Hey, everybody! Welcome to my fic. I'll keep it short - I'd just like to give a warm 'welcome!' to all readers, new and returning. I noticed the relative lack of RickxOC fics on the site, and was struck - Rick is such a lovely, interesting character. I had always liked him, and wanted to write a story with him - and then, late last night as I sat in my bed, I was suddenly struck with inspiration. I couldn't help but type a little story setter up! I hope you all enjoy.
So far I'm thinking that this will probably just be a lovely little side project for me to work on in between my other TWD fics, unless the response is good. Let me know what you think, as always, and I hope you enjoy!
Anyway, that's enough - let's get this show on the road, everybody!
DISCLAIMER: Me no own-y! ;A;
Chapter 1 - Expect the Unexpected
Sweat dripping from his brow, blood seeping slowly into his shirt, Rick stared silently at the unmoving corpse on the side of the road.
All throughout the day, the sun had been beating down harshly, baking him within the stuffy police car he and Shane used for patrols, indefinitely borrowed from the station in what he dubbed a rather worthy use of government property. It had been hard to pry the spare keys from the ring on Officer Lebowitz' pedantically spotless leather belt, even if he had never really liked the steadfastly obnoxious man – and even harder to stop himself from gagging and retching up the pitiful little lunch he had just had when he opened the car he and Shane always used, only to find that Shane had left what looked like half a burger in the backseat which had now effectively reduced the air within to little more than a noxious bomb of cloying, choking nausea.
Swiftly turning away to a patiently awaiting Morgan, he had unsuccessfully tried to ignore the fact that he would be spending the next day or so in the awful stench, feeling a twinge of sympathy for Duane as the young boy's nose scrunched up and his throat gagged harshly, forcing him away from the vehicle as his steadfast father remained where he was, smile straining slightly as the wind carried the putrid heart-attack on a bun over to him. The odour had become all the more unbearable as the day dragged on, even though he had thrown the burger away as soon as he was on the highway, unable to bear it any longer – an altogether revolting combination of its remains and the blinding bolts of the unsympathetic sun making his head swim, furrowing his brow and thinning his mouth against the assault. Throw in the permeating, inescapable stench of the dead outside, and the tense, horrifying quest for his family became all the more excruciating.
Which brings us back to the fly-smothered body outside.
Seeing the flickering, feeble little arrow of the gas meter start to slump downwards – Shane had forgotten to fill the tank again – Rick had cursed through his gritted teeth, a hand coming up to press against his stressed forehead as he let up on the gas pedal, sighing tiredly to himself. Night-time was swiftly approaching at that point, creeping up on the horizon, hitching up his shoulders and tensing his muscles, nagging him with the questions of where he would sleep, would he set camp, find more supplies, how much longer until Atlanta, so on and so forth. He wanted to push on, ignore his growing thirst and rumbling stomach – the small canteen of lukewarm water Morgan had given him quickly depleted in the long hours of driving, the little cans of soggy, unidentifiable meat clattering in the backseat unlikely to give him more than a day or two of nourishment at most. However, despite his adamant desire to continue, his quickly depleting gas and lurking exhaustion – how could someone who had just woken up from a coma be so tired? – were fast becoming an issue. So, to solve at least one issue, he had dug out his coffee-stained, Cynthiana Police Department regulation map of America and searched for the nearest township and its off-shooting gas station.
Juttering to a slow stop, eyes carefully glancing over the area around the small station he had found, he was struck by the mass of utterly still, silent cars. With a convoy of vehicles that size, you would expect at least a few people to be wandering about, but there were none. Alarm growing, instincts niggling and scraping at the back of his mind, he then spotted the half-eaten corpse on the side of the road, a small trio of crows picking conspicuously ignoring picking at it in favour of snapping at a basket of rotten corn. This was a bad sign. In his time on patrols through his small hometown, he had seen a lot of roadkill – always being viciously torn apart by some form of scavenging, opportunistic bird. He simply stared at in silence for a long while, utterly silent, gaze hardening – mind turning back to that poor husk of a human being, the horrifying but painfully sad shell of a woman that had been the first monster he had ever seen outside of his childhood nightmares. It had nearly reduced him to sobbing, the first time he had caught sight of her trapped beneath a bicycle, his stomach turning, mouth falling open at his horrified gasp, his arms jerkily twitching about as she moaned, the devoured remains of her hands weakly clawing out at him.
He shut his eyes at the thought. Without pause, he abruptly decided to just do what needed to be done, reminding himself that Lori and Carl were waiting for him – he hoped to god this were still so, his isolated mind tearing itself to shreds in their absence, his heart spewing awful, uncontainable fear and horror into the empty space they had left – and punched the door handle open, throwing it out for him to swiftly exit. At his sudden movement, the crows who had previously just looked wearily up at his car rumbling slowly down the road scattered, their loud, indignant squawks echoing through the vehicular graveyard Rick now made his way up through, empty canister and loaded gun in hand.
