A long western corridor stretched outside the laboratory.
Old wall lamps buzzed with bad contacts, their dim yellow light flickering over stained wallpaper.
Leon led the way.
The moment he pushed open the teak door, a powerful smell of preservative mixed with rotten meat struck him in the face.
Seven or eight zombies in Umbrella researcher coats wandered aimlessly farther down the hall.
At the sound of the door, they turned.
Corpse-pale eyes fixed on the two living people, and guttural moans escaped as they shuffled closer.
The corridor was less than two meters wide, both sides crowded with abandoned sheet-metal storage cabinets.
Leon glanced at the available space and frowned.
The Doorstop was simply too large.
If he tried to swing it here, the weapon would bury itself in a wall.
He clicked his tongue and lowered the greatsword vertically.
Its broad point smashed through the tile and lodged deep in the marble floor, leaving the weapon standing beside him.
The zombies were already within five paces.
The first male corpse had lost the flesh from half its face.
It opened its mouth and lunged for Leon’s neck.
Leon advanced instead of retreating, the massive body beneath the heavy black armor exploding forward.
His right hand flashed to the tactical rig on his outer thigh.
A military combat knife with a blood groove appeared in a reverse grip.
He shifted just enough to avoid the bite, rolled his wrist, and drove the blade precisely through the zombie’s temple and into the brain.
As he withdrew the knife, another zombie’s claws were already reaching from the left.
Leon did not even look.
His left forearm rose, using the high-carbon-steel bracer marked in white paint as a shield.
His waist snapped and the mass of his thick arm hammered sideways.
The zombie flew into a wooden door along the wall.
The thin panel exploded under the impact and the corpse tumbled through the splinters into the dark room beyond.
Rebecca stood behind Leon with the Remington shouldered.
His broad back filled so much of the narrow corridor that she could barely find a safe firing lane.
Leon moved like a bulldozer ahead of her.
Left arm blocking, right hand stabbing—each movement flowed cleanly into the next without hesitation.
A zombie in a nurse’s uniform rushed him.
Leon sheathed the knife, closed his right fist, and smashed a heavy downward punch into the top of its skull.
The force was absurd.
Its neck broke under the pressure and the entire head was driven bodily into the chest cavity.
The sternum collapsed with it and filthy blood sprayed across the corridor wall.
The last zombie lunged from the right.
Leon turned in place, black combat boot leaving the floor in a textbook roundhouse.
It struck the zombie’s abdomen and launched the body seven or eight meters down the hall, where it hit the far wall and slid motionless to the floor.
The fight ended in less than half a minute.
Broken corpses lay scattered through the corridor.
Rebecca swallowed, a chill running down her back.
She advanced with the shotgun and cautiously put two rounds into the zombies that were still twitching.
Watching Leon pull the greatsword free, she could not help asking, “Sir…
no, Leon.
Your close-quarters skills don’t look anything like those of an ordinary patrol officer fresh out of the academy.
What special-operations unit did you serve in?” Leon yanked the Doorstop out of the floor one-handed and casually wiped blood from it on a nearby researcher’s lab coat.
He glanced at her.
“Don’t make such a big deal out of it, medic.” As he returned the knife to its thigh sheath, Leon began lying with complete composure.
“It’s called American iaijutsu.
Works great on uppity niggers.
Mandatory course at the academy—no passing grade, no diploma.
Come on.
Let’s check that room.” They pushed through the wooden door the zombie had destroyed and entered a spacious chamber.
It resembled an expensive private lounge, with thick red carpet and solid-wood bookcases filled with hardbound volumes.
An antique grandfather clock stood in one corner.
Most striking of all was the black grand piano at the center of the room.
It was well maintained, lid half open beneath a thin layer of dust.
Rebecca swept the room with her weapon.
Once she was satisfied no infected were inside, she approached a desk.
Several empty wineglasses and scattered documents lay across it.
She picked up a yellowed sheet carrying several lines of musical notation, apparently a fragment of a classical composition.
“Part of a score…” Rebecca studied the notes and looked toward the piano.
“This could be a mechanism code.
Old buildings love tricks like this.” Leon dragged the heavy slab over.
Every step made the wooden floor beneath the carpet groan under his armor.
He stopped at the piano, studied the black and white keys, and extended a high-carbon-steel finger.
He apparently meant to test a few notes, but the thick armored knuckle was not designed for delicate work.
One press flattened four or five keys at once and produced a huge, piercing mess of noise.
Rebecca jumped at the sound, hurried over, and shoved his thick arm aside with an openly disgusted look.
“Move!
Are you playing the piano or demolishing it?” She set the shotgun aside, sat on the bench, took a breath, and placed the fragment on the music rack.
Dusty fingers hovered over the keys, then began moving with practiced confidence.
A smooth classical melody, tinged with melancholy, filled the room.
Rebecca played with precision, every note landing cleanly.
