Tie the Noose Chapter 31

The road to the facility was long and winding, curling up from the gatehouse and following the edge of the mountain. The heavy reinforced fencing lining the side road stretched on like a never-ending tombstone, guiding Daniel toward Central Parking and the security station he hoped was still intact. The fence posts passed in a steady rhythm, a constant visual anchor against the white churn of the storm, and even with the four-wheel drive and the V8 roaring he had to fight to stay on the rough-hewn road.

His mind burned as he turned over the encounter again and again. The monster he'd just put down had seemed barely held together, yet it had been insanely tough and disturbingly intelligent. It had known enough to protect its one weak point, shifting and bracing itself while trying to close the distance, and only overwhelming firepower had finally put it down. It had been a damn sight tougher than the plant zombies, and he almost missed the ones that burst into a toxic cloud, but this was something different, something new.

He found himself thinking about what it would have been like if that sludge had gotten on him, especially if he had any open wounds... Its death just as lethal as its weapons, between the snapping maw and that frog-like tongue. That might have been the point, to inflict some kind of harm, some kind of injury for whatever that filth was to seep in. One last attempt to infect a new host after the old one had failed, a final contingency built into whatever process had created it.

He didn't know what to make of it. The creature had been wet, slimy, rotting, but also strangely cohesive, almost oily in the way it held together when it should have collapsed. The way it had pulled its severed limbs back to itself painted a grim picture that refused to leave him. It wasn't just durable. It was persistent in a way that suggested it could recover itself over time. Worse, he wasn't sure if it was actually dead to begin with, or just discorporated. That made it a dangerous enemy he would have to account for moving forward, something that couldn't be treated like the others.

Something that might not stay down after he killed it.

'Fuck,' he thought to himself bitterly, filing it away as just one more addition to the menagerie of horrors Umbrella had conjured up. And where there was one, there would be more. There were always more. Like cockroaches. See one, and the rest waited just outside the light, except in this case it was made out of some kind of weird, likely murderous ooze. Because fuck him, Daniel guessed. Why not?

That would have to be a problem for later. For now, he needed the security building. According to his map, the structure was laid out like a pentagram. One central garage with facilities branching out from each spoke, and a watchtower rising directly from the center. It was designed to control inner access and to hold under pressure, a position that could be locked down and defended from multiple angles. If something went wrong, an outbreak or a riot, it would become a choke point that funneled movement and limited approach. More importantly, it was separate from the underground maintenance lines. Those tunnels were a labyrinth, and he had no interest in dealing with them if he could avoid it. Experience told him that was unlikely, and that he would end up down there eventually whether he wanted to or not.

The weather was getting worse. Snow came down in heavy sheets, turning the road into a near-total whiteout, and even with the high beams cutting forward he could barely make out more than a few feet of ground ahead. The edges of the road blurred into the storm, forcing him to rely on the fence line and his own sense of spacing to stay centered. Worse, the surface had begun to glaze over. Every correction carried a hint of slide, the tires struggling for consistent purchase as the climb steepened. The temperature had already dropped well into the negatives by the time he reached the midpoint of the mountain, and as the elevation climbed, so did the wind chill. By the time he reached the mine location, it sat at negative eight. In the open breeze, it bit closer to negative fifteen.

He had to hope the security station's generator still had fuel in it. Shit, he had to hope it was still in one piece. The alternative was spending the night in the vehicle, and that would have left him vulnerable as hell if he had to leave it in the open. Those temperatures would cut through even his heavier layers, and the cold wouldn't stop at him. It would hit his equipment just as hard. Batteries bled out quickly in conditions like this, draining far faster than they should. He knew how much he relied on them. The helmet, the readouts, the information feed, the mini-map, even the strength and speed support from the exoframe. If those systems started to fail, he'd be cut off at the knees before the monsters even had a chance to kill him.

That left him with a problem he would have to solve whether he liked it or not. His best bet, as much as he hated it, was to wait out the storm as best he could, and take his chances in the daytime. If this one held true to all the others they'd had this spring, it would only last a few hours, maybe the night at best, and burn out once the sun came up. It would still be cold. At this elevation it was still full-on winter temperatures, but he could insulate his systems more once he had the station secured.

Fortunately, the security station was supposed to have its own indoor motor pool. That meant tools, maintenance supplies, and possibly a fuel reserve. If he was lucky, there would be enough on hand to keep the generator running through the night. If not, there might at least be enough battery backup to carry him through most of it. Either way, it was step two of his plan, and it wasn't optional.

As he pulled up, the structure came into view through the storm, and he found himself slowing without meaning to. The building was squat and reinforced, recessed into the ground like a bunker and surrounded by high fencing that mirrored the perimeter below. The walls had no windows, only narrow firing slits set at even intervals, and the main garage entrance descended along a ramp that disappeared into the structure itself. Above it all, the watchtower rose several stories, a concrete column capped with glass, not unlike the ones at the gatehouse, standing exposed against the wind as it overlooked the entire approach. Circling it, he began to notice the octagonal shape, and snorted.

Umbrella was far too in love with their own design, sticking it anywhere they could, and he suspected at an angle the whole station would look just like the company namesake. Not that it wasn't an effective design, with the reinforced fencing and concrete barricades. Even the garage door was made of thick, banded metal that looked like it had been made nearly ram-proof, even with the bollards down and the rippers recessed.

The gate to the inside of the facility was open. That was the first thing he noticed when he approached it, the biting cold and the wind digging into him as he swept it with his P90. It had been secured by a magnetic lock, but the loss of power had disengaged it, which was a small miracle in itself. The bars were thick, at least half an inch, and looked like chrome steel. They were built to be tough and delay anyone trying to get through, unless you had the right tools. He did, between the torches, saws and other more explosive options he had, but being able to skip it altogether was a mercy.

The heavy security door opened cleanly, another gift, and swung without resistance, clearly well-maintained despite the cold he threw his gauntlets when he grabbed the frozen handle. Stepping across the threshold felt like stepping into a refrigerator. The interior had trapped the cold and held it there. Even with the firing slits closed, frost had crept in along the seams, and wind-driven snow had found its way through any gap it could, piling around the edges of the doors through the shutters.

The room he found himself in was as barebones as it got. A single desk sat against the wall, several lockers mounted beside it, a chair knocked over and left where it had fallen. A black computer rested on the desk, completely dead without power, its screen reflecting nothing but darkness. It was very clearly a check-in room. Sign your name, punch in for your shift, keep things moving. Functional, impersonal, and bereft of anything useful. The lockers had some old coats inside, a few faded pictures, and a few dead flashlights and a lot of built-up detritus. It had been picked over pretty well, and he left it to sit as he moved on.

The door behind it, another heavy metal security door, sat ajar. Another magnetic lock that had failed when the power went out. He was beginning to see a pattern forming. Without power, nothing here stayed sealed, which was good for him now, but if the generator went, the only safety the building would give him was its obscurity. That would have to be a problem later. As it stood, it meant all the doors were open, which would make clearing and securing the building straightforward.

From the way the design was set up, the garage fed directly into the interior. Each section branched off from it by section, some larger than others but all of them following the umbrella pattern. There was an outer hall that also ringed the building, for the firing slits, but everything here was connected by at least two entrances. That was another point in its favor. Made it harder to get cornered, if worse came to it.

He stepped out of the processing room and into the motor pool. There were no vehicles left. Whatever had been here had been taken or moved before whoever had been here cleared out. What remained were tools, racks of them, scattered, as well as a few in-built stations for power tools that didn't seem to be present any more. A full-size fuel tank sat off to one side, marked with flammable decals, clearly intended for refueling vehicles kept there, but the well was empty and hollow. Not great, but not unexpected. He found himself wondering where the cars had wound up, but it wasn't important right now. What was important was that he found the controls for the gate and the stops, all dead, but intact, and there was more than enough room for him to store his own vehicle.

