Chapter 61 - 62: The Queen Leech

Chapter 61: Chapter 62: The Queen Leech

"Watch your footing, young lady. My children take it personally when they are stepped on."

Rebecca stopped with one boot hanging over a leech the size of her palm.

It had pulled itself from a crack between the incinerator-room grates, black and glossy in the red emergency light. Its mouth opened in a tiny circle of teeth as it stretched toward the sole of her boot.

Ghosty’s scythe-claw came down beside it.

The leech burst under the edge of his claw, leaving a dark smear across the metal.

A wet, collective rustle moved through the room.

Rebecca tightened her grip on the shotgun and looked up.

The incinerator chamber had been designed to burn industrial waste. Old ash residue still clung to the furnace doors across the far wall, and rusted conveyor rails ran over a deep trench in the center of the floor. Every surface was crawling now.

Leeches filled the trench.

They slid along pipes.

They dripped from the railing above.

They crowded the corners in slick heaps that shifted like a single black mass trying to decide where to go next.

A man in a long black cloak walked along the upper service balcony.

He moved with an almost leisurely rhythm, one gloved hand trailing across the railing as though he were taking an evening stroll through a garden rather than standing over an industrial oven packed with mutant parasites.

"Welcome," he called down.

His voice carried cleanly over the low mechanical hum of the furnace machinery.

"I had begun to wonder whether you would find the treatment plant at all. Then again, you have been rather busy making a mess of my facility."

His gaze passed over Rebecca for a moment.

Then it settled on Ghosty.

The man stopped walking.

The faint smile on his face widened.

"Particularly you," he said. "Your existence has intrigued me far more than anything else in this wretched facility."

Rebecca raised her shotgun in a single, fluid motion, the heavy barrel centering directly on the man’s chest.

"You!" she barked, her voice echoing off the concrete walls. "You were the creep singing on the cliff outside the train! Who the hell are you?!"

The man didn’t flinch. He didn’t even reach for a weapon. He merely rested both elbows on the iron guardrail, looking down at her like a bored professor tolerating an unruly freshman.

"Who am I?" he mused, his voice rich and melodic. "A fair question, though perhaps irrelevant to someone of your modest pedigree. But since you have managed to survive this far, I suppose you deserve a proper introduction."

He reached up, pulling back the black hood.

Beneath the fabric, his features were impossibly smooth, resembling a young man in his early twenties with long, styled hair. But as Rebecca watched through the iron sights of her weapon, the skin across his face began to ripple.

Tiny, translucent beads of mucus bubbled beneath the surface. His flesh shifted, sagging and wrinkling as the structure of his jaw rearranged itself. The youthful visage melted away, replaced by the stern, weathered face of an elderly man with sharp, aristocratic cheekbones and cold gray eyes.

Rebecca’s finger tightened against the trigger. "James Marcus...? That’s impossible. You’ve been dead for ten years!"

"Dead?" Marcus let out a soft, theatrical laugh that sent a wave of rustling through the thousands of leeches carpeting the floor. "Yes. Assassinated by the very men I raised into prominence. Spencer... and those treacherous vipers, Albert Wesker and William Birkin. They stole my research, shot me in my own laboratory, and threw my corpse down the waste chute like yesterday’s trash."

He spread his arms wide, the sleeves of his cloak trailing thin threads of black slime.

"They thought they had buried me. But they failed to account for my most magnificent creation. The Queen Leech found my dying body in the dark. It entered me, merged with my cellular structure, and slowly rebuilt my consciousness from the ground up. For ten long years, I slept in the sewers, waiting for the day I would reclaim my throne and exact my vengeance upon Umbrella!"

Ghosty let out a low, gravelly rasp beside Rebecca, his reptilian snout tilting upward with an expression that looked remarkably like complete boredom.

Marcus lowered his arms, his theatrical posture dissolving as his eyes locked back onto the seven-foot Hunter Alpha.

"Did you really believe shooting out a handful of security cameras would hide the truth from my eyes, girl?" Marcus asked, his tone shifting from grand monologue to sharp, clinical fascination. "I have observed your little procession from the moment you derailed my express."