He spared a glance at the collapsed body once more, to see if it was about to reanimate as Morgan had grimly forewarned him of, stuttering up on rotting legs to attack anything within grabbing distance and adding any they could to their damned legion of faceless, aimless drones. Luckily, however, as he nudged it carefully with his tightly booted foot, gun firmly at the ready, it didn't move at all, seeming for all the world to be truly, positively, stone-cold dead. This relieving possibility was further evidenced by the conspicuous dent in the back of its head that he crouched warily downwards to study, a splatter of its dark bile covering the ground, its blood now so far past the point of congealing that it couldn't even pool out around it, instead caught in its various wounds and exposed areas of muscles, hardening stiffly in the concentrated, baking heat. Frowning slightly at the relative freshness of the wound – from what he could tell, anyway, in all its rotting decay – he wondered on who had dealt the final blow before straightening, gaze flickering about to ensure nothing was creeping up on him before he continued on.
The cluttered path through the centre of the mess had evidently been disturbed by many pairs of feet, reinforcing the notion of a large encampment, perhaps even larger than what cars had been abandoned there. It was likely that people had fled on foot in their desperation, leaving behind all material wealth and supplies in favour of survival. Maybe there had been an attack, and everybody had scattered – he was pondering on that notion when, passing by a car window, he caught sight of a decaying carcass, a bullet hole and splattering of dried blood accompanying it. Brow furrowing, he glanced around and found much the same elsewhere – the other cars intermittently housing a firmly housed corpse, their collective, rotting stench making him choke and pull a hand up to cover his face for a moment as he regained his composure. Eventually, slowly pulling the hand away, the realisation that he was never going to find another survivor here washed over him, and he steadily pushing away the niggling sorrow of that comprehension in favour of deciding to just grab the gas he needed and get the hell out of there as soon as possible.
This is mind, he pushed forward again, legs working harder, muscles growing tenser and finger tightening further on the trigger guard of his pistol. Nudging aside the detritus of the desperate haven of pseudo-civilisation the small gas station had once been, he steadfastly turned away from the corpses staring unseeingly at him with accusing eyes, the abandoned, bloody toys of long-past children hitching his breath as he finally neared the middle of the camp, head flicking up in grim relief to the gas pump.
He paused.
'ALL OUT OF GAS.'
His silence dragged on and on. His eyes never left the hasty, haphazard sign nailed shakily above the pump: eyes fixed, hard, disbelieving – before, quite abruptly, he turned, kicked a nearby friendly sign-post encouraging visitors to buy rinky-dink keychains and postcards, and let loose a gritted, pained grunt of fury, head turning reproachfully to the heavens. The empty canister in his hands suddenly felt so much heavier than it had been before, seeming to accuse him of something, pulling on his dirtied fingers and sweating his palm.
A faint, resolute thought at the back of his head that sounded vaguely like Shane encouraged him to throw it away, to just run to Atlanta on foot – but he quashed that stupid train of thought before it got far, recognising that he'd probably only get a few miles in before his supplies depleted and he succumbed to exhaustion. His grating tongue, drying swiftly in the heat and the stress of the last few minutes, jarred uncomfortably at the roof of his mouth, reminding him swiftly of his already present dehydration, another reminder from the part of his mind that was still maintaining some amount of sense in the face of this disastrous development – and a disaster it was, no doubt. He wouldn't have enough fuel left in the sorely depleted tank to ride out in search of another gas station that was probably miles off, and he knew that any nearby town would probably be overrun with the dead. There was simply nothing he could do.
His head turned back down, expression crumpling, features twisting. How the hell he would reach his family now was anyone's guess. He would die for them, he would do whatever it took to reach them – but he had no idea of what to do. It horrified him. The weight of this recognition slumped his shoulders, his posture slipping as he let loose a soft, hitched sigh, the gun in his hands twitching and nudging at him, niggling unwanted thoughts.
There was no way he was ever going to find them.
Abruptly, at that thought, a rock slammed into the back of his head.
Jolted forth with the sudden, powerful impact, he stumbled forward on his abruptly unsteadied legs, the gas canister falling with a loud clang as his hands flew up on instinct to the back of his twinging head, his scratchy throat gritting a pained grunt through his chapped lips, a curse escaping him. In the moment of utter shock he was so suddenly struck with, he was unable to process a proper thought – until, senses kicking back in, he brought up his pistol, whipped around with startling force and lined up his forcibly steady aim, mouth thinning into a determined line.
Before he even got to properly scan the eerily empty space before him, his twitching finger at the ready on his trigger at the bizarreness of it all, a quiet little tremble of a curse floating through the air above him flicked his head up, his gun shifting in aim. After a moment's pause, his brow rose, and he halted.
There, dangling clumsily off the roof of the gas station, a pile of sharp rocks in hand, stood a wide-eyed woman.
Well, there you go! Hope that was to your liking. If you enjoyed that, let me know - it brings a gigantic smile to my face when I see people are enjoying what I've written, and I'd like to see how much interest there is in this type of story :') If you want to see more of my TWD fanfics, check out my DarylxOC fic 'Something to Rely On', and my GlennxOC fic 'The World Changed, Not Us' (wow, I'm fairly going through the men, amn't I? Haha!)
Anyway, as always, wish you guys all the best - see you next time! :)