AN: Here we are, another chapter here.
I will admit that I'm not going into tons of detail about events that don't really need to be spelled out for the progress of this particular story. I'll handle them in a bit of a "glossing over" manner. I hope that doesn't drive anyone too crazy. If it does, my apologies.
I hope that you enjoy! Let me know what you think!
11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
The push-in and push-forward that they had imagined did not turn out anything like what they'd hoped.
Daryl stood in the prison yard, smoking a cigarette and keeping Sophia out from underfoot while her mother worked. He was keeping watch, too, over the stirrings that were taking place in the part of the yard that they'd closed off.
There were three men in the fenced-off portion of the prison. There were three men that they didn't know well. Three men that were convicted criminals. Three men that they weren't sure what to do with.
Inside the prison, there was absolute chaos.
It had all started relatively calmly. There were parts of the prison that, until now, they'd kept locked and, in the cases where the locks failed because of something that had apparently happened back at the turn, they'd kept the doors chained.
The prison was old. It was built like a labyrinth and the layout suggested that it had been one of those institutions that had been upgraded a few dozen times during its existence. Each time, the people hired to upgrade and add-to the location had clearly been the contractors who'd offered the lowest quote to the government. The old adage about getting what you paid for rang true in most cases. Though their work wasn't necessarily shoddy, it was more than evident that they hadn't given much thought into how their additions would affect the flow of the prison. They'd literally made the additions that they needed to make in the most convenient way possible. In some locations, this meant the addition of another cell block—essentially a wing or peninsula—that was oddly place and jutted out of the structure with no rhyme or reason. In other locations, that meant the construction of a separate building that was connected to the original structure—where their cell block was located—by a hallway that was little more than a well-constructed and permanent connecting ramp.
Before they'd begun their march forward and deeper into the bowels of the prison, they'd rifled through desks in the offices that they could reach and searched for fire safety maps that would give them some guidance as to where they were going and how they might get there. There had been some exchanged laughter among them because, upon finding the maps they were seeking, they'd found several versions practically stuck together as they'd been stacked, with each new addition, on top of one another and stored in a drawer that was sticky with the remnants of exploded packets of unidentifiable sauce from a local Chinese restaurant.
The most recent map had prepared them for the path that they would take as they pressed through the prison. They found spray paint in storage, and decided to use it to mark their way, but they'd also memorized the twists and turns from their cell block to the cafeteria—the first place of importance—like the steps to some kind of popular dance: left, left, right, left, right...until they were comfortable saying all the turns they would make, forward and backward, so that nobody could get too lost in the pitch black labyrinth.
They had anticipated that they might encounter Walkers on the way. For that reason, they'd left the women and children behind until they knew what to expect. They didn't have enough flashlights to go around, and they didn't want anyone starting off in the dark, even though some of them may somehow end up in the dark.
They hadn't expected the sheer magnitude of Walkers that they encountered.
Daryl felt like they'd spent hours just pushing Walkers back and putting down as many as they could. They'd finally tried to double back toward the safety of the cell block to catch their breath, regroup, and figure out a better way to handle things. On their attempt to return, however, they'd gotten overrun in the worst way and pushed off in a direction they'd never planned to go. On top of everything else, Hershel had been bitten on the leg, and they'd had no choice but to try to find a place to help him.
That's how they'd found the cafeteria.
There, they'd immediately chopped off Hershel's leg with an axe.
And they'd found five prisoners that had been locked in since the turn—they were, as far as anyone knew, the last remaining prisoners that had not died.
Everything that happened later was practically surreal to Daryl. Caught up in the adrenaline rush caused by fear for Hershel, fear that they wouldn't make it back through the Walkers to the cell block, and fear that strangers could be more dangerous than beneficial, he felt like his brain had recorded everything that happened in the same way an old-fashioned video camera might have recorded things with the lens' cap snapped in place.
These prisoners were unarmed but determined to make it out of the cafeteria—and panic made any man dangerous, especially one who was likely dangerous to begin with. If they wanted to save Hershel— with half his leg chopped off with an axe—before he bled out, they had to act quickly. They didn't have time to dawdle with negotiations.
Daryl's solution to the whole thing would have been to act as quickly as possible, while the prisoners were unarmed, and put down anyone who didn't want to go along with the plan, but he realized that was coming from a reactionary position of fear. He also realized that Rick wasn't going to go along with that. Saint Rick was determined to save them if they could prove useful—and he could paint it any damn way he wanted, but that was why he wanted to save them.
In the negotiations, Daryl and the group earned half of what was in the cafeteria and the assistance of the prisoners getting back to the cell block. They promised a part of the yard and assistance in clearing out another cell block that could be locked and kept separate. After all, they didn't know each other yet and some of them had families to protect.
In the process of returning to the cell block, they lost one of the prisoners—some damn people didn't know how to play with others, and it was better to get rid of them early on. While Daryl had supported Rick's decision to be rid of the asshole, he'd silently scolded the man for not just getting rid of the others. They didn't all seem horrible—and, in fact, three of them seemed quite anxious to comply—but there was at least one other asshole left in the bunch that seemed a bit too squirrely for Daryl's tastes.
This wasn't a time when Daryl valued spontaneity and unpredictability.
Still, they'd locked all the prisoners in the farthest cell of cellblock C while they'd gotten Hershel in the care of Carol and whoever she chose to assist her. They'd found her everything she needed—everything they could find, at least. And they'd all prayed, or done whatever they felt best, that they wouldn't lose the old man. They were trusting that Carol would, somehow, magically possess the medical knowledge necessary to save his life.
