Carol couldn't breathe.
Well, she could but it was a little more difficult than usual, and she wasn't quite sure why.
Well, she was sure why, in a sense, but she wasn't sure specifically why. After all, while yeah, Shane's got a gun and he's a touch unhinged and things are gonna go bad, very bad, unless something goes right very quickly was a general cause for concern, it was really just the root cause.
The specifics were the confusing part. After all, there were about three things going wrong - at least - at that precise moment and separating which was enough to influence her respiratory system wasn't easy.
On the one hand, there was the Shane's got a gun and he's a touch unhinged and things are gonna go bad, very bad, and Sophia is less than ten feet away thing. That was a touch worrying. She'd already done her best to hide her daughter - she was getting a lot of practice with her legs serving as human shield for Sophia - but it wasn't enough, not with that damn gun so very close.
On the other hand, there was the Shane's got a gun and he's a touch unhinged and things are gonna go bad, very bad, and he's literally pointing the damn thing at Daryl and he's not really putting it down thing. Yeah, it shifted position a bit, raising and lowering as Shane was talked down or re-agitated - and holy hell, but she could not imagine how the hell Daryl was able to focus enough to talk Shane down with that gun still trained on him - but it didn't move enough.
And then, on the third hand - or maybe she was juggling? - there was the fact that Rick and Hershel had finally returned.
They weren't alone, though, because of course they weren't. And she wasn't talking about Jimmy.
No, she was referring to the two walkers being led between them by snare poles, still biting and snapping and snarling. Still alive. Ish.
For a second everyone was still, staring at the dead men walking towards them.
And then the gun was lifting again, as though Shane didn't seem to realize that the bullet would pass through Daryl before hitting either of the walkers. Carol's breath hitched again at about the same time as Daryl sucked in a breath through his teeth, stiffening without really moving. She could see him looking around, even if he didn't move in the process, eyes flickering around the crowd before settling back on Shane. "Easy…"
Carol could practically see all the progress Daryl had made with Shane drain away, even without the gun still leveled at his face. He wasn't looking at Daryl anymore, or at Lori, or Carl, or any of the others. No, he was staring directly at Rick and the struggling walker at the end of his leash. "What is that?" It was vicious, violent, breaths ripping free from his chest in heaving grunts. "What is that?"
Rick kept walking forward, his walker in front of him, Hershel's in the same position relative to him. They didn't seem to fully grasp the full gravity of what was happening, not since all Hershel could say was a growled out, "Why do your people have guns, Rick?"
Especially not when all Rick said was, "Shane, just… back off."
Back off? It was a bit of a hysterical thought - fostered from one of the three things going to shit right about then, and it wasn't like she was sure which it was anyway - but she kept herself silent. No need to make things worse all around, not with a gun and two walkers in play and equally unreliable.
The distraction was enough, though. The gun fell, finally dropping away from Daryl as Shane broke into a sprint, heading at enough of a trajectory that he'd end up running into Rick and the others just in front of the barn.
Carol couldn't help a sick sense of concern about what would happen if he got there. She wondered if it was just her head playing tricks on her, if maybe she was reading things wrong. If the heat was getting to her.
But then Daryl pulled the crossbow from where it was anchored on his back, breaking into a run with Wes and his daughters running just behind him, and she knew. Or, at least, became reasonably confident that she wasn't just making the whole thing up.
She ran, too.
Not too quickly and not too far - she had Sophia to care for again, after all. To protect. To train. - and she couldn't get too close without getting worried about her daughter's safety, but it was enough. Enough to see what was going on, to hear everything, to keep an eye on whatever business was about to go down. She was reasonably certain she wasn't going to like it, but she was going to be there to find out. Maybe she could even help.
Shane was already shouting again by the time she stopped, not too far away from the conflict, but not too close either. "Are you kidding me?" He turned, and Carol couldn't tell if he were looking at Rick or at the group Shane himself had led over, but it didn't much matter. "You see what they're holding onto?"
And she did. She saw every detail of the creatures Rick and Hershel were leading. Saw the old fashioned white nightgown hanging off the rotting frame of the first, the workman's uniform gracing the second. She saw the grey skin practically sliding off their skeleton, the snapping of their jaws. She saw where Hershel was going with it all, how he could see people in them.
But they weren't people.
So, when Hershel answered Shane with a correction, with, "I see who I'm holding onto," she was quite confident in her immediate rejection of that idea.
For once, she almost agreed with Shane with his overly-harsh, overly-blustery, "No, man. You don't," even as she recognized that he was going about it the wrong way. That wasn't how they'd get through to Hershel, not with guns and violence and slaughter. Hershel was a man of words and logic and patient explanation.
It didn't stop her from echoing Shane's disbelief when Rick chimed in with the overwhelmingly naive, "Shane, just let us do this and then we can talk."
