While Huo Xiu raced from the hospital toward the outskirts, Katherine Warren woke in the sewers.
Her memories returned slowly.
Her father had told her there was an epidemic and entrusted her to Uncle Irons, asking him to keep her safe.
Katherine had known Irons for years.
He had always treated her kindly, so she’d trusted him.
She remembered going to the police station, finding him, talking for a while…
and then falling asleep?
So why am I in a sewer?
She had no time to think.
A visceral sense of danger made Katherine roll aside.
An instant later, enormous force shattered the concrete where she had been lying, leaving a crater as though the floor had been struck by a high-caliber round.
Katherine looked up and felt her scalp go numb.
A monster clung upside down to the ceiling of the dim sewer.
It had no eyes.
A pink, exposed brain dominated most of its head.
Skinless muscle covered a body that reminded her grotesquely of a frog with its hide peeled away.
Long claws extended from its fingers, dug deep into the ceiling to support its weight.
Katherine had never seen anything like it.
Worse, the creature was retracting a long tongue into its mouth.
That had apparently been what punched through the concrete.
Irons lay not far from her, his heart pierced clean through.
A knife was still clutched in one hand.
Katherine became fully alert in an instant.
If she had reacted even a fraction slower, that tongue would have gone through her too.
The creature had no eyes, which meant it probably located prey through hearing, smell, or some other sense.
Katherine had never considered biology her strongest subject, but she knew enough about evolution to understand that when an animal lost one ability, another often became more important.
This thing might operate on a principle similar to a bat.
Uncle Irons must have awakened before she did and made enough noise to attract it.
The knife suggested he’d tried to fight.
If so, it had ended badly.
With Irons dead, no one remained to tell Katherine what he had actually intended for her.
Perhaps, in its own grim way, ignorance was a mercy.
She couldn’t waste time wondering why Irons had brought her into the sewers.
Maybe he had been taking her toward one of Umbrella’s underground facilities.
He’d mentioned having good relationships with people at the company before.
Whatever the reason, Katherine would never learn it if she failed to escape this monster.
“Sorry, Uncle Irons.” Fortunately, Katherine knew police officers carried sidearms, and the chief was no exception.
She quickly pulled the handgun from Irons’s belt and took the knife as well.
It might be useful.
Then she aimed at the creature hanging above her—specifically at the enormous exposed brain.
Leaving your most vulnerable organ on the outside has to be the stupidest evolutionary decision imaginable.
“Eat this, freak!” Katherine pulled the trigger without hesitation.
The bullet struck the Licker’s exposed brain and knocked it from the ceiling.
To her horror, the creature didn’t appear seriously injured.
“You have got to be kidding me…” Her hand began to shake.
She wanted desperately for this to be a nightmare.
Wasn’t this supposed to be an epidemic?
What kind of disease produced that?
Nothing about this belonged in any ordinary outbreak.
Running was her only option.
There were exits in both directions, and one handgun didn’t have enough stopping power to reliably kill the creature.
If she kept moving, perhaps she could find something in the facility she could turn into a weapon.
Katherine ran toward the nearest source of light.
If the creature’s eyes had already degenerated, then its resistance to bright light should be weak.
Maybe she could use electrical wiring or something similar to hurt the monster.
She kicked a trash can into the Licker’s path.
Its claws and tongue ripped through the metal almost effortlessly, and it kept coming.
Something else bothered Katherine: she was moving constantly, yet the tongue strikes remained unnervingly accurate.
If she hadn’t dodged at exactly the right moments, one of them would already have hit.
That supported the idea that it was tracking sound.
Yet it had failed to avoid her earlier gunshot, meaning the creature wasn’t so fast that it existed beyond her ability to react.
If it was still a biological organism, then there had to be a way to beat it.
For the first time in her life, Katherine regretted wearing clothes with so little storage.
She darted into one of the side laboratories and silently thanked whoever had ripped the door off its frame.
Otherwise, she never would have entered quickly enough.
Waiting for an electronic door to cycle open wasn’t an option.
