[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 287 - The Root Cause of the Walker Pileup

Ashley picked up the pen, ready to start mapping out her grand "funnel the herd" blueprint — and then her hand stopped.

She looked up. That usually confident face had something new on it: unease.

"Leon, I just thought of something."

"I think it might actually be the main reason those Walkers are congregating there in the first place."

Every head in the room turned toward her.

"What is it?"

"Planes." Ashley said it flat, two syllables, and let it land.

Rick gave a slow nod. He'd already made the same connection.

He stepped in to explain.

"Almost every day around three in the afternoon, I hear transport planes passing overhead. Southeast heading." He picked up a pen and drew a dashed line across the map as he spoke, cutting straight through the region they'd been arguing over. "The flight path looks fixed."

That dashed line ran directly through the plain where the horde had massed.

Fuck.

The smile dropped off Leon's face.

Goddamn planes.

It was like setting up a careful mousetrap, then watching cheese rain out of the sky nonstop, drawing every rat within ten miles straight to your door. Even if you caught them all, the cheese kept falling. The rats kept coming.

There was no winning a game like that.

"You mean..." T-Dog's voice was flat with exhaustion. "Even if we manage to draw this wave off, the planes just pull in fresh ones? And the whole bridge piles up again?"

"Exactly." Ashley nodded, expression darkening by the second. "The terrain there works like a funnel. The planes are someone up top who never stops pouring in more beans. We clear it out, they pour it back. Over and over." She looked around the table. "Unless we ground those planes, we're just patching holes. Never fixing anything."

"Goddamn it!" Merle's fist hit the table. "Then what the hell have we even been doing? We might as well pack our shit and leave!"

Dead silence swallowed the room.

The small, fragile hope that had built while they were finding solutions, gone, just like that, crushed under two words.

It was the feeling of grinding your way up a mountain, finally reaching the top, and finding another, taller mountain waiting there, just staring back at you.

Leon didn't say anything.

He just stared at that dashed line on the map.

Planes.

Fort Benning.

Those military survivors, still running air routes like the world hadn't ended.

He'd been deliberately keeping that factor off the table. He hadn't wanted to get tangled with "legitimate" military forces, people who still held the levers of what was left of the state, before he was ready. In his view, they were more dangerous than any Walker horde.

But the problem had stopped waiting for him to be ready.

And it wasn't just the Walkers the planes were dragging in. That was only part of it.

Ashley had clearly followed the logic the same direction he had.

"There's a worse angle to this." She looked at Leon, voice pulled low. "If their planes are pulling in Walkers, that means any movement we make out there gets noticed too. Anything large-scale — clearing bodies, reinforcing positions, anything — and eyes in the sky see all of it, crisp and clear." She paused. "We might already be in a report somewhere. Sitting on someone's desk. Filed under 'threats to be addressed.'"

They had all been operating like hunters in the dark.

Turns out they might have been goldfish in a glass bowl the whole time.

Leon pressed two fingers against his temple.

Large-scale operations were out, military observation made them too risky. Daryl's plan, T-Dog's plan, shelved. Even Ashley's sound-lure approach became dangerous at any real scale; it would be audible from altitude. But operations too small wouldn't clear the horde. And even a full clear meant nothing, because the next transport flight would reset the entire board.

It was a dead loop. No exit.

"So..." T-Dog swallowed. "What do we actually do?"

"Move?" Merle threw the option out again, but the conviction that had been missing before was even further gone now.

A few faces around the table shifted, not enthusiasm, but the desperate flicker of people running out of other options.

It died just as fast as it appeared.

Move to where, exactly?

Everything they had was here. The walls. The water supply. The land. The armory they'd bled for. The fields were already planted and growing. The livestock pens were newly built. Walking away from all of it and finding somewhere with the same advantages? That was a harder lottery ticket than anything that had ever been printed.

And moving meant logistics, exposure, the unknown. It meant running into new survivor groups in new territory, handing over everything they'd built. They'd spent months clearing the surrounding area, laying this foundation piece by piece.

Every eye in the room moved to Leon.

Their brains had hit a wall. They were done problem-solving. They needed someone to cut through the noise and hand them a direction, live or die, this way or that way, someone who would actually decide.

Leon was quiet for a long time.

Then he looked up at the group.

He had a plan. He'd had the shape of one for a while now. It wasn't clean. It wasn't anything most people in this room would call humane.

"Rick." His voice came out level. "Go get Murphy. The blue one. Bring him to me." He held Rick's gaze. "I need to talk to him. Alone."

➤ Next: Replicating the Whisperers