September 29th. West Wing Hallway, R.P.D. Station. 8:36 P.M.
The heavy steel door of the Safety Deposit Room opened with an agonizing creak, pushed by John Wick's shoulder.
The western hallway they had cleared just minutes before was now a stroboscopic nightmare. Red emergency lights spun frantically, dyeing the blood-spattered walls with an infernal glow, while the deafening bell of the fire alarm hammered their eardrums mercilessly. The air was saturated with a thick white dust and the acrid smell of aviation smoke filtering in from the east wing.
Jill stepped out behind John, holding her Beretta high. The R.P.D. tactical vest was tightly fastened over her chest, giving her a much more militarized appearance. Ada brought up the rear, coughing slightly from the dust, her analytical eyes scanning the moving shadows.
John adjusted his shotgun sling. The Kevlar vest is heavy, rigid, he evaluated mentally, feeling how the thick material slightly restricted his usual fluidity of movement. It's not a tailored suit. But it will absorb the blunt force trauma that my ribs can no longer withstand. It's a necessary evil.
"The fastest route to the east wing and Irons' office is through the Main Library," Jill shouted to make herself heard over the wailing sirens, pointing ahead. "It's right at the end of this hallway, through the Operations Room."
"As long as the ceiling doesn't decide to fall on us before we get there," Ada commented, brushing a speck of plaster off her shoulder with apparent disinterest. "Lead the way, officer."
They moved forward with the synchronization of a veteran tactical team. However, they had barely taken ten steps when John raised a closed fist in the air, the universal and silent tactical signal to stop dead in their tracks.
Jill and Ada froze instantly.
"What do you see?" Jill whispered, barely moving her lips.
John didn't answer with words. He simply raised the barrel of his shotgun a few degrees toward the ceiling. Following his gesture, the women looked up.
There, clinging to the thick ventilation pipes and moving nervously amidst the intermittent shadows of the red lights, were at least four flayed abominations. A full pack of Lickers. They were visibly agitated by the roar of the fire alarms, hissing and flicking their long drooling tongues from side to side like blind whips, completely disoriented by the acoustic saturation.
Four targets. Blind. Acoustic sound-based predators, John's brain analyzed at breakneck speed. A shotgun blast would alert the rest of the station. It would waste too much ammo. Unviable. The alarm noise is our cover.
John turned his face slightly toward the women.
"Not a single sound," he whispered in a voice so low and raspy it barely brushed the air. "Stick to the wall. We're going under them."
"You've got to be kidding," Ada muttered, though her eyes gleamed with the challenge. "Fine. If I get drool on my dress, I'm holding you responsible, Wick."
The tension was suffocating. They walked beneath the lethal monsters, holding their breath, praying that the crunch of broken glass or an empty casing under their boots wouldn't give them away. Jill felt like her heart was going to burst from her chest; a single drop of cold sweat slid down her temple as they passed directly beneath the hanging claws of one of the beasts.
They were about to cross the corridor's threshold and finally step out of the danger zone, when a new sound cut through the roar of the sirens.
It was a rhythmic sound. Metallic. Absolutely devastating.
Boom... Boom... Boom...
The sudden, immense noise made both the humans and the blind beasts on the ceiling snap their heads in the same direction. Irresistibly drawn by the intense physical vibration in the structure, the two largest and most aggressive Lickers let out deafening shrieks, dropped from the ceiling, and lunged frantically into the dense curtain of smoke at the end of the hallway, wall-running straight toward the source of the noise.
"Problem solved," Ada murmured with a cynical smile. "Let them kill each..."
But what they heard next froze the blood in their veins and wiped the smile off the spy's face.
There was no real battle. Only a choked bellow was heard, a wet, horrifying tearing of flesh, immediately followed by the dry, brutal, and spine-chilling crunch of thick bones and spinal cords snapping without the slightest effort. In a couple of painful seconds, the mutant shrieks were completely silenced.
"My God..." Jill whispered, taking an instinctive step back.
