They came across a car graveyard a short time later. Rick navigated the Bronco through the maze of steel coffins with an expert hand. His face may have betrayed nothing, but the way his eyes shifted from left to right told her he searched every vehicle they passed for some sign or clue of his missing wife and son.
Every empty vehicle magnified his fear, grief, and frustration. It snapped in the depths of his eyes, as bold and as clear as the rips of lightning that ripped the twilight blanket covering the mountains rising up in the distance. She desperately wanted to reach out to him, to comfort him, to let him know she understood everything he was going through at that moment.
Even knowing her family as she did, she did still fear for their safety. She wished she could tell him it was gonna be okay, that he would find his wife and son safe at the end of the yellow brick road, but she couldn't. Not because she didn't think there wasn't any hope of him finding them, oh, no. It was more because she knew this new world they lived in offered no guarantees.
She figured that out long before Rick Grimes came into her life.
She figured it out on the night Jeffrey Wilkes returned home with other neighbors and friends as a member of the walking dead, intent on doing one thing: feeding...
...
Blue Ridge, Georgia
10 days after the outbreak
Word came down just after midnight about another mob gathering outside the barricade they hastily erected. The hodgepodge barrier had been fashioned from old fencing, abandoned vehicles, metal sheeting and reinforced by cinder blocks and heavy stone prevented the hungry horde from reaching the nourishment they instinctively knew to be on the other side of the wall.
The walkers moaned their collective frustration, their confusion, pleading for relief from the starvation that gnawed upon their backbones with the ferocity of a pack of hyenas. The horde of undead repeatedly walked into the wood structure, slapped at it with palms that no longer felt the roughness of the wood against them, tore at it with nails that cracked and split down to the bone. People inside the camp shouted in order to stir the others from their beds.
Dozens of windows got thrown open so that angry, fearful and distraught faces could stare out in order to see for themselves what the commotion was about. Many watched with bated breath to see whether or not the reconstructed walls would keep the undead from getting inside the camp.
As if the barrier had been constructed from sand, the planks splintered beneath the collective weight of so many bodies repeatedly shoving against it. One huge section of fence came down with a roar that rattled the windows of every house that lined the first half of the street.
It was a sound the walkers could hear, but which they no longer had any auditory system left in which to translate into sensical sound. They felt the vibrations as they traveled through the bottoms of their cracked and peeling feet, up their spindly legs and into their spines to where it triggered the only autonomic reflex they had remaining to them.
A massive dirt cloud kicked up where the huge chunk smashed down upon the dry ground, obscuring the pack from the view of those who waited for them to appear with their hearts slamming like pistons against their ribcages. The wait did not turn out to be a long one.
The first handful of figures staggered through the huge ball of dust, each one bound and determined to rid themselves of an ache that refused to go away, no matter how much they fed.
Some of the horde came one by one, others two by four, and more still three by five. They fanned out like a pack of wolves, each and everyone ready to attack as one deadly force. From her own vantage point atop her roof, Raya could see how all of the undead were in various stages of death and decomposition.
None were aware that their flesh was slowly peeling away from their bones, or that fragments of necrotic muscle and tissue dripped like gooey rain behind them, or that with every bumbling step they took their tendons snapped, cracked and popped like Rice Krispies.
Each and every man and woman who came through that opening was completely oblivious to the fact that the only reason for why they still functioned was because their brains were unable to perform the system shutdown necessary to grant them release from the curse that this cold, cruel and calculating world placed upon them.
Inside the makeshift camp, people scattered. Doors slamming drowned out the atonal chorus of the damned. Rifle barrels protruded from second-floor windows, barking fire and filling the night air with the smell of cordite and blood. Children shrieked in terror and searched for any place to hide until the worst of the storm had passed.
Some of the creatures went down in the bursts of gunfire, but Raya, much like everyone else, saw they didn't remain down for long. So, gunshots tend to have about as much effect upon them as a taser would.
The thought was not a comforting one.
With rising dread, she watched as other members of the horde took errant bullets to their chest and abdominal cavities, barely flinching at the pain, and with many not even recognizing they had been shot, much less wounded.
Gunfire continued to echo from all directions as the swarm of undead moved forward with steadfast determination, unbelievable precision, and ferocious intent. The stench of so many undead bodies collected in one place rose up like floodwaters, clogging the air with the acrid stench of pus, blood, and rancid flesh.
The collective clamor of the undead reminded Raya of the buzzing of bees, their dissonant moans muting out all other ambient sounds save for their pitiful pleas. Some of the undead pulled mangled, putrefied legs behind them as if they were huge chains trying to fasten them to the parched earth.