The armory had been stripped down to the bolts. Racks stood empty, mounts left bare where weapons and gear had once been secured. Not unexpected, really, but the lack of weapons had hinted at something concerning all its own. The bunk room, which had enough beds for two dozen men or more, had been torn apart with equal thoroughness. Mattresses lay half off their frames, some flipped entirely, others dragged aside as if someone had been looking for something under them. Footlockers had been overturned and emptied, their contents either taken or discarded. Desks and bookcases had been stripped clean, anything useful removed, anything worthless left scattered across the floor. What remained had been gathered into a barrel at the center of the room and burned, reduced to ash and warped scraps.

There were no shamblers, moldy or otherwise, anywhere in sight. He'd take that, even as he swept the room, searching for any hidden bodies that might decide to get up and greet him once he'd settled in, but no. Hell, there weren't even any bloodstains, which told him a lot on its own. It was almost too clean really, but the meaning behind it was lost on him.

The chow hall, if it could even be called that, had suffered the same treatment. A fold-out table sat askew, plastic chairs pushed out of place or knocked over entirely. The refrigerator hung open, emptied down to the ice cubes, its interior stripped bare. Anything that had once resembled food had been taken or consumed long ago. The vending machines had been forced open, their fronts pried apart, and every last can, every last bag, had been pulled free and removed. Again, despite the mess he could see the methodology behind it. The cupboards were just as barren, and if he looked close he could see where grasping fingers had all but pulled up the paint on the shelves. Like it had been stripped clean by starving men, without a crumb left to show for it.

The command and control room was surprisingly intact, compared to everywhere else. Several banks of monitors lined the walls, all of them dark, their screens blank and lifeless. A short-range radio sat nearby, likely intended to communicate with the main security building. He recognized the model immediately, and it didn't have the reach to transmit beyond the mountain, much less reach the city. Clearly a security feature, he knew. Umbrella was paranoid to a fault and definitely didn't want the world to know their latest taco cart was in the process of killing everyone in it.

Finally,  he found the generator room. The generator itself was in remarkably good condition, especially compared to the last one. There was no need to hunt for parts, no missing components to track down. The setup matched the one from the gatehouse, down to the snap-lock fuses. Despite that, the fuel reserves were dangerously low. At a glance, it held perhaps a day or two's worth at best, and that was with careful management, and he would have to scrounge up more. He could raid the gatehouse later, maybe siphon some of that, but he still needed it to be able to lift the gate, so it would be a balancing act if he went that route. Of course, that assumed he couldn't get the power plant back online, which was going to be his next stop, once the storm cleared up.

Hitting the switches and flipping the lever was straightforward. The system had been designed for rapid activation, even in total darkness, with controls laid out for immediate use. When it engaged, the machine responded with a low, steady hum that spread through the room. The building followed in stages as power returned. Lights flickered, some stuttering before stabilizing, others taking a moment longer to come fully online. The cold, the weather, and the extended period of inactivity had taken their toll. Hopefully it would hold at least till morning.

Daniel spotted at least a dozen small issues that would need some attention before long, little things that would become real problems if left alone. He cataloged them, committing each one to memory as his eyes moved across the machine, but he found himself hoping he wouldn't have to deal with them. That he would be done with this place before the generator took its last gasps.

He snorted. There it was again. Hope. You'd think he'd learn, was the bitter thought that echoed through his head, and just knew that the generator would shit the bed the second he needed it not to. That was for certain. It was that thought that led him from the now-powered station to an alcove that was almost hidden off to the side of the main hallway. The last spoke, as it were, to the wheel.

It was a barren room that held a set of holding cells, tucked behind two heavily reinforced doors, each requiring a key he didn't have. Unlike the rest of the facility, these weren't magnetic locks. These were solid deadbolts, nearly an inch thick and reinforced with a titanium crossbar. Built to stay shut even if everything else failed. Cutting through them would take time and the right tools. Fortunately he brought a bevy with him. He would need something stronger than his regular sawblades though, a diamond edge if he went that route. He had thermite that could do the job just as well, or one of the torches he had, but that brought up another question.

Was it worth it?

From his angle, he could see through the reinforced glass. The cells looked empty. No movement, no sign of recent occupation, just the same abandoned feel that clung to the rest of the building. The room itself was sparse, almost stripped down to nothing, and he found himself weighing the effort against the payoff. Ultimately if he did decide to get in there, he would do it in the morning. It wasn't worth it now, tired as he was from the drive and the gatehouse, and the appeal of a safe bed was almost too strong to ignore.

With the power restored, the locks and switches were working. He hit the control for the garage door. The thick metal panel responded immediately, sliding up into the ceiling as the external defenses disengaged. Spikes retracted, bollards lowered, and he had a clear path. He guided the SUV down into the garage, then parked it inside and sealed the entrance behind him. The heavy door came down with a solid finality that cut off the storm outside.

He took a moment, then let out a slow breath. Now that he had juice running and the heating units buzzing away, he decided he would go over the building again, methodically, to make sure nothing had been missed. After that, he would rest until morning. It was kind of funny, that he went through all of that just to sleep in the truck in the end, but that was what he decided to do despite the fact that he'd found several intact mattresses in the barracks. Call him paranoid but he wanted an extra layer of armor between him and the outside.

He got to work unloading the vehicle, moving with steady efficiency despite the fatigue settling into his muscles. He set up a place to sleep, checked his gear, made sure everything was where it needed to be. He took the extra time to shut down the exterior lighting. There was no reason to advertise his presence any more than necessary. If something had already seen him, then it knew. If it had not, he intended to keep it that way.

When everything was done, the silence settled in around him, broken only by the steady hum of the generator. It was deep into the night by then, in the kind of silence where time blurred and everything started to drag. He sat down, letting some of the tension bleed out of him.

Tomorrow morning, he would head for the power plant. He needed a stable source of energy more than anything else. Everything up here depended on it. Without heat, the cold would become his biggest problem, and the Arklay Mountains weren't forgiving to those caught in the elements.

At least now, with the generator running, the magnetic locks were functional again. The building could be secured, at least to a degree. It wasn't perfect, but it was something. It was about as safe as he was going to get under the circumstances.

After finishing a hot MRE, one of the better ones, he climbed into the little nest he'd set up and settled in as best he could. The cold still lingered, seeping in from every surface, and sleep didn't come easily. When it did, it came with the mocking tones of his own voice, lying again to everyone, the horrified face of Rebecca, as she pointed the gun at him, and the hidden whispers of the monsters that lived in his mind, like old, forgotten friends, twisting the knife.


000


Daniel's eyes snapped open as he jerked awake, panic clamping down on his chest while the last fragments of the nightmare tried to drag him back under. The echoes lingered. He could still hear the screaming, still smell the sharp bite of cordite, still feel the phantom ring in his ears from the gunshot. It had settled into him, a recurring loop that refused to fade. It wasn't his death that haunted him. though. He dreamed about dying often enough that it had lost its edge. No, what stayed with him was the hollowed look in Rebecca's eyes, the way the light had gone thin and distant. He hated that. He hated that he had put it there. He hated that she was probably tearing herself apart over it even now. He drew in a slow breath and forced it out. He could not afford to let that thought take root.

He dragged a hand over his face and let out a low, rough groan. The cold had crept in again. Not enough to freeze him, but enough to settle deep in his joints and refuse to leave. The heaters never quite managed to chase the cold away, and the lingering chill had soaked into the concrete and into him with it. It was early, at least according to the clock. The sun should have been up, but the dim gray light outside said otherwise. The generator still whined somewhere in the structure, steady and alive, so it hadn't died during the night, but it barely did the job anyway.

He pushed himself upright. There was no point lingering. He had a plan, and daylight was a resource he couldn't waste. The last thing he needed was to be out there after dark with whatever else might be lurking in the snowdrifts. Not that he thought the sun would make a bit of difference, though at least he might see it coming. He let out a quiet huff of amusement at that. The likelihood that it would make any kind of difference was laughable. The thought tugged at his lips like a cruel joke, pulling a sardonic snort from him as he reached for another MRE and set his small camp stove to work, coaxing a pot of water toward a boil for coffee. 