From the thick curtain of dust and smoke at the end of the hallway, a gigantic silhouette emerged, crushing under its massive boot the ruptured skull of one of the Lickers it had just killed with its bare hands. It easily stood over eight feet tall. It wore a heavy, dark olive-green military trench coat that brushed the floor, and a gray fedora that shadowed a face devoid of any human features. Its skin was a pale grayish hue, and its cold, dead eyes instantly locked onto the three survivors.
"We have company," John said with absolute coldness.
His instincts dictated that the greatest threat had to be neutralized immediately with overwhelming force. He stepped half a pace forward, raised the heavy Remington 870 shotgun to his shoulder, aimed directly at the creature's center of mass, and pulled the trigger. BAM!
The roar of the 12-gauge at point-blank range in an enclosed hallway was deafening. A full load of high-velocity buckshot that would have cut a normal man in half hit the giant squarely in the chest.
The trench coat barely rippled. The monster didn't let out a single sound of pain. It didn't step back a single millimeter. It didn't even break the rhythm of its lethal walk. Boom... Boom...
John's eyes narrowed. His tactical mind processed the impact in a millisecond. No penetration. No visible bleeding. The kinetic energy was entirely absorbed by muscle density. Like shooting a concrete bunker with a BB gun.
He quickly racked the slide, ejecting the smoking shell, and adjusted his aim at an upward angle. Let's see how hard your skull is. BAM! The second shot went straight for the head. The giant's hat went flying, revealing a deformed, grayish skull. The kinetic force of the blast managed to knock the creature's head slightly backward, tearing a chunk of dead skin from its cheek. But in less than a second, the giant straightened its neck again. Its lifeless gaze remained locked on John.
"John, it's useless!" Jill yelled, her voice torn by a mix of sheer panic and recognition. "Don't waste ammo! It's a Tyrant! It's a walking tank, a bio-organic weapon! Bullets aren't going to stop it!"
"Then we'll have to find something bigger," John replied, without taking his eyes off the behemoth.
Before he could react to the warning to fall back, the Tyrant closed the distance with a terrifying burst of speed, unnatural for its immense size. It raised a fist the size of a cinder block and threw a devastating punch straight at the assassin's torso.
John, using every ounce of his trained reflexes, dropped the shotgun, letting it hang by its sling, and crossed both arms in a tight block in front of his chest, reinforced by the new Kevlar vest.
The impact sounded like a truck crashing into a brick wall.
He was lifted off the ground by the sheer brute force of the blow and thrown violently backward. He flew nearly ten feet through the air before crashing brutally into a row of metal filing cabinets, denting them with his weight. He coughed up blood, the air escaping his lungs while the sharp pain of his fractured ribs screamed in protest. If he hadn't put on that police armor in the safety deposit room, that single punch would have ruptured his lungs.
"Take cover, you creature of habit!" Ada yelled with obvious frustration.
The spy slid across the floor with feline agility, passing under the Tyrant's outstretched arm, and emptied half a magazine from her 9mm pistol directly into the creature's kneecaps. The bullets sparked as they hit something dense beneath the flesh, but they managed to make the monster stumble for a fraction of a second, losing its balance.
It was enough time. Jill ran to John, grabbing him by the straps of his tactical vest and pulling him hard.
"Up, get up! I told you not to take it head-on!" Jill scolded him, half-dragging him. "To the Library, now!"
John caught his breath and regained his composure in an instant, gripping his shotgun in one fluid motion.
"I'm fine," he grunted, ignoring the fire in his chest.
The three of them burst through the heavy double wooden doors leading to the Library, slamming them shut behind them.
The place was a masterpiece of gothic design: three stories high, carved wooden walkways surrounding the room, and dozens of massive rolling bookshelves packed with old books and files. The fire from the crashed helicopter had begun to seep through the broken glass ceiling, casting titanic, dancing shadows all over the room.
"Barricade the door! Help me with this!" John shouted, shoulder-pressing a heavy solid oak book cart to wedge it across the entrance. Jill and Ada joined him, combining their strength to jam the iron handles.
