[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 498 - A Bold New Idea

The second truck's Walkers had been cleared out. Skeletons were piling up at the bottom of the pool, and the salvage work was getting heavier by the hour.

Jim set up three rotating shifts.

Five people per shift — one fishing out bones, one grinding them to powder, the remaining three heading outside to lure Walkers in and feed them to the Leeches.

On the open ground along the pool's edge, white bones stacked up fast. A small mountain of them.

These bones wouldn't go to waste either. One last contribution from the dead.

The sun tipped westward.

Merle rolled the modified Heavy Truck out through the prison gates, heavy metal blasting from the loudspeakers.

Leon stood at the pool's edge, reaching out with his senses to locate the Leech Queen.

It had settled at the deepest point, lurking at the bottom. Already twice the size it had been when he'd first dropped it in.

Digesting. Building strength. Preparing for the next wave of reproduction.

Candice walked over with a clipboard.

"Feeding efficiency is extremely high," she said. "120 Walkers. 47 minutes total. Bone retention rate, one hundred percent. Soft tissue stripping rate, one hundred percent. Individual leech count is impossible to estimate."

She pushed her glasses up.

"If we maintain this food supply, the pool will hit its carrying capacity within three days."

Leon nodded.

Once they hit the limit, they'd start devouring each other. And then they'd evolve.

He kept staring at the churning black mass in the water. Something about just letting that happen felt wrong. Like waste.

A bold idea surfaced.

He turned and looked at the prison walls rising behind him.

"No," Leon said. "The scale is still too small."

Jim blinked. He looked at the pool they'd just finished digging and filling.

"Boss... this really isn't small."

"It's definitely too small." Leon's eyes stayed on the black Leeches rolling at the surface. "I want to surround the entire prison."

Candice's pen stopped moving.

She looked up.

"A moat." Leon said it like it was obvious.

Jim swallowed.

"Boss, are you serious?" He pointed toward the outer walls. "Do you have any idea how long a full loop around this place is?"

"Dig a moat? We have two excavators. Two. That's not possible."

"Then find more." Leon's tone didn't change. "The Walkers roaming Atlanta have already been drawn away. That city is still full of salvage."

The logic in his head was simple enough.

One Mutant Leech on its own wasn't particularly frightening. An ordinary person with a gun could handle one just fine. But a swarm? Without heavy weapons, you weren't fighting them, you were feeding them. Forget ordinary people. Drop a Tyrant into a river packed with Leeches and it wouldn't last long either. It would be gnawed to a skeleton before it even understood what was happening.

Individual strength meant nothing against that kind of density.

Their devouring speed was the entire point. When numbers reached a critical mass, a leech-filled moat would be more reliable than any wall he could build.

"Now that," Merle said, showing teeth, "is a hell of an idea."

"A river stuffed with carnivorous bugs. Walkers come stumbling over, fall right in, and the Leeches get a free meal. Leeches stay fed, and you get stronger, Boss." He shook his head with something close to admiration. "I genuinely don't know how you think of this stuff."

"The construction scale is the problem." Jim shook his head. "The soil is hard. A moat 3 meters deep, 5 meters wide, all the way around the perimeter — even if Dale's crew worked without sleeping, we're talking months."

"And the Walkers are still building the outer walls. We've got the dome project running at the same time. We can't pull them off without killing our progress. That means we'd have to do the digging ourselves."

Leon knew Jim wasn't wrong.

Carrying, stacking, building the dome support pillars, the work list never got shorter. And the prison's footprint was enormous now. North against the plains, east along the highway, west into the farm zone, south toward the Fort Benning treeline. The full territory he'd staked out for them.

Digging a complete loop through that terrain would be brutal.

Footsteps behind him.

Maggie came over carrying two cups. Simple plaid shirt, hair pulled back, unhurried.

Merle pinched out his cigarette.

"Probably looking for you. I'll go make sure the truck got cleaned." He grinned and walked off.

Jim and Candice suddenly found other things to attend to.

Maggie stopped beside Leon and held out one of the cups.

"Warm water," she said.

Leon took it and drank.

Maggie looked at the black Leeches churning in the pool. She didn't step back. Didn't flinch.

"I heard what you were talking about." She nodded toward the pool. "You want to build a moat?"

"Yeah." Leon nodded. "The construction scale is the problem."

Maggie turned and looked toward the east side of the prison.

"You're overcomplicating it," she said.

Leon followed her gaze.

She walked to the center of the open ground and picked up a branch, crouching to scratch a rough map into the dirt.

"This is the prison." A circle in the middle.

Two lines extended from it — one north, one east.

"There are natural rivers in both directions." She pointed at the lines. "The river outside the prison already connects the north and east."

She looked up at him.

"Why would we dig a new river right next to an existing one?"

➤ Next: Basically Confirmed — The Conversation