The Gridlink rested across his lap, its display filled with the power plant schematics. The complex sprawled across the screen in sharp lines and labeled sections, far larger than he would have liked. According to the documentation, the entire facility ran on something called a Mag-Friction Arc Coil Generator, all caps, a system he'd never heard of but one that allowed for a frankly insane amount of power generation without the usual byproducts or telltale markers of more traditional gas or mineral generators. Leave it to Umbrella to come up with a legitimate alternative to fossil fuels and then use it to power some borderline-abandoned mine in the middle of fuck all nowhere.

His opinion on the stupidity of the megacorp side, the details didn't really matter that much. Power was power. It turned turbines, lit corridors, opened doors, and would get the various systems online he knew he'd need going forward. Not to mention the heating, because if his weather alerts were any indication, this lull in the storm was going to last a few hours at best, and then continue on and off for the rest of the week.

That only left the issue of getting to it.

Never mind that it was the furthest facility from the security station. He would have to make the trip on foot. Several feet of snow had fallen overnight, enough to bury anything left out in the open. The roads were effectively useless, which meant he would be slogging the entire way. Fortunately, the exo-frame was waterproof and built for terrain like this, and it would at least make the march manageable. The temperature had crept above zero with the rising sun, and the blizzard had thinned from a suffocating whiteout into a dull, foggy haze. It gave him a little more visibility, and he would take that without complaint.

The facility itself was another puzzle box, a perfect reflection of Umbrella's obsession with strange keys, odd latches, cranks, timed locks and unnecessary mechanisms. Before he could even think about bringing the power plant online, he had to activate three substations to prime the system. One sat to the east, one to the west, and one to the northwest. After that, he could access the main control panel, flip the necessary switches, and start the system. Only then could he move on to the control room.

The dossier included a compact manual that outlined the startup process, and the plant was designed to run with minimal oversight. He wanted to believe it would be as simple as throwing a few switches. It never was, he knew better than that, but he'd gotten lucky before. The reality of it was that all he could do was hope that whatever damage had been done could be repaired or bypassed. Without power, the rest of the complex stayed sealed. Every door relied on card readers, touchpads, and biometric systems that were dead without current. He had the ability to bypass them if he could get them on, but only if he could get them on.

Umbrella might have been an OSHA wet dream, but it never compromised on security. That held true whether the facility was buried in the woods or hidden in a city. The research lab, beyond its own security detail, was protected by a reinforced vault door that depended entirely on external power to function. The thing was two feet thick and made of solid vault-grade steel. He'd need a tank to get through it, and even then, the building would come apart around the fucking thing before it broke.

There was another option. The worker quarters were supposedly tied into the network of underground maintenance passages. If he could get inside, he might find an entry point that bypassed the main access doors, but that meant going into the underground labyrinth that crisscrossed the mountain, and whatever lurked within. It wasn't something he was looking forward to.

Then there was the direct approach. The machine shop stored explosives, cutting charges, and heavy mining equipment. If he wanted to carve his way through reinforced concrete, that was where he would find the tools to do it. Equipment far beyond the scale of his own cutting and breaching charges. Industrial-grade explosives were designed to pack a much larger blast than the home-made stuff he had, and if he could find or make a hole in the wall, he could potentially punch into the building without needing to move the door at all. But those were plans B and C and maybe D right now. Just getting power on and letting the door do the work for him would be preferable.

Sighing, he set the Gridlink aside and leaned back, closing his eyes as he tried to force the pressure behind them to recede. The headache had come on fast and settled deep, sharp enough to make him grit his teeth. It was always something. Always another ache, another reminder that his body was being pushed harder than it liked. This time it felt closer to a migraine, digging into the space behind his eyes like a drill. He would just have to deal with it, same as anything else. He exhaled slowly and steadied himself. He had already wasted enough time riding out the storm, and this gap wouldn't last long enough for him to get over whatever was bothering him now.

But if he was going to get moving, he needed to get to it. He'd thought about how to try and shield his equipment a bit better from the cold, the loss of his own batteries a paramount concern. Fortunately, a solution had presented itself. The coats from the processing room came apart under his hands, the outer layers torn open so he could pull free the insulation. He wrapped it around his exposed battery packs and secured it with duct tape, building a crude barrier against the wind and snow. It wasn't perfect, but it would keep the worst of the chill out of his sensitive systems. More than that, he stuffed what was left under his armor and into his boots. Anywhere it would fit, really. He remembered how the cold seeped into him in the gatehouse, his own winterized clothing proving to be not nearly enough for the high-altitude freeze.

Once that was done, he started gearing up. The extra layers made the armor sit tighter, the weight pressing into his shoulders and chest, but the warmth settled in quickly. That mattered more than his own comfort, and it did little to impede his movement, so he could deal with a little claustrophobia here and there.

He took his time checking his weapons. Everything had been cleaned and oiled, as ready as he could make it for the cold, but that didn't guarantee anything. If the temperature dropped again, parts could seize, materials could fail, and he would be left dealing with it in the worst possible moment. The P90, for all its reliability, had already shown some issues when he pulled it apart last night. Ice in the magazine, stiffness in the trigger, and despite swapping out his usual lubricant with arctic grease, the feed had fought him when he tried to clean it out. It made him nervous enough to consider leaving it here, at least for the time being. Once he got everything up and running, then he could come back to it, but the constant cold was taking a toll.

The Mare's Leg and the Saiga would carry him instead. He checked both again before loading up. Slugs, buckshot, incendiaries, shock rounds, grenades, everything that would give him the stopping power he needed. He swapped out the pouches for the P90 mags for more of the Saiga sticks, doubling up on what he had, and filled his pockets with the .45-70 cartridges. He was more than aware that the mold zombies were tougher than they had any right to be, and he wanted to prepare accordingly. It meant carrying less overall ammunition, but he could resupply if he had to at the station. He'd had the good sense to bring enough to rearm an army, a dozen times more than he had at the hospital and then some.

It still felt wrong leaving the P90 behind, but that was the nature of the game. He hoped he wouldn't regret it.

He had to force the door open as he stepped out into the cold. Snow stretched in every direction, piled high and undisturbed, turning the landscape into a blank, hostile expanse. The first step sank deep, nearly to his thighs, and every movement after that became a slow, grinding effort. Even with the exo-frame assisting him, the wet, heavy drifts dragged at his legs and resisted him every inch.

The power plant sat less than a half-mile away. Under normal conditions, it would have been an easy walk, but in this, it felt like he was going on a damn expedition. It wasn't light snow, either. It clung to him like slurry, compacted and wet under the constant flurries, and even with his helmet suite doing its best to keep him on course, he kept drifting, half-lost in the blinding conditions.

Still, kept the Saiga ready as he pushed forward, stopping when he needed to catch his breath. Each inhale burned, the air cold enough to sting all the way down. He kept moving anyway. It brought to mind something he'd heard, years ago, about being in the Rockies, how if you breathed too hard and too deep, the frigid air would freeze your lungs, and choke you to death on your own blood as the flesh split from the ice. It was a horrible way to die, choking on the cold, and his chest ached in a way he didn't like when he pushed himself too hard.

He stopped more than once to listen, his attention fixed on the uneven mounds of snow around him. In the distance, near the mines and the research facility, strange shapes broke the otherwise smooth surface. More than once he dropped, watching, as he heard something below, moving in the snow nearby or under his feet, maybe in those tunnels he had avoided. Nothing burst out at him, nothing attacked, but it left him unsettled.

The cold, much as he hated it, did more to keep the horrors of this place confined to their little holes, and away from him, than any amount of firepower might. It was more than frigid enough to turn a body into a popsicle, not that he had any illusions about it actually killing them, but a frozen enemy was a nonthreatening one. Not that it would stop him from popping its head off if he found one, but he didn't.

