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Skinwalker faction

The Skinwalker faction is the organized group of skinwalker copies that holds most of Ballard, Utah, massacres the Roosevelt police, steals every car, runs the bridge blockade and hoards supplies at the community center.
Type Organization (hostile)
Aliases Ballard faction; body snatcher faction; the cult; Skinwalker community of Roosevelt; fake police
Members Skinwalkers; the mayor (Wilford Hiram); the double of Andrew Howard
Base Ballard, then the community center
Status Main force stranded and crushed in Walkers 09; some copies and pilots escaped
First appearance Walkers 07

Overview

The faction is never given a name in the show. The players called it "the cult" and suspected a religious cult, a Mormon theory with no evidence behind it, until the autopsy in Walkers 08 showed the members were piloted copies. After the gym scene in Walkers 07, Andre privately briefed Rita, who from then on played the replica of Andrew Howard. The briefing said the faction controlled about 60% of Ballard, was nearly ready to drop pretenses, cloned people from tissue, commanded animals and armed townspeople, and worried that the outsiders could bring real reinforcements.

Members

History

Quiet replacement (before Walkers 07)

By the time the team arrived, the sheriff reported more than half the high school student body absent, houses empty for days and attendance records showing nothing wrong (Walkers 06). The theft of every recording and three employees from Bigelow's ranch happened the same night as the gym ambush (Walkers 07). See Disappearances in Ballard.

Open action (Walkers 07 and 08)

After the gym, the faction massacred the Roosevelt police station and stole all drivable cars, sabotaging the rest by hand: batteries taken, wires and belts cut, tires slashed, and sugar put in gas tanks (Walkers 08). Three men in maintenance uniforms came to find the substation keys; see Utah cleanup crew. A blockade of about twenty to twenty-five heavily armed people, most dressed as police, turned traffic back at the bridge, including a FedEx truck; see Bridge blockade.

The team concluded that the outside world was probably normal, that Ballard was lost, and that Roosevelt was being replaced person by person, starting with the police.

The stronghold and the evacuation (Walkers 09)

A cold open showed hundreds of cars piled inside the fence of the community center, with armed, mostly naked townspeople hauling supplies. The copies fought the National Guard force, with Ned Simpson's killdozer grinding through them, then carried tanks of blood with creatures down the shaft to the portal. When the cavern's power failed and Huell's grenade struck the support machinery, fifty to sixty copies were stranded in the dark; the community center collapsed into a sinkhole (Walkers 09).

Trivia

  • Rita's secret turn as the replica begins at the end of the gym scene in Walkers 07, when Andre breaks off and hands her a private handout, telling her she is now playing a replica. No duplicate of Andrew appears in Walkers 06.

Appearances