[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 514 - So Here You Are

The night wind had a bite to it.

Leon walked out of the garage, a set of pickup keys hanging from his fingers.

Ford F-150.

The bed had been fitted with a roll bar and heavy waterproof canvas. The tires were swapped out for puncture-resistant off-road rubber.

This truck was built to take punishment.

Absolutely solid.

He pulled the door open, tossed the Remington Shotgun onto the passenger seat, and turned the key.

The modified V8 answered with a low, throaty growl.

The truck rolled out of the prison's inner zone, turned a corner, and stopped at the northern pit pool — the one they'd filled not long ago. Under the headlights, the water's surface glowed a dark, crawling red. The leech density in there was obscene.

The stench rode the night wind straight into his nose.

Leon pushed the door open and walked to the edge of the pool.

In the wash of the headlights, masses of dark shapes writhed beneath the surface.

"Time to work." He whistled at the water.

Which, admittedly, sounded insane. Greeting a pool full of bloodsucking parasites.

But the response was immediate.

Splash.

The water churned. The black swarm received the call and surged toward the bank in a single mass, pressing and grinding against each other, making a wet, sticky sound that crawled across the skin.

Leon walked to the tailgate, lowered it, and pulled back the waterproof canvas.

Four large blue industrial drums sat in the bed, each one roughly half the height of a man.

He let his focus shift inward and reached for the Leech Queen.

That strange master-servant link lit up in his mind.

The swarm began climbing the muddy walls of the pit. They merged into thick black columns, crested the edge, and flowed straight for the truck bed in a steady, purposeful stream.

The sight was deeply wrong in a way that was hard to name.

The entire mass moved like liquid metal, seeping through the gaps at the tail of the truck, every last one of them funneling down into the four blue drums without a drop left behind.

It didn't take long. All four drums were packed full.

That would do.

These little things were more useful than grenades.

Picture it: a bucket of hungry Mutant Leeches thrown into a Tyrant's face. That would be something to see.

Leon sealed the lids, locked the clasps, pulled the canvas back down tight, and tied off the straps.

He dusted off his hands, climbed back into the driver's seat, and put his foot down.

The pickup crunched over gravel and rolled out through the prison gates.

Destination: the Spencer Mansion, deep in the Fort Benning Mountains.

The place was a fair stretch from Atlanta, out in a remote stretch of hill country. The mansion sat hidden in old-growth forest that had no reason to exist on any map anyone cared about.

Both sides of the highway were dead — abandoned vehicles rusting in the weeds, wilderness slowly reclaiming the asphalt.

The occasional Walker drifted into the headlights. None of them had time to make a sound before the off-road tires crushed their spines flat.

Leon drove one-handed. His other arm rested on the window frame, the night wind pulling at his hair.

Thirty-some miles out, the road died.

A chain-reaction pileup of heavy trucks had sealed the lane completely, bumper to bumper, no room to squeeze through on either side.

He hit the brakes.

Leon was still working out whether to push the wrecks clear when the high beams swept across the roadbed embankment and something in his peripheral vision moved.

Not a Walker's slow, stiff shuffle. This was rhythmic. A dry, deliberate rustling.

The movement of something with too many legs.

Something large.

Leon narrowed his eyes and raised the Remington in one smooth motion.

The thing crept out of the shadow of the brush.

Wide black pincers. Tail stinger arched high. A heavy carapace that caught the light with a dull metallic sheen.

Well, damn.

The Scorpion King.

Leon let his grip on the gun go slack.

How did this one end up out here?

Back at the Executive Training Facility, Leon had decided the creature was too large to bring into the underground levels. So he had given it a simple order: guard the entrance. And one addendum, just in case: if things go bad, run. Don't fight to the last.

When the underground facility got blown to rubble, Rick had led a team back to clear the site. They had specifically looked for the giant scorpion.

Nothing. Not a trace.

Leon had been genuinely disappointed about that. A mutant creature that required no fuel, ate whatever was available, and looked like something out of a nightmare — mounts like that didn't come around twice in the apocalypse.

And here it was, on this stretch of broken highway, picking at a desiccated Walker corpse with its pincers, trying to scrape something edible from between the bones.

It hadn't paid the truck any attention at first. Just another metal box.

But when Leon stepped out and started walking toward it, the stinger snapped upright, the attack posture locking in instantly.

Then it registered who it was looking at.

Something moved through those compound eyes, a brief flash of recognition. The stinger came back down, slow and deliberate.

It crossed the distance on six thick legs and stopped right in front of Leon. Both pincers, each one capable of crushing a sedan, pressed flat against the ground. Its massive head rubbed against his combat boot.

On something that looked like that, the gesture was profoundly absurd.

"Starving, huh." Leon reached out and knocked his palm against the hard carapace.

It had clearly followed the escape order to the letter after the explosion. Spent however long wandering the back country, and the back country had nothing left in it, the Walkers had cleaned out every living thing. So it had been surviving on Walker scraps, which tasted exactly as bad as that sounded, and it hadn't been eating much.

But hunger didn't negotiate.

The abdomen was visibly sunken. Leon put it at several days without a real meal.

Well. Since they'd found each other, it was time to rejoin the team.

Four wheels versus six legs. No contest.

The Fort Benning mountain roads were brutal, narrow, broken, and steep. The pickup was going to be a miserable ride up there. The Scorpion King was purpose-built for exactly that terrain.

Leon walked back to the truck, unfastened the straps, and pulled back the canvas.

"Come here." He waved the scorpion over.

It crawled obediently to the tailgate.

Leon unloaded the four blue drums one by one. They were heavy, a few months ago they would have taken real effort. Now he moved them single-handed like they weighed nothing.

He grabbed several thick nylon straps and lashed the drums to both sides of the Scorpion King's broad carapace. Two per side. The weight distribution was clean.

The giant scorpion stood under its new load, looking like some kind of armored pack camel, and gave a slow, irritated shake of its body.

It didn't like the smell coming out of the drums.

"Tough it out. That's our secret weapon."

Leon gave the straps a firm tug. Solid.

As for the pickup, abandoning it felt wasteful.

He drove it down off the roadbed and buried it in a dense stand of trees, broke off some branches, piled on some weeds, and called it camouflaged. Someone from the prison could come retrieve it later when there was time.

A V8 was too good to leave for dead.

Done.

He walked back to the Scorpion King, grabbed the carapace edge, and swung himself up onto its back. He clamped his legs against the sides and settled in.

No saddle. The ridged shell dug into him in uncomfortable ways. But the sightlines were excellent, and the sheer physical presence of the thing underneath him was something else entirely.

"Let's move, big guy." He patted the broad head.

"We finish this job, I'll buy you a whole cow."

The Scorpion King let out a low, rasping hiss.

All six legs drove into the ground at once.

That massive body tore across the dark wilderness at a speed that had no business belonging to anything that size.

➤ Next: Arriving Early at the Spencer Mansion