Chapter 34
Written in Stone

We took turns taking small naps while we let Michonne sleep straight through her next shift. Then after a few hours the sun was finally up and we were getting ready for the long day ahead.

Just before leaving we actually decided on taking the horses with us at least till we reached the Capitol Mall, since there was still quite a distance between where we were and our destination. Plus, simple shopping carts were not expected to be big enough when we found more stuff on our way. And we found a lot of stuff.

We scored big time when we came across a whole gun store, almost entirely untouched. Firearms, ammunition, blades, and all kinds of weapons abound greeted our eyes. It was so much more than we could have hoped for. I just about wanted to cry with our wonderful luck; Michonne and Carl just about did, too.

"This is great." Michonne announced. "These guns are going to mean so much when we get home."

But there still remained a dilemma. "Will we be able to hide all these from Negan and his men? What if they start looking through houses again?"

"We've gotten better at smuggling since three years ago, Judith. I think we'll find a way."

I grinned brightly by that.

By the time we finally made it to the National Mall, our single horse-drawn cart was piled so high with things that it stood over me with supplies and weapons abound. The horses looked extremely happy when we finally let them rest again in another garage same as the night before. I can't say how many times we checked and rechecked the building to be sure it was clear and safe to leave them there for a few hours of sight-seeing. We left them water and feed, taking care to reinforce the doors as strong as possible to make sure nothing got through while we were away.

"We'll be right back, girl." Carl vowed, stroking the nose of his charcoal-colored mare, Pepper. "You can relax here with Apple and get a few more hours to catch your breath before we head out again. We'll be back soon."

And with that we sealed and reinforced the doors and started on our way.

About a block down, Michonne pulled out an old tourist map. "I found this in a car a way's back. Thought it might be nice to check off all the stuff we see." It was bright and colorful, listing off the biggest things to see like this was any other typical vacation outing. The first attraction we came to was the Albert Einstein Memorial. It was much different from the photograph taken over a decade prior. The bronze was rusted and there were vines and vegetation growing all over the shrine dedicated to one of the brightest minds that ever lived.

I looked up in strange curiosity. It was so much bigger than I expected it to be and the statue was blobby, like someone molded it from clay instead of metal. He looked like a giant that had submerged himself in mud and then sat down on some white steps. There was a book in his hands marked with his greatest mathematical equations and his signature.

"How long are we supposed to stand here appreciating it?" I asked Michonne after a while.

"It seems disrespectful not to give it at least a decent three minutes. There's supposed to be a small eulogy around here."

"If the dead haven't eaten it by now, the plants probably did." Carl announce.

"Yeah, zombies eat people and plants eat memorials. We shall all be erased from time one way or another."

Michonne and Carl both looked over at me with wide sort of horrified expressions. "Geeze, you want to get a little darker there, Judy?"

"I got goosebumps with those words."

"I think I sort of gave myself goosebumps with those words." After admiring Einstein for a few moments more we continued on our way again. The next on the pamphlet was the National Academy of Science, an enormous building that looked too big to really explore entirely and still make it back before dark. There were also the remnants of an old rusted pickup truck that had rammed in the side of it, blocking the main entrance and making most attempts at getting in inconvenient. It wasn't on our top list of things to see anyways so we stuck a pin in it and just moved on.

There was the long Vietnam Veterans Memorial that we spent a good deal of time browsing and appreciating. It seemed to have held up nicely despite its age, though there were parts that seems to have flaked off thanks to time and neglect and without someone to take care of the lawn, the grass had grown wild atop the hill it was built into and hung over the smoothed stone like shaggy hair.

As we had come to notice all over town, this place had not been spared the skeletons of people that had met their ends here during the earliest days of the blight. We left that sight and passed various other statues and monuments till we reached the one Carl had been most excited to see.

"Well… there he is." He proclaimed.

We all stood before the giant of Abraham Lincoln, sitting on his marble throne as he looked down upon maybe the first living people he had beheld in a very long time.

