September 29th. Arklay Highway, ten kilometers from Raccoon City. 8:12 P.M.
A few minutes ago
The Jeep's engine roared with a constant, monotonous hum, cutting through the thick fog that enveloped the winding road of the Arklay Mountains. The outside air was freezing, typical of late September, but inside the cabin, the atmosphere was thick with a feverish tension. As they advanced, devouring kilometers of wet asphalt, the oppressive, ancient darkness of the forest was left behind. However, what awaited them on the horizon was not the warm, welcoming glow of an active city, vibrant with nightlife; it was a furious, apocalyptic orange halo that tinged the low clouds, flickering with the irregularity of hell unleashed on earth.
Leon S. Kennedy gripped the steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles were white, almost translucent. The sleeves of his brown leather jacket stretched tightly over the wrinkled blue shirt he had grabbed in a hurry at the motel after oversleeping. He was traveling light, painfully vulnerable, with barely more than the clothes on his back. He hadn't even been assigned his locker yet, nor had he been issued the heavy tactical vest, or the official navy blue R.P.D. uniform; all of that, along with his shiny metal badge, was supposedly waiting for him at the desk sergeant's office that very night. Sitting there, driving toward that blistering glow, he felt like an impostor. He was an unarmed civilian stripped of authority trying to play cop in what seemed to be the very end of the world.
Beside him, Claire Redfield looked out the passenger window, watching the tall pines pass by like fleeting shadows, specters that refused to speak. The silence in the cabin was dense, suffocating, heavy with the weight of the residual adrenaline from the Mizoil gas station and the unmistakable smell of dried blood that permeated their clothes, until she finally dared to break it.
"I keep thinking about those guys at the gas station, Leon," Claire said, her voice sounding strangely calm, but with an underlying edge of anxiety that vibrated in every syllable. "They didn't feel pain. That thing looked me dead in the eyes when I shot it. Its pupils were dilated, dead, and there was absolutely nothing human behind them. They looked... dead. Walking corpses."
Leon sighed deeply, trying to cling tooth and nail to the structured logic of his academy manuals, resisting with all his might to face the madness head-on. He needed the world to make sense.
"Drugs, Claire. It has to be that, a narcotics epidemic," he tried to rationalize, though his own words sounded hollow to him. "Bath salts, experimental PCP, some synthetic stuff that got completely out of hand for the local gangs. At the academy, they showed us dozens of hours of videos of guys who wouldn't drop even with three shots to center mass because the narcotics completely shut down their nervous systems and pain receptors. Their brains simply don't register trauma."
Claire turned toward him, crossing her arms, not buying his academic excuse for a single second. Her survival instinct was much more raw.
"And do drugs also rot their faces in real-time? Leon, please. Half of that man's jaw was hanging off like old meat in a slaughterhouse. He wasn't bleeding the way a living body should bleed. He wasn't high. But do you know what scares me the most about all this?"
"Oh, really? Because I found the simple fact that they almost bit my neck off in the snack aisle pretty terrifying," Leon half-joked, trying to inject some levity into the cabin to chase away his own ghosts.
"The silence scares me," she continued, completely ignoring the joke, her tone growing sterner and more somber. "If people are going crazy like that, biting each other at a gas station on the outskirts of the city... why hasn't the government said a damn word? Why are there no army roadblocks on this interstate highway? I've been flipping through stations on your radio since we left, looking for any emergency frequency, and I only get dead static. State police should have issued a national alert, or at least a civil radio evacuation notice. Nobody warned us. They let us walk into a trap."
Leon frowned, his eyes fixed on the road that was growing brighter and brighter from the distant fire. The girl's deduction was flawless, chillingly logical, and he too was terrified by that absolute void of information. But his institutional loyalty forced him to defend the colleagues he hadn't even met yet.
"Maybe the situation escalated too fast to contain it through the usual channels. If the main power grid went down or the metropolitan area's transmission antennas were damaged in the riots, civilian communications are cut off by default. That's why I'm heading to the station, Claire. The R.P.D. is an absolute fortress. It used to be an old museum, it has stone walls. I'm sure Chief Irons and the elite officers are maintaining order in the central precinct and organizing the survivors on the perimeter while they restore the radio signal."
Claire watched him for a long moment, studying his profile illuminated by the faint gauges of the car's dashboard. She saw the stubbornness of a kid who refused to believe his world had collapsed on his graduation day.
"You're a painfully optimistic guy, I'll give you that. But tell me, rookie, with all the demand there must be in the country for freshly graduated cops with your record... why Raccoon City? You don't look like a lover of the mountains, the cold, and small-town life. You could have gone to New York, to Chicago."
Leon smiled faintly, a crooked, almost melancholic smile that didn't quite reach his eyes.
"Ironic, right? I wanted to start in a quiet place. Get away from the constant noise of the big cities, from organized crime. They told me at the academy about Raccoon as a model city, a midwestern utopia funded almost entirely by a world-class pharmaceutical corporation, where the crime rate was so low that cops got bored. I thought, 'Leon, go there, learn the trade in peace, help the community, build a career without getting shot in your first week.' I wanted to make a real difference."
Claire let out a short, almost bitter laugh that somewhat released the suffocating tension in the air.
