Chapter Two: My Body is a Cage

"My body is a cage,

that keeps me

from dancing with the one I love,

but my mind holds the key…"

"Think we'll get to see the Washington Monument?"

"Is Richmond close to D.C.?"

"I don't think so. But we might pass it. It'd be cool to see, I guess…"

Michael wished he was better at talking.

So talk.

"I saw it once a few years ago."

"You did?"

"Yeah. I visited my grandparents with my mom and my dad before my brother was born. They wanted to take us on a trip, and my grandmother lived there until her twenties, so… yeah."

There.

"Didn't you say your grandmother was from Brazil, and that your grandparents lived in Hawaii?" Carl asked.

"Peru, I think. South America. And that was my dad's side. My mom's parents were full blooded white Americans, living the dream."

"Oh," Carl said. He shifted awkwardly (Michael didn't have the energy to undo that damage) and the roof under them creaked; old cars didn't make for the best watch posts but it was better than the dirt. Too many bugs to bite at them down there. "What's it like?"

"Big," Michael said. "Underwhelming. Like… it's this thing we're always learning about in school and it's supposed to be such a big part of American history, but... it's just a big statue in the end."

Carl mulled this over as he chewed on his bottom lip. Michael laid himself back on the roof; it groaned under his weight but he was probably too light to make a huge dent. Food had been scarce lately and most of it went to Carl and Judith. Michael didn't mind and tried his best to assure the others he was fine. Sometimes his stomach protested, giving out little rumbles or a whimper, but it was best to focus on something else. He did that a lot now.

"My mom and dad went to the grand canyon when I was a baby-well, they tried to. I got sick halfway there and they had to go back home."

Michael tried to smile, really. It probably came out as some kind of grimace but Carl wasn't paying attention.

"I'm sure they had a good time, anyways."

Carl smiled. "That's what my mom said."

"Boys?"

Carl looked over but Michael kept staring at the afternoon sky. It was a bit cloudy but Michael doubted it would rain. It'd been weeks since the last time any of them felt it on their skin and all the creeks and rivers were dried up by now.

"Yeah, dad?"

"We'll be leavin' soon. Just a few towns over and we're there," Rick said. From the corner of his eye, Michael could see him-Judith was propped on his hip and playing with a piece of plastic too large for her to try and swallow.

"Okay."

After a nod, and a glance at Michael, Rick walked away. Once he was gone, and when it was just the two of them, Carl joined Michael in laying on the roof of the car and watching the sky do nothing.

And as they did this, a part of Michael drifted away. Somewhere far, somewhere deep into a fog, where he'd been before but hadn't seen in a while. It's a hollowness in his chest that sent him there, that kept him sitting on a little loveseat until he was brought back into reality by someone saying his name.

"Yeah?"

"We're leaving now."

They leave.

There was walker gunk in Michael's axe. Crusted flesh, hair, a small shard of skull bone-it took a few tries for him to get it off, picking at it with a pen and wiping the rest away on a dirtied shirt, but after a minute it was as clean as it could get. For now, Michael silently hoped as he tossed the shirt down.

They were ten miles away from Wiltshire, parked and settled around a farmhouse missing a part of its roof. Rick said this is where they would wait while he took a small group with Noah to scan out the area.

"I'm coming, too," Michael said after a brief moment of consideration, giving no room for protest as he took a seat in the very back of the van. Glenn was there, too, fumbling around with a CD booklet. He glanced up at Michael slowly, then opened his mouth like he was about to say something. Then he looks back at the booklet, silent.

They asked Michael if he really wanted to go. What Michael figures they really meant to ask was if he could handle it-doing something productive, something other than existing and moving when told is? He probably could. Probably would. He said so, even if they didn't believe him-Michael was sure they didn't. And they had good reason; Maggie cried at least twice a day and Daryl didn't talk much, but when he did it was more or less just some kind of grunt. Michael guessed his connection to Beth worried them.

As if he were important enough to worry about.

Rick asked him again, just to make sure. Michael told him yes.

"How far out?"

"Five miles."

"Hey, Carol?"

"I'm here."

