The silence was tense as the two slipped into the Archives room, the restored power allowing the previously sealed door to slide open with the press of a button. What greeted them were rows of shelves stuffed with boxed files, each one swollen with age and coated in dust. The air felt stale and heavy, clinging to her skin with the smell of damp paper and mildew. Alyssa stood just past the threshold, bent forward with her hands on her knees as she struggled to breathe. She tasted copper and mold with every strained inhale, her lungs burning from the filth that she'd been breathing in for the last few hours. Her legs shook under her, refusing to steady, and the image of those shambling things stumbling after her replayed over and over. She kept seeing their arms reach out, hearing the scrape of their nails across the tile. Even now, safe for the moment, she felt their presence like a cold stain creeping along her spine.

  Alyssa forced herself upright, blinking through the dizziness as she looked toward Daniel. She could not stop staring at him. The armor he wore made him look more like a machine than a man, all sharp angles and heavy plates that caught the faint light. His visor cast a red glow that painted the dust in harsh tones, turning him into something surreal. She watched the deliberate rhythm of his movements as he loaded those boxy magazines, the mechanical clicks oddly soothing despite the situation. Every sound he made was controlled. Every motion precise. He was so calm it unsettled her. Compared to her shaking limbs and frantic breaths, he felt impossibly grounded, like he belonged here. The contrast made her feel small, fragile, and painfully aware of how close she had come to dying.

  She tried to draw a deeper breath, but her chest tightened painfully and she almost doubled over. It took everything she had not to collapse into another coughing fit. The panic she had carried into the room had not faded. It only shifted into something wet and painful, something that squeezed around her ribs and refused to let go. Her thoughts tangled in exhaustion and fear. Her throat ached. Her eyes stung. She kept telling herself she needed to stay focused, but her body disagreed. Every pulse through her temples reminded her she was one mistake away from collapsing entirely. That constant fight to stay upright made the room tilt at the edges, but she bit down on the fear and forced her feet to remain planted, refusing to let her own weakness swallow her here.

  The soldier ignored the room’s decay at first, dropping his pack onto the least-damaged table and pulling free one of his boxy magazines. The sharp, rhythmic clicks of him loading shells echoed in the cramped space, firm and steady, each one landing with a confidence she envied. Alyssa watched him from the corner of her eye, unable to look away. The sleek plate armor made him look broader and more solid than any normal person should look, each panel catching the weak light and throwing sharp lines across his silhouette. His visor cast a muted red glow that colored the dust around him and made it hard to read anything about the man behind it. Even the steady hiss of his respirator seemed too calm and even for the chaos they'd just fled.

  The longer she watched him, the more uneasy she became. She couldn’t decide which bothered her more: the things she’d just run from or the fact that this man looked completely prepared for all of it. His posture, his gear, the calm way he handled his weapon, it all suggested someone who’d been through dangerous situations before and managed to come out the other side. He didn’t seem surprised by any of this. He looked like he’d expected it. That thought alone tightened her stomach. Because this situation was surreal enough as it is. How does anyone prepare for it?

  She’d imagined military responders. Or the police. Or even other hikers trapped like her. She hadn’t imagined a man built like a walking tank dragging her through a collapsed hallway with an almost casual strength. He’d saved her life without hesitation. Not even a grunt of exertion. Just a firm grip, a shove through the door, and then silence as he secured the room. It left her caught between feelings of gratitude for saving her and fear about what was coming next.

  “You didn’t answer my question.” His voice cut through her spiraling thoughts. The modulation of the respirator made him sound detached, tinny and distant. Cold, in a word, and harsh. “Where the hell did you come from?”

  Alyssa flinched, her breath hitching. He didn’t raise his voice, but there was weight behind the question. His visor locked onto her, unmoving, the red glow catching faint reflections off the dusty floor. “This place was abandoned, and Umbrella went to pains to make sure it stayed that way.”

  She wiped her lips with the back of her hand, aware of how small she felt in front of him. “I could ask you the same thing, Mr. Red.”

  He tilted his head, confusion flickering in that subtle movement.

  “Mr… Red?”

  “Look, I doubt you’ll give me your name, and your gas mask’s eyes glow red. It’ll save you having…” Her voice cracked, then dissolved into a coughing fit so violent it made her vision blur. She bent forward with a strangled wheeze, clutching the desk to stay upright. The man straightened, half stepping toward her before her trembling hand signaled him to stop. She forced the coughs down, swallowing against the ache. “Having to lie to me,” she rasped once her voice cooperated. “My name is Alyssa.” She hesitated. “Thanks. For opening the door. You really saved my ass back there.”

  Her voice trembled despite her best effort to steady it. Fear still crawled through her mind, exhaustion pressed on every muscle, and the shock of nearly dying clung to her thoughts like it refused to let go. She felt worn down to the edge, as if one more hit to her nerves would make everything inside her give way.

  “Fine. Red, then.” He resumed loading the magazine with the same quiet precision. “The question still stands though. Why are you here, Alyssa?”

  She looked down at the floor, watching dust shift beneath her boot as she shifted her weight, trying to hold herself together long enough to speak. Her breath kept catching in her throat, the air scraping against the rawness left behind by fear and exhaustion. Daniel didn’t move. He didn’t interrupt. He didn’t even shift his stance. He just waited, silent and steady, letting her have the space she needed. That should’ve helped, but somehow his patience made it harder. It left her alone with the weight of everything she’d been running from, both outside these walls and inside her own head.

  When she finally managed to speak, the words came out in uneven pieces. She told him about the nightmares that ripped her awake night after night, the way they clung to her even in daylight, twisting her sense of time and reality. She talked about the gaps in her memory that terrified her, the moments she couldn’t explain, the creeping fear that she was losing her grip on her own mind. She admitted how people stopped believing her long before she stopped believing in herself. Her voice cracked more than once, and each break made her feel smaller, but she forced the words out anyway. She needed someone to hear them, even if that someone was a stranger behind a mask.

  She kept going, pushing through the trembling in her chest. She told him about her partner disappearing without a trace, how the police shrugged it off, how the silence afterward felt like a trap closing around her life. She told him how she’d felt drawn to this place in a way she couldn’t explain, like something inside her had been tugging her toward the mountain whether she wanted it or not. By the time she realized tears were sliding down her cheeks, she was already wiping at them uselessly with the back of her hand. Her voice wavered and thinned, the last of her strength spilling out with every word, until all she could do was stand there and breathe through the ache in her chest.

  Mr. Red hesitated as if unsure whether comfort was something he was allowed to offer. Then he set the magazine aside and placed his heavy gloved hand on her shoulder. The weight of it surprised her. It was gentle despite the armor, steadying in a way she didn’t expect from a stranger who looked like an armed nightmare. The cool metal across his knuckles pressed lightly against her skin through her shirt. The padded leather beneath the plates settled with deliberate care.

  “That’s it,” she whispered, the words breaking apart. “The whole stupid story. I came up here to try and… I don’t know. Find some peace. I almost got eaten by… by…”

  “Zombies?” he offered.

  She let out a broken laugh, wet and humorless.

  “Yeah, zombies. What the fuck is going on here? Between the weird plants and the walking dead and that guy with the axe…” She shook her head, unable to grasp the scale of what she’d seen.

  “It’s Umbrella,” he said simply.

  She stared at him, disbelieving. “That’s not an answer.”

  “It is,” he replied. “Funny enough, I came here for the same reason you did. Answers.” He adjusted the grip on his weapon, checking the chamber before setting it aside within easy reach. “Answers and proof. Umbrella’s worse than you know. Worse than anyone knows. This place? All the shit you’ve seen? They made it happen. Then they let it fester. God knows why.”

