Well, here's the first chapter of my Walking Dead fic. It's definitely Daryl/Carol kids, so don't worry that the first chapter is from the POV of an original character, I wanted to get an outside view of things. Trying new things here, people. Hang tight, because there will most definitely be good stuff coming.
That being said, I think of fanfiction as pure entertainment so everybody just relax. If this were serious stuff, my grammar would be a thousand times better and I'd be getting paid.
Also, I never write original characters for fanfictions, so...I'm sorry if he's terrible. I just thought I'd try something new. Obviously, I'm not Cajun, so forgive any errors I made in researching the actual Cajun dialect. I did my very best to honour the culture (it's a fascinating one). The key to understanding some of the Cajun phrases is at the bottom of the page for those who care.
Chapter One: Le Petit Cabri
**The Lieutenant**
The world was a shitty place before the dead started walking around like they owned the joint.
Seemed everywhere a man went there was a beaten, broken creature who everyone avoided because they made them uncomfortably aware of how imperfect the world was, and that was still before the world had gone down the drainpipe.
Now it was easier to identify the pariah's, they drooled, groaned and dragged their sorry asses over hills and down valleys just to get at their next meal.
Hell, he'd even seen a couple of them bastards trying to slog their way through the Louisiana bayou back home. The uggies had no sense of how to do things the easy way, because they had no sense left.
That was okay by him. It made carrying out his orders easier.
His commanding officers had told them 'shoot to kill', take down every last one of them, and that was what he planned on doing.
One by one his squad had left him, either picked off by a lucky uggie or just plain run off in the night.
Heading home, he assumed. And to be honest, the Lieutenant didn't blame them. The more they patrolled from small town to small town, the more he realized there was no one left alive. The orders over the radio had stopped coming nearly nine months ago, the last word out of the old field radio he carried on his back had been to keep clear of the major cities, and then the damned thing went dead.
Hell, until a few months ago, he had assumed he was the only couyon left alive on earth.
Didn't matter. Everything he left back home in Basile, Louisiana was inanimate and cold, nothing that could warm him on dark nights anyhow.
It was on one of his patrols, moving across the great state of Georgia, that he came upon a high, grey brick wall, beyond that towered an old looking church of some sort and some equally dated looking buildings surrounding it.
When he had scaled the wall, to perch high and get his bearings, he was surprised to find a handful of nuns working in a garden below. At the time they didn't notice him as he perched on their wall. They seemed too intent on gathering the bounties of their vegetable garden.
With his rifle shouldered, he had watched them at work, amazed to find life so deep in the woods.
Of course, surrounded by the high wall and the thick forest, he shouldn't have been so surprised at the time.
He remembered looking around the inside of the walled in area for guards.
All the groups he had come across in his journeys had armed men and women to act as lookouts. The sisters inside the wall had none of this, they merely worked hard and fast, plucking fruits and vegetables from the plants and dropping them in wicker baskets.
That had all been a little less than seven months ago, if his digital watch still served him correctly.
Now he was hunting, not just taking out uggies – as was and would remain to be his orders – but he was stalking a wild turkey through the woods. He had been on the trail of the little bastard for nearly a month now, keeping a keen eye out for its droppings, looking for a sign of the little monster, just because a little girl asked for turkey.
Inside the convent – as he had learned it was – was only ten other people, the old Mother Superior whom he had taken to calling Old Missy, a wee little thing of a girl who became Little Missy, seven nuns and a priest. The rest, they had said, went down the hill into a small, nearby town to help out once the trouble broke and they never came back.
Those that remained needed the protein a vegetable couldn't provide and not a single one of them knew how to use a gun. Which left him hunting daily for meat.
How they all managed to make it through the hell that was happening all across the country, he couldn't say. Luck, probably, and the fact that the convent was so far removed from civilization that no one thought to venture in their direction.
He was probably the biggest couyon he ever knew taking on the sole responsibility of caring for those in the convent, but he was also a protector by nature and couldn't just walk away. Not from a group of Christ's own or a pischouette like Little Missy, especially when she turned those big brown eyes of hers upon him and asked if they could have a wild turkey for Sunday dinner.
That had been eight Sunday's ago.
The turkey turned out to be an elusive, ugly bastard.
Crawling slowly over a fallen tree, the Lieutenant spied a creature moving, crashing through the brush and brought himself to a halt. By the jerking movements, the irrational direction the creature was stumbling, he assumed it was just another uggie and raised his rifle to his shoulder, eyeing the thing through the high powered scope.
He had never seen an uggie dragging the carcass of another, so he lowered the weapon and made his move closer to what he assumed was a living, breathing human being.
A few feet from it he began to smell the blood and the gunpowder, as the man standing began to slow his exodus from wherever the hell he came from. His legs were shaking, trembling like the legs of a newborn fawn, the larger man he was hauling around dropped from his grip, falling to the ground with a thud. The one standing fell to his knees right after, collapsing in exhaustion.
But he wasn't going down without a fight, as he gripped his unloaded crossbow in his hands and turned on the Lieutenant who was emerging from the underbrush, heading for them.
Predator-like blue eyes narrowed at him, but they were glassy from blood loss.
As though on instinct, the man pulled the trigger of his crossbow, but it clicked, empty, the string not even drawn into place.
Panting, the man dropped his weapon and weakly reached for something at his hip, finding it barren, he growled.
"Fuck you," he muttered in a thick Georgian accent, dropping face first onto the forest floor.
