A hush fell across the room at the words, and realization finally struck Gregory. "Great…. Wonderful." He was scared, now, and it was easily apparent, but it looked less like concern for the men under his command and a hell of a lot more like fear for himself. He shifted in his seat, seconds of precious time ticking by. Then, he reached for his headset and shifted it in front of his mouth, muttering into it. "Look, uh…" He coughed, anxiety in each motion, then continued. "Deanna, look… We can't have you people firing in there." He winced before adding his next comment, anticipating the uproar it would cause. "Collect all the magazines from your people."
Sure enough, a chorus of cries rose from the marines, from Merle's trademark eloquence - "Why, I oughta give you my magazine... right in the face, man!" - to Rosita's muttered blend of Spanish and English. Andrea's voice was most prominent despite the cacophony, her shout of, "Give up our guns? You have no right to take it! I'm not going out there without my gun. What are we supposed to use? Harsh language?"
Gregory was unphased, save for the sweat beading his forehead - at which he was dabbing with a literal handkerchief… because that was a necessity - and the slight quaver in his voice. "Flame units only. Rifles slung. That's my final word on the matter."
Rick could see Deanna trying to placate her men through the video cameras, watched her reach for the microphone and try to negotiate. "Sir, I-"
"Just do it, Sergeant." He clicked off, then clicked on again. "And no grenades, either."
Rick could see the cameras swinging towards the various marines as the filmers made skeptical eye contact with those nearby - Andrea looking to Dixon, Merle to Deanna, Rosita to Abraham - and he couldn't blame them. Even knowing what they didn't, even understanding the catch-22 situation in which they found themselves, he still didn't see why Gregory didn't just call it a day, didn't just pull them back, get them better equipped, or just do a little more reconnaissance.
Deanna evidently decided to cooperate. "Alright, pull them out… let's have them." She didn't look happy about it, at least according to what Rick could see from Merle's camera stream, but she was doing it. It was a testament to the respect she garnered - because it sure as hell wasn't Gregory - in her men that they obliged, pulling out their magazines and handing them to Deanna for deposition into a communal ammo sack, which she handed to Andrea. With one final shake of her head and a sigh, Deanna finished with a gruff, "Dixon, cover our six. Head out, people."
Dixon nodded at the order, but Andrea lingered by his side for a little before following the others, and Rick watched through her monitor as Dixon unclipped something - big, black, and bulky, but nondescript in the shadows and the glitching of the monitor - from his back. It was only when he'd brought it fully around and had it resting comfortably in his hands that Rick recognized what was, evidently, an old-fashioned, antique Earth crossbow. Dixon grunts out a comment to Andrea - "Glad I've got this, then. Fer close encounters."
Andrea nodded. "I hear that." Then, she moved forward, and Dixon followed a few seconds later.
They moved forward quietly, and Gregory's questions about any new discoveries were met with negative answers. Something started to make Rick nervous, the tension building… It took him a while to realize that the lumps in the walls, the weird protrusions mixed in with the already slimy surroundings, weren't just random, inanimate lumps.
They were people. Dead people encased in slime and trapped in the walls.
Rick immediately turned to Judith, spinning her around to break her gaze where it was locked on the monitors. "Judith, I want you to go to the front of the car. Don't look. You hear me?" She didn't listen, so Rick raised his voice, telling himself that he could ignore the slight flinch that it produced. "Go, now." She listened that time, scurrying away in a motion too much like that of an animal.
The marines continued to move forward, and Rick had to hold his breath steady to avoid gasping as Dixon's camera came to a rest, focusing on an egg-like pod attached to the ground. Dixon began to follow something - something Rick can't see, some invisible traces on the ground - walking slowly away from the egg. Mere moments later, Dixon knelt before a tangled section of pipes, reaching one of the bolts for his crossbow in amongst the pipes and pulling out the stiff, tangled corpse of another facehugger (for lack of a better word). Another second passed and the corpse was flung onto the ground, bored disgust on Dixon's face. Rick didn't breathe easy until the marines - all of the marines - had begun moving again.
That breath then left him again as Michonne, walking towards one of the bodies currently imprisoned in the walls, tilts back a corpse's head and it springs to life.
Rick couldn't catch his breath. He was struggling to breathe, the air simply not coming, trapped somewhere outside of his body - save what he could just barely pull in with short, hyperventilating breaths - as he regarded another survivor of the aliens. Except she wasn't a survivor, was she, since he could see the skeletal remains of another facehugger just below the body. She might have been clinically alive, but she was nothing more than the walking dead; the dead creature beneath her told of impregnation, of a fate worse than death. And she knew it, too, if her cry of "Kill me" - so much like the one Rick had uttered in his dream mere weeks before leaving - meant anything.
Because of this, Rick wasn't surprised when she started to convulse. He didn't share the marines' cries of surprise or horror, didn't do anything but watch. It felt as though his chest was the one exploding from the inside, as though the creature was living in him, not in the poor hapless colonist before him. The feeling continued long after the creature completed the final burst from the colonist's body, after Dixon pulled a flamethrower from one of his frozen colleagues and seared the thing into oblivion, after the situation was once more - or as close as it could ever be to - secure. Eventually, he gives it a name (or several).
It was fear. It was dread. And it was the dead certainty that the nightmare that he'd thought was gone after the Atlanta had returned, and that it wasn't letting him go.