[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 502 - Cunning Ada — The Conversation

The Spencer Mansion was a Victorian-style building buried deep in the mountain wilderness. From the outside, it looked like some bankrupt nobleman's country retreat — all ornate facades and manicured pretension.

Beneath it, the mountain had been hollowed to the bone. What lived in that hollow was the Umbrella Corporation's most classified biological research facility.

Ada walked the red-carpeted corridor, her heels striking the hardwood in low, rhythmic thuds.

She pushed open the door to her private sterile suite.

She stripped off the Red Qipao, a faint trace of road dust on the hem, and changed into a black silk robe.

She didn't go to wash up. Instead, she crossed to the table and drew out a strip of ultra-thin transparent plastic film from the waterproof pouch she kept against her skin.

Under the lamp, the film's surface held faint impressions. Barely visible. But they were there.

Hours ago, on that rutted dirt road outside Atlanta, she had pressed this film against Leon's lips. Between their mouths. Just that thin layer of plastic separating her from him.

Rick and the others, brutes all of them, probably wrote it off as some French farewell, or a quirky sense of humor.

Only Ada knew what she'd lifted off that man.

Leon.

The one who had fused with the Restoration Vaccine virus. The one capable of suppressing even weaponized bioagents with his own body.

His blood. His saliva. Every cell he carried. All of it, priceless.

Candice had been working for months trying to crack the special control chain in Leon's biological fluids. Ada wasn't about to let something like this walk past her.

She picked up a pair of precision tweezers and pinched the edge of the film.

Then she tore open the sterile packaging of a long medical swab.

She worked the swab tip across the section of film that had contacted his lips, slow, methodical, thorough. Scraping. Smearing. Nothing wasted.

A bottle of purified water sat on the table, fresh from the refrigerator. Condensation still beaded on the glass.

Ada unscrewed the cap and submerged the swab.

She stirred it in slow circles. The invisible residue, saliva, epithelial cells, dissolved into the clear water without a trace.

"Your charm really is something, Leon."

The murmur was almost affectionate. She snapped the swab at the stem, dropped the pieces into the medical waste bin, and screwed the cap back on tight.

She held the bottle up to the light and tilted it gently.

Clear. Still. No visible change whatsoever.

An unreadable smile settled on her face.

She took the bottle with her, left the suite, and stepped into a concealed elevator that dropped her straight to the third sublevel.

The doors slid open.

The Victorian woodwork and warm lighting were gone. In their place: harsh cold fluorescents, bare stainless steel walls, and the particular sterile silence of a place where things were grown rather than built.

This was William Birkin's domain.

The most brilliant virologist in the Umbrella Corporation. Also, by any reasonable measure, the most unhinged.

Ada passed through 2 iris-recognition checkpoints and walked into the main lab.

The scale of it stopped you for a moment every time. The central floor housed 5 cylindrical reinforced-glass cultivation tanks, each one rising 2 full stories. They were filled with pale green nutrient solution, lit from within, casting everything in a sickly jade glow.

3 tanks were empty.

The other 2 were not.

What floated inside them made the skin crawl.

Over 2.5 meters tall. Musculature the color and texture of dead volcanic rock. Bald. No lips, just exposed gum lines and teeth. The right hand on each had warped into a massive claw, fingers fused and elongated into something that wasn't a hand anymore.

T-02 Tyrants.

Built on the foundation of the T-01. The culmination of everything Umbrella's board had staked their ambitions on.

William Birkin stood in front of Tank One.

His lab coat was a wrinkled disaster. His hair had gone past greasy into something structural. His eyes were so bloodshot the whites had nearly disappeared, and the bags beneath them sagged halfway down his face.

He held a data slate and muttered at it while his fingers hammered the screen without pause.

"Blood pressure two-forty. Cell division rate exceeding projections by twelve percent... Inhibitor dosage needs another increase..."

"How's production progress?"

Ada's heels rang out sharp and clear in the empty lab as she approached.

William turned. His bloodshot eyes landed on her like a predator clocking something that had interrupted its meal.

"Oh. You."

He recognized her and scratched irritably at his matted hair.

"Don't talk to me about progress."

"Those suit-wearing idiots on the board think I'm assembling toasters on a production line? They have absolutely no conception of what bioengineering actually involves."

Ada leaned back against the stainless steel workbench and tossed the water bottle toward him without ceremony.

William caught it on reflex and tucked it under his arm without looking at it.

"Hit a wall?"

Ada studied the gray-white giant suspended behind the glass, its eyes closed, utterly still.

"It's a catastrophe." William jabbed a finger at the tank, spittle catching the cold light. "Look at it."

"Perfect muscle density. Regenerative capacity that has no equal. It can tear through steel plate with its bare hands." He paused. "But there's a fatal flaw."

"Not obedient enough?"

"Wrong." William slapped his palm flat against the tank glass. The impact rang through the lab like a struck bell. "They're intelligent."

"The T-Virus strengthens the body, but it preserves too much of the host's neural architecture in the process."

"These things think. They have their own internal states, their own reactions." His voice pitched higher. "They feel."

He started pacing, agitation and excitement fighting each other across his face.

"You want to know what happened last Tuesday? Test Subject Two was in a live combat trial. It pretended to comply with the stop command. Just stood there. Completely cooperative." He spread his hands. "3 researchers went in to remove the restraint harness."

"Less than 2 seconds. 3 broken necks."

He stopped pacing.

"It had been tracking the surveillance camera positions the whole time. It knew exactly which angles the cameras couldn't cover. It planned the whole thing."

"Took everything we had to put it down."

Ada raised an eyebrow, just slightly.

"So. Mass production means accepting that any one of these things might turn on you the moment your back is turned."

"Exactly!" William let out a string of obscenities that bounced off the steel walls.

➤ Next: Controlling William — Face to Face