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Tie the Noose Chapter 39
The roar echoed across the room, a physical force that rolled over everything with ear-shattering volume, loud enough that all three had felt the rolling impact like a punch to the gut, hidden down the corridor of corroded and mold-stained cubicles. It cut through the dark, covered in glowing pustules of rot and bleeding electric orange from between the seams of the countless bodies that seemed to cover it, draped over its massive frame like savaged pelts of its victims, mottled and decaying even as the black, wet flesh consumed them.
The Grafted stood just past the stairwell behind them, huge and misshapen in the tight entry, its bulk hunched beneath the ceiling panels. Another roar rolled through the upper office, and across the cubicles, the dormant Headless began to answer it one at a time.
The closest one shifted first. Its sensory antlers flexed in the dark, rising from the black crown where its skull had sagged uselessly behind the neck. Another answered deeper in the office, then another, each faint movement spreading through the room in uneven stages. Chris could hear the dry click of bone against bone, the wet creak of ribs opening, the slow drag of claws over concrete and tile. There were too many of them to fight, even with their rifles, even with the launcher, the shotgun, the grenades... they would run dry long before they ran out of monsters.
Wesker’s hand came up fast, flat, and low. The motion was simple, the order to fall back almost a relief as the three huddled together, their breathing muted in their masks. Wesker leaned close enough for his voice to barely come out as a whisper under the heavy stomping that seemed almost predatory, the words clipped, restrained. “We need to move to the far side of the office. I spotted what looked like a security gate on the far side over the cubicles before. That's our exit.”
Chris followed the smallest tilt of Wesker’s head and caught a faint rectangle of metal glinting beyond the cubicle maze. It was barely visible through the gaps, half-hidden behind sagging partitions and the unmoving bodies clustered between desks, bathed in an eerie light that glinted off the metal bars. The distance wasn’t far in a normal office, on a normal day, barely a moment's walk. Here, with the cubicles packed into a maze, with Headless things waking all around them and the Grafted smashing its way forward, it might as well have been the other side of the mountain.
“Move out,” Wesker hissed, and cut two fingers forward, then split them left and right. Chris took the left edge of their line, Barry took the rear and right, and Wesker led from the center with his rifle tucked close. Their lights stayed low, angled toward the floor and the undersides of desks, never lingering long on the standing Headless. The beams were necessary, and dangerous. Each pale sweep gave them a piece of the path, then vanished into the mold-heavy air before it could betray too much movement.
The evolved Headless seemed to know when the beams touched them, would twitch in irritation, turning or shifting, but it barely seemed to grab their attention beyond that. All three were certain that if they let their lights linger, it would grab the thing's attention, but a light touch seemed to be safe, for the moment. It was a small mercy that the mold seemed to swallow their cones after such a short distance, because unlike the seemingly unconscious Headless, the Grafted, with its eyes that seemed to watch all over its body, was more than drawn to it.
They would have to be cautious, and the density of the Headless that seemed to infest this place wasn't doing them any favors. The place was lousy with them, clogging up the most straightforward path to the far wall. Which meant detours. How lovely, Chris grumbled internally, as they were forced to veer off to avoid the first pack of emaciated infected.
The detour forced them within arm’s reach of a dormant Headless. Its forearms hung closed at its sides, the bone scythes hidden beneath its split skin. Its chest hadn't yet opened, though the central seam across the ribs flexed with faint pressure from inside. Chris slid past it with his body turned sideways, his rifle held vertical against his shoulder to avoid striking the partition. The smell coming from it hit through the filter anyway, wet decay and mineral rot, enough to make him gag, but that wasn't where his focus was. He kept his eyes on its antlers, the wet, cilialike protrusions mounted on the reformed bone wriggling and twitching like it was tasting the air.
Barry came through behind him, slower by necessity. His heavier frame brushed the cubicle wall, and the fabric panel gave a soft rasp. The Headless tilted toward him. Chris’s stomach tightened. Barry stopped dead, one boot suspended above the carpet, rifle tucked under his chin. The Grafted slammed into a cubicle behind them, tearing the soft fabric, and the dormant thing turned away from Barry toward the vibration.
Wesker gave a single downward flick of his fingers. Keep moving.
They threaded through the next gap. The cubicles here had been packed with old terminals and stacks of ruined paper. Mold had risen over the desk surfaces, swallowing keyboards, phones, nameplates, and anything else that remained until the workstations seemed buried under black growth. Chris stepped over a fallen monitor, then guided his boot between two piles of loose binders. Every step demanded his utmost attention. Carelessness would kill them, and all it would take is one crunch, one clatter, and they would be fucked. But they had to keep apace. Slowness would let the Grafted catch up, and that too, was death. The balance between those two facts of reality sat on the back of his neck and pressed down with every breath.
Behind them, the Grafted began to move, and it wasn't at all subtle about it. It drove through cubicle walls that snapped and collapsed under its weight, as the desks beneath them screeched across the floor before giving way. One Headless stood in its path, only half-awake, antlers twitching toward the noise. The Grafted slapped it aside without slowing. The blow launched the smaller monster through a partition, and the sound made three more Headless turned to shamble towards the noise. Chris saw that in fragments between the gaps, and resolved to move faster.
Ahead, Wesker lifted his fist. Stop and hold. The exact opposite of what Chris's instincts were screaming at him. He dropped behind a half-collapsed workstation all the same. Barry settled behind him, careful to keep his gear from catching the partition corners. Ahead, a pair of Headless stood in adjacent lanes, both facing away. Their antlers drifted slowly, tracking the Grafted’s violence rather than the three men. Wesker waited until the larger monster slammed into another row. The crash covered their next movement. He pointed forward, then crooked his hand right.
They moved during the noise, three controlled steps and a turn. Chris’s boot landed on something brittle. He felt it crack beneath his sole, a thin little snap that sounded way too loud inside his own head. The nearest Headless rotated a few degrees. Its chest seam pulled wider. Chris stopped mid-stride and let his weight settle without scraping the floor. Barry’s breath came through his mask in a measured hiss behind him. Wesker had already gone still.
The Grafted roared again, and the Headless turned back toward it.
Chris released the breath he had held and continued.
They advanced that way, stolen movement between the Grafted’s impacts, dead pauses whenever the Headless stirred, quick hand signals passed low at waist height. Wesker never wasted any motion. Two fingers meant hold. A curved hand meant ‘go around’. A flat palm meant lower. Chris answered with small nods, Barry with the slightest shift of his shoulders. Their training held the line for them when their instincts wanted to run. Chris knew how fast panic could spread in close quarters. One hard footfall, one rifle snagged on a partition, one whispered curse at the wrong moment, and every monster in the room would come right for them.
The next lane narrowed around a fallen bank of filing cabinets. Chris had to crouch lower, sliding through with his winter coat brushing the metal. His vest caught once, not hard, just enough to tug him back. He stopped rather than trying to pull free. That was noise. That was death. Barry reached over, and freed the strap with a quick, easy jerk, and tapped his shoulder once. Chris started moving again, grateful, his faith in his teammates absolute.