There weren't as many plants as I had come to expect to be around this place, but that didn't mean age had not taken its toll on the temple.

One of the columns was crumbling away and others held various cracks along them. There were a few skeletons around here as well, along with the remains of a few rusted vehicles that had collided at the steps and with one another, leaving them useless and forgotten.

At least the words could still be read:

IN THIS TEMPLE
AS IN THE HEARTS OF THE PEOPLE
FOR WHOM HE SAVED THE UNION
THE MEMORY OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN
IS ENSHRINED FOREVER

I looked at him, and it was as if his unreadable eyes were burning me where I stood. I couldn't see his ghost, if there was one left of him, but I pondered over what he might have said if I could see him. How would he respond to the state of this country? What would he say?

No one would ever know.

We gave his memorial a bit more time to explore the exterior parts of the temple before moving on to the next attraction. The Korean War Memorial, then the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, the Japanese Lantern, and then the World War II memorial. The pool fountains, as displayed in the photograph of the brochure no longer worked and the water inside was old and green and smelled bad. The stone was at least mostly intact.

It was walking around this attraction that I suddenlyhad an idea.

"We should build a memorial." I said all at once.

"We do have a memorial. It's on the town walls."

"No, that's for the people who died during the Battle of Alexandria." I told them. "We should have a memorial for everyone. Everyone who died because of the Blight. That's what Bianca on the radio says we should do."

"That would have to be an extremely big memorial then. We can't even begin to count all the people who died because of that."

"Well we don't have to. Maybe we don't even have to make it all that big, maybe we just need to be sure it… lasts."

Michonne's arm wrapped around me in a side hug and she kissed the top of my head affectionately. "I think that's a very good idea. There should be a memorial, and it shouldn't have taken us this long to realize that."

We moved on through the grounds, stopping for a while to be appropriately impressed about the Washington Monument's size before continuing on.

The Smithsonian was right in sight but Michonne wanted to visit the Museum of African American History and Culture first, so we found a door we could bust in and looked upon the countless historic displays. Everything was covered with a thick layer of dust, but it still managed to be impressive. We had to be careful, though. It was dark inside and we only had our flashlights to illuminate the windowless building while we explored.

It was fascinating to be so close to history, to see the remnants of what celebrities used to wear and use when staring in a movie or television show. We moved through the building, pausing when we came to the part that centered around Slavery of early America.

For a while I couldn't really move from the first exhibit, overcome by the ugliness of it. I was shocked by the startling cruelty that people went through and dealt out. I lived in an ugly time right now, but I could still somehow be shocked by how much cruelty truly existed in a time I assumed was supposed to be better.

As impressed as I was about so much history, I was somewhat confused about it, too. I had never realized how controversial skin color was back then. Living in a world where it was mainly living verses the dead, I had never noticed things like skin color or realized there was a whole other culture or bigotry that used to exist because of it. I actually believed everything in the olden days was almost… perfect. They had food and clean water, entertainment abounds, no need to hunt or grow their food if they didn't have to. They could do whatever they wanted pretty much.

But here I learned that everything was not as perfect as books and movies had taught me.

I mean, I knew about the KKK and I knew it was a hate group that targeted non-Christians like Pagans, Jews, and Wiccans, but I hadn't realized their main targets had centered almost entirely around African descendants. It didn't have anything to do with what they believed but simply for the shade of their skin. They could have been the most Christian individuals in the world and they'd still be inferior because of their color.

It was horrible.

I stood still near an antique illustration of a man being whipped for an error his eight-year old daughter had done. The image reminded me of when Dad had been shot after I smashed that bat to splinters right in front of Negan. That's where Dad was again, it seemed like. Any time I screwed up around Negan, he made sure to take it out on Dad and I hadn't realized how horrible that was until I was literally coming face to face with it in a drawing. I grew queasy and the similarity and a horrible realization over-powered me just then.

Were we… slaves?

I stepped away from the display, moving over to where Michonne was examining a case with a pair of irons. She must have seen my expression and put a hand on my shoulder to steady me.

