[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 590 - Heading to the Underground Hive

The steel panel's internal hydraulic locks snapped under Leon's hands.

Not bent. Not pried. Snapped, like something inside the mechanism just gave up.

This was not a force any flesh-and-blood body should be capable of producing.

The solid alloy door, hard enough to stop a rifle round, crumpled like a cheap plastic toy and tore open a gap wide enough for two people to walk through side by side.

Alice went completely still.

Her deep blue eyes stretched wide. Her breathing caught mid-inhale.

A few minutes ago she had been arguing back hard against Leon's claims about clones and biological weapons. She had been completely certain she was an ordinary housewife.

Now the man in front of her had just done something impossible, with ridiculous ease, using nothing but his bare hands.

No tools. No mechanical exoskeleton. No leverage point of any kind.

Even Chris — built like a wall, not easily rattled by much, couldn't help the corner of his mouth twitching. He knew what Leon had injected into himself, knew about the viruses. But every time he watched this kind of raw, brute physical force on display, it still hit him as something that simply should not exist.

Leon let go and turned around.

Completely calm. Breathing even. Not a single sign of exertion anywhere on him.

"Seen enough?" His gaze moved to Alice.

Alice stood rooted to the ground. Her feet had apparently decided they lived there now.

If that kind of strength was real, and it clearly was, then everything he had said about genetic modification and Umbrella Corporation was not a scare tactic. Not a lie. Not anything she could keep dismissing.

"In this godforsaken world," Leon said, walking straight toward her, "common sense got flushed down the drain a long time ago."

"Your head is a mess right now. I get that."

"But I don't need you to figure everything out this instant."

"You just need to stay with the group, keep your head down, and not cause some disaster I can't clean up — not right now, not at this stage."

"Once this mission is over, as long as you're still breathing, I'll fill in every blank myself."

He said it like a guarantee. Clear, direct, no padding.

"Who built something like you. What the original clone template for that body actually was."

"And exactly what crimes against humanity this goddamn Umbrella Corporation has been running."

"Every word of it. I'll tell you."

Alice looked up at him. Domineering didn't begin to cover it.

The last few minutes, the visual shock, the information overload, had already cracked her resistance. She believed him. Some part of her had felt the wrongness inside her own body for longer than she wanted to admit.

But the amnesia had left a hollow where her sense of self used to be, and that hollow was full of fear.

"Can I trust you?" She bit her lower lip and pushed the words out. They sounded weak. They were weak. Asking something like that right now, in front of everyone, was borderline ridiculous, but it was the only handhold she had left.

A soft rustle of fabric from nearby.

Ada stood with her arms folded, leaning against the side of the railcar with the kind of ease that belonged to someone entirely unbothered by the situation.

She looked at Alice, guarded, lost, a little pitiful, and spoke.

"You'd better trust him completely." Ada's voice was cool and flat.

She lifted one finger and pointed lazily at the ceiling above them.

"On this completely rotten wasteland, he is the one and only person still willing to reason with you. The one person who actually wants everyone to make it out alive."

"You don't have a choice."

Ada lowered her hand.

"As for Umbrella Corporation, the organization that built you, then dumped you here with your memory wiped and left you to die —"

"They are the most purely evil thing on the face of this earth."

"They don't see people. They see cold experimental data and biological weapons. That's the whole list."

"To them, you don't even rate as a dog. You're a consumable. Use once, discard."

Ada's words landed with surgical accuracy, right in the place where Alice's fear lived.

Alice swallowed.

She turned and looked into the pitch-black interior of the train, then back at Chris and Jill, fully kitted out, weapons up, radiating the quiet readiness of people who had already decided how today was going to go.

"What exactly are you going down there to do?" She forced her voice steady. "What is your mission?"

Leon stepped into the railcar. He found a window seat, dropped into it, and laid the M4 Carbine, Tactical Flashlight still mounted on the barrel, across his lap like it weighed nothing.

"Find someone."

No elaboration. No preamble.

