Leon led the way up the broad staircase covered in scarlet carpet.
His heavy black military boots made dull, rhythmic creaks against the wooden steps.
Chris and Jill followed half a pace behind, both gripping sidearms with only a few rounds left.
The air on the second floor was fouler than below.
Old mold and heavy blood hung in it like something viscous clogging the throat.
The second-floor corridor was extremely dim.
Antique wall lamps hung every few meters, but only a handful still gave off weak yellow light.
A three-meter mahogany table occupied the center of the corridor, covered by a runner trimmed in gold tassels.
The disgusting chewing came from the shadows at its far end.
Leon stopped and tilted his head slightly, the black-steel greatsword resting quietly against his back armor.
Chris took a deep breath and raised his Beretta toward the sound.
Jill hugged the wall, gripping her small tactical folding knife.
“Who’s there?” Chris demanded quietly.
The chewing stopped.
Then, accompanied by breathing like a broken bellows, an enormous body slowly shuffled out of the darkness.
It had once been one of the mansion’s security guards.
Now it easily weighed more than two hundred kilograms, bursting through what had once been a properly fitted dark-blue uniform.
Thick yellow fat bulged through torn cloth, smeared with blood and scraps of meat.
Its rotting, bloated face sagged into a neckless mass.
It clutched a human thigh torn from somewhere, viscous fluid dripping from its mouth.
“Fuck, how good is the food in this place?” Chris muttered through clenched teeth.
At the sound of living voices, the obese zombie turned its head.
Cloudy white eyes locked onto the three people at the other end of the corridor.
It dropped the leg and let out a deafening roar.
Then the four-hundred-pound mountain of flesh charged, heavy steps pounding the wooden floor hard enough to shake the wall lamps.
Like a runaway road roller, it barreled down the corridor, its bulk occupying most of the width.
Chris had no time to think.
Years of combat instinct made him fire immediately.
“Bang!
Bang!” Two sharp shots.
The 9mm Parabellum rounds struck the zombie’s barrel-wide belly with perfect accuracy.
They produced only two small blooms of blood before lodging in the thick layer of mutated yellow fat.
Enough firepower to drop a grown man failed to slow the creature for even half a second.
Chris pulled the trigger again.
“Click.” The slide locked back.
The chamber was empty.
“Damn it!” Chris grunted and reached for his tactical knife.
Jill tightened her grip on her folding blade as both instinctively tried to give ground.
But the corridor was too narrow and the monster far faster than expected.
The choking stench of it was already within five steps.
Just as Chris prepared to meet it head-on, a huge black figure shot past his side.
Leon moved.
Facing the charging wall of flesh, he didn’t retreat—and didn’t even draw the greatsword from his back.
“Move, senior,” Leon said coldly.
He dropped his center of gravity, leg muscles locking beneath the armor.
His heavy steel boots drove into the carpet, and he launched an utterly unreasonable countercharge.
The two collided in the middle of the corridor.
Leon didn’t punch.
He delivered a textbook running shoulder tackle.
He turned sideways and drove the high-carbon-steel plate over his left shoulder into the zombie’s broad chest like a battering ram.
“BOOM—CRACK!” Flesh met steel, followed by the snap of a sternum breaking.
The obese monster actually left the floor.
Its enormous body traveled through a short arc and flew backward.
“CRASH!” It landed directly on the expensive antique mahogany table.
Its weight and the impact split the ancient solid-wood table down the middle.
Carved legs shattered, sharp splinters and torn fabric flew in every direction, and one broken table leg buried itself in the wallpaper.
Chris remained frozen with his knife in hand.
He forgot to breathe, eyes wide as he stared at the wreckage.
“What…
what kind of monster is that…?” Chris clearly wasn’t talking about the zombie lying in the broken furniture.
Jill leaned against the wall, pale, lips parted slightly.
She had seen Leon carve through the dogs in the forest, but the broad violence of a heavy weapon was nothing like watching raw physical force answer raw physical force.
This was another level of shock entirely.
The fight wasn’t over.
Though its sternum had been crushed, the virus had given the obese zombie horrifying vitality.
It thrashed in the broken wood, thick arms clawing at the floor as it tried to rise.
When Leon approached, its nails scraped furiously across his shin armor and threw off sparks.
“Resisting arrest?” Leon looked down at the mountain of flesh.
He bent and reached out with his heavy iron-gloved right hand.