He leaned further over the railing, his fingers drumming against the rusted iron.

"A fascinating anomaly. Truly fascinating. At first, I assumed you were merely an escaped Cerberus unit from the kennels. But then you grew wings and crossed the forest. And then you stepped into my processing facility looking like an alpha-series Hunter."

Marcus shook his head, his brow furrowing in genuine scientific bewilderment.

"What are you? The MA-121 strain requires precise human-reptile embryological bonding under strict thermal regulation. You should not possess the capacity to restructure your entire skeletal framework on a biological whim. Your cellular density defies every law of the Progenitor matrix."

Rebecca shifted her stance, instinctively stepping slightly to the side to keep herself between Marcus’s line of sight and Ghosty’s flank.

Her mind raced. When she had first seen Ghosty shift shapes, she had rationalized it as some ultra-classified Umbrella prototype—a black-budget experiment hidden so deep in the archives that not even the facility logs mentioned it.

Yet here was James Marcus, the literal co-founder of Umbrella and the father of the t-Virus, staring down at Ghosty with the exact same clueless confusion.

If Marcus didn’t make him... who did?

She pushed the question down. She wasn’t about to start taking a talking pile of sewage worms at his word.

"Maybe Umbrella just didn’t trust you enough to keep you in the loop, Marcus," Rebecca called up, her tone dripping with deliberate sarcasm. "Sounds to me like you got replaced by better scientists while you were busy taking a decade-long dirt nap."

Marcus’s calm facade cracked instantly.

His hands gripped the iron railing hard enough to bend the metal, a sharp hiss escaping between his teeth.

"Nonsense!" he snapped, his voice trembling with sudden, volatile rage. "There is nothing in this facility that is hidden from me! I laid the foundation of every viral strain that company ever produced! Umbrella could never create a specimen like this! They lack the vision! They are bureaucrats and thieves playing with matchsticks in the dark!"

He pointed a shaking, gloved finger directly at Ghosty.

"You have seen it too, haven’t you, officer? The way it feeds? It does not attack mindlessly and consume flesh like the other infected creatures. The t-Virus is supposed to destroy higher neural functions, degrading the host into a mindless biological engine driven by base hunger. Yet this creature acts with greater intent!"

Marcus leaned down, his eyes widening with unhinged, manic curiosity.

"For a two-bit rookie cop, you certainly have a loud mouth, but you should have been torn to ribbons hours ago. It makes me wonder... what exactly did you do to tame such a creature?"

A sudden, violent wave of heat rushed straight up Rebecca’s neck and flooded her cheeks.

Flashes of memory she had spent the last hour desperately suppressing suddenly slammed into the forefront of her brain.

Oh God. Oh sweet Jesus. He cannot know about that.

Her face turned a brilliant, radioactive shade of crimson beneath the grime and dried blood.

She cleared her throat aggressively, forcing her voice to drop back into her best authoritarian S.T.A.R.S. cadence to mask the absolute panic short-circuiting her ovaries.

"I’m not discussing my methods with a delusional mass murderer!" she yelled, racking the slide of her shotgun with a deafening clack. "Step away from the railing and get face down on the ground with your hands behind your head! James Marcus, you are under arrest for biological terrorism, corporate treason, and the mass murder of S.T.A.R.S. Bravo Team personnel!"

Marcus stared at her for two solid seconds in utter silence.

Then, he threw his head back and howled with laughter.

The sound was high, shrill, and completely detached from reality, echoing off the iron furnace grates like scraping sheet metal. The leeches covering the floor began to writhe in synchronized agitation, rising on their tails and hissing into the air.

"Arrest me?!" Marcus shrieked, wiping tears of manic mirth from his cheeks. "You foolish little girl! Look around you! I am the ultimate evolution of the Progenitor strain! I am the god of this new world! I am immortal!"

He leaned over the railing, his eyes gleaming with greedy, ravenous hunger as he stared directly down at Ghosty.

"Your little pet is magnificent, officer. A genetic anomaly beyond anything Spencer could have ever dreamed. And once I tear it apart and assimilate its unique genome into my swarm, I will be completely unstoppable!"

