[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 618 - Moral Cause and Legitimacy

"Citizen Z..."

Kaya murmured the name. The disbelief in her voice was impossible to miss.

She stared hard at Simon, her freckled face written over with shock.

She stepped forward abruptly and planted herself right in front of him.

Then, with a suddenness that caught everyone off guard, she bent down and gripped his still-cold hands in both of hers.

Simon didn't know what to do with himself.

Ten minutes ago, no, three minutes ago, this woman had written him off as a frail, useless burden.

The old man stopped chewing his beef. Something like disbelief flickered through his cloudy eyes.

He pushed to his feet, crossed to the corner of the cabin, and spent a long moment rummaging through a battered wooden crate.

Then he came back holding a dust-covered glass bottle.

Cheap vodka. Utterly unremarkable anywhere else on earth. Out here, in this frozen wasteland, it was worth more than gold.

They'd traded an entire seal for it.

The old man walked to Simon's bedside, poured a full cup into a clean wooden cup, and offered it with both hands.

The old woman crowded in beside him, her face full of the kind of simple, unguarded warmth that had no performance in it at all.

Simon stared at the ceremony being laid out in front of him, and his breathing actually slowed.

He took the cup and scratched at his messy hair, awkward.

God, this was too strange.

He was just a shut-in who sat behind a keyboard in an Arctic relay station.

On a normal day it was either talking to his dog or muttering into a microphone.

Being treated like a living saint, right to his face, he genuinely couldn't adapt to that.

Kaya sat down on the edge of the bed. Her eyes were shining with a brightness that was almost unsettling.

"This is what you deserve." She looked at him.

"You have no idea what the things you said over the radio meant to people struggling through the end of the world."

"Loneliness is enough to shatter a person's mind completely."

"It was you." She pointed at Simon.

"Your broadcast. Every evening, eight o'clock sharp. That's what told us the world still had hope."

"Everyone needs a beacon for the soul. That's what keeps people going."

Kaya's voice didn't waver once.

Simon took a sip of the vodka. The cold that had been sitting in his bones finally started to loosen.

He looked at the liquid in the cup and shook his head.

"But it's so cold here, even the Walkers can't survive."

He pursed his lips.

"Out there, those things that can strip a person down to bones in seconds — at this latitude, they're all frozen solid."

"You have no Walker threat here. I can't even warn you over the radio to avoid a Walker Horde. So why are you still grateful to me?"

Kaya's brow furrowed. She fired back immediately.

"Who said only monsters are frightening?"

She pointed at the cabin's front door, which the wind was hammering like it had a personal grudge.

"You think that blizzard out there isn't deadly enough?"

"This environment is more terrifying than any of those monsters." Her words came faster now.

"Out there, monsters can be shot, can be cut down. But in the Arctic, what do you use to fight the cold?"

"Loneliness and despair are the real killers out here."

"Without your broadcasts, my parents might have chosen to give up — that winter, a year ago."

Simon went still.

The hand holding his cup stopped mid-air. A sharp current blazed through his mind.

An idea, insanely bold and yet entirely workable, took shape with sudden, rapid clarity inside that very clever head of his.

A beacon for the soul.

Pointing the way forward.

Right... listening to Kaya, it seemed he actually had a bit more imagination than he'd given himself credit for.

Simon snapped upright, so fast he forgot the pain in his left leg entirely.

All this time, he'd felt that tagging along with Leon, beyond the electronic surveillance and code-breaking support, made him little more than a dispensable logistics hand.

Because Leon was simply too powerful.

The man could tear through swarms of bio-weapons single-handedly, flip a truck with his bare hands, and on top of all that he commanded a Mutants special-ops unit and a controlled monster legion.

Faced with violence that absolute, Simon had always assumed his hacker skills would eventually be pushed to the margins.

But Kaya's words had just snapped him wide awake.

No matter how godlike a person's individual power was, it could only intimidate so many people.

Right, no matter how strong Leon got, unless he turned into Superman, the reach of his direct influence would always have a ceiling.

For Leon to build an unassailable fortress on this shattered wasteland, he needed population. A massive population. That was the only thing that could sustain it.

Engineers. Doctors. Agricultural specialists. Repair crews. And fighters — an endless supply of fighters.

What reason would survivors have to travel from far away to join him?

Because he killed without blinking?

Because he kept a pack of man-eating monsters?

No.

In a world where everyone feared for their own life, iron-fisted rule could only breed fear. It couldn't make people give themselves over, body and soul.

What they needed was hope.

A righteous stronghold. One that offered absolute safety, plentiful food, and a banner of human resurgence to march behind.

What if he used the name Citizen Z, leveraging a satellite broadcast with global reach, to package Leon's prison base as that beacon?

Paint it as the last true Sanctuary in the apocalypse. No Walker infestation. High walls. Heavy firepower. A place where people could actually live.

Then push that message out over radio to every corner of America.

Every survivor scurrying like a rat across the wasteland would swarm toward Atlanta like moths to a flame.

This was a perfect recruitment declaration.

By leveraging his own influence, he could help Leon expand his power at extraordinary speed, and more than that, he could build Leon the image of a legitimate leader of humanity. Positive. Credible. Righteous.

Once that coat was on, whenever Leon led his people to sweep other states for supplies, or moved to absorb other survivor camps, it would all follow naturally. It would stand on solid ground.

Anyone who crossed paths with Leon would have to show some measure of respect.

Because beneath that packaging, opposing Leon would mean opposing the tide of history itself.

In this world, legitimacy was always the most useful weapon.

➤ Next: The Plan Takes Shape