Chapter Thirteen

I was beginning to think that there was no such thing as a normal day anymore. I was right to think that Patrick sitting out from kickball was a little weird. As it would turn out, sometime during the day or night Patrick died and became reanimated.

Not everyone kept their cell doors closed while they slept. D block was hit pretty bad.

The best I could figure it, Patrick rose just before sunrise. I'm sure he took some chunks out of someone and it snowballed from there.

Most of our new Woodbury friends didn't get up as early as we did. There were enough of us that most people who had children didn't have bigger jobs, so most of D block's residences were still in bed when Patrick and the other one started looking for something new to eat.

That also meant most of the main group was outside. Maggie and Glenn had been on watch most of the night. Michonne was getting ready to go looking for the Governor again. Carl and Rick were out tending to our small farmland.

I was walking the perimeter when the sound of gunshots made me jump.

"Who's…" I said, and then I heard yelling.

"Help! Please! Come quick!" It was Lizzie and her little sister Mica, coming running out of D. I saw Rick go running to the inner gate and I followed after. We got inside just as Daryl, Sasha, and Tyreese came pouring out of C block.

"There's walkers in D!" Glen yelled.

"What about C?!" Rick yelled back at him.

"It's clear! We locked the gates to the tomb. Hershel's on guard," Sasha informed Rick before running towards D.

"It ain't a breech!" Daryl added, crossbow in hand.

The word chaos doesn't even cover what was going on inside.

Carol scrambled to get people inside cells where they would be safe while the rest of us set to work trying to take the walkers out.

"Check all of them! Every cell!" Rick yelled over all the noise. There were cells on the ground floor and up on the catwalk, and any of them could have had walkers in them. New walkers. Strong walkers.

"Oh." I came up behind Daryl just after he shot a walker that had come after Glenn. "It was Patrick. All of them." He shot the poor girl Patrick had been feeding on before she could rise.

There was a big mess in the aftermath. Dead bodies with bite marks had to be dealt with before they could come back. The survivors were scared and some were hurt.

But I was most interested in Patrick. His eyes were…different. I mean, all walker eyes look pretty gross, all yellowed and the irises and pupils filmy. But Patrick's eyes looked weird and almost bloody. Looking at them made me shiver.

Then there was Charlie. His cell door was locked, but he was just as undead as any walker. Charlie wasn't bit and he wasn't hurt, but he was a walker and there was blood all over his face.

"Hell, he was just eating barbecue yesterday," Daryl said to Hershel. "How could somebody die in a day just from a cold?"

"I had a sick pig, it died quick." Rick said. "Saw a sick boar in the woods."

"Pigs and birds, that's how these things spread in the past." Said Hershel. "We need to do something about those hogs."

If I had learned anything from living in college dorms it was that if one person got sick, damn near everybody got sick. Our living conditions in the prison were more crowded even than that.

All I could think of was the Mexican lady and what she had told me about the old man in their group. About his fever.

I put my hand on Daryl's arm and motioned with my head for him to follow me.

"Daryl," I said, "that woman who stopped by here not long ago, the one that only spoke Spanish? She said her people were sick, remember? She told me an old man in her group started bleeding from his eyes and his nose and his mouth out of nowhere. I asked Hershel about it but he said he figured it was some kind of stroke."

Daryl's blue eyes were hard as they swept over the carnage that had become cell block D.

"You reckon it's the same thing?"

"It's a hell of a coincidence if it's not."

Daryl took a big breath and sighed. "All's we can do is wait."

Dr. S had the idea that it was probably some kind of flu.

"The last major flu killed thousands," I heard him telling Rick. "It swept through the nation. People were dead within days because their fevers became so high."

"The Spanish Influenza, right? In the early 1900s?" I asked, and Dr. S nodded.

"Listen, I gotta tell you something." I said to Rick. "I told Hershel already, but we had no idea it would be something like this."

"What's that?" Rick asked. He was sitting on the stairs with Dr. S. Glenn and Daryl were collecting bodies.

"When that Mexican woman came here, she told me about a man in her group that died like this. Like Patrick and Charlie, blood pouring out of their faces."

"It's not uncommon for flu strains to mutate, especially when living conditions aren't clean and people are in close contact with each other. This right now is the perfect time for something like that," Dr. S. said. Rick shook his head. There was worry in his eyes.

"Rick," Dr. S said, putting his hand on his shoulder. "We should burn these bodies. To try to keep it from spreading."

"We don't burn our own," Rick snapped. "We bury them."

I didn't say so, but I agreed with Dr. S. Compassion be damned, if we wanted to stop it now we needed to do what needed to be done, even if it was horrible. But I wasn't on the council. It wasn't my call to make.

"At the least, all of those in this cell block should be kept away from the others for a little while. We can't have those exposed to it spreading it around." Dr. S. wasn't letting up on Rick.

"Okay, fine," Rick said and he got up to leave. He motioned for me to follow, already disobeying doctor's orders.

"Could you clear that out a bit? The gunshots really drew them in." Rick pointed out to the outer gate, where walkers were ramming themselves against it.

