Ch. 27

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Maggie walked into the clinic and shut the door behind her before locking it. "There's been some things pop up since last night that I think y'all should know."

It had been a week since Beth had been hurt, and Rosita had gotten to go back to their house a couple of days earlier, so now him and Beth were the only ones in house most of the time. Sasha and Bob slept on the second floor during the night, just in case she needed something, but usually it was just them. He took care of her wounds and helped her to the bathroom and other everyday tasks.

Beth hated it, and if it was something that truly embarrassed her, he would have to go get Margot to help. She didn't like anyone but him changing her bandages, though. The first time she had seen the line of stitches up her body, she had gasped and watched in shock as he cleaned them and rewrapped everything.

"I should prolly be dead," she said.

"But ya ain't," he had answered back.

That was the last they had talked about them.

"What's going on?" Beth asked as she tried to scoot around and get comfortable. The stitches would pull if she moved the wrong way, and she would flinch all the time.

"There were about twenty walkers along the wall. All had 'W's in their foreheads. Sasha took 'em out from the tower, but about an hour ago, ten more showed up."

"Ya think they're sendin' 'em?" Daryl asked and looked to the door.

"I don't know," she said. "Merle went out with Michonne to look around, but they didn't find anythin'.

"When we were out there lookin' for 'em, we couldn't ever follow their tracks. They were like ghosts," Beth said quietly.

They all went silent for a few seconds before he asked, "These new walkers at the same spot as the old ones?"

"Basically. It's along the western wall."

"Who's in charge of defense?"

"Rick and Abraham mostly." Maggie said. "Merle's been workin' with a group to reinforce the walls. Since Noah had been workin' with Reg, he knows a little bit about them, so he's helpin' him. They've got some welding equipment, and there's a guy who's making parts of the wall stronger."

"We'll need to get together and figure somethin' out," Daryl said. He was chewing on the inside of his cheek and wondering what could be next. None of the scenarios were good ones, though.

Maggie nodded. "I'm gonna try and talk to Deanna. She's on the fence about all of us now, but she needs to give Rick and Abraham free reign when it comes to what happens inside these walls until we deal with the threat."

"She ain't go no choice," Daryl muttered and scrubbed a hand over his face. He knew this had been coming, but he had pushed it away, hoping that Beth would be better before they needed to fight or run. It didn't look like he was going to get that, though.

Maggie leaned down and hugged Beth then whispered something into her ear before the left the house.

Once the door clicked shut behind her, they looked over at each other for a moment before looking down at their hands. If the Wolves came, he would need to be up front, defending the walls and trying to keep them from getting inside. Beth would be here with Bob and Margot, and while Bob knew how to fight, and Beth could have a gun at her side, it wasn't enough.

He needed to make sure someone was inside this house with her, someone that wouldn't hesitate to defend their family but didn't need to be in the big fight at all. Daryl sat there for a few more minutes thinking over his options before he kissed Beth's cheek. "I'll be back later."

"Okay." She leaned her head back against her pillow. "I really hate not bein' able to do anythin'."

"I know," he said and stood up. "You'll be back on your feet before too long."

He found Bob and Margot in the back, trying to catalogue their supplies. Pete's system was shit, but that was probably because he put stuff away or threw it down when he was wasted.

"I'm gonna take off for a little while. Want ya to lock the door behind me."

Bob nodded and walked behind him. "Is there a problem?" Bob asked once they were in the hall.

"Not yet, but just some stuff don't seem right with the walkers gatherin' like they've been doin'. I'ma send Carl and Judith down this way, too."

"I can help, Daryl," Bob said quietly.

"Yeah, but you're needed more here now," he said and pointed to Beth who had her eyes closed again. He knew she wasn't asleep, though.

"Okay," he said. "Will you look out for Sasha? She's been havin' trouble."

"Yeah. Listen for Carl to knock soon."

He took off from the clinic and was down the steps to the house everyone else was sharing.

Merle stood in the kitchen and watched as Daryl talked with Carl.

The kid didn't want to be left out of a fight, but the more Daryl spoke, the more puffed up Carl seemed to become. He was a good boy, and he'd grow up to be a good man, but he was still a teenager who was looking to prove something.

His baby brother played that like a fiddle, too.

"I'm askin' ya to go there, to protect her for me. Beth can't get up outta bed on her own. How's she gonna fight if someone gets in there? Bob and Margot need to worry about keepin' her alive and takin' care of her and Judith. You need to be there to kill anythin' that tries to get in."

"Did ya talk to my dad?" He asked and picked at the table.

"No, but it don't matter. We all got jobs to do right? This one's yours."

With the knowledge that Daryl hadn't met up with his old man to clear it with him, Carl seemed to take on a whole new attitude.

