Forbidden
Chapter 1 - Beyond The Walls
Disclaimer: I don't own TWD. Also, I haven't read the comics. I only know that Maggie becomes the leader of the Hilltop and names the baby Hershel and that's where this idea kind of stemmed from, so the details may not line up with what's happened/happening in the comic books.
READER WARNING: Crude language / Racist themes in this chapter.
It was December.
At least, that's what Mr. Porter had told the kids. Carl said they couldn't really know. They lost track of time for a few years, and they could never really know for sure.
Judith didn't care though, because in December, even if that wasn't really the month they were in, they celebrated Christmas and it was her favorite holiday. Holidays were a recent concept for the kids. Something from the old world. A new word to learn. Define: holiday. Noun. A day of festivity or recreation when no work is done.
In the old days, back when things were different, Carl said they used to chop down trees and bring them inside and decorate them with strings of electric lights and plastic balls. Parents would lie to their kids about some fat man who'd fly down the chimney to deliver presents. Wrapped in paper. Glittery, shiny paper, wrapped around cardboard boxes with big obnoxious crimped bows, just so they could be torn apart and discarded in the trash in big heaping, stinking mounds for the garbage men to take. They'd make cookies, Carl would reminisce. Real, fresh cookies with real fucking butter, not that oat and raisin shit that Carol scraped together and called a cookie.
All of it seemed like a waste of time and effort to Judith. Unpractical. And it wasn't like the Alexandrian's to do anything unpractical.
Judith read all about holidays in the books they had at the library, scoffing, once she'd learnt to read at a wise seven years old, that any child would believe in imaginary creatures. There was nothing left to the imagination anymore.
There were no walkers in the books. No guns or blood or gore. It was all fairytales and princesses with happy endings and shit. Judith much preferred Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, or J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. The edgy stuff Michonne kept in her own personal library she'd sometimes rifle through. It was thrilling, a little naughty, reading those books - teenage rebellion and all that.
That sort of teenage disobedience used to be different. Different like how you could walk into the grocery store and buy fresh orange juice and cheese and something called "greek yogurt". When produce came off a shelf into a bag, not plucked from the plant. Different like how you could watch live television, not movies or video games, but real live people moving around, doing real live things, filmed by real, live cameras, transmitted through the air, through those metal satellites still mindlessly orbiting their planet, back into their small, flat, wide-screen TV's.
It was strange to think about sometimes, Judith thought - the kinds of things people used to do before how things were now. Sometimes she'd flip through old magazines to try and understand. Articles talking about the kinds of clothes people were wearing. The newest television show. The "juiciest gossip." Divorce and scandals and breast implants. (Another new one. Define: breast implant. Noun. A prosthesis consisting of a gel-like or fluid material in a flexible sac, implanted behind or in place of a female breast in reconstructive or cosmetic surgery.)
"But they're just people!" Judith would exclaim, looking for explanation from her father. "Who gives a shit?"
He would sigh, pinching the skin between his eyes. A practice he perfected when he was trying to be patient with her. Rick Grimes had never been prepared for a daughter. "I know. But they were celebrities."
Celebrities. She'd had to look up what that was too. (Define: celebrity. Noun. The state of being well known.) Celebrities weren't a thing. It wasn't even a word they'd learned in school.
School was also different, Carl liked to point out. He'd been fifteen when she was born, twelve when the whole thing started, so he remembered a lot. When Carl was in school they would do arts and crafts and take standardized tests and eat lunch in a place called the "cafeteria" ("It was just a room to eat!?" Judith would exclaim and Carl would nod,) their soggy lunch scooped into a tray by someone called "the lunch lady."
Judith liked her school - the school she was familiar with. On Mondays and Tuesdays, Mr. Porter, who they called Eugene outside of school, taught them things like how to read and write and science, geography and math. On Wednesdays, Ms. Chambler, or Tara, taught them healing remedies, stitching techniques and things to look for when they were finally allowed out on runs - seventeen and older, no exceptions.
On Thursdays and Fridays, Daryl and Michonne (not to go by any other names, ever,) taught them shooting, archery, knife handling and other basic survival skills. Those were Judith's favorite days. Michonne and Daryl would tell her she was the best in the class, even though she thought maybe they had to say those things to her. They were practically family.
"You're lucky," Carl would say, sticking his nose in the air. He was a proud thirty-two now, and though Judith was seventeen and had learned a lot, she still looked up to him, hanging on his every word. "Didn't have this kind of training when I was your age. Had to learn it all on my own."
He was tough, her brother. He'd lost an eye at an early age, when she was just an infant, so his stare was always unsettling when he really meant something he was saying. It bore into you, that single blue iris under a narrowed lid. He wore a patch most days when he was out in town, but at home he took it off. "It's so fucking itchy," he would complain. As a child, the hole, the hollowness and the blackness of it never sat right with Judith. Make her stomach turn over, like she'd be sick. It was something she just couldn't help. She would stare at him and he would taunt her with it. Eventually, she just got used to it.
