fandomismylife Yes, thank you, me, too!
I have long covid and I sleep constantly so it took me much longer to finish this chapter than I expected but even so I HAD TOO MUCH FUN WRITING THIS ONE. It gets nasty: a mesh between the episode 'One More' and Maggie's spooky story about the old man. I just felt like that whole story deserved a fleshed-out version somewhere, you know? So here you go!
If you are the dealer let me out of the game
If you are the healer it means I'm broken and lame
If thine is the glory then mine must be the shame
You want it darker, we killed the flame
Magnified, sanctified, be thy holy name
Vilified, crucified in the human frame
A million candles burning for the help that never came
You want it darker...
Daryl, Kelly, Maggie, Elijah, and Cole arrive back to Alexandria the morning after the rest of us. With them, we meet Agatha and Frost, who're husband and wife, and Duncan, a large, bald, bearded man who I think could de-road a small truck if he wanted to. Hershel, with us now, too, is as big as Judith, despite being a few years younger, and it goes without saying that he is all the best parts of his parents.
We're running low on food. Without our livestock or the majority of our horses, hunting, recapturing our animals, and rebuilding the wall all at the same time has been slow and exhausting, and mostly unsuccessful, so for the last two weeks Gabriel, Aaron, and I have been off scavenging — I'm more useful out here than back home anyway; Siddiq can handle the clinic on his own, and Oceanside's fine with Alex as their new medic...
"Maggie tell you about the Reapers?" Aaron asks me on our way through a pasture of dandelions. "People who attacked her home?"
"No," I answer uncomfortably, "I just know what she told Daryl. That they came out of nowhere, wiped out everything in their way. And that their leader, Pope, has it out for them for some reason. She doesn't want to talk... to me... about anything else," I add, avoiding his eyes.
Still, I can feel Aaron watching me. He elbows me. "She'll come around. Just give her time. We don't know what she's been through in all these years, how long she's been on the road..."
I think it has more to do with the fact that she hates me now.
Aaron adds, "She mentioned that Georgie's group fell a long time ago."
I didn't know this so I look at him, frowning.
Aaron sighs, misunderstanding my jealousy for grief. "Bad things happen," he says. "It's a hell of a lot worse out here than it is for us back home. We're lucky... all things considered."
I don't say anything, just shrug.
"Walkers ahead," Gabriel says.
We ready our weapons. To watch their backs, I stay at a longer range with my bow while they go in. We clear the field in minutes. No close calls. Simple, honest work. After the recent rain, the walkers are much soggier, however. Their clothes and skin squelch. Bursts of rainy sludge-blood smatter the pasture's flowers.
We keep moving.
Gabriel's map is marked with all the unsearched buildings Maggie could remember from her travels, places she overlooked or didn't think were worth trying over the years, within the state lines. We reach another: Two storey house, storage cellar.
Burned to the ground. Inside, a charred family of three lies together on the floor, wound together by purple flowers growing from the earth under their corpses.
"What happened here?" Aaron asks.
"We'll never know," Gabriel says. He keeps walking.
By noon, we reach a large stretch of pastures filled with long grass that we need to pass through. By the fence, a walker sits asleep. When it senses us near, it peels itself off the gate post and Gabriel strikes it through the skull with his machete. I take an old cooking timer from my pack, set it, and throw it far into the field of tall grass.
Walkers rise into view.
The three of us get to work.
More unknown stories show their glimpses as we travel. Skeletons of horses and riders lying across a street, half-buried rounds littering the ground around them. A row of family cars. One with a very old walker and two empty, bloody, baby seats inside.
Gabriel goes to the trunk.
"What are you doing?" Aaron asks him.
"I'm gonna search them. There could be something here."
Aaron watches him, looking uncomfortable. I catch his eyes and nod, so he opens the car door for me. I deal with the baby-eater inside. We search the rest of the cars. Nothing but crunched up bones and damaged, rotten cans of food.
Two more locations left.
So again, we move on.
One is a grocery store that used to sell fresh produce, but we figure it's worth checking in case there're any preservatives lying around somewhere. We don't manage to get in through the front so the guys boost me up onto the roof, since I'm lightest. More skeletons. More unknown stories. I find a hatch with a ladder and use it to climb down inside. It's dark, but I have a torch, and the handful of walkers inside are old and falling apart, wet and messy, barely effort at all to put down by myself. In a few minutes, I clear the building and search every back room and shelf I can find.
I unblock the front doors.
As I leave, I shake my head. "Nothing..."
Aaron paces.
Gabriel unfolds his map and turns to us. "One more..."
I nod, sighing tiredly.
Aaron shakes his head. "We've been at this for two weeks. What do we have to show? I… I can't."
"We have to see this through."
"No… we don't. We can go back. We can check the hunting grounds."
"Aaron… there's nothing there anymore," I say, feeling my face arch, "not after the horde."
"Een's right," Gabriel says. "It's spent."
