September 29
POV Carlos Oliveira
The lobby doors were already broken, one panel hanging inward with the glass punched out from outside. Carlos pushed through with Jill across his shoulder and moved left immediately, keeping to the wall, away from the atrium's open ceiling where three tiles were missing and the dark above them wasn't empty.
Jill's boots dragged every third step. She'd stopped correcting her own weight somewhere on the last block and hadn't started again.
He found a side room on the third try — first two were gone, one with something already inside it, one with the frame buckled past using. This one was intact. He swept corners, got her down onto the gurney, and leaned over her immediately.
Pulse thin and fast. The wound under her collar was deep, tissue at the edges not doing what it should. No heat spreading outward. No swelling. Just sitting there like something had started and then paused.
He didn't know what that meant. He wasn't going to figure it out standing here.
He pulled the wheel lock on the gurney with his boot and moved it against the far wall, away from the door and away from the cracked exterior window. Then he stood there for a moment with his hand on her shoulder.
"I'm coming back," he said. "Stay here."
She didn't answer. He didn't expect her to. He went.
The service corridor was darker than the lobby, emergency strips at the baseboards giving less than they owed on battery power this old. Carlos moved through it without the torch because the torch made him visible from both ends. The ceiling above the third section had three tiles missing — not collapsed, placed neatly against the wall, which was worse — and he moved through that part faster without running, because running meant noise and noise meant the thing that had moved them knew exactly where he was.
His radio crackled as he reached the west junction.
"Tyrell." He kept his voice low. "I'm at the junction. What's your position?"
"Third floor east." Tyrell's voice was off — not the signal, something underneath it. "Comms room. I'm here."
"You sound wrong."
A short pause. "Nikolai caught me in the east stairwell. Let the infected push me into the junction first, waited for the noise." Another pause. "One shot. He knew exactly where I was going to be."
Carlos kept moving through the junction and said nothing for a moment, because what he wanted to say about Nikolai required more time than he had.
"How bad," he said.
"I'm in the room. I walked here."
"That's not what I asked."
"It's what you're getting." A breath. "Hunter came through the second floor corridor about forty minutes ago. I haven't heard it since, which doesn't mean anything."
"Bard."
"Locked himself in after the Umbrella unit came through. Clean team, fast. They weren't here for containment." Tyrell's voice flattened. "Bard saw what they were doing. That's why the door's closed."
Carlos absorbed that and moved.
The Hunter came off the ceiling between the second and third floor landing.
No warning — just air displacement and then it was already down, front limbs spreading wide for grip on the tile, head angling toward him before he'd fully registered the drop. Carlos fired on instinct and missed clean, the muzzle flash painting the stairwell white for half a second. The Hunter snapped toward the light and lunged.
He stepped sideways and it clipped his left arm hard enough to spin him into the wall. The rifle went off-angle. He fired again and the round sparked off the floor and the thing was already correcting, no delay, turning back.
He got the barrel up and squeezed twice. One hit the shoulder, stopped nothing. The trigger pulled a third time and gave him a click.
Empty.
The Hunter was already mid-lunge.
Carlos dropped the rifle on its sling and drove his shoulder into its chest as it came down, using the momentum to push it past him rather than stop it. They both hit the wall. He got a hand on its neck from behind — wrong angle, bad grip — and shoved it into the concrete. It twisted faster than made sense for something its size and one forelimb raked across his forearm.
He let go, stepped back, got the fresh magazine seated and the action racked while the Hunter was still finding its footing.
Two shots to the back of the skull.
It dropped and stayed down.
Carlos stood there with his forearm burning and his breathing loud in the stairwell and checked the ceiling and the landing above and the landing below and then checked the Hunter again. Still down. He reloaded the two rounds from the spare pouches on his vest — going into the next room short was a decision he wasn't willing to make — and started up the last flight.
Tyrell opened the comms room door before Carlos knocked. He had his rifle in one hand held wrong — keeping his right side still — and his jacket was dark on the left from a wound that had been there long enough to start clotting and had started moving again when he stood up. His eyes went to the ceiling first, then to Carlos, then to the blood tracking down Carlos's forearm.
"Hunter," Carlos said.
