[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 285 - The Source of Suffocation

The crowd gathered around an ammo crate with a map spread across the top.

"Here's the situation."

Leon dragged a mud-caked M9 bayonet across the map and scratched a hard X at a river bend about five kilometers upstream.

"I'll keep this short."

"That river is a giant walker toilet right now."

"If we don't flush it clean, we've got a week, maybe — before every single one of us starts shitting our guts out like dogs with dysentery and dies in our own filth."

Leon's words were crude, but they painted a clearer picture than any medical briefing ever could.

T-Dog's face went green on the spot.

He remembered pigs dying exactly like that on a farm he'd worked as a kid. Swine fever. Ugly way to go.

Rick's expression darkened.

His mind was already running further ahead.

Water contamination meant disease.

Disease meant panic.

And panic, in this broken world, was deadlier than any walker.

You didn't need to get bitten. You could destroy yourself just fine without any help — wasn't that how it always went in the movies?

"We need a plan," Rick said. "Explosives? Just blast that whole corpse pile apart?"

"No." Leon shut it down flat. "That just sprays rotten meat everywhere. The contamination zone gets bigger, not smaller. And the blast draws every walker within thirty kilometers. We're not kicking that hornet's nest."

"Then we clear it by hand," Daryl said. "Spears. Stab them one at a time, hook them ashore."

"Exactly." Leon snapped his fingers. "Sounds stupid, but it beats the alternative."

"We drive over, bring every melee weapon we've got. Rick, you and T-Dog take the left bank. Daryl, Merle — you're with me on the right."

"Morgan." Leon turned to the man who hadn't spoken a word the entire time.

"You're a good shot. Take the high ground, watch our backs. Anything crawls out of those trees, put it down."

Morgan nodded once.

"When do we move?" Rick asked.

"Now."

Leon folded the map and shoved the bayonet back into its sheath.

"Stay clean out there. No contact with the contaminated water. I don't want anyone bringing this back with them."

He walked to the door, stopped, and turned around.

"And keep your mouths shut. Nobody tells the others what we're doing. I don't need a panic breaking out in the yard."

"Anyone who can't manage that gets thrown in the river and can take a long, relaxing bath with the walkers."

---

Half an hour later, a convoy of modified pickups ground to a halt on a hillside that reeked of death.

When Rick and the others saw what was below them, even Merle, a man who laughed at most things that should've scared him, dry-heaved.

"Holy shit..."

T-Dog grabbed the car door. His legs weren't working right.

"What the fuck is that?"

It wasn't a river.

It was a solid mass of tens of thousands of bloated, rotting, twisted bodies crammed together, pressed against each other from bank to bank in one unbroken wall of decay.

The smell hit like a fist. Like the entire sewer system of a city had been detonated all at once, sour, putrid, something that clawed its way into your lungs and refused to leave.

"Stop staring."

Leon heaved down several bundles from the truck bed, makeshift spears and hooks, fashioned from fire hose and rebar.

"Get to work."

He was the first one down. Gloves on, spear in hand, sliding down the slope.

Daryl was right behind him.

Rick drew a slow breath and picked up a weapon.

"Fuck."

Merle swore and dropped down after them.

The rest of the prison crew followed, one by one, steeling themselves for the worst job of their lives.

It was.

Leon used the butt end of his spear to shove aside a few bloated floaters, then drove the tip down hard into a walker still thrashing in the shallows.

It punched through the skull. The waterlogged brain offered almost no resistance. A GLUB of black bubbles rose from the thing's gaping mouth.

"Daryl. Drag it out."

Daryl sank a large iron hook into the walker's gut and hauled it toward the bank.

The flesh tore like wet paper. A rope of intestines peeled free.

"Hook it solid!" Leon's face had taken on a greenish cast.

Daryl shrugged. "Wasn't my plan. They're just falling apart."

They fell into a rhythm. Fishermen working a sea of corpses, stab, drag, stab again, drag again. Mechanical. Relentless.

T-Dog's foot slipped. He lurched hard, his whole body pitching toward the pile.

"Shit!"

Rick moved fast, snatching the back of his collar and wrenching him upright in one sharp pull.

T-Dog hit the ground gasping, face drained white beneath the grime. Alive. Barely.

He'd felt it, a cold, slick hand closing around his ankle for just a second before Rick yanked him clear.

"Everyone watch your damn feet!" Leon's voice snapped out from a few meters away. "Nobody wants to go swimming with these things!"

Time ground on.

They carved out a stretch of clear water maybe twelve meters long. The black-green current began to move, sluggish, carrying scraps of flesh and loose body parts downstream.

They hadn't even caught their breath before the gap filled back in.

More walkers, drifting down from upstream. The hole they'd clawed open sealed itself in minutes.

Endless.

"Goddammit!" Merle punted a walker head clean off its shoulders. "When the hell does this stop?!"

Leon went still.

He stared upstream, brow knotted tight.

Something's wrong.

Something's very wrong.

This wasn't a high-volume river. There was no reason it should be pushing this many bodies downstream, not unless something further up was continuously feeding them into the current. Not unless there was a source.

A reservoir. Something enormous, somewhere above.

"Keep going." He tossed his spear to Rick. "Daryl. With me."

He waved Daryl off the bank and the two of them slipped into the tree line.

---

The woods were quiet.

Daryl moved in front, reading the ground the way only he could, every snapped twig, every disturbed patch of leaf litter, his eyes sweeping slow and steady like a hound locked on a scent.

Leon followed behind, a sharpened entrenching shovel in his hand.

They tracked the riverbank upstream. Two kilometers, maybe a little more.

The further they walked, the worse it got. The stench thickened until it had weight. The bodies in the water grew denser, no longer drifting, but packed shoulder to shoulder, grinding downstream in one long, slow, continuous mass.

"Hold." Daryl's fist came up and he dropped into a crouch.

Leon went low without a word.

Ahead, a small cluster of walkers shuffled out of the trees and pitched off the bank, PLUNK PLUNK PLUNK, one after another, swallowed by the current and swept away.

"That's where they're coming from," Daryl murmured.

Leon didn't answer.

He was looking past them. Past the bank. Past the tree line, out across the open ground beyond.

"...Fuck."

The words came out before he could stop them.

A highway bridge. Half-collapsed, its midsection sagging down into the river below.

And on the far side of that bridge, on the wide plain stretching beyond it,

He saw it.

No edge. No horizon. No end.

A black sea of walkers so vast and dense the ground beneath them was invisible, pressing in every direction as far as his eyes could reach. They moved the way a glacier moves, slow, unstoppable, all of them pressing toward the same point.

And the collapsed section of the bridge was a natural funnel. A trap. Every walker that reached the broken span went over the edge, fell into the river, and got carried downstream.

They hadn't come out here to clear a blocked river.

They were standing at the edge of a migration. An endless migration. And there was nothing in this world that was going to stop it.

Leon's throat had gone dry.

Fuck.

They were in a lot of trouble.

➤ Next: Several Plans — The Conversation