AN: So, I had a lot of trouble deciding who's POV this chapter should be in. Which is what led me to the idea of an inside perspective at Grady. I hope it worked!
Sgt. Bob Lampson
"We all have a Monster within; the difference is in degree, not in kind."
The linoleum was shiny, so clean he could practically see his own face reflected by the toes of his boots. Bob Lampson was glad he couldn't, wasn't much for looking at himself in the mirror these days. His face was worn, mapped with lines that seemed to appear for every day since the beginning, since the after had begun.
He stood in the familiar attention stance, hands flat at his sides, eyes baring into the wall of the office. It had been a doctor's once; the cleaner white rectangles and squares on the cream wall were the places medical degrees and certificates had once hung, maybe family photos. Now the walls were clear, any signs of the former occupant disregarded down the elevator shaft that ate everything they didn't want to look at any longer in Grady Memorial Hospital. He traced the outline of one rectangle over and over with his eyes, pushing his vision not to fall to the older woman in a heap by his feet.
She was bent over in pain, laying on her side, the yellow sponge long disregarded in a wet puddle beside her. Her breathing was ragged, her eyes clenched shut. They would open to pained slits once and while and he refused to meet them. Ruth reminded him of his wife's grandmother, kind of painfully small town southern who always seemed to have the answer to any question. He'd always liked her, Dawn had always liked her, they were what she called a 'trustee ward' with special access to information and unsupervised work. Now her wrinkled skin was splotched black and blue, one hand fat and purple where it had been stomped on. When these wounds healed, new ones would come, just as they had for the months since the escape. His own boot had been one to crush some of those ribs.
"Sargent," the word escaped from her swollen lips in little more than a hiss, "pl…please."
Lampson counted the squares on the walls again. Every time his mind got to the number 12 he paused. His son would've been 12 on his last birthday; had a police themed party like every other one he'd always insisted on. His wife used to call him "Mr. Good Guy". She was almost annoyed with the way he was always on duty, missing movies because he stopped to help a motorist with their flat tire or stepping in to assist the restaurant management with a disruptive customer. She wasn't really annoyed though; his family had held him on a pedestal of integrity. That was before of course. Before he followed his duties to the hospital instead of back to his home, before he watched the Napalm bombs dropped and knew his wife and child were out there somewhere, dying alone on the city street.
"Stop talking and clean," he barked robotically.
"Lampson," Lt. Dawn Lerner's voice was loud and cold, announcing her presence behind him, "is our ward mouthing off?"
The 67-year-old woman's mouth was practically swollen shut.
"I think she's had enough."
As soon as the words slipped from his mouth Lampson winced.
"Is that so?" Dawn snapped into the side of his face, standing facing him with her hands clasped behind her back. "Because as I recall, Mrs. Chastain has a very heavy debt to repay."
It hadn't been hard to figure out the older woman had been the third conspirator in Beth and Noah's finale escape. With her inside knowledge of the officer's where abouts and easy ability to distract Dawn with discussion over medical inventory, she had helped them plan their exit down to the perfect second. She'd admitted as much when confronted, the sweet façade she wore of the agreeable granny finally crumbling. She'd spit in Dawn's face as they drug her to be tied down.
He nodded in Dawn's direction, took a step towards the old woman and glared down at her, used his boot to nudge her swollen hand.
"My office next," he ordered before turning from the room and heading down the hall. There was no choice in the matter. Good guys didn't exist anymore, he didn't get to play hero.
He stopped at his bedroom, threw upon a drawer to retrieve the crushed pack of cigarettes, palmed one and slipped his lighter into his shirt pocket. He made a bee line for the elevator lobby, the only place Dawn would allow smoking. She was keen on that, pretending old rules as such still meant anything. He'd never smoked before, never even considered it. However, he'd picked up far worse habits than smoking following the world's jolting shift.
If you stood close enough to the open shoot you could hear the echo of the dead groaning 8 floors down, waiting for their next meal to come careening down at them. He wasn't sure how Beth and Noah had managed to make it. The girl was good at fighting the dead, he'd gathered as much. Some of the people they brought in were barely scraping by out there, ones who had come from behind walls that had finally fallen. Some, like Beth, had something else in their eyes, something feral when you looked deep enough. It was the look of someone who had lived on the outside, who had slept, ate and breathed among the infected. That look never left. That look was what kept Beth alive no matter what kind of torture they inflicted upon her, that kept her posture solid long after Gorman decided to make her his personal pet project.
He was glad the other man was dead, glad the Greene girl had left him with a bullet in his head on her way out. Still, had he found her out there on the road Bob would have killed her. It was his duty, his debt. It was what kept him alive.