Not far behind them, the Grafted altered its path. Chris heard the difference immediately. The heavy impacts shifted from random destruction into a steady drive, each crash closer to their trail. It hadn't found them yet, but something had caught its attention. Whatever sense guided it was crude, yet it was enough, and the three men listened as it seemed to close, only to stop, distracted, as it destroyed another desk. It was no more than a few rows away, if that, the halo of its molten glow announcing it on the ceiling.
Chris motioned to the Captain, but Wesker had already seen it too. His left hand tightened, then swept forward with more urgency.
They gained another twenty feet. The security gate remained distant, still buried beyond too many rows of sagging wage cages. The office opened slightly near the center, where four lanes met around a support column. Hanging from the ceiling beside it was one of the mold bundles they had seen in the dining room, a heavy cluster of black growth suspended from the tiles by thick cords. Chris saw it only as a problem to avoid hoping that the heavy partitions would keep whatever tracking mechanism it had from noticing them, until Wesker halted them.
A Headless blocked the only clear route. It stood with its back angled toward them, slumped over the entrance to the next lane. The cubicles to either side had collapsed inward, forming a bottleneck too tight to bypass without touching it. Its forearms were closed, but the antlers above its neck moved in slow, sleepy arcs. The chest seam flexed once. Chris glanced right. No room. Left was worse, blocked by a toppled desk and a row of dormant bodies beyond it, and the only other path was directly below the hanging monitor.
Wesker looked at Chris, then Barry. He pointed at the Headless, then made a short cutting motion across his own throat. Silent takedown.
Chris’s pulse kicked up, his heartbeat sloshing in his ears. The idea was dangerous, but the math was simple. Shooting would wake the room. Leaving it there would trap them. Trying to squeeze past was impossible. Barry’s eyes were hidden behind his gas mask lenses, but the set of his shoulders showed he understood.
Wesker indicated the arms. Chris pointed to himself, then the left leg. Barry answered with two fingers toward the right. Wesker tapped the hilt of his knife.
They closed on it from both sides. Chris circled left in a crouch, keeping the cubicle wall close to his back, not enough to scrape, but nearly so, his rifle pulled tight to his chest, leaving his hands free for something that could go very badly, very quickly. Barry mirrored him on the right, quiet despite the heavy weapon dangling from his back, terrifyingly silent for a man his size. The Grafted smashed through another row behind them, closer now, but a boon for them as noise covered the final strike.
Chris struck first. His boot swept hard into the back of the Headless’s left knee, driving the joint inward. Barry hit the right leg at the same instant. The creature dropped with a violent fold, and both men went down with it before its body could slam loudly against the floor. Chris pinned the left scythe arm with both hands, driving his knee into the forearm before the bone blade could unfold. Barry trapped the right arm against the tile and wrenched it outward. The Headless bucked under them, stronger than it had any right to be, its torso twisting in an attempt to give it a clear shot at them with its tongue.
Chris shifted his grip and jammed one hand beneath the edge of the ribcage. The ribs fought him, flexing inward around his glove. Barry braced his forearm across the opposite side and pulled. Together, they pried the chest open. The rib-teeth spread, wet tissue stretching between them, and the spinal tongue writhed inside the cavity as if searching for a direction to lash out at.
The antlers snapped upright as the creature started to alert. Its torso vibrated beneath them, a rising pressure building toward a shriek. Chris put more weight through his knee, teeth clenched behind the mask. Barry grunted once, barely audible, and forced the right arm lower as the scythe tried to break free. Wesker stepped in, knife already reversed in his grip. He drove the blade into the glowing core buried behind the open ribs.
The reaction was immediate. The Headless convulsed hard enough to jolt both men. Chris nearly lost his hold on the arm. Barry rode the movement with his shoulder lowered, keeping the scythe pinned until the tremor burned itself out. Wesker twisted the knife sharply, rending the core, splitting it wide. The glow inside the chest dimmed. The Headless slackened under their hands, ribs hanging open around the blade.
For one second, they had silence.
Then a cubicle wall behind them exploded inward.
The Grafted had heard enough. Its roar hit the room from the far side of the maze, and the office answered with movement. Antlers rose throughout the rows, hunting now, alive, hungry. Chest seams opened wide with a hissing repose. Bone claws clicked against desks and concrete, and the cacophony was deafening. Chris let go of the dead Headless and retrieved his rifle in one motion, already moving when Wesker ripped his knife free.
They didn't need a signal to know they had to get out of there. They moved faster now because they had no other choice. The takedown had been quiet by any normal measure, but whatever strange hive mind linked all the creatures together knew when it had lost one of its own. Barry brushed a chair aside as Chris vaulted a low partition where the aisle had collapsed. Wesker cut through the center, using the dead Headless’s body as a bridge over a tangle of fallen panels. Each new step was necessary, but at the same time, each sound woke more of the room.
The hanging mold bundle at the center stirred. Chris saw it shift above them, its cords tightening where they vanished into the ceiling. Several small vents opened along its underside, wet and circular, and a cluster of pale sensory nodules turned toward their movement. It had no eyes, but Chris felt the moment it found them. A low, almost inaudible pulse moved through the ceiling and down the mold strands webbed across the cubicles.
What came next was exactly what they'd feared. Every nearby Headless turned toward them, bone scythes unfolding and ribcages splitting. Tongues lashed out, tasting the air like serpents, and the slow shuffle of the monsters now tracking them began to fill the room. Time was running out, and things had just become that much harder.
Wesker’s rifle lifted a fraction, then stopped. The bundle hung too high and too deep within the ceiling to kill quietly. Shooting it would light up the room. Leaving it alive had already done the same thing. It was a metric that all three had to run. There was no mitigating it, though. Only escaping it. Hopefully, putting some more of the cubicles would be enough to disrupt the thing's lock on them.
They delved deeper into the maze, no longer stealing steps, now driving through every opening with aggressive speed. Chris kept his rifle tight and low until a Headless lurched into the lane ahead. He barely managed to stop from taking a reactive shot. There were too many dormant bodies around them, but his instincts screamed anyway. He feinted left, drew its antlers that way, then cut right through an adjoining cubicle. The creature’s spinal tongue snapped through the partition where his chest had been half a second earlier. The barbs missed by inches ripping into the fabric instead.
Barry grabbed the back of Chris’s vest and hauled him another foot clear before the tongue recoiled. Chris steadied himself against a desk edge, then pushed on without looking back. The gesture had saved him from the next shot, the tongue grazing past. Chris nodded to the man, and Barry shot him the barest nod back. He was already moving, already two steps ahead as Chris fought to catch up.
Their speed was needed, but also dangerous, lethally so. A Headless folded out from under a desk and hooked one scythe around Barry’s boot. The blade caught in the heavy winter tread and pulled his leg sideways. Barry dropped to one knee, barely keeping his balance, and the rifle rose in a panicked arc. Chris turned back, reaching out to Barry, but Wesker was closer. The Captain stepped onto the creature, pinning its scythe against the floor, then drove his heel down hard enough to shatter the bone. Barry tore his foot free and rolled away as the spinal tongue stabbed through the space he had just occupied.