  His certainty hit her like a faint echo of something she couldn’t place. Something buried beneath fog and fear. Something that made her stomach twist.

  “That sounds insane,” she told herself, the thought sharp and instinctive. “Completely unhinged.” Under any other circumstance she would’ve dismissed everything he’d said as the ranting of someone deep in conspiracy forums or late-night talk radio. Umbrella creating zombies, letting an entire facility rot from the inside, turning people into monsters? It all sounded ridiculous, the kind of story she’d roll her eyes at during an interview and shut down with a single follow-up question.

  But the reality around her refused to let her laugh it off. She wasn’t in a newsroom or sitting across from someone spinning wild theories. She was standing inside a rotting, overgrown hospital, her clothes still damp with sweat and the residue of the things she’d run from. She’d seen bodies walking without life, plants growing in places they shouldn’t exist, and some... Thing with an axe big enough to split a car door in half hunting the hallways like some kind of slasher movie monster. Her disbelief didn’t hold up when every breath in this place felt wrong.

  The more she replayed his words, the more they slotted into the chaos she’d been stumbling through. None of it felt abstract anymore. None of it felt distant. It matched the nightmare she’d been living, the one she’d been trying to outrun. And that realization sat heavy in her stomach as she looked at him, because if what he said was true, and if this place was proof of it, then she wasn’t standing in the middle of some madman's fantasy. She was standing inside the evidence.

  “But… why?” she whispered. “What could they possibly gain from… from zombies!?”

  000

  Daniel looked at the woman, Alyssa, and he felt a deep well of pity in his chest as he watched her go through every emotion in the book, from skepticism, to curiosity, to outrage, to disgust, to skepticism again, and more, like a cycle that he wasn’t sure how to break her out of. She stood there with her shoulders hunched, fingers worrying the edge of the table, eyes darting between him and the ruined shelves like she was trying to find a version of reality that made sense. The red gleam of his visor probably did not help. To her, he figured, he looked like another monster that had wandered out of the dark. He shifted his weight slightly, the plates of his armor creaking in a low, familiar way, and let out a slow breath.

  Finally, he sighed. “Your guess is as good as mine. Money for making bioweapons? Some kind of immortality serum gone to shit? A bunch of psycho science nerds deciding ethics are for other people? All of the above?” He chuffed out a dry laugh.

  Alyssa looked at him funny, like she wanted to argue but couldn't find anything better to say. Her brows pinched together, lips drawn tight, and for a second she almost looked offended on behalf of common sense in general. Then her gaze slid away, like she was afraid of what agreeing with him might mean.

  “The point isn’t really why, I don’t think. It’s that they’re doing it, and they’re just… killing, and killing, and killing with this shit and they’re doing it with no regard for the people caught in the crossfire.” He said with a shrug, his heart not in the gesture.

  He traced the P90, fingers moving in practiced motions over the familiar lines of the weapon. The action steadied him. Talking about Umbrella stirred something sour in his gut, but handling the gun gave his hands something to do besides curl into fists. “One day something is going to pop off that they can't contain, infecting everything it touches until there's nothing left. That's how this ends if nobody stops them. So here I am.”

  The coldly sardonic statement hit Alyssa harder than she expected. She watched him in stunned quiet, feeling something in her stomach drop as the meaning behind his words settled in. He wasn’t just talking about some rogue experiment, or a single hospital gone wrong. He was talking about something much worse. Something that wouldn’t burn out on its own. Something that could roll straight over the world if nobody stood in its way. She saw it in the way he carried himself, the heaviness in his voice, the quiet certainty in his posture. This wasn't a theory for him. This wasn’t guesswork or fear talking. He spoke like a man who had already seen too much of the fallout and was bracing for the day it got worse.

  Alyssa’s throat tightened. She’d come here chasing memories and nightmares, expecting to maybe clear her name or just find some answers. Instead she’d walked straight into a problem so much bigger than her that it made her knees weak. And the quiet part was that this wasn't the first incident he'd encountered. That this wasn't the first time some strange horror show had consumed a place, and she was smart enough to see the writing on the wall. She had wandered into the path of a catastrophe already in motion, and now she was being dragged into the current.

  It was... it was too much. Too much to consider right now. Too much to focus on. Instead, she put it on the shelf and ignored it.

  “So you got the power running to try and tap into some of these old computers?” She asked, grasping onto something practical. “Because I dunno if you’ll get much out of this junk. Most everything here is trashed.”

  He rolled his shoulders under the weight of the armor and shrugged. “I’ve found a few things. Nothing damning, but enough that it paints a nasty picture. I still have some places to look, here and upstairs.”

  His eyes, hidden behind the visor, traced the room again out of habit, measuring exits, cover, any lingering movement that might mean trouble. When his gaze settled back on Alyssa, he took in the way she swayed on her feet. Even with the dose of green herb, she was still looking like hell, skin too pale and lips a little too dry. The constant coughing was… concerning, to say the least, and he knew the longer she stayed in this building without proper protection, the worse that was likely to get.

  “You should stay here. It’s not perfect, but it’s closed off from most of the overgrowth, and the pollen is thin here.” He said. “I can come back for you on the way back-”

  “No.” She cut him off before he finished.

  Her voice was still rough, but there was steel under it. “No, I can’t do that. I came here for a reason, Mr. Red. I need to see it through.” She said.

  Daniel stared at her for a moment, as if processing that. Behind the mask, his expression tightened. He understood that kind of stubbornness. He lived in it most days. “You… do understand that this place is full of monsters, right?”

  She met his question with a flat, unimpressed look, but he continued on. “I can’t protect you. The monsters here are lethal enough to me on my own, and I have armor, weapons and equipment tailored to dealing with them. No offense, but your cotton shirt and hiking jeans aren’t going to cut it, and you don’t have a-”

  “Gun?” she cut in, drawing her pistol.

  He paused at that, then huffed softly. “I was going to say a mask, but a gun would help.” Daniel sighed.

  Up close, he could see the way her hand trembled just slightly on the grip of the Ladysmith. Not from fear alone, he thought, but from fatigue. She was running on fumes, and she still wanted to walk willingly into the mess that had already almost killed her. He supposed he could respect that, even while he hated what it meant for her odds.

  “I know how to handle myself, Mr. Red. Though if you have some… bullets to spare?” She asked, the confidence giving way to sheepishness.

  He just held his hand out, palm up, fingers loose and steady, and she placed the Ladysmith into his hand.

  “Nine mill, standard chamber. I can’t give you any of my ammo, it’s all overpressure, but…” He mumbled, more to himself than to her.

  He reached into one of his pouches, digging around until he found what he was looking for. He pulled a handful of bullets out, then another, and piled them onto the table she sat at. The mixed brass clinked softly against the wood, a small, strangely normal sound in the middle of everything.

  “I pulled these off of a bunch of… hikers. They should work.” He said.

  She lit up in spite of everything, relief loosening some of the tension in her shoulders. “I ran into them too. There were a lot of them on the other side of the building.” She chimed in, as she started scooping up bullets and reloading her magazines, what few she had.

  Her hands moved with enough familiarity that he believed her claim about knowing how to handle herself. The motions weren’t smooth, exactly, but they were practiced, careful. She frowned in thought while she worked, eyes flicking briefly toward him as she continued. “I found some stuff about orders and some bits about their employer, a Doctor, who hired them to come here. Also thanks.”

  “Hmm.” He said, as if she were just confirming his own suspicions.