The Licker followed immediately.
Its tongue struck again, but the cramped room and a sharp corner gave Katherine just enough space to evade.
The tongue buried itself in the wall.
Now!
Katherine yanked out Irons’s knife and drove it through the tongue, pinning the appendage in place.
While the Licker struggled, she emptied the handgun into its exposed head, firing until the weapon clicked dry.
Then she ran deeper into the facility.
That much firepower probably wouldn’t kill it.
Katherine understood that now.
She didn’t need to kill it yet—only injure it badly enough to slow its recovery and buy herself another stretch of distance.
The creature tore itself free far sooner than she’d hoped.
Damn it, that thing is fast—and it’s crawling.
Fortunately, another room was close.
Katherine could make out the silhouette of a large man inside.
With the last of her strength, she sprinted toward him and shouted the only word that mattered.
“Help!” Sergei, busy overseeing the recovery operation, heard the cry.
A young woman.
She almost certainly hadn’t come because she knew Umbrella was here; more likely, some biological weapon had chased her into the facility.
Huo Xiu had torn enough doors from their frames that a civilian seeking refuge could enter without much difficulty.
Fortunately, Sergei had already removed every file connected to the Hunter Gamma program, and the remaining Gammas had entered standby under his orders.
No investigator would stumble across compromising data.
If this girl was simply a civilian, helping her cost him nothing.
“You’re safe now, child.” The towering Sergei pulled Katherine behind him as the Licker came racing into the room.
It didn’t care who stood between it and its prey.
Anything obstructing feeding could simply be eaten too.
Sergei, however, didn’t even need to move.
Allowing something to threaten the master was a bodyguard’s failure.
One punch was enough.
The Licker that had nearly killed Katherine vanished into the wall under the impact, its head bursting into wet pulp.
Only after confirming the creature was dead did the Ivan Tyrant with the yellow analysis visor slowly lower its fist.
“It’s dealt with, young lady.
Are you all right?” Hearing the gigantic man speak actually reduced Katherine’s fear.
Maybe he was simply an unusually strong human using specialized equipment.
The monsters she’d seen didn’t seem capable of normal conversation.
“No…
I’m okay.” Sergei wasn’t particularly concerned.
Ivan No.
2 was already handling the recovery of U.M.F.-013’s mainframe hardware.
The outer unit was more complicated to dismantle than the core, but they had brought containers specifically for transport, and Sergei had already summoned a helicopter.
Since the facility was close to the police station, they could simply have the aircraft collect the equipment from the R.P.D.
grounds.
“All right, Ivan.
Escort the girl to the subway station.
She doesn’t know what’s happened yet.” Katherine learned the truth on the way.
While she’d been unconscious, the epidemic had exploded across the city.
Umbrella had deployed rescue units, and surviving civilians were being directed to the subway for temporary evacuation.
Once the outbreak was contained, they would eventually be allowed to return to Raccoon City.
Katherine was stunned.
Did I seriously sleep through all of that?
If she’d woken any later, she might have died.
One thing, at least, gave her comfort: her boyfriend hadn’t been caught in the disaster.
He worked for Umbrella.
Surely company employees were safer than ordinary civilians.
They encountered scattered zombies along the way, but compared with the Licker, the creatures seemed almost pitiful.
Katherine hesitated the first few times she raised Irons’s gun, but after seeing that the “patients” no longer possessed any trace of reason, she stopped holding back.
If the virus had destroyed them beyond recovery, death might be the only mercy left.
For some reason the streets contained far fewer zombies than Katherine expected.
Police guarded the entrance to the subway, and simply seeing uniforms made her feel immensely safer.
The officers were saddened when she told them Chief Irons had died in the sewers.
Eventually Katherine boarded the train.
A silver-haired U.B.C.S.
operative explained that her group would be the second wave of evacuees and could not depart until enough people had gathered, but Katherine was still overwhelmingly relieved.
Whatever happened next, she had survived.
September 24, 1998.
11:30 p.m.
Two and a half hours had passed since the Ennerdale Street demolition.