[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 284 - Preemptive Precautions

Leon's stomach heaved.

The hellish scene before him was making him genuinely sick.

What the fuck was this supposed to be? A river?

It wasn't a river. It was a massive, slowly writhing, endlessly multiplying tide of maggots.

A dam built from piled corpses had choked the channel completely. Black-green, oil-slicked water oozed through the gaps between the bodies in thin, reluctant streams, less like river water than draining pus.

Andrea had already thrown up her breakfast. She slumped against the car door, her pretty face as pale as a used tissue.

Leon stared at the river.

Clogged. Rotting. Contaminated.

Then a word surfaced without warning.

Plague.

Fuck.

He remembered.

In the original show, a deadly flu swept through the prison. A sudden, highly contagious outbreak that mowed down over half the people inside like scything wheat.

They'd blamed the pigs at the time. Those pigs they'd kept penned up and treated like precious things. The virus supposedly came from them. Then Rick slaughtered the whole herd.

But what if it wasn't the pigs?

What if... what if the source was this river?

This river, steeped into a biochemical broth by tens of thousands of rotting corpses.

He could already see it. His prisoners — tough, alive, full of fire, lying flat in their cots one by one, burning with fever, coughing blood, suffocating to death in agony. The order he'd worked so hard to build, crumbling before an enemy too small to see.

Fuck. That would be ten thousand times more pathetic than getting bitten.

No.

Absolutely not.

"Get in the car."

Leon spun around. Andrea was still retching. She flinched hard at his voice.

"What?" She looked up, blank.

He didn't waste another word. He walked straight to the passenger door, yanked it open, grabbed Andrea up off the ground, and shoved her in. Then he dropped into the driver's seat.

"Are we not... going to figure out how to clear it?" She was still fastening her seatbelt when he turned the key.

"You solve problems at the root."

He floored it. The pickup fishtailed, kicked up a wall of dust on the hillside, and tore toward the prison.

Andrea didn't dare ask again.

She watched his profile, jaw locked, rigid as iron.

An urgency she'd never felt before crept through her. Not the fear that came with Walkers. Something else entirely. The suffocating sensation of racing against death itself.

This man saw something. Something none of them could see.

A threat. More terrifying. More lethal.

......

The prison.

In the infirmary, Lee Mi-ju was leaning against the wall, sipping a bowl of meat broth in small, careful mouthfuls.

She was running on empty.

Hours of surgery had wrung her out completely. But when she thought about pulling that girl back from the edge, a wave of deep satisfaction swept through her, and she told herself it was worth it.

BANG!

The infirmary door slammed open.

Mi-ju flinched, splashing half the broth down her front.

"Leon?" The look on his face unsettled her.

He ignored her. Walked straight to the table, picked up a clean sheet of paper and a pen.

"I don't care how you do it," he said, already writing, not looking up. "Antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, anything related to preventing viral infection — inventory all of it and prepare doses per person."

He slapped the list onto the table. Several antibiotic names, written fast and tight.

"Find them. All of them."

"And from now on, there are new water regulations."

"All water brought in from outside, drinking, bathing, flushing the toilet, everything — must go through three stages: sedimentation, filtration, boiling."

"Not a single step gets skipped."

"You personally supervise compliance. Anyone slacks off, they go straight to solitary."

Mi-ju stared at him. Then at the paper.

"But... why? Our well is fine, isn't it?"

"That well is now for cooking and drinking only. Still boiled." Leon turned around and fixed his eyes on hers.

"Listen to me, Mi-ju."

His voice dropped low.

"From this moment on, you treat every single drop of water around us as if it contains a hundred billion super-viruses that will rot your guts out."

"This is not a drill."

"This is an order."

Mi-ju snapped instinctively to attention.

"Yes! Understood!"

Leon paid her no more attention. He turned and strode out of the infirmary.

As he walked, he raised the walkie-talkie to his mouth.

"Everyone, listen up."

"T-Dog. Daryl. Merle. Rick."

"Five minutes. Armory entrance. Move."

➤ Next: The Source of Suffocation