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The roar still echoed through the facility's corridors when Marcus felt it—a wrongness deeper than anything he'd sensed before, like reality itself was screaming.
"That came from below," he said, already moving. "Third level."
Alice checked her magazine. Jill's hand tightened on her Beretta. Behind them, more of Isaacs's security forces were regrouping, but they had bigger problems now.
They moved fast through the sterile hallways, Marcus's telekinesis clearing their path—doors ripping open before they reached them, security cameras exploding in showers of sparks. Alice and Jill flanked him, weapons ready, but the guards had stopped coming.
That should've been their first warning.
The blood started appearing gradually. Smears at first, then handprints. Then... more. Lots more.
"Jesus," Jill breathed, stepping over what used to be someone's arm. "What the hell did this?"
Marcus knew exactly what, but he didn't slow down. They needed to end Isaacs before—
Alice stopped so suddenly that Jill almost crashed into her.
"Wait," she said, her voice strange. Distant. "When we were flying in... did you see...?"
Marcus had seen it. They all had, during their invisible approach to the facility—a ditch outside the perimeter fence, filled with bodies. Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds.
All of them looked exactly like Alice.
The memory hit Marcus now with awful clarity: the mass grave of failed clones, discarded like broken dolls, their faces identical in death. He'd felt Alice's hand tighten around his during the flight, seen the tears streaming silently down her face as they'd passed over it.
He'd used his telekinesis to bury them. It was all he could do.
"They're me," Alice said now, her voice raw. "All those bodies. They're all me. Isaacs grew them and... and when they didn't work right, he just—"
"Hey." Jill grabbed her shoulder. "You're here. You're real. Those weren't you."
"They were close enough," Alice said bitterly. "Close enough to die."
Marcus wanted to say something, anything, but the words wouldn't come. What could he say? That it was okay? That it didn't matter? It did matter. Those women—those copies, those clones, whatever they were—they'd died because Umbrella wanted to manufacture Alice like a product.
"We're going to kill him," Marcus said finally. "Isaacs. We're going to kill him, and then we're going to take everything he built and use it to save people. Okay?"
Alice nodded, wiping her eyes roughly. "Okay."
They kept moving.
The guards never reappeared. The blood got worse—coating the walls now, pooling on the floor, creating sticky patches that squelched under their boots. Whatever Isaacs had become after injecting that serum, it was hungry.
They found the lab on the third level, exactly where Marcus had sensed that wrongness coming from. The door was shredded, torn apart by something with way too much strength. Inside, chemical containers lay smashed and scattered, their contents mixing into toxic puddles across the floor.
And standing in the center of the carnage, surrounded by holographic displays, was a little girl in white.
At least, she looked like a little girl. Marcus knew better.
"Hello," the AI said, her voice pleasant and childlike despite the bloodbath around her. "I'm an artificial intelligence. My name is White Queen. Red Queen is my older sister."
"I know her," Alice said coldly. "She's a bitch."
"My sister simply followed her programming parameters," White Queen replied, completely unbothered. "The Hive protocols prioritized containment over individual survival."
"Yeah, well, her containment protocols killed a lot of good people," Jill snapped. "And for what? The whole world's infected now anyway. Great job."
"Some outcomes exceed our control algorithms," White Queen said. "Human behavior introduces variables that artificial intelligence cannot always predict."
Marcus cut through the philosophical debate before it could continue. "What happened here? Where's Isaacs?"
White Queen turned her projection toward him, tilting her head with an expression that was probably meant to convey concern but looked uncanny on a holographic child.
"Dr. Isaacs became aware of your infiltration," she said. "In response, he injected himself with an incomplete G-virus variant—a modified strain combining T-virus base code with Alice's serum antibodies. The transformation was... extensive."
Alice's expression darkened. "He used my blood to make that thing?"
"The antibodies in your blood create unique binding properties," White Queen explained. "Dr. Isaacs theorized they could stabilize viral mutations and enhance beneficial traits. He was partially correct. The serum did stabilize his transformation and increased his strength significantly. However, the enhancement came with severe physical mutations and psychological deterioration."
"Psychological deterioration," Marcus repeated. "You mean he went crazy."
"Insane would be the colloquial term, yes."
"And where is he now?"
"I contained him in Research Lab Seven," White Queen said, gesturing toward one of the holographic displays. It showed a reinforced containment room, the kind designed for bioweapons testing. "However, my containment will not hold indefinitely. Dr. Isaacs has been consuming facility personnel to fuel his regeneration. He's significantly stronger than he was an hour ago."
Jill's face went pale. "Consuming personnel. You mean eating people."
