Tie the Noose Chapter 38

Chris had expected the transition out of the underground to feel like a relief. Instead, the deployment bay beneath Central Dispatch greeted them with concrete walls furred in black mold, a low ceiling slick with moisture, and the stink of infected air pressing hard against the back of his throat. The service hatch had dropped them into a staging room that must have once handled equipment and personnel transfers between the mine tunnels and the other facilities. If the hundreds of lockers, overturned motorcarts and countless rubber suits and tools scattered across the building weren’t enough of a clue, Chris didn’t know what was. The place was filthy, and not just because of the black mold. Rust and decay had set in everywhere, and the floor bore the scars of gunshots preserved beneath a film of fungal residue, as though the whole place had been sealed mid-panic and everyone inside was left to rot.

There were several more doors, all heading in different directions, each marked with different signs, like Research Lab, or Mine, or Workshop. They had come from the one marked Power Plant, which told him that the rest likely lead back down into the depths. Beyond those, however, there was another door, a big one, marked with a sign that said Worker Barracks/Administration, and unlike the others, it seemed to lead upwards.

Wesker came up next, almost slithering into place as he covered Chris’s flank, scanning the room but alighting on the same thing the STARS pointman had spotted, as Barry came in right behind the Captrain, slamming the hatch shut behind him. The man had kept his rifle slung as he cranked the wheel, giving a grunt of exertion as it sealed with a metallic click. Wesker had already moved forward, rifle angled down but ready, his sunglasses reflecting the dull spill of Chris’s flashlight, even behind his mask. Somehow the captain looked untouched by the filth around them, his posture calm, controlled, almost irritatingly composed.

“Status,” Wesker said.

“Green,” Chris answered, as he swept the room.. “No contact, but visibility is going to be a problem if it stays like this. There’s a lot of particulate in the air and it’s clinging to my mask.” He emphasized this point by swiping across the glass faceplate, his hand coming back smeared. “If I had to guess, we're in an NBC-2 environment, so be careful with your masks and keep an eye on your gauges. This stuff probably doesn’t play nice with our lungs, if I had to guess.” 

Barry breathed through his nose, then grimaced. “Smells like wet insulation and a slaughterhouse had a kid.” His words were heavy through his own mask, and Chris knew what he meant. The air quality here tasted foul.

“Keep your voices low,” Wesker said. “No unnecessary noise. We move slowly, clear by sections, and find the exit. If this is the deployment room, then there has to be something above us connected to the surface. From there I’d rather go swimming through the snow than deal with more tunnels.”

Chris nodded and brought his rifle higher. He would be the first to admit he was feeling antsy. He wanted to get moving, a hard push through to fresh air, maybe see the sun again. Or at least the moon. Anything would be better than this shit. Just looking around made his skin crawl. Every surface had been compromised. Mold climbed in ridges around ceiling seams, gathered in soft black mats around the drains, and crept along the corners in swollen ropes. He couldn’t tell where the building ended and the infection began. It left an ugly feeling pooling in the bottom of his gut, seeing just how thick it was.

They moved in a staggered line, Wesker first, Chris second, Barry covering the rear with his revolver, wanting the power more than the volume fire. The deployment bay opened into a short equipment hall split by folding security gates. Both gates had failed half-open, their metal frames warped by something that had forced through the track housings, blood and long strips of something none of the men wanted to think about caught in the broken mesh. Chris stepped over a swollen ridge of mold and felt it compress beneath his boot with a faint wet give. He looked down once, only once, then kept moving, pretending what he’d just stepped in wasn’t a decayed body.

The first door they reached had been marked as a security station, the letters barely visible beneath streaks of mildew. Wesker signaled a halt with two fingers. Chris took the left side of the frame, Barry took the right, and Wesker tested the handle. Locked. Barry reached for his tool roll, but Chris noticed the lower panel had already split inward. The wood had gone soft. Something had struck it from the other side many times, maybe hands, maybe shoulders, maybe a body that no longer understood how the doors worked. It creaked when Chris touched it, the hinges long since rusted, and they heard something on the other side, faintly scratching. Wesker leaned close enough to listen. Chris held his breath. Behind the door, something shifted.

“Back two steps,” Wesker murmured.

They obeyed. Wesker fired once through the center of the rotten wood. The crack snapped through the hall, small but harsh, and the reaction was immediate. The door splintered inward, snapping in two as the weakened material gave, and a mutated worker hurled itself through the opening before the shards hit the floor.

It had once been a man in a gray coverall, but the body had stretched unevenly, spine hunched forward, arms too long and elbows swollen under hardened fungal plates. Its jaw hung wrong, split wider than any human mouth should have allowed, black threads knitting the corners of its lips to the skin of its neck. Where its head had been was now a bony blossom, the skull emptied above the nose, split wide and ridged with cilia-like blooms that seemed to follow them like eyestalks. It came low and fast, not with the shambling gait Chris had expected, but with a nearly frantic, uneven lope, driving it forward in a brutal crawl that turned into a lunge.

Chris shot first, his reflexes firing on full blast. The burst took it in the shoulder and spun it sideways into the wall, stopping it from landing on the Captain as Barry’s revolver thundered over Chris’s left shoulder. The round punched into the thing’s upper chest with enough force to crack the hardened plates, but it seemed entirely unbothered as it raised an arm. With a sickening squelch, the forearm split open like a mantis claw, the bone shark and jagged, dripping with black ooze. 

Wesker shifted one step and placed two shots into the exposed neck seam, splattering chunky, viscous fluid along the wall, but it didn’t seem to care. It lunged with a manic force, its other arm splitting into a second claw, and it slashed hard at the nearest warm body. Chris blocked the stab with his rifle, as it tried to press into him, its arms flailing, but a sharp kick sent it onto its back. The creature bent at an odd, almost sinuous angle, forcing itself to its knees, as it clawed at the floor, then convulsed as black fluid spilled from its mouth in thick strands. The three men closed in an instant, and unloaded into the monster, ripping its upper body to pieces in the process before it could recover.

“Oh fuck me, what was that,” Barry gasped weakly as the creature’s lower half began to visibly dissolve into a wet, squishy fluid. He had his revolver raised, in case it tried to get back up, but it seemed to stay down.

“Some kind of advanced mutation, perhaps.” Wesker said, as he swapped out his magazine for a fresh one. “We’ll need to be careful in these tight corridors. It’s too easy to get close, and that was much more potent than the ones we faced in the underground.”

Chris let out a shaky breath, having been the closest to the monster. The encounter had lasted only seconds, but his pulse had already gone through the roof. The thing had covered the distance far too quickly, its movement erratic, like it had understood it needed to avoid their guns. That put his teeth on edge. It had also been lying in ambush, which implied it had some modicum of low cunning, a sign of some kind of intelligence. But… it didn’t have a brain, so how did it manage to plan that? And how did it know they were coming?