"Yeah, I'll take Judith, and we'll go there now. I'll bring Enid with me, so she can help with her."

Daryl just nodded and Carl took off toward the kitchen door, but Daryl stopped him. "Take this," he said and held out a pistol. It had been the one beside Beth on the floor, and Merle knew that Carol had given it to him. "I'll bring ya somethin' else after I get into the armory. Don't forget your knife."

"Got it," Carl said and took off to find Judith.

Once they were alone, he looked at Merle. "Ya think I should let him take that girl around with him?"

Merle shrugged. "She's harmless. Beth said that they sneak out sometimes."

Ignoring what he said about Carl, Daryl asked, "Any more new walkers?"

"Got about ten more wanderin' up. Sasha's in the tower, but Abraham told her not to shoot. He thinks that they're watchin' us, which they prolly are, and are tryin' to figure out where our people are positioned."

"We need to clear those walkers," Daryl said and laid his hands on the counter. "They're gonna pile 'em up on us and breach the damn wall."

"Don't know about that," Merle said and sighed. "The wall's pretty strong, but we don't need 'em attractin' more."

"How do we do it? Do we wanna risk openin' that gate and goin' out?"

Merle shrugged and shook his head. It could have been the opening that the Wolves were looking for, but the other option would be picking them off from the top of the wall, and that just sounded like a pain in the ass to him.

It wasn't up to him, though, and before he knew it, he was in a group meeting with Abraham and Rick, along with Carol, Eugene, Michonne, Noah, Glenn, and Daryl.

Eugene said they needed to go over the top to kill the walkers while others continued to reinforce the gate. "There was no reason to go out right now," he said matter-of-factly. "We have plenty of food and water to last if they attack. There's one thing we really need to worry about, and that's the gate. Stop whatever reinforcing you're doing along the western wall, and move all of it to the gate. That's where they'll try and come in at. I would imagine by using a car as a battering ram."

Abraham took several deeps breaths before he looked to Rick, who nodded. Finally, Abraham directed Noah and Glenn to gather up the construction crew to make the changes to the wall.

"I can make some bombs," Eugene offered.

The group looked at him like he was crazy, and Rick cleared his throat. "Maybe another time. We don't want the noise to bring down more walkers on us."

Eugene nodded, lost in his own thoughts. "Maybe a flame thrower then." Then he got up and left the meeting, mumbling a little to himself as he walked away.

"I'd say for someone to keep an eye on him, but I don't think that would do any good," Rick said and looked at Noah. "I know ya hadn't spent much time with Reg, but do ya have anythin' ya can tell us about the walls that might be important. Weak points or spots that are out of sight that could be easy targets for 'em?"

Noah looked around the room and nodded. "It's not really part of the wall," he said quietly and his eyes shifted quickly to Daryl and away. "There's a basement in the hospital house. There's a door behind a metal cabinet along the far back wall. It leads straight outside the walls and into a woods about half a mile away."

"And you're just now sharin' this?" Abraham's voice was loud in the small room. "We need a guard on that fuckin' door!"

"There's only two people that knew about it before me," he said quietly. "Deanna and Reg didn't want anyone to know that way if someone got banished, they wouldn't have a way back in."

"It makes sense," Daryl said. "It's also our way out if things go bad."

Rick nodded. "This doesn't leave this room." The tone of his voice left no room for discussion. If it got out about that passage, he would know exactly who could have told, and it wouldn't be pretty.

For the next two days, walkers wandered up in packs of ten to twenty at least twice a day. They'd come from the west then from the south finally from the north. The eastern wall that held the gate never at a single walker along it.

Just like they had decided, no one went outside the fence, and the work crew spent a good bit of time making the gate stronger. To kill the walkers, they put up ladders and climbed up and shot down at them, using the silencers from the armory.

Deanna had been a pain in the ass when it came to decision-making. She seemed to think that she still had a say in what happened, but Rick was trying to make it clear that while she could pretend to be the head honcho, him and his people were the ones taking this shit over.

If she fucked up with Pete, Nicholas, and Aiden and allowed for a mentality of "Run away. Don't fight," she sure as hell didn't need to be in charge of this operation.

Finally, with the support of several founding community members, she got everyone besides their group to decide that a council should be created. That gave them all flashbacks to the prison, but without it, they couldn't move forward.

That went to a vote of course. During the two days that they were working hard to get shit ready, she had been creating ballots and counting votes. It blew his mind that she was wasting all that time on something that didn't even fucking matter because they were still doing what needed to be done without her say while she jumped through proper hoops. Merle decided that she was still too far stuck in the past.

After a day of voting and counting the new council consisted of five people.

Deanna.

Carol.

Maggie.

Abraham.

And a man named Tobin.