"So is every other place on Maggie's Goddamn map!" Aaron shouts. He calms himself quickly. "Look, I just… I miss my daughter. And I know you miss yours, too. And, Enid, Oliver and the others could be back by now…"
I look away from him, pushing down the jolt of dread. Mine isn't a good argument. Ever since the horses came back without Oliver and the rest of the Charleston Mission, and ever since Maggie has been treating me like I'm a stranger, it's been hard to keep interested in things going on inside Alexandria's walls at all these days. Honestly, I think Siddiq and the Council only gave me permission to leave the clinic for so long because they took pity on me. I don't know if things will ever feel normal again with Maggie. I don't know if Oliver is even alive... but I can keep busy until the time comes when I'm forced to find out, at least.
I look at Aaron and Gabriel.
Firmly, I say, "One more..."
While treading along a muddy street during the cloudy evening, with our minds beginning to move routinely to where we're going to spend the night, I spin round at a shriek and see an arm yank Gabriel by the ankle. He trips face first into the mud. Aaron takes the walker out quickly and pushes it aside. Gabriel twists around to look at us, coated in mud and a section of frontal lobe.
"Little help?"
Aaron snickers. As he helps Gabriel to his feet, Gabriel deliberately pulls him a little too hard and smears thick mud down the front of Aaron's shirt. Aaron seems not to find this as funny as I do.
"Oh. You're gonna laugh at me, are you? How about now?"
And he slings a fist full of mud my way. I don't manage to dodge it in time. It stains my jeans, cold and damp. Aaron laughs at the look on my face, and I'm about to declare an impromptu mud-war but we both notice the miserable look on Gabriel's face...
He's unfolding the map in his hands.
Its pages are lathered in mud, unreadable. He winces.
Thunder growls overhead.
Gabriel takes a deep, determined breath. "There's a water tower by our last location. We just need to head north until we see it and then..."
"No," Aaron says, "we are not doing this without a map."
"It's only an hour away."
"I don't care!" Aaron shouts at him.
There's a lope of thick silence between them, with just the trees swishing loudly in the wind.
"Gabe..." I say, softly.
He sighs breathlessly. "Fine. We'll go back..."
And then the rain begins to fall.
The weather has been turning faster than we'd expected. If we'd known we'd have to brave so many storms we would have planned a shorter trip from the start. As the sun sets behind the murky clouds, we find somewhere to take shelter nearby in what looks like an old industrial barn or warehouse. Old rotten loading crates are stacked outside, shaking in the wind. A rusty delivery truck is parked by the loading bay.
"Was this on the map?"
"No."
Gabriel and I unsheathe our machete's, tilting our hoods from the rain. Aaron has his mace-prosthetic at the ready. Once we enter through the unlocked door, he uses his mace to bang on a shelving unit inside. The building shudders a little, but otherwise remains silent under the patter of rain on the roof. The dim room falls totally dark as Gabriel shuts the door behind us. We use our flash-lights for light.
A bright blink of lightning makes my heart leap as it lights up the large, cluttered warehouse floor. We hear the crack of it a few moments later, as we're looking around.
Someone had been living here at some point in the past. There are old, dusty books. Bibles, actually. Lots of them. Most of them ripped at the pages. I search a back office for food, but find nothing except an old, tattered rug on the floor beside the desk.
A loud bang makes me jump.
Not lightning this time.
Aaron's scream fills the warehouse.
Terrified, I run out into the main room, bow up, meeting Gabriel. In a panic, we bolt for Aaron's voice and open a door to a store room to see him stumbling back from a dead boar. It's bleeding… Aaron's knife sticks out it's throat.
Trembling and breathless, he looks to us and says, "It just… came at me… I didn't… I didn't, uh..."
Gabriel starts giggling.
"What?" Aaron demands.
"Nothing. It's just… that was quite the scream."
Aaron glares at him. "These things are vicious!"
"Clearly, no, hence… the scream."
It's hard not to laugh, too.
"Alright," Aaron complains, "let it all out… Are you through?"
Gabriel and I are falling over each other laughing, re-enacting Aaron's scream and the boar's death dramatically, and when Gabriel cries out, "Oh, Lord!" I bend up so hard that I fall to my knees in laughter. Aaron pats my back while I calm down, rolling his eyes.
Gabriel catches his breath, too.
"You know what I feel like?" he asks with an elated sigh.
"What?" Aaron says, while I kneel here, realising all at once how tired my legs are.
Gabriel grins at us.
"Dinner. And… drink," he says.
And mine and Aaron's mouths fall open as Gabriel pulls a full bottle of whiskey out from under his arm.
We make sure the rest of the building is clear before we set up a fire in a trash can. The warehouse ceiling is tall enough and with enough leaks, that we're safe from smoking ourselves out. We slaughter and cook the boar, make three heaping plates at a table —considering the boar meat won't keep until we make it back home and we don't have the resources to jerky or freeze the leftovers here— and Gabriel pours each of us a dribble of whisky into three glasses.
Aaron watches this, a crease between his eyebrows. "That's it?"
"Yes." Gabriel re-corks the bottle, setting it aside. He watches me raise my cup curiously and tip the whisky sideways a little. Even at the corner of the cup, it barely comes above my thumb. At our dissatisfaction, Gabriel adds, "That's all we get."
"Why? It's just whiskey."
