TWD - Zomboid - Chapter 267: Madison, Tara (Patreon)

Luke was looking for their leader.

The leader of the Whisperers was Alpha, the woman responsible for the infamous “Ten Heads” incident in the original series. Her victims included Tara, Enid, Henry...

In the end, Alpha was killed by Negan.

“Alpha! Alpha! Where are you?!”

Luke carefully scanned the area through his binoculars.

“Sir, those survivors look like they’re about to be overwhelmed. Should I go help them?” Leon asked.

Luke lowered the binoculars slightly and glanced at him. “You want to charge into a horde of over a thousand walkers by yourself? Leon, do you have some kind of psychological trauma, or are you just self-destructive?”

Leon rubbed his nose, looking a little embarrassed.

He’d forgotten.

With the commander right here, there was no way he could fudge the expenses this time!

Luke’s gaze settled on a figure at the heart of the horde. The person was draped in walker skin, yet somehow stood out from everyone around them.

Of course, it was mainly because of the buffs.

[Alpha]

[Teasing] [Suspicion] [Puzzlement]...

The roar of the helicopter as it landed had already alerted the horde below, as well as the group of Whisperers.

But every time the walkers approached, they instinctively scattered again.

Luke put away the binoculars and told Leon to bring him a sniper rifle.

Leon handed him a long-barreled, all-black Barrett M82A1. A .50-caliber anti-materiel rifle.

Luke didn’t normally carry something like this. It had been pulled from a Commonwealth warehouse, where it had been kept locked up and forbidden from use, so Luke had simply assigned it to Leon.

Anyone who dared cause trouble at the outpost, even a Hunter, would have to take a round... or rather, a cannon shell, and see how they liked it.

“Sir, what are you...” Leon swallowed.

You didn’t need something like that just to shoot walkers, did you?

One shot would blow them into a cloud of blood!

“Watch closely. When you’re dealing with traitors to humanity, you execute them with cannon fire!” Luke dropped to one knee and braced the rifle firmly against a raised mound of earth.

“Today, I’m going to teach you what ruthless really means! And what it means to blanket the enemy with firepower when you can afford it!”

He leaned into the scope.

Through the high-powered optics, the dark mass of walkers suddenly sprang into sharp focus.

Thousands upon thousands of rotting bodies shuffled through his field of view. Amid that sea of death, Luke picked out several dozen figures draped in decaying human skin.

The Eye of Death, kid!!

He locked onto the nearest one first.

The Whisperer was pressed close to a walker, body half-crouched, lips moving faintly as he used that strange voice to guide the horde.

That was the Whisperers’ greatest advantage.

They could steer hordes by disguising themselves as the dead, blending in among them, and moving alongside the walkers.

But that disguise was fragile.

Especially when a horde remained gathered for too long. Monsters would eventually emerge, creatures that even the Whisperers themselves could no longer control.

For now, the Whisperers only gathered and dispersed hordes temporarily. They relied on walkers for hunting and protection, but at the same time, those same hordes could easily destroy them.

“Let’s start with you, lucky guy!”

Luke centered the Whisperer’s head in his sights, steadied his breathing, and pulled the trigger.

“BANG!!!”

A deafening blast tore through the silence of the wilderness.

The .50-caliber round struck the Whisperer squarely in the head.

“CRACK!!”

His head burst apart like a watermelon smashed with a hammer. He didn’t even have time to groan before his body toppled stiffly backward.

Blood sprayed from the severed arteries, splattering across the walkers around him.

In the next instant, everything changed.

The walkers that had been clustered around him abruptly caught the scent of blood and stopped in unison.

Fresh meat!

Low growls rose from their throats as they lunged at the fallen body.

They tore into him in a frenzy, ripping him apart and devouring him.

Within a few breaths, all that remained was a pool of blood. Not even the bones were left.

That was what happened to an ordinary person caught inside a horde.

There was no other ending. You were torn to pieces.

A disguise?

“...” Leon’s pupils contracted as he stared at the scene.

So it really was people behind this shit!!

These bastards were actually this disgusting? Helping beasts slaughter their own kind?

“So the walkers weren’t being driven by mutants,” Leon said coldly. “There were living people mixed in among them. These bastards are wearing walker skins and herding the walkers around like sheep!”

“No wonder the pheromones didn’t work completely. These people were driving them back.”

“This is the apocalypse. People can be more dangerous than anything else, and you never know where the next threat will come from.”

Luke worked the action, ejecting a spent casing.

“We gave survivors a way to live. We gave everyone a fair chance to survive in this apocalypse. And even then, there are still people who don’t want others to live!”

Leon slammed a fist into the dirt mound.

Turning themselves into the dead, hiding among corpses, then herding hordes like livestock and using them to hunt down fellow humans who were still clinging to hope.

How were people like that any different from animals?

...

Before Luke fired...

At the center of the horde, the survivors were trapped.

A group of ragged survivors with fierce, hardened expressions stood back-to-back, keeping a wary eye on the walkers surrounding them.

They were a group that had fought their way across the continent from the other side.

Now the horde had completely surrounded them. There was nowhere left to run. They could only fight.

Their leader was a weary-looking middle-aged woman named Madison. Beside her were her daughter, her son, Strand, and several other survivors they had encountered along the way.

One of them seemed to be named Tara...

They had learned long ago how to survive inside a walker horde. Cut open a walker, smear its blood and entrails over yourself, and use the stench to fool the walkers’ senses.

Nick was especially good at it. He could move through a horde almost as if the walkers weren’t there.

But this time, the trick wasn’t working.

“Something’s wrong!”

Nick wiped some walker blood from his face. “Mom, there’s something wrong with this horde.”

“We’re covered in blood. They shouldn’t keep surrounding us like this.” He lowered his voice. “But these walkers are acting like they’ve gone crazy. They just keep pressing toward us, like... like something is controlling them.”

Madison’s expression turned grim.

She had noticed it too.

A horde normally moved in one direction and kept going, just like the one that had once swept through and destroyed their farm.

But these walkers were different. Instead of simply moving on, they kept circling within the same area.

Almost like an army following orders.

Was that even possible?

“We’re surrounded.” Strand looked exhausted. “We were so close! Just... that close!!”

“All we can do now is hope what we heard on that channel was true. If it was, someone has to have noticed us!”

In the distance, they could see the repaired outpost and a helicopter slowly approaching through the sky.

“There are people over there!” Alicia’s eyes lit up. She threw her arms into the air and shouted toward the outpost at the top of her lungs.

“Help! Help us! Can’t you see us? We’re trapped!”

The white-armored soldiers showed no reaction.

Only after the helicopter landed did they vaguely make out someone falling from it...

No.

He had jumped.