  In his head, he slotted that detail into the growing picture of what had happened here. Mercenaries made no real sense. Umbrella had its own private security forces, its own disposal teams, its own people trained to handle outbreaks on the quiet. Bringing in outside guns created loose ends the company never tolerated. Which meant these men weren’t here on Umbrella’s orders at all. They were here on the sly, answering to motives Daniel still hadn’t pieced together. He was well aware that Umbrella had its own loose ends and competitors. Hargreave was evidence enough for that, but that just asked the question as to what this Doctor Sundaram was hoping to accomplish down here.

  “Either way," He said, refocusing, "you’re taking your life into your hands. I hope you know that Alyssa.”

  She slid the last magazine into place, and the spare bullets into her pocket, before answering. “I do, I… I do, but I can’t let this go.” She said, tiredly.

  Her shoulders sagged with the admission, but her eyes stayed fixed on him. There was no wobble there, no uncertainty about the choice itself, just the fatigue of someone who’d had to make it over and over again in different ways. He understood, he really did. It would be hypocritical of him to deny her that, even if it would get her killed.

  “It’s your choice, but there’s still the other concern.” He said. "The way you've been coughing is a problem, and the air here was shit before all that toxic pollen got everywhere. “And I don’t have a spare mask.”

  The words made her wince. Her hand drifted unconsciously toward her throat, fingers brushing the skin as if she could feel the spores in the air. She coughed once, quiet and tight, and swallowed whatever fear tried to climb up with it. She still held her resolve, though. She didn’t look away.

  He hated backtracking, hated promising anything he wasn’t sure he could deliver, but there was little enough choice. Letting her tag along without at least trying to mitigate the risk would sit worse in his gut than going out of his way for a minute.

  “Lucky for you I know where to find one. Stay here, catch your breath. I’ll be back shortly.”

  And that was that.

  Alyssa watched the man go, the door hissing shut behind him with a weighty finality that made the room feel larger and emptier all at once. For a few seconds she just stood there, listening to the muffled echo of his boots fade down the hall. Then the quiet settled in, broken only by her own uneven breathing and the faint hum of the restored power.

  000

  Daniel sighed, counting down the shells he had left as he made his way back through the hallways he’d already cleared. The weight of the Saiga settled against his hands in a way that felt heavier than it should have. The shotgun usually steadied him, its bulk familiar, its kick something he could trust, but right now the comfort it offered was dulled. The situation with Alyssa gnawed at him more than he wanted to admit. He wasn’t second guessing himself, not exactly, but there was a pressure in his chest he didn’t care for. He wasn’t made for escort work. That much he knew. And dragging someone through this place wasn’t part of his plan.

  He stepped around a collapsed section of ceiling, boots crunching lightly over scattered plaster, and exhaled slowly inside the gas mask. The air hissed through the filters with each breath, warm against his face. He hadn’t lied when he told her she was better off staying behind. Every instinct he had told him that bringing someone unarmored and already struggling with the spores was going to get her killed. But she wasn’t a prisoner. She was here on her own terms, and he couldn’t force her to sit still any more than he could stop the creeping growth from pushing up through the floor.

  He rounded another corner, the dim light guiding him back toward the place he’d entered the hospital. Even with the pool of illumination from the old fixtures he’d powered back on, the corridors still looked like something out of a fever dream. The vines seemed thicker on his return trip, swollen with some wet sheen that caught the light at odd angles. Patches of wall where tile had once been were now obscured entirely by waxy leaves and knotted roots.

  "Goddamn it." The words pushed past his teeth without much heat. The frustration wasn’t aimed at her at all. It was the situation itself, the timing, the way everything seemed to converge into the same miserable pattern. She had walked into this place blind, dragged by circumstances she didn’t understand, and now he was the one retracing his steps to keep her alive long enough to get answers.

  He hated how familiar the situation felt, the way everything lined up in a neat little pattern that always ended badly for someone. People stumbled into places like this all the time in this world, unprepared, overwhelmed, pulled toward something they couldn’t quite explain or walk away from. Alyssa had ended up caught in that same pull, pushed into the thick of it long before she had any idea what she was dealing with.

  He stepped into a wider corridor where the overgrowth thinned just enough for him to recognize the path he had taken earlier. The hall was exactly as he had left it, every corner quiet, every shadow still. Nothing had shifted in his absence. No new sounds. No new movements. Even the foyer was empty save for the ruined corpses of the plant-men he'd burned, now passing them for the fourth time. Still, the quiet told him everything he needed to know: the route back had stayed clear.

  Good. He didn’t have the ammo to waste on repeat business.

  He reached the small storage alcove exactly as it had been described in the earlier sweep, nothing shifted and nothing disturbed. The locker door still hung open where he’d pried it loose, the hinges groaning softly when he nudged it aside. Low light caught on the scattered tools and debris inside, half-buried under dust and the damp grit left behind by the overgrowth. The industrial respirator lay exactly where he remembered it, tucked behind two rougher masks that had seen better days. He retrieved the sturdier respirator first, checking the edges of the face seal with a practiced sweep of his thumb. It wasn’t perfect, but it was functional, and the replacement filters beside it looked good, if old. It would keep Alyssa breathing safely for now.

  He rummaged deeper and found three more spare filters that were still sealed. The outer plastic had yellowed slightly, but the contents were intact. He slid them into a pouch before pausing, glancing down the hall. Something scraped lightly across tile somewhere in the distance.

  He stilled.

  The noise came again. A light, skittering sound.

  Daniel raised the Saiga, shifting his stance. The corridor was quiet except for the buzzing lights, but the sound was unmistakable. He tracked it to a vent shaft partially hidden by a sagging curtain of vines. Inside the opening, something pale and many-legged pulled itself deeper into the shaft, pincers clicking once before disappearing.

  He lowered the barrel.

  “Not worth the effort,” he muttered.

  Once he was sure the thing had fled, he resumed searching. He found nothing else worth taking, but that was fine. He had what he came for.

  He quickened his pace but didn’t rush. Part of him wanted to get back before Alyssa lost her patience and wandered off. The other part hoped she hadn’t used the time to talk herself into running ahead. The last thing he needed was to chase her through this maze.

  As he walked, the unease he’d felt earlier crept back in. It wasn’t fear and it wasn’t nerves. It was the tight, faint pressure of knowing he’d have to double back through all this again on the way out, only with another person trailing behind him. That changed the way he looked at every corner, every exposed vent, every spot where the growth piled thick along the floor. Alone, he could move fast, cut quiet, and slip through gaps without thinking twice. With Alyssa, he’d have to slow down, clear wider arcs, and make room where there wasn’t any.

  He adjusted his grip on the Saiga as he walked. Not because he expected something to leap at him, but because planning around someone else forced him to look at the space differently. Routes he would normally take without hesitation suddenly didn’t look safe enough. And the idea of leaving her behind wasn’t an option, not now that she’d made up her mind to follow him.

  He reached the stairwell and moved up quietly, boots finding the steps he knew wouldn’t creak. The air shifted slightly as he climbed, warmer on the second floor where the restored power gave the halls a faint hum. He stepped out past the nurses’ station, following the familiar path toward the Archives. The light changed a lot of things, chasing away the dark and the shadows, but he checked the hallway out of habit anyway, gave the quiet one last glance, and then stepped into the Archives room.

  Alyssa sat where he’d left her, hunched slightly over the table, looking stressed and exhausted. She looked up at him immediately. Relief washed over her face so quickly he almost felt guilty for taking as long as he had.

  “Found it,” he said simply as he reached into his bag, pulled out the industrial mask, and set it gently on the table in front of her. Then he placed the spare filters beside it.

  Alyssa stared at the mask like it was a lifeline.

  He didn’t blame her.

  “It’s not great,” he admitted. “But it’ll keep the worst of the spores out. Filters should last a while if you’re careful.”

