The girl limped up to him and Andy turned the flashlight away from her face, not wanting to blind her. Putting just the right note of sincerity into his voice – chicks dug that shit – he took a step toward her, holding one hand out.

"What happened? Here, let me help…"

A dark, heavy thing slammed into him from the side, hard, knocking him to the ground and knocking the wind right out of him. Before he even knew what happened, a light was shining in his face, and the M41 was being pried out of his hands as he struggled to breathe. "Don't move and I won't shoot," a man said, a Brit, and Andy felt the cold muzzle of a gun against the side of his neck. He froze, not daring to move a muscle.

Oh, shit!

Andy looked up, saw the girl holding the rifle, his rifle, gazing down at him. She didn't look so helpless anymore. "Bitch," he snarled, and she smiled a little, shrug– ging.

"Sorry. If it's any consolation, your two friends fell for it too."

He heard another woman's voice from behind him, soft and amused. "And hey, you get to warm up. The generator room's nice and toasty."

Killer was not amused, and as they pulled him to his feet and started marching him toward the com-pound, he swore to himself that it was the last time he'd ever underestimate a chick – and while he didn't have plans to eat his own hat, he was certainly going to remember this the next time he thought he was bored.

SEVENTEEN

PHASE FOUR WAS INDEED A CITY, AND LEON decided that it was the weirdest thing he'd seen so far, hands down. The first three phases had been bizarre, unreal, but they'd also been obviously fake – the sterile woods, the white walls of the desert, the sculpted mountain. At no point had he forgotten that the environments were manufactured.

This, though… it's not some counterfeit organic habitat; this is how it's supposed to look. Four was several square blocks of a city at night. A town, really, none of the buildings over three stories, but it was a town – streetlights, curbs, stores and apartment houses, parked cars and asphalt streets. They'd stepped off of a mountain and into Home– town, U.S.A. There were only two things wrong with it, at least at first glance – the colors and the atmosphere. The buildings were all either brick red or a kind of dusky tan color; they looked unfinished, and the few parked cars that Leon could see all seemed to be black; it was hard to tell in the thick shadows.

And the atmosphere… "Spooky," John said quietly, and Leon and Cole both nodded. Backs against the door, they surveyed the silent town and found it completely unnerving.

Like a bad dream, one of those where you're lost and you can't find anyone and everything feels wrong…

It wasn't like a ghost town, it didn't have the air of an abandoned place, a place that had outlived its usefulness; no one had ever lived there, no one ever would. No cars had driven down its streets, no children had played on its corners, no life had called it home… and the blank, unlife feeling was… spooky. The hatch had opened up onto a street that ran east to west, dead-ending just to their left in a wall painted midnight blue. From where they stood, they could see all the way down one wide, paved road that went south, ending in darkness some indeterminate dis– tance ahead, a grid of intersecting streets along the way. The soft light from the streetlamps cast long shadows, just bright enough to see by and too dark to see clearly. There was a car just in front of them, parked in front of a tan two-story structure. John walked across to it and rapped on its hood. Leon could hear the hollow link sound beneath his hand; an empty shell. John walked back, scanning the shadows warily. "So… Hunters," he said, and Leon had a sudden realization that was almost as freaky as the lifeless blocks stretched out in front of them. "The nicknames are all descriptive," he said, eject-ing the clip from his semi to count the rounds. Five left, and only one more full mag, though John still had a couple – no, he only had one, Cole had the other. And unless Leon was mistaken, John only had one full magazine left for the M-16; thirty rounds, and what– ever was still in the rifle.

No more grenades, almost out of ammo… "So?" Cole asked, and John answered, his gaze narrowing as he spoke, his expression even more watchful as he searched the heavy darkness of every corner, every window. "Think about it," John said. "Pterodactyls, scorpi-ons, spitting animals… Hunters." "I… oh." Cole blinked, looking around them with new fear. "That's not good." "You say the exit's bolted?" Leon asked. Cole nodded, and John shook his head at the same time. "And like an asshole, I used the last grenade," he said softly. "No chance at blowing the door." "If you hadn't, we'd be dead," Leon said. "And it probably wouldn't have worked anyway, not if it's the same kind of setup as the entrance." John sighed heavily, but nodded. "Guess we can burn that bridge when we come to it."

They were all quiet for a moment, a profoundly uncomfortable silence that Cole finally broke. "So… ears and eyes open and stick close," he said tentatively, a question more than a statement. John raised his eyebrows, smirking. "Not bad. Hey, what are you doing with your life if we make it outta here? Want to join the cause, stick it to Umbrella?" Cole grinned nervously. "If we make it out, ask me again."

As ready as they were going to be, they started south, walking slowly down the middle of the street, the dark buildings watching them with blank glass eyes. Although all of them tried to move quietly, the empty town seemed to echo back the soft sounds of their boots on asphalt, even their breathing. None of the buildings had signs or decorations, and there were no lights inside as far as Leon could tell. The oppres-sive, lifeless feeling gave him an unpleasant flash of the night he'd driven into Raccoon for his first day on the RPD, after Umbrella had spilled their virus.

Except the streets there smelled like death and cannibals roamed through the dark, crows were feeding on corpses, it was a city in its death throes…

About midway down the block, John held up one hand, snapping Leon back to the present. "Just a sec," he said, and jogged over to one of the "stores" on the left, a glass-fronted construct that reminded Leon of a pastry shop, the kind that always had wedding cakes in their windows. John peered in through the glass, then tried the door. To Leon's surprise, it opened; John leaned inside for a long second, then closed it and jogged back. "No counters or anything, but it's a real room," he said, his voice low. "There's a back wall and a ceiling." "Maybe the Hunters are hiding out in one of them," Leon said. Yeah, more scared of us than we are of them, wouldn't that be nice. We should be so lucky… "That's it!" Cole said too loudly, then immediately dropped his voice, flushing. "How we can get out, maybe. The, uh, animals were all kept in cages or kennels or something behind the back walls. I don't know about the other phases, but there's a hall that runs around Four, I've seen the door to this one's, it's maybe twenty feet from the southwest corner. It has to be easier than the exit; I mean, it'd be locked, but probably not reinforced."

John was nodding, and Leon thought it sounded a hell of a lot more plausible than trying to get through a hatch bolted from the outside. "Good," John said, "good call. Let's see if we can…"

Something moved. Something in the shadows of a tan two-story building on the right, something that shut John up and had all of them aiming into the darkness, tense and alert. Ten seconds passed, then twenty – and whatever it was seemed to be holding perfectly still. Or…… or, we didn't see anything at all. "Nothing there," Cole whispered, and Leon started to lower the nine-millimeter uncertainly, thinking that it had looked as though something was moving and then the something they couldn't see screamed, a shrill and terrible shriek like some kind of terrible bird, like a feral beast in a blind rage and the darkness itself moved – Leon still couldn't see it clearly, it was like a shadow, a part of a building that was in motion, but he saw the tiny, shining eyes, light-colored and at least seven feet off the ground, and the dark and ragged talons that nearly touched the asphalt, and he realized that it was a chameleon as it sprang toward them, still screaming. Reston hurried back toward the control room, the weight of the sidearm against his hip making him feel a little better. He'd feel better still if he made it back in time to watch the Hunters slaughter the three men, although he'd settle for just seeing the dead bodies.