Andrew Howard (duplicate)¶

Andrew Howard (duplicate) is the flawed, sickly skinwalker copy of FBI agent Andrew Howard who takes his place after the Ballard gym fight, travels with the task force while secretly working for the skinwalkers, and dies in the cavern under the community center.


Type	Skinwalker clone (played by a player in secret)
Aliases	Skinwalker Howard; fake Howard; X Howard; the replica; clone Andrew; Andrew Howard's double; the double
Affiliation	Skinwalker faction
Status	Dead: shot in the back in the cavern, left in the collapsing cavern while the creature that controlled him escaped (Walkers 09)
First appearance	Walkers 07
Played by	Rita (secretly, from the end of the gym scene in Walkers 07 to the middle of Walkers 09); Andre afterward

Which Andrew is which

In Walkers 06 Rita still plays the real Andrew, and the only hint of a double is a dream he remembers. The switch happens in Walkers 07 at the end of the gym scene: when the double's tendrils enter Andrew's mouth and "everything goes black," Andre hands Rita a private document and tells her, "you are not in Andrew Howard's body. You are in a replica." The gym double and the replica are the same individual: when Rita asks whether she is a new copy rather than "the one that barfed in his mouth," Andre answers, "You are the one that barfed in his mouth." Rita plays the replica for the rest of Walkers 07, all of Walkers 08 and the first part of Walkers 09, without the other players' characters knowing. The real Andrew's later story is on Andrew Howard (the Monstrous).

Description¶

In the school gym the real Andrew finds a man identical to himself sitting on a stool; the double waves enthusiastically and greets him (Walkers 07). When pepper spray hits him, his head briefly vanishes, revealing cross-sections of colors "not supposed to be in the human head," and he collapses in a grand mal seizure (Walkers 07).

The replica that leaves the gym is badly hurt and passes as the real man: sunny, fussy about FBI protocol (wants to call things in and not disturb scenes), insistent that he is "not a hippie" while knowing meditation techniques, and keen to take analog photographs of every scene (Walkers 08). By Walkers 09 he is sickly, sweaty and bruised on the arms, and refuses to open his mouth (Walkers 09).

Abilities and flaws¶

Copies are grown from tissue samples and are made in a hurry. Rita's private document says the replica is wrong and deteriorates over time, and that the sickness is leukemia; Andre explains that the faction took Andrew's tissue from the cut left by the ring on the mayor's hand, and Huell's from the bite of the "homeless" man (Walkers 07). See Replication.
The replica can eat only sugar, like other skinwalker hosts, and carries a tendril-bearing creature that can enter a victim's mouth (Walkers 08). See Pilot and host biology.
Tells in Walkers 08: a roll of 3 in a firefight makes him panic and shatter one of the car's windows, and he is shot in the shoulder; when he tries to heal the Biz, nothing happens; Rita jokes, "Since apparently I can be shot now"; and he is fascinated by the pilot organ the team recovers (Walkers 08).

History¶

Walkers 06: dream¶

Before he woke in the fridge, the real Andrew had dreamed of taking out the trash at his D.C. apartment and meeting a naked version of himself, who chased him through the alleys into the desert, smiling (Walkers 06).

Walkers 07: replacement¶

At the gym the double tells Andrew, "We can do this the easy way or the hard way." The easy way is to open his mouth unnaturally wide and extend fine gray tendrils from his throat to "kiss" Andrew; the hard way is a shotgun. Andrew asks, "What, replacing me? With you, I assume?" After a long fight, the double, with a chunk of his shoulder blown off by a grenade, crawls over the pinned Andrew, and sweet-tasting vomit and tendrils enter Andrew's mouth. Rita is then told that the skinwalker faction already holds about 60 percent of the town (Walkers 07).

The replica staggers out, bloodied, to Huell, telling him townsfolk tried to kidnap him and that he used a grenade. He leaves the double out of the story he tells Kurt and the Biz (Walkers 07). See Ballard High School and Plastic-wrapped bodies.

Walkers 08: inside the team¶

The replica photographs the Roosevelt police station, argues for procedure at the ambush site, and keeps the iridescent pilot organ in a Tupperware (Walkers 08). See Pilot organ in Tupperware and Sugar clues.

The team does not learn what he is during the session. At its end Rita tells the table that she was the one who stole the sugar from the break room, because it is all she can eat, and that she deliberately got hold of the Biz's blood so the faction could begin preparing a copy of him, though without his memories they could not yet replace him (Walkers 08).

Walkers 09: unmasking¶

An unrecorded session ("08.5") came between Walkers 08 and Walkers 09. What happened in it is known only from Walkers 09: the replacement rode with the team, spent an afternoon with the goose Nancy and rode in the Humvee with the National Guard major (Walkers 09). See Lost episodes.

The party marks itself with Sharpie to tell skinwalkers apart, and the duplicate wears a mark. A naked, subtly inhuman "runner" approaches the group shouting that he is the real Howard and asking Huell to check whether the other eats solid food. Kurt asks the marked Howard to open his mouth for a check; he refuses, shoots Kurt in the leg and bolts. Huell chases him down on horseback. When Huell shoves his fingers into the duplicate's mouth, gray tendrils pull a memory out of him: his father, Thomas Kendrick, eating bacon. Andre then announces, "Now that the game is up, Rita, let's swap back who we're controlling": Rita returns to the real Howard and Andre takes over the skinwalker Howard, who has four harm (Walkers 09).

In the cavern the skinwalker Howard limps about wearing the real Howard's suit. Cornered, he attacks the party. Kurt and the real Howard bring him to one harm, and the real Howard shoots him in the back, shouting, "You weren't even gonna tell my mom that I got stolen?" The creature wriggles out of his mouth and scurries away, and the body is left in the collapsing cavern (Walkers 09). See The cavern, The portal and Skinwalkers.

Relationships¶

The real Andrew: the original, who calls his copy the "clone freak" and demands his pants back (Walkers 09).
The Biz: the duplicate took his blood (Walkers 08).
Huell: the copy's tendrils pulled a memory from Huell's mouth; a separate clone, Skinwalker Huell, also exists.