"What a clinical eye for choosing tourist destinations, Kennedy. You're a magnet for disaster. I promise you something: if we manage to get inside your police fortress in one piece, and if by some bureaucratic miracle your boss doesn't fire you on the spot for showing up to your first day of duty dressed in jeans and a leather jacket, you and I are turning this Jeep around, flooring it, and going for some beers in another state. My treat."
"Deal, Redfield," Leon conceded, relaxing his shoulders a bit, grateful for the distraction.
But the small, fragile bubble of camaraderie burst brutally, pulverized in an instant, as soon as the Jeep crested the final hill of the Arklay highway, offering them their first full, panoramic, and unobstructed view of the immense valley.
The breath caught in both their throats simultaneously. The Jeep slowed down almost by inertia, as if the machine itself refused to move forward, while Leon let off the gas pedal, absolutely hypnotized and paralyzed by the horror unfolding below them.
Raccoon City was a literal hell. It wasn't a simple civil riot. The streets looked like the setting of an Eastern European war zone after a massive heavy artillery bombardment; a gigantic still life of disaster on a metropolitan scale. Dense, suffocating columns of thick, greasy black smoke, lit from below by tongues of fire, rose from dozens of commercial and residential buildings, completely hiding the moon and creating a stifling vault over the skyscrapers. The asphalt leading down to the heart of downtown began to show the scars of desperate chaos: dozens of abandoned suitcases, a huge illuminated "Welcome to Raccoon City" sign smashed against the pavement, and police cars parked sideways at intersections, with their doors wide open and their broken emergency lights spinning mournfully into nothingness.
"My God..." Claire whispered, her voice breaking the fragile silence of the cabin as she shook her head, her eyes reflecting the glare of the dead city. "It's a total slaughterhouse. The defense lines fell completely, Leon. There's no one down there saving anyone. They're all dead."
Leon swallowed hard, feeling an icy abyss open in his stomach and devour all his training, but his jaw clenched with stubbornness, refusing to yield to total despair.
"There has to be people barricaded. If they got overrun in the streets, they fell back. I'll get you to the station, we'll be safe behind those stone walls and we'll look for your brother in the records. I promise you."
Suddenly, a guttural, high-pitched, and terribly mechanical noise drowned out the sound of the Jeep's engine, tearing through the night.
Leon jerked his head to his left, just in time to see the massive, blinding high beams of a tanker truck emerging from a blind side intersection at full speed. The sound of the heavy air horn was stuck in a deafening, infinite, and irritating blast, like the agonizing scream of the city itself. Through the massive truck's thick, blood-stained windshield, reality hit them with the force of a sledgehammer: the driver wasn't looking at the road. His head was thrown brutally back against the headrest, his eyes rolled back, while a human figure, pale and with a horribly mangled face, hung from his neck, tearing out his throat with huge, savage bites that splattered the glass with red.
The eighteen-wheeler, a relentless beast of steel loaded with tons of highly volatile fuel and totally out of control, was heading straight for the side of the Jeep at over sixty miles per hour.
"Watch out!" Claire screamed with burning lungs, grabbing the door handle in pure panic, her voice almost drowned out by the truck's horn.
Leon reacted out of pure survival instinct. He jerked the steering wheel violently to the left with both arms, forcing the power steering to its limit, while slamming the brake pedal down to the floor with all his body weight. The tires shrieked heartbreakingly against the wet asphalt, leaving a trail of burnt rubber. The Jeep skidded sharply sideways, crashing into the dented fender of an abandoned patrol car that acted as a ramp.
The impact shook them brutally, compressing them against the seatbelts, which bruised their chests. A microsecond later, the massive tanker truck brushed past the rear of their vehicle like a derailed train, destroying the trunk with an appalling screech of tearing metal and shattering glass, before continuing its deadly and unstoppable trajectory, crashing head-on into the sturdy brick wall of a pawn shop at the end of the avenue.
The spark from the massive head-on collision was all the fuel inside the tanker needed to react.
An explosion of Dantean proportions lit up the night as if the sun had suddenly been born in the middle of the asphalt, sending a shockwave of scorching heat and pneumatic pressure that finished blowing the Jeep's remaining windows into a thousand deadly pieces.
A literal wall of roaring fire, burning debris, and twisted metal rose majestically in the middle of the street, dividing the wide avenue into two absolutely impassable halves. Hell had separated them.
Leon, dazed, coughing violently from the dense, toxic smoke of burning plastic and with his ears ringing painfully from the overpressure, kicked the jammed door on his side once, twice, three times until the hinges gave way with a snap. He stumbled out, falling to his knees on the burning asphalt.
"Claire!" he shouted, his voice raspy, getting up and running toward the smashed front of the vehicle, trying to look through the curtains of liquid fire that rose thirty feet into the air. "Claire, are you okay?! Answer me!"
Through the apocalyptic roar of the dancing flames, he heard the girl's voice, coughing deeply but steady, refusing to give up.
"I'm okay! I managed to get out the other door in time! But the fire is too high, I can't get close, the heat is unbearable!"
