[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 760 - Subject 04 — Plant Experiment

Shawn kicked a desiccated corpse out of his way.

The body was feather-light. It skidded across the polished floor, slammed into the wall, and its dried-out skull rolled free with a hollow clatter.

Rick held up the portable air quality detector.

The screen pulsed with a steady green glow. Every reading sat inside the safe zone.

"We're good." Rick patted the filter canister on his gas mask. "Air's clean. The gas has fully dissipated."

Leon pulled his mask off first. He drew a long, slow breath of cold air.

No rot. No stench. Nothing like what he'd expected.

The extreme cold had turned this place into a perfect natural deep-freeze, locking out moisture, starving bacteria of any chance to multiply. There was only the stale, flat smell of old dust.

Several high-powered flashlight beams swept back and forth across the hall, then converged, one by one, as if pulled by the same invisible hand, on the very center of the room.

Everyone stopped moving at once.

Rick sucked in a sharp breath. His assault rifle snapped level without him thinking about it.

It was a creature of enormous size.

No. More precisely, it was a tree.

A grotesquely oversized tree.

The trunk was thick enough that three or four people linking arms couldn't encircle it, its surface carved into deep, hard furrows like the bark of something ancient. The root system spread outward like a tangle of pythons, having forced its way through the thick layer of specialized alloy armor plating in the floor and driven deep into the bedrock below. Its branches sprawled upward in wild profusion, reaching all the way to the domed ceiling dozens of meters above, nearly blanketing the entire roof.

A towering tree growing inside a secret base buried under the Antarctic ice sheet. The image was wrong in a way that went beyond words.

"Relax."

Alexia Ashford's cool, clear voice rang across the empty hall.

She didn't glance at the men with their guns raised. She walked straight to the enormous tree, tilted her head back, and studied the tangle of bare, dead branches.

"This is the base's Subject 04."

She extended one gloved hand and stroked the rough bark.

"When my father and I were developing the T-Veronica Virus, we needed to test the virus's compatibility with plant tissue. We injected a high concentration of the solution into this ordinary broadleaf plant."

She turned and looked at Leon.

"The results were somewhat unexpected."

"The T-Veronica Virus granted it a terrifying capacity for cellular proliferation. It grew into this form in a remarkably short span of time."

"The good news is that it never displayed the violent aggression and bloodlust we observed in animal subjects."

"It is simply a tree that grew somewhat large."

Alexia patted the trunk. A dull, muffled thud.

"Afterward, I initiated the base's extreme-freeze protocol and cut off all heating systems. The temperature here dropped to dozens of degrees below zero in an instant. With no nutrients and no suitable temperature, it died long ago."

Shawn clearly didn't take her word for it.

He slung the assault rifle over his shoulder, drew the serrated military knife from his hip, and walked up to the trunk. He rapped the hilt against the bark several times.

THUD. THUD. THUD.

Crisp. Hollow.

He shifted his grip, aimed the blade at a protruding knot in the bark, and drove it in hard. One sharp lever of his wrist and a large chunk of bark peeled away.

He leaned in and examined the gap.

Grey-brown woody fiber, dry and shriveled. No sap. No mutated tissue. Nothing.

Dry as driftwood that had been baking in a desert for ten years.

"Dead as they come." Shawn sheathed the knife, turned to Leon, and shrugged. "Not a drop of moisture left. Hard as a rock. You'd break a sweat trying to burn this thing for firewood."

Leon let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.

He walked to a control console along the edge of the hall and swept a glance across the dust-coated screens.

"This is only the antechamber. The actual data archive and cryo-storage should be on the level below."

He pressed his earpiece and switched to the external channel.

"Merle, Daryl — what's the situation up top?"

Static crackled. Then wind and snow, and Merle's broad, carrying shout behind it.

"Wind's brutal. But there's not a soul in sight. All clear."

"Bring Simon and the transport team down on the elevator." Leon's voice was flat. "It's safe."

