[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 295 - A Wandering Woman

Those few soft words from Beth landed somewhere in every chest in the room.

Yeah.

Woodbury had the Governor. Had his lapdogs.

But there were ordinary people there too.

People just like them, people who only wanted somewhere to catch their breath, to eat a hot meal before the world finished falling apart.

Driving hundreds of thousands of walkers toward that town, how was that any different from dropping a dirty bomb?

Indiscriminate. No survivors.

Was that really okay?

"Christ, are we doing the bleeding-heart routine again?" Merle was the first to crack, impatience dripping from every word.

He knocked his knuckles on the table.

"Little girl, I know you ain't a bad person, but I gotta tell you — this ain't a goddamn game of house."

"Mercy for the enemy is cruelty to yourself!"

"We don't put them down, and when that psycho Governor catches his second wind, you wanna guess what he does?"

"He brings his people here and turns everything, walls, people, all of it, to dust!"

Shane was right there beside him.

He glared at Beth like he wanted to swallow her whole.

"Merle's right! Either they die or we die — there ain't no goddamn third option!"

Beth flinched under the force of it, eyes going red at the rims. But she kept her chin up. Stubbornly refused to bow.

She was just a girl. A girl who'd strummed guitar and sung songs on a farm, who'd occasionally trailed after Leon like a shadow.

But she had her own line in the sand.

Leon leaned back in his chair, arms folded across his chest, and said nothing.

He watched the whole thing with something close to amusement.

Merle and Shane were talking about the law of the jungle. Survival, plain and simple.

Beth was talking about humanity. About where the line was.

Neither of them was wrong.

But Leon was thinking about a third thing entirely.

He could be ruthless or he could be merciful, it didn't particularly matter to him either way. What he cared about was efficiency. He'd always go with the path of least resistance when one existed.

Nobody wanted to run in circles.

That was the whole point of engineering the brawl between Woodbury and the Highwaymen. Fewer of his own people died that way. He couldn't afford to treat his people's lives as disposable. They were all following him. If he'd been willing to throw bodies at every problem, he'd have walked straight at the Highwaymen from the start, no schemes required.

Right now, what occupied his mind was labor.

His brain was already running the math.

Woodbury had over a hundred people. Strip away the Governor's dozen or so die-hard loyalists, and the rest were pure, valuable assets.

Farmers. Workers. Doctors. Teachers.

The bedrock of civilization.

In the apocalypse, without a functioning industrial base, people were the most important resource that existed. They could carry guns and fight. They could patch walls. They could marry, have children, and grow the population for whatever came next.

Feed them all to the walkers alongside the Governor?

That would be more wasteful than pouring a whole case of Maotai down the drain.

Leon estimated the Governor's non-combat population at around two hundred, nearly as large as the prison's own numbers.

Two hundred laborers.

Two hundred mouths to feed, sure. But also four hundred hands ready to work. Hands that could farm, guard walls, turn a wrench.

Worth more than a truckload of RPGs.

Beth, bless her heart, had stumbled onto something useful. Her plea had handed Leon the perfect cover, a reason to dress up his real objective of "annexing Woodbury" as something that sounded a lot more like humanitarian aid.

The tension in the room was still building when the walkie-talkie on the table crackled to life.

"Ksshh — Leon! We got a situation!"

T-Dog's voice. Tight with something caught between nerves and excitement.

"Outer patrol just grabbed a hard one!"

"Woman, alone, carrying a katana on her back, and she's got two jawless walkers on leashes like goddamn pets!"

"We already put those two things down, but this woman... holy shit, man, she moves like a she-leopard. Took everything we had just to pin her!"

Katana.

Leon smiled.

Well, damn.

Ask and you shall receive.

He'd known for a while that his plan had one missing piece. One key that could pop Woodbury's lock wide open, a lock that looked a lot stronger than it actually was.

And now that key had walked up and knocked on his door.

"Bring her in," Leon said into the walkie-talkie. "Fast."

"Don't hurt her."

"Give her some water, then come straight here."

The room went still. Everyone exchanged glances, trying to read what Leon was playing at.

Only Shane caught it, something familiar in the quiet of Leon's voice. A scent he recognized.

...

A few minutes later, the meeting room door swung open.

T-Dog and two other inmates walked in, escorting a woman who radiated a single unmistakable message: stay the hell away.

The moment she stepped through the door, the air seemed to leave with her.

What kind of woman was she?

A worn leather jacket, crusted with dried blood and grime. The smell of days in the wild clinging to her. Her dreadlocks hung loose and tangled over her shoulders, and her face, sharp, defined, the face of a Black woman who had survived things that would've broken most people, held absolutely no expression. Just her eyes. Two chips of obsidian, cold and watchful, burning with a wildness that hadn't been beaten out of her yet.

And on her back, the katana.

Simple hilt. Pitch-black scabbard. Even from across the room, the thing seemed to breathe cold.

She was a lone wolf that had wandered in from the wilderness, and she made no effort to pretend otherwise.

"Damn..." Merle breathed it before he could stop himself.

From her, he smelled danger. Real danger.

Leon waved a hand. T-Dog and the others took the cue and filed out.

He stood, poured a glass of water himself, walked to the woman, and held it out.

She didn't take it.

She just watched him. Those eyes moving over his face with the careful patience of someone calculating the exact size of a threat.

Leon set the glass on the table in front of her and walked back to his seat, unhurried.

"Relax." He smiled. "We're not your enemy."

"We're just curious about where you came from."

The woman said nothing. Still as stone.

Leon didn't push. He reached out and tapped the map spread across the table.

"Let me think..."

"You came from a little town called Woodbury, didn't you?"

The moment the words left his mouth, something went through her. A shudder she couldn't quite suppress.

"You've been watching me?"

Leon ignored the question and kept going, easy and unhurried.

"Nice little setup they've got there. High walls, hot food, they even put together a gladiator show, if you can believe it."

Each word landed like a hammer blow.

"And a leader. Tall man. Very good actor."

"Everyone calls him... the Governor. That right?"

The detonation was silent, but she felt it in the roots of her teeth.

Her head snapped up. Those obsidian eyes locked onto Leon's face, and what was written in them was pure, disbelieving shock.

She had run for days. Fought through blood and exhaustion to claw her way out of that hell.

And this man knew.

He knew all of it.

He spoke about it like he'd been standing in the room.

The rest of the meeting room had gone completely slack-jawed. Rick. Shane. Merle. Every one of them staring with their mouths open, like a bunch of prairie dogs that had just watched a UFO land.

They'd known Woodbury was a threat. That was the full extent of it, a name and a vague danger. Who was in charge, what it looked like, what was happening inside, none of them had the first clue.

But Leon talked about it like he had God Mode switched on.

"You..."

Her voice came out low and raw.

"Who the hell are you?"

Michonne stared at him and waited.

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