Chapter 2: Ground Zero
The checkpoint at Gate Four was a trailer, a chain-link gate with three coils of razor wire on top, and two National Guard privates who looked like they had drawn the shortest straws in the entire United States military. It was six in the morning and raining sideways. The Arklay Mountains were a black line under the clouds.
Leon showed his badge. The private on the left took it into the trailer and was gone for eleven minutes, which Leon spent sitting in the driver's seat of a borrowed DSO SUV not looking at the woman in the passenger seat.
She'd changed. Not out of red. Ada didn't do that. But the dress was gone, replaced by fitted black tactical pants and a red cropped jacket over a black turtleneck, her hair tucked under a dark knit cap, the grapple gun on her hip. She looked, he thought, like the world's most expensive cat burglar. She was eating an apple.
"You brought an apple," he said.
"It's a long drive."
"It's a crater, Ada. You're not going to get hungry in a crater."
"You never know." She took another bite. "You brought a shotgun."
"It's a crater, Ada."
His phone buzzed in the cup holder. Hunnigan, of course, who never slept: Why is your badge pinging a checkpoint in the Arklay exclusion zone at 6am? He looked at it. He put the phone face down.
"Your handler?" Ada asked, without looking.
"She worries."
"She should." Ada crunched her apple. "You have terrible taste in friends."
The private came back out of the trailer looking pale and confused and holding a sheet of paper that Leon could see, even through the rain, had an awful lot of very official letterhead on it. "Sir," he said. "Agent Kennedy. It's, uh. You're cleared. Inspection of federal infrastructure, Section... it's all here. They said you'd be back by dark?"
"That's the plan."
"Who's she?"
Leon opened his mouth.
"Department of Energy," Ada said pleasantly, leaning across him to smile at the private through the window. "Radiation monitoring. Don't worry, we'll be very careful."
The private looked at the paper. The paper apparently agreed with her. He opened the gate.
Leon had not been back to Raccoon City in seventeen years.
He'd thought about it. He'd had nightmares about it, though fewer now, and he'd seen satellite photos in classified briefings and once, in a moment of weakness at three in the morning, looked it up on an online map, the tidy green rectangle where the government had drawn the exclusion zone and the grey bruise in the middle of it. He'd told himself he never needed to see it in person.
The road up from the gate was cracked asphalt with trees pushing up through it. Birch and pine and some kind of scrub with red leaves, crowding in on both sides, dripping. Every so often the SUV's headlights picked out a shape in the woods that might once have been a mailbox, or a car, or a billboard, rusted and folded over and green with moss. Ten miles in, the trees started to thin, and the ground started to fall away, and then they came over a rise and there it was.
It was smaller than he remembered. That was the strange thing. He'd carried it in his head as this enormous labyrinth, a whole world of fire and dark and screaming. And now it was just a broad, shallow bowl of grey earth, a mile across, maybe two, half filled with a rain-pocked lake and ringed with scrubby trees. Here and there, along the edges where the blast had been weaker, a few ruins still poked up like broken teeth. The black skeleton of a water tower. A brick wall with half a painted sign on it: ...ARK TONE MOTORS.
He stopped the car. He didn't decide to. His foot just did it.
Ada didn't say anything. She sat there beside him with her apple core in her hand and looked out the windshield at the crater. After a long minute, she spoke very quietly.
"The clock tower was there," she said, and pointed. "On the far side. Where the lake's deepest."
"I know."
"The police station was over there."
"I know, Ada."
"I'm just saying." She turned the apple core over in her fingers. "I sometimes forget it was a real place. That there were people. It's easier when it's just a code name in a file."
He looked at her. She was still looking at the crater. In the grey light, with the rain running down the glass, she looked younger and older at the same time, and very tired.
"Yeah," he said. "Me too."
Spencer Memorial had been on the city's western edge, far enough from the centre of the strike that part of its east wing was still standing: three floors of blackened concrete with no windows and no roof, half collapsed into its own parking lot. Ada walked straight to a rusted maintenance door in the base of the building's foundations like she'd been there yesterday. She had a key.