The deafening roar of the detonation had acted as a dinner bell on a metropolitan level. From the darkest shadows of the nearby alleys, the looted storefronts, and the wrecked cars, dozens of hungry, wet, shuffling groans began to rise, joining in a nightmare chorus. The silhouettes of the dead, lit by the orange flash of the flames, emerged from the fog like cockroaches crawling out of the walls after a light is turned on, dragging themselves inexorably toward the noise.
"Get out of there, the noise is drawing them all toward your position!" Leon yelled, quickly drawing his 9mm Matilda pistol from his tactical thigh holster, aiming at the staggering figures approaching his own side of the street. "Run to the police station! Don't look back! Keep straight and look for the large illuminated clock tower, the main building is right below it!"
"Got it!" Claire replied, her slender figure fading into the thick black smoke and sparks. "I'll see you there, Leon! Don't die, you still owe me a beer!"
"Don't you die either," Leon muttered, swallowing the lump in his throat as the heat blistered his face.
There was no time for more heroic farewells. A man, who hours ago must have been an impeccable suited executive, lunged at him from the sidewalk. His clothes were soaked in a dark substance, his jaw hung at a grotesque angle, and his bony hands reached out like claws.
Leon raised his weapon, forced his mind to disconnect from the panic, and remembered the repetitive hours at the academy's shooting range. He took a deep breath, aligned the sights, and pulled the trigger. Two sharp, deafening shots to the center of the chest, one precise shot to the head. The body collapsed heavily, spraying black blood onto the rookie's shoes.
But behind that executive, there were three more, dressed in civilian clothes, housewives, mechanics. And at the end of the street, a horde of dozens filled the avenue from side to side.
Leon took off running in the opposite direction. His escape wasn't a simple journey from one point to another; it became an agonizing and labyrinthine odyssey of pure urban survival. The minutes dragged like hours, each city block seemed endless and plagued by horrors worse than the last. He ran past a large electronics store with shattered windows, where a cluster of dozens of TVs still turned on showed nothing but flickering gray static.
That unnatural light illuminated a group of about ten zombies, kneeling on the ground, frantically devouring the mutilated remains of a large mounted police horse. Leon hugged the opposite brick wall, holding his breath, advancing with silent, millimeter-precise steps so as not to alert them to his presence, feeling the stench of punctured intestines turning his stomach.
Cold sweat soaked his back, sticking his shirt to his skin beneath the heavy leather jacket. The devastation around him was total, absolute, and demoralizing. The improvised police barricades—patrol cars parked in a V-shape, sand barrels, and thick barbed wire—had been grotesquely overrun, crushed by the sheer, unstoppable weight of the masses of bodies.
There were massive stains of blood and muddy viscera on the walls that reached as high as a full-grown man, telling silent stories of desperate struggles, of lines that broke, and horrible endings that he, in his naivety, had arrived too late to prevent. His model city was a giant open-air graveyard.
At least ten agonizing minutes of evasion, short dashes between cover, and constant terror passed. He turned down a narrow alley to avoid crossing a main avenue that was completely blocked by an overturned school bus surrounded by dozens of infected. The stench in the alley, a mixture of rain-rotted garbage, urine, and decaying flesh, was suffocating, forcing him to breathe through his mouth.
Reaching the dark end of the alley, he found a narrow, treacherous bottleneck formed by a huge overturned industrial dumpster and a mail delivery van smashed against the opposite wall. Right in the middle of the only possible passage, an extraordinarily robust zombie—a man who in life must have weighed over two hundred and fifty pounds, dressed in a paramedic's uniform bloodied from head to toe—blocked the exit, devouring something unidentifiable on the ground.
Leon stopped dead in his tracks, his boots scraping the gravel. In that exact instant, he heard a wet sound behind him: the splashing of irregular footsteps. A group of at least five infected had followed him into the alley, drawn by his scent, and completely blocked his retreat. He was trapped in a corridor of death.
If he fired his 9mm Matilda at the burly paramedic from so close, the blast in that enclosed, brick-lined space wouldn't just stun his own senses, but would instantly attract all the zombies from the main street toward the only available exit. His death sentence. He had to get through that funnel in complete silence, and he had to do it right now.
He holstered the pistol with a quick, fluid motion, releasing the retention safety. The zombie paramedic, detecting his presence by the faint clinking of the weapon, slowly straightened up. It extended its thick arms stained with dried blood, showing chunks of meat between its teeth, and let out a hollow, wet roar as it lunged clumsily forward. Leon didn't back up a single millimeter. He gritted his teeth until his jaw ached, lowered his center of gravity by bending his knees, and, using the explosive momentum of his short sprint and the countless hours of hand-to-hand combat and police takedown training, he charged with his entire being.
He drove the point of his shoulder with brute force and technique directly into the center of the creature's chest. The zombie was heavy, immensely dense, like crashing into a wet bag of cement covered in dead flesh, but Leon channeled all his desperation and adrenaline into the point of impact. He pushed violently, pinning the massive infected paramedic against the cold corrugated metal paneling of the delivery van with a dull thud.
