[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 595 - Dining Hall Area

The interior lay fully exposed.

Across the corridor floor, more than a dozen desiccated corpses were sprawled in every direction.

No.

They couldn't even be called corpses. They were nothing more than a few charred chunks of black carbon.

They were frozen in postures of extreme agony, curled in on themselves, and some of the remains had clawed at the edges of the door seams with such desperation that the finger bones had fused with the melted metal.

Vast sheets of fat had been completely rendered out by the extreme heat, congealed in hardened pools across the tile floor.

"It wasn't only the power cut and the flooding."

Ada's cool, clear voice echoed through the space.

"The moment the virus leaked, the Red Queen redirected the high-pressure gas nozzles, originally installed for sterile dust removal — and vented a combustible mixed gas at temperatures exceeding a thousand degrees Celsius."

Ada looked at the charred remains.

"To ensure the virus couldn't escape through any clothing fibers or human pores."

"She turned this place into an absolutely sealed, large-scale oven."

"Everyone alive in here was slowly baked dry of all moisture and suffocated to death inside."

Alice finally couldn't hold it back any longer.

She pressed both hands against the wall and dry-heaved several times.

There was nothing left in her stomach to vomit. It didn't matter. The nausea that came from hitting her physiological limit still left her in agony.

"Monsters..."

Alice gritted her teeth, the whites of her eyes laced with red.

"Every person in this company, and this machine — they're all monsters."

Leon felt nothing at the sight of it. He'd seen too much. He'd strangled people with his own hands. A scene like this didn't even qualify as an appetizer.

"Stop staring."

He clapped his hands, pulling the group's attention back.

"We didn't come down here to collect bodies and hold a memorial service."

"We need to reach the main server room on the lowest level. Now."

Leon's eyes were razor-sharp.

"I'm going to pull the Red Queen's processing motherboard out with my own hands."

Chris moved up with his rifle raised, his brow knotted into a hard crease.

"Boss, those routes are completely impassable."

He pointed toward the main arteries leading to the lower levels.

"Every floodgate on the main corridors has dropped. The elevators are gone. This place is totally locked down."

"And the Red Queen's highest-level defensive logic will absolutely be to prohibit any living thing from leaving The Hive."

"By the same logic, she'll prohibit any living thing from getting anywhere near her processing mainframe."

Ada glanced at the security camera mounted at the far end of the corridor.

The red indicator light was blinking with precise regularity. The Red Queen had already detected their intrusion.

"The deeper we go, the more extreme her defensive mechanisms will become."

"Right now, we're pushing right up against the limits of this deranged system."

Leon knew all of this. He didn't hesitate for a single moment.

The Red Queen had to be extracted. That was not up for debate.

"Then there's only one path."

Leon pointed to the winding route marked in green light.

At the far end of the route, it connected to a massive hall on the outer perimeter of the server room.

The hall had a set of prominent English words marked on it.

[Dining Hall B]

Alice stared at the words and went still.

She looked up, her face full of confusion.

"A dining hall?"

"Umbrella is running all these crimes against humanity down here in the depths of the earth, and they actually built a staff cafeteria on the only path to the server room?"

Chris found it equally absurd.

Who builds a place to eat on the very bottom level of a fully sealed laboratory?

Leon closed his personal terminal, re-gripped his M4 Carbine, racked the bolt, and chambered a round.

"You'll understand once we get there."

He strode off toward the auxiliary corridor.

"That godforsaken place is absolutely not there to serve you steak and eggs."

The group quickly adjusted into tactical formation. Chris and Jill provided overlapping cover at the front, Leon held the center, Ada and Alice followed at the rear.

Moving along the narrow auxiliary corridor, the temperature dropped with unmistakable clarity.

Even their exhaled breath turned to white vapor.

They walked for roughly 10 minutes.

A pair of extremely heavy hydraulic double doors appeared ahead.

No electronic keypad. No lock of any kind. Just a manual mechanical wheel, large and red, bolted to the center of the frame.

Chris slung his rifle behind his back, grabbed the wheel with both hands, and wrenched it with a hard burst of force.

Metal shrieked against metal. The pressure doors ground slowly apart.

Everyone arrived at the same realization at once.

This so-called dining hall was not what any of them had expected.

What kind of dining hall uses doors like these?

Then a surge of cold white vapor came blasting out through the gap, washing over them in a wave of frigid air.

Chris charged inside with his rifle up. His Tactical Flashlight swept rapidly across the interior.

The space was absurdly large.

Roughly as wide and open as a basketball court.

But there was not a single dining table. Not a single serving counter.

Above: criss-crossing ventilation ducts. Below: open-grid metal mesh flooring.

And arranged throughout the hall, with immaculate precision, were countless metal containers standing 2 meters tall.

They stretched all the way to the far end of the hall, densely packed in the darkness. At least several hundred of them.

The surface of every container was coated in frost. Each one was connected to thick fluid delivery tubes and life-support equipment that blinked with yellow indicator lights.

"Good God..."

Chris exhaled a breath of white vapor. His flashlight drifted continuously across the containers.

"The company calls this a dining hall?"

He looked around in disbelief.

"This looks a hell of a lot more like a large-scale cold storage facility."

Leon strode into the hall.

"This is a dining hall."

He walked up to the container nearest the entrance.

The side of the container was marked with a biohazard warning symbol in bright red spray paint. Above the symbol, set into the surface, was a bulletproof glass observation port roughly half the size of an adult person.

The glass was coated in a thick layer of white frost.

"This is a specialized feeding station — prepared to supply food and nutrient solution to certain very particular high-value subjects."

Leon raised his right hand, still clad in its tactical glove, and wiped firmly at the glass twice.

The frost smeared away, revealing the murky liquid inside, radiating a faint, eerie green glow.

Leon angled his body slightly to one side, clearing the observation port.

"Take a look."

Alice swallowed hard. Every instinct screamed at her to refuse. Her body moved forward anyway.

She looked for only a single moment.

She stumbled backward 2 full steps, nearly going down on the grid floor.

Jill and Chris rushed up to look.

The sound of sharply inhaled breath rang out through the hall.

What was suspended in the nutrient solution was not supplies. Not spare experimental materials.

It was a massive, grotesque slab of flesh.

No skin. Crimson muscle fibers, enormously thick, twisted together in tangled masses with no discernible order.

The most nauseating part: the creature's entire brain was completely exposed, sitting directly atop an ugly, eyeless skull.

Its four limbs were grotesquely malformed. The enormous claws were covered in razor-sharp barbed hooks.

Across its back, dozens of transparent tubes as thick as a thumb had been inserted directly into the flesh. Yellow nutrient solution flowed continuously through those tubes into the creature's body, sustaining a faint, barely-there pulse.

A Licker.

The ultimate killing machine the T-Virus mutation pathway could produce.

"They're actually mass-producing these things..."

Jill gripped her gun tight.

She looked out across the hall at the cultivation pods stretching on and on until they vanished into the dark.

"If all of these get released, the military forces outside..." She shook her head. "They wouldn't even be enough to get stuck between their teeth."

Leon looked at those cultivation pods, and a slow grin spread across his face.

Free muscle, delivered right to his door.

➤ Next: Encounter with the Umbrella Special Operations Unit