The Walking Dead: Maggie and Negan Show Just Confirmed a New Kind of Zombie

It seems like just last year the The Walking Dead came to an end. That’s probably because it was only just last year that The Walking Dead‘s flagship series concluded for good with its 11th season finale.

But, like any good zombie, The Walking Dead can’t truly die. The end of the series based on Robert Kirkman’s beloved comics is just the beginning of its many spinoffs. Among those spinoffs are the eighth and final season of Fear the Walking Dead, the untitled Rick and Michonne continuation, and the The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon. Also queued up for the franchise, however, will be a series that combines two of the show’s unlikeliest heroes: Maggie Rhee (Lauren Cohan) and Negan Smith (Jeffrey Dean Morgan).

The Manhattan-set Maggie and Negan adventure, The Walking Dead: Dead City is set to premiere Sunday, June 18 at 10 p.m. ET on AMC. Now AMC has unveiled a new trailer that provides our longest look yet at the spinoff. Give it a watch below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b-b4rvLJmI

Obviously there’s a lot to take in here. Maggie and Megan’s uneasy truce appears as though it will continue, albeit with some tension. That’s bound to happen when one half of a partnership beats the other half’s husband’s brains in with a barbed wire bat. Elsewhere we get to see some first looks at fresh Walking Dead characters like Gaius Charles as Perlie Armstrong, and Željko Ivanek as the villainous “Croat.” And not for nothing but has Maggie’s son Hershel aged like 40 years in the hiatus between series? Kid looks like he’s got a post-apocalyptic mortgage and bad knees now.

The most tantalizing element of this new trailer though is undoubtedly the zombies. As first teased in the post-credit sequence of The Walking Dead: World Beyond series finale, we might not know everything there is to know about the undead in this universe. It would appear that either the zombies themselves are evolving or there are different strains of the mysterious zombie virus that give select reanimated corpses special skills. In the The Walking Dead‘s final season we even saw some walker perform previously unthinkable actions like climb and operate doorknobs.

Well, in this trailer, we see yet another unique type of zombie that could be the next step in the “species'” evolution … or just a total freak of nature spawned from the NYC metro system. At both the very beginning of the trailer and the very end, Maggie is confronted by what can only be described as a “Rat King” zombie. That is to say several undead corpses have somehow fused together to become one monstrous, multi-limbed entities.

Funnily enough, this is something that The Last of Us fans might already be familiar with. Though not yet seen in the HBO series, in The Last of Us Part 2 video game, the player eventually comes across such a hybrid – several bodies combined together through the magic of mushrooms. This terrifying monster is known in TLOU lore as a “Rat King,” named after the disgusting real life phenomenon where several rats somehow get their tails wrapped together. So if it can happen to rats why can’t it happen to zombies in two different storytelling universes?

AMC’s plot description for The Walking Dead: Dead City reads:

The Walking Dead: Dead City follows the popular Maggie (Cohan) and Negan (Morgan) characters traveling into a post-apocalyptic Manhattan, long ago cut off from the mainland. The crumbling city is filled with the dead and denizens who have made New York City their own world full of anarchy, danger, beauty, and terror. The series also stars Gaius Charles and Željko Ivanek, amongst others. Eli Jorné, who has been a writer and co-executive producer on The Walking Dead for multiple seasons serves as showrunner and executive producer on the series, which is overseen by Scott M. Gimple, chief content officer of The Walking Dead Universe. Cohan and Morgan also serve as executive producers, along with Brian Bockrath.

The Walking Dead: Dead City premieres Sunday, June 18 at 10 p.m. ET on AMC. New episodes premiere Sundays at 9 p.m.