Before the beast's rotting teeth could get close enough to his neck to bite, Leon used his free arm and delivered a brutal, precise upward elbow strike to its lower jaw, dislocating it with a sickening crunch of splintering bone. Immediately after, he grabbed it by the thick lapels of the medical uniform, pivoted on his back foot using the monster's own weight against it, and threw it with a sweeping throw onto the muddy ground behind him, right into the path of the other approaching infected.
Taking advantage of the tiny, vital gap he had just created with brute force, Leon squeezed sideways through the bottleneck, his jacket scraping the rusted metal, and bolted out onto the next open street, leaving his clumsy pursuers tripping and falling over the paramedic, trapped in the alley.
Panting profusely, his lungs burning as if he were swallowing fire and his heart pounding against his eardrums, he leaned against a thick blue mailbox on the sidewalk for a few seconds to catch his breath. He looked up, pushing his sweat-soaked hair out of his forehead, and finally felt a tiny, minuscule ray of hope touch his weary soul.
About a hundred yards away, majestic and somber, rose the imposing facade of the police station. He was facing the tall, ornate wrought-iron walls that marked the outer security perimeter of the R.P.D. However, it wasn't the imposing, gothic architecture of the former art museum that made his blood run cold as he approached, erasing his relief instantly, but the Dantean massacre that adorned the paved street and the tiled sidewalk right in front of the main gates.
There were half a dozen massive, skinned Dobermans—Leon, with a lump in his throat, immediately recognized them by the remains of their tactical collars as the highly trained, now horribly mutated hounds of the K-9 unit—dead and scattered in puddles of their own black blood on the asphalt. Leon approached one of the massive bodies with his weapon raised again, fearing that one of them might still be breathing.
The closest dog had its thick neck snapped at a completely unnatural and impossible angle, and a deep, surgically precise gash on the back of its neck that had severed its spinal cord. He swallowed hard and looked toward the tall, decorative iron fence on the sidewalk. He held his breath sharply, feeling a sharp pang of nausea churn his guts: another of the monstrous, ferocious hounds was brutally impaled on one of the fence's thick, rusted spikes, with the iron tip protruding through its back, suspended in the air like a macabre, brutal tactical warning, its blood dripping rhythmically onto the sidewalk.
Leon quickly surveyed the scene under the reddish, flickering light of a broken streetlamp. He observed the wounds, the angles of the falls, and the environment. The result of his mental inspection was terrifying: there were no bullet wounds on the animals' bodies. None of the thick, flayed skins showed the unmistakable irregular hole of a projectile impact.
There wasn't a single brass casing, neither from a pistol nor a rifle, scattered in the pools of blood on the ground. There were no ballistic entry or exit holes, nor missed impacts on the surrounding masonry.
"What the hell...?" he whispered, feeling a cold, bristling sweat run down his spine to the nape of his neck. "Did someone kill this entire lethal pack at close range... with just a knife and their bare hands? Without missing a single time?"
Whoever had passed through here just a few minutes or perhaps hours before him was no ordinary frightened police officer, let alone a civilian running terrified for their life. That clinical, silent lethality wasn't taught at the academy. It was a true killing machine, an alpha predator capable of facing the mutated horrors head-on and systematically slaughtering them using nothing but brute physical force, cold steel, and the urban environment itself to their advantage.
Shaking his head vigorously so as not to lose focus and to prevent paranoia from taking hold of him, Leon moved toward the main entrance of the cobblestone courtyard. The heavy double security gate, forged in solid iron, was suspiciously ajar. A thick tempered steel chain and a massive, high-security industrial padlock hung destroyed and dangling from the bars, completely deformed and smoking, as if they had been blown apart by a direct impact from a high-caliber firearm at point-blank range. A violent, rushed job.
With extreme caution, he pushed the heavy gate, whose rusty creak sounded like a scream in the night, and entered the dark inner courtyard. He stepped over a couple of zombies dressed in blue city hall janitor uniforms, lying lifelessly on their backs, sporting lethal, clean, and astonishingly precise cuts that entered through the lower base of the jaw to pierce the brain.
Swallowing his fear, he climbed the wide, monumental stone steps to the main building's entrance, his weapon aimed steadily at eye level, and pushed the heavy, large double wooden doors of the police station with his shoulder.
He stepped into the famous Main Hall of the R.P.D.
The place was monumental, spectacular, designed over half a century ago originally to inspire profound artistic awe and dwarf the museum's visitors. Gigantic, polished marble columns supported a soaring vaulted ceiling, an intricate and beautiful tiled floor that formed a grand mosaic, and a massive classical white marble statue of a goddess holding a vessel dominated the enormous two-story hall, presiding over the reception desk.
However, the usual lighting was gone, replaced by a gloomy twilight, fed only by the pale, red flashing emergency lights that cast long, jagged, and ominous shadows that seemed to writhe on their own against the ornate walls of the second floor.
But what struck Leon the most, hitting him much harder than the architectural grandeur of the place, was the absolute, inhuman silence. There were no radios crackling with officers' voices, no phones ringing, no civilians crying for shelter.
It was a sepulchral silence, thick, dense, and almost sacred, a void broken only and unsettlingly by the percussive echo of his own boots stepping on the cold, stained marble. It was the tomb of Raccoon City's justice.
