Glenn's fever dream Part 2.


9. That's God laughing

"Which one do you need?"

"Huh?" Glenn said, blinking. He was standing in front of Dale's RV, the grill open, the guts of the thing pulled apart, the hose that was always a pain in the ass hanging loose.

"Which screw driver do you need, Glenn?" Andrea asked him again. He looked over at her, the sun behind her creating a nimbus around the crown of her head in her artfully disheveled blonde curls, almost as if rays of light were arcing out from her—that she was glowing. Glenn squinted, stepping back. He remembered this moment too—the day after Dale had died... after the walker had torn open his belly and left him to bleed to death in agony as they'd all stood by, helpless, horrified... after Daryl had to put a bullet in his brain. Dale...he had just been with him a minutes ago—hadn't he? Floating on the calm clear waters of the quarry...

"Flathead...radiator's always a flathead." Glenn replied, repeating what Dale had told him, what he'd already said to Andrea the first time this had happened.

"Don't know why we're bothering with this." Andrea said, handing him the tool out of Dale's tool bag.

"What?" Glenn asked, surprised. That wasn't what she'd said the first time.

"We'll get it running, Jimmy will die inside it, like I almost did, like Amy did. I hate this piece of shit thing. It's all a god damn waste of time."

"What's wrong with you?" Glenn asked, pushing his ball cap back off his forehead, feeling a wave of nausea—he didn't remember it having been this sweltering that day.

"Well, I'm dead. That tends to fuck up your day." Andrea said dryly.

Glenn had no come back to that, so he just turned back to working on the radiator hose, using the flathead to loosen the clamps that held it in place.

"I'm sorry, Glenn." Andrea said in a quieter, more placating tone. "For everything. For what happened to you...what happened to Maggie. I never got to tell you that." Glenn stopped what he was doing. "I didn't know."

"You didn't want to know." Glenn said angrily, stabbing the screwdriver through the hose so it hung there, swinging from the force he'd used to puncture it. He rounded on her, getting in her face, "You were happily playing hide the salami with that psychopath and –"Andrea burst out laughing.

"Hide the salami?" she exclaimed. "You been taking euphemism lessons from the Dixon brothers?"

"I think that'd be 'bumping uglies.'" Glenn observed wryly, letting his anger drain away as he watched her beautiful face, her cool blue eyes warm with humor. He realized how much he'd missed her—almost as much as he'd missed Dale. They'd been together almost from the beginning. She, Amy and Dale had come across him right after his pizza delivery car had been jacked as he was trying to use it to get out of the city, to get home to his mother and sisters.

Dale had jumped out of the RV like some avenging angel, aiming his rifle at the head of the scum bag who was wailing on Glenn while his buddies piled into the piece of crap used Subaru, Andrea honking the horn, attracting walkers from blocks around. They barely got out of there before they were surrounded; the vato who had been beating Glenn had not been so lucky.

"Did you ever wish..." Andrea began...but stopped, sighing. "When have wishes and prayers ever done anyone any good?" she muttered almost to herself, paraphrasing something she'd once heard Daryl say.

"What?" Glenn asked, leaning on the side of the RV. Andrea dropped the tool bag.

"Do you ever wish we would've just stayed in the CDC? Let the time run out?"

"No. Never." Glenn said adamantly. He thought of Maggie, Hershel, and Beth; couldn't imagine his life without them.

"Even knowing how horribly so many of us would die? Sophia, Dale, Shane, T-Dog...Lori...me?"

"You know, don't you—what's going to happen." Glenn said slowly. What had Dale called it? Omniscience of the grateful dead?

"I only know what could happen. Some bad, some good...some horrific nightmares, some ecstatic dreamscapes..." she smiled at him. "People are amazingly resilient. They can find love even at the end of the world." She said, somehow looking sad and happy all at the same time. "You did."

Glenn ducked his head, hiding his smile, feeling guilty about his luck in having Maggie; that they had both survived everything they'd been through, the farm herd, Andrew's attack on the Prison, Woodbury, when so many of their friends had not.

