…
SIX. Aftermath.
The alarm was so loud, it instantly began to hurt Beth's ears. Jamie burst into cries and Beth pressed one of his ears to her chest while covering his other with her hand in an attempt to muffle the sound. But it was too loud and it wouldn't stop. She wished she could cover her own ears but Jamie's were far more important.
Oh, no. What if this effected his hearing? He was just a couple of days old with delicate baby eardrums. How could a deaf baby possibly grow up in this world where hearing was part of their very survival?
She pressed Jamie's ear just a little tighter to her chest while making sure her hand was flat against the other.
"What is it?" Beth shouted to Daryl over the alarm as if he had any idea what it was. The generators weren't working. How was the alarm working if there wasn't any power?
"Someone set off the alarm!" Daryl shouted back so she could hear him over the noise. "It's probably on its own generator to keep workin' if somethin' goes wrong!" He added, having read her mind.
Jamie was still crying – wailing now – and Beth held him as tight to her chest as she could, doing her best to keep his ears covered. Daryl couldn't possibly hear the crying over that steady, relentless sound but he looked to the baby and then to Beth. She didn't know what he was thinking but she could see it on his face. He was trying to work something out.
His crossbow was leaning against the wall next to the door and he rushed for it, slamming the door shut and spinning back towards Beth once he had it. "I gotta find out what's goin' on and I need you to stay here!"
"No!" Beth's response was immediate. Her eyes widened. "Please don't leave me!"
Daryl paused, looking at her, looking down to Jamie wailing in her arms. He looked to her again. Without a word, he pulled the knife from the sheath hanging from his belt loop. He held the handle out for her to take.
"I need to check on the others and you'll be safe in here."
Daryl said the words, never taking his eyes from her and her baby.
She would be. She and Jamie would stay in this room and he would find Rick and figure out what the Hell was going on. And now, she had a knife and could protect herself and the baby if anything did get through that door. Daryl knew she could kill walkers. During this past winter, yes, she had been pregnant but she had managed to kill a couple even as everyone did their best to always make sure she was protected from everything. There had been plenty of walkers to deal with in those months.
Did he like the idea of leaving her and Jamie in here without him? No. Hell no. But he couldn't stay and he couldn't bring them with him. He didn't know what was going on out there but he couldn't take care of this while worrying about Beth and Jamie and making sure that they were behind him and making sure he was covering them. He'd be back and they'd be safer in here.
Beth was looking at him with her big eyes – now wet as she was about to cry, clearly scared out of her mind – and Jamie was still wailing. He took a step closer to her and put a hand on her arm, giving it a gentle squeeze.
"I'll be back 'fore you know it. Just stay in here and keep the knife close."
She looked at him for another moment and didn't say anything. Finally, she shifted Jamie into the crook of one arm so she could take the knife's handle with her other hand. Her eyes never left his face.
Daryl swallowed. He didn't want to leave. They needed him. Beth was the weakest. He wasn't say that to be cruel but it was the truth. Hell. Carl could handle himself more than Beth could. And now, with her having a baby, the most vulnerable of anything in this world, it just made her weaker. Beth and Jamie both needed him to stay there with them.
But everyone else needed him too.
"Don't open that door again until you hear my voice on the other side," he told her. "Promise me, Beth. Tell me you won't open it for anyone."
Beth swallowed, too, and gave a nod. "I promise."
As soon as the words left her mouth, Daryl turned and went to the door. If he didn't leave that second, he wouldn't leave at all and he had to go find Rick and find out what was happening and stop it. Beth and Jamie would be fine here. They would be fine.
He didn't look back at them. He cracked the door open and the alarm sounded louder out in the hallway. He closed the door firmly behind him and then headed back towards the cell block, his crossbow loaded, aimed, and ready, preparing himself for whatever the Hell was going on.
…
Somehow, the closing door sounded louder than the blaring alarm.
Beth forced herself to take a deep breath. And then another. She was alone. Daryl had left her. No, he hadn't left her. He had gone to help the others. He wouldn't have left her if he thought she was not going to be safe. She knew she couldn't go after him and stick with him with a crying baby and only one hand to defend herself. She hated being alone but she knew that this was the best place for her to be right now.
With another deep breath, she looked down to Jamie, the baby's face red from crying so hard. She began to rock him and hold him close. She dropped a kiss on his head.
"Okay. I'm going to put you down for a second," Beth let her son know. With another kiss to his head, she returned him to the box and Daryl's vest still folded on the bottom of it.
With both arms now free, and one hand still clutching the knife, she began to look around the room. Besides the two generators, there was a massive box with all sorts of buttons and multi-colored wires. She didn't look at it closer. That wasn't important right now. There were windows, high on the wall, closer to the ceiling, and she could see the black bars on the outside of them. There was a metal storage cabinet against the wall, in the corner, by the door, and she crossed the room to open the two doors – cautiously. Hearing a squeak, she jumped back but then exhaled a breath when she saw there was a mouse at the base of the cabinet.
