12:40 PM

Gavin, now hauled down from the tree blind, lay on his back on the street, with Tina by his side, applying pressure with gauze from a medical kit. Carol and Jerry, who had helped get him down from the tree, stood by with concern.

Dianne, seeing him fallen, ran across the green median that divided the main street. Her boots hit the street and clattered over the asphalt until she fell to her knees on the other side of him, the side where Tina wasn't applying pressure. Ozzy followed Dianne over, shucked out of his cavalry coat, and offered it to Gavin for a pillow. Dianne helped to ball up the coat and tuck it under his head.

"I need someone to assist," Tina said.

"I can help," Carol told her. "I've studied under a veterinarian."

Carol cut away Gavin's shirt with a pair of scissors and then doused the wound in alcohol, which caused him to scream out in pain as Dianne gripped his hand. Carol cleaned the clamps with alcohol and then handed them to Tina, who worked out the bullet while Carol helped Dianne to hold a writhing Gavin still. It didn't look like the shot had punctured any internal organs, thankfully.

"Go," Carol told Tina when the bullet was free, "check and treat the rest of the injured. I'll stitch him up."

Tina grabbed the second medical kit and was off.

Carol concentrated on her task, trying to think of it as a sewing project. All around her, there was a flurry of activity. Tina was treating the injured. Four people were putting out a fire in a gazebo in someone's yard. The structure had been set aflame by a poorly aimed and largely ineffective Molotov cocktail. Two more people were prowling about the dead and putting knives through the brains of the corpses that had not been killed by head-shots. Dixon and Zach were still picking off walkers from atop the truck with their suppressed rifles, while Cyndie, Eduardo, and Daryl were stabbing them with harpoon, bayonet, and knife when they crawled out from under the truck into Shirewilt.

By the time Carol cut the thread, Gavin's eyes were closed and he appeared unconscious. Dianne lowered her head and turned her ear to listen for his breath. She must have felt or heard it, because she let out a short, grateful sob and then turned her face to kiss his lips repeatedly. Eventually, Gavin began to kiss back, deeply.

When Dianne finally pulled away, Gavin spoke in a raspy voice: "Guess the cat's out of the bag, huh?"

"What?" Dianne asked.

He raised his eyes to Jerry, whose mouth was slightly agape in response to the passionate kissing he'd just witnessed, and then titled his head toward Ozzy, who was looking a bit gloomy.

"Screw the bag," Dianne said. "And screw King Ezekiel's concerns. So what if one of his top advisors is sleeping with the former enemy? People can think what they want, spread all the drama they want. I'll keep my head above it."

"Yeah?" Gavin asked with a crooked smile. "That mean we're going public?"

Dianne laughed. "As public as I ever go." She bent and kissed him again.

Dianne, Carol, and Jerry got Gavin settled in a bed in one of the houses, propped up by pillows, so he could rest and recover. DJ came into the room just as Dianne was pulling a sheet up to Gavin's waist. "Darren's dead," he announced.

Gavin wasn't the only one who had been shot. Darren from the Sanctuary had been knocked off his roof perch, fallen, and snapped one of his legs in a gruesome compound fracture. Between that, and the bullet in his shoulder and the bullet in his chest, which had likely punctured a lung, there was no saving him. He was in excruciating pain, and barely alive, when DJ put him out of his misery with a bullet to the brain.

Gavin sighed when DJ related all this. "He was a damn good mechanic, even if he was a whoremonger. Make sure he gets a proper burial. Take his body back to the Sanctuary now. Have Laura notify the other communities by radio the war is over, and tell Alden to bring down the military truck with the loot from Shellman's Sporting Goods so we can divy it up."

"And when you radio the Kingdom," Dianne said, "Have Daniel bring down the pick-up and trailer of loot we were storing there."

"Why Daniel?" Gavin asked.

Dianne tilted her head at him. "Because he's capable and he'll get it here without trouble."

"All right, all right," Gavin murmurred.

"You're not still irritated with him for stealing your ex-girlfriend, are you?" Dianne asked. "I mean you have moved on, haven't you?"

"It's not about what he did with my ex-girlfriend," Gavin told her.

Dianne rolled her eyes. "That was over with months ago. Now take your Oxy."

Gavin glanced at the pill she'd put on the nightstand, next to a glass of water. "I don't want to rely on that shit."

"You've been shot," Dianne told him.

"Just by a .223. It's not like it was a 50 caliber."

"Take the damn pill, Gavin," Carol insisted. "You're still in shock right now, but it's going to start hurting really badly, really soon. Trust me. I've been shot before."

"Huh." Gavin smiled. "And here I thought you were made of steel."