"We're halfway there. Just wanted to check the range."

"Everybody's holding tight. We've made it 500 miles. Maybe this can be the easy part."

"Gotta think we're due. … Give us twenty minutes to check in."

"We don't hear from you, we'll come looking."

"Copy that."

Noah was nervous.

Michael could feel it in the air; his bouncing leg, eyes going from surface to surface. "I've been wanting to tell you something," he told Tyreese. His voice was shaky.

"What's that?"

"The trade."

Shut up. Shut the fuck up. Don't talk about it.

"It was the right play."

I don't care.

"It worked. It did work."

Really?

"Just… something else happened after."

Yeah, Noah, Beth fucking died.

"It went the way it had to," Tyreese says. "The way it was always going to."

Michael took the CD booklet from where it sat between Glenn and him. There was a Willie Nelson album in there so he took it, looked at the cover and pretended it was so fascinating he couldn't focus on anything else.

"I never wanted to kill anybody before."

"I've wanted that."

God, what an amazing CD.

"But… it just made it so I didn't see anything except what I wanted. I wasn't facing it."

"Facing what?"

"What happened, what's going on. My dad always told Sasha and me that it was our duty as citizens of the world to keep up with the news. When I was little and I was in his car, there were always those stories on the radio."

They passed an old, rusted barn with its roof caved in and a chimney that looked so close to toppling over Michael almost felt sorry for it. Sometimes he thought he was like that chimney. Just waiting for something to push him too hard.

"Something happens a thousand miles away or down the block. Some kind of horror I couldn't even wrap my head around. But… he didn't change the channel. He didn't turn it off. He just kept listenin'. To face it. Keeping your eyes open. My dad always called that 'paying the high cost of livin'."

Michael was tired of paying.

"I lost my dad in Atlanta," Noah said. "I think he would've liked yours."

Tyreese smiled.

"Still got a mom and a couple of twin brothers. … I hope."

Still shaky, Michael saw. Uncertain. Just like the rest of them, really. He figured they just weren't admitting it.

"I hope so, too."

Noah said they had two more miles, and Rick nodded before telling Tyreese to pull into the woods. "We'll walk the rest of the way." When Noah said they won't have to, Rick replied, "Just in case."

Willie Nelson shattered in Michael's hands.

Tyreese pulled into a small gathering of trees, where a box truck and a station wagon collided with each other at some point or another. Both drivers were still in their seats, roused from their dormancy by the search party's arrival.

"This is good," Rick told them. "Through the trees, it might just look like part of the wreck."

The station wagon snarled, and everyone stared at it until Noah said, "It's this way."

It was a quiet walk through the forest. The only sounds came from cicadas and the group's footsteps and even if none of them had their weapons drawn, it was beyond clear that they were on edge. Michonne kept hold of her katana's hilt and Rick had his hand on his Python. Maybe this was why Noah was nervous, Michael figured. Maybe he just wanted to get home. Michael knew the feeling.

"Your people do this?"

Ahead, thick metal wires were strung around trees in an erratic pattern. "Wanted to," Noah explained. "They must have."

Rick drew his machete. Silently, they climbed through the wires, until Noah cried out when one sliced his forehead. "You okay?" Rick asked. Noah nodded after wiping away a trail of blood.

"Yeah. Let's go."

They continued. Minutes later, red-brown brick walls cane into view. Rick halted and by default so did the rest of them. He turned to Noah. "They have spotters? Snipers?"

"We built a perch on a truck? Sometimes it's out front."

Glenn went forward and Michael followed. There was a concrete sign that read "SHIREWILT" in big letters. Nobody could sight a spotter as far as they could see.

"Not today," Glenn says.

They went onto a road that lead into the community, passing scattered roadkill and pieces of a grandfather clock laying across the pavement. Noah sped up, limping to the front gates, until he was there and pushing himself at the metal bars. He listened for something. A small bang could be heard some distance away.

"You hear that?"

Nothing.

"Ty," Michael murmured, adjusting the bow slung over his shoulder. "Lift me up?"

