[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 307 - Tank? Besieged for Seven Days — How Will You Respond?
At the Governor's command, the warehouse-disguised building at the heart of Woodbury heaved its doors open.
A teeth-grinding shriek of metal filled the air. Then the tank crawled out, pitch-black, its tracks still caked with dried blood, trailing a plume of dark smoke as it ground slowly forward.
An M60 main battle tank. An antique by modern military standards, but in the apocalypse? It was a miracle. An unshakable iron truth.
The Governor stood on the wall, both hands locked around the railing.
This was his most precious secret, the last insurance policy that kept his grip on Woodbury absolute.
He'd always planned to save it for rival survivor outposts, or the roving armed bands that refused to kneel.
But there was no time for that now.
Use it now, or there was no tomorrow.
Below the wall, the horde had already started stacking. Mindless Walkers climbing over their own dead, desiccated fingers wedging into the brick gaps at the top of the wall.
Half an hour. That was all they had. After that, Woodbury would be a giant tin can, and every person inside would be fresh, juicy spam.
"Crush them! Turn every last one of those bastards into fertilizer!"
The Governor's roar carried over the din.
The engine answered with a low, guttural thunder, hundreds of horsepower screaming under the strain.
Woodbury's steel main gate swung open. Walkers flooded in.
The tank hit them like an enraged rhino, driving straight out through the gate, crushing everything in its path. The gate clanged shut behind it.
Then came the slaughter. One-sided. Total.
The tracks were over half a meter wide. Every inch the hull moved was accompanied by hundreds of bones snapping at once.
Crack. Crack. Crack.
Endless. Continuous.
The Walkers in the front rows never had time to moan. Dozens of tons of steel just flattened them.
Black rot-blood. Dark red organs. Gray-white intestines squeezed out and smeared flat, everything burst under the tracks into patches of grotesquely colored sludge.
The tank wasn't driving. It was swimming through a swamp of rotting flesh and shattered bone.
As the tracks spun, the viscous mass was scooped up and flung against the armor plating with wet, heavy slaps.
Less than ten minutes, and a terrifying dead zone had opened up at Woodbury's front gate.
A true road of blood.
The ground was covered in a layer over ten centimeters thick, dark red paste, the product of thousands upon thousands of Walkers pressed flat over and over again. The track marks trailing behind were packed with a foul-smelling carpet of what had once been people.
"Fire!" Martinez screamed from the watchtower, eyes bloodshot.
BOOM.
The muzzle spat a blinding ball of fire.
The 105mm round detonated in the densest part of the horde.
No spectacular Hollywood fireball. Just the bloody spectacle of severed limbs cartwheeling into the sky.
One shell, and a ten-meter hole tore open in what had been a solid black sea of bodies. Severed heads. Scattered arms. Torsos shredded by the shockwave. They rained down on the surrounding Walkers in a dark red downpour, splattering across rotting skulls like a heavy squall.
The Walkers didn't retreat.
They didn't know how. They had no word for fear.
They walked on the remains of their companions — on severed limbs that still twitched, still reached — and kept surging toward the steel monster in an endless wave. The tank's side skirts were already draped in torn flesh. Some Walkers had been sucked into the tracks and shredded to scraps, yet their jaws kept working, locked around the steel plating.
On the distant hillside.
Leon held up his binoculars and watched, face blank.
The Governor having heavy equipment, not surprising. A military outpost would have all kinds of hardware.
He wasn't worried.
If anything, he almost wanted to laugh.
"He's using gold to swat flies."
"What does that mean?" Rick stood beside him, face a shade too pale.
The tank's power was immense. So immense it had hollowed out something in his chest. If that thing put one round into the prison wall, every fortification they'd built would fold like wet paper.
Leon pointed at the tank as it plowed through the horde.
"Rick. How much fuel do you think that thing drinks?"
"How many of those shells do you think the Governor has left?"
"A tank is a trump card against survivor groups like ours — no question. But against an endless horde like this?" Leon's voice carried the patient, faintly vicious edge of a man watching a chess game play out exactly as he'd foreseen. "It's just a very expensive stick to stir shit with."
An M60 carried about sixty rounds at full load.
Every shot the Governor fired now, Leon heard as the man shoveling his own grave.
Those weren't shells. They were his survival chips, the last scraps of his leverage, his confidence, his future. Right now he had stock. But once it was gone?
Shells weren't easy to find.
When the ammo ran dry and the fuel ran out, that invincible tank would become a pile of dead scrap squatting at the gate, unable to move an inch.
"How long do we wait?" Shane asked, impatient, knuckles white around his gun.
"Seven days," Leon said.
"Seven days?" The group's voices overlapped in disbelief.
"Seven days." Leon settled back into his folding chair with the unhurried ease of a man watching the Metropolitan Opera. "In those seven days, I want every single person in Woodbury to learn one thing."
He paused.
"How to be quiet."
➤ Next: Even the Tank Is Useless!