Grady Memorial Hospital
6:45 PM
Dixon swallowed hard and shifted from one foot to the other where he stood next to Daryl in front of the entrance to Grady Memorial hospital, his rifle in his hands, Noah between him and Rick. Noah, with his hands tied behind his back, looked like a prisoner ready for exchange.
Rick stood dressed in his neatly pressed King County Sheriff's Deputy uniform, his silver revolver in a holster by his side, the hat Carl had taken to wearing now returned to his own head. He had thought wearing the uniform might earn him some trust from the Atlanta PD and make the plan run more smoothly.
When they'd gotten to Atlanta, they first recovered Daryl's motorcycle, which had been left behind on the search trip. Then they obscured the military truck in the garage of a building near Grady Memorial hospital. They sent ahead three scouts to scope out the hospital and the location of any guards, as well as the location of the cop cars. Next, they'd run through the stations using Rick's handheld radio until they'd gotten ahold of one of the cops at Grady Memorial. Rick had used as much police jargon and codes as he could to build a rapport, and Lt. Dawn Lerner had eventually agreed to a prisoner exchange – Beth for Noah.
Right now, however, Noah, Dixon, Rick, and Daryl and a quietly panting Max were the only ones standing before the front door of the building. As far as Lt. Lerner knew, they were the only people showing up for this exchange. They'd rolled up on Daryl's motorcycle and in a rusty sedan they'd hotwired. Both vehicles were now parked at the curb of the sidewalk leading to the entrance of Grady Memorial. They had wanted to appear far more vulnerable than they were.
The armored vehicle was park nearby, but out of sight, in a back alleyway, in case they needed it. If all was going according to plan, the rest of the army, under the direction of Rosita, had already snuck up on the building from behind, quietly taken out the guard on the back door, and was at this moment wiring explosives on the back exit doors (which could only be opened from the inside).
Now, the glass doors of the lobby parted and five cops walked out, two female and three male. One of the men had a gun pressed to Beth's back. Dixon let out a shaky sigh when he saw her, alive but with a jagged, stitched-up scratch on her forehead, limping her way forward with the help of an ankle brace.
Dawn looked them all over one by one, glaring particularly hotly at Noah.
"Why don't we all put our weapons up," Rick suggested, "and do this as easily as possible? You and I are both cops. We know how to negotiate. And I don't think you want trouble."
"What I want is Noah," Dawn replied. "My officers put their lives on the line to find him. He killed three of them, one right here at Grady Memorial, and two out there on the streets." It was Beth who had killed the man in Grady, and Dixon and Daryl who had killed the men on the streets, but Dawn didn't know that. "We found their bodies near a bridge. We haven't found the car yet. I suppose he took it somewhere."
"Yeah, we found him in it," Rick lied. "And we're willing to hand him over, if you'll give us Beth."
Beth shook her head. "No," she half whispered. Then louder, looking at Dixon, "You can't give them Noah. They'll kill him! Or worse! You can't just trade him for me. He's good. He doesn't deserve this. He's been - "
"- It's all right," Noah interrupted her. "It's all right, really. Better me than you."
Beth shook her head again, and Dixon looked from Noah to Beth. "It's gonna be okay," Dixon assured Beth. He nodded every so slightly to her, trying to give her a look that would make her understand that they had no intention of permanently handing over Noah. Daryl wasn't sure if Beth had perceived Dixon's meaning.
"So, weapons up?" Dawn asked. "On the count of three?"
"The one with his gun on Beth first," Dixon insisted.
Dawn nodded to the cop who had was holding Beth at gunpoint, and he holstered his weapon.
"On the count of three, all of us," Rick said. "One, two…three."
Everyone on both sides shouldered or holstered their firearms. Daryl swung his crossbow on his back. His handgun was already holstered.
"Hey, boy," one of the cops said to Max. Max barked. "Nice dog you've got there. Looks like a police dog, almost."
"Because he is," Rick replied.
The cop nodded to Dawn. "We should take the dog, too, as compensation. We lost both of our dogs to rotters."
"Ain't gettin' the dog," Daryl replied. They were going to use Max to notify the army behind the building when they safely had Beth in their hands, so they could blow the doors off the exits and advance through the stairwells.
"Then I think you aren't getting Beth," the cop replied.
"Shut up, Officer McGinley," Dawn barked. "I'm in charge here. I'll call the shots." She nodded to Rick. "We'll take the dog, too."
Rick and Daryl exchanged a look. Max crouched down and growled at Dawn, a low, angry growl, his throat reverberating.
"Stay!" Dixon commanded, and Max stopped growling.
"He's not well trained," Rick said. "I mean, he was, but he went half feral before we found him. He'll only listen to Dixon here." That was a lie. There were a dozen people at Fun Kingdom whose commands Max would respond to. "He'll be more trouble than he's worth, I promise you."