Glancing around to ensure that the man wasn't yelling obscenities at a creeping uggie, the Lieutenant found the forest empty and furrowed his brow a little, knowing the obscenity was for him, before dropping to one knee to survey the damage done to the two men. He looked for bite marks or anything that looked ominous, but came up with only weapon wounds.
The bigger one, the grande beede as the Lieutenant knew he was going to take to calling him, had one hand and a mean look on his face, but his heart was still weakly pumping blood as his pulse caressed the Lieutenant's fingertips every time it beat.
The littler one, the petit cabri, with his goat-like scruff and wolf-like eyes, was alive as well, his pulse stronger, but still dangerously sluggish in his artery.
Both men looked like they had fought the devil all the way through hell and came out running on the other side, there were bruises and welts and cuts to both of them that looked both defensive and accidental, but the blood would attract the uggies and the Lieutenant knew he had to find some way to get them out of the woods to safety.
Not that he trusted them, but he was a good man and wouldn't just leave them. If he left men to their deaths in the forest, it made him no better than a murderer and he wasn't about to let his morals go down with the rest of society.
Taking his heavy combat knife, he hacked at two sturdy trees the size of his arm and knocking them down, tied them together.
It took him a good half an hour to make a tripod stable enough to stack the two men onto, then another half an hour of dragging them through the woods to get back to the trail that lead back to the convent's back gate.
Father O'Rourke greeted him at the gate with the pistol the Lieutenant had given him and a quiet, worried look on his face. He was a middle aged man, shockingly boisterous for a preacherman, but he had a warmth in his blue eyes that reminded the Lieutenant that the man did actually care for people, just in his own way.
"Who are these men?" He asked, opening the gate.
"I think they're selling door-to-door insurance," the Lieutenant teased, tearing up the once lush green lawn of the convent with his dragging load. The winter had browned it, turned it into a dead mess of untrimmed straw-like scruff and the Spring was only just beginning, so he was sure it wouldn't matter much anymore anyways. The new growth would clear up his drag marks.
Locking the gate back up, the Father reached down and shouldered the little one, taking a burden off of the Lieutenant's own hands.
He nodded his thanks and carried on faster now that he only had one man on his tripod, heading for the building that housed the convent's infirmary and care area for the older nuns.
Toeing open the door's latch with his combat boot, the Lieutenant pushed open the door and knelt to shoulder the grande beede onto his back, just as Sister Mary Claire, the young nursing nun hurried out from her backroom at the sound.
She was a nervous sort of woman, high strung, always looking around with big green eyes at the slightest sound. If the Lieutenant was a betting man, he'd say she saw something, something that made her a little more aware of the situation than the others, but if she did, she never said a word about it.
"What happened?" She demanded. "Who are these men?"
Not wanting to repeat himself ten times over, the Lieutenant dropped the heavy man on a cot and stepped back, hoping he could get away with ignoring her inquiry.
Buzzing around the two men, Sister Mary Claire left the Lieutenant and Father O'Rourke to eye each other in an out of the way corner. A while back, the Lieutenant had told Father O'Rourke about the state of humanity outside the walls of the convent. He regretted it, but felt the man needed to know. The only people who knew how badly the world was outside the walls were the Father, Mother Superior, Little Missy and the Lieutenant.
He wished the little one didn't know, but she had arrived at the gate a couple of months after him, dirty and hungry, blood soaking her little dress and hair.
She never said a word about what happened to anyone, she never spoke much at all, except to chirp out commands to him like a little princess.
He forgave her; the girl was in a whole new world and unable to comprehend. Besides, he couldn't help but adore her; she had a draw that pulled people in. All of the sisters and even Father O'Rourke spoiled her a little more than they should have, but with what she had been through they wanted some form of healing for her and if doing her bidding pleased the little one, who were they to argue.
It wasn't like she demanded the world.
Remembering the wee boo, he cursed softly. The wild turkey got to live one more day in the woods, but after that there would be a feast.
..-~-..
..-~-..
By the time Sister Mary Claire finished up, the Lieutenant and Father O'Rourke had both fallen asleep propped up in chairs against the wall.
"They're in bad shape," she said softly, washing her bloody hands. "Looks like they fought the good fight, but the big one has a bullet wound to his shoulder that won't stop bleeding and the little one has a sprained wrist and several deep cuts to his arms. We have antibiotics to prevent infection, but they could both do with some blood and without knowing their blood types…"
"Will they live?" Father O'Rourke cut to the chase.
"If I can get the big man's shoulder to stop bleeding, find the source, then he might make it, I have more hope for the little one, but…they need rest before I can tell for sure."
The Lieutenant nodded, moving across the room to the beds.
Tearing a sheet off an empty cot on his way by, he started tearing strips off and began to tie the men to the cots.
"What are you doing?" Sister Mary Claire demanded.
"Taking precautions." He explained. "With a house full of hens, I don't want these boys to get any ideas."
He halted for a second when he went to tie the grande beede's wrist on his right hand, before shrugging. Wasn't much he could do with a stump anyways.
Straightening up once the men were secure, he eyed the Father and Sister both, before nodding. "Padre, watch the men, don't untie them for anything, Sister you watch yourself around them, yeah?"
The two nodded.
"Mais, I'm going to see if I can catch something for dinner before the sun dies," he muttered, marching back out into the world full of the walking dead.
The Cajun Dialect
Couyon - Silly or foolish person. Stupid, idiotic.
Pischouette - Runt, little person (feminine form).
Grande Beede - Big clumsy man.
Petit Cabri - Tiny goat.
Mais - Well. Used at the beginning of a sentence usually. Eg: 'mais, might as well get to work'.