Chris made a snap decision, and levelled his rifle. The barest glance to the Captain saw the man nod, the time for subtlety was over, as he slid back. The trigger depressed, and the rifle cried out like a dinnerbell, the roar drowning out even the Grafted as the heavy rounds stitched across the Headless's chest, pulping it at this close range. There was a momentary breath, a hesitation as the creature fell still. Then all hell broke loose.
The center of the office had become a spreading pursuit. The mold bundle pulsed from above, guiding the Headless in their direction. The Grafted hammered through the outer cubicle rows with increasing speed, no longer searching blindly, but instead coming straight at them, the rotted desks and walls doing little to slow it down. It had a target now, the same direction as the others, and its mass let it carve a crude path through everything between them. Chris heard metal partitions buckle under its weight, heard the Headless get caught beneath it and crushed with a brittle series of cracks, heard the thunder of its heavy steps, and he could hear the roar! The Grafted didn't care. It tore ahead, using its body as the solution to every obstacle.
Wesker changed course twice, each time with a fast hand signal to guide them. Like a reflex, there wasn't any more room left to question. Chris's faith in Wesker to get them out of there was absolute. Left past a copy station. Right through a supervisor’s cubicle. Over a fallen cabinet. Beneath a sagging strip of ceiling where mold cords dangled low enough to brush Chris’s shoulder. He resisted the urge to swat them away, as he slid over and under and through.
The security gate came into view at last.
It stood across a wide lane on the far side of the office, built into a reinforced wall that separated the cubicle floor from a security wing. Iron bars ran from floor to ceiling, with a heavy sliding panel set beside a card reader. The reader was still dark. The gate itself looked manually seated, shut tight, with a frame heavy enough to hold back a tank, or at least he hoped. Chris saw the problem at once. They had to reach it, open it, get through, and lock it again before the entire room landed on them.
Fortunately, in those last few moments, the power problem solved itself. There was a low electrical thrum that rolled through the ceiling, as the sound of long-dormant ventilation systems and generator elements found power coursing through their systems once again. They could all hear it as the buzzing hum of energy woke up dozens of appliances, computers beeping to life, copy machines and fan units whirring as system after system came alive.
Then the lights came on.
Not all at once. The first row flickered overhead with harsh white glare, then the next, then the next, until the room burst into ugly life. Fluorescent panels buzzed and stuttered above the cubicles, turning the darkness into a bright, contaminated field of movement. The cover they had used vanished. Every Headless within sight locked onto them. Antlers snapped forward. Chest mouths opened. Scythe arms unfolded with dry cracks that ran together through the office.
Wesker didn't bother with subtlety any more. “Gate! Move!” he barked, lifting his rifle and stitching a line across the hanging mass of vines, the rounds tearing through the pod and sending the hungry nightmares into a flailing panic. The whole bulbous mass fell out of the ceiling with a crash, splattering on the floor, and more than half of the Headless fell to the ground with it.
Chris fired, putting a burst into the nearest Headless as it charged from the right, one of the few still cognizant. The 7.62 rounds punched through its chest-mouth and drove it back into a desk. Barry fired past him, catching another across the legs, then stepped through the gap before it could fall into their path. Wesker let his rifle hang, retrieving the shotgun and firing directly into the chest of a Headless that came at them from behind, sending it to the ground as its hips disintegrated.
The office turned into a shooting gallery, the roar of violence only subsumed by the roar of the grafted as it got closer and closer. Chris backed toward the gate with his rifle shouldered, firing in a short, tight burst when another Headless came over a partition instead of around it, scythes spread, spinal tongue whipping toward his mask. He ducked past the tongue and fired upward through its ribs, then shoved the body aside with the rifle’s barrel before it could collapse against him. Behind him, he heard Barry’s launcher thump, the warning coming too late and drowned out by the cacophony anyway.
The flashbang round detonated in the middle of the pursuing pack, and whatever those antlers did to enhance their senses left them all particularly vulnerable. Incandescent white filled the cubicle rows, brutal even through Chris’s closed eyes. The sound struck a half-beat later, a hard concussive crack that hammered the tight office and sent the nearest Headless staggering. Several lost their footing entirely, antlers snapping in confused directions, scythe arms cutting empty air, and even the Grafted let out a pained shriek as its arms came up to block the flare, flailing violently as it caught swaths of Headless in it's impossibly strong swipes.
“Again if they close!” Wesker called.
“Already on it!” Barry answered.
Chris reached the gate first. The manual handle resisted his first pull, jammed with disuse. He put his weight into it and felt the mechanism grind. Wesker arrived beside him, one hand diving into Chris's pocket, and fishing out the yellow card. Barry stayed planted three steps out, launcher up, covering their backs as the two men worked. Seeing what he was doing, Chris stepped back, as Wesker held the card to the reader.
The reader blinked from red to green in an instant, and a loud clunk resounded.
A Headless came in from the left. Chris caught it with rifle fire to the torso, then drove a boot to its knee when it tried to keep moving. Another lunged from behind a cubicle wall, and Wesker lifted his shotgun in a smooth, clean motion. The blast shattered the creature’s antlers and sent it crashing into the partition.
“Open it!” Wesker snapped.
Chris hauled the barred panel aside. The gate shrieked along its track, loud enough to draw every monster still moving. The opening widened inch by inch. Wesker fired again, catching another of the recovering Headless as the thundering footfalls of the massive infected started again, this time faster, and angrier. Barry stepped backward through the gap first, firing out into the office, another sun birthing between the cubicle rows, but it didn't stop the monster's charge, not this time.
The Grafted burst from the confines of the cubicle maze.
It came through the final row with enough force to throw desks and partitions through the air and crashing against the wall. Several Headless were caught in its path, battered aside or crushed under its weight as it drove for the gate. Its roar swallowed the rifle fire for a second. Chris saw its mass bearing down on him, too large, too fast, and far too close.
“Chris!” Barry shouted.
Chris slammed the barred security door closed.
The door crashed into its frame just as the Grafted hit the far side. The impact drove Chris back a step, his hands still locked around the handle. Iron bars bowed inward, not enough to fail, but enough to make his arms jolt with the force. Chris stumbled back, getting away from the reinforced grate as the Grafted nightmare ran foot-long claws across the secured bars, grasping at them, but unable to reach.
Barry fired one last flashbang through the bars.
The round burst at the Grafted’s feet, filling the other side of the gate with white glare and a concussive snap. The Grafted recoiled, its bulk pressing back into the pursuing Headless, crushing them as it stumbled back, before falling with a titanic crash. Moving deeper into the wing, they finally lost sight of the monster, even as it roared in rage.
For a moment, the three men stood inside the security wing, now safe, at least for the moment, from the horde and the Grafted, each gasping to catch their breath, each amazed that they survived that. Barry's hand came down heavy on Chris's shoulder, a comfort to the younger man that had come far too close to getting skewered by the great and massive nightmare that had seemingly tracked them through the whole facility.
Even Captain Wesker seemed relieved, as much as he could be, the slight tremor of adrenaline that coursed through him barely seemed to affect him as he slid shell after shell into the shotgun, before checking the receiver. Even now Chris could see his mind whirring with plans as he looked over the hallway full of offices, his face unreadable under the mask and the glasses, but focused all the same.
