“Impossible.
My memory isn’t wrong,” Alice said with absolute certainty, her eyes narrowing.
“Unless…
Damn it, it was Spence!
That bastard took the serum along with the T-Virus samples!” Alice was completely confident in her recovered memories.
Spence wouldn’t have risked stealing the T-Virus without securing the antiviral agent for himself as an insurance policy.
“What do we do now?” Matt asked, shifting the unconscious Chu Feng higher on his back.
“Spence collapsed in the train car,” Alice reasoned, connecting the dots.
“The virus cases and the serum must still be inside the train.
We need to get back to the station.” CLANK!
BANG!
Before anyone could move, the heavy reinforced steel blast door they had just entered through slammed shut with a deafening thud.
“What the hell?!
Why did the door close?” “Damn it!
It’s locked from the outside!” Rain, Chad, and Matt, who were closest to the entrance, lunged toward the control panel, pounding on the manual override.
But the heavy titanium door remained dead and unyielding.
Panic instantly flared through the group.
“What is going on?
Did someone lock us in from the outside?” Chad yelled, his voice tight with desperation.
“That’s impossible!
Who else is even left down here?!” “It was you, wasn’t it?” Alice said, stepping into the center of the room and looking coldly up at the ceiling camera.
The rest of the group froze, staring at Alice in confusion as she spoke to empty air.
“I felt something was off the moment we entered the utility tunnel,” Alice continued calmly, her voice echoing in the quiet room.
“Why would a low-traffic maintenance conduit be jammed wall-to-wall with hundreds of infected?
Workers don’t gather down there to hold parties.
There’s only one explanation: someone intentionally drove those corpses into the tunnel to herd them directly toward us.” She paused, looking up at the blinking red lens above.
“I was too focused on Chu Feng’s safety to process it earlier, but now that this room has been remote-locked, it’s completely clear.
Who else in this facility has total control over every security blast door except you…
Red Queen?” A short pause hung in the heavy air.
Then, the cold, synthetic voice of the Red Queen echoed from the lab’s intercom system, offering no denial.
“I am surprised you have survived this long,” the AI stated plainly.
“Statistically, it should have been impossible for your party to remain uninfected.” Survival was a basic requirement of her programmed logic, but her primary directive was absolute containment—to prevent a single strain of the T-Virus from reaching the surface world.
To guarantee complete containment, she had calculated three successive defensive lines.
The first line was herding the bulk of the facility’s wandering infected into the utility tunnel to ambush and overwhelm the survivors.
The second line was sealing off critical sectors to isolate any who escaped.
The third and final line was releasing the experimental Licker bioweapons to mop up the remnants.
In her predictive models, the first line should have yielded a hundred-percent mortality rate.
The remaining steps were merely automated precautions.
She had never anticipated that Chu Feng would unleash a magnetically guided blade, carving through two dense waves of infected in seconds and allowing the squad to bypass the herd before it could regroup.
When Alice recovered her memory and led the group into the testing vault to look for the serum, it gave the AI the perfect opportunity to execute a hard lockdown.
“What?!
You drove those things into the tunnel on purpose?!” Chad yelled, his face turning pale.
He suddenly remembered Chu Feng demanding his tactical dagger earlier, warning them that a horde was waiting ahead.
Chu Feng hadn’t been foreseeing the future—he simply never trusted the Red Queen’s promises from the start!
“You miserable piece of junk!” Rain growled, pulling her sidearm.
“If we die in here, you’re coming down with us!” Chad shouted, pulling out the wireless circuit breaker detonator he had wired into the Red Queen’s primary server bus in the control room.
“I press this button, and your main CPU fries!” “When we were in the server chamber, I provided the coordinates to the utility passage,” the Red Queen responded smoothly.
“Had I chosen to seal you in the server core, your journey would have ended there.
Yet I allowed you to leave.” “What are you getting at?” Chad asked, holding the switch tight, confused by her sudden posture.
“You are no longer a threat to me,” the AI declared neutrally.
“Arrogant machine!
I’ll burn your central processor right now!” Rain snapped, snatching the controller from Chad’s hand and slamming her thumb down on the red trigger button.
CLICK!
CLICK!
She slammed the button repeatedly, waiting for the overload signal to destroy the main server stack.
But no warning alarms sounded.
The Red Queen’s voice continued to echo overhead, entirely unfazed.
“As I stated: you no longer pose a threat,” the Red Queen said, a subtle, cold mimicry of mockery laced in her synthetic tone.
“What?!
Why isn’t it working?!” Chad grabbed the remote back, frantically pressing the trigger over and over.
“Save your effort,” the Red Queen replied.
“This primary bio-testing chamber was constructed with heavy electromagnetic shielding.
Radio frequency transmissions are completely blocked inside this vault.” She was an advanced artificial intelligence; she had no intention of allowing herself to be destroyed.
She had intentionally lured them into this specific shielded room precisely because their wireless kill-switch would be rendered useless.
“Damn it!” Chad cursed, slamming his fist against the steel wall.
They were completely helpless.
Alice looked at her trapped companions, a heavy wave of guilt washing over her.
“I’m sorry…
If I hadn’t insisted on coming in here to search for the serum, we wouldn’t be trapped like this.” Outside the shielded room, the wireless signal couldn’t reach her server core, but inside, they were trapped in a steel coffin.
Little did they know, even if they hadn’t entered the lab, the Red Queen’s third line of defense—the mutated Licker bioweapons—was already stalking through the outer corridors toward them.