July 16, 2010
Everyone bursts into motion. It's nearly impossible to keep track of everyone as the walkers pour in, but Shane helps Rick back Lori and Carl toward the RV, keeping them sheltered.
He hears Merle barking orders, yelling for Carol and the girls to get to the RV and divides just enough attention to make sure their dash across camp is a safe one. It is, but not just from he and Rick covering them, but because Carol's swinging a machete with hoarse little grunts, covering the girls' retreat.
Harper and Sophia don't just hide behind him, though, but climb the ladder, going for high ground. Carol fills in the gap next to him, begging Lori to take Carl up the ladder.
Shane isn't sure if Lori's just too frozen to react or not, but he can feel Carl's fingers grip into the back of his shirt, so he knows they're still on the ground. He's out of ammo in the Mossberg, so he drops it to draw his Glock despite knowing the shotgun's at least a good bludgeon when empty.
Rick's still firing next to him, but somehow has a shotgun instead of his Python. He would have run out of ammo in the revolver about as fast as Shane did the Mossberg. The next walker he aims at falls to an arrow before he can fire, and he realizes that at least one of the girls above on the RV has a bow.
It seems like forever and he's had to change the magazine out in his Glock once by the time there are no more walkers for him to shoot. He's shaking from the adrenaline rush, checking on first Lori and Carl and then Carol and the girls. Carol's chest is heaving, but she looks fierce, not scared.
Lori is terrified, clinging to Carl and now Rick. The girls are poised on top of the RV, and Harper still has an arrow in place on the bow. Sophia doesn't have a weapon, so it was Harper who was helping pick off walkers.
His heart rate finally settles enough for him to check on the rest of the camp. He knew at one point, he'd heard a male screaming, so he looks for the boys first. But he can see Jesse's been boosted to high ground similarly to the girls, laid out on his stomach on top of the box truck with his hunting rifle.
Micah's on foot, grouped with the Dixon adults where they'd taken on the swarm while backed up to the box truck. Jacqui, Glenn, and Dale have bloodied axes, from where they helped Morales corral Miranda and the children against one of the vehicles. Jim and T-Dog hold their own bloody weaponry, alert and breathing heavy where they have Andrea safe between them. Only Ed is missing.
Merle speaks before anyone else. "Get the kids inside," he orders, and no one argues.
Rick pushes Lori and Carl toward the RV door, so Shane turns and makes sure Harper and Sophia make it to the ground safely. Carol takes both girls from him, letting him take her bloody machete instead and slipping inside after Quinn runs a hand over both girls' hair. Andrea finally realizes she's separated from Amy and scrambles into the RV, with Miranda and her kids following.
On top of the box truck, Jesse hasn't moved, but since Merle doesn't seem concerned, Shane isn't going to be. Xander lopes over to stand guard near the RV door.
"We need to make sure they're all dead," Rick begins, but Merle interrupts him.
"In the dark, where we're almost blind? Are you fucking nuts, Officer Friendly? Best thing we can do is hold high ground til daylight."
"Someone was screaming," Jacqui mutters. "Who's missing?"
Everyone looks around, doing a similar headcount as Shane did. He doesn't feel guilty that several faces show the same relief he felt. If Ed is bitten, no one's going to miss him.
Quinn and Daryl edge towards Ed's tent. The hunter nudges a walker sprawled near the entrance. He doesn't seem concerned, so Shane figures someone got it with a headshot. Quinn uses the barrel of her rifle to nudge the tent flap back while Daryl stands guard with his crossbow raised.
The sharp twang of Daryl's crossbow tells them all they need to know.
Everyone else seems in agreement with Merle that checking the rest of the dead can wait til morning. Shane knows the RV is stuffed to overflowing at this point. Daryl makes his preference of where to spend the night known by nimbly climbing the front of the box truck to join Jesse on top of it.
"Anybody thinks they can manage a bit of sleep, crawl into a car and give it a try," Shane says. "I'll take watch on the RV. Anybody not sleeping, follow their example." He points to Jesse and Daryl, waiting only long enough for everyone to nod tiredly before retrieving his shotgun and going to climb to the top of the RV.
