[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 558 - Rebekah's Brilliant Idea
The door swung open.
Leon stepped out, straightening himself in ways that left no obvious evidence of what had just happened.
Candice was waiting in the corridor, clipboard in hand.
She glanced at Leon. Then at the half-open door behind him.
"Test her tomorrow," Leon said. "She's exhausted."
Candice shrugged.
"Young people and their energy. Good thing, generally."
"Just don't run her into the ground. She just crawled back from death's door."
Leon rubbed the back of his nose.
"She's tougher than you think."
Clearly he hadn't walked away clean from that one.
---
Second basement level. The lab.
The air circulation system was cranked to maximum. The exhaust fans ran loud and constant.
Rebekah was hunched over the workbench, dropper in hand, eye pressed to the microscope.
In the culture dish below the lens, a cluster of green plant cells was tearing through the surrounding nutrients like it had somewhere to be.
Plant 42 remnant genes, extracted from the Spencer Mansion database.
The man-eating flower itself had been reduced to gravel by one of Barry Burton's grenades — but that hadn't stopped Chris Redfield from walking out with its core. He'd grabbed the experimental data while he was at it.
Solid contribution, all things considered. Even buried in the chaos, he'd kept an eye out for anything worth taking.
Now that plant sample was earning its keep.
Rebekah stared into the eyepiece, brow knotted.
She'd read Leon's plan. The "everyone becomes a super-soldier" one.
Insane. Obviously. Also possibly fatal.
Leon himself was a freak of nature. Candice said he'd gone through the entire 3-year nationwide Wildfire contamination period clean, no infection, which was the only reason he'd survived the Restoration Vaccine. That same resistance had let him absorb the T-Leech virus perfectly.
Ashley had just been dumb luck.
And it was fortunate Marcus happened to be at the prison, fortunate that Bruce and the other two dogs had nearly been wrung dry before they swallowed the Solar Stairway and came out the other side, misfortune flipping into something better by sheer accident.
Without all of that lining up exactly right, 9 lives wouldn't have been enough.
But the others weren't any of those things.
The ordinary survivors patrolling the prison with rifles, their foundations were too weak. Every single one of them had already been touched by the virus at some point. Even if Dr. William Birkin could synthesize a safe version of the T-Virus, the mortality rate from direct injection was still too unpredictable to calculate.
Even Wesker had needed years of preparation. Spencer had been injecting him with the Progenitor Virus since childhood, building tolerance layer by layer through countless rounds of prior conditioning.
Most of his peers hadn't had that. They died.
Wesker was one survivor pulled from a pile of corpses. That was the only reason he could afford to play dead and slam the T-Virus directly into his own bloodstream, because anyone else, no matter how exceptional, would have hit the floor immediately.
So how did you get ordinary people safely across that line?
Rebekah straightened up and worked her fingers into the back of her neck.
Her gaze drifted to the stack of plant Genetic Blueprints sitting beside the workbench.
Something detonated in her head.
"Plants can be infected by viruses," she murmured. "And they mutate when they are."
She turned it over.
"What if you injected the T-Virus into ordinary fruit trees?"
The more she thought about it, the more solid it felt.
Direct injection was too violent. Too blunt. So use a gentler carrier instead.
The tree absorbs the virus. The fruit it produces carries T-Virus mutagens, filtered, diluted, processed through the plant's own biology. You eat the fruit. You don't become a superhuman overnight, but your immune system starts learning. Starts adapting. Builds tolerance the way a vaccine builds it, just slower, more gradual.
Way more survivable than shoving a syringe into someone's vein and hoping.
Although, what if the fruit came out with T-Virus concentrations that were too high? How would you even control that variable?
Questions for later. Right now she needed to find out if the idea was real.
"Dr. Marcus! Dr. William Birkin!"
She spun around and shouted across the lab.
In the corner, Marcus was holding a beaker and losing his mind at William over the arrangement of a few gene sequences. William was giving it right back.
"That theory of yours is completely obsolete!" William snapped, spittle flying.
"I discovered the Progenitor Virus — you listen to me!"
Marcus didn't give an inch. "That's nothing but an old man's stubbornness! John's data proves my G-Virus fusion model is the right direction!"
Both of them red in the face, necks flushed, going at each other like neither had slept in a week.
Rebekah walked straight into the middle of it.
"Can you two stop for one minute."
She slapped the Plant 42 Genetic Blueprint down on the table between them.
"I have an idea. I need your help."
Both men stopped. Looked down at the diagram.
"What are you trying to do?" William pushed his glasses up.
"Farming," Rebekah said flatly.
Marcus stared at her. The look on his face was the specific look reserved for people who were wasting his time.
"We are engaged in the great work of reshaping human evolution," he said, very slowly, "and you want to go farm."
"Hear me out."
Rebekah pressed both palms on the table and laid it out, the fruit tree as a biological filter, the fruit as a delivery system, T-Virus mutagens diluted and restructured through plant cellular activity, tolerance built gradually instead of forced all at once.
The lab went quiet.
A full 30 seconds.
William's expression had shifted by the time it ended.
"Using the plant gene chain to dilute and restructure the T-Virus's destructive properties..." He rubbed the stubble on his chin slowly. "That's a genuinely insane idea. In the best possible way."
Marcus had dropped the dismissive look too. He picked up the blueprint and ran his dry fingers across it.
"Plant 42's cellular activity is extraordinary," he said quietly. "If we can isolate part of its characteristics, splice them into a standard fruit tree genome, introduce a low concentration of T-Virus into that matrix—"
He raised his head.
His clouded eyes were burning.
➤ Next: Injecting the T-Virus into Plants