This new council met and decided that Abraham should be in charge of strategy and defense, which he pretty much already was. It took a hell of a lot of arguing with Deanna, but Maggie finally convinced her that Abraham should be allowed to pick who he wanted for the positions he deemed necessary and not have to get council approval—which they had already done anyway.

Even after all that planning to get stuff back how Deanna wanted, they still managed to control things because they held three seats on a five-seat council.

While they had been clearing the wall, the others had been given jobs, too. Rick was put in charge of gun training inside the homes so if someone was watching, they wouldn't see. Daryl was on wall duty when he wasn't taking care of Beth. Michonne was still acting as constable, but had also been checking out guns to families for home protection. Surprisingly, Morgan had taken to going around and visiting with each household then installing little traps they could set up during the night and push into place quickly if they heard the signal.

When Merle asked what he was doing to the front porch of their home, Morgan smiled and told him to stand back. He used his staff and tapped on the bottom step. From out of nowhere an axe swung from the porch roof, slicing through the air where a person could have been walking.

"I may have picked up a few things along the way," he had said with a small grin.

"You're insane," Merle said. "Smart as hell, but crazy."

"I've been told that from time to time."

Of that, Merle had absolutely no doubt.

"I don't think anyone's comin'," a young man said as they moved the ladders to the western wall for the second, and usually finally, time of the day.

"They're runnin' us around," Daryl said, cutting off another man who was about to start talking. "They're out there, and they're watchin' us."

"If that's true, then why do you stay down on the ground? Why isn't that black chick shootin' 'em from a distance? Y'all are supposed to be the best, right?"

"Ya don't show your hand," Daryl said and propped the ladder along the wall. "This is the last one we'll do with guns, too."

"What?" A shocked voice asked from the mass of people.

"We can't use all our bullets, can we?" He asked, and Merle shook his head. "And we want 'em to think they're all gone. When they bust in that gate, we'll put holes in 'em."

Everyone was working hard to ensure things went smoothly when the Wolves came. From a distance, it looked like they were going about their normal business with the exception of the men killing walkers instead of going outside the gate for construction projects and hunting.

If they were up in the trees keeping watch, all they saw were a bunch of confused people that seemed a bit scattered and scared.

"I bet they wait until it's dark," one guy said. "It'd be harder to take 'em out at night."

Daryl nodded. He had thought about that, too. It's what he would have done if it had been him.

There was no telling really when they would pounce or how they would do it. They were crazy, and no one could predict their next move. For now, they seemed okay with sending in the walkers, and the group inside the safe zone agreed to sleep in shifts and that the lights should be killed completely at night.

All in all, he and the others were staring to feel pretty confident that they were prepared. The one thing that really worried them was fire.

If the Wolves knew they were going to lose, would they just burn it all down? It was with that thought that made the group decide that if things went south, they would meet at the cabin they had found when they had been separated from him weeks earlier.

This thoughts were killing him, though. The plan was a good one, but Beth wasn't even walking that well, and she leaned heavily on Daryl for help. When he was gone, she depended on Enid with Carl and Bob as their defense. As soon as the shit started to get serious, Margot had stopped coming to help with Beth. Daryl didn't blame her, she had a family to look after, but that was just one less person on the inside to help.

Even though Merle had given Beth another gun that she kept close by, it wasn't enough to take on several men running through the doors at once. If it looked bad at the gate, Daryl was going to run and get her and the kids out. His goals would change the moment things took a turn.

That night, he lay in bed beside Beth, and they talked about what could go down. She was convinced that they would come with walkers from all angles and attack the gate when the groups focus was pulled in so many directions.

Daryl thought that they would sneak up on them and not bring any walkers at all. They liked to make walkers, so they'd want as many people alive as they could get.

In the end, neither one of them was really right.

Early the next morning, Sasha radioed down from the tower that two men were approaching the front gate on foot. Merle ran up to the tower and looked around, there was nothing moving in the woods or anywhere else.

Just those two men, walking calmly forward, 'W's marked on their foreheads.

"Keep that gun locked on 'em," he told her as he started to slip out.

"I will," she said then right as he started to shut the door she said, "Be careful, Dixon."

He nodded and shut the door behind himself. He let out a sharp whistle once he got back outside then did it again a few seconds later. He waited at the bottom of the tower then heard other whistles throughout the safe zone as people peeked out from second floor windows, guns at the ready.

Merle took a deep breath and walked forward, meeting Abraham and Rick as they moved toward the gate. Daryl fell into step soon after, his bow hanging at his side. Michonne was already at the gate, her blade drawn, and Morgan stood beside her, no weapon but his walking stick. Glenn fell in behind them all with Maggie at his side, guns drawn.

Rick looked at each of them. "We know who these people are. Just like Terminus. Don't hesitate. They won't."