"We need to find that last card." He said, finally, pulling the other two men from their respite. "I doubt we'll be getting back through that gate, but there has to be another way out of this wing. Keep your eyes peeled, we aren't done yet."
The Grafted hit the barred door again, and the whole security wing answered with a hard tremor through the floor. Chris kept his rifle on the corridor ahead, breathing hard as he tried to tune out the enraged monster. The sound behind them kept echoing, a steady sequence of metal impacts, clawed scraping, and wet, enraged breathing from the other side of the gate. The bars had held so far, but that didn’t mean they would keep holding. He could hear the Headless milling beyond it too, gathered around the monster, their scythes scraping the iron and their ribcages clicking open and shut in an agitated rhythm.
“We're in the home stretch now, gentlemen,” Wesker said, voice clipped through his gas mask. “All that's left is the last card, and we're out. Check your ammo, reload, and let's get moving." As he spoke, he started sliding shells into his M3, before brushing past the other two.
Barry gave the gate one last glance, then turned with Chris. The hallway ahead stretched into a series of administrative offices, most with their doors hanging open or swollen against their frames. Mold had claimed the walls in heavy patches, crowding the corners and sealing several rooms almost shut. The restored power had brought a few overhead lights back to life, but most of the fixtures flickered weakly or stayed dead, leaving their gun lights to do most of the work. The air hadn't improved. It still tasted damp through the filters, thick with black particulate and the faint chemical bite of something else beneath the rot.
The first office gave them nothing. Its desk had split down the middle, and the shelves had collapsed under fungal growth that had turned paper into black pulp. The second held two overturned chairs and a dead terminal, its casing cracked and its keyboard fused to the desktop. The third had been almost completely swallowed, with mold packed so thick along the back wall that no one bothered crossing the threshold. Wesker checked the nameplates when they were still readable, then moved on without comment.
Chris tried not to think about the gate behind them. About how weak those bars had looked as they bent under the Grafted's tremendous weight. He tried to focus on the now, on what he could control, as he checked his rifle in tandem with Barry. Both had several full magazines left, more than enough for the moment, and unlike the office, this place seemed barren of life. Or at least the still-moving kind. Keeping their eyes peeled, it was just more of the same, room after room of overgrowth, with nothing standing out.
Eventually they reached the end of the hall, the corridor splitting off to the left and a wider door marked Duty Room right at the junction. Wesker tried the handle, found it unlocked, and pushed in. The room beyond was larger than the offices before it, laid out with several rows of desks facing a far wall. Most were in bad shape, their surfaces warped, drawers hanging open, legs bent or broken from age and decay. A few remained intact enough to show what the room had once been: a workroom for shift logs, rosters, reports, and guard assignments. Mold crept over the rear corners and down from ceiling vents, but the central floor remained passable.
Barry swept his light across the desks. “Looks picked over.”
“Check anyway,” Wesker said. “We've been lucky so far.”
Chris moved down the left row, careful with his steps around old binders and cracked coffee mugs. He opened a drawer and found nothing but mildewed forms. Another desk held a rusted stapler, a packet of ration slips, and a drawer full of blackened paper clips. Barry found a drawer with an empty pistol holster and an empty box of bullets, but no card. Wesker moved toward the far wall and stopped in front of a blackboard.
“Well, this is interesting” he said, mostly to himself as he examined it, grabbing the attention of the other two as they came over to see what the Captain had found. The board had five labeled rows written across the top in chalk that had faded to a gray smear but remained mostly legible. The first were obviously dates, followed by times, the third being just a number, usually between fifteen and thirty, followed by a column for arrivals and departures, and a final column with more numbers, marked with plusses or minuses. Mostly minuses.
Beneath those headings ran more than a dozen descending entries, each written in quick, blocky script. Some dates had multiple times beneath them. The lots listed numbers in small batches at first, then larger ones. The counts were steadily increasing with each entry, and each load had come like clockwork, once every week, the last ending in January.
Barry leaned in and read the first few rows under his breath. “Date, time, number, arrivals or departures, plus twelve, minus six, plus twenty-three. What the hell is this supposed to be?”
“Shift counts?” Chris asked. “Maybe personnel transfers.”
“Possibly, but it doesn't feel correct,” Wesker said. He traced the columns with his light, not touching the board. “Arrivals and departures from where? And why track the difference separately unless the difference mattered more than the raw number?”
Barry looked around the duty room, then back at the board. “Maybe vehicles in and out. Convoys. Supplies.”
Chris frowned behind his mask. “Then the third column should have truck numbers or route numbers. This looks more like a count.”
“Assuming it is,” Wesker said.
None of them had a good answer for that. The board zero gave zero context, aside from it referencing the comings and goings of something. Which begged the question of what, since apparently it wasn't supplies. They could guess, and they had their theories, but there was nothing concrete. Chris stared at the board but held his tongue. THis place had been a horror show so far, and those numbers could mean nearly anything, but he suspected he wouldn't like the answer when he found out. But then again, it could be nothing at all and he was catastrophizing, but he doubted it.
Another crash sounded from behind them, distant through the hall and gate. The duty room’s lights flickered once. All three shout a sour look in the direction of the barred door. That was rapidly growing old, even if it sounded like it was getting weaker.
Wesker stepped away from the board, ignoring the ruckus. “Let's keep moving.”
They left the duty room and continued down the hall toward a staircase at the end of the wing. The stairs dropped sharply, concrete steps slick with condensation and streaked with old mold that had built up in however many months this place had lain fallow. Chris went down first at Wesker’s signal, rifle tight, boots placed carefully. Barry followed close behind him, and Wesker took the rear, stopping once to listen before continuing.
The lower level opened into a locker room. Rows of metal lockers lined the walls, broken by shower entrances and benches bolted to the floor. The room had the practical layout of any facility changing area, but time and contamination had stripped it down to rust, damp, and neglect. Most lockers hung open and empty. A few still held old uniforms stiff with mold, cracked boots, shaving kits, cigarette packs, and small personal items left behind by men who never returned for them. Several mirrors above the sinks had been broken. The showers were stained, their drains clogged with black buildup.
Chris checked the nearest lockers while Barry moved down the opposite row, slowly, almost gingerly hunting through the lockers, most of which were left empty, out of some kind of hesitance to touch the decaying guts inside. Wesker searched with quicker, colder efficiency, compared to the other two, snapping the doors open, rummaging through the remains, and moving on, leaving piles of personal items forgotten on the floor. The first few yielded nothing of use. A dull watch, a comb, a packet of letters fused together into a wet block, an old lunch tin with nothing inside. It almost felt like grave robbing, at least to two of them.
Chris glanced over when he saw Barry had stopped at a locker near the shower entrance. He was holding something in his hand, tension in his shoulders as he stared at it. Coming closer, he saw what the big man had found. Barry held a small photograph in gloved fingers, careful not to damage the damp picture. In it, a man stood with a little girl in his arms, both smiling at whoever had taken the shot. The girl wore a bright jacket, and the man had one arm wrapped around her with a kind of awkward pride Chris recognized as the type only a father could have. Barry had been staring at it, a haunted look in his eyes.
