Chapter 9 "Temporary"
Day 20
The group drove for hours in their new vehicles and eventually made it out of Georgia. They passed the Alabama state line and continued driving for hours. They passed things that they did not even expect to see. In this distance, they once saw what looked like almost fifty walkers, walking together as a unit. Some of the towns they passed through seemed okay, but others were awful. One town on the edge of the Georgia border had half of its buildings completely engulfed in fire.
That night, they set up camp off the road a ways outside of a town, with two people on lookout at any given time. They woke up the next morning and began driving once more after having a light breakfast of canned food and the last of their remaining vegetables from the farm.
Slowly they drove down the lonely roads, cluttered with debris. Crashed or broken vehicles littering the highway, with the occasional blood splatter here and there, walkers roaming all about.
Eventually, they made it into a town and spotted a house that seemed usable. All of their past houses had been farm houses basically in the middle of nowhere. This one was quite a large house sat in the center of a neighborhood. It seemed to be large enough to hold all of them, and they decided to stop and check it out. Arnold, Seth, Lee, and Shawn volunteered to check and clear out the house.
The entrance room was quite large and split off into two directions. To the left, the kitchen and living room were visible. Down the right, a long hallway with many doors could be seen. Seeing no immediate threats, they split up. Lee and Shawn went to the left, exploring the main rooms, while Arnold and Seth went to the right to check out the hallway, which presumably was the bedrooms.
Lee and Shawn made themselves busy with scrounging for supplies, checking out any unexpected doors — which either led outside or to a bathroom or closet — and making sure all windows and doors were secured.
Seth and Arnold decided to split the doors between themselves to save time. Seth took all the doors on the left-hand side of the hallway, while Arnold took all the doors on the right-hand side of the hallway. They agreed to not open any two doors at once, and to wait for the other person to open their door before they open their own.
Their first two rooms were perfectly fine, the only thing seeming off was the room Arnold opened smelling like rotten eggs and soured milk. The trend continued, with every door they opened seeming perfectly fine, though some things being slightly off, like a blood splatter here, or a cracked window there.
At the end of the hall, Seth had just opened his room and was currently inside of it, checking it out, signalling to Arnold that it was okay to open his door. He slowly cracked it open, nervous. As he entered the room it appeared to be, like the others, clear. Relieved, Arnold sat his gun down onto the bed and layed down on his back next to it. He sighed, finally able to rest, and this time on an actual bed! It had been almost a week since he had a bed of his own, and he wanted to enjoy what little time he had with it.
As he was beginning to doze off, he heard a scratching noise under the bed, but figured it was a bug or rat and continued focusing on his relaxation. In an instant, something grabbed onto his right ankle, and he felt an intense pain. A quite delayed reaction, he sat up and yelled in pain, doing his best to get his hands around his gun. Seth bolted into the room and noticed a small walker ripping into Arnold's ankle. Arnold had gotten his hands around his gun and pointed down, figuring he had gotten the aim right, but shot himself in the calf instead and yelled furiously in pain, throwing himself on his back again, writhing in pain. Seth gasped and lowered his gun. He looked around the room before ripping a loose slice of wood off of a dresser. He slammed it into the walker's head, blood spewing out of the hole made with the wood and a the monster's mouth, mixing into Arnold's blood.
By this time, Lee and Shawn had heard the commotion, and Lee had already left to go get the others. Shawn and Seth began working on cleaning Arnold's leg and getting the walker out of the way, but it was stuck to something under the bed. Seth went around the side of the bed and attempted to pull it out from under the bed and found that the walker's legs were tied to the bedposts. Seth used the same piece of wood he used to put down the walker to free it, and he dragged it out from under the bed. It was the body of a young boy, thin and small, no older than 10. Seth grimaced and looked to Shawn, who was pressing his hands against Arnold's legs, attempting to slow the bleeding. They shared worried looks about all of this and Seth began dragging the young walker out through the hall, out the back door so that no one in the group had to see it. Hershel, Maggie, and Patricia came through the doors of the house just as Seth made it through the back. Lee led them to Arnold and Shawn, and the older duo immediately began working on him, cleaning and disinfecting the wound and wrapping it up as best they could. After, Seth rejoined them.
"I'm sorry, Hershel. We should have been more careful. This is my fault," he said to Hershel, genuinely feeling very guilty.
"No, son," Hershel said to Seth, "this isn't anyone's fault. Neither of you could have known. He thought it was safe and it wasn't. If anything, it's Arnold's fault." He paused, and reconsidered his words. "I didn't mean that, I just...I'm sorry Arnold," he said, looking to Arnold's pained, barely conscious face. After checking other beds and blind spots in all of the bedrooms, Seth and Lee helped Arnold get properly into the bed. Hershel knew that no matter what he did for Arnold now, nothing could help him. Saying that aloud though would help no one, though. He cleared his throat sadly and got up to inform the people outside that it was clear to come in and get settled before warning them to be careful and not to disrupt Arnold.
About an hour later, everyone had picked out sleeping arrangements for the seven bedrooms they had to share. The sun was beginning to set, and Arnold had woken up. All of the Greenes were surrounding him, hoping that these would not be the last moments they spent with him. After the initial relief and shock once they saw he was awake, they rushed to help him in any way, adjusting his pillows or kissing him in glee that he had awoken.
Before long, though, Arnold brought the mood back down. He loved them, but he was scared and wanted answers. "I'm going to die, aren't I?" Arnold asked them. "Just like LaRissa...and Aunt Annette." Beth sadly looked to the ground and Maggie shook her head at him.
"No, Arnold," Maggie said. "We don't know that. We don't know how this works. We were able to disinfect your wound pretty quickly after it happened. You're going to be fine."
Though Maggie said it, just like Hershel, she knew she was wrong. That she was lying to Arnold. No one believed her, but they wanted to. God, did they want to.