Hell, there was little enough to see with the fresh snowfall and the haze from the moderate blizzard that Daniel almost managed to calm his heart down. Not all the way, never all the way, but it gave him a sense of safety, false as it might be. Nothing was out here, not now. He shuddered to think what it would be like once he got into the bowels though. If these things were as smart as he thought they might be, they probably headed to the only places where there was any warmth. Places like the power plant he was headed to, that loomed in the white, a silhouette against the blinding snow.

The structure rose ahead of him, triangular in its footprint, almost pyramidal in its overall shape. The central generator towered over the rest of the complex, a massive silo capped with a pointed cone. In front of it, the main entrance jutted out as a squat, arched structure. Its doors had been torn open and left hanging. Beyond them, darkness swallowed the interior. The daylight did nothing to penetrate it, but that was expected, drowned in snow that it was.

Inside, the front reception area felt strangely out of place. A large half-oval desk sat elevated on a platform, with couches and chairs arranged neatly along the sides like a waiting room. It carried a polished, deliberate aesthetic that clashed with everything else he had seen, but Umbrella had always taken pride in presentation. Even their worst facilities were dressed up to impress.

The walls were finished in white, polished metal, lined with framed displays and posters advertising one breakthrough or another. It felt almost artificial, like a staged facade meant for visitors, all form with little function, and it made him wonder why they went to the effort of it all. It was the duality of Umbrella, Daniel suspected. For all the horrors that they managed to pump out, they wanted to keep their squeaky clean facade up and the illusion of them being anything but the lunatics running the asylum intact. Not that it made any kind of difference now. Especially not with the fact that this place had been turned into a warzone.

He stepped inside and activated his night vision, sweeping the room in steady arcs. It was painfully clear that the plant had seen a real fight. The walls were scarred with bullet holes, and dark stains marked the surfaces where blood had dried and spread. Furniture had been dragged into a barricade near one of the interior doors, stacked in a desperate attempt to hold something back. It had not worked, apparently, given how it had clearly collapsed at some point, leaving a rictus of holes in the stopgap.

Daniel let out a slow breath as he studied the broken barricade. There wasn't enough space to slip through cleanly, but the mass of it made shifting it out of the way impractical. He tested it once, then gave up on that idea and lowered himself instead. It took time, careful movements, slow adjustments, and more crawling than he would have liked to get through it. The surface was slick with dried, partially frozen blood and scattered viscera. He wasn't the first thing to force its way through that gap. More than once, broken nails snagged against his armor or scraped along his pants, catching and dragging before he worked free. It was messy, uncomfortable, and deliberate work, but he made it through eventually.

He pulled himself up on the other side and paused, taking in the hallway ahead, and froze. There, standing in the darkness of the hall, stood an unmistakable sight. Its left arm was gone entirely, and the lower half of its jaw had been torn apart, the cheek split open so that muscle and tongue hung loose in a wet, slack mess. It still wore an engineer's uniform, the name tag pinned neatly in place, but it was swallowed up by the hanging intestine that had burst from its guts, leaving a dragging mess of stiff, partially frozen meat that dragged across the ground.

He brought the shotgun up in a smooth motion, the action automatic. The creature took a step forward, uneven and dragging. He barely felt the pull of the trigger as the gun bucked in his grip. The blast cracked through the hallway, sharp and violent in the enclosed space. The recoil drove back into his shoulder, and the report echoed like a bomb had gone off despite the muffling of his helmet.

The buckshot struck the thing in the throat. Its head came free in a single motion, separating cleanly as if the structure holding it together had given way all at once. Daniel held still as he watched it happen. The flesh didn't tear so much as fracture, breaking apart in brittle chunks, the spine followed the same pattern, hard but inflexible, splintering like broken stone. The body dropped immediately, collapsing where it stood. The head hit the floor a second later, the eyes fixed in a glassy, vacant stare.

A quick search only revealed the walking corpse's name. Martinez, it read, but it didn't have anything else of value to it. No magnetic strip, or clearance tag. It was marked as E1, the designation meaning nothing to him. The man didn't even have anything worth taking. Daniel snorted, before standing and moving over to the door at the far end of the hall.

Annoyingly, it didn't have a handle. It was another one of Umbrella's middle-splitting sliding doors they seemed obsessed with. He wedged the crowbar between the panels and started working it back and forth. Bit by bit, the mechanisms whined as he forced them apart. Once the bar slipped fully through, he used it for leverage and began prying the halves open. It took nearly a minute of steady effort before the mechanisms finally gave and the door slid free.

The top half of the door slid down behind him, hanging limply, the bottom hanging open, broken. Daniel wouldn't complain, though. Fuck it. That just made his exit that much easier once he was done with this place. He raised his shotgun to his shoulder as he stepped fully into the main body of the plant, a sprawling edifice of open space dominated by a massive machine at its heart.

The central chamber stretched out before him, massive and industrial. The space rose three stories high, built to cradle the strange generator that lanced up from the ground like a spire of ringed steel. It resembled a pistoning engine wrapped in a series of dormant rings, all of which seemed to spin in tandem with one another when the giant power unit was active, but now lay silent. The structure plunged deep into the ground, with only the upper portion visible. A glance into the pit suggested it extended another five stories below, at least, and dropping a light stick down there revealed it just kept going and going and going.

Spindly, spike-like structures surrounded the machine, arranged with deliberate spacing. He didn't know their purpose, but they weren't decorative. Studying the layout, he picked out the pattern. The chamber formed a hexagon. Each corner fed into the central device through long spokes packed with cables as thick as his torso, all converging into the top of the generator.

The room was completely dark, visibility only possible through his night vision. It was also silent. Nothing moved. Nothing stirred. He preferred the quiet, but he still felt the tingle of something watching him. He never let his guard down, even as he tossed more light sticks, the infrared flares bathing the room in thermal crimson. Up above two coils of catwalks dominated the upper levels, protected by thick railings meant to keep anyone dumb enough to hit them from tumbling over.

He circled the machine, giving it a careful inspection. He couldn't begin to understand the full mechanics behind it. All he could pick out were the obvious elements. It took him a moment to recognize the spiked structures as something similar to transformer caps, which at least gave him a rough idea of the system's function. All in all it almost seemed to be some kind of free-energy system right out of Tesla's playbook, but that stuff was science fantasy. Then again, so were zombies, and they clearly hadn't gotten the memo, so what did Daniel know?

Nothing appeared outright damaged. That alone was surprising. There were signs of repair work everywhere, patch jobs layered over older fixes, but the structure held together. It wasn't reassuring, but it was better than the alternatives. It could have been burning, collapsed, or torn apart. Instead, despite the damage outside and whatever had come after, the core system still stood intact.

The machine itself looked like hell, but as long as it turned on, he didn't really care.

What mattered more was the layout. The two western doors needed some kind of crank to open them. The doors themselves were thick bulkheads, the kind meant to keep people out while the machine was running. Each one had an emergency access bolt set into the side, but the shape of the access point was weird. Not something he could make work with the tools he had on hand. It looked like it needed some kind of spike that was supposed to slot in, and the latch itself was slightly magnetic. He tried anyway, testing what he had, but nothing caught. Nothing held. If it looked like he could've blasted the damn thing off its fucking hinges, he would've done it. But no.

No, this was another goddamn fetch quest, because easy, apparently, was for other people.

At least the east entrance was already open. He stepped through into another waiting room, a bench against one wall and a pair of dead plants flanking it. The cold had finished them off, leaving brittle stems and curled leaves behind. He swept the room with his shotgun as he moved in. This place hadn't been spared. Bullet impacts chewed into the walls, and one section had been blown wide open, a jagged hole like someone had fired a rocket straight through it. God only knew why, though.

Beyond the damage, the path forward was clear. The hallway stretched ahead without obstruction. According to the instructions, getting the power converter running meant activating three switches in the central junction. After that, he needed to move through two side corridors connected to primer stations, flip those, bring power back online, then engage the primers to feed the first charge into the generator. That was how it was supposed to work.

Stepping into the junction of the first primer wing, he already knew this was going to be a huge pain in the ass. The junction box itself was still intact, but the rest of the room looked like it had been at the center of the firefight that had ravaged the rest of the building. Three bodies were scattered across the floor, or what was left of them, and the concrete was caked in dried, partially frozen blood that cracked faintly under his boots and a mass of shell casings from what looked like automatic rifles.

