Early Morning
Atlanta
The teenager, it turned out, was named Noah. He was the same age as Dixon – barely 18. Noah was from Richmond, Virginia, but was living in Atlanta to attend his first year at Emory University when the plague broke out and the dead began to rise. He spent the first week in a refugee camp on the campus at his university, but when people began to grow ugly and fight for food, and rumors circulated that the military was about to bomb the city to stop the spread of the undead, he and a small group of fellow college students, along with two professors, fled the camp. They battled their way out of the city, barely escaping the military planes as they began to drop bombs onto the streets below.
Noah's plan was to return to Sherwitt Estates in Richmond to see if his mother, father, and two little brothers still survived there. His small group hoped to find it a safe place to stay. But he lost every member of his group, one by one, in the long slow battle out of Atlanta and beyond. By the time he made it just twenty miles north of Atlanta to Marietta, he and his Calculus II professor were the only men still standing among the hopeful who had fled Emory University's refugee camp.
Just outside of Marietta, as they wandered in search of a vehicle, they were plowed down by an Atlanta PD cop car. The car killed Professor Safar on impact, but took Noah onto the hood. An ambulance followed the cop car, and Noah was loaded into the back on a stretcher and taken to Grady Memorial Hospital.
"I knew it!" Dixon exclaimed. "That's what the pen and pad said in the van."
Noah was telling them this story where they sat under the bridge in the shade as Dixon held an instant cold pack to his forehead where he'd been bruised upon impact after the van toppled from the bridge. The cold pack had been in the back of the van. By some miracle, he hadn't broken a single bone, and as far as Daryl could tell, he had no concussion.
"The place was being run by former members of the Atlanta PD," Noah explained. "They were suppose to evacuate the hospital before the military's firebombing, but instead they'd made it a camp of sorts. It survived the bombing intact, and they began letting the unfit, who they deemed too expensive or useless to treat, die. Those who could work once treated, they continued to care for. And they began recruiting still more workers by injuring them – like they did to me - patching them up, and then making them work off their debt as orderlies."
The hospital still had power. It ran on generators. It was supplied with water from a massive water tower not being used by other buildings, which had been bombed. The orderlies would tend to new patients, Noah told them, sometimes called "recruits," and work for the cops. They would clean the place, cook the cops' food, wash and iron and mend their clothes. "I was essentially their slave for months."
"Is there a girl there?" Dixon asked anxiously. "About – "
"- 17?" Noah interrupted. "Blonde hair, blue eyes? Really pretty?"
"That's her!"
"Beth."
"You know her name?" Dixon lowered his cold pack and looked at him in astonishment. "Is she okay?"
"She's okay," Noah assured him.
Noah explained that Beth had been brought in to Grady Memorial early yesterday morning. She'd had bruises, a cut on her forehead that needed stitching, and a sprained ankle, but she'd been quickly patched up and put to work by afternoon. She'd been given a foot brace for her ankle that allowed her to walk, albeit slowly. "There's always work to be done, even if you're sill healing," Noah said.
"These cops," Dixon asked, his voice thick with emotion, "these men. Are they…have any of them tried to…have they hurt her?"
"They want us to be physically capable of work, so they don't hurt us," Noah explained. "But they do threaten us with a period of solitary confinement if we try to escape. Or death, if we do escape and they catch us on the run. And there is this one cop…Gorman."
Gorman, Noah explained, has been known to rape some of the female "recruits," without the knowledge of the leader of the camp, a woman named Lieutenant Dawn Lerner. He had attempted as much with Beth late last night, but she'd stabbed him in the eye with a scalpel she'd manage to pilfer and hide in the sleeve of her hospital scrubs. Then she grabbed his gun from him and shot him at close range in the chest.
"She got his keys from him and unlocked a back door that enabled me to escape," Noah said.
"And you didn't bring her with you?" Dixon roared.
"She couldn't run. Not with that sprain. She'd be caught and killed for what she'd done to Gorman. So, we agreed I'd take the blame. She'd tell them I killed Gorman, stole the keys, took his rifle, and escaped on my own. They're looking for me right now. They'll bring me back if they catch me, either to execute me or enslave me again. I don't know which. Lieutenant Lerner didn't like Gorman much. He was beginning to become a rival to her power. And she may not be that upset he's gone. She may just want to put me back to work. Now Beth asked me to go to an amusement park and find you and tell you where she is. I mean…I assume you're Dixon?"
"Yeah," Dixon said. "And this my Uncle Daryl." He stood, tossed the instant cold pack on the ground, slung on his backpack, and gripped his rifle in one hand. "Let's go get her then."