About 10 minutes passed.

A deep, resonant rumble built from somewhere above. The heavy-duty elevator descended slowly into the edge of the hall. The thick metal doors ground open.

Merle and Daryl stepped out with rifles up. Behind them came Simon, face flushed, eyes already darting everywhere, and a dozen logistics and transport personnel brought from the prison camp.

Simon made it 2 steps out of the elevator and froze.

Not because of the desiccated corpses.

Not because of the enormous tree.

It was the rows of equipment racks lining both walls of the hall, standing in perfect formation.

"Good Lord..."

He moved like a man who'd just spotted the love of his life. He scrambled headlong to the nearest rack and scrubbed furiously at the dust on the glass door with his sleeve, eyes going wide.

"Umbrella's supercomputing servers? Liquid-cooled ones?"

His voice was shaking. He spun around and shouted across the hall.

"Leon! These are top-tier hardware you couldn't buy for any price before the outbreak! Pull a single motherboard out of one of these and the computing power alone would outstrip every piece of equipment I had back at my old listening station, combined!"

He darted between the racks like a man possessed, running his hands over one, pressing his face to the glass of another.

"We're rich! We are absolutely loaded!"

The fervor spread. It was contagious.

Rick walked over to Leon's side and took in the vast underground hall. His brow furrowed.

"The gear is first-rate, no question. But Leon — the scale of this is enormous."

He pointed at the server racks standing a head taller than a man.

"Just in this hall, there are no fewer than dozens of units. That's before we get to the data archive and cryo-storage on the level below." He ran the numbers quietly. "Our snow-tracked vehicles can carry 2 racks at most per trip. Even packing every inch of available space, we're looking at 5 or 6 round trips across the ice sheet."

He paused.

"And the C-17's cargo hold has limits too. No way to load everything in one run. At minimum, 2 flights."

This was a colossal undertaking. In Antarctica, every single round trip carried real risk. And once they returned to Atlanta, they would have to turn around and fly back out again for another load.

There was no alternative. Their heavy transports were limited, and every one of them was already committed, running supply runs to the cities around Atlanta, ferrying critical materials back to the prison.

Leon gave a single nod. He knew the full weight of what this would cost them.

But every piece of equipment in this base, every file and document, was a cornerstone of Atlanta Prison's future. And the T-Veronica serum Alexia had described, that was something he was not leaving without.

"We move it all." He turned to face the transport personnel, who were already visibly itching to start. "Every piece comes back with us."

"Shawn, Rick — you two lead the teams. Dismantling and loading."

"Simon, you assess priority. Pack in order of importance. Don't waste a single minute on scrap."

"No rest, no sleep. Strip this base to the walls."

"Yes, sir!"

One voice. Every person in the room.

The Antarctic underground base, silent for 15 years, exploded into furious motion.

Simon, toolbox in hand, directed several burly workers as they attacked the server mounting bolts with brute force. Shawn and Merle drew on the fearsome strength the T-Virus had built into them, hoisting massive metal components onto their shoulders and hauling them to the elevator in long, powerful strides. Flashlight beams crisscrossed the hall, slicing lines through the dark. The clang of metal, the heavy breathing of working bodies, the grinding roar of the elevator motor, it all crashed together, shattering the dead silence that had held for over a decade.

Everyone's focus was locked on the equipment. On the files. On the prize.

No one gave the enormous tree a second thought. It had been ruled a dead thing. That was settled.

The flashlight beams swept across the domed ceiling from time to time, and moved on just as quickly.

Up at the highest point of the hall, in the thick shadows pressed against the ventilation ducts, one of the tree's heaviest branches hung in silence, drooping downward. Its surface was dry. Withered and yellowed. Not a trace of life.

Then a sweep of flashlight beams passed over it and slid away.

And the very tip of that dead branch curled upward, slowly, just half an inch, in one slow, unmistakable motion.

➤ Next: The Strange Wound