[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 306 - Woodbury’s Resistance
The Governor felt all the blood in his body surge straight to his skull. His vision went dark for a split second, and he nearly toppled off the watchtower.
What had he just seen?
A Walker... flipping him off?
That was absolutely not a hallucination.
Even through the telescope lens, he could see it clearly, that middle finger, crusted with strips of rotted flesh, raised in a posture so textbook-perfect it belonged on a street corner in downtown Atlanta.
"Sir? Sir!" Martinez was shouting at his elbow.
"The flank's gone! The wire's breaking — those things are stacking on top of each other, climbing over!"
The Governor shoved Martinez aside, snatched an M60 off the parapet, and opened fire in the direction of that raised finger.
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat!
The burst shredded that section of the horde to ribbons. Blood mist hung in the air like smoke.
When it cleared, nothing remained but pulped meat.
The strange figure had already vanished into the black depths of the surging dead.
"This is impossible. This is absolutely impossible."
He reloaded, fingers working the ammo belt, muttering like a man coming apart at the seams.
His hands were shaking.
Not from fear of the Walkers. From humiliation. Someone was out there in the dark, playing with him, and his mind couldn't even process who or how. The rage was eating his brain raw.
Woodbury's defenses were facing the greatest test they'd endured since the walls went up.
Those high walls and heavy guns they'd been so proud of looked like a sandcastle now, shuddering before an endless tsunami of corpses.
"Fire! Get all the spare gasoline down there!" the Governor bellowed, eyes bloodshot.
Dozens of Molotov cocktails arced into the horde.
Fireballs bloomed skyward. The stench of charred flesh swallowed the rot whole.
Hundreds of Walkers became walking torches.
They felt nothing. Wreathed in fire, they kept slamming against the heavy iron gate, mindless and relentless.
It looked like a siege force straight out of hell.
Two kilometers away, on a hillside overlooking Woodbury.
Leon was sitting in his folding chair, holding a cold can of cola he'd pulled from the prison's cold storage specifically for the occasion.
The tab popped, TSSST, a crisp, clean sound.
He watched the distant skyline of Woodbury, fire climbing, gunfire cracking, and listened to Murphy's voice crackling through the walkie-talkie. A gentle, fatherly smile settled at the corner of his mouth.
"Boss, the old bastard's packing serious firepower. Looks like he's burning through a lifetime of savings up there."
Murphy was wheezing through the radio like a broken bellows.
"I've damn near run my legs off. He is not shy with the bullets — spraying them around like they're free."
"Good." Leon took a sip of cola, savoring the carbonation detonating in his chest.
"The more he's willing to spend, the more terrified he is."
"Fear drives men insane."
"And an insane man plays out his last card very quickly."
Leon set down the walkie-talkie and turned to look at Rick and Shane.
Both of them were staring at him like he'd just stepped off a spacecraft.
What he'd pulled off here, not a single fighter spent, nothing but a handful of masks, one blue-skinned coward, and a few loudspeakers, and he'd brought an armed fortress of hundreds to its knees without once showing his face.
It had gone beyond the realm of warfare.
This was slaughter.
Elegant. Artful. And he hadn't even stepped onto the field yet.
"Leon." Rick moved forward, something careful and complicated in his voice. "There are still a lot of civilians in there. They're barely holding on."
"If you want to wipe Woodbury out, that's fine. We can claim the plan went sideways."
Leon glanced at him. A flicker of surprise moved through his eyes.
Rick was growing faster than expected.
He wasn't that hand-wringing, hedge-everything good cop anymore.
But this time, Leon genuinely wanted the manpower. He had no intention of killing those civilians.
"These people are still useful to me. We wait."
He raised one finger.
"When the last bullet is gone. When the last drop of gasoline burns out. When they're sitting in the dark listening to Walkers gnaw through their comrades' bones — when the despair is total and absolute."
Leon stood up and brushed the dust off his ass. The sun stretched his shadow long across the ground.
"That's when we make our entrance and collect the fee."
He turned back to face the prison inmates massed behind him, blood up, fists clenched, itching for the signal, and grinned.
"Boys, take the next couple of days. Shine up the vehicles. We're about to take in some new members."
In the distance, Woodbury's heavy machine guns were going quiet.
Barrels overheated from continuous fire. Ammunition reserves bleeding into the red.
The Governor stood on the smoke-choked wall, staring down at the Walker horde still carpeting the hills in every direction. Some were already climbing, using the crushed bodies of their own dead as footholds. He watched, and the despair in his eyes was absolute.
He turned. His teeth ground together.
"Get that tank started! Go! Now!"
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