From the Umbrella Executive Training School to the church, and from there to the laboratory.
Their persistence finally paid off.
In the underground treatment plant beyond the lab, the three of them found the equipment that could carry them out.
But at that moment, not one of them noticed.
On the roof of the cable car, an Eliminator crouched in the dark, tracking their every movement.
As Ivan came within reach of the cable car entrance, the creature measured the railing beside him.
Its chance had come.
It hurled itself off the roof, dropping out of the shadows to hook onto Ivan’s back and open him up.
But Ivan’s senses had kept sharpening with every passing day.
Almost the instant the Eliminator left the roof, he spun, his right hand closing into a fist.
Then both feet left the ground — a full two meters of lift — and he drove a Rising Dragon uppercut into the thing’s descent.
WHAM!” The moment fist met Eliminator, a monstrous force blew through the creature’s ribcage.
Its chest folded inward, thin as a sheet of paper.
Whoosh!” The whole body tore through the air and slammed into the ceiling more than twenty meters overhead.
CLANG.
Splat.” Skull met metal plating, and all that kinetic energy crushed the hard bone into fragments in an eyeblink.
The paper-thin chest followed a heartbeat later.
It took no more than an instant.
What had been a lean, angular Eliminator was now a patty of meat, glued fast to the ceiling.
The kind you couldn’t scrape off if you tried.
Billy still had no idea what had happened.
All he’d seen was Ivan punching some white shape into the air.
By the time he found it again, it had become a smear of red and white.
Gulp.” Billy swallowed hard, and the look he turned on Ivan was thick with suspicion.
A bold thought struck him.
Was the man who’d saved his life the same as those B.O.W.s?
Injected with some kind of virus?
Rebecca’s eyes, still fixed on the ceiling, glittered with the same question.
She pulled her gaze back quickly and stepped in front of Ivan.
She had barely opened her mouth when Ivan shoved her aside.
WHAM!” The next second, the floor shook.
Where Rebecca had been standing, a monster now filled the space, built on a scale no human matched.
It stood roughly two and a half meters tall, naked from head to foot.
Its hide was a sickly gray-white, and the virus had eaten into it so badly that patches of dead, necrotic tissue bloomed across the skin and around the joints.
The right arm ended in a single claw shaped like a cavalry lance — threat enough at a glance.
The left arm was smaller, but it carried a massive claw of its own.
On the surface of the right side of its chest, an organ that looked like a heart pulsed with a steady thud-thud.
Rebecca’s pulse hammered.
If Ivan hadn’t pushed her clear, she’d be up on that ceiling with the Eliminator right now — a Rebecca-flavored pancake.
And from the thing’s features, she knew exactly what she was looking at.
Umbrella’s experimental records had covered it.
A humanoid B.O.W.
created by fusing an adult male with the t-Virus.
T-001.
The Tyrant.
The Tyrant paid no attention at all to Rebecca or Billy.
Seconds after it landed, it swung the clawed right arm forward and launched a Lance Charge at Ivan.
There was no mystery to it.
This human carried something inside him that called to the creature — a powerful, living energy.
The Tyrant sensed that if it devoured him, it would ascend to something greater.
Ivan met the charge without panic, shifting his weight and slipping sideways, and the killing blow passed him by.
If he hadn’t been worried about infection, he’d have gladly traded punches with the thing.
What Ivan failed to notice was that every dodge carried him closer to the railing at his back.
By then, Rebecca and Billy were in position.
Both of them were professionals with combat instincts honed to a fine edge.
So it took them only a moment to react and squeeze their triggers.
Rounds from M4A1s smoothed out by suppressors fell across the Tyrant’s back like rain.
That red heart in particular got their full attention.
The Tyrant’s body seized into convulsions.
Ivan wasn’t about to waste the opening.
He whipped the Remington 870 off his back.
Two blasts, point blank, straight into the Tyrant’s head.
At under a meter, the Remington’s power was magnified to its absolute limit.
No.
4 buckshot tore the Tyrant’s skullcap clean off.
Before the shells hit the floor, the Tyrant — which had taken both rounds dead on the head — discovered it could no longer see.
What Ivan’s squad hadn’t counted on was this: heart shredded, most of a head missing, and the Tyrant still refused to go down.
If anything, the pain lit its rage, and its strength and speed surged for a brief window.
Guided by its sense of the life energy in Ivan’s body, it charged straight at him.
The claw on its right arm switched from a thrust to a horizontal sweep.
Ivan had gone straight from his successful dodge into drawing his shotgun.
He never registered how close his back had come to the railing.
And the walkway inside that railing was barely a meter and a half wide.
Which left him almost no room to maneuver.
Rebecca and Billy were frantic, but neither dared fire again.
The Tyrant’s bulk had swallowed Ivan completely from their angle.
If a round found him instead, it didn’t bear thinking about.
There was no time to shoot.
All Ivan had left was his own body.
In that one ten-thousandth of a second, he threw one last punch.
WHAM!” The Eliminator had been nothing like this.
The Tyrant’s hide and sheer mass were several grades above it.
And Ivan’s punch had been rushed, short on power.
All it bought him was half a step of ground.
But half a step was enough.
His body took over, and he jumped.
The Tyrant’s swing was already sweeping in across his chest.
Between the height of his jump and that half step the punch had earned, the claw on its right arm missed him entirely.
And that was when Ivan discovered a new problem.
To clear that killing blow, he had jumped far too high.
Momentum carried him over the railing.
“Oh, hell.” The thought flashed through him.
A second later, all that filled his vision was the ceiling, racing away above him.
He was falling faster and faster, and yet time seemed to crawl.
Images flickered through his mind.
The first time he’d met Rebecca.
Standing together against the zombie dogs.
Her hands bandaging him.
Her voice whispering close to his ear.
So much of it, and nearly all of it was her — her face, her voice, her laugh.
And Billy, too.
Ivan’s face eased into something calm, almost peaceful.
He had never recovered his own memories, but in this stretch of time he’d been lucky enough to meet them.
That was already enough.
Ivan smiled and accepted the fall, and the short, blazing life that ended in it.
Up at the cable car, Billy and Rebecca watched the Tyrant knock Ivan over the railing.
Their eyes went red.
Bullets poured into the Tyrant, carrying every ounce of their fury.
The creature had already been running on its last reserves, and under a barrage like that it jerked into convulsions and dropped for good.
They kept firing anyway.
Until the last round was gone.
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