  She let out a breath she’d been holding for far too long and took the mask with both hands.

  For the first time since meeting her, Daniel saw the tension in her shoulders ease by a noticeable degree.

  “Thanks,” she said quietly.

  He nodded once.

  Then he stepped back toward the door, ready to move deeper into the building.

  “Last chance,” he said without looking at her. “Are you sure about coming?”

  “Yes, Red,” she answered, voice steadier now. “I’m sure.”

  He didn’t sigh this time.

  “Alright. Let’s go.”

  000

  True to what he’d seen before, most of the hall was swallowed by wild growth, but seeing it with the restored power did little to improve the view. The faint glow from his visor traced the nearest knots of vine and the slick surfaces where the plant matter pushed through the walls, while the weak overheads added only enough light to show how uneven and constricted the corridor had become. Some fixtures flickered, others stayed dark entirely, leaving long stretches where the growth pressed tight against the ceiling and walls. The clearer visibility didn’t soften the hostile feel of the place. If anything, it emphasized how completely the overgrowth had taken hold, turning the passage into a damp, constricting channel of pulsing vines and warped tile.

  Daniel walked a half step in front, boots placing carefully between the worst of the roots and holes. He had seen this section before, but the view with the lights on felt almost like a different place. The vines crawled across the walls in tangled ropes, gripping cracked tiles and peeled paint, and in some spots they bulged out like tumors, swollen with slick nodules that pulsed faintly with trapped moisture. The smell was stronger here too. A thick, wet stink that reminded him of rotting vegetation and standing water, undercut by a sharp, chemical tang that permeated the undergrowth. Almost like an ammonia stink that cut its way through his mask, crawling into his mouth and down his throat.

  Behind him, Alyssa stayed as close as she dared without crowding his back. The industrial mask he’d given her sat snug on her face, the elastic straps digging into her hair. Her breaths sounded louder in her own ears now, filtered through rubber and plastic, but at least they didn't burn as much. Every inhale still tasted stale, but the raw edge in her lungs had dulled. Her eyes, however, had nowhere to hide. She took in the glistening walls, the way the vines seemed to creep in slow motion, and the sight of the floor made her throat tighten.

  The floor was almost worse than the walls. The tiles had been punched through again and again, leaving holes of varying sizes that led down into dark, cramped tunnels just wide enough for something horrible to squeeze through. The bodies of the giant insects Daniel had put down earlier lay scattered around those openings. Their chitinous shells were dull and cracked, limbs splayed at unnatural angles, thick sections of their bodies split where rounds had torn through them. Their antennae and pincers had gone still, but the thought of how fast they had moved remained fresh in his mind.

  “What… what are they?” Alyssa whispered quietly as the two sidled around one of the massive earwigs, her eyes wide.

  Her voice sounded small in the hallway, even with the slight muffle of the mask. She kept herself angled away from the corpse, trying not to brush against it, but it was impossible to avoid looking at the thing entirely. Its body was nearly as long as her leg, flattened and segmented, ending in wicked pincers that looked like they could cut through bone. Dark fluid had leaked out around it and seeped into the cracks in the tile.

  “No idea.” Daniel shrugged. “Quick though, and those pincers are nasty. You didn’t see any on the other side?”

  Alyssa shook her head quickly and he chuffed a laugh.

  “Lucky then. One of these little fucks almost took my leg.”

  From behind, Alyssa looked down and noticed the tattered pant leg, the fabric torn and darkened around his calf. She didn't see any blood, and he walked like it didn't bother him, but the gap at his lower leg told its own story. She bit back a fresh wave of anxiety as she looked back up at the man’s broad back.

  “I’ll… keep an eye out.” She finished, somewhat lamely.

  “Do that,” he said, tone dry and sardonic.

  They moved on, picking their way between the holes and bodies. Alyssa tried to keep her eyes on Daniel’s shoulders, using his steady pace as something to anchor herself to. The hall felt like it was closing in, the mix of light and shadow playing cruel tricks on her nerves. Every time a vine shifted under the weight of its own growth, she flinched, bracing for another creature to come tearing out of the dark. Her mind grabbed at any scrap of normalcy it could find and came up mostly empty.

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  Daniel, for his part, kept his attention split between his minimap, his ears, and the corridor ahead. The Gridlink’s projection inside his visor showed him the path he had mapped earlier, the rough outline of walls and doors traced in faint lines that shifted as he moved. The little marker tracking his position edged closer to the Surgery wing. Nothing new had appeared on the overlay, but he knew better than to trust that completely. The plant growth made clean mapping difficult, and there was always the chance something had crawled in from an unmarked shaft after his last sweep. He kept the P90 at a relaxed low ready, muzzle angled toward the floor but never far from where it needed to be. He had been tempted to keep hold of the Saiga, but his slugs were running lean, and he wanted to save the stopping power.

  Alyssa’s footsteps scuffed lightly behind him, uneven but determined. He could hear the occasional faint tap as she shifted her weight, careful not to get too close to the holes. She was scared, that much was obvious, but she was still moving. Still following. He'd honestly been expecting her to fold, at least a little bit. Some part of him respected that she hadn't.

  The Surgery room loomed before them at the end of the hall, its heavy door set into the wall like the entrance to a vault. The sign above it was stained and partially obscured by creeping vines, but the faded letters were still just legible. Daniel slowed as they approached, eyes scanning the ceiling and walls for anything out of place. The locks had been disengaged when he restored power, and now the indicator panel beside the door glowed a tired green. He shifted his grip on the handle and leaned in.

  He pushed the door open, the hinges protesting with a low groan. The air that escaped from inside smelled stale and faintly metallic, tinged with the sourness of old disinfectant and something earthy beneath it. The lights inside flickered on with a delayed buzz, illuminating the Surgery Prep room beyond.

  The walls were lined with tall metal lockers, many of their doors ajar. Some hung crooked from broken hinges. Most of them still held scrubs, surgery shoes, and gloves, all of it yellowed or flecked with mildew from the humidity. Two large sinks dominated the far wall, their basins stained and clogged with debris. A few tables lay on their sides or half folded, wheels twisting uselessly as if someone had shoved them without care in a hurry. Medical tools were scattered across the floor, mixed in with the creeping shrubbery that had pushed its way up through cracks in the concrete. Scalpels, clamps, broken syringes, all half swallowed by encroaching roots.

  The concrete underfoot was a cracked and splintered mess as roots slithered up from between the walls, floor and ceiling. In some places they had forced the floor tiles upward entirely, leaving jagged ridges that would catch an unwary foot. The pattern of the growth told Daniel that the plant’s heart, whatever counted for a central mass in this thing, sat deeper in the structure. This was just one of the many places its influence bled through.

  Alyssa stepped inside after him and paused, eyes roaming over the scattered uniforms and abandoned tools. It was easy to imagine this room full of people once, doctors and nurses moving in and out between surgeries, changing clothes, washing up. The thought made her chest ache in a way she could not quite name. The silence now felt thick, like the air was holding its breath.

  “Stay close,” Daniel said quietly. “Watch the floor. Roots like to hide trip hazards.”

  She nodded, even though he didn't look back to see it. “Got it,” she murmured, voice low.

  He gave the prep room a slow, methodical sweep. He nudged locker doors open with the muzzle of his P90, checked behind overturned tables, and prodded at suspicious clusters of vines with the toe of his boot, ready to pull back at the first sign of anything moving that should not. Aside from the ever present plant growth, nothing in the room reacted. No shamblers lurched out from behind the lockers. No insects skittered out from the vents. Just the creak of metal and the quiet rasp of their breathing.