She loved Carl, but she hated how he reprimanded her, like somehow it was her fault that he'd been born in such an unfortunate time. It wasn't her fault everything had gone to shit while he was in the middle of growing up. That he had to shoot their mother in the face. And he knew that, but he still liked to remind her how much easier she had it any chance he got.
His hair was as long as hers and he kept it tied back behind his head most days. (A man bun, the magazines called it. Define: bun. Noun. A hairstyle in which the hair is drawn back into a tight coil at the back of the head.) He'd grown from a gangly boy into a strong man with a long beard and she'd grown from a skinny baby into a skinny kid into a skinny teenager. She had thick brown hair, frizzy and untamable, that she kept swept back in a ponytail. Out of her face. Out of the way. She was strong, but still lanky - like her limbs were growing so fast that the rest of her body couldn't keep up
Seventeen now, and everyone told her she looked like her Mom, but Judith wasn't convinced. Her mother had been beautiful and Judith was hard-looking, no doubt the effect of the world around her. Her mother's name was Lori, with an "ORI," not an "AURIE," Carl had told her when she first learned to spell. And Judith was the reason she'd died.
Judith was one of the lucky ones - thats what they all said. Most of the kids were orphans, with one or no parents or siblings to call their own blood. Judith Grimes still had a brother and a father, and Michonne, who was as good as blood, as good as any mother would be - and life didn't get much better than that.
Her father, Rick, had been in charge of Alexandria for some time, although many would argue that Michonne and Daryl had single-handedly held this place together. Judith was somewhat of a celebrity, she supposed if they were using the word in context. People always liked to know what she was doing, what her family was doing, what her role would be in the community now that she was "of age."
Seventeen. That magical age of adulthood for the Alexandrian kids. Judith had been both terrified and thrilled for the day to come. She could finally put to practice all she'd learned. She could finally go on runs. She could finally be a member of the community. She'd excelled at school. Maybe she could shadow Daryl. What she hadn't expected was what else seemed to be expected of her.
There had been twenty pregnancies since Judith was old enough to remember. Two of the mothers had died in childbirth. Postpartum hemorrhages, Tara had identified. (Define: hemorrhage. Noun. An escape of blood from a ruptured blood vessel, especially when profuse.) The first time, Tara had run from the clinic, sobbing. Covered in blood. Carrying the baby. Screaming. The second time, no screaming, but she had drank a lot of alcohol that night, straight into morning and gotten very drunk, vomiting bile into the street. Since then, Tara had gotten better, but still didn't handle crisis very well.
Fourteen of the babies had survived past infancy. Some were stillborn. Some got sick. It was just the way the world worked now. The ones that survived were tough. The kids were all tough, like Judith. But she was the toughest of them all. (Or so she liked to think.) She wasn't sure many of them were fond of her. In fact, Judith knew many of them weren't fond of her. She didn't have many friends. Only acquaintances. She liked the adults better. And now she was one.
There were only four girls "to be of age," her Dad was saying. "Babies are important."
"I'm not having this conversation with you, Dad," Judith said firmly.
Rick and Michonne sat side by side on the couch, staring at her. "It's pertinent to our survival," her father said smartly. "Just something to think about. For your future. There's plenty of nice gentlemen in our community."
Judith rolled her eyes, landing them on Michonne who gave her a small grin. They'd had this talk already. "The birds and the bees," Michonne called it with a nervous laugh, whistling through her teeth.
"It's called fucking," Carl would tell her later, crudely. "And you better hope you don't get pregnant."
Carl had told her one night after he'd had too many beers that Eugene and Abraham had brewed themselves, exactly how their mother had died. On a cold, hard floor. She'd been spliced open with a knife, like a fucking animal, and Maggie had pulled her from the carnage. Bloody and beautiful, screaming, pink and healthy. The cord was cut and in that moment, Judith was separated from her dead mother's corpse. Alive.
And after that, Judith planned on never getting pregnant and never having kids.
"I just want you to find someone who will take care of you Judith," her father said in his most honest tone, "I won't be around forever."
I fucking know that, she wanted to say, but didn't. Instead, in her most teenage way, she stormed up to her room angrily, slamming the door behind her.
The moon was full.
High in the sky, the orb hung over their pathetic little planet, illuminating the ground brightly. Street. Houses. Old street lights that no longer worked (a waste of electricity.) Judith much preferred the night. You could slip out, unnoticed, so easily. The darkness was a blanket.
The fence around Alexandria was sturdy, but not safe. Nothing was safe, really. But it was safe enough, built up over the years, optimized for the world they lived in. For attack. For the walkers. But there were still ways out - Uncle Daryl had showed her years ago, "Just in case of an emergency," he'd drawled and she'd nodded in an understanding response. "If you ever need to get out."
He'd made her promise not to use the exits he'd showed her, but she was seventeen now. An adult. If she was to be expected to contribute her uterus to society like her father had requested, she sure as hell had the right to leave Alexandria whenever she damn well pleased.
