[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 530 - Still Not Giving Up on Rebekah

That was indeed the case.

Back then, Wesker was an ambitious schemer. William was a scientific madman.

Both needed vast resources and absolute power to realize their ambitions. But they had no connections, no seniority, only a bellyful of raw passion.

So they agreed to Spencer's terms.

"For two young men desperately in need of resources and status, it truly was an irresistible temptation." Marcus let his tone soften again.

He gave a self-deprecating smile.

"Honestly? If it had been me, I would have done the same thing."

"Spencer understood the human heart too well."

"He tossed you a bone and made you bite people for him. And what did you get out of it?"

William lowered his head.

Jack shit.

Wesker got planted inside S.T.A.R.S. to monitor the police for Umbrella. William got shoved into a sunless hole 3 floors underground to research the G-Virus, never getting within touching distance of anyone who actually made decisions.

Disposable tools, used and discarded. That was what they'd both been.

"So you don't need to apologize to me." Marcus stood.

He walked over to William and rested a hand on the shoulder of what had once been his most prized student.

"You're here now. Let the past stay in the past. Just do good work going forward."

That was all it took. The last trace of guardedness in William's chest came apart.

He looked at Marcus and nodded, slow and heavy.

Old grievances were settled in an underground facility in Atlanta, in a manner that was almost absurd.

William Birkin and Marcus, the two most formidable virologists in the history of Umbrella Corporation, were colleagues again.

The air between them had barely begun to settle when the lab's metal door swung open.

Rebekah poked her head in.

She was carrying a stainless steel tray, a row of vials holding Walker blood samples freshly drawn from outside. Lately the number of running Walkers had been climbing, and she was here to drop off experimental materials for Candice.

Marcus heard the door and turned.

The moment he saw Rebekah, something lit up behind those cloudy old eyes.

Like a starving gold prospector spotting a fist-sized nugget on the riverbed.

"Oh, look who it is."

Marcus rubbed his hands together and moved toward her, his whole bearing suddenly animated.

"My dear girl. We meet again at last."

Rebekah flinched at the sudden warmth. She stepped back half a pace, shoulders hitting the doorframe, both hands pulling the tray up against her chest on instinct.

She hadn't forgotten. The Management Training Facility. Underground. This same old man, commanding a tank crawling with leeches.

That image had never left her.

"Dr. Marcus... Ms. Candice asked me to bring these over."

"The Walkers outside lately have been acting somewhat—"

She stumbled through her explanation.

"Set them down, set them down. There'll be plenty of hands for grunt work. You should be focused on research."

Marcus closed the distance, his aged face split into a smile like a dried chrysanthemum.

"Do you still remember what I proposed to you back then?"

Rebekah stared at him.

Proposed?

Marcus read her blank expression and started gesturing, impatient.

"Becoming my disciple!"

"Say yes, and I will give you everything in my head. Virology. Genetic recombination. The architecture of insect-based bio-organic weapons. Every last piece of it — yours."

He meant it. He genuinely wanted her.

In a world overrun by brutes and killers, finding a young person who had real talent for biology, a mind that was still clean, and the patience to sit with difficult work, that was harder than finding a gold nugget in the rubble.

Rebekah bit her lower lip and shook her head, quick and emphatic.

Every instinct she had said no.

Learn from a man who fed living people to leeches?

She was pretty sure she wasn't tough enough to survive that.

"Dr. Marcus, I—"

"Don't turn me down yet!"

William cut her off before she could finish. He crossed the room in a few long strides and planted himself beside Marcus.

"You have no idea who's standing in front of you."

He pointed at Marcus, words coming fast.

"His name should have been written into biology textbooks 20 years ago."

"The knowledge he holds is priceless. Those Nobel laureates people keep talking about? They aren't fit to tie his shoes."

He meant every word of it. He had his reservations about Marcus as a person, always had, but his respect for Marcus's academic genius was absolute and unconditional. It was why he'd studied under him in the first place.

"If you walk away from this, you're the fool." William added.

Having 2 titans of biology staring her down was suffocating.

Rebekah felt exactly like a rabbit being sized up by two old foxes.

She clutched the tray and let her eyes slide sideways.

"This... I need to ask Leon first."

A stall. Pure and simple.

She'd never trusted Marcus, and William was a prisoner Leon had physically dragged back in chains. Standing between these two, she had a persistent, low-level sense that she might end up on a dissection table before the week was out.

Hearing Leon's name, Marcus didn't react with irritation.

He laughed.

There was a quiet smugness in it. A certainty.

"Go ahead. Go ask him."

He drifted back to the workbench and resumed fiddling with his glassware.

"My offer has no expiration date."

"This door stays open for you. Whenever you're ready."

Rebekah set the tray down like she'd been handed a pardon and bolted out of the underground lab.

William watched her go, then sidled up to Marcus.

"You're serious about teaching her?" He kept his voice low. "She's too soft. In Umbrella, that temperament wouldn't have survived the first cut."

"Umbrella is gone, William." Marcus breathed out a ring of pale gray smoke.

"Soft? Leon will keep her safe here, that's not the problem."

"What we need is a clean mind."

"She's kind. Good foundation. Cleaner than either of us, by a wide margin."

"You and I, wherever our research goes, it always ends up at human experimentation sooner or later. She's still a blank page. I want her to find a different path. Not to become what we are."

"Maybe that leads somewhere new."

William understood.

Science needed obsession. But it also needed purity. And Rebekah was genuinely pure.

He studied Marcus's weathered face.

Surrounded by high walls and heavy machine guns, doing research, arguing about methodology, watching a strange young woman find her own path through the dark, he thought, with some surprise, that this might actually be a decent way to spend whatever years were left.

He was so tired of the games. The backstabbing. The endless, grinding political war.

"One more thing." Marcus tapped ash from his cigarette and glanced sideways at William.

"Since you're here, you can start by cleaning up the lab."

"Especially those jars over there. The ones that held the leeches. Get them properly clean."

William's face went still.

The architect of the G-Virus. Former chief of the Arklay Research Facility. And his first assignment here was washing dishes.

"Stop standing there with that look on your face. Move!" Marcus barked, eyes sharp.

William let out a long sigh, rolled up his sleeves, and walked to the sink.

➤ Next: Ada Confesses Everything