[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 602 - Here They Come — Time to Feed

"I came all the way out here to take everything. What else would be the point?"

"As for those monsters?"

"They're biohazard trash that should've been incinerated a long time ago."

"They're not worth sending me home empty-handed."

Leon ignored the Red Queen and the mercenaries entirely. He just tilted his head toward Kaplan.

"Pull it."

Two words. No negotiation.

Kaplan had a mountain of gear strapped to his back and his hands were already shaking.

But the absolute obedience command buried deep in his mind crushed the fear before it could take hold.

He turned, gripped the power-cutoff lever on the main control valve with both hands.

The Red Queen's holographic projection lurched violently. The light tore apart in jagged, severe distortions.

"This is absolutely the most foolish decision."

Her speech rate spiked.

That cold synthetic voice finally cracked open — a note of hysterical warning bleeding through.

"You will not make it out of this facility alive."

"All of you."

"You will all die here!"

CLICK!

Kaplan didn't hesitate. He yanked the lever all the way to the bottom.

The heavy main blast door disengaged directly above the matrix. The enormous motherboard's connection lines were severed in one shot.

The instant the power died, the entire vast server room went dark.

Every diesel generator fell silent at the same moment.

The massive fan blades spun slower and slower, losing their will to move.

The Red Queen's holographic projection dissolved into the air between one breath and the next.

Only the echo of her last sentence remained, drifting through the dark.

That crushing, absolute silence lasted exactly 2 seconds.

Then.

Blinding red emergency lights snapped on in every corner of the server room.

The rows of alarm lights in the corridor outside lit up with them.

The piercing wail of the alarm tore through what was left of the quiet.

Then came something else.

From somewhere deep in the floors below, a muffled, heavy crash of metal against metal.

Not a robot rebooting. Those were the airtight alloy doors the Red Queen had kept locked solid.

With the hydraulic locks dead and the power gone, the pressure built up behind them — water, or something else — had slammed them open by brute force. The rush and crash of flooding water carried all the way up through the pipes.

With it came a howling that didn't belong to anything human.

James snapped his rifle up immediately, muzzle trained on the server room entrance.

"Defensive formation!"

The task force scrambled for cover with practiced speed, minds already running the math on how many monsters were coming.

Chris worked the bolt on his weapon.

"Oh, fantastic."

He spat it under his breath.

Leon didn't spare a glance at any of it.

He walked straight to the black matrix sitting dead in the center of the water-cooling pool.

The motherboard compartment had already popped open the moment power cut — automatic release.

Inside sat a glass storage unit roughly 1 square meter across, perfectly still.

It was blanketed in an insanely dense web of chips and nano-conduit wiring.

The Red Queen's core computing motherboard.

The single most valuable object in this entire facility.

And the brain of the absolute defense system that would one day make the prison unbreakable.

Leon reached in with both hands, gripped the handles on either side, and pulled the heavy unit out of its slot in one smooth, unhurried motion.

He turned and held it out to Kaplan, who was drenched in sweat.

"Pack it in your bag."

He patted Kaplan on the shoulder.

"This thing is worth a lot. Protect it. Understood?"

Kaplan nodded and took it immediately, tucking it into the specialized bag with hands that moved far more carefully than they had any right to. He snapped every buckle shut.

The moment the motherboard cleared the slot,

A sudden cascade of dense, heavy impacts from just outside the server room.

THUD!

Thud. Thud.

Like something massive dropping one after another from deep inside the ventilation shafts, slamming down onto the metal corridor floor.

Then a sound that scraped straight across everyone's back teeth.

Razor claws dragging across metal.

SKREEE. SKREEE.

Closing on the server room door fast. Way too fast.

Alice pressed herself flat against the casing of a generator unit and stared at the entrance. Her eyes were wide. Her breathing had gone shallow.

At the far end of the glass corridor, wrecked by the earlier explosion, enormous, grotesque silhouettes moved slowly through the red emergency light.

Crimson muscle fibers, fully exposed. No skin to speak of.

Long tongues hung to the floor like whips, trailing a steady drip of stinking slime.

The containment units in the other dining area were completely destroyed.

Every one of the extremely dangerous Subjects that had been frozen inside was awake.

And they had already found the scent.

Over a dozen Lickers of immense size clung to the corridor walls and ceiling. The fully exposed brains on their heads pulsed in slow, rhythmic beats. Their eyeless faces swiveled and locked, aiming directly at every person inside the server room.

