[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 586 - An Unexpected Discovery

Every second of that week was an absolute grind.

The ashtray on the desk in the prison's communications room was packed with crushed cigarette butts.

The screen was dense with red dots, every last one a Walker horde wandering the open world outside.

Simon kept zooming in on the main display, cycling through feeds at a furious pace.

Both hands were locked in his hair. His eyes were shot through with red.

"Boss, this is insane!"

Simon's voice crackled through the prison comms channel, raw with irritation.

"What, did this woman grow wings and fly off the planet?"

Pure frustration.

"Thirty full kilometers around Fort Benning. Every abandoned factory, every road — I even went through every fire-scorched tree hollow in the Arklay Mountains three times over!"

"I even zoomed in face by face on those massive Walker herds — tens of thousands strong!"

Simon's words came faster.

"But there is absolutely no trace of the monster you're looking for!"

Leon sat at the console, eyes fixed on the live feeds cycling across the screen.

Nothing. Not a single trace. She should have been completely exposed under military-grade satellite coverage, yet she simply wasn't there.

Unless she had hidden somewhere even satellites couldn't reach.

"Don't rush," Leon said. Perfectly calm.

"A mutant that's undergone deep genetic modification, its instinct is to seek out dark, completely sealed-off spaces."

"Keep looking."

"Patience."

He crossed his legs and propped them up on the console.

"Speaking of which, Simon."

"How are you holding up over there at the Northern Lights NSA outpost?"

"You're out there all alone in a place like that, does it get too quiet?"

Static crackled through the channel for a few seconds.

Simon exhaled slowly. The manic energy driving his frenzied work pace drained out of him all at once, replaced by something heavier, exhaustion, and a hollow sense of helplessness.

"Too quiet?" He let out a bitter laugh. "Quiet doesn't even begin to cover it."

"Boss, this place is enormous. Empty. Besides the wind and snow that never seems to stop outside, and this dog at my feet that does nothing but sleep, I haven't seen a single living soul."

Simon rested his chin on the edge of the console.

"Sometimes I genuinely feel like I'm starting to lose it."

"You know what happened last night?"

"I went down to the base's lower storage level to grab some canned food. I saw a cold-weather jacket hanging on the wall in the corner." A pause. "I walked right up to it and held a full conversation with it. For half an hour."

"I even gave it a name. Bob."

"It wasn't until I actually reached out to shake its hand that I snapped back and realized, it was just a damn coat."

"I'm really losing my mind."

Simon's voice dropped lower.

"Boss, I'm genuinely scared. One day I'll wake up and not even remember how to spell my own name."

Leon said nothing.

Loneliness could break a person's mind far more easily than a horde of Walkers. Human beings simply could not endure isolation.

Simon was an irreplaceable genius hacker. This line of defense could not be allowed to collapse. He needed to give this kid something alive to hold onto.

The Inuit girl. Kaya.

The survivor living near the Arctic Circle who had always idolized Citizen Z.

In the previous timeline, it was Kaya's presence that had kept Simon from going over the edge, from letting the extreme cold and total isolation swallow him whole.

But the timeline had shifted. Simon still hadn't met her.

"I completely understand that feeling, Simon."

Leon said it with a smile.

"Actually, you could go out and get some air. Your area isn't all permanent glaciers."

"I just pulled up some early polar perimeter reconnaissance data on my end."

He typed quickly, pushing a set of polar coordinates through to Simon's terminal.

"Roughly 40 miles southeast of your base. There's a well-hidden shelter out there."

"I need you to make a trip when you get the chance."

On the other end, Simon sat up straight.

"What am I going there for?" A beat. "Scavenging junk? Hunting broken parts?"

"To find something," Leon said, his tone easing.

"Something that'll keep you from talking to coats every day."

"It's extremely important. It directly concerns your mental state for the rest of your life."

He didn't come right out and say there was a person there. He knew Simon too well, the perpetually shut-in hacker type. Tell him directly to go out into the wilderness to meet a girl, and Simon would find ten thousand reasons to stay barricaded inside the base and never set foot outside.

He had to lure him out under the cover of a proper mission.

"So mysterious," Simon muttered.

But he was already typing, logging the coordinates into his personal navigation terminal.

"Fine." A click of the tongue. "The wind and snow should die down in a few days anyway. I'll be making rounds to the supply stations for food, I'll take the snow crawler out to that place you mentioned and have a look around."

"But I'm stating this upfront."

"If there's nothing there but a few walkers frozen solid, I will absolutely come back and drive you insane over comms."

"Once you get there, you'll understand everything." Leon's mouth curved.

The two drifted into a few more minutes of casual talk, base supplies, cold-weather fuel reserves.

Then.

The rhythm of Simon's keystrokes cut off without warning. A half-second of silence, then far more frantic typing came clattering through the mic.

"Hold on." Simon's tone shifted instantly. "Boss, something's up."

He yanked the terrain map on the main screen wide open.

"I've been running cross-scans of the area around Fort Benning, infrared thermal imaging layered with special satellite frequency bands. My detection radar just swept over an abandoned industrial complex in the eastern sector."

"And then —"

Simon split the coordinate grid and jabbed a finger at one of the squares.

"The data just cut out."

Leon dropped every last trace of ease from his expression.

He put his feet down from the desk, leaned forward, and stared hard at the screen.

"What do you mean, cut out?"

"Vanished into thin air!" Simon said, fast. "The signal interference is extremely strange. This isn't natural attenuation from buildings or a geomagnetic storm."

"This is massively powerful active electronic jamming."

Simon's hands became a blur over the keyboard.

"Someone has set up an extremely advanced military-grade signal shielding dome over that entire abandoned zone. Scanning up to that boundary is like slamming into an invisible wall. Every single probe beam, swallowed. A hundred percent."

Simon looked up. His eyes locked on the black blind spot sitting stark and wrong on the screen.

"Boss, I know this counter-surveillance method. I know it too well."

"The band-masking technique, the shielding signature, it's cut from exactly the same mold as what was deployed at the Spencer Mansion in the Arklay Mountains."

"This is absolutely Umbrella Corporation's work."

Leon's eyes narrowed.

A signal-shielded zone.

A secret Umbrella outpost?

Lisa, that pitifully broken woman, was a monster with no independent reasoning left. There was no way she could have engineered electronic shielding of this caliber on her own.

But what if she'd been forcibly captured?

Or what if she'd drifted on pure instinct to somewhere once familiar, and been detained by Umbrella remnants already garrisoned there?

Either way.

That blind spot was hiding something big.

"Sync me the exact coordinates. Now."

No hesitation. No qualifications.

"Right away." Simon hammered Enter.

An extremely clear satellite overhead image snapped onto the console's main screen.

Location confirmed: 30 kilometers outside the outskirts of Fort Benning.

A stretch of heavy chemical processing plants. Completely abandoned.

On the surface, nothing but enormous rusted storage tanks and brick factory buildings half-collapsed into rubble.

But on the backend signal scan interface, the entire central zone of the processing plant was a pitch-black, bottomless void.

"Boss, that place is definitely wrong," Simon said. "To set up a shielding field of that scale out in the middle of nowhere, there has to be a massive underground facility beneath it. And the external electronic firewall is high-grade, I can't crack their internal LAN right now, can't pull any surveillance at all."

"Though honestly, they're kind of stupid too. It's already the apocalypse, the more aggressively you block people from looking, the more obviously you're screaming that something's here. If it were me, I would absolutely,"

Simon was still rambling.

Leon stared at the terrain map of the abandoned processing plant on the screen.

"You've done well, Simon."

He synced the coordinate data directly to his laptop.

➤ Next: Alice?