TWD - Chapter 523: The Wolf King (Patreon)

Leah’s fingers repeatedly rubbed along the grip of her weapon.

“...I’m not certain yet, but it’s very possible, Cali. Our company, Sentinel Tactical, is based in Arlington, Virginia.”

Calista’s eyes widened.

She raised the binoculars again and zoomed in, carefully scanning the masked figures one by one.

The more she watched, the more their combat habits resembled Leah and her team.

Carver was the first to recover from the shock.

He raised his rifle again and looked toward Calista.

“Calista, those people down there... I know them.”

Not “might know them,” as Leah had said.

Not “they look familiar.”

He knew them.

Calista stared at Carver in silence for several seconds, then looked at Mike and the others one by one.

The answer was written in their eyes.

Holy shit.

That old bastard, the Pope, had shown up.

Down on the battlefield, the remaining Wolves in the dormitory were still firing intermittently, but their tactical ability was an entire era behind the eleven people holding the main building.

Far too many of them exposed half their bodies when they fired.

Their reloads were clumsy.

Their choice of cover was terrible.

If the eleven in the main building had wanted to kill them all, they could have finished the job long ago.

But they had not.

They were waiting.

Waiting for what?

Calista’s thoughts raced.

“Bossie, how many Wolves did the drone spot last time?”

Bossie thought for a moment. “There were still more than forty alive. Judging by the battlefield now and the bodies on the ground, quite a few must have escaped.”

That confirmed Calista’s suspicion.

“They’re waiting for Wolves’ reinforcements. The scattered Wolf squads operating elsewhere.”

Bossie’s pupils contracted. “The Wolf King.”

“Maybe.” Calista nodded. “Or maybe not. Maybe the Wolf King is already dead.”

Her gaze returned to the main building.

“And those people know that too.”

“So they’re not in a hurry to wipe out the remaining Wolves,” Bossie realized immediately. “They’re leaving the survivors as bait and waiting for reinforcements to come to them.”

Calista nodded.

That meant the masked group did not intend to leave, at least not anytime soon.

The resort was not a temporary hunting ground.

It was a base.

An outpost for a larger, longer-term operation.

Based on what Calista knew about the Pope, his people were terrible at infrastructure and production.

They would survive for more than a decade after the apocalypse only by violently plundering other communities.

Seen that way, the Wolves were only the first stepping stone in their push south.

Their real target would be a settlement large enough and rich enough in supplies to be worth taking.

Something like Alexandria.

Or Rock Fortress.

That meant this standoff was no longer someone else’s war.

At three in the morning, the gunfire around the resort finally died away completely.

The wind on the ridge had grown colder than it had been earlier in the night. It swept down from the north, from the direction of the Shenandoah Valley, rushing across the bare treetops around the resort.

The surviving Wolves withdrew deeper into the staff dormitory.

The eleven people in the main building also tightened their defensive perimeter and pulled back inside, leaving only two fixed sentries: one at the rooftop water tower and another behind a porch pillar.

At dawn, the drone detected Wolves’ reinforcements arriving one group after another.

Calista immediately swung her binoculars toward the direction Bossie indicated.

Three kilometers away, a pickup truck bounced violently along the winding mountain road, drifting around turns as it approached the resort.

Near the entrance, it slammed on the brakes.

Four or five people jumped out and stood staring toward the resort.

Then came a second vehicle.

A third.

The Wolves’ reinforcements gathered at an unsettling pace.

From different directions and distances, pickup trucks, vans, and even motorcycles entered the roads surrounding the resort in groups of two or three before stopping in concealed locations.

People climbed out and looked around uncertainly.

Some of them did not even seem to know one another.

The only thing that clearly identified them as members of the same group was the “W” painted on every forehead.

Their weapons were just as varied.

Hunting rifles.

Sharpened metal pipes.

Baseball bats.

Heavy cleavers.

They were ordinary people driven insane by the apocalypse, bound together by a twisted belief imposed on them by someone even more insane.

“These people...” Turner mocked under his breath as he watched them. “Have they ever actually fought anyone?”

“They have,” Calista said calmly. “But only when everything was in their favor. Charging into poorly defended communities, chasing down unarmed residents, hacking them apart. They’ve fought that kind of battle countless times.

“But against a real armed force, the Wolves don’t stand a chance.”

“What are they waiting for?” Mike asked. “Why haven’t they charged yet?”

Leah kept her binoculars raised. Her view passed over the confused Wolves gathering below and settled on the white skull mask half-kneeling behind the base of the water tower on the main building’s roof.

“Probably the Wolf King,” she replied casually.

A little while later, an ordinary older-model Chevrolet Suburban appeared and drove slowly toward the resort.

Unlike the other vehicles, it did not hide in cover.

It stopped in plain sight across from the resort entrance, beside an abandoned gas station.

Calista locked her binoculars on the driver’s door.

The window slowly rolled down.

An elbow rested on the frame.

Then the door opened.

A man in his early thirties stepped out.

He had a face that could reasonably be called handsome.

He looked around at the people gathered along the roadside, all watching him with a strange mixture of fear and expectation.

Then he smiled.

“That’s him,” Carver said with certainty. “The Wolf King.”

The Wolf King slowly turned and looked toward the main building three hundred meters away, held by the eleven masked fighters.

His expression did not change.

He simply took one step toward it.

The forty-odd Wolves gathered outside, along with the dozen or so still inside the staff dormitory, surged out from cover at the same moment and charged toward the main building with howls and screams.

Some tripped, hit the ground, then scrambled back up and kept running.

Others were struck by the first sniper shots and collapsed, only for the people behind them to step over their bodies.

There was no cover.

No coordinated fire.

No flanking maneuver.

Only a frenzied charge.

Before the Wolf King arrived, they had been a scattered flock of sheep.

Now that he was here, they had pulled themselves back together into something capable of biting the enemy before being killed.

They truly were madmen.

The Wolves had no real tactical training.

The only thing they shared was a belief that the world was already dead.

That the living were a cancer on it.

That the world needed to be purified.

That death was liberation.

That killing was mercy.

Gunfire from the main building suddenly intensified.

The ten members of Calista’s group watched silently from the ridge.

Wolves fell one after another.

Bodies rapidly piled up in front of the main building’s porch, all of them Wolves.

The eleven defenders burned through their ammunition round by round.

The white skull mask on the roof was the first to lower his rifle and draw the combat knife at his waist.

On the second floor, the fighter in the black moth mask jumped down.

He stumbled slightly when he landed. Blood was already seeping from a wound in his calf.

Behind the porch pillar, the rusted metal mask gripped a short sword tightly. Two chips had been knocked from the blade.

Eleven people in total.

Their ammunition was almost gone.

Close combat was about to begin.

How many Wolves were left?

More kept pouring out from the direction of the staff dormitory.

Combined with the ones that had originally been hiding around the perimeter, at least thirty Wolves were still alive.

They brandished their weapons and surged toward the main building in wave after wave like a tide.

Thirty against eleven.