And, much as she still felt that he was going about it the wrong way, she had already been thinking along the lines of Shane's subsequent, angry, "Whaddya want to talk about, huh, Rick?" Of course, as with all things, he went too far, charging past them and blocking their way. His hands were flung wide, gesturing so wildly she wondered if he were fully in the moment… and yet he still seemed to be. "These things ain't sick. They're not people. They're dead. Ain't gotta feel nothin' for 'em. 'Cause all they do? They kill." Actually, no… Carol was wrong.
He wasn't out-of-the-moment or insane (or, at least, not just insane). He was a drill sergeant. A trainer. A teacher who chose hard teachings over soft cajoling regardless of the situation. Yeah, maybe this particular situation wasn't the time for his style of teaching, and yeah, maybe it'd backfire, but he hadn't completely lost the plot, either.
He was still pushing though, and that still wasn't the way to go. "These things right here. They're the things that killed Amy!" He looked directly at Andrea for that, and Carol could see her expression morph, a split second of pain and then she was nodding, resolute and on Shane's side. She hadn't ever been much of one for subtlety or patience, not when there were guns to be used. "They killed Otis. They're gonna kill all of us-"
Rick was still walking an impossible line, still trying to balance arguing with his partner - ex-partner? Carol wasn't sure - and guiding a walker closer to the barn full of who-knew-how-many others. "Shane, shut u-"
He wasn't listening. Carol wasn't quite sure why Rick thought he would be, not when he hadn't listened to the last six things anyone had been saying. "Hey, Hershel, man, let me ask you something-" Somehow, he managed to be both in Hershel's face and five feet away. However it worked, he was lifting the gun before she could figure it out, checking something about it as he spoke. "Could a living, breathing person-" And then the gun was lifting further, pointed at the walker. "Could they walk away from this?"
He fired.
He fired, and the bullet passed straight through the female walker's stomach, blood splattering across the grass behind her. Another shot, another spray of blood. Another. They'd all ducked when the shooting started, and, by the time Carol looked up again, Hershel's face looked devastated. (And yet, in some ways, a touch more sane.)
Rick couldn't see that, though, or didn't want to, and - amidst still trying to steady his own walker - shouted something inconsequentially useless along the lines of, "No, stop!" And, really, Shane might not have been going about it all in the right way, but Rick wasn't either.
Shane ignored him. "Now, that's three rounds in the chest. Could someone who's alive, could they just take that?" His hand - not the gun hand, his normal hand - lifted, pointed. "Why is it still coming?" Then his other hand lifted and the gun was back and it was firing twice more, bullets whistling through the air. "That's its heart. Its lungs. Why is it still coming?" Another shot.
Another.
Another.
Rick chimed in then, commanding and, in that moment, absolutely useless. "Shane, enough-"
"Yeah, you're right, that is enough." And then he was charging forward, gun lifted again, barrel pointed directly at the thing's head.
He fired.
It fell.
For a second there was an interminable silence. No one spoke. No one moved. The only sound or motion was the creature's corpse falling to the ground, lead-pole falling into the dust beside it.
It was a Moment. A point of no return, and everyone knew it. It was in how Lori pulled Carl back against her, in a rare gesture of parental care. In how Sophia tucked herself even closer. In how Andrea looked satisfied and all of the Greenes and Greene-adjacent looked devastated. In the way Daryl looked like he both approved of the thing being dead and like he knew exactly how bad things could go. In the mix of shock and anger on Rick's face, and the determination continuing on Shane's. In the conflicted expressions of all the others: of Glenn and Dale, Wes and his daughters, T-Dog and, probably, Carol herself.
"Enough abiding by these people's stupid rules. Enough living next to a barn full o' things that are tryin' to kill us. Enough, Rick. It ain't like it was before." He paused, and, for a second, Carol was pretty sure he was looking at Sophia. "We've been lucky so far, Rick. We found the girl. I didn't think we would, and I was wrong." Carol stiffened, somewhere between anger at the past and relief at the present.
"Yeah, you were." Rick's agreement felt spiteful, vicious. It wasn't something that needed to be said, that was for sure, and especially not when he can't back it up since he was still holding that damn snare pole.
"But that don't change the fact that we're livin' in a different world now. And now? If you wanna live, if you wanna survive, you gotta fight for it. I'm talking about fighting. Right here, right now!"
They all knew what was gonna happen, with varying degrees of certainty. It was in the way everyone with a weapon tightened their grip on it - Daryl, Glenn, and Wes with their shotguns, Andrea, Deanna, and T-Dog with their handguns, Wes and his daughters with their weapons - lifting it to be ready. In the way Rick started badgering Hershel to take the walker he was holding, no matter how devastated he looked, no matter that he was on his knees staring at the dead body of someone he regarded as a person. It was in the way Shane took a pickaxe from… well, somewhere, and went at the lock, starting to break it off of the wood despite the sheer number of Don't do this, brother!s that Rick sent his way. It was in the many, many shouts - from Glenn, from Lori, from Rick - directed at him to just stop that he ignored, just like he had all the others.
And it was in the way the doors finally opened, caught by the chain at the top, and in the way the first walkers started slowly trickling out.
Then, the world dissolved into a mess of gunshots and blood and rot and gunpowder, punctuated neatly by the thump of falling bodies.
