[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 758 - Simon and Kaya's Family

The polar night in Antarctica was always long enough to drive a person mad.

In this white, dead silence, where even Walkers would freeze into ice sculptures on contact, the military listening post half-buried beneath the ice sheet was the only living thing.

Inside the post.

"Move it! Faster! Pull every last one of these damn server drives!"

Simon had a large electric screwdriver in one hand and sweat running down his face as he worked frantically down a row of equipment cabinets blinking with indicator lights.

In this godforsaken apocalypse, he had held this highest-grade polar communications base alone, broadcasting to survivors across the world over radio, grinding through the most desperate years by sheer willpower.

Until Leon assigned him a partner. Until Kaya came with her family.

Simon yanked out a cluster of thick data cables and pulled a hard drive free, then set it carefully into the foam-lined, anti-magnetic temperature-controlled case beside him.

He was barely keeping it together.

Just a dozen or so hours ago, Leon had patched directly into his main control console over a top-level encrypted channel.

Leon told him Atlanta had already established an impregnable fortress.

More importantly, Leon was personally leading a team to bring him home.

Simon had had enough of Antarctica.

Enough of eating military rations every day. Enough of anxiously checking the generator fuel levels every single morning. More than enough of this godforsaken, endless, white nothing that stretched to the edge of the world.

All he wanted now was to return to civilization. To drink a steaming cup of coffee. To take a long, hot shower.

"Take this motherboard too — this is a key terminal that links directly to low-Earth-orbit military satellites."

"Once we get to Atlanta and plug it in, I can reactivate the entire planet's communications network!"

Simon muttered to himself as he dismantled equipment with quick, practiced hands.

In the rest area nearby, Kaya's family was scrambling to pack up their supplies. They stuffed several heavy polar cold-weather suits into rough canvas packs, then did a final count of the last of the dehydrated vegetables and emergency medical supplies.

Kaya, meanwhile, stood before the massive bulletproof glass window.

She wore a thick down jacket, both hands gently cupped around a mug of water that had long since gone cold. Her gaze drifted through the glass, out over the raging blizzard, the decommissioned radar antennae barely visible through the ice below.

Her expression was hard to read.

The conditions here were brutal, yes. But that terrifying cold was also the most natural barrier in the world, one that had shielded them from everything outside wanting to eat them alive.

This place had witnessed her meeting Simon. Falling in love with him. It had been their only shelter in the end of everything.

Now they were leaving, suddenly, for some completely unfamiliar city called Atlanta. A deep, restless unease rose inside her, tangled up with something she hadn't expected.

Reluctance.

Simon locked the last hard drive into the temperature-controlled case and exhaled slowly.

He turned and saw Kaya standing motionless at the window.

He paused.

He set down his tools and walked over to her.

"Hey, sweetheart."

He looked at the weight in her profile, the slight heaviness around her eyes, and his chest gave a sudden lurch.

He was a lifelong shut-in hacker who had never managed a relationship in his life. Somehow, at the end of the world, he had found a woman willing to stay by his side. He was terrified of losing her. Terrified of losing any of it.

"You look... unhappy?" he asked carefully.

Kaya said nothing. She kept staring out the window.

Simon panicked.

He grabbed her by the shoulders, his voice going urgent.

"Kaya, do you not want to leave with me?"

"If you really don't want to go, if you think it's safer here — then I won't go either."

"Forget the equipment. I'll stay here with you. We can keep the generators running for a few more years, we'll be fine, we'll—"

He was already half-turning to go tear open the cases he'd just finished packing.

Kaya watched him flail around like a complete idiot and rolled her eyes.

She reached out and caught the hem of his jacket.

Then she placed her other hand gently on her belly, on the slight, unmistakable curve that had only just begun to show.

"Is your head full of nothing but garbage?"

She shot him a look, her tone halfway between exasperated and something much softer underneath.

"I'm carrying your child, Simon."

"How could I not leave this frozen hellhole with you."

"I'm not letting our kid be born in a minus-fifty icebox without so much as a drop of fresh milk."

Simon went still.

He looked down at her belly. Then up at her eyes.

And then this hacker, the man who had once held dominion over the world's digital infrastructure, scratched the back of his messy hair like a complete idiot and broke into the most helpless, awkward grin of his life.