On the other side, a dull thud made the thick wood tremble. Then another. The hinges began to groan.
"That won't hold it for even a minute," Ada observed, wiping the sweat from her forehead.
"The stairs to the second floor are blocked by debris," Jill analyzed, sweeping the room with her flashlight. "We'll have to go around the ground floor and use the service stairs at the back of the library to reach the east wing balcony."
John nodded, systematically reloading the two shotgun shells he had spent.
"Move. I'll cover the rea..."
John froze mid-sentence.
A lifetime in the underworld had taught him to trust his ears as much as his eyes. Amidst the crackling of the fire devouring the roof, the wailing of the alarms outside, and the pounding on the barricaded door behind them, John perceived something else. An auditory discrepancy.
The knocks on the door have a rhythm. But there's a second rhythm..., John thought, tilting his head slightly. An echo of footsteps that doesn't match the giant in the hallway. They're coming from above.
"Wick?" Ada asked, noticing his stiffness.
From the darkness of the service stairs that Jill had just pointed out as their escape route at the back of the immense room, familiar sounds were coming down.
Boom... Boom... Boom...
Heavy, metallic boots made the wooden steps creak. From the shadows of the second floor, a second figure descended. It was identical to the one pounding on the door behind them: the same colossal height, the same pale, dead skin, the same heavy olive-green military trench coat.
The second Tyrant raised its massive face toward them, its cold gaze locking onto the group as it crushed the head of a librarian-dressed zombie that crossed its path, with the indifference of someone stepping on a cockroach.
"Are you fucking kidding me?" Ada hissed, her eyes widening. "Umbrella cloned this beast?"
The wooden door behind John groaned with a splintering crack, on the verge of giving way to the first monster.
The makeshift barricade of books and solid oak exploded into a thousand wooden splinters behind them. The cart flew through the air as if it were made of cardboard, and the first Tyrant burst into the library, shoving the doorframes aside with its massive hands.
In front of them, the second Tyrant finished descending the steps, blocking the only exit to the east hallway. The two trench-coated titans slowly turned their heads toward the center of the room, boxing the trio in between the tall bookshelves.
"We're out of room," Ada muttered, sliding a hand to the back of her dress, desperately searching for something in her limited inventory. "Tell me you have a plan, Baba Yaga, or we're dead."
John didn't waste breath on words. His mind had already mapped the geometry of the room and the most brutal solution. His thumbs instinctively brushed the steel rings on his vest. In a fluid, perfectly synchronized motion, he ripped off two heavy flashbang grenades he had taken from the armory.
He pulled the pins with his teeth, spat the rings onto the wooden floor, and threw the grenades in opposite directions: one toward the shattered door, the other toward the service stairs.
"Eyes closed, now!" John roared.
CRAACK-BOOOM!
The entire library was engulfed in a white, incandescent flash, so intense it seemed to erase the dancing shadows of the fire, accompanied by a dull boom that made the air vibrate. The two Tyrants, despite their ballistic invulnerability, possessed biological visual and auditory receptors that responded to extreme physical stimuli. Both giants brought their massive arms up to their faces for a microsecond, temporarily disoriented by the sensory overload and the deafening noise.
"To the east wall! Find another way out!" Jill ordered, recovering her vision and pushing Ada down a side aisle formed by two massive rolling shelves of old books.
The three sprinted down the narrow wooden corridor, desperately searching for a side door or a window overlooking the main hall, moving away from the center of the room. The library's old wooden floor creaked painfully beneath their hurried footsteps. The building had already suffered catastrophic damage from the helicopter's shockwave; the upper beams groaned, and a fine rain of plaster kept falling on them.
They were about to reach the eastern wall of the room when a new, terrifying tremor shook the entire library, much stronger than the giants' footsteps. It wasn't coming from behind, or from ahead. It was coming directly from their right.
The solid masonry and brick wall separating them from the adjacent hallway began to bulge inward, cracking with a sound like caged thunder.