"Hello?" Leon called out, his voice echoing weak and small into the high, dark vaults of the immense lobby. He held his pistol high, both arms tense, visually sweeping the large, dark central reception desk, and then checking the thick metal security shutters that were now tightly closed, blocking the entrances to the east and west wings of the building. No answer. "Is anyone here? I'm Officer Leon Kennedy! I just arrived!"
As he slowly advanced toward the center of the main hall, lowering his guard just a fraction of an inch at the apparent, deceptive lack of immediate enemies, the sole of his left boot stepped on something unusually wet, thick, and sticky. The sound was a disgusting "schlap." Leon looked down, frowning under the dim light. Under the flashing, alarming red glare of the sirens, he saw a huge, disturbing pool of fresh blood staining the pristine white marble black. It wasn't just a few drops from a fleeing wounded person; it was a continuous, thick, grotesque trail, betraying a recent butchery.
Following the brutal trail with his gaze toward the darkness off to the side, Leon felt all the air leave his lungs at once, as if he had been punched in the stomach.
Lying miserably next to one of the heavy wooden visitor benches, rested an immense corpse that defied any human nightmare or anatomy textbook. It wasn't a simple zombie, nor did it even resemble an infected human being. It was a muscular, hulking abomination, without a single square inch of protective skin left on it.
Its entire body was a disgusting mass of raw, red muscle fibers exposed to the air, pulsing even in death. The most disturbing part was a bulbous, grayish, swollen brain with throbbing veins that peeked out and protruded directly from the top of its deformed skull, without the slightest protection of a cranial vault or ocular tissue.
A grotesquely long tongue, as thick as a man's arm and covered in thorns, hung limp and drooling from its massive jaws filled with razor-sharp fangs, and its abnormally long arms ended in enormous claws the size of curved butcher sabers.
Leon took a step back instinctively, stumbling slightly and aiming the Matilda right at the creature's monstrous head, his heart hammering frantically against his ribs, expecting the nightmare to leap at him. However, the monster was clearly and definitively dead.
Daring to observe it more closely, lowering the weapon slightly, Leon noticed brutally deep, surgically precise cuts that had sliced through thick tendons of its musculature, and, as a final blow, what looked like a devastating point-blank ballistic impact from a shotgun or a high-caliber weapon, which had completely shattered its spine at the neck, nearly decapitating it.
"But what kind of damn nightmare is this?" Leon whispered, horrified to the core at the bizarre mutation and, at the same time, feeling a profound, inexplicable awe mixed with dread at the unfathomable level of brutality of whoever had taken that thing down in hand-to-hand combat. Whoever had killed it there, in the middle of the hall, had done so with an absolutely overwhelming coldness, technique, and lethality, unphased by the beast's alien appearance.
Suddenly, a crackling, discordant electronic noise jolted him sharply from his morbid stupor. A flicker of white static light caught his attention behind the imposing, tall central reception desk made of dark mahogany.
Leon rushed around the desk, almost tripping in his haste. On the polished wooden table, abandoned amidst the chaos, the screen of a rugged security laptop flashed white and gray, displaying feeds from the closed-circuit television channel. Through the noisy hiss of static and interference, the grainy image of a long, flooded hallway gradually came into focus, and a human voice—desperate, high-pitched, and choked by the purest panic—violently tore through the sepulchral silence of the lobby through the tiny speakers.
"To anyone listening! For the love of God! I'm Officer Elliot Edward! I'm trapped near the watchman's room in the east wing, lower level!" The sweaty, pale, blood-stained face of a young police officer appeared on the black-and-white screen, his eyes bulging and looking frantically over his shoulder, as if the devil himself were chasing him. "They're breaking the door down! There are too many of them, please! I need backup, please, anyone, get me out of here!"
Leon's protective instinct flared up and triggered instantly like a coiled spring, erasing from his mind any trace of residual fear of the flayed creature or the profound fatigue of the night. There, just yards away behind those doors, was a live police officer. Someone from his new team, a brother with a badge, was begging for his life and desperately needed him.
"Hold on, officer, hold on, I'm on my way!" Leon yelled at the computer screen, leaning his hands on the desk, even though he knew perfectly well the other officer couldn't hear him through that one-way feed.
He spun on his heels with feline agility and ran at full speed, his boots ringing on the marble, toward the massive, heavy metal roller shutter that tightly blocked the entrance to the East Wing. Next to the gate's huge tracks, there was a red emergency control metal box.
Leon ripped off the small plastic protective cover with a strong yank, forced the heavy manual lever upwards, and the internal mechanisms groaned. The immense steel shutter slowly began to rise, protesting with an agonizing, deafening, and painful screech of rusted metal that surely alerted everything nearby. It lifted just enough to open a tiny, half-meter gap from the floor, and there it stopped dead, jamming hopelessly halfway due to the lack of electrical power.
Without thinking twice or considering the risks of getting trapped, Leon dove headfirst and slid on his belly beneath the heavy metal shutter, tearing his jacket in the process, landing heavily in a hallway plunged in almost absolute darkness. The impact of his boots landing didn't ring against tiles, but splashed with tremendous force; the level of the dirty, stagnant, and deadly freezing water in that sector reached well above his ankles.