"It's not just whiskey. It's perfection. It's rare. This bottle — easily cost over two-thousand dollars."
"That was a lot, right?" I ask.
"Yes, Enid," Aaron answers, "it was."
"Like, enough to buy a house?"
"No, erm, not that much. We'd be talking tens of thousands, just to start a mortgage. Two grand would maybe be enough to rent an apartment. A very small one. For a month." This concept both confuses and horrifies me. I widen my eyes at the whiskey bottle. Aaron nods, like I've proven his point. "Yeah. The fact that people would pay that much just to get drunk is a huge part of what was wrong with the world before."
"The point isn't to get drunk, it's—" Gabriel stops himself. "Just... take the cup to your nose and sniff. Alright? Both of you. Just trust me."
We do as we're told...
"Now take a moment," Gabriel says, "tell me what smells you're both getting. What does it remind you of?"
"Maple syrup, vanilla," Aaron answers, "breakfast as a kid..."
Gabriel looks to me inquisitively. I shrug, agreeing with Aaron, more or less, but my silence seems not to be enough for Gabriel, so I roll my eyes and think of something to say.
"It smells like tree bark, and something sweet, yeah..." And I think of the candy apples at the fair last year. Alden's kisses in Hilltop's orchard, his gentle weight on my chest, the dewey grass on my back. I even think brightly back to the days when Oliver, Carl, and I wasted hours and hours out in the woods, in Nowhere, with our locker full of stale M&M's and tennis balls and comics… hiding in the hollowed out tree log... Oliver's trembling wrist against my fingers...
"Now take a sip," Gabriel says, nudging my attention back to him, "and let it sit… now pay attention to the finish, how the flavour evolves."
He's right. The whiskey I've tried before has stung on the way down my throat, but swallowing this is like an intense song, changing and shifting and soothing. I shut my eyes and smile.
"Wow," I hear from Aaron beside me.
Gabriel grins at us. "Yeah, exactly," he says, softly, and proud. "Now we eat and the meat will taste even better."
So we do that. And Gabriel is right. And he seems to be in such a good mood that he allows the three of us to drink some more — "After our rough day and all," Aaron reminds him.
We hold out our cups and Gabriel fills them heartily.
I don't drink anymore after that second glass, on account of the fact that one of us has to keep look-out, but I do happily watch them both drink on into the night, until somehow half the whiskey bottle is gone and they're both slurring over an extravagant card game, which soon moves on to mini-golf, using a ball and club one of them found among the shelves.
Eventually they both dissolve into two beanbags that I procured for them earlier, when I noticed how quickly they were losing the ability to stand upright. Smiling, I watch them from where I'm leaning against the wall next to the door we'd used to get in here. The windows in this warehouse are high up, so the best I can do other than keep watch outside, exposed, is stay in here by the door and keep an ear out, and occasionally crack the door open to peer outside.
Gabriel and Aaron begin giggling over something. It's hard not to laugh at them. It's hard not to feel glad I know them, glad to call them family.
"Oh, Een, we're sorry," Aaron says.
"We are?" Gabriel says.
"Yes, because we're drunk, and we left you to keep watch, all night!"
"I don't mind," I say, caught off guard by a yawn. I blink wet out of my eyes. "This place is pretty hidden away anyway. Plus, you both deserve a night off."
"We do," Aaron says.
"Yes, that, we do!" Gabriel sings.
Fools, I think. Fools who I love.
"So..." I must nod off because at Aaron's voice my head snaps up to look at him. I shake my head to clear it and stand a little straighter. "...Gabe, what does God think of you drinking and gambling right now?"
Gabriel chuckles tiredly. "He's probably okay with it."
Aaron giggles. "Yeah? Card sharking part of proper priest training? There a whiskey class in the seminary?"
"Actually, yes." Gabriel draws in a wobbly breath. "I'm serious. I had a mentor. Reverend George. He was a good friend, and a great teacher. My first class was at a boy's funeral. Thomas Franklin. He died of cancer during his freshmen year at college. Everyone in town came to the funeral and Reverend George performed the service. He spoke as he lowered Tommy into the ground and he said all the right things… without even trying. At least, it didn't look like he was."
I watch Gabriel lose himself in the memory, feeling my eyebrows crease. I glance away when he starts talking again.
"Funeral ends, we get in his car to go to the wake, and he… he just takes off!" He chuckles. "Eighty. The whole way. He says, 'We have to get there before the others!' and he's running stop signs, and saying a prayer each time he does and… my eyes were closed the whole way. And we get there and he heads straight for the liquor cabinet. I said, 'What are you doing, Reverand?' and he says, 'Shut up, Gabriel!' and he snatches off my collar, and he pulls off his and he starts pouring, and then Tommy's father walks in… and Reverend George walks over to him, two drinks in hand, and… he just starts talking. Talks to everyone. They're at ease. Smiling. And laughing. Then he tells me, 'All I have to do is be with them, in the moment. Speak from my heart and don't worry about what I think they want to hear.' I try… but… I'm not as good at it as he is."
He smiles to himself, modestly.