Dawn looked at the dog. "We don't need to be wasting our food resources on a dog anyway. But Noah took three of my men." She looked over the line, and her eyes settled on Rick. They flitted appreciatively up and down his frame. "You're a cop. You'd fit well here. If you work hard as an orderly for a few months, get along, maybe one day I'll give you your gun back and you can be one of the team."
The woman was trying to save face, Daryl could tell. She must be holding onto her power by a thread here, trying to appear strong before her men. "Nah," he said.
"Then I guess the girl isn't worth the sacrifice," Dawn told him.
Rick and Daryl exchanged a look. This might actually work to their advantage, to have Rick on the inside when everything went down.
"Okay," Rick agreed, despite Beth's shaking head.
"Put your gun on the ground and walk over here with Noah," Dawn ordered him.
Rick drew his gun slowly and crouched, one hand up, to lay it on the ground before standing again.
Beth locked eyes with Dixon. She was clearly trying to figure out why they were giving up so much for her sake. Daryl just hoped she didn't do anything stupid to mess up the plan.
On the count of three, the two groups sent their prisoners forward. Noah's ropes were loosely tied. All he had to do was yank his wrists apart, but Lieutenant Lerner didn't know that.
Dixon tried to step forward as Beth walked toward them, which made Dawn put a hand on the butt of her revolver. Daryl shot out a hand to hold the young man back. "Wait," he hissed, and Dixon stilled. Dawn relaxed her grip and returned her hand to her side.
When Beth was two steps away, Daryl let Dixon go. The young man stepped forward and embraced her. He gently kissed her forehead where she'd been wounded, then both cheeks, and finally her lips, one hand cupping her chin. His blue-green eyes shot anxiously over her face.
"Dixon, you can't let No –"
"-Shhh," Dixon hushed her with a kiss. The he kissed her ear and whispered, "We have a plan."
One of the cops was now patting down Rick. He pulled the knife off his belt and a small handgun out of an ankle holster under his left pants leg. "Hiding this?" he asked as he stood holding the gun in the palm of his hand.
"I wasn't hiding anything," Rick replied. "You told me to lay down my gun from my holster. I did."
Lieutenant Lerner looked him over warily but then her lips twitched into something like a smile. "It's fine. He's a cop. Of course he had a backup weapon. We should have told him to leave that, too."
Another cop patted down Noah but found nothing.
"We're going to go inside now," Dawn told them. "But two of my cops are going to keep guns on you to make sure you don't try anything. Once we're inside, you can leave."
While Dawn and two of her cops led Rick and Noah inside, the two others drew their handguns and kept them trained on Daryl, Dixon, and Beth until the others had backed all the way up to the automatic, sliding doors and disappeared inside.
"You can go once we're inside," one of the officers told them before they, too, walked backward to the building, pointing their weapons, and disappeared one by one inside. Through the glass, Daryl could see that one guard headed for the elevator while another sat down at the guard desk in the lobby.
When the guard inside was looking down at some kind of log book, Dixon crouched down next to Max and held a bandana with the scent of Rosita on it to the dog's nose. "Track!" he ordered, then pointed in the direction of the back of the building. That was the best they could do to get their message across to Max that they needed him to serve as a messenger. Max barked and bound in the direction Dixon had pointed. He ran for several yards before he began sniffing and disappeared through some bushes at the side of the building.
"Get Beth to safety," Daryl said as they turned and began walking toward the sedan and motorcycle parked along the curb. Daryl wasn't actually going anywhere. If that guard inside looked up, Daryl just wanted him to think he was leaving. "Get 'er back to the armored vehicle. We may need you and it later."
Dixon nodded and swept the limping Beth off the ground, hooking the back of her legs over his arms, and carried her to the sedan, where he settled her in the passenger's seat. Daryl saddled his motorcycle as Dixon began driving off toward where they'd left the armored vehicle. But then he rolled the bike out of sight of the glass front doors, dismounted, and crept back toward the entrance.
Fun Kingdom
6:57 PM
Hershel was in the old stone chapel in Medieval Kingdom, where he had once married Maggie and Glenn and then later Daryl and Carol, on his knees before the altar, praying for the safe return of both his daughters. Morgan, one of the few fighters left in Fun Kingdom, stood guard atop the castle tower slides. Carol would relive him in an hour, but now she was cleaning up from the super Patricia had cooked.
Luke and Mika were outside the Royal Banquet, playing with friends, with instructions to be home at dark. Duane, Carl, Sophia, and Patrick played Dungeons and Dragons at the dining room table. The chatter of their voices and the intermittent laughter that drifted into the kitchen soothed Carol's nerves somewhat. As she washed the dishes, however, she kept glancing at the silent CB radio. She'd left it on and tuned to the channel Daryl had said the Fun Kingdom Army would be using to communicate with one another, but so far, she hadn't heard a peep from the gently crackling speakers.
