The wails had fallen far enough behind for Carlos to feel they could stop for a minute, after running for what felt like forever. Randy's limp seemed to be getting worse with every step, and Carlos desperately needed to catch his breath, just to think…

…about how they died, about the woman who bit into Olson's throat and the blood that ran down her chin, and the way that Waller started to laugh, high and crazy, just before he threw his weapon away and let himself be taken, and the sound of somebody screaming prayers at the uncaring sky… Stop it!

They leaned against the back wall of a convenience store, a fenced recycling area with only one way in and a clear view of the street. There was no sound except the faraway singing of birds, wafting over them on a cooling, late afternoon breeze that smelled faintly of rot. Randy had slid into a sitting position, pulling his right boot off to take a look at his wound. His lower pant leg was shiny wet with blood, as was the collar of his shirt. He and Randy were the only two that had made it, and just barely; already, it seemed like some impossible dream. The others in the squad had already gone down, and there were at least six of the cannibal zombies still coming at him and Randy. Carlos had fired again and again, the smells of burning gunpowder and blood combining with the stench of decay, all of it making him dizzy with adrenaline-driven horror, so disori-ented that he hadn't seen Randy fall, hadn't realized it until he'd heard the sound of Randy's skull smacking into the pavement, loud even over the cries of the dead. A crawling one had grabbed Randy and bitten through the leather of his boot; Carlos had slammed the butt of his M16 down, breaking its neck, his mind screaming uselessly that it had been eating Randy's ankle, and he'd scooped up the half-conscious soldier with a strength he didn't know he possessed. And they had run, Carlos dragging his injured comrade away from the slaughter, his thoughts incoherent and wild and, in their own way, as terrifying to him as the rest of it. For a few minutes, he'd been loco, unable to understand what had happened, what was still hap-pening…

"Aw, Jesus, man…"

Carlos looked down at the sound of Randy's voice, noticing with some alarm that his words were a little slurred, and saw the ragged edges of a deep bite maybe two inches above the top of his foot. Thick blood oozed steadily out, the inside of Randy's boot drenched with it.

"Bit me, goddamn thing bit right in. But it was dead, Carlos. They were all dead… weren't they?" Randy looked up at him, his eyes dazed with pain and some-thing more, something that neither of them could af-ford – confusion, bad enough that Randy could barely focus. Concussion, maybe. Whatever it was, Randy needed a hospital. Carlos crouched next to him, his heart sick as he tore off a piece of Randy's shirt and quickly folded it into a compress.

We're screwed, there were no cops out there, no paramedics, this city is dying or already dead. If we want help, we're going to have to find it ourselves, and

he's in no shape to fight. "This may hurt a little, 'mono, but we gotta stop you from getting your boot all wet," Carlos said, trying to sound relaxed as he pressed the folded material against Randy's bleeding ankle. There was no point in scaring him, especially if he was as whacked out as Carlos thought. "Hold it down tight, okay?" Randy clenched his jaw, a violent tremor running through him, but he did as Carlos asked and held the makeshift bandage in place. As Randy leaned forward, Carlos studied the back of his head, wincing inwardly at the bloody, slightly misshapen spot beneath his tan-gled black curls. It didn't seem to be bleeding anymore, at least. "We gotta get outta here, Carlos," Randy said. "Let's go home, okay? I want to go home." "Soon," Carlos said softly. "Let's just sit here and rest for another minute, and then we'll go."

He thought about all of the wrecked cars they'd run past, the piles of broken furniture and wood and brick in the streets, hastily assembled blockades. Assuming they could even find a car with keys in it, just about every street was impassable. Carlos didn't have a pilot's license, but he had flown a helicopter a few times – fine, if they happened to stumble across an airport.

We'll never make it on foot, though. Even if Randy wasn't hurt, the entire U.B.C.S. was taken out, or damn near close. There's gotta be hundreds, maybe thou-sands of those things out there.

If they could find other survivors, group to-gether… but tracking anyone down in this nightmare would be a nightmare all its own. The thought of Trent's restaurant occurred to him briefly, but he ig-nored it; to hell with that crazy shit, they needed to get out of town, and they needed help to do it. The squad leaders were the only ones who'd known the plan for pickup, or had radios, and there was no way Carlos was going to go back -

– but I don't have to, do I?

He closed his eyes for a minute, realizing that he'd missed the obvious; maybe he was more freaked than he thought. There was more than one radio in the world; all he had to do was find one. Send out a call to the transports – hell, to anyone listening – and wait for somebody to show up. "I don't feel so good," Randy said, so quietly that Carlos almost didn't hear him, the slur of his words more pronounced than before. "Itches, it itches." Carlos squeezed his shoulder lightly, the heat from Randy's feverish skin radiating out from beneath his

T-shirt. "You're going to be okay, bro, just hang on, I'm going to get us out of here."

He sounded confident enough. Carlos only wished that he could convince himself.

TED MARTIN, A THIN MAN IN HIS LATE 30s, had been shot several times in the head. Nicholai couldn't tell if he'd been murdered or if he'd been put down after contracting the virus, and he didn't care; what mattered was that Martin, whose official title was Personal and Political Liaison to the Chief of Police, had saved Nicholai the time it would have taken to track him down. "Most kind of you," Nicholai said, smiling down at the very dead Watchdog. He'd also had the courtesy to die near where he was supposed to be, in the detective squadroom's office of the RPD's east wing.

An excellent start to my adventure; if they're all this easy, it will be a very short night.

Nicholai stepped over the body and crouched down next to the floor safe in the corner, quickly dialing in the simple four-digit combination given to him by his Umbrella contact: 2236. The steel door swung open, re-vealing a few papers – one looked like a map for the police station – a box of shotgun shells, and what would surely become Nicholai's best friend until he left Raccoon: a state-of-the-art cellular modem, designed to look like a piece of shit but more advanced than any-thing on the market. Grinning, he lifted out the PC lap-top and carried it to the desk, the safe door closing itself behind him. His trip to the station had been reasonably uneventful, except for the seven undead he'd dispatched point-blank to avoid too much noise; they were embarrassingly easy to kill, as long as one paid attention to one's surround-ings. He hadn't yet come across any of Umbrella's pets, the only real challenge he expected to face; there was one nicknamed "brain sucker" that he was very much looking forward to meeting, a multi-legged crawler with killing claws…

One thing at a time; right now, you need information.

He'd already committed the names and faces of his victims to memory and had a general idea of where each one was supposed to make contact, if not neces-sarily when; all of the Watchdogs were on different schedules, subject to change but mostly accurate. Mar-tin, for instance, was due to report to Umbrella from a computer terminal at the RPD building's front desk at 1750 hours, about twenty minutes from now; his last report should have been just after noon.