Daryl and Noah scrambled to their feet. "It's not that simple," Noah said. "There's three of us, and eighteen of them. They all have handguns, and they have at least twenty semiautomatic rifles between them."
"We've got more," Daryl told him.
"We have to go now!" Dixon insisted.
"Think," Daryl growled. "She's a'right right now. We got time to get an army together. Can't go in outnumbered."
Dixon inhaled and then exhaled. He closed his eyes and nodded. When he opened them again, a cop car came roaring around the corner, turned under the bridge, and headed straight for them at full speed, a voice crying through the speaker, "Weapons down and hands up! Noah, we see you. Weapons down and hands up!"
But Dixon didn't put his hands up. He raised his rifle, stared calmly down the scope, and shot straight into the windshield at the driver, seven times, until the glass cracked and spidered, the car spun out, and the driver fell, dead, on the steering wheel. The horn blared.
A second cop leapt out of the driver's side and opened fire. Daryl sent a bolt flying from his bow, and it penetrated the left eye of the cop, whose mouth dropped open as he slumped to the ground.
The three men ran for the cop car. Dixon and Noah scooped up the weapons while Daryl yanked out the driver. The blaring horn stopped suddenly, but not soon enough. Walkers were streaming toward them from the east and the west. Dixon pressed the button that dropped the magazine from his rifle. The magazine clattered, empty, onto the gravel below. He took another fully loaded magazine from his belt, slapped it inside, and shot two walkers as Noah dived into the back of the cop car. Then Dixon leapt into the front passenger's side as Daryl, now in the driver's seat, peeled off, pushing the accelerator to the floor, and thudding through three walkers even as Dixon pulled the door shut.
"Whoo wheee!" Daryl cried as he took a sharp turn onto the roadway and roared toward a city exit. Some of the shattered glass on the dashboard slid into his lap as the wind whipped through the opening of the windshield.
Over the car's radio, a woman's voice was calling, "Sergeant Lamson, come in. What happened? You said you spied Noah? Where are you? Come in. Over."
Daryl ignored the call and continued to drive out of Atlanta. He'd come back for his motorcycle later, after they'd gathered an army and dealt with Grady Memorial and its sadistic, slave-driving cops.
"Well," Dixon said as the cop car sped down a street, around two cars, and toward the highway, "I guess there's only sixteen of them now."
[*]
The back of Daryl's old pick up was half full of loot from the aquarium. After Dixon and Daryl had headed off to investigate the van on the bridge, the rest of the search team had taken the packaged snacks from the cafeteria, the boxes of mashed potato flakes (those should last another twelve months), the canned fruit cocktail, and the canned green beans. They'd also taken some clothing items from the giftshop. It would be nice to have something with a different logo for a change. It had taken a couple hours to scavenge and load up.
Now they were heading out of Atlanta, Rick in the driver's seat and Maggie wedged between him and Glenn in the bed. Carol rode in the bed with the goods, rifle ready for walkers or more of those Atlanta cops. She was sitting with her back to the window of the cab and peering through her scope now when she spied just such a cop car pull onto the highway from an entrance ramp not far ahead of them.
Rick noticed, too. He slowed the pick-up so Carol could leap into a standing position without being jolted. "Try to keep them alive for interrogation!" he shouted through the half opened cab window.
Carol raised her rifle over the cab of the pick-up and took aim at the cop car in front of them. She shot at the left rear tire. A bullet pinged into the bumper. Two more pinged into the trunk of the car, then a fourth off the bumper before the fifth one finally hit the rear tire and sent the cop car spinning out on the highway.
Carol was taking aim again when a familiar voice came through the speaker on the cop car – "Aunt Carol! Cease fire! Cease fire!"
Rick stopped the pick-up truck abruptly, and Carol slammed against the cab and then stumbled forward down into the bed, atop the looted cardboard boxes of food, before scurrying into a standing position again, leaping out of the bed, and running toward the cop car. Glenn was spilling out of the passenger's side and running alongside her, soon followed by Rick and Maggie.
"Did I hurt anyone?" Carol cried as she ran, her heart sunk down into her stomach, terrified when Dixon – but not Daryl – exited the car. She ran around to the driver's side and saw Daryl there, face-down on an expanded airbag, the glass of the windshield shattered around him. She'd only hit the trunk and bumper. How had that glass shattered? "Daryl!" she cried as she held her rifle upward and jerked open the door of the car.
Daryl groaned and sat back against the headrest of the car. "Jesus, Miss Murphy," he muttered. "Wish I'd never taught ya to shoot now."
