[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 604 - The Idea of Taking the Hive for Himself

"Go sweep this godforsaken place clean."

Leon sent the purge order straight through his mind.

The instant it landed, the pack of Lickers flanking him on both sides scattered.

Their massive hind legs drove them airborne — straight up the walls, straight into the ventilation shafts. Nothing left behind but a smear of afterimages.

What followed was one-sided and total.

Not a targeted sweep of a few corners. A grid-by-grid erasure rolling through the entire underground Hive. Piercing shrieks echoed back from distant floors, one after another, layer by layer. The Walkers the Red Queen had sealed into each sector were finally meeting their end. Licker talons and teeth — the most efficient killing tools in the building.

The group stopped inside a relatively clean backup operations room.

Chad Kaplan set the backpack holding the Red Queen's motherboard on the table with both hands, moving like it was made of glass. Then he dropped into a chair and just breathed, chest heaving.

James Shade and Rain Ocampo were still running checks on their weapons. Their hands wouldn't quite stop shaking. Too much insanity in too short a window. They were close to the edge.

Chris Redfield walked over to Leon.

"You just sent those things to clear the place?" He scrubbed his face with one rough palm.

"Relax." Leon dragged a chair over and sat. "Their efficiency beats ours by a mile. Combat strength too. They're exactly what you want for this job."

He dug out his cigarette pack, slightly crumpled, running low — and bit one between his lips.

"Want one?"

He held the pack out toward Chris.

Chris hesitated 2 seconds. Then he took it, flicked his lighter, and pulled a long, deep drag.

The nicotine hit his lungs. Those wire-tight nerves finally gave, just slightly.

Leon exhaled a slow cloud and looked up, letting his gaze move around the operations room. The space was absurdly large. Better equipped than he'd expected.

The underground Hive was bigger than anyone would have guessed, and whoever built it hadn't cut corners. Full ventilation system. Independent generator array. A storage depot large enough to get lost in. Living quarters. A dedicated laboratory sector.

Compared to the prison they were currently running, this place wasn't even in the same category, not in defensive grade, not in hardware, not in anything.

He'd be lying if he said he wasn't tempted.

But he knew exactly why he couldn't move on it yet.

Umbrella had poured obscene amounts of money and effort into this facility. And now it had gone dark. Strike team unaccounted for. Red Queen offline.

He didn't need to think hard about what was happening up the chain. Somewhere in a headquarters conference room right now, very expensive suits were slamming their fists on a very expensive table.

A larger force would be coming. It was only a matter of when.

Leon himself wasn't losing sleep over it. His body, refined to where it currently sat, could walk through just about anything this world threw at it. Conventional weapons couldn't put him down. Bioweapons could be flipped against the people deploying them. Human special forces were a delivery service. The only thing on the menu that might actually matter was a nuclear warhead on a missile, and that kind of firepower belonged exclusively to the U.S. military.

Umbrella was a pharmaceutical company that got ambitious. That particular toy was still above their pay grade.

So the threat, net-net, rounded down to essentially nothing.

His people, though, were a different equation entirely.

Chris Redfield. Jill Valentine. Ada. The strike team he'd just folded in. Every single one of them, flesh and blood. Even fully trained special forces wouldn't last 10 minutes under Umbrella's saturation fire.

He couldn't run this world by doing everything himself. That was a fast road to burning out. He needed to build something solid around him. A real team.

So he was waiting.

Waiting on what Marcus and William Birkin, those two research-obsessed lunatics, were working out in the lab. They were deep in the problem of getting the T-Virus fruit into clinical application. If they could crack stable mass production, and everyone under him could evolve into Mutants operating well past the human ceiling,

Then one Umbrella branch wouldn't even be a warm-up. Their global headquarters would fall just as easily.

One step at a time. Until his people had finished their transformation, this particular hot potato was better left sitting right where it was, gathering dust.

He didn't think it would take long, though.

4 of the sharpest minds he'd ever encountered, Rebekah, Dr. William Birkin, Candice, and Birkin, all pointed at the same problem. It would break.

Alice appeared from the direction of the break room, carrying a cup of instant coffee in both hands.

She set it in front of Leon.

"Something still drinkable in a place like this." A small shrug. A dry edge in her voice. "I'm almost impressed."

Her memories had been coming back in pieces, steadily, and it showed. The raw panic from those first hours had settled into something harder and quieter. She knew now, with full clarity, exactly what kind of organization she had been working for.

"Thanks."

Leon took the cup and drank.

Alice hoisted herself up onto the table across from him, legs dangling, blue eyes watching him with open curiosity.

"Those monsters," she said.

"How are you doing that? Making them listen to you?"

She paused.

"The way they look at you." Her voice dropped just slightly. "It's like they're looking at God."

➤ Next: Take the Red Queen Back