Water flowed continuously in small waterfalls from large ruptured main pipes inside the drop ceiling, dripping incessantly, soaking the shoulders and back of his clothes in seconds. The entire environment of the East Wing looked as if it had been subjected to a long, brutal, and bloody siege, losing the battle in the process.
Heavy metal filing cabinets stuffed with documents had been violently overturned, blocking much of the narrow path like makeshift barricades; entire chunks of torn masonry and fallen ceiling hung like dead vines from the walls, and the very few dying fluorescent tube lights that still barely worked flickered erratically, emitting a constant electrical hum, akin to a death rattle, that set every nerve in his body on edge and ruined his peripheral vision.
He advanced with a determined step, holding the 9mm Matilda firmly high in front of his face, guiding himself solely and exclusively by the narrow, trembling beam of white light from his tactical flashlight, precariously attached to his shoulder strap. Every careful, shuffling step he took in the deep water violently shattered the heavy, sepulchral silence of the narrow hallway, echoing and bouncing off the walls like a revealing sonar ping that screamed his position to the shadows.
The air down there was dense, stale, and suffocating, saturated to the point of nausea with a penetrating, rancid stench of old mold, subterranean dampness, and copious coagulated blood.
Pure, primitive fear tried to grip his throat, squeezing like an ice claw, making him doubt his sanity for a millisecond when his beam illuminated a pile of completely smashed rolling medical gurneys, stained crimson red, and he stared in shock at the incredibly deep claw marks—identical to those of the beast in the lobby—gouged mercilessly into the plaster and concrete of the walls down to the inner bricks. Everything around him was the undeniable trace of a massacre and a desperate, lost battle.
"You can do this, Leon... You can fucking do this," he whispered to himself, his voice just a thread, clenching his jaw and forcing himself to swallow the terror that fought to paralyze him, tightly adjusting his grip on the sweaty handle of his service weapon until his fingers ached. There were no excuses. There was a live human officer nearby in that darkness who depended absolutely and solely on him. He couldn't, and wouldn't, fail on his first day as a cop.
He rounded the next corner of the narrow hallway with his heart pounding wildly against his ribs, as if it wanted to jump out of his chest. Suddenly, the rhythmic, frantic, and desperate sound of deafening metal strikes against steel broke the monotony of the dripping water. The furious impacts were coming from a few yards ahead.
"That has to be him! He's still alive!" Leon thought, feeling a violent, renewed jolt of pure adrenaline injecting into his bloodstream.
Without hesitating a single second more, and abandoning the stealth he had tried so hard to maintain, he started running at full speed down the dark, flooded hallway, kicking up huge, noisy splashes of dark, foul water in his rapid wake, completely ignoring the dark, threatening silhouettes that danced deceptively on the walls, propelled by the jerky beam of his small flashlight.
"Officer! Hold on! Keep banging, I'm here!" Leon yelled at the top of his lungs, hoping his vibrant human voice would pierce the metal barrier and give a glimmer of hope to the man trapped on the other side. "Just a little longer, buddy, I'm getting you out of there no matter what!"
At the end of the long, gloomy tunnel, dimly lit by an emergency light, in front of a service door connecting to the watchman's room, he saw the backlit silhouette of a man on his knees, struggling and kicking frantically.
It was Elliot. The officer was face down, desperately trying to drag himself under a second metal roller shutter that had gotten stuck halfway open, but something monstrous, or rather several somethings, were holding him tightly from the other side, in the deep darkness of the adjacent room, pulling his legs backward with a massive, terrifying force that the man couldn't match.
"Help me! For the love of Holy God, get me out of here, they've got my legs!" Elliot screamed, his voice breaking, stretching his arms out toward Leon's saving figure. The trapped officer's fingers uselessly clawed at the joints of the tiled floor, slick with his own slippery blood, and his face was contorted into a heartbreaking grimace of pure, absolute terror, his eyes brimming with tears of panic.
Leon unclipped his small shoulder flashlight, which fell to the floor and rolled splashing through the water, casting erratic lights on the ceiling, and dropped to his knees on the wet floor without a thought for his own safety. He firmly grabbed both of Officer Elliot's cold, sweaty wrists with all the strength his body could muster, clamping down like a vise, and pulled toward himself, resolutely bracing the rubber soles of his heavy boots against the shutter's vertical steel frame to get a perfect foothold and use his legs for leverage.
"I got you, Elliot! Easy, don't let go for anything in the world!" Leon roared, the veins in his neck popping and the tense muscles in his back burning from the titanic effort, as he played an agonizing, macabre game of tug-of-war against the unseen, silent horde on the other side of the steel.
For a brief, hopeful second, it seemed the combined strength of both was winning the battle for his life. Elliot advanced a couple of torturous inches toward the longed-for freedom of Leon's hallway. But then, the monsters on the other side, in a collective frenzy over the prey slipping away from them, all pulled backward in unison with a dull, brutal, mechanical, and completely unnatural force.
The sound that followed that yank was horrifying; a nightmare symphony that Leon would never forget. A deep, wet tearing sound, quickly followed by the repulsive, loud crunch of human flesh, tendons, and spine violently giving way under an extreme external pressure that the body isn't designed for, echoed brutally in the acoustics of the narrow hallway.