She exhaled. "I'll just be a second," she said out loud to the mouse and looked at what else was in the cabinet.
A hard hat on the top shelf along with a pair of work gloves. A couple of maintenance shirts with the name – TOM – stitched on the breast pocket in red thread were hanging. Long-sleeved shirts. She looked to Jamie, still crying in his box, and back to the shirts.
From the corner of her eye, she suddenly saw something and she spun around, her knife up as if there was a walker somehow standing right there.
There wasn't anything and it took her a moment to see what had gotten her attention. It honestly was hard to concentrate on anything with the alarm still blaring. But she saw it again and she stared at it as if she had never seen anything like it before. She wondered how she had missed it the first time.
Hidden in that massive box of wires and buttons, there was a flashing red light. It flashed on and off in-time with the alarm's noise. Beth's fingers tightened around the knife – as if drawing strength from the weapon – as she approached the box, her eyes fixated on the red light.
She didn't understand anything she was looking at and she wished Daryl was still here.
But no. Daryl had to run out because he had to check on everyone else and make sure everyone else was safe and she got that. She really did. But in the pit of her stomach, she didn't like the idea of him leaving her and Jamie alone. She understood she was just a number in the group to him but she had needed him to stay.
He wasn't here though. It was just her and this darn red flashing light. There was the smallest lettering underneath the light and she leaned in close to see what it said.
EMERGENCY MANUAL OVERRIDE
Override for what? It had to be the alarm. It HAD to be. It was silently blinking, staring at her, daring at her to turn it off. If Daryl was here, he'd be able to take one look at this entire mess of wires and buttons and know what to do. Jimmy had once tried to show her under the hood of his truck in an attempt to teach her basic maintenance and it had not gone well. To put it lightly. She just didn't have the mechanical kind of brain like other people were blessed at having. She could look at a piano and be able to write a song or play a piece of music. That was her talent. This? This whole thing might as well have been in Arabic or calculus formulas.
What was the worst that could happen though? It seemed like the worst was already happening. The sound of this alarm was going to bring every walker to them. She had to do something. She couldn't just stay in this room with her screaming son while her family was possibly in horrible danger. She had to help – somehow. She knew she was looked at as basically useless but she wasn't. She knew she wasn't. It was now time to prove it. If this button didn't stop the alarm, no one else would ever know. After all, no one was expecting her to get the alarm to shut off.
She forced herself to not close her eyes as she did it.
She did hiss though as her thumb pressed the button as if it was about to inflict pain and she then held her breath.
The alarm cut off so suddenly, she still heard it in her ears for a minute after. She released her held breath in a giant whoosh and she instantly turned and hurried back to Jamie. He was still crying and she set the knife down so she could gently lift him into her arms, sitting down on the ground.
"It's alright, Jamie. It's alright now. I fixed it," she said in a gentle voice, rocking him closely.
Oh my goodness, she did fix it. She – Beth – turned the alarm off. If Daryl hadn't been so quick to get out of here and leave her, he would have seen the flashing red button, too, and he would have been the one to fix it. But no. Daryl hadn't done it. She had done it. If hadn't been exactly brain surgery – push the big red flashing button – but still. No one else had done it.
It took another few minutes for Jamie to quiet down again and Beth kept rocking him. Her head and ears were both still throbbing and she could just imagine how much his little ears and little head was hurting.
She had no idea where anyone else was. She couldn't hear anything else. The generator room had been a good ways away from their cell block – on the edge of the area they had cleaned out of walkers – and she didn't know where the alarm had led everyone else.
She had promised Daryl that she would stay in here and not come out again until he was the one to come and get her but Beth looked down to Jamie. She couldn't just stay here. She had to see everyone else and find out what had set the alarm off in the first place. If she stayed here, did anyone else know where she was? If she didn't leave, and something had happened to Daryl, how long would it be before someone else came to look for her and Jamie?
No. She had to leave and find the others.
She set Jamie down on the vest in the box again now that he was no longer crying and seemed alright and got to her feet. Going to the cabinet, she took down the maintenance shirts that had once belonged to a man named Tom. It took her a few minutes – first to figure out how to do it and then to actually attempt it. It took her a couple of tries to button up and knot the shirts that she envisioned in her head.
"Thank you, Tom," she whispered into the air.
Testing that they would hold, Beth tugged on the knotted shirt sleeves, happy when they didn't come untethered. She looped them around her neck and then went to go pick up Jamie. Gently, she set him down into the shirts, testing his weight and the strength of the sling she had made. It seemed to hold just fine and Jamie was nestled inside and seemed just fine, too.
Beth exhaled a breath. Now her hands were free to hold the knife and defend herself and her baby if that was what she had to do. She tightened the knot behind her neck – just in case. She then took a deep breath and her fingers curled around the knife's handle as her eyes stared at the door.
A part of herself wished that Daryl would show up right now but the door remained closed and everything was silent on the other side.