Others stumbled towards those who had been brave enough to have crept out from their homes in order to fire at the mob. Their internal organs hung out from the gaping holes that had been carved into their abdominal and chest cavities, their heads lolling back and forth like bobble heads, and their gaping maws dripping maggots and worms in their wake. People quickly started to run out of bullets, options, and hope.
Jonas McGrath found himself caught between the frenzied undead and the barrage of bullets being fired by his friends and neighbors. He remained crouched beside an old blue Chevy, his shock keeping him from making any sort of race to safety. He clearly had no idea that the fear dripping down his face only made him smell like a Christmas goose. A large group of them slowly turned in his direction. One of them, a woman who Raya recognized as Donna Stevens, stumbled towards Jonas, whining pathetically with her want, and her need for sustenance.
So fixated was she upon assuaging her terrible demand for a taste of his salt glazed flesh that she barely felt the bullets that slammed into her back, side, and right thigh. She continued coming towards him, stretching out gnarled, blackened fingers, but the younger man came to his senses before she could sink her talons into him, squawking a curse as he rolled out of her reach.
Donna grunted her annoyance and gave chase, but Jonas made a break for it when a stray round slammed into her thigh and dropped her down to one knee. The ginger-haired man found himself surrounded by the rest of a mob hellbent upon satisfying their thirst, same as Donna.
"Help me! Dear God, help me!"
People turned in his direction, taking aim as he fought his way to freedom, but a stray bullet clipped his side, and he was thrown back down to the ground.
"Help!"
Donna and the others all descended upon him in one collective rush, their howls muting out Jonas's high-pitched shrieks of pain and terror.
"Help me!" he pleaded. "Somebody, please! Help me!"
Raya stood, every ounce of the crime fighter inside her screaming at her to go and do something that would help him escape before the horde ripped him to shreds. The rational part of her mind, the one that she couldn't shut off no matter how hard she tried, told her about how there was absolutely nothing she could do, save for stand here and watch as an innocent man became food for the new predators taking over the world.
Nausea rolled greasily in her belly as the animals ripped into Jonas, Donna on his left side, chewing through the faded blue of his denim into his thickly muscled thigh, and straight through to the vein underneath while a boy that looked maybe all of fifteen ripped into Jonas's throat, tearing open his jugular with his razor sharp teeth.
Blood spurted, coating the youth and the rest of the monsters in a thick coating of sticky magma that brought more undead to the feast. Raya, as well as the rest of the once quiet neighborhood, were all forced to watch Jonas get reduced to nothing more than a quivering mass of flesh and bone, twitching and gurgling, as the scraggly youth and the others all shared his face and intestines. Raya counted the seconds that it took for the poor man to stop moving in heartbeats.
It took ten, long and agonizingly slow beats before the end came.
Not that any of the walkers who chewed on what remained of Jonas, cared. All that mattered to them, all they cared about, all they knew was that at that moment the hunger that had been religiously dogging them was satiated.
The undead horde was so intent on feeding that they never noticed a man in a flannel button down with the sleeves ripped off slowly curve around the corner of Ellen and Troy Jones's house, eyes narrowed intently upon the oblivious horde, his lean body rippling with every step he took. Raya spotted the man from out the corner of her eye and turned to watch as he hefted up a Horton Scout HD 125 crossbow in his well-muscled arms.
The confident and cool way he held the weapon more than told her that he was quite adept at wielding it.
And that he was quite intent on using it, too.
Whatever words she might have shouted at the man, and she wasn't rightly sure what she was even going to yell at him, died before they could even form. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth as she watched the young boy tear off one of Jonas's finger at the same time as the sandy-haired stranger took aim with that weapon of death he cradled so lovingly.
Her breath came in tattered rasps as she watched as the undead teen chewed on his proliferated digit, completely oblivious to the fact that the hunter's finger was curved around the trigger of that weapon he held so calmly.
Every ounce of her rebelled at what she knew was about to happen. The crime fighter inside her begged her to leap from the roof and save the boy from his intended fate. The rational side of her screamed at her about how she would be torn apart in seconds if she attempted to save the teen.
Resigned frustration careened around inside her. She had never felt so helpless; so useless. Being forced to do nothing, beyond stand there and watch as the once-human boy swallowed his tasty morsel as the man fired a bolt from that crossbow, was the most bitter pill she had ever had to swallow.
The teen never heard the familiar thwack as the bolt pierced through the fetid air, flying straight and true as it streaked right towards him.
He never felt as that bolt, its green and orange feathers the only color to be seen amidst so much gray, slammed through the back of his skull, airbrushing swatches of blood and rancid brain matter all over the side of that old, beat-up Chevy.