"Something wrong, sweetie?"

"I just feel bad." I admitted. "I didn't know there was so much controversy back then, all just because of skin color. It's awful."

She looked over at the display, a shadow crossing her face at the sight of it. "It is awful."

"It's weird," I began. "But I have this picture in my mind of what it might have all been like, but I didn't realize it wasn't… what I thought it was after all."

"What did you think it was like?"

"I don't know." My shoulders shrugged. "I just thought life was better for everyone. Everyone just sort of lived-it-up. You could get things easier. There was plenty to go around. Things were just better and there weren't so many problems. I just thought everyone got along better and you didn't have to kill anyone back then."

We turned from the exhibits and she steered me through the dark halls. "In most ways it was better, but we still had problems. Nothing is ever perfect and if it is, it's too good to be true, most of the time."

there was still something bothering me, though. "Michonne, can I ask you something?"

"Sure, honey."

"Are we… are we slaves?"

I felt her stiffen at the word and the air became very tense. She took her time to answer, time I felt was not reassuring. "I wish I could say different, but then I'd be lying to you. I think in some degree, we are."

"I want to fight back." I said to her. "I want to be free and I want to kill Negan and all the Saviors. We've got more guns now, we could do it."

"We don't have the numbers." Michonne argued. "The Kingdom won't fight with us, and Hilltop's suffered enough. There's not enough of us versus them. We would all die."

"…Maybe that's better."

"Don't say that!" She said firmly, putting her hands on my shoulders and making me look her right in the eye. "Never say that. It is never better being dead. Everything is over after that. There's nothing left of you. And what's worse is that it wouldn't be us to die. They'd make sure of that. They'd line everyone we care about up, everyone who couldn't fight and make them suffer one-by-one till there was nothing left of them. Could you live with that?"

Faces came to me with those words. Mrs. Byron, Dad, Mari, Tanti, Luis… anyone and everyone I looked after lined up side by side while Negan went down the line, deciding who was going to die for our pathetic attempt at rebellion.

Her eyes drilled into me for an answer. "…No. I couldn't."

"Your father has told you this before. We don't have the numbers, we don't have the man power, and the guns we have now, they're nothing compared to what the Saviors have. Our rebellion would be over before it started. Maybe we manage to kill Negan, but there are a dozen others to take his place were that to happen. And from the Saviors I've met so far, they may be just as worse. We know what we have now, but getting rid of this problem may just make a bigger one."

Her logic made a horrible sort of sense. There were too many variables to take into account, too much to risk and too little to gain in the end.

I looked away from her, tears burning my eyes. If there weren't Saviors and there weren't Negan…

"He's holding us back." I muttered in quiet bitterness. "They're all holding us back. We could be so much more…"

"I know, sweetheart."

We walked more around the museum, flashing our lights over the numerous exhibits till we turned a corner and found several skeletons huddled together in a corner. It didn't look like they had any head trauma but they were so decomposed, it didn't look like they weren't getting up to walk around anyways. Perhaps they starved to death, then.

This seemed to unease Michonne and she turned us both. "Come on. Let's get out of here."

We found the exit and left.

Finally, we reached the Smithsonian, the one place I had wanted to see from the beginning. We were about to go into the American History Museum but I convinced Carl and Michonne to let us see the Natural History Museum first. It had stuff from around the world instead of restricted to one singular country and I was eager to see what else lied beyond our world.

The entrance hall was enormous! I bet we could have fit the whole town in that one room. It was also illuminated with natural light, pouring in from the massive windows and allowing us to save the batteries from our flashlights.

