[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 479 - Dehumanization — Tears Unshed

"No... No!"

A strangled roar, barely contained.

"Ashley..."

Lilly slammed on the brake.

The battered pickup carved a crooked scar across the pothole-riddled dirt road and shuddered to a stop.

She whipped around, heart still slamming.

Leon was slumped in the passenger seat, eyes screwed shut, forehead slick with cold sweat.

His lips moved without sound, like he was facing down something, or someone — only he could see.

"Ashley..."

He said the name again. The pain in his voice was the kind that made your chest clench just hearing it.

"Why did he suddenly become like this?"

Lilly's heart sank.

She unbuckled her seatbelt, leaned over, and gave his shoulder a gentle shake.

"Hey. Wake up."

Nothing.

He only sank deeper, brow knotting tighter, like something had its hooks in him and was pulling.

Lilly hesitated, then pressed her hand to his forehead.

Burning.

Not a fever — not that kind of heat. More like a piece of iron dragged out of a forge, radiating from the inside out.

She unraveled the bandages across his chest.

The wound was fine. Stitches clean, no redness, no pus. She'd been thorough when she'd cleaned it, and it showed.

Not infection. Not fever.

Then what?

She forced his eyelids open. His pupils were contracting violently, the whites threaded through with red.

He looked like he'd already left.

"Look at me," Lilly said, raising a finger in front of his face and moving it side to side.

"How many fingers?"

What came out of Leon's mouth was a stream of disconnected murmuring. Angry one second, crushed the next, then something that sounded like grief.

His emotions ran like a horse with no reins, slamming itself against the edge of collapse over and over.

He kept muttering. His voice dropped lower and lower.

Then everything stopped.

The anger. The grief. The guilt. All of it — gone, like an invisible hand had reached in and wiped the slate clean in a single stroke.

The cab filled with a silence so complete it was hard to breathe.

A chill crawled up Lilly's spine and didn't stop until it hit the back of her skull.

She eased her hands away from him.

Leon's eyes were still open. But there was nothing behind them.

No more delirious words. He just lay there. Still. Like something that had been a person a moment ago and wasn't anymore.

"Hey. Leon?"

"You okay?"

Her voice came out dry.

Silence.

He was suddenly, completely a stranger. And strangers like that were terrifying.

Lilly put the truck back in gear and kept driving, her pulse unsteady.

Leon's eyes stayed open the whole time. Unfocused. Aimed at nothing.

She kept her hands locked on the wheel, palms cold and wet. She didn't look at him. She fixed her eyes on the road stretching out ahead, broken and endless, and didn't let them move.

But she could feel it.

The person sitting next to her had changed.

Not his face. Not his body. Something underneath all of that. Something she couldn't name.

It was a strange feeling. The kind you couldn't explain no matter how long you tried.

Like you'd been sitting next to a person this whole time, and then suddenly, you realized it was just something wearing one.

The rage was gone. The sorrow was gone. That scorching, suffocating restlessness that had felt like it could burn a person alive just being near it.

All of it, gone.

Leon's head turned slowly toward her.

Those empty eyes found her face.

Lilly's whole body locked up. She felt exactly like a mouse that a snake had already decided on, every nerve ending firing, screaming at her to move, to run, to get out.

There was nowhere to go. She was trapped in a little iron box doing sixty on a dead road.

"Stop the car."

Leon's voice.

Lilly's mind went white. Her foot hit the brake on pure reflex.

The pickup shrieked and stopped dead in the middle of the road.

"Get out."

He was already pushing the door open before he finished saying it.

Lilly stood frozen a beat, staring at the side of his face, flat, unreadable, like the surface of still water, and then she got out too.

"What are you trying to do?" There was no hiding it. She was scared.

Leon stood in the road with his head tilted back, looking up at the gray sky.

His world had shifted.

The color had bled out of everything around him. It had all become black and white, clean geometric forms, lines and angles. A simplified model of the world.

Trees. Cover.

Rocks. Obstacles.

The birdsong fading somewhere in the distance. A potential threat signal.

And the woman standing in front of him.

His gaze came back down to Lilly.

Her heart rate. Her breathing. The tension running through her muscles. The pulse ticking in every vessel under her skin.

All of it fed into something behind his eyes, sorted, catalogued, processed.

And the voice that had been locked down inside him, the one he'd always kept buried, spoke now with perfect clarity.

Kill her.

Or control her.

An uncontrolled variable left at your side is a liability.

➤ Next: Tie Me Up