To make it out of the city, barefoot and armed with only one gun between the two of them, he had to give her credit. It had been a shock to see how far they'd made it when they came across Noah's corpse in the road, two counties outside the city limits. Beth wasn't there but he and Kramer had abandoned the search anyway, there was no way the girl could last alone in the woods. She had left in a bad state, that wrist hanging so unnaturally and one ankle barely able to hold her slight weight.
Ruth would be next, he knew that. There was no paying off this debt, Dawn would work her until she couldn't move. Then the wards would be lined up, forced to watch as the elderly woman had her knees kicked in and fell to her death. He might even be the one to deliver the final blow.
It wasn't until he took the first long drag that he felt the cool metal at the base of his neck, heard the familiar click of a weapon being cocked. His smoke dangled between his lips as he slowly raised his hands.
"Dawn?" he croaked and the menthol tumbled to the ground. He was sure that his superior had come to make it clear that his brief question of her judgement was not going to be tolerated any longer.
A heavy hand snaked around his body and released his sidearm from his holster and then growled. The voice did not belong to Dawn.
"Turn around."
He did so slowly, inching his feet around until the barrel of the gun was cool between his eyes.
The man before him was a stranger, messy brown hair and blue eyes like ice. He wore a ragged leather vest over a flannel, a crossbow slung over one shoulder.
"If you came to steal," he managed calmly, "there are a lot more than just me, all armed. This won't go well."
The man didn't speak, watched him with a tilt to his head like an animal watching its prey.
"From what I hear," he began, his accent telling Bob he had grown up outside the city, that rural Georgia drawl clinging to his words, "you're the one in the business of stealin', stealin' people that is."
"We help people," he argued, the lie tasting bitter, "rescue people on the outside."
"Rescue," the man weighed the word, pursing his lips in disagreement, "didn't know rescue meant rapin', killin', keepin' folks against their will. See my family, we ain't ok with what you do here. Heard a lot of stories."
And then, like the ceiling collapsing on him, Lampson knew who he was staring at.
"Beth," he whispered and those blue eyes turned colder if it was possible, a tension settling in the man's jaw.
"Don't even say her name," he pressed the gun hard into the space between Lampson's eyes, "I'll shoot you where you stand."
"She said you'd come," he managed between shaky breathes.
"I said stop talking about her," this time he was struck in the side, right at his ribs, with the butt of the gun. Lampson doubled over, his breath catching in his throat for a long moment.
"I ain't the only one here, lot more where I came from. They're already here, already inside. Any minute now you're gonna hear the shooting. You, you're gonna come with me and try to talk some of your men down. If they listen, I'm still gonna kill them, but maybe not you. If they listen, maybe at the end you get to keep breathin'."
There had been something about the girl, about the confidence in her eyes when she spoke, that had always brought about a rise of fear in his gut. He'd always known they'd made a mistake bringing her in, keeping her alive.
"When my people come…when he comes…you'll be sorry. You can't just steal people, we aren't things. People love us and if you think nobody is ever gonna come here lookin' for justice than you don't know where I come from."
Beth had spoken that to him from her knees, where she knelt with her hands cuffed behind her back, forced to stare down into the black hole of the elevator shaft after her second escape attempt. Her eyes had been blackened, lip split down the center and he knew that Gorman had inflicted his own kind of personal punishment. Still, she'd held her head high as she spoke to his retreating back, practically spit it at him.
This man, with the icy eyes, scarred knuckles and gravel in his voice, he was the him Beth had spoken of; the justice come knocking. In the old world, he was the kind of man Lampson would have gotten calls about, kind of ragged and suspicious in the wrong setting. Here, in this world, the man in the biker vest was the hero, the moral compass. Lampson was the evil and he knew it well, carried it like the weight of the world. Beth had known; had known that he had conceded to the darkness out of nothing more than weakness.
"You used to keep people safe, what happened to that? You should stop wearin' that uniform Sargent Lampson, you're a disgrace. Too afraid to make it on your own out there? I did, look at me. I made it out there and you couldn't."
She always said his name, all their names, like they were bile in her mouth.
"I'll do whatever you want," he promised, swallowing a lump in his throat, "but….Beth….she's not here, she didn't make it."
He waited for the blast, waited for the blissful end. Instead, the man almost grinned.
"Nah," he shook his head, "she is here."
Lampson felt his eyes widen. She had made it.
And then, with a deafening blast, the first gun shot rang out.