The others scatter, some into vehicles to sleep. Rick and Morales both approach the RV to check on their wives and children, but Shane's surprised when Quinn climbs up to join him. She is quiet while she checks over her rifle, replacing the magazine on the Remington 7600 with quiet efficiency before moving on to check over her handgun too.
"You good on ammo?" she asks quietly from where she's sitting cross legged next to his chair.
"For the Mossberg? It's in my tent. Got half a magazine left in the Glock."
She reaches into the bag she has slung over one arm and hands him a magazine. "Hopefully you won't need it. Your tent's gonna be a mess. There's a whole lot of walker gore splattered on it."
He looks to see that she's right. One of the walkers has collapsed his tent, with a second close enough by whomever shot it probably splatted the tent too. "You good on ammo still?"
"Yeah. We were further out when they started swarming, so we had more time to grab."
"Merle had y'all moving fast."
"Military training. For all his crazy shit on a regular day, he never forgets a thing. He'll sit there at night in the middle of a card game and randomly run a scenario with the kids on what to do if walkers come. Don't ever play chess with the man unless you want to be completely embarrassed."
"I'm glad they listened." He remembers how much calmer the girls had been. No tears, just quickly following directions. He realizes now that he knows that shotgun Rick was using. "Can't say I didn't mind the overhead coverage from Harper either. She passed her shotgun off to Rick somehow, when he ran out of ammo."
Quinn laughs softly. "Explains why Sophia was weaponless then. She must have given her bow off to Harper since she's been shooting longer. Makes me glad you lost the argument with me about the kids' guns when we came to camp, too."
"You and me both."
The door to the RV opens and Rick and Morales both exit. Rick heads for the ladder and joins them, looking exhausted. Quinn pats the spot next to her and scoots closer to Shane's chair to make room. She unzips the bag, sliding it toward him. "You can reload if you like. Harper's are the 20 gauge."
Shane's partner stares at the bag for a moment before reaching for it, reloading. "Never thought I'd have a little girl save my ass with a loaded gun," he grumbles.
Shane laughs ruefully. "That's the problem with the Python, brother. No magazines and only six shots. Good chasing criminals, not so much against walking dead swarms. At least when my shotgun ran out, I had backup."
"I shoulda had one of the shotguns from the station with me too."
"Shoulda, coulda, woulda. We did okay. How're all the kids doing?" Shane asks. "And Amy?"
"Amy's still in shock I think, between having the shots fired so near her head and realizing she nearly got bit. Carl calmed down once he got loose from his mother and is cuddled up between the two older girls. Morales kids are doing better than I expected, too. Started to let the dog in until I realized he had walker gore on him"
"He hamstrung several," Quinn explains. "He can't kill them, but he can at least limit their speed."
"And if he gets bitten?" Rick asks, looking apprehensive.
"Animals don't turn, thank God. There was a case back home where a farmer's lamb was bitten, right at the beginning. Vet stitched him up and treated it like any other predatory wound. It was still roaming the pasture when we headed for Atlanta, more than a week later. So we'd do the same - stitch him up, dose him with antibiotics, and pray he didn't die of infection."
"Bet that freaked the hell out of the local police to be reported," Shane remarks. "I know the first calls we got were like some damned SyFy movie."
"No fucking kidding." Quinn shifts, stretching, calling Shane's attention to surgical scars on her left arm. The scars are accented by a tattoo pattern of colorful butterflies, wildlife, and purple ribbons. He can't make out the text that runs along them in the moonlight, but he's seen enough of them before to know it's poetry.
"I thought the dispatch had lost their minds the first time we got called out for a bite victim. Thought my partner and I were going to see a victim of a drugged out domestic attack. Instead it was a sixty-year-old man who managed to lock his petite wife in the bathroom after she bit him twice."
"And what happened from there?" Rick asks. "It was hard to miss, when I woke up, that the world had taken one hell of a wrong turn. But before? I can't imagine."
It takes Shane a minute to answer. Those first few calls are foggier than they should be, because fear and worry for Rick clouded everything he did.