"Yes."
"How many?"
"Seventeen staff members. Possibly more. My surveillance coverage has gaps."
The casual way she said it—like she was reporting cafeteria inventory instead of cannibalism—made Marcus's skin crawl. But that was AI for you. No matter how human they looked, they weren't.
"There's something else," White Queen continued, focusing on Alice. "Dr. Isaacs's research indicates that your blood is the key to developing a permanent anti-virus serum. Not a preventative vaccine like Dr. Ashford created, but an actual cure. One that could reverse T-virus infection even in advanced cases."
Alice and Jill both went still.
"Wait," Alice said slowly. "My blood could cure infected people? Not just prevent infection, but cure it?"
"In theory, yes. Dr. Isaacs's data suggests your antibodies can bind to T-virus proteins and neutralize them even after cellular integration. The research is incomplete, but this facility has the necessary equipment to continue development. Provided you survive the next hour."
"Why wouldn't we survive?" Jill asked, though she already knew the answer.
"Because Dr. Isaacs will break through my containment any moment now," White Queen said pleasantly. "And when he does, he will attempt to kill you. His higher cognitive functions have degraded, but he retains enough intelligence to recognize threats. You represent a significant threat."
Right on cue, an alarm started blaring—harsh and immediate.
"Containment breach," White Queen announced. "Research Lab Seven. Dr. Isaacs is free."
Marcus felt it before he saw it—that wrongness he'd sensed earlier, now moving through the facility like a cancer. Fast. Way too fast for something that size.
"Where?" he demanded.
"Approaching your position. Two corridors east. You have approximately thirty seconds."
Alice raised her weapon. Jill moved to flanking position. Marcus reached out with his telekinesis, feeling the thing that used to be Isaacs barreling toward them like a freight train made of hate and hunger.
Twenty seconds.
"This is insane," Jill muttered. "We should fall back, regroup—"
"No time," Marcus said. "Besides, we came here to kill him. Let's kill him."
Ten seconds.
Marcus could sense him now in perfect detail—eight feet tall, tumors bulging across every surface, right arm ending in a mass of writhing tentacles instead of fingers. His mind was there too, what was left of it: fractured, screaming, reduced to base instincts and rage.
Five seconds.
The door at the end of the corridor exploded inward.
Isaacs had been a distinguished scientist once. Brilliant, meticulous, ambitious. The thing that squeezed through the doorframe shared nothing with that man except DNA.
His face was barely recognizable—stretched and distorted, covered in pulsing growths that looked almost like scales. His eyes glowed with a sick yellow light. The tentacles on his right arm moved independently, each one tipped with something sharp and hooked.
And when he saw them, he shrieked—that same sound from before, bestial and wrong.
"Holy shit," Alice breathed.
Then he charged.
Isaacs moved like nothing that big should be able to move—crossing thirty feet in a heartbeat, tentacles lashing out faster than humanly possible. Alice opened fire, bullets punching through his torso, and for a moment Marcus thought it would be that easy.
It wasn't.
The holes sealed up almost instantly, flesh knitting back together with nauseating speed. Isaacs didn't even slow down. His tentacle caught Alice across the chest and sent her flying, slamming her into the wall hard enough to crack concrete.
Jill tried for a headshot. Got it too—perfect placement, right between the eyes.
Isaacs's head snapped back. The bullet hole wept clear fluid for half a second.
Then it closed up, and he turned those glowing eyes on Jill.
"Down!" Marcus shouted, and Jill threw herself flat as a tentacle whistled through the space where her head had been. The appendage punched through the metal wall like paper.
Okay. Regeneration was a problem.
Marcus reached out with his telekinesis—felt Isaacs's mass, maybe four hundred pounds of mutated muscle and bioweapon bullshit—and shoved.
Isaacs flew backward, crashing through lab equipment, but he was already recovering. Getting up. And Marcus could feel something pushing back against his telekinesis. A force. Psychic resistance.
Isaacs had telekinesis too.
"Of course you do," Marcus muttered. "Because that makes perfect sense."
Alice was back on her feet, and she'd figured out the same thing Marcus had. "He's got powers!" she shouted. "Maybe five tons worth—I can feel him pushing!"
"Less talking, more shooting!" Jill unloaded her entire magazine into Isaacs's legs, trying to slow him down. It didn't work. He just healed faster than they could damage him.
They fought for three minutes that felt like three hours. Alice and Jill worked in perfect sync—covering each other, landing shots, staying mobile. But Isaacs was relentless. Every time they hurt him, he healed. Every time they slowed him, he sped up. His tentacles were everywhere, his telekinesis swatting bullets out of the air, his regeneration making him effectively immortal.