She couldn't just stay here, waiting for someone to come. What if someone else in the group needed help? It was her turn to help one of them. And it was a strange feeling she couldn't exactly describe but her son was only a few days old but already, it was important for him to know that his mom wasn't weak. His mom could take care of the both of them and anyone else who needed them.
Anyone could be anything in this new world. And yes. She was a teenage mom but she was going to be someone more than that.
"Let's go, Jamie," she said to the baby before going to the door, putting her hand around the knob, and slowly pushing it open.
…
The man named Axel, one of the prisoners, was staring at his friend's body on the ground. Daryl and Rick stood on the other side of the body and Daryl saw the massive chunk of flesh missing from Oscar's neck. He had bled out almost immediately and he and Rick now glanced to one another. Rick gave a single nod.
"Axel," Rick said and the man instantly lifted his head to look at him. "Daryl has to take care of this. I don't know if you want to watch."
The man still didn't say anything as he stood up and turned his back. He still flinched when he heard Daryl release a bolt into the man's head so Oscar didn't come back.
One of the prisoners that had gotten away from them on that first day – who both he and Rick had thought had surely died from a mob of walkers – had set off the emergency alarm and had released doors from other parts of the prison so the walkers in those areas would be able to come.
Luckily, most of their group had been able to hole themselves up in safe spots until the alarm went off – somehow – and then they had been able to take out the walkers. But they hadn't all made it. There was Oscar and then…
Daryl glanced in the direction of the hallway where Carol was. She and T-Dog had been together, fighting off the walkers as best as they could though there had only been two of them. T-Dog wasn't even sure what happened because it had all been a blur but during it all, Carol had got bit. More than once.
He wasn't going to think about it. He couldn't. That was… that was Carol and she had been here this morning and now, she was just gone. Daryl knew it hadn't hit him yet. Or maybe it had and he was just completely numb to it. They had already lost so many and Carol was important to him in a way that no one else was.
But even before this new world happened, Daryl was used to this. People came and the next day, they were gone. He was used to it. He was numb to it. He couldn't think about it right now. Tonight or tomorrow, he would think of Carol and allow himself the emotions that would come with it but not right now.
The dead walkers were littered all around them and they would have the task of dragging them all out and cleaning the inside of their space again.
He bent down and pulled the bolt from Oscar's head. They would bury him and they would bury Carol, too. He might not have known Oscar at all but he hadn't died a walker so they weren't going to burn him like he had been.
"Beth! Beth? Where's Beth?" Maggie suddenly started shouting.
She had been with Lori and Carl, locked away in a boiler room, and they had come out to take stock of everything. Maggie was turning in circles as if the more she turned, Beth would appear out of thin air.
"Shit," Daryl swore to himself. He didn't want to say that he forgot about Beth and Jamie – not at all – but he had wanted to make sure that the coast was absolutely clear before he went back and got her again. "Maggie!"
"Jamie!" Maggie was now shouting as if the newborn could answer her frantic cries.
"Maggie!" Daryl shouted again so she could hear him. "She's in the generator room! I'll go get her!"
"Glenn and I will go," Hershel suggested, keeping his voice calm, going to his daughter and putting hands on her shoulders, because it was obvious that Maggie was freaking out enough for everyone – first from the alarm and all of the walkers and now with Beth and her nephew being separated from everyone else.
Maggie's head wasn't clear and they all knew that that could be a very dangerous thing in these times.
Daryl opened his mouth to say that he would go instead but Beth's dad and Glenn were going to go. They didn't need him coming, too. Why would they all need to go? Beth and Jamie were fine. They were fine. (He repeated that to himself but wasn't going to focus on why.) Most of the walkers had been gathering out in their courtyard and in their cellblock. They had been nowhere near the generator room.
They were fine and safe and FINE.
"Beth!" Carl was the one to exclaim and all of their heads swiveled around to see Beth coming from the hallway in the direction of where the generator room was.
She was wearing what looked like a sling made of shirts and there was the knife Daryl had given her in her hand, the blade stained with blood. She had the faintest spray of blood across her face, too.
"Beth," both Maggie and Hershel rushed for her, hugging her between them, mindful of the sling across her chest and Jamie, who was clearly inside of it.
Daryl stared at Beth and felt a tight knot in his stomach.
Seeing her in front of him, with Jamie, both apparently fine on the on the outside, Daryl felt relief. But at the same time, he began to feel anger. She had promised she wouldn't leave that room until he came to get her. Yeah, it seemed safe now but what if it hadn't been? By the looks of her knife, she had killed a walker. Possibly more than one. What the Hell was she and her baby doing out here? Anything could have happened to her or Jamie. They had been safe in the generator room so why the Hell had she left?
He began to frown – it growing heavier by the second – and when Beth lifted her eyes and seemed to look straight at him, Daryl didn't stop frowning. He wanted Beth to know that he was pissed off. At her.
…
Thank you very much for reading and please take a moment to review!
I'm sorry for the delay in writing and uploading this chapter. I've begun writing an original story and it's kind of begun to consume my muse.