"Me and Leon, God, Rick, some of the shit we got called out to was just insane. Everyone kept saying it was drugs, bad ones, at first, but let me tell you, it was clear pretty quick that it wasn't any drug we'd ever seen. It was after Leon got bit that I bailed. Grabbed Lori and Carl and headed for Atlanta, even though that promise of safety turned out to be wrong."
Rick sighs. "I put Leon down before I left King County. Couldn't leave him to just wander around."
"It was the same way back home. People dying of the flu to the point they took over the hospital when they started biting the staff. That's how my partner died, actually. We'd just brought in a patient and someone stumbled out of a room in the ER. Wasn't until Adam beat her off him that we recognized the charge nurse we'd worked with for years. There was no way Regina did drugs a day in her life. She was a holy roller of the truest sort."
She's quiet long enough Shane thinks she isn't going to continue. "Got Adam out to the rig and radioed in that the ER had at least a dozen people affected and if they tried to bullshit me it was drugs again, I was quitting on the spot."
"What'd they tell you?" Shane asks.
"Asshole in dispatch admitted the police department had told them it wasn't drugs, but they didn't believe it. We'd gone out on that run, pulling an accident victim out of a smashed up car, without a clue he could have died in our rig and eaten me then and there. That was when I said fuck it and quit anyway.
"Knew Adam was dying and I wasn't going out solo. Took Adam home. Merle had heard from some friends confirmation about destroying the brain. Adam asked for enough painkiller to make it quick. Merle took care of him after for me. Buried him in the backyard. We loaded up and evacuated that night."
The grief in her voice affects both men. Shane knows how he felt when he thought Rick was dead. There was no miracle for her partner. Rick reaches out to pat her knee and she smiles slightly at him.
"So y'all lived together before too?" Rick asks. "You and Merle and all?"
"Yeah. Keeps Merle on the straight and narrow, and where Merle goes, Daryl does. And as rough as they come across, they're family men in their own way. None of us had the best situations growing up, and when I came to Georgia and needed help, they were willing. So we built the family we wanted when we were kids."
"I gotta ask. What did they do for a living before?" Shane hopes the question will both satisfy curiosity and lighten her mood a little.
It works, because she laughs. "Merle had a bike shop. Builds customs and sells them, does repair. That's how he ended up with that bike. It was at the shop when he closed it down and he figured what the hell."
"The swastika did make us all a bit nervous."
"Considering the late owner, you'd be right if you came across him. Man had a record rough enough to make Merle flinch, but they served together, and Merle never could turn him away. He wasn't all bad though. I got the feeling he really liked that Merle went straight. Sent him a lot of business to help him stay that way."
"So he did serve time?" Rick is looking out to where Merle is on alert sitting in the back of the Ford pickup, but Micah is curled against him, relaxed and asleep despite the uncomfortable truck bed.
"Several short stints, all a decade or more ago. Drunk and disorderlies, one longer stretch for assault and another for possession. But the service I meant was actually the Marines."
Rick has the grace to blush, just a little, at the soft rebuke, and Quinn continues. "Daryl got hurt real bad in a bike wreck, about six months before I came to Georgia. Merle was so focused on making sure he got back healthy he accidentally got clean himself.
"Then I appeared on his doorstep and he had even more people depending on him. Some men don't know how to be anything but bad if that's all they know growing up. Merle's the type that just needed someone to believe he could be good. Needed to be needed, and God knows I was pretty desperately in need at the time."
That explains the fierce protective streak she has towards the oldest Dixon. If she feels he was her savior when she was in a bad way, that's a loyalty beyond blood. "And Daryl?"
"Maintenance, repair, construction, you name it. Worked for himself as sort of a general handyman all over our county and the neighboring ones. They both put me through college to get my paramedic licensing. First Dixon to ever get a college degree, although Merle's got a few classes under his belt. He thinks it's funny to plunk down a couple hundred to annoy the shit out of a professor for a semester now and then at the local community college. Always passes them too."
It's both hard and easy to picture Merle in a college classroom. Rick and Shane meet each other's eyes and grin tiredly at the idea of just how crazy a student like Merle would be. He wonders what kind of classes would interest a man like Merle. By the time he got done with college, there's no way he would have gone back just for fun.
They all fall silent, but it's a companionable silence, just waiting for the dawn.