The two mostly intact bodies had been mauled beyond recognition, their heads reduced to pulp, bone and tissue smashed flat into the floor. The third was something else entirely. It looked like it had been nearly cut in half by some kind of saw, but not cleanly. Bone, muscle, and organs had been torn through in a jagged diagonal line that started at the shoulder and ended at the hip, leaving the bisected torso literally beside itself.

That wasn't what caught his eye though. The head of the body had been run through with what looked like a hand drill at first glass, the end driven deep into the dead man's eye socket and out the back, pinning the head to the ground before abandoning the place. It stood out as he crouched beside the corpse, tilting the head to get a better look, and he realized that it was the missing crank handle, and looking at the device itself, the head was oddly similar to a headphone jack, except much larger and the notch lined with teeth.

It was also wedged into the skull it rested in pretty tightly. He stepped forward, braced his boot against the corpse, and pulled the crank free with a wet, reluctant sound. He wiped as much of the dried viscera off it as he could against the fabric of the body's uniform before giving it a quick once-over. It didn't look damaged, despite the odd design. Small mercy, that. He didn't think he'd find a replacement if it had been damaged beyond repair.

It was lucky, is what it was, he thought as he stood. Making his way over to the doors leading to the manual primer pumps, he noticed that the same type of crank input as the ones in the main generator sat beside the heavy steel door. Interesting, that, and it started to paint a picture of just what had happened here. Someone had been trying to get over here, likely to do the very thing he was attempting, and someone had stopped them. Violently.

The thought stayed with him as he slotted it into the port and started turning. One, two, three, four. The mechanism resisted at first, stiff from disuse, but it gave a little more with each rotation. On the fifth turn, the door shifted with a heavy clunk, wedging open just enough for him to see into the junction room beyond.

The passage wasn’t clear. Four more bodies lined the walls, slumped where they had fallen, most of them looking like they had been left to die in there. The bodies were dried out, skin drawn tight over bone, faces hollow and fixed. He crouched beside one and checked it carefully. No signs of infection. No reanimation. They had simply been locked in and abandoned in a box they couldn't escape. It was a nasty way to go, but dehydration would have taken them long before starvation had the chance.

They looked like mummies, all of them still dressed in engineering uniforms, every name card stamped with the same designation: E1. More victims of whatever had happened here, of the monsters, of the mold, ultimately of the corporation. Daniel had a lot of hatred in his heart for Umbrella, but he didn't blame these people, the love level janitors and maintenance workers that were just there for a paycheck. None of them signed up to be turning into a fucked up experiment, yet here they were, subjects all the same.

He swept the area one more time, but there was nothing particularly interesting. With a quiet exhale, he moved to the first primer pump. The machine inside was some kind of hand-driven jack system, set up as a hand generator that was all muscle powered. Gripping the lever, he forced it down against the counterpressure, muscles tightening as he put his full weight into it. It resisted hard at first. The mechanism answered with a series of dry clicks and ticking sounds, metal grinding against itself.

With every pump, it loosened a little more, the resistance easing as if the machine itself were waking up after being left idle for too long. It took ten full strokes before the light above it flickered back to life, shifting from red to yellow and finally to green as he kept working. It took close to a minute to get the system fully primed. Once it stabilized, he stepped back out, crossed to the other crank, and repeated the process with the same steady rhythm.

With both primers set, he returned to the junction box. He flipped the first switch, then the second, then the third. With a guttering roar, the room surged to life as the lights snapped on.

And that was when he heard it.

A sharp metallic crash, the unmistakable force of a door being ripped free of its hinges, followed by a loud metallic crash, like a pan hitting the ground. His hand shot to his Saiga, bringing it up in a smooth, practiced sweep. From the corridor he had just come through, something moved. The sound was sharp, like someone tapping a metal bar against the ground rapidly. Skittering, wet and fluid, but setting his nerves on edge all the same. He edged closer and glanced in.

What he saw made his stomach twist.

It looked like a spider, but wrong in every way that mattered. A thing made from a human torso, its head twisted completely out of alignment, the mouth torn wide as a single giant orange eye bulged from within. The skull had split open down the middle, jagged and uneven, and from it extended a long proboscis that was buried deep into the throat of one of the corpses. It bulged wetly as it injected something into the body, the jaw ripping loose as the mouth distended beyond the limits of its stiff, emaciated muscles. The body twitched, and Daniel swallowed wetly as he watched in muted horror at this new abomination.

He raised the shotgun to fire, but the body twitched and spasmed erratically, limbs jerking in broken, uneven motions that threw off his aim. The first shot caught it in the torso and blew it back a step, but the spider thing reacted instantly. It skittered up the wall with a wet scraping sound before diving onto another body. The corpse that had just been reanimated surged upright with a sudden, violent energy that put it between the skittering nightmare and the barrel of his shotgun.

Daniel tried to snap his aim back onto the spider, trying to stop it before it could trigger another transformation, but the reanimated corpse came at him with a ferocity he hadn't expected. It lunged forward and nearly body-tackled him, slamming into his chest and shoulder hard enough to knock his next shot wide.

He didn’t hesitate. Daniel reached back and drew his combat knife, driving the knuckled grip forward into the zombie’s head. The impact snapped its head back with a dull crack. In the same motion, his other hand dropped to his side, drawing Rebecca’s pistol. He fired four rounds almost point blank into its chest, each shot thudding into dead flesh, before bringing the knife down again in a brutal downward strike.

This time the blade slid between the ribs. He wrenched it free and kicked the living corpse away, the assisted strength of the exo-frame sending the body skittering across the ground in a loose, uncontrolled tumble.

By then the second corpse in the hall was already dragging itself upright. Without breaking his rhythm, Daniel transitioned weapons. He grabbed the Saiga, braced it tight into his shoulder, and fired three rounds in rapid succession. The blasts hammered into the zombie’s chest and threw it backward, slamming it off its feet and across the floor. He tried to finish it, but the first corpse was already getting back up.

He spun and fired again. The shot obliterated its head in a spray of bone and tissue, yet the body kept moving, the ribcage beginning to split and peel apart as something inside tried to force its way out. Daniel didn't give it the chance, already knowing what was coming. He emptied the remainder of the magazine into it, each shot tearing it apart until the mass collapsed into a pulped ruin before the mutation could complete.

The third corpse hit him from the side, slamming into his ribs with enough force to stagger him. He reacted on instinct, rolling hard to throw it off as he found the handle of his knife again, driving the blade up into the zombie’s eye. The resistance gave way with a sickening push, and the creature let off a hissing scream as it reeled back, taking his blade with it. Daniel let it go, already moving.

With his hand free, he was able to drop the empty magazine, before grabbing another, and ramming it into place in one smooth, practiced motion. The bolt snapped forward as he brought the Saiga back up. He fired three more rounds into the staggering corpse, blasting it back to the ground, then shifted and put two more into the second one that had already begun to rise again.

He found the spider thing ripping the jaw open of the fourth, its proboscis already driven gut-deep, the body twitching as it injected whatever foul payload it carried. It didn't matter though, he finally had a clean shot. It took the last six buckshot rounds to rip it apart. Each blast tore away more of it, the proboscis severed, the split skull shattered, the limbs blown free in wet chunks that slapped against the walls and floor. By the time he finished, there was nothing left of it but a mauled, twitching body. That stopped the immediate threat, but what little it had done to the fourth body was enough.

The corpse convulsed and began to rise.

"Fuck!" Daniel bit out as he ejected the second magazine, the empty clattering away. He reached back and grabbed a third. This one had yellow tape wrapped around the base. The taser rounds. He shoved it home and racked the action, already bringing the weapon back up. He wanted to see how they liked 50000 volts of pure electricity.

