Free Resident Evil: Underworld by S. D. Perry Page A

wasn’t an intercom, there was a gun in his room but if they had the code, he didn’t have time to—
    — override .
    Reston turned away from the screen and started for the door, kicking himself as he hurried out of control. There was a manual override switch in a hidden panel next to the elevator, he could keep the lift down even if they had the entrance numbers—
    —and the teams will come and collect our little pack of invaders, and I will have handled it.
    He smiled, a smile entirely without humor, and broke into a run.
    * * *
    Leon watched anxiously as David typed in another string of numbers, hoping their presence hadn’t been detected yet. He hadn’t seen a camera, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t one; if Umbrella could build massive underground laboratories and create monsters, they could hide a video camera.
    David hit a final key—and there was sound and movement at once, the low hiss of hidden hydraulics, the distant hum of an engine. A giant piece of the wall to the right of the keypad slid upward. As one, all five of them raised weapons—and lowered them again when they saw the thick mesh gate and the black and empty elevator shaft behind it.
    “Damn,” John said, a tone of awe in his voice, and Leon had to agree. The panel was ten feet across, thick and heavy with machinery, and had completely disappeared into the ceiling in two seconds. Whatever mechanism was operating it was exceptionally powerful.
    “What’s that?” Rebecca whispered, and Leon heard it a second later, a distant hum. Apparently the entry code had also recalled the elevator; they could hear it rising, hear the growing echo of well-oiled sound in the freezing darkness of the shaft. It was rising fast, but was still a long way down. Leon wondered, not for the first time, how the hell Umbrella had managed to build such a thing; the Raccoon lab had also been massive, with God-knew-how-many floors of laboratory, all of it deep beneath the surface of the city.
    They must have more money than God. And one hell of an architect.
    “We may have triggered a warning device or alarm,” David said quietly. “It might not be empty.”
    Leon nodded along with everyone else; they were all silent and tense as they waited, John pointing his rifle at the mesh gate.
    * * *
    Reston found the flat, seamless panel, and pried it open without any trouble—
    —but there was a lock on the switch, a thin metal rod hooked through the top, keeping it from being pushed down. It wasn’t until he saw the lock that he recalled it; yet another of Umbrella’s precautions, one that suddenly seemed monumentally stupid.
    The keys, the workers all have them, I got a set before I came —
    Reston ran his hands through his hair, wracking his brain, feeling desperate and harried. Where’d I put the goddamn security keys?
    When he heard the lift being recalled to the surface only seconds later, it was all he could do to keep from screaming. They had the code. They had guns and there were five of them and they had the code.
    Takes two minutes to get to the top, I’ve still got time and the keys are —
    Blank. His mind was blank, and the seconds were ticking past. He’d already hit the recall button, but it wouldn’t bring the elevator back down if someone opened the gate on the surface. For all he knew, the assassins or saboteurs or whatever the hell they were had already pried opened the gate, were now watching the lift on its way up, waiting—
    —or maybe throwing a few pounds of plastique into the shaft — or—
    — control, they’re in control!
    Reston turned and ran, across the wide corridor and ten feet to the right, down the small offshoot outside of control. His first day at the Planet, one of the construction people had shown him all of the internal locks—backup generator, drug cabinet in surgical… manual override for the lift. He’d yawned his way through that particular tour, then tossed the keys into a drawer in the control room, knowing