Upon entering, we were greeted by an elephant frozen in time with its trunk lifted high in an eternal trumpet. It looked so lifelike that I almost expected it to walk right off of the platform it stood on. But I was reminded quickly of its true artificial state thanks to the dust covering it from head to foot and the right tusk that had crumbled away on it, revealing the yellowing plaster it was structured from. Around its dais was a table lined with pamphlets and brochures detailing the magnificence of these animals. Entitling the table were the words,

Elephants in Danger: Your Choices Make the Difference

My head cocked at this. It had been eleven years since the words had been inscribed. With the eradication of so many people (who both threatened and preserved these animals) were they still endangered? I lifted a pamphlet, blowing away the top layer of dust and opening it to read the outdated information.

"Do you think they're still endangered?" I asked Michonne curiously. "After all this time?"

"I don't know." She answered, gazing up at the massive animal. "For all we know there could be more elephants than there are people left."

"Maybe that's better. It says here that (other than the babies) adult elephants don't have natural predators. That's gotta be pretty nice."

We steered away from the display but grabbed a few leaflets and maps for the building, wondering through it as we had done for the first museum.

The dinosaur exhibits were the first on our list and we were pleased to see that nearly every display was still intact if only covered in dust like everything else. It was dimmer in this part of the building though with fewer windows. Still, we managed to see them well enough, even without florescent light.

It was more fascinating than I had predicted.

There were some dinosaur books in our library and I'd watched Jurassic Park and its sequels before, but this was better—way better. The only downside was that they weren't as big as I had expected. Still big enough to eat a man in one bite, definitely, but not as big as those movies had beefed them up. Aside from that, it was the first I realized that all the famous dinosaurs apparently hadn't coexisted on the planet at the same time, as I assumed. The stegosaurs went extinct about eighty million years before the first t-rex started walking around. That time was greater than the time separating the t-rex and me!

Even Michonne and Carl were enjoying themselves. We moved from the dinosaur exhibit to the FossilLab, to the Ice Age, through the African Voices exhibit and all through the first floor.

When we reached the Ocean Hall we met with the jaws of the Megalodon and I couldn't sustain my amazement while I stood right in front of it, comparing my size to the diameter of its own bite.

"Look at this thing!" I told the other two, attempting to puff myself up to my biggest height. "I fit into this thing's mouth! It wouldn't even have to chew! What kind of steroids were these animals on back then?"

Both Carl and Michonne laughed by those words.

"Fresh air and some enriching volcanic soil?" Carl suggested.

We wondered more around till we made it up to the second floor. I was disappointed to see the Butterfly Pavilion as well as the Live Insect Zoo completely derelict. The exotic plants that used to grow abounds were withered and dead along with the insects that called it home. There was a musty smell around this part, making us more inclined to get out of that area as fast as we could. The next part was the Bones and Mummies and it seemed that the current neglect that shrouded over the rest of the building seemed to suit this area rather well.

After that we followed a path to the Korea Gallery and we all paused at a glass case containing a traditional wedding hanbok.

"Wasn't Glenn from Korea?"

Carl and Michonne shifted with those words. It hurt them any time they remembered our friend because they couldn't stop from thinking to the night he died.

"His parents were from South Korea, but he was born in America." Michonne answered quietly.

"He was still Korean. It was still a part of him, and it's a part of Hershel, too." They remained quiet. "I think I'd like to bring him back something, something from here—so he can remember his heritage and all, you know?"

"What were you thinking of?"

"How 'bout that little tapestry?"

"It might be a bit hard to get at it from behind the—,"

CRASH!

Michonne was cut off when Carl slammed the butt of his gun into the glass, shattering the display to reach in and take the old cloth from the display.

"Carl!" Michonne snapped.

"What? No one's looking at these displays any time soon and no one cares either way."

She wasn't happy about what he'd done but couldn't find a good enough reason to reprimand him about it. After all, we'd been looting and scavenging for years and years. What was so different about a museum display?

He gave me the tapestry and I took great care to fold it neatly and tuck it into my knapsack. It felt old and delicate and I sure hoped it wouldn't fall apart inside there.

We continued on, stopping at the Gem and Minerals Store with my insistence and I stocked up on some crystals I'd be able to use in some spells and rituals I'd been dying to try out but been unable to because of the lack of materials. The short stop initiated an argument with Carl about filling my bag up with rocks and carried on all through the Geology exhibit, we quieted though when we reached the Gems and Minerals displays.