The office opened into a large security vestibule, though the darkness made it hard to get a clear picture of the room. Their lights moved across rotting desks, overturned chairs, rust-streaked filing cabinets, and walls furred with black mold. The air was thick with cloudy spores, carrying that same buried rot from the underground, only heavier now, trapped inside a room that hadn’t seen working ventilation in god knows how long. Chris tested the light switch, some vain hope that there was power, but, as he expected, the lights stayed dead. Looking at the others, he shook his head, and they moved on.

At the far end of the room, Wesker’s beam caught the gate. It was massive, floor-to-ceiling, built from heavy iron bars set into reinforced concrete and flanked by a keycard reader. The reader’s faceplate was dark, its indicator lenses unlit, but even if they had the right card, without power the gate itself wasn't going anywhere. The hinges were shielded, with an internal lock and bars too thick to bend or cut with anything they had on them. Which was a problem, given the fact that they could see a large double door just past the bars, a dead EXIT sign hanging above it.

Wesker stepped toward it, hand coming up to grab the bars and give them a good rattle. He sighed with a hint of frustration, as he examined it, before turning to them. “Redfield, Burton, begin a sweep of the room. See if you can find anything that might help.”

“Copy that,” Chris said.

Barry gave a low grunt of acknowledgement and moved right, revolver held close as he checked behind the first row of desks. Chris took the left side, as he worked along the wall, and the two went digging. It took them several minutes of fruitless searching before he managed to spot something pinned to the wall, hidden under a half-dozen flyers. The mold had swallowed most of the posted notices, but a few still clung beneath warped plastic sleeves. He wiped one with the edge of his glove, clearing enough grime to read the blocky type beneath.

NOTICE: OUTDOOR ACCESS HAS BEEN LOCKED DOWN DUE TO VIOLENT WORKER UNREST. RELEASE OF THE EXTERIOR SECURITY GATE REQUIRES JOINT AUTHORIZATION FROM THE HEAD OF BUILDING SECURITY, THE ADMINISTRATIVE DIRECTOR, AND THE STATION CHIEF. NO SINGLE DEPARTMENT MAY OVERRIDE THIS ORDER. ALL PERSONNEL ARE TO REMAIN INSIDE UNTIL CLEARANCE IS GRANTED.

Chris looked over his shoulder. “Captain. Found something.” Holding up the notice, Wesker took it and read it over, before handing it off to Barry. None of them seemed particularly pleased to find out that the whole place was on lockdown, which implied that this might be the only exit, barring the good fortune of someone blowing a hole in the wall.

“Violent worker unrest?” Barry hummed, chewing it over. “What do you think was going on here?”

“That’s what I’d like to know,” Chris said, "From the sound of it, nothing good, though. Think the people here rioted or something? Maybe when all this started going off?"

“This was a panic response. If there was some kind of infection going through the camp it might have been a quarantine measure, which might explain the worker unrest, especially if they were being denied their freedom." Wesker hummed, " That would be more than enough to send the leadership into a panic, especially if they were outnumbered.”

"But that just makes it stranger than nobody went out to get help. Raccoon isn't that far away, and it's not like they could keep everyone locked in forever." Barry posited, but Chris shook his head.

"Not if they were here illegally. This was a protected site and it's clear they set up a massive operation right on top of it without telling anyone." Saying it out loud made Chris pause, "Which is weird, because there's no way they managed to do it without anyone noticing."

"Something to investigate later. Right now we have other priorities, like finding a way out. If we can find the keycards to open the door, that would be a good first step, and if this place has a generator setup like the gatehouse did, then we might be able to get the reader online. The only problem is finding them." The Captain sighed, before looking back to the gate. "Let's get moving."

The three men started making their way out when a faint plastic scrape came from beneath Barry's boot. He looked down, then crouched and shifted a fallen clipboard aside. A blue keycard lay half-hidden under mold-stained paperwork, clipped to an identification badge with the photo mostly obscured by grime. He lifted it by the edge and wiped the nameplate with his thumb. He paused when he realized just what it was he was looking at.

“Well, finally a bit of good luck.” Barry said. “Looks like we’ve got one.”

Wesker crossed back and took the card long enough to inspect it, before snorting in a decidedly un-Weskerly way.. “Huh. Shit. We still need the cards from the building security head and the station chief before we can see about getting the power on, but this does simplify things. Good job, Burton.”

Beyond the vestibule, following the corridor past it, the walls changed from poured concrete to painted cinderblock, though the paint had blistered and peeled beneath away from what looked like water damage. Old directional signs pointed toward changing rooms, payroll, commissary, and administrative processing. It felt so mundane reading it off, but to Chris, it was an unsettling reminder of how normal things had been here, once. The place seemed to shift when he wasn’t watching, not visibly enough to be obvious, but enough to nag at the edges of his focus.

A set of stairs rose ahead, blocked by a collapsed security shutter, but a side hall bent toward the commissary wing. Wesker slowed at the corner and raised a closed fist. Chris froze and Barry almost slammed into him from how fast he stopped. Ahead, something dragged across the tile, slow and heavy. It was mass moving against mass, wet and deliberate, sloughing with a weighty moistness that made their skin crawl.

Chris angled his light down the hall, keeping most of the beam against the floor. Thirty feet ahead, where the commissary doors opened into a larger space, a bulk of fused bodies shifted past the gap. Arms jutted from it at wrong angles. Heads had been swallowed into a central ridge of blackened flesh and fungal tissue, some faces half-visible, mouths open in a soundless scream. It moved with terrible patience, hauling itself forward on whatever limbs could still reach the ground. A dozen torsos had collapsed into one another, work uniforms, guard belts, and bare infected muscle all melded together by the same spreading mold.

Now, up close, it was so much larger than they’d first imagined, those brief, momentary flashes of horror in the deep tunnels not doing it justice for the unfathomable nightmare that stood before them. Wesker began backing up, slowly, steadily, and as he eased back the other two followed, until all three had slipped back. The thing passed slowly, scraping against the door frame, a hand sliding across the tile, fingers bending backward beneath its own weight. Another limb reached out and pressed against the wall as though hunting for something.

“Careful,” Wesker whispered, as he flicked his own torch off. “Lights out.”

Chris barely breathed as he fingered the stud of his mounted light, followed by Barry.. The abomination paused long enough that he could hear its wet tissue pulling apart inside it, then reforming with soft, obscene snaps, and as they listened, they could hear it. A hundred tuneless hisses of inhaled breath. It was worse than any roar could have been. A wet, hissing whistle of a dozen throats and lungs, expanding and contracting, moaning from the agony, as if its component parts were still alive, still conscious in the amalgamated mass.

The three of them jerked when they heard a crash off in the distance, something metallic, a shelf bowling over or a table finally giving under some unseen weight. It was loud, though, deafening almost in the permeating silence. The Grafted monstrosity reacted instantly, its head, made up of countless fused eyes and mouths, swung towards the disturbance. Chris felt his finger settle against the trigger as he lifted his rifle. Wesker turned his head slightly, and Chris knew the order without needing to be told. Hold.

The abomination shifted toward the sound, dragging itself away from the commissary entrance and deeper into the dark. Its bulk disappeared with a deceptive quickness, and after a moment, the halls were silent again. Long seconds passed before Wesker motioned with two fingers and they moved.