  From his map, Daniel knew this led towards the head doctor’s office, and he hoped it would be a better showing than the Archives. Nothing there had been worth anything, the most recent records being a decade old, or more. Worse, the PC in there had been just as decrepit, and his check of the hard drive revealed that it had long been destroyed by the creeping plants. The Head Doctor’s office was, if nothing else, a better chance for finding something usable.

  He paused near the far end of the prep room, where a second door waited, half swallowed by vines that curled around the frame. The sign on it had been partially obscured, but he could still make out enough letters to recognize it as leading toward the observation and office cluster. He reached up and brushed some of the thinner growth aside with the back of his glove, feeling the faint give of living tissue underneath.

  "We can go through here to get to the head doctor's office. The surgery theater is connected to it through a back hallway." He rumbled as he moved, Alyssa caught in his wake.

  “Why does he have an office directly off the primary surgery?” Alyssa asked quietly, more thinking aloud than expecting an answer. “Is that… normal?”

  “Not really,” Daniel said. “Most places keep admin and cutting rooms a little more separate.” He studied the door for another second. “But then again, it's Umbrella.”

  The two words carried a lifetime of implication. Alyssa exhaled through her mask, the sound rough.

  He didn't voice the rest of his thoughts aloud, but it settled in his mind all the same. Probably wanted to have a personal hand in whatever horrors the company got up to. It was exactly the kind of arrangement he would expect from someone who wanted to oversee something ugly firsthand, close enough to watch every cut and stitch without having to walk far.

  He adjusted his grip on the P90 and stepped toward the door.

  “Stay behind me,” he said, and then reached for the handle.

  000

  The surgery theater had been built to impress once. That much was obvious, even buried under rot and overgrowth and the stink of death. It was a broad, circular room cut deep into the second floor, the tile sloping gently down toward a central operating platform surrounded by a shallow ring of steps. The walls rose high above the floor and curved inward, crowned by a ring of observation windows that wrapped around the upper edge of the room like a band of dead eyes. Those thick panes of glass had been set into darkened recesses, the lights behind them long extinguished, so from below they looked like black, empty squares. One-way mirrors, Daniel guessed, the same kind that let administrators and visiting suits watch surgeries without getting their hands dirty.

  The overhead fixtures that had once thrown bright, clean light onto the operating floor now flickered weakly or stayed cold. A single examination lamp hung over the central table, the housing cracked and canted off to one side. Its bulb managed a sickly glow that pushed back some of the gloom, turning the metal surfaces below into dull silver streaked with old stains. The rest of the room was caught in uneven shadow, broken by scattered pools of light from the environmental system Daniel had reawakened when he restored power.

  Every part of the theater carried a layer of grime and age. The walls were streaked with mildew and discoloration, paint bubbled and peeling where moisture had seeped in. In some places the plant growth had forced its way in through stress fractures, thin roots threading down from high cracks near the windows or snaking out from broken tiles along the lower edges. They were not as thick here as in the halls, but they were present, clinging to corners and seams like the first signs of an infection that had not yet reached full bloom.

  The floor told the real story.

  Bodies lay strewn throughout the theater, every one of them dressed in the same mix of gear he had already seen on the hired guns in the rest of the hospital. Tactical vests, mismatched fatigues, old surplus boots, foreign makes of rifles and shotguns scattered near nerveless hands. Whoever had hired them hadn't cared about anything but numbers and firepower. It hadn't saved them.

  Some of the mercenaries lay where they had fallen, slumped against the lower ring of steps or sprawled near the central table. Others looked as if they had been dragged, limbs extended at odd angles, backs arched over railings, faces turned toward the ceiling with vacant eyes filmed over in a milky gray. Several had been arranged in a rough, grisly pattern around the operating platform, bodies laid out in a loose circle. Whether they had collapsed there or been moved afterward was hard to tell. The dried blood and plant growth undercut any clean narrative.

  The wounds were worse.

  Every injury, every kill, belonged to the same brutal hand. Deep cleaving cuts had taken arms off at the shoulder. Gashes split torsos open from collarbone to hip. Ribs were crushed inward and skulls caved where impossible force had come down on them. Some wounds still held the faint, curved impression of the axe’s edge, as if the bone itself had remembered the shape that destroyed it.

  He recognized that pattern. He had seen it on the bodies outside.

  Near the base of the steps, one mercenary lay with his chest opened almost completely, ribs pried apart like the lid of a box. Something green and fibrous had begun to grow inside the cavity, winding around his spine and through the collapsed lungs. Another man lay facedown on the operating platform itself, his legs hanging off the edge. His back had been split diagonally, the cut so deep that vertebrae gleamed through torn muscle. The back of his helmet was missing entirely, shards of composite and plastic embedded in the gore.

  Here and there, smaller details caught the eye. A hand that still clutched a useless empty pistol. A severed limb tangled in a mass of vines. A broken flashlight lay crushed beneath one of the bodies, its casing split and the bulb shattered, as if someone had fallen on it mid-struggle. A shotgun buckled in half where something stronger than a man had stomped on it.

  Alyssa stopped just inside the doorway with Daniel and stared, her breath catching behind the filter of the mask. Even with her face half hidden, he could see the way her eyes widened and stayed that way, the light from the overhead fixtures reflecting in them. She had seen bodies already tonight. She had run past more horror than anyone should ever have to. But this was different. This was slaughter laid out in deliberate, awful detail. It felt less like a battle and more like a ritual, one that made a sick kind of sense, when he thought of all the altars he'd found.

  They stayed there for a few seconds, just taking it in.

  Daniel’s gaze moved from the central table to the ring of windows above and back again, and the more he took in, the more the place felt wrong in a way that went past bloodshed. This was an Umbrella hospital. Nothing here had ever been innocent. The theater had been built to focus attention on the patient and the surgeon, to make every slice and incision visible from every angle, a perfect stage for whatever experiment or demonstration some ambitious bastard wanted to drag an audience into. He could picture it too easily: a room full of corporate vultures watching through the one?way glass while some poor fool on the table was peeled apart in the name of research. God only knew how many bodies had been laid out here, carved open at the whims of the monsters who’d run this place. Now it wasn’t a center of medicine or a place of healing. It was a pit full of corpses, the final result of whatever nightmare they’d unleashed.

  “Stay sharp,” he said quietly.

  His voice came out low and flattened by the respirator, but Alyssa nodded anyway, her hands tightening around her pistol. They stepped forward together, leaving the threshold of the prep room behind.

  Moving into the theater felt like stepping down into a bowl. The tile underfoot sloped more noticeably as they descended, feet scuffing against small fragments of debris and loose shell casings. The air grew denser near the floor, thick with the layered smells of old blood, disinfectant residue, and the vegetable rot of the creeping plant life. Each inhale carried a mix of copper and damp earth, dulled by the filters in their masks but not erased.

  Daniel threaded his way between the bodies with deliberate care, keeping his center of mass low, P90 ready at his shoulder. He didn’t bother trying to avoid looking at the dead. He catalogued them instead, because that meant his mind stayed on angles and lines of fire rather than on the carnage itself. He noted who had died with their rifles raised and who had died trying to run. He noted where bullet impacts had chewed into the walls and where the tile had been crushed by something heavy slamming down from above.

  Alyssa followed in his wake, placing her feet where his had just been, like she was tracing his path a beat behind. The central platform drew her eyes again and again. Up close, the main surgical table looked like every operating surface she’d ever seen in photographs and medical dramas, only wrecked. The straps hung loose, buckles snapped. The fitted mattress was torn open in several places, stuffing dragged out and left in clumps along the floor. A stand that had once held IV bags lay on its side, its pole bent at a sharp angle.