"Later he tells me that real ministry isn't preaching from a pulpit," he goes on, "it's talking to people, one-on-one. On their own terms. Relating to them, you know? That's how I know about whiskey. It's how I know about a lot of things."
"You should start preaching again," I tell him, biting back another yawn.
"I was just about to say that!" Aaron beams. "Really, Gabe. I'm gonna be mad at you if you don't. We both will, won't we, Een?"
"We will. Definitely," I say with total seriousness.
Gabriel giggles.
Aaron watches him unsteadily, but with an earnest rigidity in his eyebrow. "Listen," he slurs, "when I was out there, finding people to bring to Alexandria, that felt right. Helping was right. We haven't done that for a long time. We gotta get back to it."
"I don't wanna preach anymore."
"Why?"
"You really think things are gonna go back to the way they were?"
"It has to."
"It won't." Gabriel looks up to the tall ceiling, shaking his head. "The world isn't built for the way we used to be."
"You don't believe that. You're head is all..." Aaron makes a washy motion against his temple. "...over the Whisperers, but who and what they were is… not most people."
Gabriel looks at him. He sits up from his beanbag with a grim look on his face. "Evil people aren't the exception to the rule. They are the rule."
Aaron stares at him. I uncross my arms, half of me expecting an argument to break out, but Aaron just raises his eyebrows and says, "Well, now I'm sober." He stands and picks up the golf club. "After this next round, I'm going to... climb up to the roof and jump off head first."
"Aaron," I complain.
He giggles.
Gabriel smiles up at him from his seat. "You want me to perform your last rights?"
"I'll get back to you."
I tut and check outside. Clear. When I shut the door and look back at them, Aaron is swinging half-heartedly at the golf ball, but hits Gabriel in the ankle instead.
"Ow!"
"Sorry."
"Alright," I say, stepping over, "time for us to just calm down and go to bed, I think."
Aaron chuckles. "Good idea. Good idea. One more round. And I will."
I sigh, exhaustedly. "One more. Then bed."
"You'd make a great mom."
"If I wanted, sure. Too bad I don't. Play."
So they play one more round, and then they stumble back into the comfort of their bean bags, and I stay awake all night keeping watch in silence, only I must fall asleep at some point by accident, because the next thing I realise is that the sun is shining through the door's keyhole, and I am sitting alone beside two empty bean bags.
"Gabriel? Aaron?"
The warehouse is so cluttered that there is no echo or sound in response to my calls. I gasp when a stranger's voice answers me from within the aisles.
"Oh, they ain't here no more..."
I stand up instantly, bow up, aimed.
Slowly, a small, hunched-over, old man steps into my view. He squints at me, and sniffs. "Who are you cooking?" he croaks, or at least I think he says this, because when I ask him to repeat himself he says, "What are you cooking?"
"Boar..."
"Boar," he repeats, humming it. His pale grey eyebrows jump across his wrinkled forehead. "How was it?"
I don't answer. I just keep my bow and arrow aimed at him. He hums at this curiously, the sound gruff in his throat. He makes an 'it's alright' gesture with his arms and takes off a tatty cap hat and tosses it aside on a shelf, brushing back his long, wispy, white hair with knobbly-looking fingers. He must be in his eighties, at least. His back hunches when he walks. He doesn't seem to have any weapons either, and is wearing just less than a few rags. He isn't even wearing shoes, but his feet are dirty.
Still pulling my bowstring taught, I tell him, "You can have some, if you like."
"Oh, thank you, girl. Thank you."
I watch him set up a bowl from the leftovers on the table. He sits with a tired grunt and eats like he's not starving, which must mean he isn't.
"I'm Enid," I say, approaching slowly, "what's your name?"
"My name is Mays."
I watch him pick at the boar meat. Sucking pork grease off his thumb, he glances at me, up and down, then without looking round, he reaches behind himself into a shelf drawer and pulls out a fork.
I force myself not to cringe. "This is your place."
He grunts in confirmation. "My place. My boar." He glances at the empty bottle cast away on the floor, adding in a gruff drone, "My whiskey..."
I squeeze my fingers around my bowstring. "I didn't think anyone lived here. I was just looking for food. I didn't mean to steal from you. I'm not a threat."
Mays sets down his fork and pulls a sack from under the table, that wasn't there last night, up against his knee. I watch him retrieve Aaron's prosthetic arm from inside it. It's spiked mace twinkles against the sunlight coming in through the high-windows. He sets it on the table beside his plate.
"Don't seem so harmless to me," he says.
The blood leaves my face. I think quickly. I don't know what Mays has done to Aaron but I don't see any blood on his prosthetic, so I have to assume he's still alive. Same for Gabriel. I consider telling Mays about our numbers back home, but I realise this means nothing if nobody knows to come and help us in time, especially since we're some place Maggie didn't even mark. And in any case, if there's anything I've learned from Carol in the last decade, it's not to give away all your strengths until the time comes for when they're needed.
"Where are my friends?" I ask, calm.
"How should I know?" Mays answers, chewing. "Haven't seen 'em since they both wondered out to take a piss in the night. I can take a wild guess by the sound of the growls, though. And the screams. Who knows where they've wandered off to by now."
