[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 617 - Citizen Z's Die-Hard Fan

"Beef."

Simon raised an eyebrow, thoroughly pleased with himself.

"Farm-raised cattle. Slow-braised with top-grade sauce."

"Way better than that seal fat you people eat, right?"

Kaya nodded several times, picked up the pot, and walked straight to her parents.

The old man used his hunting knife, worn smooth from years of cutting raw meat, to spear a chunk of beef and drop it in his mouth.

The old woman grabbed a piece with her bare hand.

Then.

The whole family huddled around that small iron pot and ate like they were starving.

They were completely silent. The only sounds in the cabin were rapid chewing and swallowing.

Under three minutes.

Two large cans of braised beef, gone without a trace.

Kaya even scraped the last bit of sauce off the bottom of the pot with her fingers and licked them clean.

After that, the atmosphere in the cabin thawed considerably.

Food is always the fastest way to close the distance between people. That holds true anywhere.

Kaya walked to the corner, poured a cup of heated snowmelt, and brought it to Simon.

The look she gave him had changed. It was no longer the look you gave a useless deadweight about to freeze to death.

The guy was scrawny beyond belief, but at least he was an outsider who could produce food like that.

She dragged the battered stool back over and sat down in front of Simon's bed, her tone considerably warmer than before.

"Honestly." Kaya looked at him. "What on earth are you doing all the way out here in the middle of nowhere?"

Simon held his cup and took a long, satisfied sip.

"Work."

"Work?" Kaya looked like he'd said something absurd. "The outside world already turned into a wasteland. Living people are almost all getting killed by those monsters, and you came all the way to the Arctic — what kind of work could you possibly have here?"

Everything she knew about the outside world, she'd learned through the radio.

Simon leaned back against the log bedpost and found a comfortable position.

"I'm a technician." He tapped the side of his head. "In this godforsaken world, brute force can kill Walkers — sure. But brains aren't any worse. Sometimes they're more powerful than force."

He watched the flames jumping inside the fireplace, and his gaze went somewhere distant.

"I was stationed at a top-secret communications base." He began describing his old trade. This was the thing he was genuinely proud of.

"I held the highest-level satellite clearance in North America. Every day I sat in front of rows of screens, tracking radar signals."

"Who were you working for?" Kaya pressed, drawn in despite herself.

"For an extremely powerful and very charismatic boss." Simon shrugged. "But that's recent."

"Before that, I spent my time as a navigator, for every lost soul out there struggling to survive in the apocalypse."

He warmed to it, gesturing as he talked.

"I used the station's massive antenna array to transmit radio signals to every corner of the world. Through the broadcasts I told people where safe Sanctuaries were. Told them where the storms were heading. Where the Walker Hordes were moving."

"Those survivor convoys driving beaten-up vehicles across the wasteland roads, at their most desperate, the only sign of another living person they could hear was me."

"I've saved countless people who should have died."

Kaya went still.

Her hands locked around the reindeer hide on her knees. Her eyes went wide and fixed on Simon's face like she was trying to see straight through him.

"The Radio Station..." Her breathing quickened.

"The one that came on at 8 o'clock sharp every night?" Her voice jumped up an entire register, and there was a tremor in it she couldn't hide.

Simon paused. The hand holding his cup stopped in midair.

"You actually listened to my broadcasts?"

He seemed to register it a moment later. "Right, I used public frequencies. It's perfectly natural you would have heard them."

"That's right. No question about it." The corner of his mouth twitched. "I am... Citizen Z."

Kaya shot to her feet.

"At the beginning or end of every broadcast — you always said the same line."

She stared hard into Simon's eyes, looking for proof.

Simon smiled.

"I greet you all from beneath the Northern Lights."

He delivered it without hesitation, completely fluent, like reciting something he'd said a thousand times.

Kaya went rigid.

The polar radar station had been buried under ice and snow for as long as any of them could remember. Her family had kept watch here for over a decade, living in near-total isolation from the world beyond the ice.

That battered old radio, traded from a scientific expedition crew ten years ago, was the only connection they had to the outside. Their one window into everything past the frozen horizon.

When the world first turned into hell, they sat by it every single night. Right on time.

Listening to that voice cross thousands of miles of wilderness, punch through polar winds and blizzards, and reach them here.

It had been the only beacon they could hear through those desperately dark days. The thing that kept them sane through the long polar night.

Kaya's eyes went red.

She looked at him, this thin, frail man who'd needed her to strip off her clothes and press her body against his just to keep him alive.

She couldn't make it fit. No matter how she looked at him, she couldn't connect him to that voice from the radio. That voice, so steady and professional, with its deep magnetic warmth.

But it was true.

He was Citizen Z. The one countless survivors had passed the name of like a prayer.

And she had been one of his most fanatical fans.

➤ Next: Moral Cause and Legitimacy