They crossed the commissary entrance in silence. Chris’s boots wanted to stick to the tile, every step pulling faintly against the built-up fungal residue. The commissary itself was a ruin of overturned tables and metal serving lines. Mold had swallowed the far wall, but the central aisles remained passable. The smell of old food had long since been overtaken by damp rot, chemical cleaner, and something like spoiled meat that came with a sour, almost stolid taste to the stink. Still, it was blessedly empty, and they would take the gift for what it was. The last thing they needed to do was get into a gunfight with that giant thing lurking nearby. How it hadn’t heard their earlier mishap was a miracle.

Wesker led them to a door behind the serving counter, leading into the back of the cafeteria. It was better than risking the hall with that titanic flesh mound out there, or so Chris hoped. It was a combined kitchen and pantry back there, full of barren, empty shelves that sagged under its own weight, the only thing on them pots and pans. It was oddly empty for a kitchen, and prying open the refrigerated boxes revealed nothing but barren metal. The freezer itself was picked clean, as well, despite its massive size, pallets upon pallets piled up against the far end, forgotten.

Hanging from a torn down tackboard, there was a plastic-bound book, filled with dozens of pages of hand-written notes. Barry crouched beside it, pulling it free and flipping through it, his face stormy as he went deeper and deeper. “Captain,” he said, finally, “You’ll want to see this.”

Wesker took the bundle while Chris covered the door. The handwriting had been tight, cramped, and increasingly uneven across several sheets. It looked like a ration ledger, at first, but as he went through the book he noticed the meals getting leaner, the supplies dwindling at a geometric rate. Then the notes started appearing, talking about ‘supplemental materials’ and how the cookstaff were being kept separate from the others. What had started out as hearty meals slowly transitioned to gruel, then to stew, then notices that this or that worker was on punishment detail and wasn’t to be fed at all. Then it started to change. Administration and Security had started supplementing them with ‘wild-caught’ meat, though a source wasn’t provided. By that point they had been on critical rations, with a note that operations were in full lockdown at the mine, and that they weren’t getting shipments in at all of anything they needed.

The writer complained about how there was an illness spreading through the facility, and how there had been an accident at the mine. About how there was mold getting into what few food supplies they had left, leaving it inedible, and that nothing was being brought in any more. He talked about not feeling well himself, and that the ‘replacement crew’ was becoming irrational. How there was a new points system that decided who got how much food, and that they’d been ordered to be ‘stringent’ with meals. The back of the book devolved into a tracking system for the ‘menials’.
Names had been divided by bunk number, shift, and work status. Several had notes beside them: coughing blood, black phlegm, reassigned, no return. A lot of them read as deceased. The sick were marked as non-salavagable, not to be fed. Infractions were piled up higher and higher, until they just stopped altogether. The final entry on the first page stopped mid-word, ink smeared by a thumbprint turned brown with age.
Chris looked away from the hall long enough to absorb the meaning. “They were starving them out. Left them to die once they knew everyone was infected.”

“Jesus, that’s a horrible way to go.” Barry said with a hard look in his eyes, “Locked in here like rats, then just… slowly strangled to death under the weight of a million excuses not to feed them, until they were too weak to try and fight back.”

“More than that,” Wesker said, folding the book shut. “They were hiding whatever they were getting rid of the witnesses, bit by bit. People who could testify, or shine a light on what was happening while burning out whatever plague was ripping through the camp. Efficient. Disgusting, but efficient.”

Chris didn’t like the way Wesker said it. Like the man was almost impressed by the cruelty, but he knew that couldn’t be true. He forced himself to focus on the door as a faint scrape sounded somewhere beyond the commissary. The disgusting ledger settled in his mind all the same, though, like a bad itch he couldn’t scratch. As they moved on, he glanced back to the barren kitchen, wondering what it had been like for them as they realized that they didn’t even have crumbs left, that there wasn’t any more food coming in, that they’d been abandoned and imprisoned inside these walls, just to starve to death.

The staff dining room lay through a far door out of the kitchen, set apart from the general cafeteria with enough expense to make the separation unmistakable. The floors were covered in thick, lush carpeting matted down by mold and filth. The walls had been dressed in dark wood paneling, with brass trim along the corners and around the service doors. Even the rot that had infected this place had not hidden how much money had been poured into making this room comfortable while just a few thin walls away the workers were left in a concrete box.

The furniture was all high quality, made of broad hardwood tables standing in neat rows, each one surrounded by padded chairs with high backs, carved arms, and stained upholstery that had once been plush. Several tables still held their place settings: tarnished silverware, cracked plates, cloudy glasses, and cloth napkins stiffened by old grime, all now abandoned, but hinting at a lavish dining experience.

A chandelier hung from the center of the ceiling, too ornate and indulgent for the mold that had overtaken it. Its metal frame had tarnished green and brown from the gunk, and the glass pieces were tainted a muddy grey, but the fixture still dominated the room. Mold had grown around the ceiling mount and down part of the chain, hanging down like fuzzy creepers, a tangle of messy slime that spread like a spiderweb over the fixture.

The rear wall held several glass-front cabinets filled with stacked plates, serving bowls, wine glasses, polished trays, and decanters. A long sideboard stood beneath them, still crowded with covered dishes, serving utensils, and empty condiment jars arranged with an almost deliberate care. A narrow pass-through window connected the room back to the kitchen, making it clear that meals had been prepared and delivered separately from the cafeteria line. Every feature of the room pointed to a private dining space for administrators and supervisors, built inside the same facility where the labor force had been infected, rationed, and worked until they broke.

The tables themselves were covered in plates and platters, with more than a few bones scattered about. Barry walked over and lifted one, and a complicated expression crossed his face. Wesker walked over to him, and seemed to see the same thing, but Chris was lost.

“What is it?” He asked, and Barry dropped the chunk of bone back onto the table.

“I think we know what they were calling wild game, Redfield.” It was Wesker who said it, nudging another bone with the barrel of his gun, as if he didn’t want to touch it. “See the tool marks? They were splitting those for the marrow, but do you recognize the shape of the bone itself?”

Chris leaned over, searching his mind, until something hit him, hard enough to make him physically jerk back. “That’s a femur, isn’t it?” He asked in a hoarse whisper, disgust etched across his face. “They were cannibalizing the dead.”

There was a crash outside the room that pulled the three men from their horrified reverie, their heads snapping up as one as messy shuffling rose beyond the far door. Wesker’s hand snapped down in a sharp, silent order, and Chris and Barry dropped with him, sliding behind the nearest tables as the doors shook with one heavy impact, then another, then a third. The ornate wooden panels burst inward under the pressure, hinges shrieking as several infected stumbled through into the dining room.

Chris crouched behind the broad hardwood table with his breathing locked down. Barry was several feet to his right, tucked behind an overturned chair and the edge of another table. Wesker remained between them, pressed into cover, his attention fixed on the infected. None of the Headless seemed to have noticed them. Even so, their bodies began to drift toward where they;d hidden, not fast, not certain, but still slowly drawing closer.

