The armory door slammed shut behind them, muffling the deafening roar in the corridor. The building kept shaking. Ceiling debris pattered down, stinging where it hit bare skin.
"This way!" Marvin pressed a hand to his left arm and pushed to the front, pointing toward the fire escape on the west side. "That stairwell goes straight down to the parking garage!"
Ryan scanned the passage ahead. X-ray vision showed seven or eight zombies drifting through the stairwell, but nothing on the level of a Licker. He pulled Sherry close to his side and glanced at Ben. "Stay on Leon. Don't fall behind."
Ben's face was the color of old paper. He gripped a pistol he'd grabbed from the armory, fingers trembling, but he bit down hard and nodded.
Six of them pushed through the fire door. A wall of hot, rotten air hit them instantly. The stairwell was near-dark, emergency lights flickering overhead, stretching the shambling figures below into long, warped shadows.
Ryan raised his pistol. Three shots.
Three zombies dropped. The muzzle never wavered, his stride never broke, and he didn't bother checking whether the bodies stayed down. In his vision the remaining zombies had already rounded the landing and were stumbling toward them. Position, distance, speed, all of it mapped.
"Two on the left!" He barked it low and stepped aside to clear the line of fire.
Leon and Claire fired together. Two zombies caught rounds at the turn of the stairs, spines snapping, bodies tumbling down the steps in a twitching heap.
They stepped over the corpses and kept descending. Fast, controlled. Sherry stayed glued to Ryan's side, small fist locked on his jacket, teeth clamped on her lower lip to keep from crying out. Ben stumbled after Leon, nearly missing a step twice before Leon grabbed his collar and hauled him upright. Marvin's breathing grew heavier with each flight. Blood was seeping through his left sleeve again, but he ground his teeth and said nothing.
Marvin kicked the fire door open at sublevel one. The parking garage stretched out ahead of them, dim and cavernous. A handful of emergency lights still burned, catching the outlines of abandoned vehicles in flickering relief. The air stank of decay and gasoline. Somewhere in the dark, zombies groaned.
"Cars are over there." Marvin pointed east, then stopped mid-sentence.
Shapes were spilling out from between the vehicles. Dozens of them. Former station clerks, civilians who'd come to file reports, inmates still wearing orange. All drawn by the gunfire, clouded eyes swiveling toward the stairwell door, lurching forward with a collective moan.
"Too many!" Claire dropped the two closest and kept firing, but more kept pouring out of the shadows.
Ryan narrowed his eyes. X-ray vision swept outward, mapping the entire garage within a hundred meters. Vehicle positions, zombie clusters, every viable route laid bare. The police cruisers to the east were intact, but the horde between here and there was too dense. They'd be swarmed before they reached the doors. To the west, a few heavy SWAT vehicles sat near the far wall, the surrounding area relatively thin on infected. The armored bodies would block most of the lunging dead.
"This way!" No hesitation. He scooped Sherry up and sprinted in the opposite direction.
Leon and Claire froze for a half-second, then followed. Marvin gritted his teeth and stayed close. Ben stumbled along at the rear. Ryan led from the front, pistol up, punching a bullet through every skull that stepped into his path, forcing a corridor through the horde by sheer accuracy.
They reached a black armored truck. Ryan wrenched the rear door open, shoved Sherry inside, and turned back toward the others.
Snarling erupted from the left.
Three zombie dogs burst from behind a wrecked sedan. Fast. Horrifyingly fast. Rotting fur hung in strips over exposed bone, and their milky eyes locked on Claire, the nearest target.
She fired. The first shot missed. The second punched into the lead dog's torso. It staggered, kept coming.
Three shots. Ryan's arm came up and the pistol cracked three times. Each round found a skull. The dogs seized up mid-leap, hit the concrete, and lay still.
Claire stared at him for a beat. She hadn't even seen him aim.
Leon stared too, but there was no time to think about it. Heavier footsteps were coming from deep in the garage. One at a time, slow and deliberate, each one shaking the ground.
A massive shape stepped out of the darkness.
Close to three meters tall. Gray-black muscle exposed to the air, the right arm mutated into an enormous claw. A dark red glow pulsed from the core in its chest. Every footfall sent a tremor through the concrete. Zombies unlucky enough to stand in its path were torn apart without a glance, severed limbs scattering across the floor.
Tyrant.
Ben pressed himself against the armored truck, white as a sheet. His lips shook. "It's... it's here for me. Umbrella wants to silence everyone who knows. Anyone with information gets hunted down. I hid in the station all this time, and it still found me..."
The Tyrant's red eyes had already fixed on Ben. It picked up speed, closing the distance stride by stride.
Leon opened fire. Bullets sparked off its body like flint on stone. Claire squeezed the trigger. Same result. Marvin braced and put a shotgun blast into its chest. The thing rocked back an inch. Its feet never stopped.
Twenty meters. Fifteen. Ten.
The Tyrant's right arm swung high and came down at Ben.
Ben closed his eyes.
An engine screamed from the side of the garage.
A second armored truck, SWAT stenciled across the hull, tore out of the shadows at full throttle. The roar of the motor drowned out the moaning dead. Its front end caught the Tyrant square in the flank, and the impact launched three meters of muscle and claw off its feet, slamming it into the load-bearing wall behind.
The crash shook the garage.
Concrete exploded outward. The wall cratered inward, and the Tyrant was buried to the waist in rubble, arms flailing uselessly, pinned for the moment.
The truck's hood was caved in, the windshield a web of fractures. The driver's door swung open and a woman stepped out, unhurried.
Beige trench coat. Black stockings. Shoulder-length dark hair, a few damp strands stuck to her cheeks. She pushed the hair from her face, revealing sharp, elegant features and eyes that swept across the group before settling on Ryan.
She produced a badge from inside her coat and held it up, casual as a business card.
"FBI." Her voice was cool, faintly amused. "Looks like you could use a hand."
Leon blinked. FBI? Here?
Ada's gaze lingered on Ryan for two seconds. From the moment she'd rammed the Tyrant to now, his expression hadn't shifted once. He hadn't even glanced at the wrecked truck. He just looked back at her, calm to the point of unsettling, like he was studying a variable he'd already accounted for.
Interesting, she thought.
"Let's go." She looked away and flicked her eyes toward the Tyrant still thrashing in the wall. "That won't hold it long."
She turned and walked, the hem of her coat tracing a clean arc behind her. Two steps in, she glanced back over her shoulder, eyes finding Ryan again. The corner of her mouth lifted.
"Oh, and..." Her tone was light, throwaway, like mentioning the weather. "Nice shooting."
Then she vanished into the shadows between the vehicles, leaving the mangled truck behind and the Tyrant's rage echoing louder by the second.
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