As the final note faded, gears turned somewhere deep inside the wall.
The solid-wood bookcase packed with hardcovers slowly split apart, revealing a black passage.
A sour smell of aged red wine and mold drifted out.
It was clearly a hidden private wine cellar.
Leon shouldered the greatsword.
“These terrorists have offensively bad taste.” He entered the passage with a snort.
“An illegal underground bioweapons site, but they still need a piano in the lounge so they can pretend to be cultured.
What, do they play a nocturne to get in the mood before cutting people open for experiments?” Rebecca followed with the flashlight, illuminating the stairs.
She rolled her eyes at the black-armored brute.
“It’s called art.
A musclebound black bear with no artistic sense wouldn’t understand.” The cellar was small, with rows of dusty oak barrels lining both sides.
At the far end, beyond the barrels, stood a dusty table stacked with thick files.
Rebecca immediately started searching them.
The documents had been sealed inside a waterproof bag and were relatively well preserved.
Rebecca pulled out the first one and skimmed it by flashlight.
Her movements gradually slowed.
This was not bioweapons data, but an original mission report stamped with a red MILITARY CLASSIFIED seal, accompanied by several pages of private notes.
“African peacekeeping operation…
Second Squad casualty assessment…” Rebecca’s eyes moved rapidly over the page.
When she reached one name, her pupils widened.
The top-secret report described the village massacre in Africa the previous year in detail.
The truth was there in black and white: faulty intelligence had allowed a guerrilla ambush, and to conceal the operational failure, the commanding officer had issued an insane order to execute twenty-three innocent villagers in the surrounding area.
Below the long list of dead and those who had refused orders appeared one line: Former Marine Second Lieutenant Billy Coen—disarmed after refusing to carry out the massacre and attempting to stop it.
Disposition of incident: assign all civilian deaths to Billy Coen; court-martial him for war crimes and sentence him to death.
It was the script of a corrupt institution choosing a soldier with no connections and turning him into the scapegoat.
The flashlight beam began shaking violently across the document.
Rebecca’s hands would not stop trembling.
The pages crumpled under her grip.
The justice she had always believed in—the law-enforcement system she had sworn to serve and taken pride in—was capable of murdering innocents and framing someone who had tried to stop it.
“It’s fake…
The terrorists must have forged this!” Her voice broke, eyes reddening as she remembered the condemned prisoner the giant scorpion had cut down on the train.
Right up until his death, Billy had insisted he had killed no one.
Leon turned around.
He looked at the young officer trembling beside the table.
Any normal person would have stepped forward, put a hand on her shoulder or offered a hug, and told her that reality could be cruel.
Leon did not.
Dragging the heavy bomb armor with him, he slowly walked to an empty oak barrel.
Under Rebecca’s stunned gaze, he bent down, planted one hand on the cellar floor, extended the steel-plated left leg behind himself, and lifted the other leg clear.
Then, armor grinding at every joint, he began doing controlled one-arm push-ups.
One.
Two.
Muscles tightened beneath the plating.
“Don’t be surprised, rookie.” Leon spoke calmly while performing the exhausting warm-up.
“Corrupt bureaucrats are everywhere.
To protect their pathetic pensions and promotion prospects, they’ll do any rotten thing imaginable.
That’s why I hate office work.
The people sitting behind desks often have colder hearts than terrorists.” Rebecca’s mouth remained open.
The tears that had been gathering in her eyes were forcibly derailed by this new absurdity.
She stared at the man doing one-arm push-ups in a hundred and fifty kilograms of steel.
Her brain stalled.
Somehow, the crushing despair of having her faith in the system collapse was diluted by how ridiculous the sight in front of her was.
“But don’t give up, medic.
Even in a system this rotten, there are still good people.” “Luckily for us, Captain Wesker is an upright leader who takes care of his subordinates.” Leon paused, utterly certain.
“Once we carve up every bug-raising terrorist in this place and hand these files over intact, Captain Wesker will clear that poor bastard’s name.
He went out of his way to protect a rookie like me who keeps causing trouble through excessive self-defense.
He’s absolutely a man of justice.” Down in the Basement Level Three surveillance room, William Birkin watched the scene while biting one fingernail.
The fanatic excitement on his face at discovering a new experimental subject twitched slightly.
He glanced toward the perpetually ice-faced Wesker beside him.
William wanted desperately to comment.
He managed to keep it in.
Back in the cellar, Rebecca rubbed her eyes hard and finally abandoned the attempt to cry.
She carefully folded the heavy file containing the truth and tucked it into an inner pocket of her tactical pants.
Then she looked at the steel bulldozer who sincerely believed his captain was “justice incarnate” and released a deep sigh.
With this man beside her, even in a hell full of monsters, despair somehow started to feel inappropriate.
Leon reached the far wall of the cellar and raised his flashlight toward a rust-covered hidden door.