One of them stopped beside a table and tilted towards Chris’s position. The fungal crown spread slightly, its wet ridges opening in slow, petal-like segments before tightening again. Another turned toward Barry, fingers scraping the wood with a soft rasp as it took two shambling steps closer. The third remained near the ruined doorway, swaying in place while the black growths across its shoulders pulsed in faint rhythm.

Both men slipped back, moving in a wide circle around the roaming monsters, but despite that, despite the creatures seeming to not even know they were there, it still slowly began to follow them. Both did, stumbling over chairs and bouncing into tables, not really seeing what was in front of them, but following Chris and Barry all the same. Wesker moved closer, and in an instant, the third started to stumble his way too, like he had wandered into its range, but for all the predatory nature of the monsters, they didn't quite seem to know precisely where he and the others were. It felt wrong to, how they moved, how they seemed to just... track them.

He moved back out, and the one tracking him froze, suddenly and unexpectedly, like it had lost his scent. Something connected the two, but what? Wesker’s gaze lifted from the infected to the chandelier above the room. The fixture hung low over the dining tables, its tarnished frame wrapped in heavy strands of mold that had crept down the chain and across the glasswork. Those strands were no longer hanging still. They leaned subtly toward the three men’s hiding places, stretched taut in their direction as if tugged by a current. The movement was slight, but it was coordinated, and each slow shift of the mold seemed to draw the Headless another step closer.

Wesker looked to Chris first, then to Barry. He raised two fingers toward his own eyes, pointed at the chandelier, then shaped his hand into a fist and gave a short downward motion. Chris followed the gesture instantly. Barry did the same a beat later, his jaw tightening as he angled the revolver upward beneath the table edge. Wesker counted them in with his fingers, three, two, one.

The shots cracked through the dining room in brutal succession. Chris’s rifle tore into the chandelier’s central mount, Barry’s revolver punched through the core, and Wesker placed a burst straight into the pulsing mass that had congregated in the center of the fixture. It gave way with a metallic scream. Glass, tarnished metal, and thick ropes of mold crashed down across the tables, smashing plates and splintering wood as the chandelier struck the floor in a heavy, glittering collapse.

The Headless reacted at once. All three bodies jerked toward the fallen fixture, fungal crowns flaring and contracting in frantic pulses. One lurched into a chair and toppled over it, clawing blindly at the carpet. Another stumbled toward the wreckage and began pawing through the mold strands as if trying to recover as much of the muck as it could. The third turned in a full circle, shoulders twitching, like it was having a seizure, unable to process whatever had just been cut off.

Wesker rose first, low and controlled, cutting across the aisle between the tables. Chris followed tightly, stepping around broken glass and keeping his barrel trained on the nearest Headless, followed by Barry, broad frame moving with surprising care as he dashed for the doorway. The infected continued to thrash around the collapsed chandelier, drawn to the severed mold strands and the pulsing mess spread across the carpet. By the time any of them began turning back toward the fleeing men, they had already reached the far hall.

Through and into the dark beyond, they kept moving, boots hammering on the concrete. None of them wanted to risk a firefight with the big one so close, but that didn’t change the fact that what they’d walked into was nothing short of enemy action. As they found another door, one marked as Administrative Access, the three didn’t hesitate to open it and slip inside. Not a minute later, they heard the lost shuffling of the creatures follow them, but thankfully, as the sounds of their footsteps faded, they were able to breathe a sigh of relief. They managed to shake the monsters.

“What the hell was that?” Chris hissed, as he slumped against the wall, “Those things were tracking us.”

“An elegant sign of intelligence, don’t you think?” Wesker hummed to himself, “It’s clear they’re connected to all this black filth we’ve been wading through, but I’m not sure what the difference is between what’s on the walls and what was in that chandelier. It could tell we were there, and transmitted it to those creatures.”

“Are you thinking it might be some kind of hive mind, Cap?” Barry asked, “Because while I’ve seen those in nature, it’s not quite so literal as this. Those things were following our scent, and when we ran, they followed. That speaks to a sense of object permanence, which, when you think about it, is really fucking scary.”

“Are you saying these things remember us?” Because if that was the case, then it meant that the creatures could start to adapt to them. Had started to adapt to them, maybe. It meant that it was learning. It sent a shiver down Chris’s spine.

“Maybe. Adaptations can happen in nature but that’s a case of evolution, Chris. The only creature on earth that can actively adapt to their surroundings like that are people, so all the normal rules are out the window.” Barry sighed, tiredly. “Between the walking corpses and our friend that’s made out of half the staff here I’m at a loss. What about you, Captain?”

Wesker hummed to himself as he looked at the other two. “We’re in it deep, gentlemen. Sitting here guessing about the hows and whys isn’t productive, though. We need to go get those other keycards, wherever they are, and get the power on, or otherwise take our chances with going back underground. What we do know is the big one is down here and heading towards a different part of the building, which means we should be clear to engage if we need to. Between the cinderblocks and the concrete it should muffle our shots enough to keep it from figuring out where we are.”

“Hopefully.” Chimed Chris.

“Hopefully.” Wesker agreed.

“Shit in one hand.” Was all Barry contributed, drawing a snort from the younger man, but Wesker chose not to indulge. Regardless, the three glanced down the hall they found themselves in, running down the center of a block of cubicles and open offices, and started creeping forward. Under the cones of their lights, the place almost looked normal, compared to the overgrown cafeteria and cannibal smorgas board. Or at least as normal as this place seemed to get, with the thick sheaf of black mist floating in the air that Chris could taste through his mask, leaving a stolid, bitter taste in his mouth. 

“Found something.” Barry intoned over the silence, pulling Chris’s attention to the big man as he stepped into a side room. Chris fell back to cover the door as the Captain moved in behind him. The room itself was small, a manager’s office, maybe, very simple in its design as barely more than a glorified cubicle with a door. The desk had been knocked over, the chair left on the floor, and the filing cabinet lying on its face, but that wasn’t what caught his eye. No, that was taken up by the decently sized safe, a steel box with a simple combination dial on its front.

"What do you think is in it?" Chris asked as he leaned against the doorframe, taking up the overwatch as Barry and Wesker moved in to examine the lockbox that was bolted to the floor. It was a strange thing to see, given the location, and stood out to all of them as an odd addition to what had to be a low-level manager's office. It also looked comparatively new, in contrast with the battered filing cabinet, metal desk, and roller chair that looked like something straight out of the 1970s.

"Well, it's got to be something important. You don't just leave a safe like this down here. What are you thinking, Captain?" Barry asked as he squatted next to it, resting a hand on the top to steady himself. Wesker hummed quietly as he stared at it, the wheels in his head visibly turning.

"It might be documents, payroll, or something benign, but I doubt it." He said almost to himself, studying the dial and the door seam without touching either at first. "The combination might be nearby on a post-it note or the like. I have the odd feeling that data security wasn't at the top of the priority list." He chuffed, before turning to Chris. "Redfield, keep an eye out. Barry and I will search the office. I want to know what's in there, but not enough to waste time with it. With a little luck, maybe we can find the combination. If not, we'll mark it down, come back for it later. We can't spend too much time down here."