“You good?” Chris asked quietly.
Barry tucked the photo back onto the locker shelf instead of pocketing it. “Yeah. Just thinking about my girls.”
Chris didn’t push. Barry had always been a private person, except when it came to his daughters. He had a boisterous pride that led him to shoving dozens of family photos into the face of anyone dumb enough to ask, or not be fast enough to get away. Seeing that, he guessed it haunted the man, the idea that it could be him never going home to his little girls. Or that whoever had owned this locker, they had a life, a family that'll never see them again, never truly know what hap[pened to Dad. Or what might happen to Barry, if they weren't careful. Chris clapped his shoulder, a small act of support, before going back to his hunt, letting Barry get his bearings back.
Wesker’s search turned up something different. He crouched near a locker with a broken latch and lifted a small cloth bundle from behind a pair of rotting boots. When he opened it, coins spilled into his palm, joined by jewelry that caught in the light: rings, a thin chain, a small pendant, two earrings, and a woman’s bracelet with the clasp broken.
“More coins?” Chris asked.
“Not only coins. Personal items as well.” Wesker separated the jewelry with the tip of one gloved finger. “These were taken from people.”
Barry’s voice tightened. “Stolen?”
“Either stolen or used to bribe security.” Wesker tied the bundle closed. “Possibly both. Of course, when things fell apart here, the distinction may not have lasted long.” He said cooly, as he pocketed the pouch, more evidence for later. Maybe they could find out who those belonged to, get them back to their families, after the fact, or at least Barry hoped as he watched it vanish into the Captain's pocket.
They moved on, digging through the last of the lockers for anything else they might have missed, but it seemed the whole room had been a wash, right up until Chris spotted something sticking out from behind the last row. Reaching behind it, he found something crinkling under his gloves. Pulling it out, he lifted a journal tucked beneath it, sealed in a plastic pouch that had only partly done its job. The cover was warped, but the pages inside had survived well enough. He flipped through the first few entries and felt his brow draw down.
“Captain,” he said. “I’ve got a journal.”
Wesker and Barry came closer as he flipped through the pages. Chris held the book under his light and began reading aloud.
“October 3. First week on lower security rotation. The facility's larger than they said. Mine personnel look rough, but that’s not our problem. Orders are clear. Keep them in designated areas, stop fights, prevent theft, report sickness to medical liaison. Pay’s good. Food’s better than I expected. Most of the guys say not to ask questions.”
Chris turned the page.
“October 19. New workers brought in late. No paperwork came through the duty office. Johannson said central cleared it and told us to stop whining about keeping records. Half of them don’t speak English. Some look scared out of their minds. We were told they signed contracts and owed the company for transport, food, and housing. Doesn’t sit right, but nobody else seems bothered.”
Barry shifted beside him, heavy and silent.
Chris kept reading.
“November 2. First bribe today. Twenty dollars for extra bread from the kitchen. Told him no at first. He showed me two old coins he said came from the deep shaft. Real gold, maybe. I took one and passed him a ration pack. Felt bad for about an hour. Then I remembered what they pay us to stand here and what they pay him to cough blood into a mask.”
He turned another page. The handwriting slowly became more scrawled.
“November 17. Bribes are regular now. Cash first, then gold. Food. Cigarettes. Five minutes on the phone. Time away from the shaft work. One man paid three coins so his brother could sleep through a shift. Guard Commander knows, but he doesn't care so long as he gets his share. Nobody writes it down officially. Men in charge keep pushing us harder. More shifts. More lockdowns. More sick workers moved out after dark.”
Chris’s throat felt dry despite the mask filter. He turned the next page.
“December 8. Saw Bledsoe break a miner’s jaw because the man dropped a tool. Saw Ames lock three workers in the Box for stealing potatoes, no water, no lights, temps are going below zero. Probably won't make the night. Johannson laughed when he heard, said it was good for morale. Said the fear saves on ammunition. This is fucked. Some of the guys enjoy it.”
Barry’s voice came low. “Jesus.”
Chris kept his eyes on the page because looking up felt harder.
"December 21. I’m writing names because someone should. Bledsoe, Ames, Kline, Weller. Kline has been taking women from kitchen staff into the interview rooms. Says they trade willingly for favors. Nobody believes that. Weller beat a sick man until he stopped moving. Had to send for cleaners to get the blood out of the tiles. Everyone acts normal at shift change. I don’t know when we became this.”
The next entries grew shorter, rougher.
“January 11. Food shortage. Kitchen says stores are cut. Workers are angry. Gold doesn’t buy much now because guards are hoarding what they can. Coins everywhere and nothing to spend them on. Medical says the lung sickness is spreading. Black phlegm full of blood. Workers that collapse on shift and get hauled away. Incinerators at research never stop, but there are too many. Captain says they're going to start shipping out the excess. Pretty sure it's too late.”
Chris felt Barry move beside him, shifting his weight with a restrained discomfort.
“January 20. Workers getting violent. Can’t blame them. They’re starving. They think we’re hiding food. Some guards are. One transport came in with thirty-nine new bodies. Same night, forty-six left under tarps. Difference is getting worse. Board upstairs doesn’t show names, just numbers. Easier that way.”
Chris paused at the final page. The last entry had been written with an unsteady hand, the ink smeared in several places.
“January 28. Got bit during yard break. One of the violent ones, feverish, erratic, black veins up his neck. Cleaned it. Doesn’t matter. Black lines are starting under the skin near the bite. They spread when I move my hand. I can feel something in there. If I report it, Medical takes me. I’ve seen where that ends.”
There was nothing after that.
Chris lowered the journal. His jaw was tight enough to ache. Around him the other two were silent. Wesker was unreadable, but Barry had his hand wrapped tight around the grip of his rifle, and Chris found he was as well, the sick feeling in his gut from reading that... that hint of just how bad it had become there, as the days and months went by.
“They knew. Some of them knew exactly what this was turning into.” His voice was tight, angry, "The rest just fell in line, got comfortable. Got mean. And the people in charge just... just let it happen!" He hissed venomously.
“Control yourself, Burton. This was a tragedy, but these men are likely long dead, and without any real proof all we have is conjecture.” Wesker said. His tone remained controlled, but the words landed with a hard edge. "Once we get out, then, perhaps we can see about getting justice, but for now, as much as I might hate it, this is a tertiary issue."
Chris stared at the journal. “That’s not enough.”
“No,” Wesker said. “It isn’t. Justice will be done, Redfield, but not if we die in this place.”
The answer hit like a hammer, but that was the reality, wasn't it. It was so hard to keep focused on that, when this place seemed to spit out nightmare after nightmare. Chris hated that he agreed, even as hard as it was to accept it. He closed the journal and secured it inside his pack.
“Yeah,” he said, voice low. “You’re right.”
Barry gave a reluctant nod. “Doesn’t sit right.”
“It shouldn’t,” Wesker replied. "Now let's get moving.”
They left the locker room through a service corridor and found the armory next. The sign on the door was scratched but readable, and for a moment Chris allowed himself to hope. That lasted until Barry forced the door and their lights swept the room.