  One of the mercenaries lay directly beside the table, his arm reaching toward it, fingers curled inward like he’d been trying to pull himself up when something cut him down. Alyssa’s stomach clenched as she stepped past him, careful not to touch the body, her boot sliding just shy of a dried smear of blood.

  “This is…” she started, then trailed off. There wasn’t a word for it that didn’t feel too small.

  “Bad,” Daniel supplied. “Yeah.”

  He kept moving until they were near the middle of the room. From there, the full shape of the theater settled into clearer focus. The observation windows ringed the upper wall in a complete circle, each one framed by dark molding. Some had hairline fractures in the glass. Others were intact but filmed over with grime. The angle of the glass and the lighting made it impossible to see anything behind them. To anyone standing below, the gallery was just a line of opaque black rectangles.

  He didn’t like it.

  Alyssa followed his gaze upward. Her shoulders hunched a little more as she stared at the windows, suddenly feeling far more exposed than she had a moment before. The room that had looked like a pit from the doorway now felt like a stage.

  “That’s a lot of places to watch from,” she said quietly.

  “Yeah,” he replied. “And not a lot of cover from this side.”

  He let his eyes track slowly around the ring, searching for any hint of movement. A flicker of motion, a glint of reflection, anything that might indicate they weren’t alone. For a long moment, there was nothing. Just the stillness of the dead and the faint hum of struggling electrical systems.

  His minimap told him what he already suspected. The observation deck wrapped around the theater on what counted as the third floor, connecting back into a corridor that led toward the head doctor’s office and a cluster of administrative rooms. There were stairs leading up on the far side of the wall, out of sight from where they stood. If the doctor had wanted to oversee whatever madness had happened here, he would’ve had the perfect vantage point.

  Daniel shifted his stance, nudged a spent rifle casing aside with his boot, and kept listening. The theater was too big, too open, too visible. He didn’t like staying in one place. He definitely didn’t like staying in one place surrounded by glass he couldn’t see through.

  Something in the air felt wrong.

  It wasn’t a sound at first. It was the lack of one. The distant groan of the building’s bones, the creak of settling walls, even the faint crackle of old wiring in the vents seemed to draw back and hold its breath. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled under the hood.

  “Red?” Alyssa asked.

  “Something’s off,” he replied.

  She didn’t ask what. She tightened her grip on the Ladysmith and tried to follow his lead, forcing herself to breathe slow and controlled, eyes tracing the paths his gaze took.

  He watched the windows.

  For a heartbeat, nothing changed.

  Then a silhouette moved behind one of the panes.

  It was only a suggestion of shape at first, a darker shadow against the black. Broad shoulders. A hunched outline. The faint impression of something long and heavy held in one hand. He caught it at the top of his vision and snapped his attention fully toward it.

  “There! On the upper ring!” he said sharply.

  Before Alyssa could track what he’d seen, the theater exploded with sound.

  The pane directly above them shattered outward with an ear splitting crack, the force of the impact sending thick chunks of glass and ragged shards spraying into the space below. The sound rolled around the chamber and hit them from every angle, a crash followed by the high, shrill tinkling of smaller fragments raining down. Alyssa flinched backward, throwing an arm up over her head out of instinct. Daniel stepped in front of her without thinking, shoulders hunching slightly as glass pattered off his armor.

  Something huge dropped through the fractured frame.

  The Axeman fell from the height of the observation gallery like a dropped executioner’s blade, hooded, broad, and wrapped in the same filthy pants Daniel remembered from before. The plant growth that had taken root in his torso bulged and twisted beneath the cloth, a mass of pulsing green tumors pushing against his distended skin and leaking faint, glowing sap where the flesh had torn. His boots slammed into the operating platform with a heavy double impact that made the metal frame groan and the surrounding bodies jolt.

  He landed in a low, hunched crouch, free hand slamming into the table to steady himself as the axe he carried swung downward with the momentum. The head of the weapon was a brutal wedge of stained steel, its cutting edge nicked and darkened with old gore. Thick vines wound around the haft and along his arm, anchoring the weapon to him as if the plant itself refused to let it go.

  For an instant, the Axeman’s head lifted, the hood tilting just enough for Daniel to glimpse the ruined lower half of his face and the glistening plant mass that had erupted from his abdomen. The air around him seemed to buzz faintly, like the room itself recognized the thing that had entered it.

  The Axeman had come.

  Daniel didn’t waste breath on a curse. He yanked Alyssa sideways, shoving her toward the slope of the steps, and brought the P90 up in the same motion.

  “Move!” he barked.

  The first burst caught the Axeman squarely in the chest. The 5.7 rounds hammered into his torso in a tight cluster, punching through cloth and meat and bursting several of the swollen growths clustered there. Green fluid sprayed in short arcs, spattering across the operating table and nearby tile. The impact staggered the big man backward a step, shoulders jerking with the force, but he didn’t go down. He let out a guttural, muffled roar that vibrated in the air more than it carried as sound, then surged forward.

  “Jesus Christ,” Alyssa whispered, stumbling down two steps as she tried to get out of the line of fire. Panic flared hard and hot in her chest. The man- the thing- in front of her didn’t move like something that should exist.

  The Axeman closed the distance with frightening speed, far faster than he’d moved when Daniel first saw him in the garden grounds. His long strides ate the space between them in seconds, the axe coming up in a smooth, terrible arc driven by both hands.

  Daniel backpedaled, boots skidding slightly on a patch of slick tile, and fired again. He walked the stream of rounds up from the Axeman’s stomach to his shoulder, chewing through robe and plant flesh alike. More of that phosphorescent sap flew, splattering across the nearest mercenary corpse and dripping down over exposed bone. Holes appeared in the Axeman’s clothing, widening into ragged gaps that showed glimpses of pale, scarred skin and the writhing green mass underneath.

  The axe came down where Daniel had been a heartbeat before. The blade hit the tile in front of him with a crack, sending a spiderweb of fractures racing outward. Chips of ceramic and concrete jumped from the impact. The force of the blow rattled through Daniel’s knees even without contact. If that had hit him square, the armor might’ve slowed it. It wouldn’t have stopped it.

  He pivoted away, keeping his shoulders square to the target, and fired another controlled burst into the Axeman’s leading leg. The rounds punched into meat and plant flesh just above the knee. The leg buckled for half a second, the big man dipping with the hit, but he caught himself, one massive hand slamming into the floor to steady his weight. The axe scraped across the tile as he dragged it back into guard.

  Alyssa, halfway down the steps now, forced herself to draw a bead on the Axeman’s side. Her hands shook, but the muscle memory from long hours on the range kept her grip steady enough to fire. She squeezed the trigger of the Ladysmith, sending a shot into his flank. The nine millimeter round struck the slick resin coating his exposed skin and barely sank in, deflected more than absorbed, doing little more than spitting up a thin mist of glowing fluid.

  The Axeman didn’t react.

  She fired again. And again. The reports of her pistol cracked around the theater, sharp and small against the deeper rattle of the P90. She saw impacts, saw little flares of dark mist and sap, but compared to the effect of Daniel’s bursts, her shots looked like mosquito bites hitting a bull.

  “Red!” she shouted, her voice desperate, “Red, this isn't working!”

  The Axeman pivoted, a startlingly smooth movement for something his size, and swung the axe in a sweeping backhand arc that crossed the space where Daniel had been a moment earlier and continued toward the base of the steps. The steel edge cut through one of the dead mercenaries as if he wasn’t there, cleaving the corpse almost in half and sending the upper portion sliding away in a wet slump. The follow-through of the swing took the blade within inches of Alyssa’s chest.

  "Find something heavier! One of these guns should still work!" His voice carried over the hissing snap of the P90, the Axeman seemingly entirely uncaring about her, his swings wide and vicious as he chased the armored man around. One slash passed dangerously close to her, missing her on the backswing just barely.