With the plan in place, the three began. Chris took back his position at the door, where he could see the first stretch of cubicles beyond the threshold. The place felt too quiet. The office made every sound feel too close, too loud, and it put his teeth on edge. The sound of the Captain and Barry digging through the remains of the office felt deafening to him, even though both men were being careful not to make a racket, but it still grated on him. Past the doorway, the cubicle lanes remained broken and dark, each partition cutting the room beyond into narrow strips that could hide something until it was nearly on them.

The search itself seemed fruitless at first. Anything that might once have mattered had either been destroyed, carried off, or left to decay into muck. Desk drawers held swollen folders bound in rusted staples, the letters long since made illegible by the moisture. The ruined cabinet gave them nothing but a black, sticky substance that had chewed through the papers and glued the drawer runners into a tar-like mess. The fact that all of it had degraded to the point of worthlessness was irritating enough, for everyone involved. It felt like a pointless exercise, a hint at something valuable with the safe, but just out of reach.

Chris glanced back into the cubicles as the others worked, listening past the office’s small noises. The building felt claustrophobic, and had even as far back as the tunnels. A confined, enclosed feeling that made Chris think that he was going to develop a complex just being there. He glanced back to watch Barry and Wesker search. They seemed like they were about to give up when Barry spotted something and let out a soft groan.

"You've got to be kidding me." The amused annoyance in his tone grabbed both men. Chris turned his full attention to the burly armorer while Wesker abandoned his search of the desk.

"What have you got?" Albert asked.

"Take a look, Captain," Barry grunted, sounding amused. "Right there on the side of the safe, tucked over by the corner."

Wekser tilted his head, not unlike a curious bird, and ambled over, leaning over the side of the safe where Berry indicated. What he saw drew an audible groan from the implacable man. The combination was scratched into the side of the metal.

For a moment, nobody said anything. The discovery sat there like an absurd joke, bright under Barry's flashlight and mocking them. After the locked doors, the stupid security features, and every other piece of corporate paranoia they had already crawled through, the sight of the safe defeating itself was almost insulting.

"That seems rather ill-advised," Wesker said drolly, the words flat. "What even is the point of having a safe if you're just going to scratch the combination into the side of it?"

"Maybe it was supposed to be hidden," Chris chimed in from the side, "like the cabinet was sitting in front of it, or something."

"Doubtful," Albert said with a light sneer in his voice. "The safe is bolted into the ground, and the side with the combination is facing the desk. No, this was just laziness and incompetence."

"All the better for us, though, isn't it?" Barry chuckled. "Makes life a little easier."

"So it does, so it does." Wesker chuckled as he kneeled down and entered the combination.

It was such a stupid thing that Chris couldn't help but feel the corner of his mouth twitch despite himself before he turned his attention back to the door. In another place, under other circumstances, the whole thing might have been funny. Maybe, just a bit. God knows if it was anyone in the office that did something that stupid God himself couldn't have saved them from the Captain's wrath. He already knew that if they all lived through this Wesker would be insufferable about it. If. The thought soured that brief light of amusement, strangling it in the crib.

The wheel ground against the metal of the safe, creaking as Wesker turned it through the scratched sequence. The mechanism had clearly not been lubricated in quite some time, and the sound carried too far in the quiet. Four twists, five twists, a sixth spin of the dial, and the safe unlatched with a clunk that seemed to echo through the silent office.

Chris listened, straining his ears, for just a moment. Nothing answered, not immediately, and he felt a small sigh of relief leave his lips. It seemed that all of Claire's old monster movies were wrong about the whole dramatic timing thing. If something would have happened, that would have been it.

Wesker opened the safe and shone his light inside. Contrary to their expectations, they didn't find a bunch of documents or ledgers, or anything else that might have explained the safe's presence. Hell, at first glance, it didn't look like it had anything else in it at all. Then the light caught on a pouch tucked in the back, pushed into the corner as if someone had tossed it as far back into it as they could and hoped drowning it in the dark would be enough to keep it from prying eyes.

Wesker reached in and pulled it free. The pouch was stiff with age, its drawstring tight and the leather aged and stiff. When he loosened it and tipped the contents into his gloved palm, the office filled with the dull shine of gold coins. Old gold coins, Civil War era, if the dates stamped into the metal were accurate. Each one was heavy, a solid disk of dull shining metal plastered with a seated woman on one side, holding a flag and a shield, and the other marked with CSA 20$ in a ring of chain links. They were in immaculate condition for something forged in the 1860s, without a bit of visible tarnish, marking them as nearly, if not totally pure.

The first one to speak was Barry, his tone quietly shocked. "I'll be... I wonder what these are doing here. I never put much credit in that old myth, but it's kind of hard to argue with the proof," he said more to himself than anything.

"Old myth?" Chris asked.

"Proof?" Wesker followed up.

"Oh yeah," Barry hummed. "This place used to be the site of an old Civil War fort, put up in the latter years of the war. My dad told me the story about it once. Back in the old days, when all of this was largely untamed wilderness, there was a story, an old tale passed down by the native tribes, that there was a mountain made of gold hidden deep within the Arklay Range, but the gold was cursed. The story went that if you ever picked it up or even came close to it, you'd be seized by an insatiable greed, where you'd start digging and digging and digging. You'd stop sleeping, you'd stop eating, you'd stop drinking. You'd just keep going until your tools broke, and then you'd start digging with your hands. You'd just keep digging and digging, no matter how much it hurt, no matter how much you bled, until finally you fell over dead, feeding the mountain."

Barry paused, as he lifted one of the coins, almost reverently, rolling it between his fingers, as if he expected it to vanish from his hand, before continuing. "The native tribes stayed away from this place. They called it evil, possessed by dark spirits and monsters... But it was this rumored mountain of gold that drove General Messer and his whole battalion up here. He punched his army straight through the Union lines and made for the deep wilderness, setting up a fort at the base of this very mountain. It was right before winter set in and the passes were blocked, so he and his soldiers wound up trapped here. The Union set up a military camp in response, having chased the General into the range but getting cut off by the weather before they could arrive. With the snows falling, they set up a fort in the plains by the pass, called Fort Raccoon, waiting out the bad weather until spring, where they could move in and force Messer and his soldiers out from their hidey holes."

"The thing is, once the pass is cleared... The whole Union army under Fitzgerald marched right up that pass. They found the fort, but didn't find a single sign of Messer or his men. As the story goes, supposedly the entire reason he came was for that mountain of gold, and supposedly he found it, along with the curse. They searched high and low for years, trying to suss out what happened. There were concerns, you see, that the rebels had taken up into the caves that littered the range when the pass closed and their supplies ran out." Barry shrugged, handing the coin back to the Captain.

