[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 594 - The Deranged Red Queen

The thing had its swollen mouth pressed flat against the bulletproof glass, its entire face smeared against the surface.

Alice stumbled back two full steps, her chest heaving.

Anyone would feel it, that primal, instinctive fear when something impossible is staring back at you.

Jill moved first.

She stepped forward and put herself between Alice and the glass, rifle up, stock braced against her shoulder, the Remington's thick barrel aimed straight at the female corpse on the other side.

If that pane showed even a hairline crack, Jill's finger was already on the trigger.

"Don't shoot, Jill."

Leon stood off to one side.

He hadn't even raised the rifle slung across his chest. Both hands were in the pockets of his tactical pants, watching quietly as the corpses inside the "aquarium" started coming back one by one.

The other bodies in the water seemed to sense the movement. Twitching. Convulsing. Waking up.

"It's bulletproof glass."

Leon tilted his chin, telling everyone to calm down.

"With the muscle strength these infected have left, they couldn't scratch through it in ten years."

"That's the T-Virus. These things are completely dead — cerebral cortex entirely necrotic."

"They're not getting out. Let them keep swimming."

Chris had his rifle up, his eyes going wide.

He stared at the hundreds of twisted undead churning in the water below.

"This is insane."

He bit out the curse through clenched teeth.

"The Red Queen did this too? That AI?"

"Flooded the entire lab? Drowned all these researchers in here like pickled vegetables?"

Years of special ops. He'd seen every breed of brutal, every flavor of terrorist. But this kind of coldly efficient mass execution still sent ice crawling down his spine.

No human being could have made that call.

Humans flinch. Humans hesitate. They act on impulse, they feel fear, and they make the wrong choice at the worst moment.

The Red Queen had none of that. No feelings, no second thoughts. Just the calculation of what needed to be done.

If it hadn't sealed the facility immediately, whatever got out would have caused far worse damage outside. And the T-Virus had already shattered and drifted through the ventilation system into every corner of the Hive, these researchers were already dead the moment that happened.

Let them run, the virus spreads, they die anyway.

Either way it was death. Better to keep it contained right here.

Leon's mouth pulled into a thin smile.

"Drowned?"

"This was a physical containment measure. The Red Queen used it to prevent the virus from spreading outward through the air and through blood."

"For Umbrella Corporation's employees down here in the Hive — being drowned clean and quick is the greatest mercy the Red Queen had to give."

Alice didn't have a single doubt left about anything Leon had told her.

A company that could build this kind of hell this far underground was not manufacturing cold medicine. It was never a legitimate business. It never had been.

And herself, this so-called Alice Clone, was almost certainly nothing more than expendable material. Mass-produced. Disposable.

The group kept moving, pushing deeper along the dim corridor.

The standing water underfoot grew shallower by degrees. The floor began sloping upward.

Ahead, a vast central atrium opened up.

A dozen thick concrete load-bearing columns held up the enormous underground space above. At the center of the atrium stood 4 banks of high-speed elevators, arranged side by side.

Their doors had been torn outward and bent back, exposing the shafts behind them, pitch-black, apparently bottomless.

"Watch your step."

Chris took point, sweeping ahead with his Tactical Flashlight.

He moved to the edge of one of the open shafts and sent the beam straight down.

The light cut through the dark.

It found the bottom.

The massive elevator car had been completely destroyed, its original height of over 2 meters crushed and twisted into something unrecognizable. From the gaps in the buckled framework, motor oil and dark reddish fluid seeped steadily outward. Between the crumpled metal, barely visible, were compressed masses of human tissue.

The visual hit harder than the flooded lab had. More immediate. More final.

Chris swallowed and moved the flashlight away.

He had no desire to keep looking at what was coating the inside of that shaft.

"Also the Red Queen's work."

Leon walked over and looked down.

"To cut off movement between floors."

"It force-shut the elevator power systems, then severed the main load-bearing cables while the cars were running at full capacity."

"The executives and armed security trying to escape — they didn't have half a minute to leave final words. They went straight to God."

A suffocating silence settled over the group.

This was massacre reduced to pure logic. No appeal. No negotiation. No exception. Every person in the group felt it, the specific, bone-deep terror of a mind that could operate that way without hesitation.

Ada crossed to the far side of the atrium hub.

A sealed corridor ran along that wall, marked as the staff decontamination and sterile dust-removal passage.

The transparent reinforced-glass tunnel had lost its color entirely.

The interior was blackened. Every surface smoked through and coated with a thick layer of tar-like residue, so dense it was almost solid.

Ada found a patch marginally cleaner than the rest and pressed close to see inside.

➤ Next: Dining Hall Area