[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 773 - Immediate Surrender

High in the sky.

The cold wind cut against their faces like a blade.

Below the cloud layer, two massive slabs of heavy iron plating tore through the air like a pair of black giant blades, ripping twin white pressure waves in their wake as they screamed forward at blistering speed.

On the lead slab, Leon stood upright, his black trench coat snapping and cracking in the gale.

Alice clung tight to his waist from behind, her whole body pressed flat against his back.

Slightly behind and to one side flew a second slab, just a size smaller.

Carlos was sprawled across it in a completely undignified heap.

Both hands clawing at the edge of the metal for dear life.

His stubble-covered face had gone a frozen shade of blue, every feature twisted into a single grimace.

"What the hell — slow down! Slow the hell DOWN!"

Carlos roared into the wind at the top of his lungs.

The words were shredded to nothing the second they left his mouth.

He'd been Umbrella Corporation's ace pilot for their counter-force units. What kind of brutal weather hadn't he flown through? Single-engine failure at altitude, forced landing in a blizzard, he wouldn't even blink.

But at least back then he'd been sitting in a cockpit. Strapped in with a seatbelt. With a parachute if everything went to hell.

What in the hell was this?

Two sheets of armored plating ripped from God knows where. No handholds. No harness. Nothing.

Just blasting along at insane speed, hundreds of meters up in open air.

If they hit a strong current, or if the guy up front dozed off for even half a second, a fall from here wouldn't just leave you black and blue. You'd be reduced to paste so flat they couldn't scrape it off the pavement.

"Hey, buddy." Carlos pressed his face hard against the freezing metal and screamed.

"Can we fly a little lower! I'm dying up here!"

Leon completely ignored him.

Then the corner of Carlos's eye caught the ground below.

In the middle of a desolate stretch of highway, several battered yellow school buses sat motionless. And surrounding those buses was a dense, dark crowd of people.

"Look!" Carlos strained to lift one arm, jabbing a finger toward the angle below.

"Down there! Down there — huge crowd, all bunched together!"

Leon's gaze had already locked onto the spot several seconds ago.

At his current level of vision, a scene hundreds of meters down was no different from something held right in front of his face.

Yellow school buses.

A cluster of unarmed survivors.

And on the outer perimeter, several dozen heavily armed men who looked every bit like a gang of bandits.

What made Leon's eyes go cold was the scene at the very center of the open ground.

A teenager with a baseball bat had it raised high overhead, about to bring it crashing down on an old man lying in the road, head soaked in blood.

Beside him, Deanna Monroe was on her knees in the gravel, sobbing like her heart was being torn out of her chest.

"Hold on tight," Leon told Alice.

BOOM!

His Psychic Intrusion snapped the force field into reverse in an instant.

The two slabs jolted to a dead stop in midair, then dropped. Like two heavy meteorites. Screaming with a sound that split the air, they plunged vertically toward the road below.

"AHHH, WHAT THE —"

Carlos let out a shriek like a pig being slaughtered, his entire body nearly lifting clear off the slab.

......

Down on the road.

Ron Anderson held Lucille high, the grin on his face twisted with vicious pleasure.

He looked down at Reg curled on the ground. Then at Deanna Monroe kneeling in the dirt, already broken.

One swing of this bat and he'd be a Savior.

He'd get to live. And every person who'd ever looked down on him would end up under his boot.

"Die!" Ron bellowed, and swung.

Negan stood a few meters back.

God, he loved watching a bloody initiation.

But.

The bat made it halfway down.

And then a deafening sonic boom cracked open the sky directly overhead.

The kind of sound a fighter jet makes when it screams past at ultra-low altitude, right over your skull.

Every person on that road froze. Every head tilted back.

The sun hung dead overhead.

In the blinding glare, two enormous black shapes were plunging straight down at a speed that made no physical sense whatsoever.

"The hell is that?"

Simon narrowed his eyes, raised his rifle, and took two steps forward.

He never got a good look.

BOOM!

The first slab hit the road like a falling mountain, dead center, less than 3 meters from Ron Anderson.

The asphalt exploded outward.

Chunks of rock and tar flew in every direction like shrapnel.

The ground cratered half a meter deep.

Ron took the full brunt of it. The bat never finished its swing. The blast wave picked him up and hurled him through the air. He tumbled twice and slammed hard into the drainage ditch at the road's edge.

Negan and Simon were shoved back two full steps.

The Saviors' rank and file raised their weapons on instinct, eyes locked onto the rolling cloud of dust.

Then,

BANG!

The second slab came down just behind, slightly smaller, grinding across the asphalt for 10 meters in a shrieking trail of sparks before grinding to a stop.

Carlos was still face-down on it. He retched violently, right through the metal.

"Battle stations! Take them out!"

Simon bellowed and worked his bolt.

Dozens of guns swung toward the center of the dust cloud.

A breeze moved through. The dust began to settle.

Standing quietly on the badly warped slab at the bottom of that crater were two people.

A man in a black trench coat.

A blonde woman in a form-fitting tactical suit.

Deanna Monroe was still on her knees. She had gone completely still.

She stared at the familiar silhouette on that slab, and the despair in her eyes detonated into something wild and frenzied.

"Leon!" She screamed it with everything she had and scrambled forward two steps on her hands and knees.

Aaron struggled to lift his bruised, swollen face and let out a long, slow breath.

They'd made it.

Leon was here, which meant they'd made it.

Negan's mind had gone blank. It dawned on him, in a cold, clarifying instant, that standing in front of a man who could fly, the pressure he'd been feeling was somehow not nearly large enough.

Wasn't this just goddamn Superman?

Fight?

Fight what?

Just surrender.

And with that thought, Negan simply laced his hands behind his head and dropped to his knees right there in the road. All resistance, gone.

Not because he was a coward. Because he wasn't an idiot.

A man who could literally fly, if he wanted your life, it would be the easiest thing in the world. Surrendering was the only way out. And maybe, if the man happened to be in a good mood, he'd let you walk.

➤ Next: Audacious Beyond All Measure