"There was a fear that Messer and his boys were going to come down if the army left and start raiding up and down the Arklays and they were just biding their time, so that Fort turned into a small settlement. But Messer never came out of the mountains, and neither did his army of Greycoats. After the war many of those soldiers ended up putting down roots, and Fort Raccoon became the Town of Raccoon, and you know the rest." Barry finished, and Chris asked the obvious question.

"Did they ever find out what happened to Messer or the rest?" Barry glanced at him and shrugged, standing up and stretching before he answered.

"The prevailing theory was they all starved to death up here. They weren't expecting the harsh winter, and ran out of supplies and turned on each other. None of Fitzgerald's men ever found any hint of the truth though. Never found any gold either. In the end they wrote the whole thing off as a fit of madness, a last desperate ploy to go and find some way to keep funding the losing side of the war. After the city closed the tourist site down, everyone largely forgot about Fort Messer. So who knows?" The man grinned at Chris, his smile broad even under the mask, "I'll tell you this much, the fact that there are these old coins and a fair few of them from the look of it, does add some credence to the fact that maybe Messer did find his gold. Though God only knows what happened to him after that, along with the rest of it."

"Real question is, what are we gonna do with it?" Chris asked, looking to the Captain as the man gazed at the coins with a complex expression. Finally, Wesker dropped the coins back into the pouch, tying it tight with neat, economical motions, and put it into one of his hip pouches. They rattled quietly as he snapped it shut.

"For right now, we'll take it with us. The only thing that we're sure of is there was some kind of illegal operation going on up here. If they were looking for gold, this may be the evidence we need to show that whoever set all this up, had a motive, a reason, to do the terrible things they did here. And an illegal gold mine? I could see the motivation for keeping a tight lid on the workers, shutting things down once they managed to extract their wealth, and then did all they could to silence the rest." Albert said, finally, his tone icy.

"How do you figure all the monsters fit into it?" Chris asked, bringing the man up short. It was a fair question, but Wesker could only shrug in response..

"I'm still working on that," He replied, honestly, and Chris had to admit that was about as good an answer as he was going to get. As the two men moved to join the STARS pointman, his light glinted off of something tucked all the back in the safe, glinting in the back. 

“Hey, are you sure you got everything out of the safe?” Looking at it, Chris strode forward, crouched down, and reached all the way into the back, finding something loose that had been pressed into the back wall of the bottom shelf.

“What did you find?” Barry asked, as he leaned over to see what Chris was doing. It took a bit of work, his gloves not helping, but he eventually managed to get the thin object loose.Pulling his hand back, he found himself staring at another keycard, shoved behind the pouch of coins, almost as if the gold itself were a distraction, meant to draw the eye while missing the real prize. Like the last one, this one had the picture of a woman on it, with the words Station Chief Deladia on it, a magnetic strip on the back, the only difference being it was yellow, instead of blue.

“Good eye, Redfield.” Wesker said, was going to say something else, but a loud crash dragged his attention away.

"What was that?" Chris asked quickly, quietly, his rifle coming up to his shoulder.

Barry’s rifle followed a moment later as Wesker leaned toward the office door. The cubicle rows beyond turned everything they tried to see into a morass of shadowy puddles blocked out by the sagging walls of each little square, hiding whatever was moving. The air was thick with black particulate, and the beams from their lights cut only a short distance before the suspended mold swallowed them entirely.

"I don't know. I didn't see anything," Wesker said, his voice low, before he motioned for them to fan out. "Sweep and clear, watch your corners, and keep your heads on a swivel. We're tight in enough that an ambush isn't out of the question."

They left the office in a tight stagger, Wesker taking point, Chris drifting left, Barry covering the right with the steady weight of his Galil tucked into his shoulder. The office was pitch black outside of their gun lights, and the cones felt so very small indeed, everything beyond them packed in tight in a mess of hidden alcoves and dividing walls. The stolid taste and the floating grit that turned every breath into a reminder of the gas masks sealed against their faces, making each breath seem impossibly loud as adrenaline flooded their systems, bringing them to a state of near hyperfocus. Somewhere ahead, something tapped lightly against the broken tile, paused, then tapped again. It sounded deliberate, almost curious, and the smallness of it made the surrounding blackness seem so much larger.

They moved up the first row with controlled patience. Wesker’s hand cut through the air twice, halting them at each opening while Chris checked the nearest lane and Barry covered the angles behind them. Plastic wheels clicked underfoot when Chris eased an abandoned computer chair aside, clearing the path before him. A warped nameplate came loose from a partition as he brushed past it and dropped into the mold with a dull slap. None of them spoke, zeroed in on the rattling, scuttling sounds coming from just out of sight. The sound came again from their left, closer now, a wet patter followed by the scrape of something dragging across carpet.

All three froze. Their lights converged through the cubicle gap, and for a moment, something moved, quick and nimble, out of their line of sight. Letting out a nearly silent curse, Chris moved forward, his boots rolling across the ground, training taking over as he kept his footing sure in the wet, slick mold that seemed to carpet the ground. Wesker was right on his tail, the two spearing towards the thing hiding just out of sight with Barry a silent step after.

Turning the bend, they spotted it. Another of those strange creatures made out of a human torso skittered around a corpse, its mutated bone limbs stabbing into the floor in quick, skittering rhythms. Its lower body had collapsed into a knotted mass of ribs bloated with fungal tissue, while its headless upper half bent over the dead man with intimate purpose. A stabbing proboscis slid from its chest cavity, flexing with wet pulses as it prodded at the corpse’s throat.

Wesker closed his fist and pointed to the creature.

In an instant, the room was lit up. Three rifles roared together, their 7.62 rounds hammering through partitions, desk panels, and the creature’s malformed torso. Chunks of gray flesh and bone splintered from its side, yet it kept moving, its limbs striking the floor hard enough to tear through the carpet. It twisted away from the first burst, folded itself under a desk, and vanished behind the cubicles escaping as the last rounds shredded the corpse it hadn't yet managed to infect.

"Go, go, go! Follow it!" Wesker snapped.

They pushed around the corner fast, close enough to almost touch, separated enough that one lunge couldn't take all three at once. Chris took the outside lane and Barry stayed near the partitions, his rifle tracking the gaps where anything could punch through. They found the creature crouched over another mangled body, its proboscis buried deep. As the corpse began to twitch, its chest split open with a slow, cracking spread, and Wesker shouted, "Take it down! Focus fire on it! Don't let it raise anymore!"

The rifles opened up again. Their rounds peppered the Necro’s body, breaking one of its limbs at the joint and blowing a ragged trench across its side. It hit the ground and flailed, scraping itself behind a row of cubicles with hideous speed. The corpse beside it lurched upright before any of them could score the kill.

"You two, take the walker!" The Captain shouted, the command in his voice sharp and cold. "I'll get the Necro!"

Albert drove past the rising Headless before Chris could answer. He cut through a gap between two cubicles and disappeared into the maze after the skittering torso, leaving Chris and Barry with the thing that had just been a corpse.