The two of them walked over to a spot just beside the front gate; Tyreese got down on his knees and Michael climbed him like a tree trunk, moving from Tyreese to the gate itself. When he was finally up and could see past the top of the wall, Michael squinted against the sunlight.

There was nothing.

A handful of walkers shambled aimlessly through the streets. Personal belongings, toys, furniture-it was all discarded and thrown about like a storm had raged through. Some houses had scorch marks, some partially burned down, one with only its foundation remaining. There were bodies everywhere, most of them charred to the bones.

Michael looked back at the others, avoiding Noah's eyes, then shook his head. There was a short moment when the realization of another lost possibility sank into them all, hiding in a cloud of silence, before Noah forced himself over the wall. Michael and the others followed. He wished he could say there was something more than tired defeat in them. It's a feeling he'd gotten used to and he briefly thought that maybe it should stay that way.

Noah grunted, almost falling as he landed on the grass, but corrected his balance and moved forward as Michael landed almost gracefully on the other side of the wall. Rick and Glenn followed, then Michonne and Tyreese, and before any of them could stop him Noah was running further into the destruction. It was hard to ignore the carnage as they ran after him; the burnt bodies, charred grass, entrails spilled over the once-beautiful community. Whatever happened here was something Michael wanted nothing to do with.

Noah finally collapsed in the middle of an intersection. He was crying, sobbing, clutching his head in between his arms and pulling his knees up to his chest. Tyreese bent down to comfort him, telling him, "You're gonna be with us now."

Walkers snarled from down the road. Michonne watched them, an exhausted look in her eyes, before she drew her katana. "I'll get 'em."

"I'm sorry, Noah," Rick said, voice coarse. He crouched down. "I truly am. … We should see if there's anything we can use and head back."

What is there to use? Michael wanted to ask. Knitting needles, snow globes, remainders of a world that just got worse as time went by?

"Then what?" Michonne asked. Her voice was sharp. Rick didn't have time to say anything before the walkers got louder as they neared. Michonne turned to face them. "They see us."

Michael glanced down at Noah. He was still on the ground, still crying even though his sobs had died down a bit. A part of Michael wanted to sit down beside him but in the end Michael thought it would be useless. It was starting to feel like it was always useless.

"We can make a quick sweep," Glenn spoke aloud. Tyreese told the rest of them that he'd stay with Noah.

A walker got too close so Michael changed the grip on his climbing axe.

"Carol, you copy?"

"We're here."

Its knee was weak enough for Michael to break bone with a swift kick. The walker collapsed but it was still upright, snapping its jaws wildly, and a swift swing of Michael's axe stopped it from moving forever.

"We made it. … It's gone."

Their sweep didn't do much.

Most of the houses that hadn't burned down were locked, and those that weren't had been picked through already. At a house with an open garage, Michael bent down to grab an old pocket knife as glass shattered behind him.

"Clean shirt."

"We'll make it."

"We will."

Michael let the knife slip out of his hand and into a garbage back (used for collecting useful things, and still almost entirely empty) before moving on. Deeper into the garage, Michael rummaged through moldy clothing in a laundry basket until he heard, "I saw that woman, Dawn."

And his blood went cold.

"She didn't mean to do it. I knew it. I saw it… But I wanted to kill her. I remember, I just wondered if it even mattered, one way or another. Didn't have a thing to do with Beth."

It had everything to do with her.

"I don't know if I thought it would still be here. But Beth wanted to get him here. She wanted to get him back home. This was for her."

Rick paused when Michael left the garage.

"And it could have been for us, too."

Michael can remember the days after, when he usually sat alone, away from the others. Maggie cried a lot and he just… existed. Angry. Upset. Numb. So many feelings, all of them strong and painful and oh so vivid, but none of them told him that putting a bullet through Dawn's eye was wrong.

"Beth wanted a lot of things," Michael said, before moving to the house across the street.

The door was unlocked.

Inside, it was almost pristine, other than a layer of dust that covered everything. It looked like a regular home; a dining table, a living room with a couch and a loveseat and a recliner, an entertainment center with a flat screen TV. A glass coffee table with items scattered about the surface. There were a few paintings on the walls and large pictures of a family of three; a mother, a teenage daughter and a preteen son. They looked happy.