1:35 PM

The gazebo fire was by now extinguished, with no damage to the nearby house. Three houses were riddled with bullet holes, and there was a couple of broken windows, but the overall property damage was not severe. Shirewilt was still entirely livable. The walkers drawn by the battle had all been slain. The truck had been moved, and the corpses of those walkers that had crawled under it were now being dragged outside the wall. Tobin went to work organizing a crew to begin building a real front gate. Meanwhile, a guard stood in each of two of the blinds in case more walkers stumbled their way into Shirewilt before the gate was built.

There were other injuries, besides Gavin's, but they were minor-mostly cuts from shrapnel, and, in Noah's case, a broken finger.

"Hope it's not your trigger finger," Zach told him.

"No, it's this one," Noah replied, flicking him off with his freshly splinted middle finger.

The teenage boy Aaron had captured turned out to be Ron Anderson, son of Pete and Jess Anderson. Carol and Dianne joined Aaron on the porch of one of the houses as he questioned the young man. Ron claimed he'd been forced to come on this collection and serve as a chauffer for the neo-Saviors.

"Then why were you reaching for a handgun in the truck when I grabbed you?" Aaron asked.

"Because it was there and I was scared. I didn't know what was going on…all that gunfire."

"Is your father back at their camp?" Aaron asked Ron. "Was he impressed to be their doctor?"

"Impressed?" Ron asked.

"Forced to work," Aaron clarified.

"Yeah!" Ron exclaimed. "Yeah. Me and him both, we were impressed to work for these assholes. We just want to go home. Or to the Kingdom, if that's where we have to go. I know my parents are split now and you don't want my dad in Alexandria. But he's my dad. I'm not leaving him."

"If you want that," Dianne told him, "if you want to settle at the Kingdom, then you need to lead us back to the camp they took you to. Do you think you can do that?"

"Sure," Ron told her. "Yeah, I can do that. I mean I drove here."

"How many fighting men are there?" Carol asked. "Back at that camp?"

"Only two, I think. The rest all came here for the collection."

"We better take at least seven armed men anyway," Carol said.

"You won't need that many," Ron assured her.

"Better safe than sorry," Carol insisted.

Carol gathered up volunteers, and Aaron got into the driver's side of a pick-up truck with Ron in the passenger's seat to navigate. Dianne and Jerry slid into the backseat of the pick-up's extended cab, and Dixon, Cyndie, Ozzy, and Zach piled into the bed. Daryl and Carol followed them by motorcycle. After only about thirty minutes of driving, Aaron eased the pick-up truck to a stop and stepped out. Daryl balanced his bike by the tail of the vehicle.

"Ron says the camp is in the Audubon Botanical Gardens about half a mile up this road. I figured we better park here out of sight first and scout it out on foot."

Daryl, Dixon, Carol, and Dianne went ahead on foot to scout out the place, while the rest remained behind with the vehicles. They each brought a pair of binoculars with them. The Audubon Botanical Gardens consisted of 102 acres of land, ponds, and buildings surrounded by a combination of stone walls and a faux golden, barred fence. The soldiers split up to quietly cased the perimeter of the facility, occasionally getting up in an outside tree for a better view, and then returned on foot to the vehicles to report what they'd seen.

"Six armed guards." Daryl narrowed his eyes at Ron. "Not two like ya said."

"And those were just the ones we could see," Dixon added.

"Sorry," Ron apologized. "I didn't realize there were that many here. They don't tell me numbers and stuff. They just told me to get in the truck and drive it."

Daryl eyed him suspiciously.

"There are two guards on the front gate," Carol reported. "And two patrolling two different garden plots, each with four men working them. A fifth guard is outside a building that looks like a first aid station or an emergency clinic based on the red cross sign outside of it."

"That's where they're holding my father," Ron interrupted. "At the clinic. It had medical supplies, you know, in case people visiting the gardens got injured or something."

"The sixth guard was walking around the inside of the perimeter, just following the walls and fence," Carol continued. "There were two gasoline tankers parked on the dirt road inside the gate, and several other vehicles as well. Around the back, in the rear wall, is a doggy gate. No guard on it. We go in that way. We'll have to crawl."

Once through the doggy gate, the coalition soldiers split up to clear the premises. Dixon and Zach headed with Ron to the infirmary—which is where Ron said his father was being continuously held and forced to work—to quietly take out the guard there. Daryl went west, Dianne went east, Aaron went south, and Ozzy went north through the gardens. Meanwhile, Cyndie, Jerry, and Carol went together to clear the conservatory, because it was the largest building in the gardens and Ron said it was where the neo-Saviors actually slept. Ron also said it wasn't likely to be guarded, but they were going in as a trio just in case. He'd been wrong about the number of guards inside the wall, after all.