The first Headless came up wrong, unfolding from the floor as though something inside its spine had yanked it upright. Its skull was flopping back uselessly, the neck stump had hardened into a ridged black crown, while two sensory antlers of fungal bone rose from its upper back and twitched toward the nearest source of heat and movement. Its ribcage peeled open down the center, each rib sharpened into jagged teeth that flexed around a wet inner cavity. The barbed spinal cord tongue snapped out from inside that chest-mouth and struck the cubicle wall beside Chris’s head hard enough to punch through the fabric panel.

Chris ducked under the retracting tongue and fired a short burst into the creature’s sternum. The rounds slammed home, deep and heavy, but the Headless only folded a step and came on. Barry’s rifle answered from the right, his bursts cutting across the exposed ribs, splintering bone teeth and punching black holes through the torso. The thing lunged sideways into a cubicle wall, bounced off it, and opened both forearms with a dry crack. Bone blades unfolded from beneath the skin, mantis scythes slick with mold and sharpened to hooked edges.

"Left arm!" Chris barked.

Barry shifted his fire without hesitation. His burst took the scythe limb at the elbow and tore it halfway free. Chris stepped in on the injured side, keeping the desk between him and the snapping chest-mouth as the spinal tongue lashed again. It hooked the sling across his rifle and yanked hard enough to drag him against the cubicle frame. He turned with the pull instead of fighting it, slammed his shoulder into the partition, and fired from the compressed angle. The muzzle flash filled the cubicle with harsh white light, and the rounds chewed through the creature’s open ribs.

The Headless shrieked through its chest cavity and rushed Barry. The remaining scythe arm carved across his vest, scraping hard against the rip-proof fabric as he twisted away. Barry answered with a tight burst into the creature’s hip and knee, then drove his boot into the ruined joint as Chris came in from the side. Their fire met at the center of the torso, two streams of 7.62 tearing through ribs, mold, and whatever core kept it upright. The Headless staggered back three steps, chest-mouth spasming, then collapsed into the aisle with its limbs folding beneath it.

It only lasted moments, but Wesker was already gone.

Chris's boots hammered against the ground, running full-tilt as Barry fell in beside him, both men cutting through the cubicle lane after the Captain. The necro’s path was easy to follow, carved through desk clutter, scattering files, and tearing partitions. A smear of black fluid streaked across the floor where its broken limb had been dragged, leaving a slick trail through the muck. The sound ahead kept shifting, sometimes a scrape, sometimes a wet thud, sometimes the sharper sound of Wesker’s rifle firing somewhere deeper in the maze.

"Captain! Captain, where are you?" Chris shouted.

All they heard was silence at first, then a cubicle panel to Chris’s left bowed outward. The two barely had a moment to react as a second Headless burst through it, driving straight into him with both bone scythes spread. Chris took the impact against his rifle and forearms, the force knocking him into the opposite desk hard enough to crack the faux-wood panel. The creature’s ribcage-mouth snapped open inches from his mask, jagged rib-teeth clacking shut with enough force to spray black flecks across his lense. Barry fired past Chris’s shoulder, controlled and tight, punching rounds into the thing’s flank, stymied as he tried to avoid hitting Chris.

Chris shoved the rifle up and across, using the Galil’s barrel and handguard to jam the rib-mouth open before the spinal tongue could spear out through his head. The tongue snapped anyway, grazing the side of his gas mask with barbs that scraped across the filter housing, leaving a deep score across the material. He drove a knee into the creature’s midsection, gained a foot of space, and angled the muzzle under the open ribs. His burst tore upward through the chest cavity and out through the back.

The Headless didn't drop, despite the brutal, critical damage. Its right forearm scythe came down in a brutal chop, and Barry caught the limb against a metal filing cabinet with a shoulder-driven shove that pinned it long enough for Chris to pull clear. Barry’s next burst broke the creature’s spine just below the antlers. Chris stepped around the desk, settled his fire through the centerline, and put a final string of rounds into the twitching upper body until the scythes slackened and the thing slid off the cabinet to the floor.

No sooner had it fallen than a third one came out of the next lane, lower and faster, crawling on all fours with its forearm blades folded against the floor. Barry pivoted first and put two bursts into its shoulders, but the Headless flattened itself as it moved, letting the rounds rake over the hardened growths across its back. Its spinal tongue speared toward his thigh. Barry twisted, and the barbed length ripped through a loose strap on his gear instead of his flesh, snapping him off balance.

Chris caught Barry by the back of his vest and hauled him clear before the ribcage-mouth could clamp down on his leg. Barry regained his footing in the same motion, planting himself beside a cubicle post, and fired into the tongue while it recoiled. The rounds shredded the elastic cord into wet strands, and the Headless bucked hard enough to slam its own body into the floor. Chris used the opening, firing into the exposed antlers until they cracked apart. Barry finished it with a burst through the opened chest, and the creature finally stopped moving at their feet.

"Reloading!" Chris snapped as Barry covered him, the training and practice paying off as he moved with a mechanical efficiency despite the blood hammering through his ears. "Clear!" he shouted a moment later, covering Barry as he swapped to a fresh magazine as well. Not a moment too soon, either, as both men caught the flicker of movement perilously close.

The fourth Headless announced itself with silence. A cubicle wall ahead shifted by an inch, then the top half of a body rose behind it, antlers turning toward them with awful precision. Its forearms opened slowly, bone scythes spreading out while its chest-mouth flexed around a set of longer rib-teeth. It had waited while the others rushed, like some kind of ambush predator. That patience made Chris’s stomach tighten as he made a quick, hidden motion with his hand.

Barry moved right without needing a word, as Chris moved left, the sudden burst of speed setting off the monster. The Headless tracked between them, sensory antlers twitching as if uncertain which target mattered more. When it lunged for Chris, Barry fired into its side and drove it off-line. When it turned for Barry, Chris put rounds into the back of its knee and forced it down. The creature’s spinal tongue lashed across the aisle, wrapped around a chair, and hurled it into Barry’s path. Barry shouldered through the impact with a grunt, kept his rifle high, and fired through the chair frame into the thing’s torso.

Chris closed the last few feet before it could recover. The Headless snapped one scythe toward his neck, and he dropped beneath it, feeling the blade skim past the top of his head, barely brushing against his hair. His rifle barked from below the creature’s open chest, the recoil punching through his arms as he held the trigger in a hard, heavy burst. Barry’s fire joined his from the side, and the two streams met inside the torso. Bone teeth shattered. The chest-mouth collapsed inward. The antlers spasmed once, then the whole body toppled against the cubicle wall and slid down into a twitching heap.

Chris didn't waste a word on it, rising in a singular motion. Barry was already moving, and Chris went with him.

They found a door hanging ajar, leading to a staircase, and the violence beyond it sounded wild, vicious and heavy. Wesker was halfway inside the stairwell, one knee braced on the Necro’s back as the torso monster thrashed beneath him. The creature’s mutated bone limbs stabbed at the steps, punching chips out of the concrete, while its proboscis whipped in vicious arcs toward Wesker’s throat. Wesker had one gloved hand wrapped around the slick length just below its stabbing tip, his arm locked with visible strain as he kept it from driving into his mask.

