The wind picked up and pushed the smoke sideways, thinning it out over the wrecked rooftop. Shattered concrete, spent casings, and dark bloodstains covered everything. The smell of gunpowder and blood wasn't going anywhere.
Nemesis lay in the middle of the rubble, completely still. The last faint twitching had stopped.
Brad's legs gave out and he sat down hard on a pile of broken stone, pulling in air in ragged gulps. Jill wiped dust and blood off her cheek with the back of her hand, shotgun slung across her back. "That's done. We can't stay up here. The helicopter going down will tip Umbrella off soon enough."
Ryan nodded and said nothing. He was the only one who knew the truth: the thing wasn't dead. It had gone into a deep shutdown, the kind its modified biology could crawl back from. He thought briefly about putting more rounds into it, then let it go. Without heavy weapons, pushing it into a second form right now would only make things worse.
He reached into his pack, pulled out the C4 explosive and the timer, and set it for sixty seconds without drawing attention to what he was doing.
While Jill and Brad checked their gear, he walked over to Nemesis and placed the charge against the soft tissue at its chest. Then he stepped back, casual, and pointed to the lower platform on the building's outer face. "The way we came up is surrounded. We go this way."
One by one they climbed over the broken railing and dropped to the platform below. Ryan caught Jill on the way down, then grabbed Brad's arm before he could stumble and fall. They ducked into the stairwell and moved.
The rooftop went quiet behind them. The C4's red counter blinked in the dark.
Fifty seconds. Forty. Thirty.
At ten, Nemesis moved.
Its eyes opened, clouded and slow. Pain came from everywhere, every strip of muscle screaming at once. It lowered its head with the dim, confused instinct of something badly hurt, and its claws found the object resting against its chest. Something soft. Something foreign. Something with a small red light blinking on it.
The numbers were going down.
Whatever Umbrella's surgeons had put into it, the survival reflex was still intact. The fog cleared fast. Its hand clamped around the charge, arm swung back, and it threw the thing as hard as it could toward the open end of the roof.
The C4 made it a few meters.
The blast tore the silence apart. Fire went straight up. The shockwave took the remaining railing with it, scattered rubble across the whole surface, knocked everything that hadn't already fallen over the edge. A column of dust and smoke rolled upward.
When it thinned, Nemesis was face-down on the concrete. Its clothes were gone, skin cut open in a dozen places from the shockwave, every old wound cracked open again. The blast had thrown it into what was left of the wall. Its body convulsed a few times. It tried to push itself up and couldn't.
Not dead. But it had nothing left. Its fingers wouldn't close. A low, miserable sound worked its way out of its throat, and then it went under again.
Down in the stairwell, the explosion reached them as a deep thud.
Brad flinched hard enough to stumble. "What was that? Where did that come from?"
Jill stopped and looked back toward the roof, jaw tight.
"I left a charge behind," Ryan said, keeping his pace. "In case it woke up. Even if it didn't finish the job, it buys us time and keeps it from following."
Jill looked at him for a moment. "Good thinking. That thing doesn't give you a second chance if you're careless."
They went down the rest of the stairs without stopping. The stairwell was dark and damp, the walls gouged with long claw marks. Zombie sounds drifted up from somewhere below, hollow in the enclosed space, but nothing moved to block them. They reached the ground floor without contact.
Ryan put his hand up the moment he heard it. Footsteps outside. The clink of a weapon.
All three pressed against the wall. Guns up, aimed at the entrance.
The door swung open hard.
The man who came through wore U.B.C.S. combat gear and moved like someone who'd been doing this a long time. Assault rifle up, eyes sweeping the room. He found the shadows and locked onto them without hesitating.
"Who's there. Step out. Weapons down."
Carlos Oliveira.
Ryan stood slowly, letting the Desert Eagle drop to a low, neutral angle. "Survivors. We're not a threat."
Jill moved up beside him. "S.T.A.R.S. Jill."
Carlos lowered his rifle. "U.B.C.S. Carlos."
The moment the words were out, Jill's expression went flat. "U.B.C.S. means Umbrella. Umbrella did this to the city."
The room got very still.
Carlos raised one hand, rifle pointed down, voice steady. "I know how it looks. I'm here to pull civilians out, same as you. Whatever's happening at the top, I'm not part of it. I got separated from my team and I'm trying to reach the subway station."
"We're heading to the subway station," Ryan said.
Jill glanced at him. He gave a small nod.
She turned back to Carlos, gun still not moving. "Fine. You stay where I can see you."
"Works for me," Carlos said. "Right now getting out alive is the only thing that matters."
The four of them walked out of the building together. Late sun threw a pale yellow light across the street, doing nothing to warm it. Wind pushed debris across the asphalt. Somewhere in the middle distance, zombies called to each other in the dark.
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100 p.s = Extra chapter
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Read advance chapters at Patreon.com/NiaXD