It had been stripped bare.
Empty weapons racks lined the walls. Ammunition crates lay open across the floor, some overturned, most empty, all picked clean. A few loose casings glittered under the benches, but nothing usable remained. The cage doors had been cut, not unlocked. Someone had taken everything in a hurry, or many someones had taken it. In the last days of the mine, before everything was fully locked down, when the riots were in full swing and they were losing control, this was probably a prime target, so close to the barracks as it was.
By the time they got to it, the place was stripped clean, assuming there was anything left to take. Wesker found the log pinned under a crate lid and read quickly. “Stock depletion. Shotgun shells, nine millimeter, rifle ammunition, less-lethal rounds, riot gas. Entries go from routine issue to emergency withdrawal.” He flipped the page. “Final note says no resupply pending and all remaining ammunition transferred to the response teams.”
“Response to what?” Barry asked, as Wesker handed him the log.
Wesker shrugged, almost callously. “At this point, does it matter?”
No, no it didn't did it? That said, it read disturbingly close to their own armory roster, several items of which were things no civilian corporation should be able to get ahold of. But that was playing off the false assumption that it was something they cared about. If Barry or Chris had to guess, the answer to that was a comically resounding no, considering the hellscape they'd already uncovered.
The hall beyond the armory led to a barred door with a keycard reader mounted beside the frame. A sign above it indicated holding cells and exit access. The reader glowed now that the power had returned, steady and functional. Chris felt the first real bit of hope in his chest since they entered the wing, seeing it. It was a fragile thing, one quickly dashed as Wesker tried the blue card first. The reader rejected it with a red flash. He tried the yellow card. Same result.
Chris stared through the bars. The corridor beyond seemed to continue into the cell block. Somewhere past that, if the sign was honest, there was a way out.
“Try them again,” he suggested.
Wesker did. Red. Red. Chris struck the door with the heel of his hand, hard enough to rattle the bars. “Damn it.”
Barry glanced down the hall. “We are in the Security wing. We probably need the other keycard.”
“The head of security,” Wesker said. “Lets keep looking. If nothing else we might get lucky. We have been so far.”
Chris forced himself back from the bars. His frustration had nowhere useful to go, and every second spent feeding it was another second he was stuck in this god forsaken place. It built up, just a bit more, under the surface, roiling like a furnace in his chest, this whole misadventure having tested him over and over again, needling and poking at him, and he hated it. All he could do was follow the others, though. He had a job to do. He would do it.
Down the hall, the offices changed. The doors became heavier, and several had observation windows set into them, reinforced with wire glass. The first room had a table bolted to the floor, two chairs, and wall-mounted shackles. Chris’s light caught rust-red stains along the restraints, then across the table edge and chair legs. The stains were old, dark, and layered. Barry stepped in behind him and went still. Neither had to guess what the room had been used for.
The next room was worse. Hammers lay on a shelf beside crusty red nails, some bent, some still tacky with dark residue that had dried into the grooves. The table bore cut marks, dented places, and deep gouges along one edge. Another interrogation room held restraints on both sides of the chair and several loose teeth gathered near the floor drain, too many to have come from one mouth. Each was a new horror, a new hint at the level of depravity that had taken place here.
“What were they doing in here?” He asked, rhetorically, his mind mentally recoiling from the truth staring him in the face. It just confirmed what the journal had been hinting at, and it made him sick.
Barry’s answer came flat and no-nonsense. “They were torturing people in here.”
Chris grimaced and stepped back from the threshold. They kept moving until they reached a door marked Head of Security. The nameplate beneath it was smeared, but the title remained legible. Wesker opened it with his rifle held close and his shoulder angled to the frame. No attack came.
The office inside was almost fully overgrown. Mold covered the rear wall and climbed over the corners of the ceiling, thick enough to outline the furniture beneath it. Behind the desk sat what had once been a corpulent man, his remains sunk into a chair that had partly collapsed under him. Rot had eaten through the soft tissues, but the body’s bulk remained, suggested by the way the growth had formed around it. His skull had been blown open, the damage clear even under the mold. An empty pistol lay on the floor beneath his emaciated hand.
On the desk sat a red keycard and a leather-bound book.
Wesker took the card first. The face on the badge showed a fat, smiling man with a broad grin and small eyes. Bobby Johannson. Head of Security. The picture had survived cleanly enough that Chris could compare it to the corpse in the chair, though he wished he couldn’t.
“Found our card,” Barry said, bitterly. "Seems you called it, Captain."
Wesker picked up the leather-bound book and opened it. His light moved over the pages. The first look made him pause.
“What is it?” Chris asked.
“A record,” Wesker said. “The columns match the blackboard in the duty room, but this goes back months. There are dozens of entries here."
Chris stepped closer. The pages had the same five-column format: date, time, number, arrivals or departures, and difference. This time, the entries had notes beneath them. If the numbers were right, there had been hundreds, no thousands of people brought here, somehow completely undetected, and even more bodies removed.
“It was as we feared, gentlemen. This is a complete record of their incoming and outgoing victims, many of which seem to have been trafficked right past Raccoon. Most of which were from places where nobody would notice them going missing.”
Barry swore under his breath at the sheer scope of it. It had to be more than an illegal mining operation, not for these kinds of numbers. There had to be someone on the institutional level pulling a prodigious number of strings to just... make this disappear. It wasn't just the scope, either, but the speed that was staggering.
Chris looked at the book. Names were mostly absent, and sources were described in broad terms: slums, border pickups, homeless camps, detention transfers, private collections, purchased groups. Fresh bodies. Healthy bodies. Workers to replace losses.
Wesker turned another page. “Workforce at initial internal record, three hundred twelve. Later entries show increased procurement. Eight hundred. Fifteen hundred. Three thousand. Last total listed is just under six thousand.”
Both men stared at Wesker as he rattled it off. Six thousand people, hidden inside a mountain, worked until they collapsed, replaced by more bodies dragged in from places no one would notice or care to think about. It was a truly damning indictment of society that it had worked so well, that had they not been chasing Daniel Carter up here they likely never would have known, not until this nightmare spilled over out of the mountains like a tide.
Wesker continued, quieter now. “Note from Johannson: upper management wants production maintained regardless of attrition. Medical delays are affecting output. The replacement pipeline must stay ahead of losses. So long as payroll clears, I don’t care where procurement finds them. They’re undesirables anyway.”
No one spoke as the naked callousness in the words landed between them, hitting like a bomb that made Chris feel like the bullet the fat fucker ate was far too little. The room seemed smaller after that. Chris looked at Bobby Johannson’s grinning face on the red card, then at the corpse behind the desk. That was all that remained of the man who had counted living people in one column and dead people in another, who had watched the numbers climb and cared only that his paycheck cleared.
Wesker closed the book and packed it away, another nail in the coffin of whoever was running this place. Chris had thought of it as a hellscape before, but that was too small a description to truly encapsulate what had really happened here. The more he thought about it, the more he began to believe that if there was a Hell, a real one, this place had touched it, digging too deep and too far, they'd dug themselves into a place of genuine evil, and it had killed them all in an orgy of cruelty and violence.