Two of the zombies stumbled out from the side junction just in time to wander between his crosshairs. He squeezed the trigger. The taser shots cracked through the air, two striking the first one in the chest. Its body seized instantly, muscles locking and then spasming violently as it collapsed, limbs flailing in an uncontrolled seizure. Two more rounds hit the second corpse and it dropped the same way, twitching and jerking across the ground. He shifted and fired again, putting two more into the third as it tried to rise.

With all three laid out and convulsing, he let the gun hang as he drew his pistol and opened up, sending high-velocity rounds into their chests in tight, controlled bursts. The shots thudded into meat and bone as the corpses flopped and writhed, still trying to pull themselves toward him. Tight grouping, right into the center mass, where those freaky eyes tended to be, shattering bone and rending muscle as the hot-loaded hollowpoints dug deep.

The first one stopped moving altogether after he emptied half a magazine into it. He shifted and finished the second just as brutally, but the third had taken less damage and recovered faster than he expected. It sprang at him like a missile, its head folded all the way back and its ribcage pried open wide, rib-fangs glistening with blood and muscle as it lunged.

He reacted without thinking. The combat hatchet left his hand in a single smooth motion. The blade caught under one of the ribs, the hooked edge biting in. Using that leverage, he wrenched it off-center and sent the corpse crashing and rolling across the ground.

He grabbed his shotgun and fired the last four taser rounds into it. The charge hit full force. Two hundred thousand volts surged through the body, locking it in place as the flesh blistered and peeled under the electrical burn. The swollen eye in the center of its torso burst with a wet pop, collapsing in on itself like an overripe balloon. The body popped like an overfull balloon a moment later, coating the ground around it in foul-smelling goop.

Daniel gasped, already ejecting the third magazine and slamming in a fourth. He had only brought three mags of the electro rounds. One was already gone, leaving him twenty rounds on hand, but they worked. Hell, they worked better than buckshot did against these things, and right now that was all that mattered. He knew that now, and he'd be ready next time.

As he took a moment to gather himself, collect the spent magazines, and reload, his heart hammered in his chest hard enough that he could feel it in his throat. The adrenaline hadn’t faded yet, and it left his hands shaking, every movement deliberate as he forced himself through the motions. Where had that thing come from? That question looped over and over. A mutated torso turned into something out of his fucking nightmares, and now it was real, sitting dead a few feet away from him, and he had no idea how it got in.
He walked over to it carefully, weapon still raised, unwilling to trust that it was actually down. His eyes tracked every inch of it as he approached, watching for any twitch or sign of movement that might mean it wasn’t finished. It didn’t move. It just lay there in pieces, slack and ruined like the rest of the corpses in the room. Even so, he didn’t lower his guard, not yet, not after what he’d just seen it do, and standing over it, he realized he didn’t know what to make of it at all.

The abdomen had distended into some kind of swollen pouch, stretched tight with a viscous fluid that clung and shifted beneath the surface. The smell coming off it was immediate and overwhelming, a mix of rotten eggs and vomit that turned his stomach and made his throat tighten. The limb bones, the thighs, the biceps, had been wrapped in some kind of slick, black muscle that looked wrong in both texture and structure. It didn’t look like natural growth, more like something layered on top, something forced into place. The entire thing had a wet sheen to it, consuming and replacing anything human that remained.

But the most horrifying part was the skull. The brains had been completely sucked out, leaving the cavity hollow and empty. The skull cap had been split clean down the middle, jagged edges peeled apart as sharp fangs had grown outward from the break. A tube-like structure had extended from the spine, forming the structure of the proboscis that even now was still partially lodged in the ruined throat of the fourth corpse where he’d shot it off. It had been injecting something, forcing whatever process this was into motion with terrifying efficiency. Even dead, it looked like it had been built for that single purpose.

The mutation had been insanely quick, horrifyingly so, far beyond anything he’d expected even from Umbrella. It had taken seconds, not minutes, not hours, but seconds to go from inert corpse to active threat. First one, then the second, then the third, then the fourth, each body cascading into the next before he’d had time to properly react. He was lucky he’d stopped it when he did, because if it had reached the rest of the bodies in the room, he would’ve been buried under numbers he couldn’t handle. The thought sat heavy in his chest, a cold acknowledgment of how close that had come to going very differently.

From the look of it, the thing had been in a ventilation duct, tucked away somewhere above or behind the walls where it couldn’t be seen. The noise from the machinery, from the startup, or even his own movement must’ve been enough to wake it. That realization didn’t sit well with him at all, because it meant there could be more, hidden in places he couldn’t easily check. It meant the environment itself wasn’t just dangerous, it was actively hostile in ways he couldn’t predict. And that, more than anything else, put him on edge. It was just perfect in the worst possible way.

It reminded him of an old horror game he used to play, something set on a spaceship where things kept crawling out of the walls when you least expected it. Back then it had been a cheap scare, something you could laugh off once the screen went dark. Now it felt way too close to reality, and the comparison didn’t help him at all. It made him wonder what in the hell Umbrella had been experimenting with up here, what kind of twisted line of research led to something like this. Because this wasn’t just another variation of what he’d already seen. This was something new, something worse, and it didn’t sit right with him.

"Fuck," he muttered under his breath, the word coming out more tired than angry as he reached for the crank. Grabbing it from the socket, he forced himself to move, to keep going instead of standing there and thinking about it. He stepped back out into the central corridor, eyes scanning automatically even as his mind kept circling back to the encounter. He still had two more primers to go, and the thought of what might be waiting in those sections didn’t do him any favors.

"God damn it," Daniel sighed quietly as he slotted the crank into the next plug. He didn’t have much of a choice at this point. He would have to do it and deal with whatever might be waiting on the other side. That was just how this worked, one step forward whether he liked it or not. He braced himself without really thinking about it, expecting resistance, expecting something to go wrong again. His grip tightened slightly as he started cranking.

In this case, blessedly, there wasn’t anything at all. The western transistor station had been in perfect condition, untouched in a way that felt almost unnatural after everything he’d just gone through. No bodies, no bullet holes, no battle damage, and no signs of that all-infectious mold. The halls were clear, the primer room empty, the wings silent and still. It felt like a break he didn’t quite trust, but he took it anyway.

Once he got that system up and running, the process went smoothly, almost too smoothly compared to the last section. The machinery responded the way it was supposed to, the lights cycling through their indicators without any resistance or delay. All he had to do after that was move on to the northwest station and repeat the process. Simple in theory, even if reality had proven otherwise more than once already. He didn’t let himself relax, not completely, but the absence of immediate danger helped take the edge off.

He cranked open the door for the last of the primer stations, hoping for the best but already bracing for the worst. Experience had taught him to stay ready, and the odds were never in his favor. So far he was one for two, and he felt like he was playing a rigged game. He swept in like a storm, ready for anything, weapon raised as he swept the room. It was blessedly silent though, no bodies and no monsters to be found.

The transistor junction was clear, the equipment intact, and there were no signs of disturbance anywhere in the immediate area. It looked like the only section that had been compromised was the eastern junction, where he’d already dealt with the worst of it. That thought brought a small measure of relief, even if he didn’t let it show.

He exhaled slowly and stepped forward, slotting the crank into place for the final primer wing. The motion was automatic by now, muscle memory carrying him through the setup as his mind stayed half-focused on the surrounding space. He was already thinking ahead, already preparing for the next step once this was done. Everything felt like it was finally lining up, like he might actually get through this section without another fight. For a brief moment, it almost felt manageable.

And that was when it all went wrong.

He’d barely gotten two full cycles in when something shot out of the dark and slammed into his chest hard enough to lift him off his feet. The impact drove the air out of his lungs as he hit the ground and skidded, his vision flashing white for a split second. A long, fleshy tentacle tipped in a razor-sharp bone spike snapped back from where it had struck him, the tip glistening wet under the dim light. If not for the thick plates of his Phalanx vest, that hit would’ve punched straight through him. He felt the force of it even through the armor, a deep, bruising ache spreading across his ribs. Pain flared, sharp and immediate, but he forced it down as he rolled and pushed himself up.