Ghosty took a slow, deliberate step forward, looking up at the screeching old man on the balcony.

His reptilian head tilted slightly to the left, his slit-pupils narrowing into a look of profound, unadulterated disgust.

Yo, what the absolute fuck?

Ghosty gave a low, disgusted snort through his nostrils, his scythe-claws twitching as if he were trying to shake off the mental image of an eighty-year-old leech mimic trying to get inside his pants.

I am a certified monster of refined taste. I hunt S.T.A.R.S. heroines, not slimy old men wearing vintage choir cloaks. Keep your gross, squirming parasite-dick away from my chassis, you geriatric freak.

Marcus didn’t notice the insult. He simply raised his arms as the leeches across the balcony began to climb up his legs in thick, pulsating waves, preparing to initiate his grand transformation.

"Let us see," Marcus sneered, his body beginning to swell with hundreds of writhing black worms, "how well your pet protects you when I feed you both to my children!"

The transformation started in the most disgusting way possible.

Marcus suddenly doubled over the guardrail, clutching his stomach as his throat bulged to the size of a watermelon. He let out a wet, gagging retch and spewed a literal firehose of thick black sludge, vomiting hundreds of squirming leeches across the balcony floor.

Then his entire body decided to throw basic human anatomy straight into the dumpster.

His cloaked frame split right down the center with the sound of tearing canvas and wet meat. Thousands of slick, veiny leeches braided themselves together, expanding outward into thick cords of glossy green musculature. His head flattened and stretched into a grotesque, horizontal T-shaped hammer, with tooth-lined slits ripping open across his shoulders and chest like jagged, hungry maws.

The whole thing finished twisting into a towering, gangly monstrosity that looked like a swamp tree made out of veiny muscle and pure hatred.

Before I could even process the visual war crime, the creature kicked off the balcony with terrifying speed. It shot straight up into the air, slamming its clawed feet into the rusted steel girders on the ceiling and hanging upside down like an overgrown, mucous-dripping gargoyle.

Rebecca backed up, her shotgun raised as she stared up into the shadows with pure disgust.

"What in the fresh hell is that?!" she shouted over the turbine roar. "I have seen some seriously repulsive shit tonight, but that is easily the ugliest motherfucker in the entire tri-state area!"

The creature answered with a high-pitched, wet shriek that vibrated the metal beneath our boots.

It let go of the ceiling.

Eight hundred pounds of slimy green meat dropped out of the rafters like a falling anvil, diving directly toward Rebecca with its elongated arms spread wide.

Rebecca didn’t freeze. The Panacea flowing through her veins gave her the reaction speed of an Olympic acrobat, and she threw herself sideways into a clean tactical roll. She cleared the drop zone by a solid foot, coming up on one knee with her grenade launcher leveled.

The Queen Leech slammed into the iron floor with a heavy, squelching thud, leaving a crater of crushed leeches beneath its feet.

And right in front of my face was its wide, completely undefended backside.

Oh, you’re really going to turn your ass to me like that? In my house? Are you completely unaware of my track record with backshots?!

I didn’t waste half a second thinking about it.

I dropped low, coiled my reptilian thighs, and launched myself straight at the bastard’s spine like a heat-seeking missile.

Unlike the Proto-Tyrant, which had bone plating dense enough to dent titanium, the Queen Leech had basically negative armor. It was just a giant, walking column of congealed worms and soft tissue pretending to be a raid boss.

I drove both of my Hunter scythe-claws deep into the small of its back and turned my arms into industrial blenders.

Rip. Tear. Shred.

My claws tore through its veiny green hide like a hot cheese grater going to work on warm mozzarella. Black sludge, severed leech chunks, and globs of foul-smelling jelly sprayed across the walls in massive, wet arcs as I carved giant trenches through its spine.

The monster let out an ear-splitting, gargling screech of absolute agony.

Then, its entire back violently ruptured.

SPLURT.

The shredded meat between its shoulder blades burst wide open, and dozens of thick, glistening, pinkish-purple tentacles erupted from the wound like an explosion of angry tapeworms. They whipped through the air with terrifying speed, lashing out in every direction and coating the grating in acidic slime.