Carol shouldered her rifle and bent down to lean inside the car. She peppered his face with grateful kisses, covering his cheeks and then pressing her lips to his. "Are you all right?" she asked. "
He smiled. "Am now."
"I thought you were those cops. I - " She stopped speaking when she noticed the black teenager in the back seat. Startled, she stepped back and began to instinctively reach for the rifle on her shoulder.
"He's with us," Daryl said.
Noah waved from the backseat. "Hi. You must be Carol. Beth told me about you."
[*]
It was probably for the best they hadn't tried to go all the way back to Fun Kingdom in the Atlanta PD cop car. If anyone was looking for Sgt. Lamson on the highways outside of Atlanta, it would have been too obvious. But it was a crowded ride in the bed of that pick-up, with four people and the loot. Carol snuggled in close to Daryl.
Maggie turned half backward in the cab and, through the open window said, "Good job, Dixon. We're going to rescue her. It's all going to be over soon."
"I didn't do anything," Dixon said. "The answer just showed up." He waved toward Noah.
"If you hadn't thought to investigate that van on that bridge, you wouldn't have been in the right place at the right time," Maggie told her. "You never would have run into Noah, and who knows if he could have made it out of Atlanta and to Fun Kingdom on his own, or how long it would have taken. So, I'll say it again – Good job."
She slid the glass window shut and sat forward again.
"Think that means she forgives me?" Dixon asked Daryl.
"Think so," Daryl told him.
[*]
Hershel got down on his knees and thanked God when he heard Beth was alive and only mildly injured and that they knew where she was and what they had to face to get her back. "I may be a pacifist," he said to Dixon, "but that's my baby girl in that hospital. Light them all up if you have to."
Dixon nodded solemnly.
Rosita examined a map of the area around Grady Memorial Hospital and debriefed Noah. The Governing Board met quickly to authorize sending the army to rescue Beth. They also approved taking in any innocent patients who survived the collateral damage of the confrontation – but ultimately, the goal was to secure their own.
A plan was hatched. They would contact Lt. Dawn Lerner by radio when they arrived and use Noah as a decoy in a prisoner exchange to lure the lieutenant and Beth out of the building to make sure Beth was safe and clear of the building as two groups of soldiers blasted through the back exit doors, made their way up the stairwells, and took out any cops inside. Noah had told them the cops all still wore uniforms.
"That will make sorting the wheat from the chaff convenient," Hershel said.
As soon as the meeting adjourned, Rosita was issuing rapid commands to her soldiers. They armed for battle and loaded up. Oscar wanted to come, but she insisted he stay. "You were shot not that many days ago. You're still healing. And we need you on watch here. We can't have all our soldiers out there."
"Carol's staying," Oscar said. "Patricia, too."
"And so are you," Rosita insisted. "Look, I'm not losing you out there like I did Abraham. You aren't ready to fight with that wound. You're staying."
Oscar smirked. "So, does this mean you actually care about losing me?"
"Of course I care," she murmured, and then kissed him on the cheek before returning to shouting commands.
Noah anxiously watched the scene as RPGs went into the back of the military truck and a long clip of ammo was loaded into the machine gun atop the armored vehicle.
"You can't just blow the place up!" he insisted. "There are lots of innocent people in there. Old people, young people, women, patients…orderlies who – "
"- We aren't going to blow it up," Rosita interrupted him. "We have a plan, and you're a part of it. But if we need those, we need those. And we may need them to get through a herd of walkers on our way out."
Noah sighed in relief to know they didn't simply plan to set the whole place on fire to smoke Beth out.
Rosita raised a hand and whirled a finger in the air. "Let's move out!" She nodded to Noah. "You, ride with me."
Noah took the rifle they'd given him fresh ammo for and climbed into the passenger's side of the armored vehicle as Rosita took the driver's seat. Daryl, Dixon, Rick, Michonne, Maggie, Tara, Andrea, T-Dog, Sasha, and Bob – they needed their field medic, just in case – clamored into the back of the military truck. It would now be twelve against sixteen, a near even match – a more than even match, given this group's experience in battle.
As the military truck began to roll out, Max tore out of the partially open gate of Fun Kingdom, ran after it, and, barking, leapt up into the back and onto Dixon's lap. "Good boy," Dixon told him. He scratched Max behind the ears, and the dog let his tongue loll out of his mouth.
"He's not theirs, do you think?" Tara asked.
"Nah," Daryl told her. "Took us to an Athens PD car. Not Atlanta." Daryl reached over and scratched the dog's head. "But we might just need a police dog to help reason with these fuckers."
Max barked as the military truck rumbled out of the Fun Kingdom parking lot. By dinner time, they'd be in Atlanta.