"Right... yeah. Right! Our kid has to grow up in the sunlight."

He pulled her into a fierce hug and pressed a hard kiss to her forehead.

"Leon said Atlanta has the best agricultural experts in the whole country. Fresh vegetables. More beef than you can eat. Our kid is going to be born in the safest place in the world!"

Kaya leaned against his chest. The corners of her mouth curved into a quiet, settled smile.

The wait always seemed to stretch longer than it had any right to.

The clock on the wall ticked steadily on.

Half a day passed.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

The surface radar on the main control console erupted into a rapid alarm.

Simon shoved away from Kaya and bolted to the screen in a single stride.

Several large red dots were advancing across it, steady, unhurried, cutting through the polar storm toward the listening post at a speed that didn't waver for a second.

"They're here! They're here!" Simon's shout filled the entire base.

He snatched up the communicator and punched in the encrypted channel.

"This is Citizen Z! Leon, is that you? I've got your signal on screen!"

A faint crackle of static. Then Leon's low, even voice came through and filled the room.

"It's me."

"Open the gate. We're here."

RUMBLE,

A few minutes later, a deafening wall of engine noise swallowed the howl of the blizzard whole.

Several heavy tracked snow vehicles came grinding forward like iron behemoths, crushing the ice ridges around the perimeter without slowing, and came to a stop in front of the listening post's thick blast-proof steel doors.

HISS,

A door was shoved open.

Leon dropped down first.

Black polar tactical suit. Military boots hitting the ice with a heavy crack. The gale drove snow into his face and he didn't blink, standing straight and still as a post driven into the permafrost.

Behind him, Merle, Shawn Greene, Rick, and Daryl Dixon dropped down one by one.

"Goddamn miserable weather! This place is colder than a woman's heart!"

Merle was cursing before his boots hit the ground.

He was wearing a single thin tactical jacket. Enhanced by the modified T-Virus, the cells in his body ran like miniature furnaces, the kind of cold that would give a normal person frostbite registered to him as little more than a mild chill.

Shawn Greene slung his assault rifle across his chest and rolled his neck.

"Alright, Merle. Shut your mouth and get to work."

The heavy blast-proof doors ground slowly upward.

Simon led Kaya's family to the entrance, all of them buzzing with excitement.

The moment Simon actually laid eyes on Leon, he felt the urge, irrational, overwhelming, to drop to his knees and kiss the man's boots.

The pressure radiating off him was something else entirely. Even just standing there, casual as anything, he projected a sense of force that felt utterly beyond contest.

"Reporting, Commander Leon! All equipment fully packed and ready for loading!" Simon snapped to attention and threw out an awkward salute.

Leon walked forward and clapped him on the shoulder.

"Good work, Simon."

"Atlanta needs what's in that head of yours. And it needs this equipment."

He glanced at the mountain of anti-magnetic temperature-controlled cases stacked against the wall.

"Rick, Shawn Greene — take some people and get it all onto the vehicles."

"Move fast. We're not spending any more time here than we have to."

Rick and Shawn Greene moved immediately. Each of them reached down and lifted single-handed the kind of equipment case that would've taken 2 ordinary people to carry, and tossed them effortlessly into the cargo bays.

Simon stared.

His eyes nearly came out of his head.

What the hell kind of monsters are these people?

The loading was over fast. Under 10 minutes. Every piece of core equipment worth salvaging from the listening post, every last bag of Kaya's family's supplies, gone, packed, done.

Simon took Kaya's hand and fell in behind Leon as they walked out.

At the threshold, he stopped and looked back once at the place he had spent years of his life. He breathed in a long pull of frozen air.

Then he turned away and stepped into the warm interior of the tracked vehicle without looking back again.

Leon stood in the wind and snow.

Alexia Ashford came to his side, dressed in a white cold-weather suit. She reached out one gloved finger and tapped a point on the map on her tablet.

"200 kilometers due south from here, deeper into the ice plain."

She raised her head. Those blood-red eyes fixed on him.

"That is the Antarctic Research Facility my father built. The place where T-Veronica's original data and the finished serum are stored."

Leon nodded.

He turned and pulled open the passenger door.

"Get in. We're going now."

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