Screams? I didn't hear anything. I didn't even wake up when they left the warehouse. And I was sleeping right by the door. How could I have let this happen? I force the panic and grief down, burying it under my old mantra: Just Survive Somehow.
Stepping towards the door, slowly, I say, "If you don't mind, Mays, I should go and look for them. Even if they're… wandering… I'd still like to bury them."
"You can do that," he says, "but I wouldn't bother. They'll be all gobbled up by now. Nothing left to find. Nothing to bury. Unless…" He looks at me again, up and down. "They good fighters, your boys? Maybe they survived."
"They were drunk."
He squints. I don't know why.
He says, "Don't be upset. These things happen. Some folk just ain't built like us, to survive. You say you're looking for food?"
I watch him. I nod.
"I got food. Plenty for you, at least."
I glance distractedly around the warehouse, confused.
"It's hidden." Mays' voice is so rough and harsh that I almost jump, but manage not to. My eyes dart back to him. I swallow. He nods. "I'll show you where. Just put down your bow. You can trust me."
Our eyes lock for several moments. His eyebrows arch. His lips curve gently. And I know he's lying. I put my bow and arrow on my back. He stands up from his chair and walks over to me, pointing with one arm towards the loading bay behind me. I don't turn my back to him, but instead step towards it backwards.
"Through there. Could you just get the key, on the side there?"
I glance at them, quickly. I see him reach into his pocket. And I swing quickly — too quick for him to react to me snatching up the golf club from the floor and cracking him across the skull with it.
He hits the floor, out cold, instantly.
I drop the club, breathless, my chest hammering. I grab his hand from his pocket. Inside his fist, I find a rag. I can smell the chemicals so I plug my nose. He has zip ties and a switch-blade on him, too.
Mays starts to stir, groaning and squinting at me. He tries to lurch at me but I press his switch handle to his throat, thumb on the button. Mays stops still. I shove him to the floor and stuff the rag in his mouth. He screams at me, coughing dizzily on the chemicals. I elbow him in the face and after a small struggle, I manage to zip-tie his wrists together. He spits the rag out while my hands are busy, shouting nasty slurs at me, but I knee him in the chest and it knocks the energy out of him. Quickly, I stuff the rag back in his mouth and use another two zip ties to trap him against the iron beam of a shelving unit, tying his ankles together, too.
He glares into my eyes while I hold the rag in his mouth, until finally the chemicals take full effect, and his eyes roll back, and his body goes limp. I clamber off of him, my heart in my throat. I put his knife in my pocket. Heading to the door, I peek through the key hole and see nothing and nobody waiting outside. Still, I jam a chair under the handle. If Aaron and Gabriel are still alive, they can knock, but the griefed doubt in me doesn't hold them to it.
I glance back at Mays. I think of the food he tried to bait me with. I march over to him and tug the rag out of his mouth. While I wait for him to wake up, I search every inch of the warehouse again, but find no food just like the night before.
Finally, Mays groans from his crumpled up place on the floor.
Just Survive Somehow...
He yanks against his zip-tie, then growls another slur at me across the warehouse. I wait for him to calm down. Finally he does. His white eyebrows knit tightly together angrily as he says, "You're stronger than you look..."
I stand across from him, folding my arms.
He coughs, sounding even more ancient than he looks. "You know I've got guys outside. Ready to come in and take you the moment I say so."
I watch him, thinking again of the things Carol has taught me over the years. People don't give away their strengths that easily. Not if they mean them.
"Lie better," I say, and it's a relief to see his eye twitch, bluff foiled. "Where's your food, Mays?"
"Gone. There is none."
"You eat slow."
"What? I don't speak crazy-bitch."
I narrow my eyes.
Mays sighs. "I ran out of food yesterday, okay? That boar was the last thing I had left, and you ate it."
"Mays... where... is your food?"
"I look stupid? You're just going to kill me anyway."
"If you lie again, I will."
I wait, then I draw my bowstring.
"I'll tell you what," he says quickly, faking calm, but I can see the anger he's holding back in his voice. "I'll give you a riddle. If you get it right, you find the food. If you get it wrong, you let me go, and I'll still show you where the food is. It's a win-win for you either way."
I watch him. He must be joking.
He sighs, smiling that fake smile again. "Call it a peace offering, for my… misdeeds."
I scoff at him, putting my bow on my back and arrow back in its quiver. "Misdeeds? After the shit I found in your pocket? You're an animal."
He shrugs, and like earlier, he glances at me, up and down. I see the hunger in his eyes this time though, and not for food either. I grimace, taking his switch out of my pocket and clicking the blade out. He swallows.
"Say your riddle," I tell him, clenching my jaw. "I'll decide what happens next."
He smiles a toothless grin, and after a short pause, he speaks.
"A home with many aisles and rows,
tiny woven threads mark which way to go,
the earth is hollow and blind,
a gateway is hidden behind..."
I glare at him. He didn't have to think very hard to come up with that. He must've done this before. A shiver runs down my spine, a dread in me wondering if this is still going the way he plans, all part of some game. I double up on the zip-ties; two more around his wrists and the shelving unit, and two more around his ankles. I also set the glass whiskey bottle against the door handle in case anyone tries to get in.
