The footsteps outside the door grew louder. Each one landed like a sledgehammer, sending a faint tremor through the floorboards.
Ryan locked his eyes on the door. The thing outside was closing at a steady pace. He shot a glance over his shoulder: Claire shielding Sherry, Marvin doubled over with blood seeping through his fingers, Ben and Katherine huddled against the wall shaking. Seven people. Nowhere to go.
"It's here." He thumbed off the safety. "Everyone back down the corridor. Now!"
"What is..."
Leon never finished. The front door exploded inward.
The orphanage's heavy oak frame blew off its hinges and the Tyrant filled the doorway, its massive frame blocking the exit entirely. Dead grey eyes swept the room, then fixed on the pendant around Sherry's neck.
"Fire!" Leon emptied his magazine. Rounds peppered the dark green coat and left nothing but pale scuffs on the surface. Claire's shots did no better. Marvin gritted his teeth, leveled the shotgun, and put a round square in its chest. The thing didn't even flinch. It kept coming like a bulldozer.
The Tyrant reached out with one black-gloved hand, straight for Sherry.
Its fingers were an inch from the girl's hair when the wall beside it blew apart.
Through the billowing dust, a deformed, bone-white claw punched through the hole. It drove through the Tyrant's bulletproof coat like paper, and with a wet crunch, several blood-slicked bone spurs burst out through its back.
The Tyrant was lifted clean off the ground and hurled into the rubble on the far side.
William forced his way through the breach, half his body swollen with tumorous growths. The massive eyeball on his left shoulder twitched and rolled, then locked onto Sherry behind Claire.
"She... rry..."
Bloody, garbled syllables bubbled from his throat.
Ryan's mouth twisted. "Buy one, get one free."
"Move! Go!" He grabbed Katherine by the arm and shoved her toward the side corridor.
Claire scooped up Sherry and ran. Leon covered the rear. Marvin hauled Ben along on rubber legs. Seven people sprinting through narrow hallways.
They made it to the third floor. An iron door at the end read ROOFTOP EMERGENCY EXIT. Ryan kicked it open. Cold wind hit them full in the face.
Night air howled across the rooftop. Beyond the edge, nothing but black emptiness and a long drop.
Before anyone could catch their breath, the iron door behind them crumpled inward. William squeezed onto the rooftop, sealing off the only way back. That enormous eye found Sherry again.
Ryan stepped forward, putting himself between the creature and everyone else. He raised his pistol. A heartbeat before he pulled the trigger, the rooftop floor at the edge detonated upward.
A blood-drenched shape launched through the hole from the floor below, carrying terrifying momentum, and slammed into William.
The Tyrant.
Its restraint coat had been torn away completely, exposing the pale muscle underneath, writhing and contracting. Without the coat, the power limiters were gone. Even with a killing wound through its torso, it was still executing its core directive. Massive fists hammered down on William's shoulders and drove him flat against the concrete.
Two apex bioweapons tore into each other. Half the rooftop caved in within seconds. Flesh ripped. Fluid sprayed.
"Go!" Ryan holstered the gun without hesitation.
Leon was already pointing. "Fire escape, that side!" They scrambled down a rusted ladder and dropped into a narrow alley that reeked of sewage.
The instant their feet hit the ground, the deafening roar and crash above them stopped.
Silence.
Ryan looked up. The rooftop was empty. Both creatures had plunged through the collapsed floor into the wreckage below.
"Keep moving. Don't stop." Seven people leaning on each other, they pushed deeper into the alley until the darkness swallowed them whole.
...
Fifteen minutes later. Deep in the rubble beneath the orphanage.
In the dark, a sound: wet, raw, the noise of meat knitting together.
The Tyrant lay on its back in the debris. Its right arm had been ripped off at the root. The green coat was shredded to rags. Inside the gaping hole in its chest, pale tissue was multiplying in a frenzy, fighting to repair a body on the edge of death. William was gone.
A rat crept out of the shadows. Far too large. A dark red growth bulged from its back, and its eyes glowed a feral scarlet.
It had found a better host.
The rat crawled through the Tyrant's torn-open chest and burrowed inside.
The Tyrant's ruined body seized once.
The rat ruptured. Dark red parasitic tissue spread through the chest cavity like something alive. Tendrils that had once belonged to Nemesis coiled around the Tyrant's regenerating flesh, strangled it, and forced themselves into the spine, the nervous system, the heart.
Bones cracked and shifted. The Tyrant's remaining left arm clawed at the rubble's edge, and the body hauled itself upright, swaying.
Where the right arm had been torn away, dozens of dark red tendrils braided together and hardened, forcing a new limb into shape. Thicker than the original. Misshapen. The chest wound stopped bleeding. In its place, a parasitic core pulsed with strong, steady rhythm. A Nemesis heart.
The Nemesis parasite had seized this body, this husk already mid-evolution toward Super Tyrant, and made it something new.
Those pupil-less eyes reignited. They ground slowly in their sockets.
"S.T.A.R.S..."
Half a word scraped out of the ruined vocal cords before it jammed. Two directive sets clashed behind those dead eyes, locking the body in place.
Seconds passed. The eyes stopped moving. They fixed on the far end of the alley, the direction Ryan had gone.
The base-level kill directive was overwritten. Something older, rawer, had taken priority. This stitched-together newborn remembered one thing above all else. Not S.T.A.R.S.
Him.
The one who'd put it down again and again. The one who'd made it get back up again and again. The one responsible for all that pain.
It started walking toward the place where Ryan had disappeared.
In the dark, nothing remained but ragged breathing and the wet drag of tendrils across concrete.
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