"Where did you get a key to a hospital that's been gone for seventeen years?"
"Eighteen years. I had it made in 1997."
"Why?"
"I was very thorough," Ada said, "in 1997." And the lock turned.
The stairs went down a long way. The air turned cold and stale and smelled of wet concrete and something chemical underneath, faint but sharp, that hit Leon right at the back of the throat and made his hand go to his holster before his brain caught up. He knew that smell. Every agent who'd ever been in an Umbrella facility knew that smell.
"Easy," Ada said, without turning around. "It's just old disinfectant."
"You don't know that."
"No," she agreed. "I don't."
Their flashlights cut long white tunnels through the dark. Corridor. Door. Corridor. Stairs. A sign on the wall, faded almost to nothing: UMBRELLA CORPORATION, RESTRICTED. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, with the red-and-white logo underneath. Ada passed it without a glance. Leon stopped and looked at it for a second too long.
"You coming?" she called back.
"Yeah." He followed her. "Just. That logo."
"I know. I hate it too."
They went down two more levels. At the bottom of the last set of stairs the corridor widened into a kind of foyer: a security desk, its monitors long dead, a row of filing cabinets on their sides, and at the far end a vault door, round and steel and massive, like something from a bank in an old movie.
It was standing open.
Ada stopped dead. Leon felt her go still beside him, the kind of still he'd seen once in a Spanish castle, right before everything went to hell.
"Ada."
"I know."
"You said a week."
"I know what I said, Leon." She had her gun out. He hadn't seen her draw it. "Voss must have moved faster than I..."
Something on the ceiling moved.
Leon was already turning when he heard it, the long, wet, crackling breath that he had heard in his nightmares every month since 1998. His flashlight beam swung up and caught it: pink and raw and skinless, clinging upside down to the concrete above the security desk, exposed brain glistening, long claws dug into the ceiling. It had no eyes. It didn't need them. Its tongue came out slow, a yard of it, tasting the air.
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," Leon said.
The licker dropped.
He fired twice before it hit the floor and once more as it came at him, and the shotgun's roar in the enclosed space was like being hit in the head with a shovel. It slammed into the security desk and went over it and kept coming. He had time to think, very clearly, that it was faster than he remembered, or he was slower, and then the crack of Ada's gun came from his left, three shots, fast as one, and the thing jerked and screamed and turned toward her.
"Leon, down!"
He dropped. Something whistled over his head: the hiss and snap of her grapple line, the hook catching on a pipe above the vault door. She swung. She actually swung, in the dark, at the bottom of an Umbrella bunker in a crater that used to be a city, and she came down feet first onto the licker's back and put her gun against the back of its head and fired, and fired again, and it stopped moving.
Silence. The ringing in his ears. Dust falling softly from the ceiling into his flashlight beam.
Ada stepped off the licker's body and holstered her gun and tucked a loose strand of hair back under her cap.
"That," she said, a little breathless, "was older than I'd like."
Leon lay on his back on the concrete for a second longer, looking up at her. Raccoon. Spain. China. And here they were.
"You swung on a rope," he said.
"It's a grapple line."
"You swung on a rope at a licker."
"It worked." She held out her hand. He took it. She pulled him up, and for a moment they were standing very close, his hand still in hers, her pulse going fast under his fingers. Neither of them let go. Then the vault caught her eye over his shoulder, and her face changed. He let her hand drop.
The vault was enormous inside, rows and rows of steel shelving reaching back into the dark, all of it packed with grey archive boxes, every one labelled in Umbrella's neat stencilled type. Most of them hadn't been touched. One had. In the middle of the main aisle, a box lay on the floor, open and empty. The label on its side read: SECURITY. INTERNAL. W-SERIES. CONFIDENTIAL.
On top of the empty box, someone had left a phone. Brand new, screen lit up, a single text message waiting.
Ada picked it up. Leon watched her read it. He watched the colour leave her face.
"What does it say?"
She turned the phone around and held it out so he could see.
Hello, Ada. Thank you for bringing him. You're still the best at what you do. The deal stands: his badge and his codes for your file. You have until dark. — V