"Watch out, the wall!" John yelled, grabbing Jill by her vest and yanking her sharply backward just as the entire wall erupted in a violent explosion of dust, bricks, and mortar.
Through the massive hole newly opened in the structure, brushing aside concrete rubble as if it were cobwebs, a third colossal silhouette burst through. A third Tyrant, identical to the previous ones, emerged from the dust cloud, its cold eyes immediately locking onto the Baba Yaga.
"Three!" Jill exclaimed, losing her breath, her police mind refusing to process the magnitude of the tactical horror in front of her. "This isn't a rescue anymore, it's a corporate execution!"
"Less talking, more moving, Valentine," Ada snapped at her, backing toward the center of the library, looking for a blind spot.
But there were no blind spots. Three walking, invulnerable fortresses had cornered them in the same room. It was a perfect checkmate, meticulously designed by Umbrella. The three giants began to advance toward the center, closing the deadly triangle on the assassin, the officer, and the spy. Every synchronized step the three beasts took echoed in the library like the hammer blows of doomsday.
Boom... Boom... Boom...
Suddenly, a dull crack, much sharper and more lethal than any footstep, echoed beneath their feet.
John looked down instantly. The heavy Victorian beams supporting the library floor, already deeply weakened by the fire, the helicopter explosion, and decades of deterioration, weren't designed to withstand the structural punishment they were taking. And they certainly weren't designed to support the concentration of over three thousand pounds of pure bio-organic muscle mass from three Tyrants simultaneously stepping on the same section of old wood.
The floor began to sink rapidly, forming a concave crater around them. The rolling bookshelves started to tip toward the center of the room, vomiting hundreds of books and crushing the zombies still wandering around.
"The floor is giving way!" Ada yelled, her eyes widening as she realized the deadly and inevitable trap that gravity itself had set for them.
There was no time to formulate an escape plan, nor to fire a single shot.
With a cataclysmic roar that deafened any alarm in the station, the entire cross-section of the Main Library collapsed onto the lower level. The fine woods snapped like toothpicks, and a massive dark abyss opened beneath their boots, swallowing bookshelves, debris, fire, and bodies alike in a waterfall of destruction.
In the millisecond gravity claimed its toll and the floor disappeared beneath them, chaos took over everything. John's mind worked at hyper-speed, evaluating the imminent danger.
I have survived worse falls. My body is built to absorb trauma. Hers isn't, John thought, looking at Jill.
Operating on pure, absolute protective instinct, John used the last fraction of a second of stability to push the young officer with all his might. The assassin's hands slammed against Jill's vest, launching her violently in an upward angle toward the only stable ledge left connected to the heavy doors of the Main Hall.
"Up, Valentine!" John yelled.
Jill flew through the air with a scream, extending her arms. Her gloved hands clung agonizingly to the splintered edge of the intact floor, her body slamming painfully against the wall while her legs dangled over the newly formed dark void.
Beside her, Ada didn't need saving. Anticipating the collapse thanks to her cold sharpness, the spy launched herself using the third Tyrant's back as a springboard just as the monster began to fall. With a graceful and athletic leap fueled by pure survival, her fingers grasped a rusted brass railing on the level of the second-floor upper walkways, leaving her suspended over the disaster, her red dress billowing in the rising dust.
But John had sacrificed his own momentum and position to save the officer. With nothing to hold on to and the center of the floor disintegrating around him, the assassin was sucked straight into the jaws of darkness.
The Baba Yaga plummeted, surrounded by an avalanche of heavy oak bookcases, splintered beams, and tons of concrete from the shattered wall. And he wasn't falling alone. A massive, pale, gloved hand belonging to one of the Tyrants surged from the mid-air debris, trying to grab him during the deadly fall into the gloomy lower levels of the station.
The darkness of the precinct's basements engulfed the monsters, the debris, and the assassin in a thunderous chorus of destruction, brutally and definitively separating the fates of the lethal trio.