Fast zombies are bad enough but talking zombies!? That’s too much even The Walking Dead. The talkers recently introduced were actually living humans wearing zombie masks to blend in with walkers in similar to Michonne’s pet zombies.
“It wasn’t entirely a fake out,” creator Robert Kirk insisted in the letters page of The Walking Dead #132
The Hilltop colony leader Maggie Greene sends Dante and two others to search for Ken. Marco abandoned him after hearing the talking zombies though no one believed his crazy story. While searching a barn they’re overrun by walkers. The seasoned soldiers enter a back-to-back formation. They take 5 steps out to clear the area then return to repeat the process. They nearly succeed until one of them spots a walker holding a knife. It frightens them and they break formation, which gets them all killed expect for Dante. He screams at them to tell him how they can talk.
“We whisper and the dead don’t mind. You’ll see,” the talker explains. “You’ll be dead soon yourself. Then you’ll see.”
Dante kills him but when he examines the corpses, he discovers that they’re wearing masks reminiscent of Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Several other talkers sneak up behind him on the final page.
The Walking Dead #134 cover shows Paul Monroe AKA Jesus standing over a talker holding its wound. He’s clearly shocked since the undead don’t feel pain. “From whispers to screams,” hints the tagline. The Walking Dead #135 cover shows Maggie and Jesus interrogating the talker. “Face to face,” the tagline reads. The obvious question is why?
The talkers could be herding the walkers to take over territory belonging to other groups. An even for frightening possibility is that they are cannibals like the Hunters or Termites from Terminus on the television series. The difference is that they’re feasting on the living raw, which would be a new level of horror for TWD.