Rain's palms were soaked around her shotgun. She barely dared to breathe.

The pure terror of facing apex predators at point-blank range had a gravity to it, the kind that could crack a person's mind clean open.

They looked like they were about to feed.

"They're... they're all actually out."

Rain said it through clenched teeth, barely above a whisper.

Leon turned around.

He looked at the mutated creatures stacking up at the server room entrance.

He rolled his wrist. His knuckles cracked.

A dozen-plus Lickers in a space this tight. Yeah, that was a real problem.

But his eyes held nothing close to fear. If anything, there was a flicker of something else.

Something that looked almost like excitement.

"Chris. Jill."

"Get your angles and switch to semi-auto."

"Aim for the heads."

He walked to the front of the group.

Right up to the edge. Facing the corridor full of monsters that had already dropped into kill-crouch, coiled and ready to strike.

These weren't his.

So Leon sent the command in his mind.

On the other side of the facility, the Lickers in the dining area began to move. They tore free of their containment units. A red tide of bodies surged toward Leon's position, reinforcements incoming.

But on Leon's end, there was no repositioning. No tactical footwork. No evasion.

He held his ground.

The largest Licker in the pack wrenched its jaws wide and detonated off the wall, all four limbs firing at once. Those massive hind legs gouged deep dents into the concrete. Its entire body became a streak of crimson, carrying a wave of nauseating rot-stench, hurtling straight at Leon's face.

Thick claws spread wide in midair.

Another half second and they'd reduce his skull to shredded meat.

At that range, in that dim red light, something shifted in Leon's eyes. His pupils darkened. Deep in them, a molten gold ignited, absolute and dangerous.

Pure violence about to break loose.

James and the others fired from behind at nearly the same instant.

But bullets are slow when something is already this close.

The Licker's claws were less than half a meter from Leon's eyes, carrying the kind of force that could shred special-forces body armor, hammering down with everything it had.

Leon didn't move.

He just raised his right hand, the one with the tactical glove, casual as setting something down on a table.

Five fingers snapped open wide.

He caught it.

Every muscle in his body locked to absolute maximum in that instant. Pure physical force drove straight into the monster, head-on. No technique. No footwork.

Just brute against brute.

Every person in that room went still, eyes fixed on the back of the man who didn't step back.

The monster was several times his mass. They hit each other like two walls colliding.

Leon held his ground. Right arm braced solid against those massive claws. Knees didn't bend a fraction. He ate the full force of the strike and didn't move an inch.

And his hand had already closed like an iron vice around the creature's forelimb, fingers digging into the muscle.

The Licker thrashed and shrieked, a sound like steel tearing.

The corner of Leon's mouth pulled into something slow and brutal.

"That all you've got?"

His right arm erupted.

He swung the creature, several times his own body weight, clean off the ground and slammed it into the concrete load-bearing column beside him.

The sound of bone and flesh shattering rang through the server room like a gunshot.

The Licker was still dazed when Leon stepped forward and brought his boot down onto the exposed brain with full, savage weight.

He pressed the large-caliber handgun directly against the center of the mess.

No words. He just pulled the trigger.

BANG. BANG. BANG.

Magnum rounds tore through the fragile brain tissue and detonated inside it. Reeking fluid and shredded meat sprayed in every direction.

The killing machine that had been so dominant 3 seconds ago stopped convulsing. Became a pool of dead matter on the floor.

The other Lickers froze.

They clung to the walls, throats rumbling with agitated, anxious growls. Primal instinct held them back from committing.

Jill swallowed hard. Her shotgun stayed level. James and his team had stopped being soldiers and started being witnesses, staring with their mouths open.

They'd braced for a brutal grinding defensive fight.

What they got was one man dismantling the most dangerous vanguard with his bare hands.

Alice leaned against the generator casing, eyes stretched wide.

Her gaze crossed over Leon's broad shoulders and found the corridor beyond the server room door, soaking in red light.

Past the Lickers. Around the bend in the corridor.

A dense mass of ragged figures in torn lab coats and security uniforms was pressing forward, dragging stiff feet, slow but relentless, filling every meter of available space.

The entire underground defense had just collapsed.

Not a single inch of ground was safe anymore.

Then from the other passage, a new wave. Countless fresh Lickers exploded out of the dark, launching into full pounce, hurtling toward everyone.

That was it.

They were completely done.

➤ Next: Licker Reinforcements