[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 747 - Get Him Into the Lab — Now (Patreon)

Now everyone was deliberately avoiding one corner of the cabin.

A woman sat there.

Alexia Ashford.

Her long dress was torn to rags, caked with dried blood. The vines across her body had stopped their frenzied growth, but strange dark-red tracings still lingered on her skin like old scars that hadn't decided whether to heal.

She sat perfectly still, both hands resting flat on her knees, gaze passing through the porthole into the pitch-black sky outside.

Everything around her seemed to have nothing to do with her.

No one spoke to her.

No one tried to restrain her.

No handcuffs, no straps. Not a single gun pointed in her direction.

Not because they didn't want to.

Because they didn't dare, and because there was no point. Everyone on board understood perfectly well that ordinary physical restraints would be a joke to this woman. If they actually provoked her, this Black Hawk cruising at altitude would become an iron coffin in about three seconds.

In the far corner, Arthur had his shoulders pulled up around his ears, eyes locked on the side of Alexia's face with naked terror. Every time he closed them, the same image played behind his eyelids, himself, jerked around like a puppet by the Veronica virus, helpless, utterly without agency.

Chris paced the narrow aisle like a caged lion. His eyes kept dragging back to the door leading to the rear compartment.

There was nothing he could do. He knew that. He paced anyway.

Ada leaned against the cabin wall with her arms folded, watching all of it.

Before boarding, the question of bringing Alexia had nearly sparked a mutiny. Chris objected first. Arthur had screamed — genuinely screamed, that bringing this woman was the same as strapping a nuclear bomb to the fuselage. But Ada had overruled them both.

Because of Veronica.

Alexia was the only perfect living sample of the Veronica virus on the planet. The only one. And as long as Leon could pull through, he was going to need her.

So Ada had ignored every objection and physically dragged this extraordinarily dangerous "prisoner" onto the aircraft.

Now she pushed off the wall, crossed the cabin in long strides, and walked straight toward the corner everyone else was treating like a blast radius.

Under the stares of Arthur and Chris, the kind of stares men reserve for someone walking off the edge of a building, she sat down right beside Alexia.

Alexia didn't turn her head. She kept looking out the window.

"What are you looking at?" Ada asked.

Alexia's lashes trembled, just slightly.

"Nothing."

Her voice had lost that divine, above-it-all quality entirely. What remained carried a trace of something much more ordinary.

Exhaustion.

"I just feel..." she said, "...this night sky looks a little different from what I remember. Before I went into stasis."

Ada nodded. "The world changed long ago."

Alexia finally turned. Those blood-red eyes found Ada's face, no anger in them. Only confusion.

"Loving someone," she said softly. "Dying for them."

A pause.

"What does that feel like?"

She was still turning that question over. Still couldn't find the answer.

Ada looked at that blood-streaked face and felt something she hadn't expected.

Pity.

A genius of supreme intellect. A monster of tremendous power. And in the one subject that actually mattered, she was no different from an infant who'd never learned to walk.

"I can't tell you what it feels like," Ada said. Her tone had softened, just a fraction.

"That's not something you learn from a book. And no one else can teach it to you." She leaned forward slightly, holding Alexia's gaze. "You have to experience it yourself."

"But understand something first." Her voice went quiet and precise, the way a blade goes quiet before it cuts. "You put us all through hell. You pushed Claire to the edge. You turned Leon into a monster."

"That is what you owe every single one of us."

Alexia's lips moved. Nothing came out. After a long moment, she nodded.

"Now that you've surrendered," Ada continued, each word deliberate, "and you want to try returning to a normal life — then start by learning how to be a human being. Make an effort to change. Use that brilliant mind of yours to clean up the wreckage you caused."

"Otherwise, you'll always be exactly what you were before."

The silence stretched long.

Then Alexia nodded, something contemplative settling behind her eyes.

"I will."

Three simple words. Ada felt a quiet wave of relief move through her and said nothing.

Time bled away, second by agonizing second.

From the rear compartment, muffled impacts drifted through the wall. Suppressed, guttural sounds that didn't belong to anything fully human anymore.

Every time one landed, Chris's whole body shuddered.

He ground his teeth. His knuckles had gone white around his fists a long time ago.

No one knew how much time passed.

"All units, attention — we are approaching the destination."

The pilot's voice from the cockpit.

Ada stood and moved to the porthole, looking down.

Beneath the night sky, the outline of Atlanta, Georgia sharpened gradually through the dark. In all that dead silence and wasteland, one area blazed with light, towering walls, columns of Searchlight beams sweeping back and forth, burning starkly against everything black around them.

Home.

The helicopter formation began its descent. The massive rotors churned the air into howling wind as the aircraft settled onto the prison's landing pad, and the moment the landing gear touched down, every person in the cabin exhaled at the same time.

The cabin door slid open.

Outside, a crowd was already waiting.

Rebekah was up on her toes, craning past people to see into the cabin. William Birkin and James Marcus stood behind her. Beside them, Rick had a squad of fully armed guards already drawing up a perimeter, fast and practiced.

"Where's Leon!"

She saw Ada step off first and cried out before Ada had both feet on the ground.

Ada didn't waste words. She turned and pointed at the sealed rear compartment door.

Chris was already past her, moving.

He hit the button. The pneumatic valve let out a sharp hiss. The heavy metal door slid back.

A wave of blood hit them first. Then something else underneath it, an indescribable, strange smell that had no clean name.

Chris held his breath and went in.

He stopped dead.

The rear compartment was a wreck. The walls were scored with deep gashes, the kind only claws make. The seats had been ripped apart by brute force and twisted into heaps of scrap. Every surface told the same story of something that had been barely, barely contained.

In the corner, Claire's clothes were in tatters, her body soaked through with sweat. Face white as paper. Eyes shut. She looked like she'd been wrung out and left there.

And beside her, Leon lay on the floor.

The mutation across the right half of his body had stopped spreading. That massive eye was clamped shut. The dark-red muscle tissue had gone still, no longer writhing, settling instead into an eerie, ashen gray.

The G-Virus had fulfilled its drive to propagate. And exactly as Rebekah had said, he'd dropped into deep recovery.

"Medical team! Now!"

Chris roared it, scooped Claire up, and charged out of the compartment.

Rebekah was already moving to meet him, guiding Claire onto the mobile stretcher waiting just outside. She ran a check, quick and practiced, and exhaled.

"Her vitals are stable. Actually..." She paused. "Stronger than normal."

"Leon's control was suppressing the G-Virus's frenzy."

Then William Birkin and Marcus came through the door, leading several fully armed biosoldiers. They looked down at Leon, half-human, half something that had no category yet, and felt their scalps crawl.

"Unbelievable..." William murmured.

"Can you stop running your damn mouth and get him into the lab?" Marcus snapped. "The cellular activity inside him is still fluctuating. The dormancy phase could end any second. You really want to be standing here when a rampaging Leon wakes up?"

The biosoldiers moved immediately, lifting Leon onto a gurney. William and Marcus took up positions on either side and pushed, moving fast, practically running, down the corridor toward the Core Laboratory beneath the prison.

Ada stood on the landing pad and watched the gurney disappear at the far end of the passage.

Behind her, Alexia stepped down from the aircraft.

She didn't look at the guards standing at full readiness. Didn't look at anyone. She just turned her gaze slowly across the prison grounds, blood-red eyes moving with quiet, unhurried curiosity, taking in this place she'd never seen before.

➤ Next: Injecting the Perfected G-Virus