Grady Memorial Hospital
6:58 PM
Daryl was almost to the door, still out of the guard's line of vision, when the blasts sounded - a bang and a boom followed by a bang and a boom. He swung his crossbow into his hands and ran for the entrance as the startled guard stood from the desk. The sliding glass doors parted, and Daryl burst through the opening. He pulled the trigger of his crossbow. A bolt soared through the air and penetrated Officer Franco's forehead before he had even halfway drawn his revolver. The officer fell, face down, on the guard desk.
Meanwhile, the frames of the back exit doorways smoked from the explosion as Rosita ordered, "Advance!" She led Maggie, Glenn, Andrea, and Michonne up the west stairwell while Sasha led Bob, Tara, and T-Dog up the east stairwell. Max bounded up the stairs after Rosita as she led her soldiers to clear the building.
About the same time, Dawn and Officer McGinley were standing with the recently exchanged prisoners in a downstairs breakroom. Dawn had been telling them both what penance would be paid for Noah's deeds. When the blast sounded, she and McGinley ducked instinctively. Noah ripped his ropes free from behind himself and grabbed the handgun straight out of Lt. Lerner's holster. Rick simultaneously disarmed Officer McGinley. Both cops were dropped instantly with gunshots to the sides of their heads. Noah and Rick ran from the breakroom and met up with Daryl in the hallway. "You clear the second floor," Rick told him, "we'll clear the third."
The soldiers on the east stairwell were in charge of clearing the fourth through sixth floors, while the soldiers on the west were responsible for the seventh through ninth. But several soldiers met cops going up. The officers had been drawn by the sound of the blast to the stairwells.
In the fray, Tara got shot in the shoulder, even as she took out the cop who shot her. Sasha ended up breaking her arm dodging a spray of bullets and toppling down the stairs. Michonne was slashed in the thigh with a knife from a cop who was out of bullets. But when the gunshots ceased, not one of their own was dead, and the invading force had expended only thirty-six rounds of ammunition total.
They put Max to work again when they realized the body count was one short. A stunned, liberated orderly told them he'd recently laundered the cops uniforms, but not the patients gowns or the workers' scrubs. Daryl had Max sniff one of the cops freshly laundered uniform shirts, hoping the scent of the detergent would be enough to enable the dog to locate the cowering, hiding cop.
Daryl now jogged alongside Max as he sniffed the ground and every door, until the dog hit on one of the patient's rooms and stood barking outside it. Daryl threw the door open and found the cop inside, stripping out of his uniform so he could put on a hospital gown and disguise himself as one of the imprisoned orderlies of Grady Memorial rather than one of the guards.
Daryl trained his bow on the officer, and the man begged for mercy. A fifty-something woman, with long, thick, wavy blondish-white hair and pensive gray eyes was sitting up in the titled bed of the hospital room. Her face was covered in slashes, her left leg was wrapped in a cast, and her right arm rested in a sling. "You must be Daryl," she said. "I'm Angela."
Daryl glanced ever so briefly from the officer to her, surprised she knew his name, and then returned his locked-eyes to the cop's pleading ones.
"The crossbow gave it away," Angela continued. "Beth told me we'd all be free soon. She said her sister Maggie and her boyfriend Dixon would try to find her, and that Dixon's uncle Daryl would help them track her. I thought she was just trying to survive mentally by keeping an impossible dream alive, or make me feel hopeful. I can't believe you actually did it! You did, didn't you?"
"Man, just let me go," the officer begged. "I'll leave, I promise, I won't come back! I'm out of ammo. My gun's in my belt on the ground. What are you going to do? Murder me in cold blood? Shoot an unarmed man?"
Angela turned her head coolly to the officer. "He's the one who drove straight into me while I was fleeing a flock of rotters on foot. He hit me at fifty miles an hour and broke my arm and leg. He did that in cold blood. He could have killed me. In fact, he was going to kill me today. He told Dr. Edwards to give me a lethal dose of painkillers, because I was projected to have an inadequate treatment-to-work expense ratio."
"I don't know what you're talking about," the cop said.
"You know exactly what I'm talking about," the woman replied. "Dr. Edwards told me. He didn't follow your orders, as you can see. He was going to try to reason with you."
"Son of a bitch," Daryl muttered, and pressed the trigger of his crossbow. The bolt penetrated the cops' left eye and punctured straight through the back of his head. The officer collapses, dead, to the ground.
Daryl looked at Angela. The woman hadn't even flinched. But when Rick entered the room, she screamed, "Behind you!"
Daryl whirled and almost shot when he realized who it was, and, exhaling, he lowered his bow. "He's one of ours," Daryl told her.
"Brown uniform," Rick said. "Not blue."
"Sorry," Angela apologized.
Rick surveyed the scene.
"That's the last one," Daryl told him. "It's over."
But just then, a blast of machine gunfire erupted from the streets. The rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat continued for a few minutes and then fell silent again.
Rick ripped his radio from his belt, pressed the talk button, and cried, "Dixon, come in! What the hell was that! Dixon, come in!"