They moved along the shattered outer wall in a tight line, crouched low, pushing forward slow.
Cold rain drove through the broken windows, each gust dragging in the smell of blood and rot and something chemically wrong - disinfectant gone sour, baked into everything. Down the road an ambulance lay on its side against a pillar, doors thrown wide. Medical kits, bloody stretchers, spent brass, empty magazines spread across the pavement like the aftermath of something that hadn't gone well for anyone.
The noise came before the entrance did. Gunfire, ragged and desperate. Zombies howling. Claws on concrete. Voices, angry and afraid, bleeding together into one tangled mess.
Ryan's hand shot up, palm flat, pressing down. Everyone froze against the wall. He turned sideways and looked through the door with half an eye, his X-ray vision already spreading across the hall.
Six fully armed Umbrella cleaner squad mercs, backs to the load-bearing pillars, making their stand. A dozen zombies shambled at them from the front. But it was the ceiling Ryan watched. Three shapes clung to the shadows up there, red all over, muscles visible where skin should have been, no face worth mentioning except a mouth that split nearly to the ears. Long tongues swept the floor. Black claws, four inches at least, scraped lightly against the concrete.
Real professional operation you're running, he thought, watching the mercs dump round after round into the dark. Every shot tells them exactly where you are.
Then one of the shapes dropped.
Nobody saw it move. There was just a scream, and then the scream stopped.
The merc hadn't finished squeezing the trigger. The Licker slammed him against a pillar, exposed muscles flexing tight, its tongue coiling around his throat. The claws went in deep.
Blood hit the wall in a wide arc.
His partner spun to help. The second Licker came in from the side, one swipe, and the gun arm split open to the bone. The man got about half a scream out before the third Licker locked his throat from behind and hauled him toward the ceiling.
Bone snapped. The sound carried across the empty hall.
Two seconds. Two mercs down. The others fell apart completely, spraying rounds at shadows, hitting nothing.
"This thing..." Jill's eyes tracked the ceiling, her body already dropping into a low ready stance - muzzle angled down, finger indexed along the guard. She'd cleared every kind of mutant the Arklay Mountains had to offer. "What the hell is it?" She swallowed. "It's too fast."
She'd never seen anything that moved without a sound and hit like that.
Kendo pressed his back flat against the wall, Becky pulled tight against his chest. The girl's breathing had gone shallow. Her cheeks burned and the veins in her skin were going dark blue underneath. His knuckles had gone white. He breathed as quietly as he could.
Ryan's hand on the Desert Eagle didn't move.
Licker. The word settled in, calm and precise. t-Virus mutation, pushed far past standard infected. No eyes, no skin - it hunted purely by sound and ground vibration. Those claws would go through a ballistic vest like it wasn't there. Burst speed at least ten times a regular zombie. And because there was no skin covering it - exposed brain, exposed heart. The only soft points it had.
He turned to Jill and caught her eye, then put up two fingers: left side, the mercs. Right side, the zombies. Together.
She gave one small nod.
They went in.
Ryan cleared the doorway first. The Desert Eagle tracked and fired, tracked and fired - each shot placed between collar and helmet, nowhere near armored. The mercs dropped. Jill came in from the right, shotgun up, two blasts that sent the front line of zombies backward and left nothing intact above the neck. No words between them, no call-and-response, just two people reading the same room the same way.
The three Lickers felt the gunfire. They dropped from the ceiling like thrown knives, shrieking.
"Get down!" Ryan said.
Jill was already rolling. Ryan stepped into the gap the first one left, raised the Desert Eagle, fired three times.
Three shots. Three exposed skulls. The Lickers hit the floor hard and stayed down.
The smoke cleared. The emergency hall went quiet. Battery-powered emergency lights cast a faint green wash across the wreckage on the floor.
Ryan scanned the room - every corner, every shadow. Nothing. He crossed to the solid wood door at the end of the corridor, closed tight, and knocked three times, unhurried. "Dr. Bard. Umbrella's people are dealt with. So are the monsters. We've got an infected kid with us, and we need the vaccine."
Silence. Five full seconds.
Then a lock turned.
Bard cracked the door with a service pistol in his hand. He'd watched all of it on the monitors - the fight, the Lickers dropping, the quiet after. The corridor was empty now. His shoulders came down and he pulled the door wide. "Get inside. Now."
They moved fast. Bard locked all three deadbolts behind them, then he and Ryan shoved a heavy metal filing cabinet across the room and wedged it against the door.
The office was a wreck. Experiment files mixed with food wrappers across the floor, canned goods and water stacked in the corner, a cot pushed against the wall. He'd been here a while. His eyes went straight to Becky and didn't leave her. Pale face, shallow breathing, veins going dark blue under her skin. His face went grave.
"The infection is advanced." He turned and picked up a purple vial from the low-temperature case on the desk, voice flat as iron. "Standard intramuscular injection won't work. The antibodies can't build fast enough to outrun the spread. Her organs would fail before the treatment ever had a chance."
Jill stepped forward. "What else is there?"
"Sub-level two." Bard tucked the vial against his body. "Umbrella's been running a private biological laboratory under this building. It has life support pods with the right controls to stabilize her while we administer the vaccine in stages. That's the only way to clear the virus out of her system. No other option."
"What's the situation down there?"
"The virus got out. The whole level is overrun with escaped test subjects - worse than the Lickers up here." Fear crossed Bard's face, quick and almost hidden. "Umbrella's main cleaner squad went in thirty minutes ago. Their orders are to destroy the vaccines, wipe the data, and eliminate anyone who's been inside that lab." He paused. "Anyone."
Ryan looked down at Becky. Her hands had gone slack in Kendo's jacket, too weak to hold on.
He looked up.
"Let's go."