Elliot let out a seemingly endless, gurgling, guttural shriek of pure agony, a scream that made Leon's hot blood run cold in his veins. Suddenly, the immense resistance on Elliot's arms gave way completely, as if an extremely taut rope had been cut. Leon was thrown violently backward by the sudden, unexpected loss of weight on his leverage, crashing painfully on his back against the cold masonry wall of the opposite hallway. Elliot's heavy body fell heavily on top of him, dragging him down into the flooded floor with a loud splash.
"Easy, buddy, I got you out, I got...!" Leon tried to comfort him immediately, catching his breath and clumsily sitting up on the flooded floor, trying to adjust the wounded partner on his lap.
But the words of encouragement and relief died instantly in his throat, replaced by an intense, sour taste of acidic bile that rose up his esophagus.
Looking down and staring at the police officer he had just rescued, the most absolute and unfathomable horror emptied his soul and stole his breath. He hadn't saved him at all. He had lost the macabre tug-of-war.
The dozens of hungry zombies hidden on the other side of the heavy metal shutter had kept the lower half of the trophy.
Officer Elliot's body had literally been ripped and torn in half, right at the waist, severed by the brutal traction. His pink intestines, stomach, and other internal organs spilled freely and horribly out of the massive, open pelvic cavity, floating and emptying onto the dirty, freezing water of the narrow hallway, quickly painting it a thick, vibrant arterial red.
Elliot's pale face was rigidly frozen in a gruesome grimace of a silent, eternal scream, his glassy eyes, already devoid of life, staring fixedly into nowhere, accusing the void.
Leon, horrified, panting erratically and on the verge of uncontrollable vomiting, let go of the warm, half-devoured corpse in his hands, pushing it away from him. He scrambled nimbly backward, like a terrified crab, seized by the rawest and most irrational panic, stumbling miserably over his own feet tangled in the water as the harsh reality of his failure crushed him.
Through the narrow, half-meter gap under the shutter, the dozens of blood-and-rot-stained hands of the infected began to poke through and eagerly claw at the floor. Soon, the pale, mutilated, milky-eyed faces of at least five zombies appeared, motivated and maddened by the feast of Elliot's fresh blood and flesh they had just consumed. They crouched clumsily and began to slither and crawl swiftly under the metal barrier, reaching their claws out directly to grab Leon's boots.
Leon blindly scooped up his Matilda pistol from the wet floor, his hands trembling uncontrollably for the first time since the endless nightmare of that night had begun at the gas station. He fired three times in quick succession, desperately, the muzzle flash illuminating the monsters' faces and the sound deafening his ears in the tunnel's echo.
The impacts shattered the head of the first infected trying to cross in the lead, splattering brain matter on the grating, but the containment space was too narrow and, upon falling, its body served as a macabre ramp. The other bodies, devoid of any instinct for self-preservation, literally piled on top of one another, using themselves as shields of inert flesh to push off and advance inexorably toward him.
There were simply too many of them, a wave of dead in a hallway too confined and lacking side escape routes. He had to retreat to open ground immediately, or he would be the next to be dismembered.
Leon spun around, ignoring his dizziness, and ran in desperate stumbles back the way he had come, toward the relative safety of the main lobby. What had once been merely a spooky, dark, flooded hallway had suddenly, as if by hellish magic, turned into a suffocating, deadly trap.
As he moved quickly, the noise of his own shots had awakened the section. The heavy wooden doors of the dark side offices, the press room, and interrogation rooms that had seemed firmly shut and silent when he passed by, began to creak and then violently give way under the collective push and weight of dozens of the dead piling up inside.
Zombies soaked in blood, putrefied, and wearing all kinds of civilian clothes and torn police uniforms, emerged from nowhere, stumbling out of the shadows of the rooms like hungry apparitions conjured by hell, immediately extending their pale, cold hands to try and snatch him on the fly.
Leon, with heightened reflexes, had to dodge them, nimbly zigzagging from side to side in the narrow corridor, slamming against the wall and violently shoving his left shoulder into a suited one that tried to sink its teeth into his face in the gloom. But, of all the terror he was experiencing, the worst, by far, wasn't even seeing their disfigured faces or feeling their slippery grasps; it was hearing them.
The echo of the narrow, walled-in stone hallway acoustically amplified a chilling, rhythmic sound: the heavy, unison, dragging slap, slap, slap of dozens of bare feet, office shoes, and thick, rotting police boots frantically stepping in the stagnant water pooled on the floor, relentlessly chasing him like a slow-motion stampede.
That furious, wet tide of splashing and inarticulate groans echoed loudly behind his back, multiplying; every second closer, louder, cruelly threatening to engulf him like an avalanche of rotting meat.
Without stopping for a single instant or daring to look over his shoulder, he spotted the end of the tunnel and dove headlong onto the paved floor upon seeing the tiny exit gap. He slid on his stomach at high speed under the first metal shutter, tearing his jacket and shirt even more, and landing heavily on the cold, smooth, illuminated security marble of the Main Hall.
