[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 603 - Licker Reinforcements

The ventilation grate on the far side of the corridor was ripped open with brutal force. Massive slabs of crimson flesh came pouring out from inside.

They crawled along the walls. Hung upside down from the ceiling.

Those exposed brains pulsed in steady rhythm under the red emergency lights. Long tongues whipped through the air. Fanged maws dripped with reeking mucus.

Ahead: a mass of bloated, waterlogged Walkers and several prowling monsters. Behind: this freshly emerged pack of killing machines, numbers unknown.

The corridor sealed shut in an instant.

James's hands shook badly where they gripped his gun. He felt his heart about to claw out of his throat.

Even with his absolute loyalty to Leon, even with every ounce of will he had, faced with this, the primal fear hardwired into every human being could not be suppressed.

"Boss!" James shouted.

"We're being flanked!"

Chris clicked his M4 Carbine to full auto.

He was grinding his back teeth too.

"Leon, find a way through — we need to fight out of here!"

Rain was already bracing for one last stand.

Alice slumped against the generator casing, legs completely gone beneath her.

She was certain every single person in this corridor would end up as food.

This place was the hell Umbrella Corporation had built for them.

But Leon exhaled a slow curl of smoke, completely unhurried.

He took the gun from his hand and slung it back onto his back.

No defensive stance. No urgency. Nothing.

"Everyone put your weapons down." He was looking at the wave of Lickers surging in from behind.

"Those are our allies."

The whole group froze.

Rain thought she'd misheard.

What the hell?

Allies?

These things that ate people whole, they could tell friend from foe?

Nobody lowered their weapon.

Leon didn't bother explaining. Deep in his mind, a surge of neural signal fired hard and fast.

He had long since become the Mutant Overmind.

The Licker was an extraordinarily savage killing machine. But it had one fatal flaw.

No vision. They hunted entirely by sound, tracking prey through that freakish, superhuman hearing. Hold perfectly still, hold your breath, muffle your footsteps, and they were blind. Completely useless. Couldn't find you if you were standing right next to them.

That was supposed to be their only weakness.

Not anymore.

Leon's mind had linked directly into the neural centers of every monster released from the cafeteria.

He had become the eyes of this pack of blind killers.

The entire lower-level layout of The Hive unfolded inside his head like a map. Every position, every target, packaged and transmitted straight into the controlled Lickers.

A perfect god's-eye view.

Lickers with radar were the most terrifying meat grinders alive.

Leon issued the command.

The next second, the wave of Lickers from behind moved.

They shrieked — PIERCING, EAR-SPLITTING — and drove off the walls with their powerful hind legs. Steel panels buckled where they pushed, deep dents cratered into the surface.

They became streaks of crimson lightning through the air, clearing the heads of Leon and the others in a single bound.

Several grazed past James and Chris at shoulder height, close enough to kick up a hot gust of blood and rot.

But not one of them so much as glanced at the living.

Targets locked. Direction fixed.

Straight for the white-coat Walkers and the wild Lickers massed at the far end of the corridor.

Two walls of flesh and violence met in the middle with a thunderous crash.

It was a completely one-sided slaughter.

The controlled Lickers didn't need to listen. They already knew exactly where everything was.

The first one hit the Walker horde like a wrecking ball. Those massive talons swept through the mass in a frenzy, a combine harvester running at full throttle.

Cut clean through at the waist.

Torsos split open.

Walkers didn't even get their arms up before they were in two pieces. Viscera and black blood coated the grated floor in seconds. Severed limbs arced through the air in every direction.

Several wild Lickers tried to fight back. They clung to the ceiling and snapped their tongues out, whipping for throats and necks.

The controlled ones never even flinched.

Leon's radar had already mapped the attack trajectories before they launched. The moment a tongue lashed out, the controlled Licker was already moving, a sharp sidestep, fluid and instant.

Then it lunged upward. Jaws wide. And bit down directly on the wild Licker's spine.

Its jaw locked with sudden, total force.

CRACK!

Clean. Precise. Final.

The spine snapped in two. The wild Licker peeled off the ceiling and dropped like a sack of rotting meat.

The controlled Licker landed, brought one thick forelimb down, and crushed the skull flat.

When one side has a full-map view of the battlefield, there is no suspense. There is only arithmetic.

The Walkers in the corridor were being erased at a visible rate.

Everyone in the generator room stood frozen, mouths hanging open.

Chris's gun was at his side. He didn't remember lowering it.

None of them had ever seen anything like this, monsters moving with this kind of organization, this kind of tactical discipline.

The division was precise. Some swept the ground-level fodder. Others locked onto elevated threats. They even coordinated, covering each other's flanks without a signal passing between them.

It demolished everything biology was supposed to mean.

"What the hell," Chris breathed. "That's absolutely terrifying."

"Then again..." He glanced at Leon. "He can control a Tyrant."

Rain stared at Leon's silhouette, still upright, still unhurried. Her eyes were full of something she didn't have a word for.

She'd guessed he had something in reserve. His confidence never wavered without a reason. But this, actually seeing it, was something else entirely.

James and his task force dropped to their knees.

Matt was in the corner with both hands over his head, shaking. He was an environmentalist. He'd signed up for clean air and sustainable futures, not this. Everything that had happened today had broken through whatever his mind was built to hold.

Alice pressed herself flat against the wall, her blue eyes wide with awe.

She looked at the slaughterhouse outside. Then she looked at the man standing in the doorway, smoking.

Leon. This man named Leon. What tier of thing was he?

Even at its most deranged, Umbrella Corporation could never have engineered something that stood above all its own bioweapons.

Why bother with bioweapons research at all? Just study Leon.

The cleanup lasted less than 10 minutes.

The corridor that had been packed wall to wall with Walkers and monsters was gone. What remained was a thick layer of shredded flesh and pooled black blood across the grated floor, and the red emergency lights falling across it all, painting everything in a deep, lurid glow.

The surviving Lickers settled quietly along both sides of the corridor.

They swung their tongues, matted with torn flesh, and made no sound. They looked exactly like hunting dogs waiting for their master's inspection.

Leon rolled his neck.

"Let's move." He turned to look at the group. "Path's clear."

He stepped directly into the bloody swamp, shoes hitting the floor with a thick, wet sound at every step.

Not one Licker moved against him. They edged aside on their own, opening a wide passage without being told.

Chris stayed close on Leon's heels, eyes tracking both sides of the corridor without stopping. Even knowing the Lickers were controlled, having them less than half a meter away still made his scalp crawl.

Jill Valentine took Alice by the arm and kept her moving.

"Don't look at them," she said quietly. "Eyes on the path."

Kaplan had both arms wrapped around the backpack holding the Red Queen's motherboard, pressed flat against James's back. They had bought that thing with their lives. Nothing was going to happen to it.

The group moved through the hellish corridor.

The Lickers began falling in alongside them, flanking the column on both sides, slow and deliberate.

Any stray Walker that drifted out of the dark was torn apart before it got within 10 meters.

The route was open the entire way.

Leon felt none of it.

Because they still hadn't found any trace of Lisa Trevor.

Was she even in The Hive?

Or somewhere else entirely?

➤ Next: The Idea of Taking the Hive for Himself