Now this was what I was talking about!

In this area, we had moved into a darkened part of the museum so we had to resort once more to our flashlights.

I had never seen such beautiful stones in my whole life. Gauzy strings of jewel encrusted necklaces, bracelets, rings, earrings, pins, buckles, and crowns lined every display, glistening like stars even through all the dust. I was entranced by the Dom Pedro, an enormous pillar of aquamarine, standing at about fourteen inches and weighing 10,363 carats, the largest in the world as it happened to be. Boy, the spells I could perform with that thing…

Even the raw uncut gems were incredible to behold, but the crown jewel of the museum out of all the exhibits was yet to be seen and happened to be the very last thing on our tour.

The Hope Diamond had its very own exhibit hall, fixed with a clear three by three square foot glass display case and a gazebo-like entrance that seemed more like the shrine for an idol.

Even when we had first entered the building we came face to face with posters and fallen banners advertising the brand-new modernized look for the diamond. It was here that we found the very first body we had come across through the whole abandoned building.

The body slumped against the case right as we were coming around the corner. By the looks of it, the body was a woman holding a gun in one hand with a gaping hole in the side of her head, so it didn't take a genius to guess how she met her end. I took the gun from her skeletal hands and stuffed it in my belt.

We did our best to step around it while we took in the display of the large diamond. Spotlight or no spotlight to shine down on this thing it was still incredibly impressive. Just then it gave me an odd sort of idea.

"You know… the Hope Diamond is pretty impressive." I responded to Michonne and Carl. "And Negan told me to get him something really impressive… and legend has it that the Hope Diamond is actually cursed, or at least all its owners have met their ends pretty horrendously… and if the dates aren't too off the first reports for the outbreak started only a few days after the "new modernized look" for the diamond was released."

Michonne and Carl's heads snapped towards me.

"Are you saying you want to give Negan a cursed 45.52 carat diamond?"

I shrugged, feigning innocence. "Well… he is an attention hog, and he wants something incredible, and I still have to get something that's going to impress him, and since I would like to reframe from giving him anything he can potentially use against us, I figured it would be enough to satisfy him. If he manages to meet an unfortunate end along with most of the Saviors—well, I'd say that's a nice bonus."

"Won't it look a little suspicious if you give him something that's so obviously from the Smithsonian?"

"For all he'll know I found it in a broken-down truck after its driver abandoned it years ago."

"You really think he'll believe that?"

"I'd believe it." I shrugged again. "We're always finding weird stuff. You found that magazine of naked women the other day and who would want something like that?"

Michonne glared at Carl who shrunk with my statement.

"Tell me you didn't keep it."

"Mom, I didn't keep it! I'm not a pervert!"

I took the butt of the gun from the body and smashed it into the glass the same way Carl did with the tapestry display.

"Judith!"

I reached in, but hesitated for a moment. I didn't want whatever curse was shrouded on this thing to latch onto me. Maybe if I kept from touching it with my bare skin...

I used a handkerchief to pick it up and wrap it, taking extra care not to let even the diamond encrusted chain touch me before tucking it in my bag next to the tapestry. Michonne wasn't pleased with what I had done, but thankfully didn't say anything about it as we turned away.

With that, we left the museum. There were other attractions we wanted to see, like the American History Museum, the Capitol, the Space and Aircraft museum, and many others but we would be out of light soon and we wanted to get a good start back to Hilltop before it got dark. Plus, we really needed to get back to the horses. Carl was worried about them and for good reason. if they got too loud they may start attracting things.

So, we saved those other attractions for another day when we would have the rest of our family with us to enjoy it more.

Author's Notes: So two chapters today. Nothing very exiting however. Just a little day trip into an overrun zombie Washington DC. The Hope Diamond does seem a little conspicuous, but Judith is a good liar so it shouldn't be a problem when Negan asks where she got it, I think...