Five steel-covered fingers clamped around the thick neck that barely had any visible outline.
Then Chris and Jill saw something their common sense would never accept.
Black armor rasped as Leon exerted himself.
With a low growl and one arm, he lifted the four-hundred-pound body clean out of the shattered furniture and into the air.
The obese zombie kicked uselessly, choking and pawing at the iron hand without effect.
A choke-lift slam.
Without hesitation, Leon swung his arm and hurled the suspended zombie into the marble floor beside him.
“BOOM!” Spiderweb cracks spread through the hard marble.
The zombie landed flat on its back, vertebrae popping in rapid succession as blood surged from its mouth.
Leon knew better than to stop.
With things like this, as long as the brain remained, it wasn’t over.
He stepped beside the ruined body and raised his right leg, the steel-plated boot pausing for half a second in midair.
War stomp.
With his full weight behind it, the steel boot came straight down on the zombie’s rotting fat face.
“SPLAT.” Red-and-white brain matter, shattered skull, and yellow fat burst across the floor in a radial spray.
Filth struck the wall paneling and slid slowly down the fine wood grain.
The huge headless body finally stopped twitching and became a useless heap of meat.
Silence returned, broken only by the occasional electrical buzz of a wall lamp.
Leon lowered his foot.
He wiped the gore from his sole on a relatively clean patch of carpet, then turned toward Chris and Jill several meters away.
Blood speckled his black armor, but his young face showed little flush from exertion.
He merely breathed a little harder.
Chris and Jill were still rigid.
They looked at the empty pistol that had become dead weight, then past Leon’s shoulder to the mound of physically pulverized flesh and broken furniture.
Years of police tactics, marksmanship, and defensive training had just been crushed under the simplest possible answer: overwhelming violence from a rookie wrapped in steel.
Jill finally found her voice.
She swallowed and looked between Leon and the corpse.
“Do you…” Her voice was dry.
“Do you usually deal with things…
like that?” Chris quietly holstered his empty gun and said nothing.
Leon shrugged his broad armored shoulders.
The plates knocked dully together.
“Special circumstances call for special measures.
With an oversized suspect refusing to cooperate, using a little force is reasonable, isn’t it?
My handcuffs sure won’t fit him.” Chris rubbed his brow and decided not to pursue that line of reasoning.
In this godforsaken place, having a teammate who could tear monsters apart barehanded was far preferable to dragging around someone who only screamed.
“The second floor’s clear for now.” Chris drew a breath, forced down his shock, and regained his professional focus.
“Let’s report to Captain Wesker and see if we can find supplies.” The three turned and descended toward the first-floor hall, wooden steps creaking under Leon’s boots.
“Captain, upstairs—” Chris reached the turn in the staircase and stopped mid-sentence.
He froze, right hand reflexively dropping to his empty holster.
Jill and Leon stopped behind him and looked into the open main hall.
It was empty.
The crystal chandelier still gave off its yellow glow.
Only Rebecca and Richard remained beside the statue at the foot of the stairs.
Rebecca held the shotgun, Richard a rifle, and both were staring around in confusion and alarm.
Chris took the last steps three at a time.
“Where’s Wesker?” Chris raised his voice.
“Where did the captain go?” Rebecca shook her head, face pale.
“I don’t know.” She pointed toward the shadows on the right side of the hall.
“We heard all the crashing upstairs and looked away.
It was only a few seconds.
When we looked back, the captain was gone.” “What do you mean, gone?” Jill hurried to the mansion’s front doors.
She touched the thick brass bolt.
It was still seated firmly in its catch, untouched, with no sign the door had been opened.
Wind and rain remained sealed outside.
“The door never opened.” Jill turned, expression grim.
“He didn’t go outside.
He vanished from this hall right in front of you.” Richard raised his rifle nervously, sweeping the muzzle between shadows and closed doors.
“What kind of place is this?
The exits are locked.
How can a living man just evaporate?” Chris paced two irritated steps across the hall, then inspected the floor where Wesker had been standing.
The marble was clean.
No blood, no drag marks, no seam indicating a hidden hatch.
Leon slowly descended into the chandelier light.
Vanished into thin air?
In a mansion this strange—practically rebuilt into a giant meat grinder—there was no way he could have vanished this cleanly unless he had grown wings.
Leon narrowed his eyes and studied the ornate paneling and closed side doors.
His blood-smeared iron glove rose over one shoulder and settled around the rough hilt of the greatsword on his back.