The Amazon rainforest should have been the loudest place on Earth, insects and birds and rustling leaves composing the symphony of life.
Now there was only one sound: a maddening crystalline chime, like glass striking glass.
Murphy stood on the top-floor balcony of Star Fire's South American field office. As a senior observer deployed overseas, he'd witnessed countless bioterror incidents. The scene before him still exceeded anything he'd ever known.
He should have been guiding civilians into the underground shelters right now. He hadn't moved. He knew the reinforced alloy bunker a hundred meters below the surface would stop these spores about as well as wet newspaper stops the wind.
Below him, in Manaus's Praça São Sebastião, nearly a hundred thousand people stood waiting for their vaccines.
Wesker hadn't bothered deploying his mutant legions here. He considered these people beneath the cost of a single bullet. All he'd given this land was rain. A dark-gold rain.
Countless microscopic crystal spores, shimmering with an almost holy radiance in the sunlight, drifted lazily down from the clouds.
They were so light, so beautiful, settling on people's shoulders, on the dome of the old opera house, on the upturned faces of children.
"Mama, the sky's glowing." A six-year-old boy reached out, curious, and caught a spore in his palm.
The instant it touched him, dark-gold veins flickered across his fingertips.
The color climbed fast, past his wrist, past his shoulder, up his neck.
The boy didn't cry. His pain receptors had already shut down, cells crystallizing faster than his nerves could fire.
Ten seconds. The living, breathing boy became a translucent dark-gold crystal statue refracting rainbow light in the sun. He was frozen in that reaching pose, eyes still full of a child's pure wonder at the unknown, like a work of art locked in time forever.
"No!!!"
His mother's scream tore out of her throat raw and animal. She threw her arms around her son's body, trying to warm him back to life. The dark gold raced up her arms the moment she touched him. She watched in horror as both hands began to harden, joints cracking like snapping twigs.
Across the square, the assimilation was erupting exponentially.
Star Fire's baseline vaccine had kept these people's minds intact.
They could feel their organs solidifying. Feel their blood congealing into fine crystal particles inside their veins. Feel their consciousness being sealed inside a shell that would never move again.
They couldn't scream for help. All they could do was wait for death in absolute terror.
"This is... the extinction of the entire human race."
Beside Murphy, Dr. Hydra recorded data with shaking hands, tears fogging her goggles. "Wesker's carpet-bombing them with high-concentration spores. He doesn't care about compatibility rates anymore. He just wants every living thing on the planet converted into puppets he can control!"
The carnage in the square was breaking her.
A young girl had collapsed among the crystallized crowd, her lower body already turned to dark-gold stone, one arm stretched desperately toward them.
Hydra couldn't take it. She grabbed her case and bolted, clutching Star Fire's latest experimental high-concentration serum, racing toward the girl who was seconds from becoming another statue.
"Hydra! Get back here! That's suicide!" Murphy's voice cracked as he lunged for her, fingers closing on nothing but a scrap of fabric.
All he could do was watch her charge into that curtain of golden snow.
Five steps. That was all she managed before her movements ground to a halt.
Her lab coat froze mid-billow, soft fabric turning rigid in an instant, then fracturing with a sound like shattering porcelain.
She was locked in a running stride, arm outstretched to save, the last spark of humanity in her eyes swallowed by a tide of dark gold.
A golden statue of mercy and courage, standing in the center of that hopeless square.
Manaus was no longer a city.
The spores had taken everything. Every towering layer of rainforest canopy, every leaf, every vine had become translucent dark-gold crystal.
A breeze stirred through the forest, and what answered was no longer the rustle of leaves but the sound of a hundred million crystal wind chimes ringing at once, a beauty so exquisite it made the skin crawl.
Beneath that sound, something stirred. A sickening pulse, like something gestating, throbbing from inside the dead crystal bodies.
One of them shattered. A powerful "warrior statue" split apart with a sharp crack.
What crawled out was no longer human, but a next-generation creature with bones exposed, back bristling with dark-gold spines, stripped of any reproductive features.
It had no eyes, yet it sensed the living around it with perfect precision.
The creatures began feeding in a frenzy, tearing into the crystallized remains of their own kind. Every shard of dark-gold crystal they consumed made them larger, the patterns etched across their bodies deeper and more intricate.
"Mr. Cole... this isn't the world of the living anymore."
Murphy's hands were shaking as he hit the final encrypted-transmit key, sending footage that would give the entire human race nightmares to the Star Fire command ship. It was his last duty as an observer.
"This is... a hatchery for hell."
The screen flickered, spat a burst of harsh static, and went black.
Manaus, city of the rainforest, sank into eternal silence behind its curtain of dark-gold snow. The only sound left was the wet, rhythmic gnashing of newborn monsters feeding among the shattered crystal remains.
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