  She felt the wind of it, a sudden rush of displaced air that grazed the front of her jacket, and dropped back on instinct, hitting the steps hard enough to knock the breath out of her. Chips of tile and a spray of dried blood dusted her mask as the axe buried itself in the floor behind her. Scrambling, she grabbed the first gun she could find, a big boxy thing that looked intimidating. Turning, she braced it like she'd seen in the movies, and pulled the trigger. It clicked! Empty!

  "Shit!" She growled, as Daniel shifted angles, working to keep the Axeman’s attention on him and not the woman on the steps. He fired another burst into the man’s shoulder, trying to shred the joint. Rounds punched through resin and into meat, snapping the limb slightly off line. The hand holding the axe didn’t release, but the next swing came a fraction slower, a fraction less precise.

  “Get wide!” Daniel snapped. “Make him split focus!”

  Alyssa sucked in a ragged breath, scrambled sideways on hands and knees, and then forced herself back up into a crouch along the far curve of the seating ring. Her heart hammered so hard she could feel it in her throat, but she moved anyway, circling to the Axeman’s left. Her boots slipped once on a smear of old blood, nearly dropping her, but she caught herself on a railing and kept going. She tried a shotgun next, but it was broken, bent, useless!

  The Axeman followed Daniel with a single-minded intensity, a focused hatred.

  He came at him in short, brutal rushes, closing the distance whenever Daniel tried to open it. The axe rose and fell in heavy, deliberate arcs that carved chunks from anything they hit. An overturned rolling tray cart vanished under a blow, crumpling into twisted metal. A mounted monitoring arm snapped in two and whirled away, torn from its bracket. Every strike that missed Daniel still did damage, reshaping the room around them.

  Daniel used what cover there was. He ducked behind the central table once, using it as a half second of obstruction to reload, hand slapping a fresh magazine into the P90 with automatic speed. The instant the bolt snapped back he came back out and put another string of rounds into the Axeman’s chest and neck. The hood jerked with the impacts, a spray of sap and blood fanning out behind the big man. One of the rounds punched into the side of his face, tearing away a chunk of cheek and exposing teeth and plant tissue underneath, and for a moment, Daniel caught a glimpse of the horror under the mask, with a face that looked more like a venus flytrap than a human's, a ghastly eye bulging from the side of a vertical mouth..

  The Axeman roared again, louder this time, the sound distorted and wet. He slammed his boot onto the edge of the operating table and kicked. The heavy frame skidded across the floor, metal shrieking, forcing Daniel to throw himself aside to avoid being crushed between it and the steps.

  Alyssa, now on the opposite side of the room, kept moving. Her eyes darted across the mess of bodies and scattered gear until she spotted an MP5 half?buried under a dead merc’s arm. She recognized it instantly. She’d covered a police demonstration years back when the RPD had shown off their newly acquired sub-machineguns, and the memory hit fast and sharp. She scrambled toward it, slipping once on the blood, then yanked the weapon free. Bracing it the way she’d seen the officers do, she aimed at the Axeman’s broad side and squeezed the trigger. The MP5 barked to life, a controlled burst peppering the monster’s torso, the shots chewing into the sap?coated flesh with far more force than her handgun ever managed. The kick was enough to almost send the gun leaping from her hands, but she held on until it clicked empty.

  One of her rounds struck the Axeman’s left elbow from behind, punching into the tendons there. The arm twitched, the axe dipping slightly in mid-swing. It still came in, still forcing Daniel to duck under it, but that small deviation gave him half a heartbeat more room to maneuver.

  He took it.

  Daniel stepped into the Axeman’s guard instead of away, snapping the P90’s stock tight against his shoulder and jamming the muzzle up toward the underside of the hood. He squeezed the trigger in a controlled, upward rake, sending a burst of rounds through the lower jaw and into the skull. Bone fragments and shredded plant tissue blew out the back of the hood in a spray, splattering against the nearby wall.

  For a second, everything went slack.

  The Axeman’s head snapped back, his whole frame rocking with the impact. The axe sagged, haft dropping toward the floor. Alyssa’s breath caught, hope flaring sharp and bright in her chest.

  Then the growth in his torso pulsed.

  The tumors along his abdomen and ribs bulged, vines tightening around his spine and up into the base of his skull. What remained of his jaw worked in a grotesque, twitching motion, and the hood dipped forward again. He let out another guttural sound, less a roar and more a grinding exhale, and the axe came back up.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Daniel snarled, anger and disbelief cutting through the strain.

  The next swing came in low and fast, forcing him to throw himself sideways. The blade skimmed across the edge of his armor, catching one of the Phalanx plates with enough force to pitch him off balance. He hit the floor on his shoulder, rolled, and came up on one knee, the P90 already seeking center mass again.

  The Axeman pressed, closing in on him a second time. The distance between them collapsed into a few long strides. Alyssa desperately searched for another magazine for the compact weapon, finding a dead body with three more tangled in its vest moments later. Ripping one out, she slid it into the well, took aim, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. She tried again. Same result.

  Then she remembered she had to rack the gun. She wanted to slap herself, but the time for self-recrimination was later. The bolt snapped shut, and she nestled the stock into her shoulder, ready this time for the force of the automatic kickback.

  “Hey!” she shouted hoarsely, as she fired twice into the side of his head, hoping to distract him more than damage him. One round struck what remained of his ear. The other punched into the grafted plant growth along his neck. Sap flew, bright against his dark hood.

  The Axeman’s head turned toward her for a fraction of a second, the hood angling her way.

  Daniel seized the opening. He aimed at the bulging mass in the Axeman’s abdomen, the place where the growth looked thickest, and emptied the rest of his magazine into it. The rounds tore into the swollen tissue, popping nodules and shredding vine bundles. The effect was immediate. The Axeman lurched, one knee dipping as if someone had suddenly taken half the support out from under him.

  A sound tore out of him that didn’t fit any human throat. It rattled the walls, a low, grinding bellow that seemed to carry more fury than pain.

  He staggered backward, boots scraping against the blood slick tile as he tried to stabilize. Daniel dropped the empty magazine, slammed a fresh one home, and brought the weapon back up.

  “Stay on him!” he called.

  Alyssa did. She kept firing, her rounds hitting wherever she could put them. Each impact flared and vanished against his bulk, but together, combined with Daniel’s heavier bursts, they started to add up. The Axeman’s movements grew less precise. The axe swings lost some of their clean, murderous lines. His steps turned heavier, more labored.

  For a heartbeat, it looked like he might press through anyway, delivering one final, crushing charge.

  Instead, he turned.

  Without warning, the Axeman pivoted away from them, his ruined hood swinging toward the far wall of the theater. He took three long, unsteady strides in that direction, dragging the axe behind him for the first two, then hauling it up in both hands.

  “Red?” Alyssa gasped.

  “I see it,” Daniel said.

  The Axeman let out one last, ragged roar and drove himself forward. The axe hit the wall at shoulder height, the full force of his bulk and unnatural strength behind it. Plaster, tile, and structural material exploded outward, dust and debris billowing into the room in a choking cloud. The blade bit deep, then continued on as the Axeman threw his weight through the opening he’d created.

  The weakened wall gave way under the assault. A section of it collapsed entirely, opening a rough, jagged hole into whatever adjoining space lay beyond. The Axeman didn’t stop. He pushed through the breach with surprising agility for his size, boots crunching on broken material as he disappeared into the darkness on the other side.