"More precisely — we're going to find a Subject that Umbrella has been keeping locked up down there for over a decade. Torturing. The whole time."

He didn't say the name.

Lisa Trevor.

That wretched, broken thing fused with lethal viruses, still searching for a mother she would never find.

"And while we're at it."

He raised an eyebrow, glancing at the advanced electronic equipment lining the car.

"Pack up everything useful they have down there and bring it home."

Umbrella had poured a fortune into this underground base. Whatever was inside would be obscenely well-stocked.

Leon leaned back, eyes half-closing.

He hadn't said the parts that actually mattered.

There were good things in the Hive, no question. Experimental records. Weapons. Antiviral serums that hadn't been fully destroyed yet. Worth taking, all of it.

But none of that was what he was really here for.

What he wanted was the AI.

The one that had complete dominion over the entire underground facility. The one running at a computational level that most people in this dead world couldn't even conceptualize.

The Red Queen.

Umbrella's finest logic-processing architecture. Security override authority so total it bordered on obscene.

Pull her mainboard out intact, haul it back to the prison camp, have Simon rewrite the base compliance code and scrub every last trace of Umbrella's highest-priority directives,

And the prison's entire defensive grid and radar surveillance network would jump to a level that had no business existing in the apocalypse.

After that, a Walker horde crashing against the perimeter? A rival faction attempting a raid in the dark? The Red Queen would process it and solve it before anyone outside had time to feel clever about their plan.

Raw strength. Fortifications. Artificial intelligence.

A trinity. A real one. An absolute defensive architecture.

This was worth every bit of risk.

Alice stood in the doorway, head full of static.

Some poor Subject. Packing everything up and hauling it out. She hadn't even finished processing the part where she was apparently a clone of something, and now she was supposed to understand what these people were planning to do in the depths of the earth below them.

Raid the underground headquarters of the world's most evil organization.

That was a suicide mission. That was just a suicide mission with extra steps.

Jill came up from behind and dropped a casual hand on Alice's shoulder.

"Get in." She hefted the Remington Shotgun and stepped past her into the car. "Stop standing there."

Alice followed.

She kept her distance from the others, the whole group had an edge to them, a readiness that put her teeth on edge, and found the corner closest to the door and sat down.

Chris came in last. Arms crossed over his chest, broad frame planted near the broken door, watching the darkness outside with the focused stillness of a man expecting something to come out of it.

"Prepare to move." Leon's voice carried the flat finality of someone who had already moved on to the next step in his head.

Ada walked to the driver's console at the front of the train.

The control panel was not a problem for her. It was barely a puzzle.

"Bottom-level security locks bypassed." She tracked the feedback data scrolling across the screen.

"Power systems re-coupling. Rerouting parallel circuits."

A row of green indicator lights blinked on, dormant for years. Deep beneath the car, the hidden generator stirred, a low, resonant rumble that climbed up through the floor.

The emergency lighting flickered. Once. Twice. Then held, casting everything in a pale, sickly white.

Ada's hand found the rightmost metal control lever on the console.

She pushed it all the way forward without hesitation.

The train lurched, a single violent shudder, and then the great underground machine that had been sleeping for years finally woke up.

It began to move. Slow at first, the rails humming with a sound like something remembering what it was for.

Then the power fed through and the speed built fast. Very fast.

Wind pressure hammered the outside of the car, a roar that filled the tunnel. The underground hall's support columns blurred past the windows and were gone, dissolving into streaks of gray before vanishing entirely.

This was not a horizontal railway.

This was a dive. A steep, unrelenting plunge directly into the earth, angled down at a grade that felt closer to a drop than a ride.

Alice pressed herself into her seat and locked both hands around the safety rail.

She watched the darkness outside, total, bottomless, swallowing everything, and felt the dread in her chest grow until it had no edges left.

Where this train was going.

What was waiting at the bottom.

How many things were hidden down there that could not survive the light.

She didn't let herself think about any of it.

➤ Next: Spence Parks