[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 427 - How to Respond
Every single thing in the mall that could be carried out was stripped clean.
Mostly daily necessities.
That was all there was to find anymore. Food? Long gone. Picked over by whoever came through before them.
All three Hummers were packed to the roof, cargo strapped down in thick bundles on top and crammed into every inch inside.
The walker laborers Leon had been running had done their job. Now he cut them loose, sent them drifting back to their corners of the mall, back to their endless, aimless wandering.
All except the Runner.
That one went into the trunk of a Hummer. Alone.
Even through solid steel, the impact came through clean. THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.
Night settled in around them.
Leon didn't take them back to the prison. Terminus wasn't handled yet, and backtracking now would burn time they didn't have. The group found a residential house across the street, cleared out the few stray walkers inside, and lit a fire.
The flames pushed the cold back.
They couldn't touch anything else.
The mood sat heavy over all of them. Nobody spoke. Just the pop and crack of burning wood, and underneath it, distant and constant, the muffled thudding from the Hummers.
"Why the hell is everyone sitting there with funeral faces?"
Merle killed a slug of liquor and dragged his sleeve across his mouth.
"It's a walker that can run. Big deal."
"No matter how fast that thing moves, is it faster than a bullet?"
"Shut up."
Shawn Greene cut him off, voice flat with irritation.
"If it wasn't for the boss just now, Glenn would already be that thing's dinner."
Glenn was still sitting by the fire, still pale.
Every time his mind went back to that rotting face rushing toward him, filling his entire field of vision in the span of a heartbeat, his stomach dropped all over again.
That speed.
He'd had no time. None. Zero.
If Leon hadn't been there, he'd be dead.
Leon hadn't said a word through any of it.
He just watched the fire.
The Runner wasn't simply fast. That would've been manageable. It was everything else, the raw strength behind it, the reaction time, the pure predatory aggression. None of that matched anything in the same category as a regular walker. It wasn't even close.
Glenn wasn't the team's best fighter, but he was solidly above average.
That thing had taken him apart in under a second.
So what happens to the survivors back at the prison?
The ones who only sat through training sessions. The ones who'd never put a walker down in their lives.
The kids.
If these things started showing up in numbers...
Could that half-built wall hold them?
No.
It couldn't.
Every edge humanity still had was being filed away faster than anyone could stop it.
"We're in real trouble."
Leon finally spoke.
Every head turned toward him.
"Today was a preview."
He lifted his gaze and swept it across all of them, one face at a time.
"If every walker we run into from here on out could be one of those things..."
He let that sit for a moment.
"Glenn, you almost died today. If that had been Carol out there, or anyone else from the prison, they wouldn't even have had the window to react. They'd just be gone."
Rick felt something cold settle in his chest.
"We need to move faster."
Leon threw his stick into the fire. Sparks jumped and scattered.
"The prison's defenses go up immediately. Walls aren't enough. I need shooting towers. I need traps. I need something that actually keeps those things outside."
"And we go underground."
His finger tapped the dirt.
"The surface isn't safe anymore. Once the wall is finished, we put a dome over it. And then we dig down."
"I want a real underground bunker. A Noah's Ark. Something where, even if a hundred thousand Runners are stacked up outside, the people inside keep breathing."
Abraham's brow creased. He ran the numbers fast.
"That's a massive undertaking. With the hands we have right now, we could dig until next year and not make a dent."
"Which is exactly why we need more people."
Leon's eyes moved toward Terminus.
"There are fifty-odd ready-made laborers sitting right over there."
"First light tomorrow, they become ours."
"And that's still not enough. At the rate we can work right now, we'd need every living person left in Atlanta to have a real shot at finishing this."
He looked at Rick. Then Shawn Greene.
"Defense still isn't the whole answer. Our people are too soft."
"Starting tomorrow, every adult in the prison does four hours of mandatory combat training. Every single day. Hand-to-hand, firearms, conditioning."
"I don't care what they were before. Lawyer. Doctor. Doesn't matter. From now on, they have one identity."
"Warrior."
A beat of silence.
"That's still not enough."
His voice dropped.
"They're getting worse. More dangerous. We don't get to stand still."
"We need to find something."
"What?" someone asked.
"The T-Virus."
Leon said it like he was reading off a list. Flat. Deliberate.
"The hell is that?" Merle dug a finger in his ear. "T-Virus. Never heard of it."
Rick and Glenn had gone quiet in a different way. Just hearing the name was enough. Whatever it was, it wasn't good. Something in the same family as the restorative vaccine Leon had injected, probably, just pointed in a different direction.
"Something that makes a person strong enough to flip a car. A real one."
"Fort Benning."
He said the name like it closed an argument.
"If it exists anywhere in this world, that's where it'll be. And there are things happening there that none of us know about yet."
"What do you want it for?" Rick asked.
It was the right question. The only question. And he already suspected the answer.
Leon confirmed it.
"If we can't outrun it, we become it."
"I'm going to build my own unit. Super soldiers. People who can put down a Runner the same way you put down a dog."
The camp went still.
Every one of them stared at Leon.
Fighting one virus by using a worse one?
Turning their own people into something that wasn't quite human anymore?
What the actual hell...
"So." Leon looked around the fire at all of them. "I want to hear what you think."
➤ Next: How to Choose