Time had gone somewhere. Minutes, maybe. Could have been a whole day.
Black raindrops laced with warm ash fell through the shattered ceiling of what had once been a shopping mall, spattering against Ryan's pale face.
"Hkk... kkhhk!"
He rolled onto his side and retched, hard. His stomach seized and wrung itself out but produced nothing. He lay curled in the rubble, shaking uncontrollably, every limb jerking beyond his command. His soul felt like it had been ripped to confetti and crammed back into his body by force, every organ run through an industrial tumble dryer.
"Hell of... a ride..."
His voice came out like two dry sticks grinding together. The tactical vest had burned down to blackened rags. Underneath, his skin was pristine thanks to HP lock, not a scratch, not a mark, but his brain screamed otherwise. Ruptured organs. Splintered bone. Phantom agony so complete and so convincing that his nervous system couldn't tell the difference.
He gritted his teeth against the sensation, the kind of full-body nerve revolt that could drive a person insane, and forced himself onto his back.
Above him, Raccoon City's sky had broken.
The darkness had bled into a sick, deep red. Clouds churned like boiling tar. Black rain and fallout ash settled on his lips, carrying a taste halfway between iron and sugar. The taste of death.
This had been a shopping center, once. Some big-box retail palace. Now it was a ruin.
Silence.
Worse than any zombie's shriek. The wind had died and the flames had gone silent, leaving only the occasional crack of a distant structure splitting apart as heat worked through uneven concrete.
Ryan staggered upright. His legs had nothing left; each step felt like walking on loose sand. Every stride sent a fresh wave of vertigo rolling through his skull, his body rejecting the demand.
He kicked aside a scorched sign half-buried in debris. Beneath the dust, a dull metallic glint.
A body lay pinned under collapsed masonry, dressed in an R.P.D. uniform. Everything below the waist had been crushed to pulp by falling stone, but the upper half was mostly intact. The holster at the hip hung open.
Ryan bent down. His fingers trembled. Nausea surged up through his chest. He pulled a dust-caked 9mm service pistol from the stiff corpse's holster.
He coughed, checked the slide. Brass rounds still visible in the magazine, less than half full. He racked the slide. Click.
"Hey... buddy. Borrowing this."
The moment he stepped through the mall's front entrance, his pupils contracted to pinpoints.
Gone.
The crisscrossing streets, the packed rows of buildings, even the terrain itself. All of it, gone.
In its place: a crater hundreds of meters across, so deep the bottom vanished into darkness. The rim had fused into a glassy, crystallized shell that caught the red light and threw back a sick, wavering glow. Rock flash-melted by tens of millions of degrees, then frozen solid in the same instant.
Ground zero.
The air bent and rippled. Distant shapes wobbled behind curtains of heat. Ryan stood at the edge and looked down into the mouth of a hell that human civilization had dug with its own hands.
Then, from the far side of the crater, from the charred ruins jutting up like broken swords against the sky, came a sound.
A slow, heavy, grinding drag.
Ssshhh... ssshhhh...
Raw meat hauling itself across crystallized rock.
Ryan narrowed his eyes. X-ray vision punched through the heat shimmer and the falling black rain.
In those scorched shadows, a massive, twisted lump of dark red flesh was crawling.
G-Nemesis.
Still alive.
But the god-like colossus was gone. The nuclear baptism had stripped it down. What remained looked about five meters tall, a misshapen thing wrapped in layers of charred carbon crust and glistening pink new growth underneath.
Every tentacle that had once torn through armored vehicles was gone, snapped off at the base. Dark green fluid gushed from the stumps, hissing and eating into the ground where it landed.
It was feeding.
A few surviving tendrils, thin and weak, whipped through the surrounding rubble like blind snakes. Whenever one snagged a charred zombie corpse or a chunk of tissue still carrying some mutant vitality, it shoved the find into the split-open chest cavity, past rows of jagged fangs.
Each time it swallowed, another plate of carbonized shell flaked away. The wet pink buds beneath pulsed and swelled with a squelching sound that set teeth on edge.
Flesh knitting itself back together. In the silence beside the crater, every wet crunch carried with perfect clarity, like something demonic chewing on the bones of the world.
Ryan stood on the opposite rim and watched.
No fear in his eyes. Only a calm so absolute it bordered on deranged. He could feel it: with every corpse the thing consumed, the life force that had guttered down to almost nothing was climbing back. Fast.
The creature must have sensed the stare. It stopped mid-feed, a half-charred torso still dangling from one tendril.
The massive skull turned. Half the flesh had been seared away, bare white bone gleaming underneath. A single huge eye, clouded and bloodshot, webbed with yellow pus, squeezed itself out from a mound of new tissue.
Across a hundred meters of scorched glass canyon. Through curtains of falling black rain. Man and monster locked eyes in the wreckage of a nuclear strike.
Something flickered in that enormous eye. Surprise, almost human.
Then the surprise drowned in hatred so cold and total it could have frozen the air itself.
"RAAAAAGHH!!!"
The roar ripped from its ruined throat, raw and ragged and seething. The shockwave kicked up rain and ash, spinning a small vortex above the crater.
Ryan didn't step back, didn't even blink.
He raised his right hand, slow and deliberate, and let that unremarkable 9mm pistol hang loose, angled toward the ground.
He spat out a last mouthful of bloody rainwater, looked across at the weakened, savage, screaming thing on the other side, and let one corner of his mouth pull into something cold. Something close to a dare.
"Quit yelling."
Quiet words. They carried far in the dead air.
"I just woke up. Let's... keep playing."
Under that bruised red sky, through sheets of black rain, man and monster faced off at the rim of the glowing crater, and the final, ugliest act of this apocalypse began.
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