The kitchen was a completely different story and Michael knew it as soon as he saw blood on the floor.

What remained of the mother was scattered across the checkered tile. Her legs were hacked off and thrown haphazardly across the kitchen and her arms were where her legs should be. There was a hole in her face where her nose should have been and a slash across her throat.

Moving into the hallway Michael could see the daughter, pinned to the wall with a fire poker through her chest. A knife stuck out of her throat and her hand, chopped off, sat in her lap. Michael ended her before she had the chance to notice him.

Something clawed at a door.

Floorboards creaked under Michael's steps as I moved to stand in front of it. There was a rasp that he could hear, a weak little snarl that almost had Michael leaving that god forsaken house. But he didn't. Instead, he opened the door and watched as the preteen, reanimated and bloody, stumbled through and tried snapping brittle jaws at him. It was instinct that had Michael kill him. His body fell to the ground in a heap and when his arms spilled out over the floor, Michael saw a slit on each of the boy's thin wrists. He blinked at them.

Rick found Michael crying over the boy's body a few minutes later.

"Michael? … Hey, Michael. It's me. It's Rick."

"He killed himself."

Rick knelt down and glanced over the boy's body. Michael still hadn't looked at him.

"He killed himself so that whatever killed his family couldn't get him, too."

There was a silence so thick that Michael almost choked on it. He could taste the acrid, bitter flavor of it, clawing its way down his throat, until Rick put a hand on his shoulder. "C'mon… we should go."

Rick pulled Michael off the floor and then they left. From the entryway, they gathered their almost-empty garbage bags, and before Michael could even try to get the bitter taste from his mouth they're out of the house with the door shut behind them.

"I'm sorry you had to see that."

Michael shook his head. There was defeat in his eyes. "It's like that everywhere."

"It isn't." Rick came to a stop and turned to face Michael. "Hey. It isn't. It can't be. There's gotta be more places out there."

Michael nodded, only because he wanted the conversation to be over, and within a few more minutes the two of them were with Glenn and Michonne again.

"We could put some of the garage doors together against the break," Michonne told them. "Park a car against them until we can brick it back up."

Rick looked at the wall. "It can work," Michonne pushed.

"This place is surrounded by a forest. There's no sight lines. Whoever, whatever, could be on top of us without us even knowin' it. That's probably what happened."

"That's what happened to us," Glenn said. The group was walking towards the break itself, Michonne leading them.

"We could start taking down the trees. We use them to build the walls up. Look."

The four of them got there, where the demolished remains of the break sat covered in dust and blood, and when they walked through it all they could see was carnage.

Bodies, dozens of them, chopped apart and thrown all over the place. Arms, legs, midsections, but no heads. There was so much carnage that even Michonne was stunned into silence. They all were.

"It doesn't matter," Glenn finally said.

"What?"

"You said you wondered if it even mattered if you killed her or not."

Dawn.

"It doesn't matter if you had done it, or if I had, or that Michael did. It doesn't matter."

Michael said nothing. There was nothing he could think of; just that bitter silence worming its way in.

"Washington."

They turned to Michonne.

"Eugene lied about a cure, but he thought of Washington for a reason."

"But he was lying."

"About the cure. But he did the math and realized that Washington was the place where there'd be a chance. We're close."

Rick sighed.

"What if there are people there? Huh? What if it's someplace that we can be safe? We're a hundred miles away. It's a possibility. It's a chance. Instead of just being out here. Instead of just making it. Because right now, this is what making it looks like." she pointed to the bodies strewn about. "Don't you want one more day with a chance?"

Walkers stumbled out of the underbrush.

"We should go," Rick said. Michonne looks defeated, but said nothing as they turned to go back into Shirewilt.

"It's a hundred miles away."

They paused.

"We should go to Washington."

Before anything can be said, someone was screaming their names and then they were rushing back into the fallen community.

A few houses down from where they just were, Noah was on the back porch fighting off two walkers. Rick and Glenn went for him while Michael and Michonne took out the ones drawn by the screams. Michonne tried taking the head off of one, but a rebar through its neck forced away her blade; she took it by the shoulders and shoved it away, giving Michael enough time to put his axe through its cranium.