"Yeah. Let me know what the council decides we should do about this."

There were still some weak spots in the fence, and walkers aren't light. If our outer fence went down, the inner one wouldn't be far behind.

I was trying to draw them away from where they had become so grouped and so heavy, but they just weren't having it. They were fixated on that one spot, or else they were stuck because there was so many of them. The fence started to cave.

"Maggie!" I yelled; she was still in the guard tower. "Maggie, I'm gonna need help!"

She went running, yelling for Rick and Daryl. I knew Maggie was fast and I'm sure it only took a few minutes at the most, but it felt like hours before she and some others got to where I was.

"It's starting to give!" I told Rick, but everyone was already in motion, driving anything sharp through the gaps in the chain link.

If it's not one thing, it's another, I thought, shoving my pipe into the eye socket of a walker. But when I pulled on it to bring it back it got stuck, pulling the walker's weight against the fence even more in my attempts to get it loose.

Someone's gloved hand covered mine and yanked the pipe hard enough to pull it loose.

"Thank you," I said when I realized it was Daryl, but I doubted he heard me over all the commotion.

"You're welcome." He kicked the fence, trying to move some of the fallen weight off of it.

"Are you seeing this?" Sasha said suddenly. "Is someone feeding these things?!"

"No wonder they wouldn't move," I said. "They know this is where they get food."

That small distraction when we stepped away was all it took. One of the walkers climbed higher someone, putting weight on the top of the fence. It started to bow inward, collapsing under the weight. The ones in the back pressed on the ones in front and they were so heavy that the walkers on the fence started coming through the chain links like chunks of cheese. I probably would have puked if I had had time.

I flipped my pipe around and placed it flat against the fence, pushing it with my hands to try to counteract the weight. Everyone else was doing the same anywhere they could put their hands so they wouldn't get bit or scratched. But there were only seven of us and dozens of walkers.

But it wasn't any use, and Daryl pulled us away from it.

"They'll come through," I mumbled. "The fence can't hold that weight."

Then Rick said, "Daryl, get the truck. I know what to do."

It wasn't hard to guess where Rick was going with this after he took a look towards the pen where we kept the pigs.

"Hershel did say we had to do something about them," Glenn said, following Rick's lead. "It's not like we could take the chance and eat them now anyway."

I stepped away, looking at the bloody rats by the fence. They were only half-eaten, with their heads bitten off.

"They should have eaten the whole thing," I said.

"Unless someone has been feeding them to the walkers through the chain link." Sasha glared down at the rats. But who would feed the walkers?

Rick and Daryl loaded the pigs into the bed of the truck and drove it out away from the gates. These walkers were lucky, getting hand delivered meals. At least pigs are bigger than rats. I hoped it would keep them occupied long enough to fix the fence.

We burned the pig's fence, to try to keep it from spreading. But we still didn't burn the infected bodies.

Rick gave Carl his gun back and started carrying his own. Our time of peace was over.

"What are we going to do with the people who have been exposed?" I asked Daryl. We were stacking big rocks across the weakened part of the fence as a temporary fix until we could get something better done.

"A block. Hershel says we should separate anyone who's been exposed."

"That's death row," I said and then I kind of chuckled. "It's kind of ironic."

"It's clean," Daryl said.

"What about Judith? What are we going to do with her?" Daryl shrugged.

"I don't think we've planned that far yet."

"Daryl?" I said, pushing some curls off my face from where my hair started falling from my braid. "Can I tell you something? And you won't tell Rick or Hershel?"

"What's that?" Daryl looked confused, his eyebrows all knit together over his clear eyes.

"We should've burned those bodies. I know how it sounds, but if we don't want it to spread it should have been done."

"I know," was all that Daryl said in response.

Our work was mostly quiet then, as it usually was. I was placing the last rock when I felt Daryl's hand lightly on my shoulder.

"I know there ain't a lot we can do about it, but try not to get sick, you hear?"

I smiled. "You too, Daryl. Be safe."

Anyone who had gone into D was put to work handling anything that might have been infected. Glenn finished burying the bodies of everyone who died that morning with Maggie's help. I helped Sasha gather up all the bedding and clothing from the cells, to be burned. We would need something strong, like bleach, to clean the whole block before anyone could live there again.

Dr. S. and Hershel went to work performing amputations for anyone who survived a bite and generally just tending to everyone who was involved in the attack. People were coming down with the sickness quick.

Karen and David became the first residents of A block, because they were already showing signs of being sick. But their stay wasn't long. Someone shot both of them in the head and burned their bodies on one of the balconies on A.

A/N: Some dialogue/scenes in this chapter are taken directly from The Walking Dead episode "Infected". I do not own this episode and no copyright infringement is intended.

Okay, legal stuff out of the way, I have a question for readers of this fic: Do you like that this chapter followed the show closely? Honestly, it felt like lazy writing on my part, but a lot of important stuff happened in this episode so I felt I should include it in the story. Please let me know if this is okay with you guys!