[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 757 - Different Reasons to Grow Stronger

The atmosphere in the cabin shifted.

Merle had been hollering for a drink two minutes ago. The second Leon finished speaking, all actions follow my orders, he went quiet.

He stared at the cup in his hand. The bourbon rippled in slow circles with the plane's vibrations, and he watched the rings, expression unreadable.

Shawn wasn't talking either. He leaned against an ammo crate, head down, working the safety on his assault rifle back and forth. Click. Click. Click. The sound was sharper than it had any right to be.

Rick was still cleaning the revolver. Slower now, though.

That loud, almost swaggering energy from a minute ago had evaporated, like someone had cracked a window and let the cold in.

Leon raised an eyebrow over the rim of his coffee cup.

These guys were never quiet. Merle especially, that mouth ran from the moment he woke up to the moment he passed out, and it was always either something obscene or something obnoxious. The silence wasn't normal.

Leon closed his eyes.

An invisible pulse of mental energy radiated outward, quiet as a ripple on still water.

Ashley's Mind Scan.

In an instant, several completely different yet somehow identical waves of heaviness came flooding through the Mental Network into his mind.

A deep, bone-level helplessness.

And underneath it, a gnawing anxiety about their own inadequacy.

Leon saw the image playing inside Merle's head.

One month ago. The Underground Laboratory.

Marcus standing there with a vial of modified T-Virus, telling everyone in the room that this thing had a lethality rate.

Merle had been the first one to roll up his sleeve.

Didn't blink. Didn't hesitate. Just held out his arm and let Marcus push that needle into his vein.

The pain dropped him. He thrashed on the operating table like a loach thrown into boiling water, bit his own lip bloody, teeth grinding down until his mouth was full of copper, and he held on through every second of it by sheer, stupid stubbornness.

Why?

Because Merle had seen the Tyrants.

Standing in front of one of those things, the marksmanship he'd spent his whole life being proud of had felt like nothing. Less than nothing.

He had been scared.

Not of dying. Of becoming useless to Leon.

Scared that someday, when Leon was backed into a corner with nowhere left to go, all Merle would be able to do was stand there with his hands at his sides and watch.

Shawn's thoughts ran the same track.

The man who, in the early days of the apocalypse, had thought about himself first, that man was now running constant calculations on how to push the camp's defenses higher.

He'd taken the T-Virus too. The suffering hadn't been any easier than Merle's.

What gnawed at Shawn was the gap. Leon's rate of evolution was moving so fast that ordinary men like them couldn't even make out his taillights anymore.

They'd volunteered as Marcus's test subjects, let themselves be filled with serums that could cause genetic collapse on a bad day, and none of it had anything to do with world domination. World domination was a concept so abstract it meant nothing.

Shawn just wanted to keep pace.

Wanted to be standing at Leon's side when the next disaster hit. Wanted to be able to block one bullet. Cut one Walker's head off.

Instead of spending the rest of his life sheltered under Leon's shadow, good for nothing except shouting encouragement from the sidelines.

Rick and Daryl were carrying the same weight.

The long faces came from something they'd both figured out: even with the T-Virus in their blood, even with strength that put them well past ordinary human limits, that feeling of facing Leon, the pressure of it, like standing in front of something that shouldn't exist, hadn't gone anywhere.

They were afraid they'd already lost the right to call themselves his comrades.

Leon opened his eyes.

He looked at these four silent men, and something lurched hard inside his chest. Like a fist had closed around something and squeezed.

He let out a quiet breath.

These idiots.

He set the coffee cup on the rack beside him and stood up.

He walked to the center of the cabin in three strides, reached out, and pulled the steel cup straight out of Merle's hand. Tipped his head back and finished the last of the bourbon in one swallow.

Merle stared at him.

Shawn's hands went still. Rick looked up.

Leon tossed the empty cup back, dragged an ammo crate over, and sat down in the middle of all of them.

"Are you all feeling sorry for yourselves?"

His tone was completely even.

Merle opened his mouth. Leon raised a hand and cut him off before a word got out.

"Marcus develops a new virus. You line up one after another to be test subjects, get yourselves tortured half to death — all to grow a bit more muscle and shave a fraction off your reaction time."

His gaze moved across each of their faces, unhurried.

"You think I'm getting stronger too fast. Strong enough to seem like a monster. Strong enough that there's a distance between us now." He paused. "That's it, isn't it."

Shawn swallowed. His voice came out dry.

"Leon, that's not what we mean."

"We just feel like... the problems keep getting bigger. The enemies keep getting worse. If we stay where we are, sooner or later we become dead weight dragging the whole camp down."

"Bullshit."

The word landed flat and hard.

Shawn blinked.

"Are you out of your goddamn minds?" Leon pointed at Shawn's face. "Dead weight. Garbage."

"I push myself to the limit. I stick half-finished viruses into my own thigh — the kind where even William doesn't know what the endgame looks like — and you want to tell me why I'm doing that?"

"So I can be invincible?"

