Genesis Read Free Page B

who lived and worked in the Hive. The existence of the Hive was not kept a secret—it was impossible to sequester away five hundred employees, many of whom were in the upper echelons of their respective fields, without someone noticing they were missing—though it was not widely advertised either. Umbrella kept its public headquarters in downtown Raccoon where everyone could see it: the public face of thecompany that provided the best computer technology and health-care products and services in the country.
    Part of Alice’s job—and that of her fictive husband—was to keep the public from knowing any more than that.
    Mansion duty meant posing as the couple who lived in that weird old mansion that all the guides to Raccoon cautioned against tourists visiting. Although an architectural marvel—built by an eccentric old millionaire in the 1960s—and rumored to be filled with trap doors, secret corridors, and other reflections of the millionaire’s obsession with spy thrillers, it was currently occupied by a reclusive couple who did not appreciate strangers knocking on their door and asking to see their house. More than one nosy visitor had found themselves escorted out of the area by the Foxwood Heights Police Department—or even sometimes the Raccoon City P.D.—for trespassing.
    That couple’s reclusive tendencies were a direct result of their not being a true couple, but the latest two members of Umbrella’s Security Division who had drawn mansion duty. For, unbeknownst to the people who wrote those tourist brochures, the mansion was, in truth, a secret access point to the Hive. Given the nature of the work Umbrella did in the Hive, the mansion was the first line of defense against everything from reporters to industrial sabotage to outright thievery.
    In theory, that made their work of critical import to Umbrella’s security.
    In reality, their work was boring as shit.
    Within a day of the picture being taken, mansion duty had begun for Alice and her new partner, whom she learned was named Percival S. Parks. For obvious reasons, he did not go by his first name. The middle initial stood for Spencer, and he said that everyone just called him “Spence.”
    Unlike Alice, who had been with the company for five years, following her distinguished but frustrating stint in the Treasury Department, Spence was new to Umbrella.
    The two of them would spend the next three months in a facsimile of wedded bliss. They had each been given plain gold wedding bands with the oh-so-romantic inscription PROPERTY OF UMBRELLA CORPORATION on the inside. Pictures of the pair of them had been placed at strategic spots throughout the massive expanse of the mansion’s interior.
    When she explored the library, she found that all the books that had been there when she and Spence took their “wedding photos” had been replaced. She recognized about half the titles as either her favorite books or ones she had intended to read someday, and assumed that the other half were on a similar list of Spence’s.
    An entire sitting room was given over to an entertainment center that included state-of-the-art CD and DVD players (all from Perrymyk Sounds, a subsidiary of the Umbrella Corporation), shelves full of CDs and DVDs, half of which were of her favorite music and movies, a plasma widescreen television (also from Perrymyk), and two very comfortable chairs.
    Next to the sitting room was a corner room with beautiful exposure, full of what looked to Alice like sculpting equipment: a kiln, clay, a small firing oven, and several small tables. She guessed that Spence was an amateur potter in his spare time.
    Off the studio were two small rooms with much smaller windows providing the same view as the picture window in the studio. Each room had a desk, computer station, fax machine, phone, PDA (mounted to the computer), and an incredibly comfortable-looking leather chair from which to operate all