They left the dead man’s office and marched back toward the barred door. There wasn't any meandering this time, just the need to get out of this place, as quickly as humanly possible. The red keycard worked on the first swipe. The reader flashed green, and the lock disengaged with a heavy clunk.
The cell block beyond the door was worse than Chris expected, and he had expected bad. The corridor was narrow, lined with barred cells on both sides. Several bodies lay in each one, emaciated and overgrown with mold, limbs tangled together where they had fallen. Some were curled against the bars. Others lay piled near the back walls. Their clothing hung loose over bones, and the mold had threaded through them until the bodies and the floor seemed fused together.
Chris counted without meaning to, the instinctive act doing little to give him any sense of comfort. Four in the first cell. Five in the next. Three beyond that, then six. Almost fifty in the dozen cells he could see, and those were only the visible ones.
Barry’s voice came low through his mask. “They were all just left there to die. Starving to death in cramped little cages.”
Chris didn't have anything to say to that, except perhaps to wonder if these people didn't get off easier than the ones left to the plague and the monsters. And wasn't that a terrible thought, Chris grimaced to himself. The idea that dying of starvation, or more likely dehydration, was a better way to go than to get caught up in whatever finally killed whoever had the misfortune to remain.
The cell block ended near a wall-mounted facility map sealed behind cracked plastic. Wesker cleared the grime with his glove and leaned close. Chris and Barry came in on either side. The exit route was marked in red. It led from the cell block into a barred exit corridor, then straight through to the security vestibule. A direct line. No more mazes or side trips or detours. Assuming nothing had blocked the most direct route, but at this point if it did he'd just be pleasantly surprised.
“We're almost out,” Wesker said. “But we need to move fast. We don't know how many of those things are wandering around now that the lights are on.”
“What are you thinking?” Barry asked. “Aggressive charge?”
Wesker nodded. “Yes. Spearhead formation.”
Chris checked the corridor ahead, then looked back at Barry. Barry gave one firm nod. Wesker did the same, and the three men moved toward the barred exit. The keycard reader beside it glowed brightly. Wesker swiped the security head’s card, and the lock opened.
The door swung into a hall full of Headless. They stood scattered along the route to the vestibule, some facing the walls, some swaying in the center of the corridor, several already stirred by the noise behind them. Wesker raised his shotgun, Chris and Barry coming up behind him with their rifles.
“Breakthrough! Breakthrough!” Wesker shouted.
They charged.
Wesker fired first. The shotgun blast took the nearest Headless in the lower chest and folded it sideways into the wall, its scythe arm cutting air where Wesker’s shoulder had been an instant before. Chris fired past him, a hard burst into another creature’s knees, dropping it into the path of the one behind it. Barry hit the third across the ribs, his 7.62 rounds breaking open the chest-mouth before it could lash its tongue.
The hallway became a narrow lane of rapid impacts followed by harried movement. Wesker drove the point, using the shotgun to disable anything directly in their path. Chris covered the left side with controlled bursts, aiming for legs, antlers, and open torsos. Barry anchored the right, his rifle fire striking with heavy, steady rhythm. They weren't killing every target, not even close. They just didn't have the time. They blew off limbs, broke joints, knocked bodies down, and kept moving before the monsters could recover.
A spinal tongue snapped across Chris’s chest and hooked the edge of his vest. He twisted into the pull, fired into the creature’s shoulder, and tore free as Barry’s next burst severed the tongue halfway along its length. A scythe arm slashed toward Wesker’s head. He ducked under it and drove his shoulder into the creature’s torso, then fired point-blank into its hip before stepping over the collapsing body. Barry nearly got caught when a Headless fell against him with its rib-mouth open, but Chris hit it from the side and knocked it off balance long enough for Barry to shove through.
It was a sprint of barely five hundred feet, but felt like miles, the trail of undead behind them barely managing to rise before they were well and truly past. There had to be a hundred of them, at least, but that didn't do much to slow the three STARS as they made their way through, shifting the point as one would drop back to reload while the other two kept the train going. They were doing well, too, making good progress, and that was the moment it started going wrong.
Like the fist of an angry god, the ground under them started to shake, with an ominous force, the sound of crashing and shattering coming from deep in the facility. The thunder came from behind them, and Chris couldn't help but glance back. He regretted that immediately as he spotted the Grafted burst out from the cafeteria doors as they sprinted past the junction. It tore through the frame and came into the hall with breakneck speed, black smoke and rot shaking from its massive body as it locked onto them again.
“Shit!” Chris snapped. He fired back at it while running, rounds hammering into its front to vanishingly little effect. The impacts tore wet holes in the outer growth, but the Grafted only lowered itself and gathered more momentum.
“Vestibule! In! In! In!” Wesker shouted, his boot crashing into the door with a vicious crack. The three men piled into the room and slammed the door shut behind them just as the creature started to charge in earnest. Barry grabbed the heavy cabinet that sat next to the door, a massive edifice made of rusted metal, and Chris didn't need to be told to help as he threw his weight against it. The thick cabinet hit the ground with a crash as the two pushed it against the door, before moving to grab a desk to pile on top. The impact hadn't come yet, but Chris could already feel it in his teeth, the certainty of it coming down the hall.
Wesker moved to the security gate after Chris and Barry shoved the blue and yellow cards into his hand, and he began running the set. Blue scanned green. Yellow scanned green. Red scanned green. Nothing moved.
Wesker scanned the blue card again.
The gate began to open.
Only a few inches.
Wesker’s head snapped toward the reader. The display flashed an instruction across the small screen as an automated voice crackled through a damaged speaker.
“Sequential authorization required. Maintain tandem scan until gate clears. Exterior exit will remain locked until security gate is fully open.”
“Fuck,” Wesker said, a hint of worry finally entering his voice.
The door behind them exploded inward, the paltry barricade launching itself across the room with a crash, barely missing the three men. It didn't open so much as vaporize. The Grafted’s long, clawed hand punched through first, scraped across the wall, and tore a strip of paneling free. Chris and Barry opened fire immediately. Wesker scanned the next card, then the next, keeping the gate moving in small grinding increments while the other two poured rifle fire into the creature’s arm and shoulder.
The bullets hit hard enough to shred the outer layer of flesh, but the Grafted didn't seem to even notice. It tried to shove itself through the ruined doorway, one side of its body wedged against the frame, too big to get through, then slammed its bulk forward again. All around the door the concrete cracked, lines of chalky dust running up the wall as it flexed dangerously. Barry fired into the joint of the reaching arm, chewing the flesh open until orange-lit fluid sprayed across the threshold. Chris put rounds into its head and upper mass, searching for anything that might slow it down. Nothing seemed to work. It kept coming.
“Keep fire on it!” Wesker said sharply, one hand pressing another keycard into the reader before spinning and firing several shotshells into the quivering mass of flesh. Over and over he emptied the shotgun into it, only pausing to spin and slam the next keycard into the reader.
Chris shifted enough to see the gate. It was rolling along, barely, and almost felt like it was actually slowing as it dropped into the floor. Who designed the thing, he didn't know, but he hoped they died screaming because at the rate the fucking thing was going they'd be dead long before it was low enough to get over.