I ask Mays to repeat the riddle. He doesn't, on account of that breaking the rules.
"I'll give you ten minutes," he says, watching me step back and recite what I can remember of the riddle to myself, "or what I guess is ten minutes."
"I have a watch," I say flatly. "I'll let you know."
"You better!" he calls out as I disappear along the shelves.
A house with many aisles and rows.
Or was it home? It means the warehouse, either way, I'm sure…
Something about thread?
My first guess is that a clue must be written on an item of clothing somewhere. Only, I've gathered all the rags I can find in this place and none of them show me anything specific. Not even anything he's wearing. I read label after label, but only find old brand names and laundry instructions. Even the rug in the back office is plain.
The earth is hollow and blind,
A gate-way is hidden behind.
The food must be behind a secret door somewhere. The earth, underground? Only the warehouse floor is solid cement, so it must be in the walls. I try pulling out all the skirting boards, searching for seams, knocking along every inch of wall, searching for hollow sounds. Nothing anywhere.
"You're so close," Mays teases, as I'm thinking about braving going around the outside of the warehouse to compare the layout. But perhaps that's what he wants. "How long left, girl?"
I grit my teeth. "Two minutes."
He cackles, gesturing his bound hands in a motion like he expects me to come over and free him.
"Not yet," I tell him, even though I know that when my time runs out I'm not going to free him at all, and instead I'll start cutting off his fingers.
I go over the riddle again.
Aisles and rows
Threads, something about threads
The earth is hollow and blind
A gate-way is hidden behind
The rug in the back office clings to my attention again. I go in. I look down at the rug carefully. I stomp on it, but only hear and feel the mild solid smack of concrete. The corner under the desk is scuffed up, more than the rest. I shove the desk aside. As I do, a leg catches on a groove in the floor. My heart jolts. I stomp there, too.
Thonk!
Breathless suddenly, I yank the rug back.
A steel hatch.
"Clever girl!" Mays calls from the main room.
Panting and clutching my t-shirt, I stare at the bolted hatch in the floor. It doesn't feel as much as a relief as I want it to because Mays is still hooting and whooping enthusiastically. Does he want me to open the hatch? What will I really find when I do? My skin crawls. I draw my bow, and with my free hand, I unbolt the hatch and pull it open, jumping back quickly. As it falls open onto the other side of the floor with a crack, I pull back my bowstring and aim an arrow, expecting some wild creature to leap out like a Jack-in-the-box, but see nothing.
I see nothing but a deep, black hole.
Blink until my eyes adjust, I make out a ladder disappearing down into the darkness. A fly buzzes out of the hole and past my face. The smell hits me then: rot and ammonia. Walkers. I don't hear or see anything when I edge closer and shine my flash-light down to the bottom. All I see is an empty cement floor.
"Hello?" I call out.
I wait a moment.
Something thumps. Once, then again. Fear grips my chest. I want to run home to Alexandria. The only reason I don't is because I can't face the thought of returning empty handed, not when I could be this close.
Just Survive Somehow...
After a deep, trembling breath, I wrap my flash-light to the back of my hand with its strap, then climb down the ladder. Mays' distant, grumbling chuckle is the only thing I can hear above me, while below, the sound of thumping grows clearer the deeper I go. A few walkers, at least. I'm careful on my way down. I bang on the ladder, hoping to attract them so that I can take them out from my vantage point, but they don't come. They sound too far away, and faint.
Climbing deeper, I finally reach the bottom, where I hop down and shine my flash-light around. Above I see the ceiling of the back office. I'm standing at the foot of a small, rectangular room with a single door opposite the ladder. I open it with my knife and flash-light leading the way, and come to a living space, with a mattress and some belongings and a lamp. Kneeling on the mattress, I light the lamp from a book of matches I find on the ground. A few more flies appear, attracted to the light.
Another thump makes me jump.
I have to catch my breath for a moment before I get up and follow the sound towards another door across the room, taking the lamp with me. The smell hits me worse as I edge the door open. More flies buzz out around me from inside. I knock, expecting walkers to snap it shut from the other side, but nothing approaches.
As I step inside the room, there are so many flies that they bump my face, filling the room like clouds. My face twists up in disgust. Walkers don't attract many flies usually. People think its got something to do with how slowly they decay. There must be rotten food down here instead. I have to pull my collar up to cover my mouth and nose. As the lamp-light spreads across the room, through the flies, I see more mattresses on the floor against the walls. Four of them. Only these mattresses aren't empty.
To each, an armless, legless, unclothed walker rests, writhing, and letting out weak, shallow wheezes. One is facing me, only its eyes are gouged out and filled with maggots.
Quietly, I approach it and draw my knife.
And the walker flinches.
I mean, it really flinches at the sound of my knife.
It's alive.
She is.