So that night, she took the hunters knife Uncle Daryl had given her a few years back, and turned it over in her hands. "She'd want you to have this," was what he had said. And when Judith asked "Who?", he'd shaken his head sadly and left her alone. It was the last time she'd asked. She knew it had belonged to someone he had lost - maybe someone they had all lost. But he wouldn't say. She could see from his face, that it hurt him too much.
The weapon was made from a light, stainless steel - easily pocketable. So when she climbed out of her bedroom window, onto the black tar roof of their house and eased herself down the gutter that barely clung to the siding of the house, she kept the knife in her hands. She jumped off towards the ground, a little too far up, landing solidly on her feet - the sting rising from her soles all the way to her calves. She ignored it, determined to move on. To get out. To see something beyond the walls.
Hershel Greene-Rhee was the only half-Asian he knew. The Hilltop was full of all kinds of people, but none of them looked like him.
Once, when he was in school, one of the kids had told him "his kind" had died off, because they were "a bunch of pussies." Then they'd pulled the skin next to their eyes taut, a crude representation of what Hershel looked like and laughed horribly at him.
When he told his mother, who led the Hilltop, she screwed her face up in an angry sort of snarl and stormed out the front door and Hershel wasn't allowed back to school for an entire week.
"Those little fuckers," his mother said later over dinner, "Don't know who your Daddy was. And if they did, they'd shut their little fuckin' mouths."
Maggie Greene was tall, strong and beautiful and also a little sad at times, despite her best intentions to hide it. Hershel Greene-Rhee was a spitting image of his father, or so he'd been told. Momma had no photos of her late husband, so he could only take her word for it.
"He was brave," Momma would say, looking off, dreamily, in the distance. It was his favorite thing, when Momma would talk about his father, like he was the greatest person she'd ever encountered. "He was thoughtful and brave and loyal and wonderful." And then she looked at him. "And so are you."
Hershel wasn't sure how true that all was. He didn't think he was very thoughtful or wonderful and he certainly wasn't brave and he wasn't quite sure what loyal even meant, so he couldn't be that. But he was one thing now - an adult. Sixteen, and at the Hilltop, sixteen was the age you needed to be to go out beyond the walls.
They'd prepared the kids for such an experience - weapon training, survival skills, how to kill the walkers. They had cars and ammo and medicine. Camping gear. Warm blankets. Bottles of water for their journeys, but he didn't really know what it was like. He'd grown up behind walls. Out there, everything was unknown.
His mother hadn't offered up much information. Just that it was dangerous and dismal and scary - nothing like The Hilltop. He wouldn't want to go out there anyway, unless he absolutely had to. Here, they were safe and fed and warm and went to sleep in a bed, and woke up alive. His Momma never talked of what life had been like before she'd ended up here, though Hershel had heard bits and pieces from others. He never asked, because he knew his mother would never tell him. It was left up to his imagination.
And that, in itself, was quite dangerous - though Hershel didn't realize it at this point in his life - how dangerous his imagination could be. He envisioned the outside to be quiet. Secluded. Somewhere where he could be alone with only his own thoughts - not like here, where he was constantly surrounded by people.
"We're thrivin'," Maggie would say. "You should be lucky there's so many people around. There was a time when there was nobody. No one. Just the dead, walking."
But he hated it, the constant chatter. The shuffling feet. The moving bodies. There were so many people. Sure, he was lucky enough to have a room. He could hide if he needed to - but he could always hear someone, even if he closed the door.
Today was his birthday and Momma had baked him a cake. He smiled at her as she made him blow out a candle - an old tradition, long since forgotten. Birthdays and celebrations had been long since forgotten too, Maggie always made a point to celebrate him. A single candle in the middle of a small cake, cut into small slivers to eat. Afterwards, he'd been allowed an extra hour of electricity to watch a movie and then, Hershel went upstairs to bed, laying in the darkness, staring up at his low ceiling. His mothers snores echoed down the hall, but Hershel stayed awake.
He wasn't sure why, but he could never sleep on his birthday. Rationale told him it was the excitement of making it to a new year, but Hershel thought it might have been something else. The anticipation of making it to adulthood. And now, finally to sixteen.
According to Momma and the rest of the Hilltop, Hershel was a real adult. He could make decisions and get a job to help contribute to their thriving society and he could finally get out to see the world with nobody stopping him. But, he didn't feel any different. He didn't know anything different. He wasn't more enlightened or more brave or anything. He still didn't know what was beyond the walls.
An overwhelming wave of frustration. Of embarrassment. Of feeling like this whole being sixteen thing didn't really matter. He didn't want to wait anymore. He wanted to find out what was out there, on his own terms. He wanted a story. He wanted to be brave.
With the moon full and bright in the sky, Hershel slipped out of the front door, past the gates and into the woods, with only a pocket knife in his hands. Away. It was time to explore.