"It doesn't feel fair..." he finally sighed and was surprised when she stepped into his space and put her arms around him.

"You're burning up." she said gently into his ear. "Your appendix is trying to decide when to explode and spread infection throughout your abdomen. When that happens you'll develop a massive infection. It will be agonizing and by the end you'll be begging them to put a bullet in your brain just like Dale."

Glenn staggered back from her words, a look of horror and disbelief on his face. Andrea smiled sadly and crossed her arms in front of herself and shrugged. Then an almost mischievous look brightened her features.

"Or if they can stop playing grab-ass long enough to get back on the road, Daryl and Carol will find the medical equipment in time to—'

"Grab-ass?" Glenn's eyes went wide, that image so incongruous to what he knew of the way Daryl related to women that it wrested his attention away from the scenario of his painful death she'd just spun out for him, his misfiring overheated brain welcoming the change.

"Oh yeah. It's like an episode of True Blood in my head right now... with a little less blood...and walkers instead of vampires...they're holed up bein' sexy in a storm shelter outside Senoia—but they're surrounded and they're gonna have to fight their way out—Carol will have to save him—if she doesn't...

"Bullet in the brain time?" Glenn said, resigned, and Andrea frowned, shaking her head slightly up and down. Then she gave him a sultry smile and it was his turn to frown. "What?"

"Well, if I'd have known what a stud Daryl could be, I'd have never wasted my time on Shane and Phillip...Carol's a lucky woman...he does this thing with his tongue-"

"Ew!" Glenn blurted out, "Can we go back to talking about my imminent agonizing death? Please?"

"Just paying you back for all those nights they had to listen to you and Maggie groping in your sleeping bag last winter." Andrea said with a grin. The reference to sleeping bag made his brain fritz back to something Merle had said.

"I had a crush on Amy." Glenn said.

"I know..." Andrea smiled. "She thought you were cute too." they both smiled sadly as they thought of the sweet young woman whose life had been snuffed out too soon. "You would've been happy." she told him, deliberately not telling him how long they would've lived and died differently if they'd have gotten together. "Like you'll be with Maggie." she added kindly.

"I don't want to die." Glenn said, hanging his head, closing his eyes.


"None of us do. I sure as hell didn't." said a distinctive gentle male voice, its unusual timbre and pauses instantly familiar. Glenn opened his eyes and found himself back on the water, but it wasn't the clear blue of the quarry, it was black, dark as strong coffee. He was seated on a bench in a swamp boat, mangrove trees hung with draping moss overhead. He looked at the seat in front of him and saw a dead man, his clothes and skin partially covered in a light layer of leaves and green moss, his features gray, and his eyes yellow tinged with red. He looked fairly recently turned, still recognizable.

"Jim?"

"Hey Glenn. How you been?"

"Dying apparently—you?"

"Walker."

"Sucks."

"Don't it just." the dead man sighed. They heard a splash, and Glenn turned his head and saw a white flash as a svelte nude female body on the shore dived into the dark water and swam towards them.

"Is that...?" Glenn asked, thinking he recognized the girl who cut through he water with firm strokes of her arms, her feet kicking out behind her. Jim nodded.

"She swims here. They all do." he picked up a paddle. "Cept me." he smiled sadly, "I got a boat...have to watch out for the roots though..." he propelled the boat towards the swimmer.

Glenn looked down at the water and saw ripples, like the ones created by the bodies of gators passing close to the surface.

"Don't lean too close...not nice to tempt 'em." Jim admonished him and Glenn looked back over his shoulder, suddenly realizing he was in a boat with a walker. "Long as I'm still talkin' you're safe." Jim said, as if he could read Glenn's thoughts. Hell, the dude had always been a little spooky, maybe he could.

"Can't. Just know what you might do...say..." Jim said laconically, back paddling to steer around a large mangrove stump projecting out of the water.

"You knew I was worried about you being a walker...that I was going to ask you if you could read my mind."

"You just did."