Scrambling to his feet, he heard the heavy doors wrench open behind him with a tortured metallic scream that echoed down the corridor. The sound alone set his nerves on edge, something final and violent about the way it gave way. He turned just in time to see what had forced its way through, and for a moment his mind simply stalled. There was no way to process it, no immediate comparison that made sense. His thoughts tried and failed to categorize it, to file it into anything recognizable. All he could manage was a sharp, disbelieving breath as his grip tightened on the shotgun.

It looked like someone had taken four, maybe five bodies and crushed them together into a single mass, like they were made out of play-doh, all mixed together with their limbs and muscles and flesh running into one another. Heads, arms, legs, hands, feet, they were all still there, but nothing was where it should’ve been. They’d been fused together under a central mass of black, slick flesh that pulsed faintly with each movement. Several of the faces were still intact enough to show expressions frozen in silent screams, their mouths stretched open at impossible angles. A half dozen pale orange eyes stared out from between layers of flesh, blinking independently, each one tracking him with unsettling precision.

The arms were worse up close, thick columns made from multiple human bodies twisted together, ending in heavy, bony claws that scraped and gouged against the floor. The legs weren’t really legs at all, more like flattened torsos that dragged and pushed in uneven motion, leaving a wet, bloody smear behind the creature as it moved. Every shift of its bulk made a sound that was too moist, too weighty, like something that shouldn’t be able to move at all. The smell hit him a second later, thick and rotten, something that clung to the back of his throat and refused to let go. It was wrong in every possible way, and worse, it was coming straight for him.

"What the fuck!?" Daniel bit out as he scrambled back, the Saiga snapping up into position as instinct took over. He didn’t wait, didn’t hesitate, he just pulled the trigger as fast as he could. The shotgun roared in rapid succession, each blast hammering into the creature’s mass. The buckshot tore into it, ripping chunks free, but it didn’t slow the thing down the way it should’ve. The pellets sank into cushioned flesh that seemed to absorb the damage, the surface shifting and reforming around the impacts. Its tentacle lashed out again, forcing him to dive and roll, the spike carving a deep gouge into the concrete where he’d just been standing.

He came up already moving, ejecting the magazine and slamming in his second load of electro-rounds without breaking stride. The action snapped forward as he brought the weapon back up and fired again, the taser prongs embedding themselves into the creature’s surface. The first few shots did nothing, the creature pushing forward as if it hadn’t even noticed. Then the fifth hit, and the reaction was immediate. Its massive frame shuddered, muscles locking and twitching as the current finally found purchase. That brief stagger was all he needed.

Daniel stepped into the opening and reached back, drawing the Mare’s Leg in one smooth motion. The short-barreled rifle came up and fired almost instantly. The .45-70 round cracked through the air and punched clean through the creature’s shoulder, blasting a fist-sized hole through the fused mass. He racked the lever and fired again, then again, each shot ripping deeper into it, tearing chunks free that slapped wetly against the floor. The creature reacted with sudden violence, its tentacle-whip snapping out and catching him across the stomach hard enough to send him staggering. The impact knocked the rifle from his hands, sending it skittering across the ground out of reach.

Daniel sucked in a sharp breath as he fought to stay upright, the hit having driven the air from his lungs again. The creature forced its way forward through the doorway, its bulk scraping and crushing against the frame as it tried to follow him. It had already pushed him back into the hallway, closing the distance faster than he liked. He staggered once, then forced himself into motion, eyes snapping toward where the rifle had landed. There wasn’t time to think, only react.

He broke into a dead sprint, boots sliding slightly on the slick floor as he dropped into a slide and grabbed the weapon. His hands closed around it just as he twisted, bringing it up and firing the last two shells into the creature without pausing. The rounds slammed into it at close range, tearing into the already-damaged mass. It roared, a deep, distorted sound that echoed down the corridor, and kept coming.

The walls screamed as its bulk forced its way forward, metal and concrete grinding under the pressure. It didn’t slow, didn’t hesitate, just kept advancing like it didn’t care what stood in its way. Daniel didn’t wait to see how far it would push. He turned and bolted, diving through the door into the central generator room. Even as he moved, his fingers worked the rifle, trying to feed fresh rounds into the receiver as fast as he could manage.

For a moment, the creature seemed slowed by the doorway, its mass catching on the frame as it tried to force itself through. Daniel raised the rifle and fired, but it pulled back at the last second, the shot missing by inches and slamming into the wall behind it. He racked the lever again, trying to adjust, trying to find a better angle. There wasn’t one. The thing surged forward again, slamming into the door with enough force to buckle the frame inward.

He fired again, three quick shots that tore into its front as it pushed through. It reared back, then slammed forward once more, the metal frame bowing outward under the impact. The structure wasn’t going to hold, not for long. Daniel tried to reload again, but the next strike came faster than he expected. A tentacle punched through the gap and snapped toward his head, forcing him to dive aside as it passed inches from his face.

Then the whole frame gave way. With a final, violent thrust, the creature ripped the door clean out of the wall. The heavy slab of metal went skidding across the floor as the mass forced its way fully into the generator room. It filled the space, its bulk pressing outward, reshaping itself as it moved. There was nowhere left to fall back to.

Daniel didn’t hesitate. He dropped the rifle and swapped back to the Saiga, bringing it up and firing again. Five electro-rounds slammed into the creature in quick succession, but this time there was no effect. A layer of thick, black ooze had spread across its surface, catching the prongs and forcing them out before they could discharge properly. The rounds slid free, useless, falling to the ground without delivering their payload. It had adapted, changing to match him with terrifying speed.

Daniel growled in frustration, ejecting the magazine and swapping to his slugs as fast as his hands would move. If the electricity wouldn’t work, then he’d just have to tear it apart the hard way. He brought the weapon back up, and lined up his shot..

"Let's see how you like this, motherfucker!"

The Saiga roared in his hands, shot after shot, shell after shell, the recoil hammering into his shoulder in a steady, punishing rhythm. Each trigger pull sent a heavy slug tearing into the creature’s mass, the impacts thudding deep without producing the kind of damage he needed. Flesh split and bone cracked under the force, but the thing barely slowed, its bulk shifting and absorbing the punishment like it didn’t care. Still, it staggered, its advance checked just enough to give him a fraction of breathing room. That was all he needed.

He didn’t waste it. His hand dropped to his belt and came back with a grenade, fingers already moving as he pulled the pin. He tossed it low and hard, angling it toward the creature’s rear mass where the flesh was thickest. There wasn’t time to make it perfect. There was only time to act. He dropped immediately, turning his body and bracing for the blast as best as he could.

The explosion cracked through the room with a concussive force that rattled through his bones. The blast tore into the creature from behind, ripping through its legs and back, sending wet chunks of flesh and bone spraying outward. Daniel stayed down, shielding himself as the shockwave rolled over him in a heavy, crushing pulse. Even with the creature taking most of it, he felt the impact slam into him. The air filled with heat and the thick, choking stench of burned tissue.

The creature roared, a layered, inhuman sound that scraped against his nerves as it staggered forward. Its arms slammed into the ground to steady itself, its structure shifting under the damage. Its ribs split wider, peeling back to expose the glowing eyes buried inside its core. Those eyes pulsed faintly, reacting, adjusting, focusing on him with renewed intent. It wasn’t done. Not even close.

Daniel surged forward, combat tomahawk already in hand, closing the distance before it could recover. He drove the blade into the exposed mass with brutal force, bursting several of the glowing eyes in a spray of fluid. The creature screamed and lashed out wildly, forcing him to jump back to avoid a crushing swing that would’ve broken him if it landed. He didn’t stop moving, didn’t give it the chance to reset.

He brought the Saiga back up and slammed a fresh magazine into place, the motion automatic despite the strain in his arms. The weapon came up and he opened fire again, focusing his shots tighter, aiming for the damaged sections. Slugs hammered into the exposed areas, chipping away at the thick bone plating hidden beneath the fleshy mass. Each hit broke something loose, but it still wasn’t enough.