Barry’s rifle ran dry. He changed magazines by feel, the fresh mag seating with a hard click before he drove his fire back into the Grafted’s flailing limb. The impacts chewed trenches through the outer growth and splashed orange-lit fluid across the busted frame, but the creature kept working its arm through the gap. Its fingers hooked around the broken doorframe, each claw digging into concrete and twisted metal as it started to pull.
Chris’s own weapon clicked empty half a second later. He dropped the spent magazine, seated another, and stepped in close enough that the heat of the creature’s body pressed through the threshold. His first burst raked across the hooked fingers, blowing chunks from the massive digits and snapping one claw loose in a spray of black rot. The damaged hand spasmed, then clamped down again, stronger than before, the ruined fingers grinding against the frame as the Grafted yanked again, the wall becoming perilously loose.
Barry shifted his fire lower, targeting the wrist and forearm where the limb narrowed through the doorway. Chris joined him, both rifles hammering the same point until the flesh peeled back and the bone underneath showed through in wet flashes. The Grafted answered by wrenching sideways. The doorframe shrieked, concrete cracked, and a section of wall tore free in a jagged slab that crashed down between them and forced Chris back a step. The creature pulled again, and more wall came with it.
The next card cycled, pulling the gate lower, almost enough for them to try vault over. There was no world in which they were going to wait a moment longer for the metal barricade than they had to. The Grafted slammed into the wall. A web of cracks ran across the surface around the doorway. Another hit widened the breach, and a chunk large enough for them to see the melted collection of faces the Grafted called a head peek back at them through the gaps.
"Where are we on that exit, Captain!?" Chris shouted, a hint of panic in his voice.
“Almost,” Wesker shot back, as he swapped to his rifle, the shotgun hanging empty.
“Define almost!” Barry shouted back as he drew his Python, the weapon cracking like lightning with every pull of the trigger.
It felt like hours, but was only really seconds when Wesker looked back and stopped firing immediately, instead his hands shooting out to hook around the lip of the gate, hauling himself up acrobatically as Chrtis and Barry followed with the kind of motivation that only the truly desperate could find. Wesker didn't wait for the other two as his boots pounded across the short span to the exit, and slammed the cards against the reader. In a second it flashed green, and the exterior door beyond the gate unlocked with a heavy mechanical snap.
At the same time as the door opened, the wall finally gave in, and the creature burst in, massive and weeping its molten orange blood, a roar so loud it shook the building as it finally breached the last barricade. The Grafted stood, its imposing figure blotting out the light overhead, its arms wide with its long, curving talons scraping the walls as it announced its triumph.
“Everyone out!” Wesker shouted, though he needn't have bothered as Barry and Chris shot past him. He slammed the door shut behind him, but had no illusions of it stopping the creature for long.
They piled through the exit as the creature forced itself through the vestibule behind them. Chris felt the rush of the icy air strike his gear, and then they were in the staging area beyond the wing, a broad exterior service space hemmed in by a steel fence with a heavy barred gate, and equipment left abandoned near the building wall. Spigots crisscrossed the ground, spewing steam up that was hot but not scaldling, washing away the snowfall and leaving an ocean of meltwater pouring through the drains below.
They ran for the gate as soon as they were in the open, but the Grafted had other plans. No longer stuck in a tight corridor it had the space to truly speed up, and with a thunderous crash it slammed clear through the door, taking the wall with it and covering the staging area in dust as the vestibule behind it collapsed, the force and the damage finally taking its toll and sending the entire front of the building crashing to the ground in a mountain of rubble, trapping the endless horde of Headless inside.
It also trapped them with the Grafted, no longer stuck in tight corridors and tiny rooms.
Barry turned with the grenade launcher and fired a flash grenade straight at it. The round detonated in front of its torso, the white light and concussion filling the staging area, but it barely slowed it. The creature charged through the fading burst and slammed into one of the machines that dotted the platform, crushing it and sending it skittering away to slam into another.
“Flash isn’t doing it!” Barry shouted.
“Swap to incendiary! We'll cover you!” Wesker ordered as he and Chris split up, pincering the creature as it recovered, their rifles roaring as it swiped wildly at the two. Barry cracked open the launcher and began loading napalm rounds with fast, practiced motions, the 40mm shells clattering on the ground as he pulled the spent shells from the revolver chamber. He let the last two flash rounds clatter onto the ground, as he finished the swap, and painstakingly hammered the Incendiaries into the gun.
Meanwhile the monster had decided it wanted a piece of Chris, and nothing Wesker was doing was managing to pull its focus from the man. The only thing keeping him alive was him employing every trick he knew just to keep ahead of the creature. Dancing between cargo crates and forklifts and barrels full of viscous goo, it was barely enough to keep the monster from hemming him in, and the cover would only last so long.
As soon as Barry snapped the launcher shut, he fired two flame rounds into the creature. Both struck hard, bursting across its back in a sheet of burning magnesium. Fire crawled over the Grafted’s shoulders and up through the fused bodies grafted into its mass. Black smoke poured off of it as the wretched scent of burning, rotten pork filled the air. The creature roared, not in pain, at least not enough to stop, but in fury, and drove itself across the staging area with an aimless, endless rage.
Wesker cut left. “Split! Crossfire! Keep it confused!”
Chris went right, Barry angling back near a concrete barrier while Wesker drew the creature’s front with rifle fire. The Grafted swung at him with a long, clawed arm, missing by inches as he moved away and fired into its head. Chris fired into its side, watching rounds strike through burning growth and vanish into meat that refused to fail. Barry hit it again with a napalm round, and the fire thickened across its chest and shoulders.
That got all of its attention as it locked onto Barry, breaking into a maddened charge.
“Barry!” Chris shouted.
Barry moved, but the creature’s charge forced him back hard, its claws tearing across the concrete barrier where he had stood, barely missing taking off the burly man's head from his shoulders. The creature was relentless, chasing after him with a singular desire to murder. Chris shifted for a better angle and caught sight of a large propane tank near the side of the building. It stood beside a service wall, marked with faded warning labels and connected by a heavy line that ran into the structure.
“Tank!” Chris shouted. “Propane tank by the wall! We lure it in and blow it!”
Wesker understood at once. “I’ll bait it.”
Before Chris could object, Wesker ran in danger close, rifle raised. He emptied round after round into the Grafted’s head and upper body, each shot drawing its attention to him. The creature swiped wildly, claws carving the air as Wesker fell back step by step, firing as he moved. Chris and Barry shifted to the sides, keeping clear of the line between Wesker and the tank.
The Grafted charged, putting all its weight into the wild assault. Wesker waited until the last possible second, then dove aside. The creature slammed into the propane tank with enough force to buckle the metal housing and wrench the line sideways.
Chris fired.
His first rounds punched into the tank. The second burst tore through the damaged valve. Gas began venting in a hard white stream. The flames covering the Grafted rolled across the escaping vapor. In an instant the staging area was engulfed in a deafening blast, one that rocked all three men nearly off their feet, as the staging area vanished in a massive explosion.
