The ergency grid ca back online and the streetlights blinked on one by one, washing pale yellow light across the rubble. Wind pushed grit along the empty road. Sowhere in the distance, zombies called out in low, carrying tones that made the dead city feel even more closed in.
Ryan and Jill left the power substation and moved quickly toward the transit dispatch center a few blocks away. They needed the full subway line map to route around the worst of the hordes and get back to the station safely. Every minute counted.
They were moving along a stretch of cracked concrete wall when Ryan stopped and raised one hand.
No explanation. He stood still and looked at the wall.
On the other side, invisible to anyone without his instincts, a massive shape was coiled tight, waiting. He could feel the weight of it, the restrained violence of sothing about to erupt.
"Get ready," he said, voice low and even. "It's on the other side."
Jill didn't need it spelled out. There was exactly one "it" that had been hunting them. Her face went tight, and she moved fast and quiet behind the shell of a wrecked police cruiser nearby, bringing the assault shotgun up, finger resting on the trigger, breathing shallow.
Ryan stayed where he was. He raised his own assault shotgun and aid at the precise section of wall that was about to co apart.
He waited.
The wall exploded.
Concrete blew outward in a wave of dust and broken stone. Nesis tore through the gap like sothing that had never heard of obstacles, all montum and fury, launching itself at the spot where the two of them had been standing.
Sa trick. Sa wall. Worked in the apartnts once, should work again.
It stopped.
Ryan was standing in the open, weapon already up, watching it with an expression that could charitably be described as bored.
He let the silence sit for half a second, then said, "Hey there. Still not learning, huh."
Behind the police cruiser, Jill was locked on, not breathing, watching the massive shadow for any twitch.
Nesis processed what it was seeing. The ambush. Again. The empty space where a kill should have been, replaced by a man with a gun already aid at its face. Sothing in whatever passed for its mind went sideways.
How. How did they know again. I was completely silent. I didn't even breathe.
Ryan's finger moved.
The trigger ca back so fast it was almost chanical, pulling in a continuous burst that blurred at the edges, one shot rolling into the next with almost no gap between them.
The rounds hit Nesis center mass, each one hamring it back a fraction of an inch, the cumulative force building until the whole impact arrived at once and launched the creature off its feet. It flew backward and ca down hard in a pile of rubble fifteen feet away, throwing up a cloud of dust and debris.
The echoes died.
Nesis lay tangled in broken rebar and concrete chunks. The wounds peppered across its chest stead faintly. The aggressive tension it had carried was gone. What remained was a low, labored sound, barely audible.
Every attempt it made beca a trap it walked into itself.
Jill ca up from behind the cruiser slowly. She looked at Ryan with sothing between disbelief and relief that she didn't try to hide.
"It won't be moving for a while." Ryan lowered the gun. "Let's get to the dispatch center."
They were inside within minutes. The building had been ransacked, lights flickering across overturned furniture and scattered paperwork. Ryan went straight to the main console and pulled up the subway line map.
Most of the network was gone. Collapses, blockages, lines that showed red across their entire length. One remained viable: the main line to Clock Tower Station.
"Everything else is dead," Ryan said. "That's the only route left."
Jill studied the screen. "Clock Tower Station connects to the rest of the network. It has to be that one."
They confird the route and left.
They were back at the subway station platform thirteen minutes later.
Murphy was on his feet, leg wrapped, leaning against a support pillar near the entrance. When he saw them co through, he pushed off the wall and walked over, moving carefully but deliberately.
"I wouldn't be standing here without you," he said to Ryan. "I an that. What you did back there... I'm not going to forget it."
Ryan nodded.
The platform had filled up since they'd left. Elderly civilians, a woman with a bandaged arm, a few others in rough shape, people who'd made it this far on luck and not much else. None of them had weapons. None of them had anywhere to go if sothing ca through that entrance.
Mikhail stood by the train car, one hand braced against the side of it. He was pale, and the wound he'd been carrying was seeping again. He looked up when they approached.
"The route?"
"Clock Tower Station. Only line still running," Ryan said.
Mikhail managed a short, humorless laugh. "The drive systems have been cold too long. Engine needs to warm up, line diagnostics have to complete. We're looking at thirty minutes before we can move."
Jill's expression hardened. "Thirty minutes is too long. This position isn't secure."
"I know. There's nothing I can do about it." Mikhail's breath was getting short. "Getting it running at all is already pushing it."
Murphy had been standing nearby, listening. Now he moved closer to Mikhail, keeping his voice down, angling away from the civilians.
"Captain. Sothing you need to hear."
Mikhail looked at him. Tired eyes, but sharp.
"Nikolai." Murphy's jaw was set. "He wasn't running an extraction. When we got hit at the garage, I watched him cut his comms himself. He used us as bait. Pulled the zombies onto us so he could slip out."
Mikhail's hand tightened against the train car. The knuckles went white. He didn't look surprised. He didn't look shaken. What crossed his face was sothing quieter and colder, a man confirming sothing he'd already accepted.
"I know," he said.
Murphy blinked.
"The first ti he went off without authorization. The first false report he filed. I knew what he was after that." Mikhail's voice was flat and very low. "He wasn't a soldier. Umbrella sent him to clean up anyone who saw too much."
He was quiet for a mont. "I was going to deal with it myself. After the train."
Then he looked at Ryan. "Thank you. For my man."
Ryan nodded. Nothing more needed saying.
He turned and looked out at the platform. Civilians clustered together near the far wall. No weapons, no cover, no exit if sothing ca through.
The thought had barely finished forming when the floor shook.
Slow. Heavy. Footsteps that landed like sothing being dropped from a height, each one a little closer than the last.
And underneath that sound, the breathing. A wet chanical rasp, like tal grinding on tal.
Jill went rigid. "It recovered that fast..."
Ryan felt it settle into him, a flat, cold irritation at sothing that kept coming back no matter how many tis it hit the ground. Not fear. Not urgency. Sothing closer to the feeling of a problem that refused to stay solved, turning up again at the worst possible mont, when the people around him had the least ability to protect themselves.
His jaw tightened.
The platform was too small and too crowded. The mont Nesis ca through that entrance, the civilians would have nowhere to go and no one would survive it.
He looked at Jill. "Too many people here. We can't fight it in this station."
She understood before he finished the sentence. Her grip on the gun adjusted and she gave him a single nod.
"I'm going with you."
"We draw it away," Ryan said.
=-=-=
I'll lower the Powerstone goal to 50 for an extra chapter for now.
Read Advance Chapters at Patreon/NiaXD
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