Ryan pulled the blast door shut and gave Jill and Kendo a nod through the small window, then tightened his grip on the Desert Eagle and moved.
Of the guns he'd picked up along the way, this one fit him best. The recoil alone was enough to make most people flinch, but in his hands it sat steady, and with ammo never being a concern, it was the right tool for cutting through a building full of things that needed to die.
Sub-level two was quiet. He crossed the corridor at a fast walk and took the stairs up. Ground floor had a handful of wandering zombies - he put them down without breaking stride and kept climbing.
The second floor hit him before he reached the top step. The smell came first, rot and blood baked into the walls, and then the noise. The entire corridor was packed solid. Patients, nurses, security staff, all of them infected, all of them staring at him with clouded eyes. The wave of them surged the moment they registered movement.
Ryan's hand went to his belt. He pulled the pin on a grenade, judged the distance, and sent it into the thickest part of the crowd.
The blast tore the corridor open. Bodies went sideways, chunks of wall scattered, and a wide stretch of hallway cleared out in one shot.
He moved into the gap, Desert Eagle up, picking off the ones still standing. His X-ray vision read everything - behind walls, inside rooms, every dark corner. He was halfway down the corridor when three shapes exploded out of the side rooms and a ventilation shaft above and hit the floor hard.
Ryan stopped.
No skin. Muscle tissue in dark red and grey-white ran exposed across their bodies, the texture wrong in a way that was difficult to look at directly. Their mouths couldn't close - teeth pushed outward in jagged overlapping rows, and the gumline was completely bare. Something thick and clear dripped from the backs of their throats and tapped against the floor. Where eyes should have been, there were just two dark holes.
Hunters. Three of them, and they'd arranged themselves in a triangle around him before he'd even registered the threat.
All three sides sealed. The smell of them pressed in close, and six sets of claws caught what little light remained in the hallway.
Ryan's pulse ran fast, but his head stayed level. With HP lock, I'm not going down no matter what. Getting hit was going to hurt - he had no illusions about that - but he also had zero intention of letting any of those claws touch him.
The one in front launched first, claws coming down at his head. The two flanking ones went wide at the same moment, cutting off every angle of retreat.
Ryan dropped his weight and spun hard, pivoting on one foot. All three sets of claws swept through the space where he'd been, close enough that the air pressure tugged at his jacket.
Mid-spin, the Desert Eagle was already level. He fired twice into the chest of the one directly ahead. The impact drove it back into the wall and pinned it there.
The other two hadn't recovered yet. He didn't wait. He pushed forward instead of back, put a pillar between himself and the flanking pair, broke their angle, and fired once at each. Both shots landed. Both Hunters dropped.
The last one, still moving, came at him from the floor with its fangs inches from his throat.
Ryan sidestepped, stamped down on its exposed torso, and held it against the ground. He pressed the barrel into the dark socket where its eye would have been.
One shot.
It went still.
Ten seconds, start to finish. Not one round wasted, not one scratch on him. He stood in the wreckage of what had been an airtight killbox and let out a slow breath.
Jill would've called that sloppy. Maybe. But he was alive and they weren't, and a lot of what had just happened - the footwork, the shot placement, reading angles under pressure - she'd drilled into him over two months of training before the outbreak. She'd set targets, offered rewards for hitting them, and he'd thrown himself at every drill without holding back, knowing the HP lock meant pain wasn't going to stop him. That recklessness had made the lessons stick fast. He wasn't going to forget it.
He swept the floor visually, checking every room, every gap behind every wall. Nothing left moving. He holstered the gun and headed for the roof access.
The helipad sat at the top of the building. The Umbrella helicopter on it was intact - fuel, rotors, ignition, all good. He did a fast circuit of the bird, confirmed it was ready to fly, and went back downstairs.
He'd just reached the ground floor lobby when Carlos and Tyrell came through the front entrance at a jog.
"Ryan." Carlos spotted him immediately and crossed the room. "We went to the police department to track Bard's signal. Turned out Umbrella had planted a fake. When we reran the location, it pointed here. Tell me you got something."
Ryan tilted his head toward the stairwell and started walking. "Come on, I'll fill you in on the way down. Bard's here. Jill and Kendo are in the monitoring room on sub-level two with Becky - she's in treatment. I've cleared the building. There's a helicopter on the roof that works, so we've got our exit. Let's go."