"It's Tyreese!" Noah finally said once they'd cleared the dead.

"Where?"

"My house, he's been bit."

Then they're running, again, going as fast as they can following Noah, because Tyreese was bitten and if he was bitten that meant they only had a short amount of time to save him. The group ran through yards and leapt over fences and slashed at any walkers that got in their way. Michael did't know how long it took for them to get to Noah's home, but it was all the way across the estate and goddamn that. Rick went in first, then Michonne and Glenn and Michael was before Noah.

"In the back!" He yelled to them. They filed into a room with model airplanes and four bodies-no, three bodies, because one of them was Tyreese, leaning against a wall with a mangled arm and his face so pale it's no wonder Michael thought he was dead. But he was alive, breathing heavily, and Rick leaned down to pull out his bitten arm. Glenn held Tyreese back and before Michael could ask what they were doing, Michonne sliced through his arm. It all happened so fast that all Michael could do was grab a blanket when Rick ordered him to, hand it to him and watch him wrap it around Tyreese's stump. He and Glenn plucked Tyreese up off the floor and then they left, going the way they came, running for the chained up gates. There were walkers on the other side trying to push through.

Glenn broke the chain with a baseball bat. Walkers flooded inside but Glenn, Rick, Michonne and Michael fought them off, slicing through and gunning them down whenever they got too close. One snuck its way past Rick and was a few feet away from Noah and Tyreese before Michael twisted and shot it through the temple. When the dead were down, Rick and Glenn took a hold of Tyreese, got him off the ground and then they kept going.

"Michael!"

"Yeah?"

"Take my radio- tell Carol we're coming back with Tyreese-tell her to get- get supplies ready."

Michael reached over and fumbled with the radio on Rick's hip. It was hard to grab, considering Rick was moving every which way to get back to the cars, but eventually Michael clicked it off his belt and put it up to his mouth. "Carol? Carol, it's Michael."

"Michael? What's going on?"

"We're on our way back, Tyreese was bit and we had to take his arm. Rick says to get medical supplies ready."

The radio was quiet for a minute. "Okay. We'll be here."

Going back through the woods, the group took the same route, but when they were at the wires there was no time to go around. Michonne and Noah held them open while Glenn and Rick got Tyreese through; when each of them begin to maneuver their way through the wires, Tyreese's foot was suddenly stuck in between two of the metal strings. When a walker got close Michael axed it down.

"C'mon, c'mon-stay up, Tyreese, keep your eyes open…"

"We're through, let's go!"

"Watch out for the branch-"

"Get his arm!"

"Michael, the door-"

"Got it."

"Hold him up!"

"You're alright, you're alright."

Michael got into the truck with Tyreese's head in his lap. Everyone else piled in, with Noah on the other side of Michael and Glenn in the very back and Michonne in the passenger seat.

"Carol, we're at the car," Rick said into the radio. His hands were so slick with blood. "We need to cauterize the arm and wrap it. Get Sasha and Carl away, they don't need to see this."

The engine started. Rick floored it but the tires spun in mud, right up until the car got loose and they rammed into the box truck. The back opened up and dozens of walker heads, each with a large W carved into the foreheads, spilled out onto the hood. They all watched, stunned, until Rick backed up and turned to go out onto the road.

"Turn it off…" Tyreese murmured. Michael held his head, gently, quiet, because he didn't know what to say. Tyreese looked around at the others, watching, blinking, then stared out the window for a few moments before his eyes fell shut.

"No," Michael cried out, "No, nononono, Ty… Tyreese, wake up- come on, man..."

Nothing. And Michael knew there would be nothing.

They bury him by a tree.

"I'm living in an age,

whose name I don't know,

though the fear keeps me moving

still my heart beats so slow…"

notes:

from now on, until my goblin brain decides otherwise, i'm writing in third-person present-tense. this was past-tense because i thought i could do it but i actually hate it, so let's just say it's because everything up until now was in the past, yeah? yeah… anyways, just a heads up :) it's good to be back, friends.