Glenn sighed. All of this metaphysical bullshit was making his head hurt again. It was stifling hot here under the canopy of oppressive weeping trees. Ignoring Jim's earlier warning he dipped his right hand in the water, wanting to draw it up to cool his head, and it was immediately snatched up by a grasping hand, the walker attached to it rising up out of the water, snarling, trying to pull him out of the boat.

Glenn screamed, pulled back, the whale gray water-swollen walker coming with him. It was every nightmare he'd ever had about the walker in the well coming true. Did this mean he was dead? Back in his bunk in the prison?

He heard a whistle and then a chunk and a loud crack, like breaking open an ostrich egg with a hammer. Walker Jim, bringing the paddle down on the head of the well walker, was standing over him. He kept striking the thing until it released Glenn's hand; fell back into the water with a syrupy splash.

Breathing like he'd just run a marathon, Glenn lay on the bottom of the boat. Jim returned to his seat, to his slow paddling. They heard the slow even splashes of the swimmer.

"Tried to warn ya." Jim said in that sad tired voice. "Your choice. Stay or go."

"How is it my choice?" Glenn said angrily. "I didn't ask for my appendix to go bad—'

"We all have the will to live, Glenn. That's what it means...when God breathed life into Adam. He gave him the will to keep on going. Our choice whether we let the trials he throws in our way defeat us. What do you have to live for, son?"

"Maggie...the baby...my family..."

"You got plans. You got a future with them. That tethers you to the world. When you let go...the will goes too..."

"Is that why you...why you gave up?" Glenn asked. Jim had been bit on his belly. There was no coming back from that.

"I wanted to be with my family...been tryin' to get to the other shore so's I can be with 'em." he indicated the opposite shoreline, the west, from where the swimmer had come. "But every time I get close...bring another one of you across...I'm back where I started. Another of you in my boat."

"Another of us?" a feeling of dread started in the pit of Glenn's stomach and spread up into his chest, out his arms to his fingers, tingling in terror.

"T-Dog was the last one. A pure soul. Gave his life for Carol. No terrible sins that he needed to hang around in the waiting room for very long...like you."

"Fuck." Glenn whispered. Jim was the ferryman.

The splash of a head breaking the water pulled his attention back to the side of the boat. Glenn looked over the side.

"Glenn." said a calm happy young woman's voice. She pulled herself up, leaning her chin on her hands overlapping both arms on the side of the low boat. She looked like a mermaid, a Nereid, a water sprite. Her light blonde hair slicked back off of her face, china doll porcelain features subsumed to huge ice blue eyes, dark water sluicing off of her perfect moon pale shoulders.

"Amy..." Glenn whispered, terrified.

"It's not far now, Glenn." she said, smiling, reaching out her hand to him.

"No. I can't... I won't..." Glenn said, looking back to Jim. "Take me back—please—turn the boat around and take me back!"


"The boat?" Rick asked, standing in the doorway of the cell, looking over at Hershel. The older man had been taking a shift watching over Glenn so Maggie could get some rest, and was bathing him in an alcohol bath to try and cool him. He'd give anything for some ice right now. The boy's fever was 103°. If it didn't break soon they were going to lose him.

"Been talking up a storm," Hershel told him. Something niggled at Rick's memory—another fevered man in a bed asking him if he'd watch the boat...another man he'd failed to protect, to save.

"God's laughing again..." Rick murmured. Hershel's head came up at that.

"What?"

"Just something a dead man told me once." Rick said.


The prompt for the first part of this came from a reader comment about Glenn never getting to have closure with Andrea, so thanks, horrorphile!

I loved Jim's little hallucination about the boat in the mangrove swamp when he's talking to Rick in the RV in the S1 episode, "TS19." Jim had already shown some sort of prescience by dreaming about the walker attack on the camp and digging the graves, so it didn't seem too much of a stretch to imagine that he was having a vision of his upcoming ferryman duties on the border of the afterlife. I also like being able to let Amy finally get to be a sort of mermaid/siren, tempting Glenn to let go of life and join her there.

And of course I also foreshadowed what's next for Carol and Daryl...some scary jeopardy ahead.

Thanks for all of your kind reviews—they make me happy and keep me writing!