And then, they'd cleared cellblock D by putting down the Walkers that were in there—there were very few given that whoever had gone through and killed the prisoners in cellblock C, execution-style, had also swept through cellblock D before the bullets or time had run out. There had been two Walkers in cells—both with gunshot wounds that suggested a nick instead of a solid shot to the head, probably caused by moving too quickly—and two wandering about in the uniforms of guards. Without hesitation, they'd put the guards down and forced open the emergency exit that allowed the men they were leaving there to access their corner of the prison yard. That was when they'd lost the second man. He'd wanted to make demands and, with those demands, he'd wanted to make threats about everything they'd deserved. He wanted to run the whole prison—scrawny ass little excuse for a man that he was—and Daryl and Rick had both given him the metaphorical keys to his own kingdom. They'd shoved the man into the overrun portion of the yard at the back of the prison—the part with the hole in the fence that they hadn't patched yet and a multitude of Walkers that they hadn't put down yet—and they'd left him to rule his kingdom as he saw fit. The last they'd seen of him was his scrawny ass trying to outrun the starving mob of animated corpses that was determined to close in on him and tear him to shreds.
They'd given his companions time to file a formal complaint, but none of them seemed particularly eager to come to his defense. They wanted more, but a portion of the yard and a cellblock would absolutely do for the time being. Daryl and Rick had chained up the fences well so that the remaining three men couldn't easily force their way into the other parts of the yard, and then they'd left the men to figure their own shit out.
Once they'd started to clean up their area, and they'd begun to realize how much effort went into turning this place into something livable, they'd begun to try to call out to Daryl to work out some kind of additional negotiation. They'd begun to beg for more because the grass was greener on Daryl's side of the fence—where the work had already been done. Daryl was still actively ignoring the loud protests of the thinnest of the two black men. He argued that it was unsanitary if they had no way to get rid of the Walkers beyond daring to open the part of the prison yard that was overrun with the active corpses. He argued that they needed more supplies. They needed things that they couldn't get while they were being held captive. He argued that it was inhumane to hold them as prisoners and then refuse to provide for them in the way that the prison would have. He argued that they deserved better.
With Hershel possibly dying inside the prison from a nasty ass Walker bite, Daryl wasn't in the mood to hear about what people deserved from some con that was only as free as he was because plenty of people had died when they never deserved it.
"This what you want your little girl to see? You want her to know you're locking people up when they live in this place? When they lived here before you did? This is our home. Taking it makes you no better than you think we are! You're nothing but a thief! Is that what you want your little girl to see?"
When Daryl shouldered his crossbow, quickly, and started in the direction of their fences, the other two men, both of which were occupied with dragging Walkers and stacking them up, for the time being, along the edge of their fence, dropped what they were doing and did their best to shut up the loud man and wrestle him away from the fence.
Daryl leveled his crossbow so that the asshole would see that he was just about done with his shit.
"You keep any mention of my daughter outta your dirty ass mouth," Daryl warned. "I ain't Rick. And I didn't want you here in the first damned place. All the hell you deserve is a prison cell or a grave—just what the hell the state decided you deserved before we even got here. Now we done give you more'n that. But if you're so damned determined to have what the fuck you deserve? I'll dig the fuckin' grave myself. And I'll let my daughter play with the earthworms—'cause she ain't never gonna be sheltered from what the hell this shitty ass world can be. She's gonna know that some people? They just deserve a bolt through their heads to make the world a better fuckin' place for the rest of us."
"Easy!" One of the agreeable men said. "Easy! We don't want no trouble. Oscar—he don't speak for us. We'd like more—we'd appreciate water, a way to do what we need to do to survive. But we're thankful for what you've given us."
"I'm not going to kiss your ass," the man named Oscar said. He shook his head at Daryl. "I'll tell you what I told your friend. I've never begged for my life. No matter what the hell's been happening around me. I won't start now. So you do what you gotta do. But what you're doing is inhumane. We're prisoners. We've been prisoners. But at the very least? We were given what we needed to survive. We don't have water. The only food we have is in the cafeteria and there are fifty of these corpse things between us and that food—people we used to know. We don't have weapons. We're surrounded by dead bodies. That cellblock is filthy. We're supposed to sleep with the bodies of people we knew. Some of 'em we used to call friends. Their brains are splattered on the wall and we've got nothing to clean that with. Your friend said burn the corpses, but we don't have a way of making a fire." He shook his head. "I understand you're going through some shit right now. We all are." He glanced down and Daryl followed his eyes. Sophia had, seeing Daryl on the move, abandoned her play in the yard and toddled after him. Now she was standing with her arms wrapped around his leg and her face leaned against his dirty pants leg. "I'm not talking shit about your daughter. She's a pretty little girl. A real bad ass to still be alive, from what I can tell. All I'm asking is that you be the man she thinks you are and give us a fighting chance—that or, go ahead and shoot us, because we'd have been better off if you left us in that cafeteria."
Daryl, himself, felt calmed by the calmed countenance that came over the man as he rationally explained the reason for his earlier outbursts and his throwing himself against the fences to get Daryl's attention.
When Sophia fussed, begging to be picked up and paid attention to, Daryl shouldered his crossbow and picked up the baby. She smiled at him, pleased with his affection.
"Fine," Daryl said. "We'll get you water. Shit for a fire. Food. Shit to clean with. We'll figure out—how to make it work. But you gotta be fuckin' patient. Move the bodies out or—somethin' worthwhile. We got a lot of serious shit of our own to deal with right now."
"If you let us join you," the man named Axel offered with an abundance of enthusiasm, "we could help you with—all of your shit. We could be good at handling shit!"
"Axel," Oscar said, with a bit of exasperation in his voice. "Shut up."
"I ain't lettin' you out," Daryl said. "But I'll get you what you need. At least until—we got the time to figure out what the hell's gonna happen here. You just—gotta be patient."
"We can be patient," Oscar assured him.