The man took him by the collar and began leading him out of the lobby, his weapon aimed before them. A girl seemed to appear out of nowhere, pretty and Latina with a hat pulled low over her eyes and an AK-47 in her arms. There was that look again, domesticated animal turned wild.
She looked him up and down with disgust and took note of his nametag.
"One down," she clicked her tongue and trained her gun on him and as they led him down the hall. In the rooms wards were cowering by their beds, some had crawled beneath them. Three more shots rang out. At the end of the hall, Licari came bounding around the corner. He was bleeding from the arm but still moving, he raised his weapon and aimed it in their direction. The man fired once and Licari was dead before he hit the ground, falling at an awkward angle.
"Stay in your rooms," the girl shouted into the open doors, "we aren't here to hurt you. We're with Beth, Beth Greene. We're going to rescue you."
She repeated the messaged as they took the hall slowly, echoing the name Beth Greene over and over. Beth, their folklore hero who had actually returned on a liberation mission.
There were dozens, survivors turned mercenaries with heavy artillery and homemade battle gear. The gun fire was constant now and as they entered the south wing through double doors, the man and girl dropped to a crouch dragging him with them. The hall was littered with bodies, Karmer, Peterson and Parker all with bullets through the head.
"There's three holed up," a man at the end of the hall shouted down in their direction, "in the office."
"That's Dawn's office," he managed, "she's not gonna back down, she won't care about me."
"Sucks for her," the girl spat and then they were dragging him down the hall, taking position beside the man who had been speaking. He too had cold blue eyes and an impressive silver revolver with a homemade silencer screwed to the barrel.
"We were told to spare you, if you we could," he directed at Lampson, "were told you were the most reasonable man here."
"She'll shoot me before she fires at you, she knows now I lied, lied when I said I found Beth's body out there in the road."
"Yea well," the man shrugged, "like I said, if we could."
And then the hallway was engulfed in a blast of smoke. The gunfire was constant, round and after round exploding and a constant ring ran thru his ears. He could hear screaming, cries of pain and terror and as the smoke began to clear more bodies were clear; Gregson, Campbell. And there was Dawn, bleeding from a wound in her stomach but still alive, blinking up at the man in the leather vest who stood over her, her wrists bound in front of her with her own handcuffs.
She was trying to say something but her mouth had filled with blood, gurgling out inaudible words. The hospital had fallen into a silence except for the quiet cries from inside the wards rooms. More and more of the strangers began to filter into the hall, some injured and clutching wounds but all on their feet. An older woman with short cropped gray hair moved aside to allow a slight blonde figure to make her way to the front of the crowd.
Beth was no longer the frail, starving thing she'd been when she disappeared into that elevator shaft. She looked strong and healthy with a long, bloody hunting knife grasped in one hand and a heavy glock in the other. She tucked the gun into her waistband, those eyes focused only on Dawn's form.
The man in the vest stepped beside her, one of his hands resting on the back of her neck. He, the man Beth had always told them would come, pressed a kiss to her temple.
"It's done," he told the side of her face, "she's bleedin' out. She can't hurt nobody else Beth."
They all watched as Dawn took one last wheezing breath and the trembles in her body seized. Beth's eyes slowly drifted upwards and fell upon him.
"Lampson," she sighed, "I hate to say I told you so."
"Please," he felt himself beg, "don't spare me, please end it."
He contemplated eating his own gun every day, but as usual, he was too weak. Too weak to face the hell he knew waited for people like him.
The people in the hall were all looking at him with the same thing, a mix of disgust and pity. They'd all done what he couldn't, survived on the outside, managed to remain on the right side.
"We're going to take the wards," Beth informed simply, "we're going to take them to the places we live, where people live free and safe. We built a world and it's a good one. It's what you could have done here."
On the linoleum, Dawn's corpse began to reanimate, her fingers opening and closing. Before the first growl could slip from between her dead lips Beth buried her knife in Dawn's skull, a guttural war cry slipping from between her lips as she did it. And then the Latina girl's gun butt connected with his head and everything went black for Lampson.
When he woke the first thing he noticed was the crisp chill of fresh air. He could feel dewy grass beneath his back and when he opened his eyes the sun made them burn.
His uniform shirt was gone, replaced with a blue scrub top. The woods were heavy on either side of the dirt road and beside him lay a long knife and a gallon jug of water. Under the water was a folded piece of paper. He read it, let the paper fall to the dirt and glanced around at the overwhelming miles of forest.
Lampson,
When you stopped searching for me and lied to Dawn, you gave me the chance to make it home. So, I'm giving you one. This is your shot to be brave. There's still a life to be lived in this world, I hope you find it.
Beth Greene
