[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 606 - Curious Alice

The vehicle was getting cramped.

The special forces survivors who'd just crawled out of hell were packed shoulder-to-shoulder in the rear seats.

Nobody spoke. Everyone looked wrung out.

Leon had shifted to the wide bench seats at the back of the compartment. Alice sat directly across from him.

The vehicle swayed.

Alice steeled herself, raised her head, and fixed those blue eyes straight on Leon.

The raw terror from before had faded. What replaced it was something more stubborn, a need to pry the truth loose and hold onto it.

"Now," she said. "Can you tell me everything?"

Direct. No preamble.

Leon knew exactly what she meant.

On the train, not long ago, he had stomped that man named Spence's head apart right in front of her. No hesitation. No mercy.

Even though the man had been completely amnesiac. No memory, no resistance, no threat.

Leon leaned back slightly, letting his hands rest loose on the seat rail.

"About the poor bastard whose head got redecorated?" His tone was utterly flat.

Alice gave a small nod.

"We were married, weren't we?" She bit her lower lip. "Even if it was fake. Even if you say the house was just a cover — he still lived with me."

The corner of Leon's mouth curved into something that wasn't quite a smile.

"You did live together," he said, watching her. "But you were never anything so wholesome as husband and wife."

"You were both Umbrella Corporation employees."

"To be precise — senior security personnel assigned to guard the entrance to The Hive bunker."

He watched her face. That hunger to understand, right there on the surface.

"Your assignment was to stay in that luxurious villa and play the loving couple. Make sure no one on the outside ever caught a whiff of the anti-human bioweapons research happening underground."

Alice listened in silence. The scattered fragments in her mind began, slowly, to click into place.

The lawn. The villa. That man with the smile that never quite left his face.

So. All of it had been nothing but a job. Clock in, clock out, play house above a mass grave.

"Then why did you want him dead?" She pressed forward, not letting it go. "If he was just a doorman, you had no reason to kill an amnesiac security guard."

"Because he wasn't content with just being a security guard." Leon's eyes cooled.

"That bastard used his high-level clearance to secretly infiltrate the deepest level of the Core Laboratory."

"He wanted more."

"He knew the T-Virus Umbrella was developing underground could fetch an astronomical price on the outside. Get his hands on it — and he could have anything. Power. Status. Women. Wealth. A personal army of fanatics, if he wanted one."

"So he packaged up the viral serum and the antidote and walked out with them."

Leon held her gaze.

"If he'd only stolen something, he'd have been a corporate spy at worst."

"But he needed to cover his tracks. Needed the underground monitoring systems to go dark."

"So when he was fleeing the lab, this idiot deliberately smashed a T-Virus canister inside a ventilation duct."

Alice's breath stopped.

She remembered the Red Queen's holographic voice. She remembered the containment measures she'd seen throughout The Hive, brutal, absolute, unimaginable.

"He caused the leak?"

Her voice was shaking.

"That's right." Leon nodded. "The viral agent hit the ventilation system and spread to every corner of the underground base in virtually an instant. The Red Queen detected an extremely lethal biochemical contamination. To stop it from breaching the surface, she activated the highest-level extermination protocol."

He gestured toward the rear.

"Those researchers you saw, drowned alive in flooded corridors. Those security teams locked in isolation zones and baked dry by extreme heat."

"All of it courtesy of your so-called fake husband."

"For his own selfish wants, he sealed hundreds of people underground and turned them into monsters. This kind of trash, hurts everyone and gains nothing, was I supposed to keep him breathing? Wait for his memory to come back so I could pin a medal on him?"

Leon laid the truth out raw, piece by piece, and left it there between them.

Alice sat motionless.

She finally understood.

The man her subconscious had attached some trace of intimacy to had been the architect of all of it. The absolute cause of every horror she had witnessed down there.

The resistance she'd felt toward Leon over Spence's death dissolved completely. Gone, all at once.

If anything, she thought, one stomp had let the bastard off easy.

"I believe you."

Alice exhaled slowly. The rigid set of her shoulders gave way.

"Since you know even the details about him." She raised her head. "What about me? You promised, if I survived, you'd fill in the blanks of my past."

Leon looked at her.

She was nothing like the woman who had come up out of that lab, eyes full of hostility and suspicion, coiled to fight everything. The apocalypse outside and the evil she'd seen Umbrella do underground were reshaping her, fast.

He decided to honor the promise.

"Alright. If you want to hear it, I'll tell you everything." He paused. "Brace yourself."

Alice nodded.

Leon began.

➤ Next: Telekinesis Worth Coveting