Quite simply, the kid who should have been worrying about things like getting his driver's license, reaching first base with a girl or boy who'd caught his eye, and what college he would be attending once he graduated high school, didn't have to worry about anything.
Not anymore, at least.
Raya watched the kid's emaciated figure slump to the ground, her heart heavy as a musket ball, and her soul bleeding for the family who likely were out there and grieving for his loss. For a moment, she imagined that boy to be her own son, Christopher. They were about the same age, she saw, with similar lanky builds and tastes in clothing.
They had the same shade of hair styled in that just got out of bed fashion. Their skin looked to be about that same golden hue that all outdoor types tended to sport, their eyes could even be the same deep shade of green. For all intents and purposes, that boy down there could have been hers.
A boy who was now one of the undead because nobody in the free world had been able to stop him from getting infected by whatever the hell was causing people to die and then come back to life. A teen who would never know all the wonders that awaited him because some asshole, organization or biological event decided it was time to eradicate the human race.
Her vision fractured as she stared at that unmoving figure, anticipating that at any moment he would rise up, as so many of the others who'd been shot had, and continue feeding upon what little remained of Jonas. The seconds ticked by, one by one, but the boy didn't get up to again walk the Earth.
What the…? Raya watched, stupefied, as the man stalked forward and yanked his crossbow bolt from out of the boy's cranium and reload it. Is that boy actually… dead? She wondered. No, that's impossible. Nothing kills the undead. Military personnel, what few members of law enforcement that remained, as well as people who knew how to fire automatic weapons had all shot these things, most often to no avail. So, what did this man do that they had not?
Raya looked more closely at the still figure, but the boy didn't blink so much as an eyelid. Both of her eyebrows shot up at the same time as there was another thwack. She looked and saw that a female member of the undead had joined her teenage companion in the great beyond.
So, Raya mused as she watched the man stroll forward with cool and casual reassurance to reclaim his twice-used bolt, head shots are what officially stop the undead. That's… interesting.
That she had actually managed to find something fascinating about these monstrous creatures should have disturbed her. At the very least, her enthrallment with these undead beings should have had her circling a date on the calendar for when she would commit herself to Arkham for a seventy-two-hour psych evaluation.
However, it didn't. As she watched the man continue to eliminate the undead with the same type of ruthless efficiency that her family used to bring down Gotham's criminals, she reasoned that part of her interest stemmed from the fact that she was a doctor and viewing the undead as the complex puzzle they actually were.
Now that her initial shock and fear had worn off, she could properly view the undead for what they were: complex puzzles. She could, in her own bizarre way, appreciate the technical aspects of whatever this virus or adaptation was. How the infected had come to be was now the greatest mystery known to mankind. Figuring out the answer, what the who, why and how was what Bruce had taught her to do.
Seeing whatever this was, acknowledging that it was complex by its very nature and design was how she processed the problem she was attempting to solve. Seeing the physical and psychological toll that this virus had taken upon those infected, though, also served to remind her of how humans were, at their very core, nothing more than walking, talking, thinking and feeling computers.
The body was little more than a soft gel casing that served to house and protect the intricate mainframe that operated, controlled and executed every one of their central processes: the brain. She'd already reasoned out that it was something in the brain that was preventing death from occurring. It made sense that only by manually shutting down the brain could they finally put a stop to these creatures.
Yet, simmering just below her sick, morbid fascination with this revelation was a volcanic rush of disquiet and disgust. The creatures swarming the street below had been human once upon a time. Underneath it all, these things were still human beings, many of whom who had never done anything wrong in their lives.
Logistically, she knew that killing them was what she had to do. She knew it was the only thing she could do. However, it went against everything her and her family believed in. They all, with the exception of Jason and their littlest bird, Damian, had willfully pledged to uphold Bruce's rule about never taking a life.
Not even if that life really deserved to be ended, she thought as the image of a pasty-faced freak rose in her mind. However, the other side of her, the one that was trained as a doctor, whispered about how granting mercy to the damned was nowhere the same as cold-blooded murder. Even the man below was not killing these hapless creatures with the same brutal disregard as men like the Joker, Penguin or Two-Face would.
It was simply a matter of survival for him.
For her, though, it was absolutely unthinkable. These people hadn't asked to be turned into monsters. They hadn't been given a choice in what was going to happen to them. They hadn't been told about what would become of them. They definitely didn't deserve to be callously put down just because that was what they had become.
Even as she thought it, the man with the crossbow used the knife that was in a leather sheath by his thigh to take out another of the undead before they could tear into him as the female and teenaged boy had ripped into poor Jonas.
"Mom?" she heard Christopher whisper. "Mom? What's going on?"
A/N: Hello, all! I hope the week has been good to you!
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