"I heard." Tyrell stepped back to let him through. "There's another one somewhere between here and the east stairwell. The tiles in that section are—"
"I saw them."
Tyrell lowered himself against the wall with the careful economy of someone accounting for pain. Carlos crossed to the far door and knocked once.
"Bard. Open the door."
Nothing.
"I have a wounded survivor. You're the only medical in this building."
A pause. Then, flat and close to the door: "I'm not opening this door."
"She's still alive."
"That's not my problem."
Carlos looked at Tyrell. Tyrell's expression said don't ask me.
He looked back at the door.
"I have weapons and nowhere else to be," he said. "Open the door."
A long moment.
Both locks disengaged.
Bard came through already assessing — eyes moving past Carlos to Jill immediately, the reflex of someone more interested in the problem than the people around it. He crossed the room and crouched beside her without being asked.
Carlos turned to Tyrell.
Tyrell kept his voice low. "The clean team. Sublevel two — Bard ran the ward down there." He didn't look at Bard. "They weren't extracting anything."
A beat.
"Subjects," Tyrell said. "He had subjects."
Carlos went still.
He turned.
Bard was working over the wound with focused attention, hands careful, entirely absorbed. He didn't look up.
Carlos crossed the room in three steps and grabbed him by the collar and pulled him upright.
"Hey—"
"Sublevel two," Carlos said. Low. "Tell me what was down there."
Bard's eyes went flat — not fear, recalibration. He looked at Carlos the way someone looks at a variable that has changed.
"Let go of me."
Carlos didn't.
Bard glanced down at Jill. Then back at Carlos with the mild impatience of someone whose work has been interrupted by something he considers beneath the work.
"Let go," he said, "and I'll tell you what's keeping her alive."
A long second.
Carlos released him.
Bard straightened his collar with two fingers and looked back at Jill — the focused interest already returned, the confrontation already filed somewhere that didn't matter to him.
He crouched beside her again. His hands moved to the wound edge, careful, reading it.
He went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with concentration.
"That's not a standard bite," he said.
"Something hit her," Carlos said. "Big. Didn't go down."
A pause.
"She was still fighting it when I found her."
Bard turned her arm slightly. His expression didn't change but something behind it did — the specific attention of someone finding data that contradicts a filed conclusion.
"Nemesis," he said. Quiet. Not a question.
Carlos said nothing.
"Then she should already be dead." Bard sat back on his heels.
"And yet," Carlos said.
"And yet." Bard was quiet for a moment. "Some people slow it down. I've seen it twice. The system fights back — not enough to stop it, but enough to buy time." He looked up. Not at Carlos. At Jill, with the detached interest of someone who has just been handed a problem he finds genuinely compelling. "She might be one of them."
"Then we use that," Carlos said.
"That's what I intend to do." Bard stood. "The full synthesis is at NEST — proper facility, proper equipment." He moved to the far cabinet, pulled it open. Inside, a few sealed cases, smaller than they should have been. "I moved one samples before the clean team arrived. Enough to slow the progression. Not enough to stop it." He closed the cabinet. "We need the lab below this level. That's where I was working."
"They weren't here to extract anything," Tyrell said from the wall.
Bard didn't look at him. "No," he said. "They weren't."
The room held that for a moment.
"My work is still down there," Bard said. His voice was even, unhurried — the voice of someone who has decided that being useful is currently the better option, and has made that calculation quickly and without sentiment. "The samples, the sequencing, everything they didn't have time to destroy. If we move now, there's enough to stabilize her." A pause. "After that, NEST. That's where the answer is."
Carlos looked at Jill. Still breathing. Still wrong. But there.
Tyrell pushed off the wall. Carlos looked at him and Tyrell looked back.
"I can move," Tyrell said.
"You're bleeding."
"So are you."
"How long does she have," Carlos said.
Bard picked up the nearest case. He didn't answer immediately — not stalling, just measuring something internal that he wasn't going to share the full calculation of.
"Enough to try," he said. "If we go now."
Carlos picked up his rifle and checked the magazine. Not full. He looked at the ceiling, at the door, at Tyrell.
"Then we move," he said.
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I've gone back and edited the beginning chapters a bit—feel free to check them.