Alice took a hit that would've killed a normal person—tentacle through the shoulder, lifting her off the ground. She screamed, and something in Marcus snapped.
Enough.
He'd been holding back. Testing Isaacs's capabilities, letting Alice and Jill get combat experience against a superhuman opponent. But this wasn't a training exercise anymore.
Marcus reached out with everything he had.
The world stopped.
Isaacs froze mid-lunge, suspended in the air like a puppet with its strings pulled taut. His tentacles went rigid. His glowing eyes widened—just enough awareness left to understand what was happening.
Marcus's telekinesis didn't just hold him. It was everywhere. Wrapping around Isaacs's body like an invisible net, threading through every cell, every molecule.
"Marcus?" Alice said, still hanging from the tentacle, blood running down her arm. "What are you—"
He pulled.
The net contracted.
Isaacs didn't explode. He didn't burst apart. He just... divided. Like meat going through a deli slicer, perfectly precise, impossibly fast. One moment he was whole. The next, he was three hundred neat cubes of flesh, each one exactly the same size, falling to the floor in a shower of gore.
The tentacle went limp. Alice dropped, and Jill caught her.
The pieces of Isaacs twitched. Tried to move toward each other. The regeneration was still trying to work, cells reaching for cells across the gaps—
Marcus set him on fire.
Not with gasoline or chemicals. With friction. He accelerated the air molecules around each piece until they ignited, turning Isaacs into three hundred small pyres burning at a thousand degrees. The smell was horrific. The sound was worse—a wet crackling, like bacon but so much more wrong.
In ten seconds, there was nothing left but ash.
Silence filled the lab, broken only by the hiss of ventilation fans trying desperately to clear the smoke.
Marcus lowered his hand, feeling the exhaustion hit him like a wave. That level of fine control took everything he had.
"Holy shit," Jill said quietly. "Holy shit."
Alice stared at the ash piles, then at Marcus. "You just... you just..."
"Yeah."
"That was—"
"I know."
"No, I mean, that was insane. You cut him into pieces with your mind."
"Technically I created a telekinetic matrix of force vectors spaced at five-millimeter intervals and applied differential pressure across—"
"Marcus."
"Yeah?"
"That was the most metal thing I've ever seen."
Despite everything, he laughed. So did she, though it came out shaky. Jill just sat down hard on the floor, looking like she'd aged ten years in the last five minutes.
Across the room, White Queen's hologram flickered back online. She stared at the ash piles. At Marcus. Back to the ash.
"That's..." she said, her voice uncertain for the first time. "That's not possible. The force required to achieve that level of precision, the control necessary, the power-to-mass ratio—the physics don't support—"
"Yeah," Marcus said tiredly. "I get that a lot."
"This is unscientific!"
"Welcome to my life."
White Queen's projection froze, probably running calculations, trying to understand what she'd just witnessed. Marcus didn't care. He walked over to Alice, checking her shoulder wound. Deep, but not fatal. She'd live.
"You okay?" he asked softly.
She looked at him, really looked at him, and nodded. "Yeah. Thanks for, you know. The rescue."
"Always."
Jill pushed herself up, holstering her empty weapon. "So. We just killed Isaacs. Took his base. And apparently Alice's blood can cure the zombie plague."
"Seems like it," Marcus agreed.
"Cool. Cool cool cool. Just wanted to make sure I understood where we were." She paused. "I need a drink."
"We all need a drink," Alice said.
"I can direct you to Dr. Isaacs's private quarters," White Queen offered, recovering from her existential crisis. "He kept several bottles of expensive whiskey."
"Best thing you've said all day," Jill muttered.
Marcus looked around the destroyed lab, at the ash piles that used to be Isaacs, at his exhausted companions. They'd done it. Actually done it. Killed one of Umbrella's top executives, taken his base, and gained access to research that could potentially save what was left of humanity.
Not bad for a day's work.
"Come on," he said, heading for the door. "Let's go tell the others they can come in. And someone should probably warn them about the mass grave outside."
"And the blood," Jill added. "So much blood."
"And the fact that we just murdered Umbrella's head scientist and burned his corpse to ash," Alice finished.
"That too."
They walked out of the lab together, leaving the smoking remains of Dr. Isaacs behind. White Queen's hologram followed, still muttering about impossible physics and unscientific phenomena.
In the end, Marcus thought, maybe that was humanity's real superpower. Not science or technology or even survival instinct.
Just the ability to do impossible things and call it Tuesday.
(End of Chapter)
PLZ THROW POWERSTONES.