His voice carried through the whole cabin.

"I do it so I can have somewhere safe to sleep at night. So I can have a group of brothers I can turn my back on without checking over my shoulder."

He leaned forward, both hands braced on his knees.

"Listen to me. I don't care what I turn into. Whether I can punch a Tank into scrap, or fly, or burrow underground — whether I can punch the goddamn moon apart with my bare hands."

"You. Rick. Shawn. Merle. Daryl."

"You are my family."

"That doesn't change. Not ever."

He held Merle's gaze. The man's eyes had gone a little red.

"Even if you're weak, Merle, you're the firearms instructor at my camp. Even if you're just an ordinary man with a gun, Shawn, you're still the sweep team captain I trust most."

"I need you. Not because of what you can do in a fight." He let that sit for a second. "Because in this goddamn world, you're the ones who make me still feel like I'm a human being."

"Do you understand?"

The cabin went dead quiet.

Merle sniffled. Then, slowly, he cracked open the ugliest grin Leon had ever seen on him.

"Damn. Way you said that, I almost cried."

He grabbed the bottle, took a long pull straight from the neck, and shoved it at Shawn.

"You hear that? Boss says we're family." His grin widened. "Starting now I walk sideways through that whole camp and nobody says a word."

Shawn took the bottle and drank. Then he laughed and shook his head.

"You already walk sideways through the camp! Last time you got into the medical alcohol, nearly burned through your own stomach lining, and it was me who carried your ass to the Infirmary!"

Rick laughed too, a real one. He slid the revolver into its holster and let out a long, slow breath, like he'd been holding it for a while.

Daryl, in his corner, made a face and said nothing. But the tension had gone out of his hands.

Just like that, the heaviness broke.

The cabin came back to life.

Merle launched into a story about what the T-Virus had done for his stamina, the kind of story that didn't belong in polite company, and Shawn tore it apart piece by piece without mercy. Inside of 2 minutes they were wrestling each other on the floor, filling the cabin with rough, loud laughter.

Leon leaned back against the ammo crate and watched them.

The corner of his mouth pulled up.

At the very rear of the cabin, by the window, Alexia Ashford sat still.

The Antarctic Research Facility documents were in her hands. Her eyes weren't on them. They were fixed, unblinking, on Leon, surrounded by the others in the middle of the cabin.

She had heard every word.

She had watched the relief move through Merle and Shawn, not performed, not polite. Real. The kind that came from somewhere deep.

Something passed through those blood-red eyes of hers. A flicker of bewilderment, there and gone. And then something else replaced it, something harder to name: a deep, quiet shock to the chest.

She finally understood.

Since arriving at the prison, she had been piecing things together. These people were all injecting viruses into themselves, augmenting themselves relentlessly. She had assumed she knew why. Pursuit of evolution. The hunger for power that placed you above ordinary life, the same hunger that had driven her. Domination. Control.

She had been wrong.

Profoundly, completely wrong.

They were not enduring that suffering to become gods.

They were doing it to keep the things they loved from being destroyed. To earn the right to stand beside their family and face this world without flinching.

Her mind went to Alexander.

Her father. The man who had rebuilt the Ashford name by creating her and Alfred, not as children, but as instruments. Stepping stones for his ambitions.

And she herself. In pursuit of a divine throne made of nothing, she had turned her father into a monster and treated her brother as an afterthought, useful when convenient and irrelevant when not.

She had possessed the finest mind on the planet. She had possessed power that no living thing could match. And she had lived like something cold-blooded, moving through the world without warmth, without weight.

And these men, rough, loud, drinking cheap whiskey and swearing at each other, had something she had never come close to touching.

Family.

Alexia looked down at her own hands. Pale. Still.

Fifteen years of sleep. That glorious evolution. The ascension she had built her entire existence around.

It struck her, sitting there, as a very large and very cold joke.

She drew a slow breath and brought her eyes back to the documents.

She knew what she was going to do.

No one could have said how much time passed.

Outside the porthole, the deep blue of the ocean was gone. In its place: white. Endless white. A world of ice and snow in every direction.

The wind out there was savage, throwing curtains of frozen debris across the sky.

"All units, attention." The pilot's voice came through from the cockpit, carrying a thin edge of tension. "We have arrived above the target coordinates."

"A derelict ice runway has been located below. Surface is snow-covered. Preparing for forced landing — everyone grab something and hold on."

The fuselage lurched.

Weightlessness hit. The transport was dropping fast.

Then the landing gear found the ice, a screech of friction like a blade across teeth, the whole airframe shuddering, and the plane went skidding down the runway for what felt like a very long time before it shook itself still.

The indicator light at the tail swapped from red to green.

Hiss,

Hydraulics engaged.

The rear hatch descended, slow and massive.

Polar wind poured in through the gap, laced with ice crystals, howling like something alive.

The white came with it, stinging and relentless, and for a moment no one could see.

Leon pulled his hood up, stepped onto the ramp, and walked out first into the silence.

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