealed, he went in after Moody, Timson, and the others. He hated wearing the damn suit, as it was impossible
to breathe properly in the thing. In the old days, he'd have delegated. Sadly, the growing unpleasantness had reduced the staff to the point that Isaacs
had to be much more hands-on than a supervisor of his experience usually was.
Another change that had come in this new world they all lived in.
Not for the first time, Isaacs cursed the name of Timothy Cain. A German immigrant who served in the U.S. Army before joining the Umbrella
Corporation, Cain was singlehandedly responsible for destroying the world.
Worse, he was already dead, so he couldn't be punished. He died in Raccoon City shortly before it was vaporized by a tactical nuclear missile strike
that Cain himself had ordered.
There was blame to spread elsewhere, of course. Based on the surveillance they'd been able to pull from the mansion attached to the Hive - the very same
one that had been partially re-created in the Cretan Labyrinth - a former Umbrella security staffer, Percival Spencer Parks, had been the one to
unleash the T-virus in the Hive, condemning five hundred people to death. After that, the Hive had been sealed, the only survivors being Alice Abernathy
and Matthew Addison, who had been brought into the Nemesis Project.
Had the Hive remained sealed and been filled with concrete, it all would have been over. In fact, that had been Isaacs's very recommendation to Cain.
As with most recommendations from anyone other than himself, Cain ignored it. Which was a pity, as Isaacs then would have been able to develop
Nemesis properly, and no one would have found out about what happened in the Hive. True, the families and friends of five hundred people would have
to have been told something, but they all lived in an underground complex that was filled with attendant risks. Surely Umbrella could have found a
cover story.
Instead, Cain reopened the Hive, supposedly because he wanted to know what had happened.
If the human race survived, Isaacs was quite sure that Cain's decision would go down in history as humanity's greatest blunder, surpassing such
classics as Napoleon's invasion of Russia and the introduction of the rabbit into the Australian ecosystem.
The infected corpses of the five hundred Hive employees - not to mention an entire Security Division team - had been animated by the T-virus, and Cain's
reopening of the Hive allowed them access to the world outside.
Within fourteen hours, Raccoon City was overrun. Each corpse was filled with an uncontrollable urge to feed on flesh, and when they did, their
victims died and became hungry animated corpses themselves. Umbrella sealed off the city, just as it had sealed off the Hive, and then blew it up
with a nuke.
That was only a temporary stopgap.
Isaacs looked down at the corpse. The dead blue eyes stared straight ahead. Blood pooled beneath the body from the gaping hole in its thoracic
region.
He shook his head. "Take a sample of her blood. The get rid of that."
Turning around, he went back into the lab. He had to get out of the damn suit.
To be continued...