He immediately rolled over and tried to get to his feet to keep running, but he was too slow. A fast zombie, wearing the characteristic grease-stained blue uniform of a police garage mechanic, had followed him too closely, crawling furiously and crossing just behind him, seconds before the gate finally gave way and jammed completely under the weight of the others banging on the metal.
The rabid creature lunged at the rookie from the floor as soon as they both crossed, with an agility surprising for a dead man, grabbing the lapels of Leon's brown leather jacket tightly and using its own dead weight to throw him back onto his back on the hard marble. The beast's disgustingly yellow, splintered teeth, stained with blood and bile, snapped violently and furiously in the air over and over, spraying black drool millimeters from the young officer's exposed, throbbing neck.
Leon, in total panic, used both arms, crossing his thick forearms to rigidly block the monster's clavicle shoulders and try to keep its deadly jaws away from his jugular, struggling desperately and uselessly as he turned his face away, feeling the disgusting, nauseating, and warm breath of dead meat and viscera brushing against his right cheek.
The dead weight of the massive zombie on top of him was absolutely crushing, a pure, mechanical force of gravity; the burning in Leon's tired arms and his remaining strength were rapidly failing after his recent, extreme physical exertions in the hallway. The creature's mouth lowered another inch. He was going to die right there, at the feet of the goddess statue.
Suddenly, an intense, fleeting, blinding star-shaped flash of fire brutally lit up the entire massive lobby for a fraction of a second, erasing the shadows. It was followed absolutely immediately by the deafening, dry thunder of a powerful, high-caliber gunshot that violently tore through the dense, sacred air of the vast Main Hall, bouncing in an endless echo off the distant ceiling dome.
The rotting head of the zombie mechanic crushing Leon spectacularly exploded like a rotten watermelon hit by a sledgehammer, opening like a grotesque flower and copiously splattering the pristine surrounding marble floor with a thick shower of dark blood and fragments of blackened skull. The beast's sudden, decapitated dead weight, now lacking any neurological motor, collapsed heavily and inertly on top of him, silenced forever.
Leon, almost in disbelief, panting agonizingly with his lungs burning from the extreme adrenaline injected into his heart, pushed the disgusting decapitated corpse aside with a strong, revolted shove, getting it off his chest. He quickly sat up on the bloody marble, wiping his face and instinctively and swiftly raising his Matilda pistol, pointing it directly at the dark, distant source from which that precise, life-saving shot in the gloom had come.
There, barely ten or twelve yards away at a safe tactical distance, sitting on the lobby floor and leaning heavily and irregularly against the thick side frame of the massive solid wood reception desk, was a black man. The mysterious savior wore the impeccable, though now completely ruined by the disaster, blue tactical uniform bearing the golden insignia of an R.P.D. Lieutenant.
His skin, which under normal circumstances should have been dark and full of vitality, was now alarmingly ashen, almost a deadly pale gray, and was entirely covered by a thick layer of bright, cold sweat. He breathed with noticeable, agonizing difficulty, through shallow, short, painful gasps, as if every inhalation was a punishment.
The battered officer's left hand pressed with pure, desperate willpower against his own right abdominal flank, gripping the fabric tightly in a vain attempt to contain and plug the profuse hemorrhaging of a gruesome, irregular, and extremely deep wound that flowed endlessly, soaking the entire lower half of his blue shirt in a bright, intense, arterial red.
Meanwhile, in his still outstretched, steady right hand, he held his heavy, standard-issue service pistol with professional expertise, aiming perfectly, its dark barrel still letting out a thin trail of hot smoke from the miraculous, life-saving shot just a moment ago.
The wounded officer lowered the weapon very slowly, trembling slightly from the effort, upon confirming the threat was neutralized and finally recognizing the scared young man on the floor, who wasn't wearing a uniform but did have a badge peeking out of his pocket and an obvious police posture.
His pupils were visibly clouded by immense physical pain and the certainty of the cold, impending fatality looming over him, but in the unfathomable depths of his gaze, they still kept alive a profound, authoritative, and unwavering spark of mental lucidity and the moral authority of leadership that commanded immediate respect.
He coughed painfully, weakly and hollowly, spitting a small speck of blackish blood onto his own sweaty chin, before focusing his blurry vision directly into Leon's eyes and offering, with infinite effort, the faintest, almost imperceptible, ironic, and tragically human smile of welcome.
"You're... you're really late, rookie," the man muttered with an incredibly hoarse, raspy voice, barely a whisper in the vastness of the hall. "I'm Lieutenant... Marvin Branagh. In charge."
Leon didn't hesitate for half a second; understanding that the zombie threat had been suppressed, he leaped nimbly to his feet, loudly holstering his weapon in his thigh rig, and sprinting across the marble toward the fallen officer, sliding skillfully to his knees beside him and braking right at the edge of the Lieutenant's thick pool of blood. Immense confusion and a nascent, very cold fury swelled inside him upon seeing up close, for the first time, the atrocious nature of the abdominal injury.
"My God... sir," Leon whispered, his voice cracking under the weight of the moment, carefully moving the officer's trembling hands aside to try and inspect the wound, immediately applying brutal, painful direct pressure to the Lieutenant's torn tissue with both of his own stained hands, trying to buy some time. "Lieutenant... What happened here? Who did this to you?"