OH SHIT, NOT THE TENTACLES!

Pure panic seized my reptilian hindbrain.

I kicked off the creature’s lower spine with both feet and launched myself backward in an ungraceful, frantic backflip, landing ten feet away with my claws up and every scale on my body standing on end.

Hell to the fucking no! Keep those greasy, hentai-tier suction noodles away from me!

I am the one who does the tentacling around here! I have hundreds of cool, refined red tendrils for absorbing biological matter! I am NOT getting reverse-probed by an eighty-year-old sewer slug with a tentacle fetish!

Just then I heard my medic’s cute voice.

"Ghosty, duck!"

Her shout cut cleanly through the roar of the turbines, and my combat reflexes kicked in before my brain could even argue. I flattened my entire seven-foot reptilian frame against the floor, mashing my scaled snout right into the cold iron grating.

THUMP.

A heavy projectile streaked two inches above my dorsal crest, trailing a thin hiss of chemical vapor.

The round detonated square in the center of the Queen Leech’s open torso.

Instead of an explosive fireball, the canister ruptured in a violent, high-pressure spray of bright yellow, smoking sludge.

Acid rounds. Beautiful, concentrated, Umbrella-grade industrial acid.

The chemical cocktail splattered across the monster’s soft, unarmored hide and drenched every single one of those pink flailing tentacles. The biological reaction was instantaneous and horrifying. The green tissue hissed and sizzled like raw bacon dropped onto a red-hot iron skillet, violently foaming into bubbling sludge as the acid ate straight through thousands of writhing parasites at once.

Those glistening tentacles didn’t even get to finish their dramatic anime debut. They dissolved into smoking, gooey stumps, dropping to the floor in melting clumps.

The creature let out an ungodly, gargling shriek, flailing its gangly arms and smashing blindly into the concrete furnace walls as it tried to scrape the burning chemicals off its chest.

Oof. Yeah, that has gotta sting.

Rebecca racked the launcher with a practiced flick of her wrist, a smug grin spreading across her face. "So much for being an immortal god, huh, Marcus?!"

The thick yellow foam began to thin out, and the creature’s absurd regenerative biology desperately tried to salvage the disaster. Fresh waves of black leeches surged out from its lower limbs, crawling over each other to patch the smoking craters in its chest.

Seeing the monster vulnerable, I coiled my hind legs, extending my claws to jump in and turn the wounded bastard into cold cuts.

"Not so fast!" Rebecca called out.

THUMP.

A second acid canister sailed cleanly over my back and smacked dead-center into the creature’s exposed hip joint.

Another volcanic eruption of burning chemical foam coated its freshly mended flesh. The newly spawned leeches dissolved into black soup before they could even link up, melting the creature’s leg down to a smoking stump of cartilage.

Oh, yeah. Good choice. Why get my claws dirty when we have industrial-strength bug spray?

The Queen Leech collapsed onto its knees, writhing and screeching on the grating like a common slug tossed into an open box of kosher salt. It was an absolute mess of melting slime, thrashing in pure, chaotic misery.

With a massive, desperate surge of viral willpower, the monster dragged its melting T-shaped head upward, opening the toothy slits along its shoulders to let out another defiant, bubbling roar.

THUMP.

BOOM.

A third grenade detonated directly against its face.

The monster’s hammerhead crest blew apart in a violent spray of shredded worms and smoking acid, slamming its limp torso flat against the grates with a wet, squelching slap.

I slowly turned my reptilian head around to look at the rookie medic.

Rebecca was already popping the cylinder open with one hand, casually sliding a fourth 40mm canister into the drum with a crisp metallic click.

Catching my wide, milky-pupiled stare, she stopped and gave a cute, innocent little shrug.

"What?" she said cheerfully. "I have six rounds in the drum, Ghosty. It would be rude of me not to use them all."

I sat back on my scaly haunches, utterly dumbfounded by the sheer, unadulterated disrespect.

The girl was literally cheesing the final boss with noob-tube spam, and honestly, I couldn’t even be mad about it.

[To Be Gooned]

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