THIRTEEN
JILL HAD FINALLY DECIDED TO OPEN THE metal shutter and make a break for it when she heard shots outside, the high-pitched chatter of an assault rifle. To say she was relieved was an understatement; the relentless thumping of the mostly dead outside had been eating at her nerves, almost tempting her to shoot herself, just so she wouldn't have to hear it anymore
– and now, in a matter of seconds, it was quiet onceagain.She moved quickly to the side door in the garage,ducking beneath a disemboweled red compact on a liftand pressing her ear to the cold metal. All was silent,the virus carriers surely dead…Bam-bam-bam!Jill jerked back as someone hammered on the door,her heart keeping time.
"Hey, is somebody in there? The zombies are dead, you can open up now!"
No mistaking the accent; it was Carlos Oliveira. Re-lieved, Jill turned the lock, announcing herself as she threw the door open.
"Carlos, it's Jill Valentine."
She was happy to see him, but the look on his face was so sincerely elated that she felt almost shy sud-denly. She moved back from the door so he could step inside.
"I'm so glad you're okay, when you weren't at the trolley, I thought…" Carlos trailed off, his "thought" obvious enough. "Anyway, it's really good to see you again."
His apparently serious concern for her was a sur-prise, and she was uncertain how to respond – irrita-tion, that she was being patronized? She didn't feel irritated. Having someone interested in her well-being, particularly considering the kind of chaos they were in, was – well, kind of nice.
The fact that that someone is tall, dark, and hand-some isn't such a terrible thing, either, hmm? Jill in-stantly clamped down on the thought, cutting it short. True or not, they were in a survival situation; they could make eyes at each other later, if they made it out alive. Carlos didn't seem to notice her slight discomfort.
"So, what are you doing here?" Jill gave him a half smile. "I got sidetracked. Don't suppose you saw Frankenstein's monster wandering around out there?" Carlos frowned. "You saw him again?" "Not him, it. It's called a Tyrant, if it's what I think it is – or some variation, anyway. Bio-synthetic, ex-tremely strong, and very hard to kill. And it appears Umbrella figured out how to program it for a specific 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.