Horrified, I startle and fall backwards, my hands smearing in what I realise is human waste. Flies swarm up out of my way. Moaning in disgust, I twist to look at the other bodies. All the same. Not walkers. Women, severed and stitched arms and legs, lying in their own piss and shit, without eyes or clothes, or even tongues I realise, when one of them tries to say something to me. All I hear, behind the buzz of flies, is a loud wheeze through an open, cauterized gash in her throat where her vocal cords have been ripped out. Her belly is round and full and purple. And it occurs to me that the thing inside of her is no longer a baby, merely a dead thing trying to get out. I cover my mouth with the back of my hand, staring so hard my eyes ache.
At least one more of them is pregnant, too, in the early stages. I crouch beside the most heavily pregnant woman closest to me, the one who's lost the baby recently. She's dying from the infection. Her skin is purple and blue and on fire when I reach out and touch her. Flies billow away. She startles again, though this time I think she realises that I am not Mays, because she just begins to sob, her eyebrows arching in pain. She mouths something. She doesn't have to have a voice for me to know what she wants, so I put her out of her misery quickly. The others, too — pushing my mother's knife through each of their temples one at a time. The last shallow breath echoes to nothing, leaving just the sound of the flies and my own breathing and swallowing.
My first coherent thought after that is that if those women were still alive, then there has to be some food down here.
Standing up, I unfold my arms from around my knees and pick up my knife. Waving off flies and doing my best to wipe waste off myself, I search the room. There's a set of drawers with nothing inside but cleaning products and other much more unsettling things that I try not to think too hard about. There's another door, though, leading deeper into this tomb, so I go through it into another room. It's a relief to get out of the clouds of flies. I wave away a few that have followed me in, raising my lamp up to light the room.
And inside…
Oh, my God!
Inside is food.
Shelves and shelves of food.
Cans, jars, sealed packets... filling almost every shelf. It's hard to see in the dark but I think there's enough here to feed Alexandria for a few months. More food than I can carry home with me, for sure. Still, I fill my bag and another two bags I find in the room anyway. If I can take a few wheels off the truck outside, I could turn one of the storage crates upstairs into a make-shift wagon to pull. Or maybe I can find a trolley somewhere.
As I get busy, I startle at another noise in a dark corner of the cluttered storage room and spin on the spot. Shadows from the shelves conceal what's there too well, even with my lamp over by my bags, so I have to shine my flash-light at it. Two more bodies are curled up together, wrists zip-tied to radiators. They, however, are clothed, and men. I go over, carefully, my light shaking, until the figures come clear…
I gasp and drop my flash-light.
Aaron's foot casts shadows in the rolling light. I shake him, but he doesn't respond. Gabriel either when I grab him by his shoulder.
"Wake up," I cry. "Please, wake up!"
It's too difficult to sit them up. I'm panicking too hard. The room is too dark. And when one of their arms coil around my torso and yank me onto my side, I scream and struggle to grab for my knife.
"Enid?"
I lose my voice. I drop my knife. I grab Aaron hard around his chest. He gasps into my hair, sounding exhausted and in pain.
"Careful," he says, "my hand. It's cutting into me."
I slice through the zip-tie as quickly as I can. He comes loose and sucks the bleeding ring around his wrist.
"Are you okay?" I ask.
"I… I don't know… Where are we?"
"You were kidnapped, last night. We're under the warehouse. I only just found you. There's food. So much. Look! Quick, help me with Gabe."
"I… I don't remember anything. No. I remember going to the bathroom."
"Why didn't you wake me up?!"
"You looked so peaceful, sleeping away, so I just used a bucket."
"Wait. You didn't leave the warehouse?"
He shakes his head. "Why?" I think hard, wondering how Mays got them down here without waking me by using the door. Before I speculate out loud, Aaron adds groggily, "I know using a bucket is gross. Don't tell Gracie."
I tut, loving him madly. We cut Gabriel's zip-tie and roll him over onto his side. He's got a big bruise on his face, but is breathing, and we both take in the relief of it for a moment. Aaron and I do our best to lug him back through the other rooms. Aaron has to take a moment to recover from seeing the dead women. Finally, he asks me how I found them down here and I tell him about the old man upstairs.
"We need to deal with him."
"We will," Aaron says to me. "We'll... figure something out."
I glare at him past Gabriel's chest. "You saw what he did to those women..."
Aaron winces, but not from the pain in his sore wrist anymore. "We should focus on getting Gabriel and as much food out of here as possible first."
Mays is still bound to the shelving aisle when I lug the first bag of food upstairs. He cheers and claps to congratulate me as I drag the bag into the main room. I ignore him and go back into the back office. Aaron and I get the rest of the food up that we can. It takes us several minutes to wake Gabriel up at the base of the stairs. We catch him up with what happened and he gains enough strength to climb up the ladder with only a little of our help.
I give Aaron back his prosthetic arm, helping him strap it on over his shoulders, then I clean the sores around his wrist. I have some saline solution in my bag, and some gauze. While I work, Gabriel sits tiredly across from Mays, glaring at him.
Mays just smiles. Finally, he asks, "Why do you wear that thing? The collar?"
"I might've said it's for the same reason you keep all those bibles," Gabriel answers bitterly, "but given what my friends and I found below in your bunker, I know now you're a man too full of evil and hate to have any real comprehension of God."