  Chunks of ceiling and wall followed him, crashing down in his wake. A heavy support beam bent and dropped, smashing into the edge of the operating platform and sending a fresh shower of debris into the theater. Dust surged outward in a dense wave, filling the air in front of the breach and turning everything beyond it into a rolling gray mist.

  Daniel raised an arm to shield his visor and took two quick steps toward the collapsing section, then stopped himself short as more loose concrete tumbled free. The opening was unstable, edges cracked and crumbling. One more shock might’ve brought a larger section of the wall down.

  When the dust finally began to settle, all that remained of the Axeman’s passage was the jagged wound in the theater and the faint, receding echo of heavy footfalls fading somewhere beyond the breach.

  000

  The silence that followed hung heavy in the ruined theater, settling slowly as the dust drifted and the echo of the Axeman’s retreat faded into whatever lay beyond the torn-open wall. Alyssa stood there stiffly for several long seconds, hands shaking around the MP5 until Daniel reached over and gently pushed the barrel toward the floor. Her breath hitched, loud through the mask, and she sagged back against the nearest intact railing.

  "Take a minute," he said quietly.

  She nodded, though her legs trembled too hard for her to trust them. Daniel used the pause to sweep the room again, not looking for movement this time but for anything that might help them stay alive. The bodies had already told him how they died. Now they had to offer something else, anything useful enough to justify standing in this slaughterhouse a minute longer.

  Looting a battlefield wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t clean. It certainly wasn’t something he expected someone like Alyssa to keep her composure through, but she surprised him by straightening up and forcing herself to follow, the MP5 hanging from her shoulder as she steeled her nerves. Together, they moved from corpse to corpse, Daniel handling most of the actual searching while Alyssa kept her eyes on the upstairs for any unwanted visitors.

  The mercs had come loaded. That much was clear.

  Daniel found the first stash of ammunition in the webbing of a man lying half-pinned under a toppled mayo stand. He pulled free a magazine pouch and opened it to find row after row of nine millimeter rounds still sealed in their plastic sleeves. Nearby, another body yielded loose cartridges scattered across the floor where someone had tried to reload mid-fight. By the time he worked through all thirteen bodies, he’d gathered just over a hundred rounds.

  "Lucky break," he muttered, handing Alyssa several full MP5 magazines he’d managed to salvage. "It seems like a lot, but be careful. Use burst fire," He motioned to the selector switch, "and try to conserve what you've got."

  She swallowed and nodded. "Right. I will."

  Next came buckshot. Three mercs had carried pump-action shotguns, all ruined, of course, either from crushing damage or warped barrels, but the ammunition on their belts was untouched. Daniel unhooked shell pouches and cracked them open, counting them out by feel.

  "Thirty shells, give or take." He said. "Good stuff too. Double-aught buck."

  Alyssa gave a shaky laugh. "I don’t even know what that means, Red."

  "It means don't be standing in front of me if I'm using it. It'll rip you up."

  She blinked. "That would be stupid, Red."

  "Exactly why you don't do it." He chuckled, pulling a thin smile from the woman.

  The work turned grim quickly. Neither of them spoke much once they started. The silence pressed in from all directions, broken only by the soft clink of gear, the shuffle of boots, and the occasional sharp exhale when they found something they weren’t prepared for. Looting the dead was never easy, even when the dead had tried to kill you.

  Alyssa kept her distance at first, hovering near Daniel as he moved through the scattered bodies. After a minute she forced herself to help, not with the searching but with keeping watch, her eyes tracing the upper ring of observation windows while Daniel dug through pockets and torn rigs. She didn’t ask what he found. She didn’t want to look too closely. Every time she glanced at the corpses she saw their faces instead of their gear.

  Daniel handled the searching with a steady, practiced rhythm. He checked belts, webbing, loose pouches, overturned equipment trays, and the ground around each body. Nothing elegant about it. Just necessity. His thoughts stayed tight and practical, but even he couldn’t ignore the weight of the room pressing against his shoulders. The smell of blood, the still-warm scent of gun oil and torn fabric, the faint chemical sting from ruptured medical supplies. It all settled into his lungs like damp ash.

  He didn’t bother cataloguing where each find came from. It didn’t matter. Only the totals did.

  By the time he worked his way through the room, they’d pulled together a workable haul. A pair of fragmentation grenades. Four flashbangs. Two usable first aid sprays. Six vials of green herb powder. All of it pieced together from whatever the mercenaries had carried into this place, now left behind for someone else to survive on.

  Alyssa finally stepped closer, face tight behind her mask. He could see the strain in her eyes, the way she tried to focus on the items instead of the bodies they’d been taken from. She forced herself to help divide things up. He handed her one of the sprays and two of the herb vials, as well as the nine millimeter rounds. It was all she could carry without resorting to her pack, and she wasn't about to wear a dead man's tactical vest, even if she'd found a mostly intact one. That was... that was a step too far.

  Neither of them said it, but they both felt it. The quiet. The exhaustion. The sheer wrongness of gathering anything in a room that felt like it still echoed with the last breaths of the men who’d died there.

  The real tragedy was the three hundred rounds of 5.56 he'd pulled from the collective dead. Ten mags worth, and not a single one of the rifles were in usable condition. Most weren't even passable wrecks. It was like the Axeman, because it couldn't be anyone else, targeted their weapons specifically, and did a hell of a job doing so.

  "Shame," he muttered, setting them aside. "Nothing that takes these still works."

  Alyssa, kneeling near another corpse, found a thick waterproof envelope tucked into the man’s chest rig. She handed it over before she had even fully registered what she’d picked up.

  Daniel opened it.

  Inside were printed mission orders, crisp and densely typed despite their age. He scanned them, eyes narrowing behind the visor.

  "Doctor Sundaram," he said under his breath. "That name keeps coming up."

  Alyssa leaned in. "That’s the guy who hired them?"

  "Looks like it." Daniel flipped the page. "Seems he wasn’t here for Umbrella, or at least, not now. He was working against them. Trying to find something called T-RXR."

  "What's that?"

  "A counteragent. Says here it breaks down the TJCC-203 strain. Rapid cellular collapse of the virus. Equivalent to a chemical silver bullet." He exhaled. "He didn’t come here to weaponize this place. He came to kill whatever infected it."

  Alyssa stared at him, stunned. "So he was… trying to help?"

  "Or trying to keep Umbrella’s mess from spreading," Daniel said. "One doesn’t exclude the other."

  They finished the search in silence, gathering what they could carry and leaving what they couldn’t. When there was nothing left worth taking, Daniel jerked his head toward the far exit.

  "Head doctor’s office is through that hall. We’ll regroup there."

  Alyssa followed behind him as they made their way down the long, narrow hall as it stretched ahead in a straight line, tighter than those on the main wing but cleaner, less overtaken by roots. A few broken plaques still clung to the wall, one reading ADMINISTRATION in faded letters. The air felt heavier here, thick not with spores but with something more human. Something mournful.

  Alyssa slowed.

  Daniel noticed too late.

  The object sitting before the office door should have been another altar like the ones he’d seen scattered throughout the hospital; vines and twigs arranged in unnatural patterns, bones placed with deliberate intention, offerings hung like trophies. He stepped forward, ready to pull free the necklace draped across the shrine.

  But Alyssa moved faster.

  She lunged past him, fingers closing not around the necklace, but around the two laminated cards hanging from it.

  Press IDs.

  One for a man Daniel didn’t recognize.

  And one… for her.

  Alyssa’s breathing hitched. Her knees buckled as if someone had kicked them out from under her. She collapsed forward, clutching the badges so tightly the plastic creaked.

  Her scream ripped through the hallway, raw and animal and agonized.

  Daniel froze, the sound cutting through him in a way no monster had managed.

  Alyssa didn’t stop screaming.