The tanker's explosion tore a column of fire through the rain, and the shockwave rolled burning fuel and debris down the full length of the street. The sound kept bouncing between the buildings long after the initial blast, rattling eardrums.
The police cruiser had been hit broadside and split apart. Both halves burned, and the wreckage divided the road into two separate fires with no clear path between them. Leon on one side, Claire on the other, neither able to do more than make out the other's shape through the heat shimmer.
The explosion had scattered most of the zombies that had been surrounding the car, but the noise and firelight pulled in more from both directions, out of alleyways and darkened storefronts, their clouded eyes fixing on the two living people caught in the middle of it all. Claire had her back to a wall, picking off the ones coming at her from the front, but the alley behind her was filling up fast. Leon's situation was no better. Two zombies had closed to arm's length and he swung his weapon up to find the magazine empty.
Three shots rang out in quick succession.
Each one went through a skull. The two zombies coming at Leon dropped. Several more of the ones closing on Claire went down in the same moment, and a narrow corridor of clear space opened up through the fire.
Both of them looked toward the sound at the same time.
Ryan walked out of the shadows at the corner. Black tactical clothing, heavy waterproof bag on his back, Desert Eagle in his right hand with a thin thread of smoke still curling from the barrel. The firelight caught the angles of his face, and his expression was completely level. He scanned the street the way someone reads a room they've already memorized.
"Who are you?" Leon said. Wary, not hostile. The tone of someone who'd used up most of his trust in the last twenty minutes.
"Ryan. Just a survivor." He raised the gun and dropped a zombie that had come around from the left, not breaking his stride. "Let's clear this first, then talk."
He was already moving before the sentence finished.
His footwork was economical, threading between burning vehicles and lurching bodies without wasted motion. Every shot landed. Even moving at speed, the Desert Eagle barely shifted in his grip, no muzzle rise, no reset hesitation between rounds. The zero recoil ability made the gun feel like a laser pointer, and with unlimited ammunition behind it, the zombies had no more effect on him than traffic cones. He moved through the burning street without slowing down.
Leon watched him work, and something behind his expression shifted.
That wasn't a survivor's shooting. The accuracy, the composure, the total absence of any hesitation - none of it fit someone who'd stumbled into this city and was trying to get out alive. And the rounds. Leon kept a rough count, and by the time Ryan had fired his twentieth shot, the math had stopped making sense. The Desert Eagle's magazine held seven rounds. Eight with one chambered. Ryan had not once reached for a reload.
The question rose and Leon pushed it aside. More zombies were coming in from the north end of the street, and he raised his own weapon and fell in on Ryan's right, working the other side of the approach without being asked. The coordination came naturally, which surprised him a little.
Ryan had noticed Leon watching. It didn't concern him.
Early on he'd been careful, kept the abilities quiet, stayed low-profile while he got his bearings. That had made sense then. It didn't anymore. Umbrella's operation ran through every layer of this city, and the t-Virus and G-Virus and every BOW they'd engineered were just the surface of it. He couldn't dismantle that alone, regardless of what his cheat abilities let him survive. Leon, Claire, Marvin - the ones who'd stayed standing in the original story, who'd fought Umbrella to the end and kept their principles intact through all of it - they were exactly the people he needed beside him going forward.
If showing what he could do made them more willing to trust him, hiding it was the wrong play.
Across the fire, Claire had used the opening to deal with the group behind her. She cupped her hands around her mouth: "Leon! The fire's spreading, we can't stay here!"
"RPD!" Leon called back. "Meet us at the Raccoon City Police Department! It should be safe!"
Claire nodded hard and turned, disappearing into the alley on her side of the street, swallowed by the dark and rain.
The fire had fully closed off the road. Ryan shot the last zombie in their immediate area and holstered the Desert Eagle. "Station's two blocks up. I'll walk with you."
Leon didn't argue. In a city full of things trying to kill you, a capable ally who'd just saved your life twice in under a minute was not something you turned down.
"I owe you one." He slapped a fresh magazine into his own weapon and matched Ryan's pace. "Leon S. Kennedy. I'm a new officer with the Raccoon City Police Department."
"New officer." Ryan almost smiled. Rookies. The most dangerous people in any room, every time. Two months ago he'd been the newcomer himself, still able to joke about it. The count of what he'd seen and done since then had added up quietly, and somewhere along the way the weight of it had settled in. Once Raccoon City was behind him, he was going to need a long stretch of doing absolutely nothing.
"Ryan Cole," he said, eyes already moving to the corner ahead. "Three zombies around that turn. Stay close to the wall. I'll take left, you take right."
Leon tightened up immediately, weapon raised, back to the brick. They came around the corner and found exactly three rotting shapes shuffling toward them at the angle Ryan had described. Not approximately. Exactly.
Leon put down his side of it and said nothing, but the math was bothering him. The alley had been dark enough that he'd only heard vague movement before the turn. Ryan had given him a precise count and a layout. Either he'd been here before and memorized it, or he was perceiving things that normal human senses didn't cover.
He didn't know that Ryan's X-ray vision had already mapped everything within a hundred meters - positions, movement patterns, anything alive or recently undead, visible through walls and darkness alike. Nothing within that radius was hidden from him.
They moved steadily toward the RPD. Ryan on point, Leon covering the flanks, the scattered zombies between them and the station never getting close enough to matter. Ryan's shooting remained what it had been at the crash site: unhurried, precise, the Desert Eagle cycling without pause or reload. Leon started to ask about it twice and stopped himself both times, landing eventually on the practical explanation that Ryan had modified the weapon somehow, carried more ammunition than was obvious, and was simply better at this than Leon had assumed anyone could be.
It was a reasonable explanation.
He held onto it.