Mays seems to agree with this, however apathetically.
"I wear it because the word of God still matters," Gabriel answers. "It's a light, in an otherwise… abhorrently dark world. It's a reminder of the goodness still within us. Things like love, mercy, forgiveness—"
"Toilet paper."
Gabriel frowns. "What?"
"The bibles," Mays answers. "They're my toilet paper. I like the thin pages, and I can find them everywhere."
Gabriel cocks an eyebrow. "Well maybe instead of wiping your ass with it, you should read it."
Mays laughs. "Yeah, I've read it, cover to cover. That's why I wipe my ass with it."
Gabriel turns his head away from him to glance at Aaron and I. I try to tell him with my eyes not to bother with the old man, but Mays distracts him.
"Must be hard preaching about somethin' you don't believe in."
Gabriel looks at him. "I do believe."
"'Evil people aren't the exception to the rule, they are the rule…'"
We all glare at him. How did he hear us? Was he inside the warehouse all night, hiding under that hatch? It makes sense as to why I didn't wake up. He didn't use the door at all.
"I was drunk," Gabriel says.
"A drunk tongue's an honest one," Mays says. "There's nothing left in this world but thieves and murderers."
"No," Aaron tells him. "There's still goodness. You just have to look for it."
"Who are you trying to convince? Me or you?"
Aaron falls silent. Gabriel, too. I hope this is them deciding Mays isn't worth losing breath over, but again, he keeps them talking.
"What happened to your arm?" he asks Aaron.
Aaron grimaces. "It was crushed, in a construction accident."
Mays makes a noise like this surprises him. He looks at Gabriel. "Who blinded you?"
"No-one. It was an infection."
"Huh."
"What?" Gabriel asks. "You wanted to hear that someone tried to pluck my eye out? Or chopped his arm off? Why? To prove how evil man is? To justify your heinous actions against those poor women downstairs?"
"What about you, girl?" Mays says to me. "Who broke your nose? Bruised you up like that? Bet you were a pretty little thing before that happened to you."
"Shut up," Aaron growls at Mays.
"It's fine, Aaron," I say, "we don't have time for this."
Gabriel grimaces at him, too. "We should leave you here to rot."
Aaron glances at him, shocked.
"No, you know what?" Gabriel goes on. "We should throw you down into that bunker, lock the hatch, and leave you down there with no food or light, just the flies — you'll go mad, and starve, and rot, hopefully not in that order."
"Gabe!" Aaron barks. "Stop it."
Gabriel glowers at him, gets up, and he and Aaron argue over what to do with Mays for several wasted minutes. Aaron wants to bring him back to Alexandria, lock him up there like we did to Negan, but Gabriel says it's out of the question, that he's too dangerous to keep around, and too dangerous to leave here while we're gone in case he were to escape and hunt us down.
"Well we can work something else out, Gabriel!"
"You're being naive..."
They don't notice me stand up. They don't notice me draw an arrow and pull it back against my bowstring. But they do notice Mays as he begins to laugh at me, low and rough.
"Enid, no!" Aaron cries.
My arrow flies — Mays' head snaps backwards, hitting the shelf rack with a small burst of blood. It dribbles down the bridge of his nose.
"It's done," I tell them both. "We're good."
Aaron and Gabriel stare at me.
And Aaron asks, "Are we?"
And calmly, I tell him, "Let it go..."
Later, we move all the bodies out from the bunker and bury them on a soft patch of earth outside the warehouse. As for Mays, we leave his body in a ditch to rot.
"We'll use this place as a food stash location, once the flies clear out," Gabriel says. "We'll take what we can now back home, then use the rest as and when we need it."
We don't talk about Mays again.
"Hey," I say, as we head away from the warehouse, "the water tower is only a mile away, right? It'd only take a few more hours to check it out. Worth it, right?"
They both look at me, in a new way than they used to, though. I must not seem like the same person they watched grow up for the past ten years. I try to remind them that I am, by giving them each a small smile.
"Last place on the map," Gabriel says, for my sake. He glances at Aaron. "What do you think?"
Aaron hesitates. I can see how hard it is for him to force the curve in the corner of his mouth.
But finally, he says, "One more."
Hineni, hineni,
I'm ready, my lord...
There's a lover in the story but the story's still the same
There's a lullaby for suffering
And a paradox to blame
But it's written in the scriptures
And it's not some idol claim
You want it darker, we killed the flame
You're lining up to prisoners
And the guards are taking him
I struggle with some demons
They were middle class and dean
I didn't know I had permission
To murder and to mend
You want it darker
Hineni, hineni
I'm ready, My Lord…
Notes
Song was 'You Want It Darker' by Leonard Conan. The episode Home Sweet Home featured a cover by Anita Lester, but I thought the original is way more chilling and fitting for this chapter.
Thoroughly enjoyed this chapter. I left out Mays' backstory and the roulette game considering his angle in this fic was arc-full enough with him being a psychopathic murderer instead of a sadistic, family-torturing brother. The arc was self-contained enough that I felt I deserved to have a little fun with it. Hope you enjoyed!
As always,
Happy reading.