The creature surged forward. He tried to move, tried to angle away, but it was faster than something that size had any right to be. The tentacle snapped out and caught him clean across the ribs, the impact driving him off his feet and slamming him hard into the ground. The world tilted as he skidded, the edge of the generator pit dangerously close beneath him. For a moment, he thought he was going over.

He caught himself at the last second, scrambling for purchase as the creature’s massive hand slammed down where he’d just been. The impact shook the ground, sending vibrations through his body. He rolled, forced himself up, and reached for another grenade without thinking. There was no space left to play it safe.

He found it and rolled it under the creature. He didn’t have a choice. He needed to force it back, needed to break its back, needed to end this before it closed the distance again. He twisted as he moved, trying to create even a fraction of separation.

The detonation hit a heartbeat later. The blastwave slammed into him, heat and pressure washing over his legs as shrapnel tore into his flesh. Pain flared instantly, sharp and burning, threatening to rip his focus apart.

He pushed through the pain, through the blood, through the way his leg threatened to give out beneath him now that he had a brand new hole through his thigh. He surged forward again and drove the hatchet into the last cluster of exposed eyes, bursting them one after another. Fluid sprayed as the structure collapsed under the assault, the core finally giving way.

The creature screamed, its movements turning erratic as it flailed wildly, striking at nothing. It staggered back once, then again, its balance failing as the damage caught up to it. For a moment, it teetered at the edge. Then it went over. It fell into the generator pit with a heavy, echoing crash, its body slamming into the metallic rings below before vanishing into the darkness. The sound lingered for a moment, then faded, leaving only the hum of the facility behind.

Daniel forced himself upright, breathing hard, his leg throbbing with the deep, pulsing pain of the shrapnel buried in it. Every movement reminded him it was there, sharp and persistent. He reached up slowly, pulling his mask up and exposing his mouth.

His fingers found the herb mixture, green and red, more potent than the standard dose, and faster acting. A rare and valuable bit of his supplies, as he'd barely managed to grow any of the prized plants even after months of trying. He thumbed the stopper and swallowed it down without hesitation. The taste hit immediately, sharp and herbal, the mint cutting through the copper of blood in his mouth, and almost immediately, he felt it start to work.

The pain in his chest eased first, then his limbs, then the deep burn in his leg began to dull. It didn’t disappear, but it went from the sharp, fresh pain of a raw wound to barely an aching bruise in moments. His breathing steadied, his vision clearing just enough to bring him back into the moment.

"Fuck."

He drew in a slow breath as he forced himself upright, muscles tight and unsteady after the fight. He was still jittery from the adrenaline, another monster taken down, another impossible horror dropped into a bottomless pit, and another list of injuries to add to the collection. What even was his life at this point? More poignantly, though, there was something else itching at the back of his mind.

"What the hell was that thing?" he whispered, the words coming out low and tight as he tried to steady himself. He’d seen a lot already, more than he ever should have, but that had been different. Something about it had crossed a line he didn’t even know existed, a new thing to haunt his already fractured dreams. His jaw tightened as he pushed the thought aside, forcing himself back into the moment.

That was when he heard it. A sharp, deliberate sound that didn’t belong in the empty dark that followed. It echoed just enough to carry, just enough to be unmistakable. Clapping. Slow, measured, almost amused.

His hand snapped to his gun as the room exploded into light, floodlights slamming on all at once and washing everything out in a blinding glare. He threw an arm up instinctively, squinting against the sudden brightness as his vision struggled to adjust. His heart kicked hard in his chest as he realized what had just happened, and what it meant.

Above him, a dozen black-armored jackboots, maybe more, stood along the upper level, rifles already trained on him with practiced precision. Their posture was steady, controlled, each of them holding position like they’d been waiting for this exact moment. He didn’t need a second look to recognize the uniforms. Umbrella’s black bag operators, their Security Service, armed and ready for a fight. They had him dead to rights, angles covered, lines of fire overlapping so completely that there wasn’t the illusion of an escape route.

"Aye, I'm impressed," a voice he thought he recognized said, cutting through the tension with a casual confidence that put Daniel's teeth on edge. "Didnae think ye had it in ye. Had a wee bet goin’ wi’ the lads, ye ken, Mister Secret Agent Man."

The accent hit him immediately, thick and Scottish, dragging something out of his memory whether he wanted it or not. It cut through the noise in his head, anchoring to something he couldn’t ignore. His eyes narrowed slightly as he focused, pushing past the glare and the rifles aimed at him.

No... He knew that voice.

It was the voice of William Birkin’s bodyguard from months ago, the man who’d stood in his kitchen, sharing mean-spirited jokes about Wesker and chuckling about the absurdity of it all. The memory snapped into place, sharp and unwelcome. The name followed right behind it, surfacing before he could stop it.

McCanan... McCartwright?

No.

"MacKinnon."

The man above him laughed, the sound carrying easily across the space, full of recognition and something darker underneath. It wasn’t surprised. It was pleased. That alone told Daniel everything he needed to know about how this was going to go.

"I'm surprised ye ken who I am, considerin’ all the trouble ye've caused me. Well, I reckon that's at an end now. Ye ken, if it were up tae me, I'd gun ye down where ye stand. But naw, I've got me orders for ye. Instead, I'd like tae introduce ye tae a friend o' mine." MacKinnon jeered openly, the tone shifting into something more mocking as he stepped aside. Behind him, the doors on the level above slid open with a smooth mechanical hiss.

A man stepped out, tall and broad-shouldered, his build matching Daniel’s own in a way that immediately set off alarms. There was weight to him, a presence that seemed to suffocate the room. It swallowed up the sound, and the light itself seemed to dim ever so slightly as he left the hidden room beyond. He moved with a quiet, controlled confidence that spoke of experience, of lethality, of danger.

The gas mask covered his face completely, the lenses glowing a deep crimson that reflected like twin pools of blood, his breathing hissing through the filter, slow and even. The USS officer’s uniform was tight across his frame, every line of it clean, sharp, but aged. Well taken care of, a source of pride, even, under a tactical vest loaded down with magazines, grenades and a dozen guns and blades that were secured across his body, and on his vest, sewn in place with clean precision, was a name tag.

H.U.N.K.

A memory sparked in Daniel’s mind, pulled at by the ease of his stance, the smoothness of his gait, he knew those moves, knew that easy calm. It tickled his instincts something fierce, like a lion recognizing a tiger. No, that implied some kind of parity. This was a beast, coming out from its cave, revealing itself to be something from an older, more brutal, more unforgiving time.

There was an echo of a memory, of this very same man, from another life and another time, though for all the years between then and now, he could recall those daydreamed shadows with almost perfect clarity.

Impassive and unreadable behind the mask, Umbrella’s boogeyman, Mr. Death himself, watched him without a hint of emotion. Daniel pulled his own mask back down into place and straightened, forcing himself upright despite the exhaustion still running through him. He met the stare head-on, refusing to give ground even with a dozen rifles still trained on him. If this was how it was going to play out, then he’d meet it standing.

And there was something else. Something beneath the surface that he couldn’t quite put into words, but he felt it all the same. A pressure, a certainty, a quiet understanding that this was different from everything that had come before. It settled into his chest and stayed there.

Something that made his blood run cold.

"Ah, there it is," Hunk said in a low, even tone that carried without effort. "Glad to see you recognize me, Tourist. I guess it's time for your final exam."

As he spoke, his hand moved with practiced ease, reaching back to draw a long, wicked blade from the sheath at his waist. The metal caught the light briefly before settling into a dull gleam. His other hand followed, slipping a karambit free from a hidden holster with the same smooth precision.

"We're going to see how good a student you are, Tourist, so prepare yourself."

Daniel cracked his neck once, slow and deliberate, as he let the moment settle. His hand dropped, fingers closing around the handle of his axe, then his dagger, drawing both in a single, fluid motion. The weight of them felt familiar, grounding in a way nothing else did right now. He shifted his stance slightly, adjusting for the light, for the space, for the man in front of him.

And then the battle was met.