His combat knife flashed in his other hand, sawing at the base of the proboscis where it vanished into the creature’s chest cavity. He had already cut deep. Black fluid sheeted over his glove and ran down the monster’s front, but the organ refused to come free. The necro bucked hard, slamming Wesker’s shoulder into the stair rail. He absorbed the hit with a sharp exhale, shifted his knee higher on its spine, and drove the knife in again.

Chris came up on the left side of the stairwell and shoved his rifle into the creature’s severed head-cavity, firing a tight burst straight through the upper torso. Barry took the right and hammered rounds into the limbs trying to brace against the steps. Bone shattered under the fire, one stabbing leg folding backward in pieces, another snapping at the joint and spraying black fluid across the wall.

The necro screamed without a mouth, its whole body vibrating under Wesker’s weight. Its proboscis stabbed downward, grazing his forearm plate, then coiled around his wrist. Wesker dropped the knife, seized the organ with both hands, and pulled against it with a cold, furious steadiness. The base stretched. The glowing orange bulbs clustered beneath the root of it pulsed faster, buried in a knot of nerves and fungal tissue that had been hidden inside the chest.

"Hold it!" Wesker snarled.

Chris pressed his boot against the creature’s side and fired into the exposed root mass. Barry fired through the opposite shoulder, pinning the body in place through sheer impact. Wesker ripped backward with everything he had. The proboscis tore loose in a wet, fibrous snap, dangling from his hands, detached, partially broken, and covered in glowing orange bulbs attached to the base. The necro spasmed violently, its limbs hammering the stairs in a final seizure.

Chris and Barry hosed the torso down in rifle fire until the body came apart under them. The bone limbs stopped twitching. The hollow chest collapsed. The orange bulbs dimmed one by one, and the creature finally fell still beneath the withering assault.

"Fuck!" Chris let out a sharp curse. "Holy shit, Captain."

Barry stood right next to him, breathing hard behind his mask. Wesker released the torn proboscis with visible disgust, letting it slap against the floor before he wiped his slick gloves clean on a rag he picked up from one of the shredded piles of junk that sat in the alcove. For several seconds, the three men only listened to the stairwell, each breath loud through the filters, each distant building sound sharpened by what they had just killed.

"What the hell was that, Captain?" Chris asked after a moment, his face stormy behind the mask. "We move as a unit. You're the one who always hammered that in."

"It was a necessary distraction. A necessary decision," Wesker said harshly, brooking no argument. "If that creature managed to find more bodies, we would be overrun, just like we were in the tunnels. I trusted both of you to be able to handle the ones it managed to resurrect."

Wesker’s matter-of-fact tone left Chris still on edge, even if he couldn’t argue the logic. Barry looked back toward the cubicles they had fought through, then toward the dead necro on the stairs.

"Next time, a little warning wouldn't hurt," Barry said.

"I'll make sure to file a complaint with the Head-less," Wesker replied, his tone sassy as he tossed the rag away. It still bothered Chris, but anything he was about to say was cut off when a loud crash rolled through the office wall behind them. An enraged roar followed, deep enough to vibrate through the walls, announcing an old friend they'd thought they'd lost. The Grafted had heard them, and was now tearing through the cubicle maze they'd just left. Its mass slammed through the thin fabric walls with heavy, plodding impacts, tearing through partitions and desks as it searched for them. Plastic panels cracked, metal frames shrieked, and it wasn't long before something large hit the manager’s office door and ripped it loose from its hinges in a sharp splintering of wood and broken glass.

Barry looked to Wesker. "That’s our cue."

"Up," Wesker said. "Now."

They moved up the stairs in a tight line, the three moving like ghosts across the concrete steps, careful not to arrest the monster's attention as it raged in the room below. The darkness above them held colder air and the same mold-thick taste through their filters. They could hear the Grafted as it tore through the office with an almost methodical violence, each impact closer to the stairwell entrance. Distance and elevation might confuse it for a few seconds, maybe more if the mold and walls broke up whatever senses guided it. None of them trusted that for long.

Reaching the second floor was easy, but getting into it wasn’t. The door at the landing had been padlocked, and a heavy chain had been wrapped around the push bars. The chain looped through twice, cinched tight by someone who had wanted the door to stay shut. Not impassable, but that was never the real issue. Getting it off would cause a racket and they all knew it.

"Shit!" Wesker let out an uncharacteristic curse. In the room below, the Grafted crashed into the wall below. Cinderblock cracked under the impact. Dust sifted down from the landing ceiling, mixing with the black mold in the air. Another hit followed, heavier, and the cinderblocks groaned. They were already out of time and trapped in a dead end unless they got that chain off.

"Burton, do you still have those bolt cutters?"

Barry nodded. "What are you thinking?" he asked.

"We need to open up this door. Cutting the lock will be loud, but it's the quietest of our options. Hopefully we can slip into the room and avoid the creature altogether. But it's too much of a risk staying here."

It was a grim prospect, trapped between a rock and a hard place. All three knew the stakes, and none of them had any confidence in being able to take down that monstrosity, especially in a damn stairwell. Staying meant letting the Grafted climb into them. Cutting the lock meant ringing a dinner bell for that same monster. They had to take the risk and hope for the best.

Barry pulled the bolt cutters from his pack and set the jaws around the padlock’s shank. Chris braced the chain to keep it from swinging, while Wesker watched the stairwell below. The Grafted was getting closer, and the sound of a desk shattering against the stairwell entrance filled the air. Stone broke loose and tumbled down the lower steps, but there was never a better chance.

Wesker nodded.

The cutters bit down. The metal snapped like a gunshot.

Almost immediately, another ear-shattering roar came from below. Chris yanked the chain free, and the whole length came loose in a hard metallic rattle that sounded far, far too loud. Barry folded the cutters back against his pack, and Wesker shoved the push bar with his shoulder. The door stuck for half a second, swollen in its frame, then gave way as the creature slammed into the stairway entrance below. The lower cinderblocks crumbled under a second impact, then a third.

"Move, move, move!" Wesker hissed.

All three men piled through and slipped into another office level. Cubicles filled the upper room from wall to wall, their partitions higher here, their lanes narrower, the air even heavier with black mold. The only light came from their beams, and those beams caught shapes standing between the desks.

Not ten feet from them, one of the Headless stood stock still. Another of the evolved ones, with the strange sensory antlers. It seemed to almost be sleeping, the body not even twitching.

Then Chris saw another beyond it. And another. More figures stood sedentary throughout the office, tucked into cubicle openings, facing walls, leaning over desks, or standing with their scythe forearms folded shut against their sides. Their headless necks were crowned with ridged fungal growths, and their antlers sat motionless in the dark. The upper office wasn't empty at all. It was full of them.

They slid farther into the mass of cubicles, choosing the narrowest lane they could reach before the nearest Headless stirred. A faint tremor passed through its antlers. Another body shifted two rows away. The room seemed to wake one inch at a time.

That was when the stairwell door slammed open behind them, and the towering mass of the Grafted stomped in with a soul-shattering roar.